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...

Lincoln (2012) Review

rating: ***

the story: Lincoln pushes for the 13th Amendment.

the review: Gosh, so I spent a decade fearing I wouldn't like this one.  Sometimes, or perhaps very often, when you think you're going to have a certain reaction, whether good or bad, you end up having it regardless of the material.  In this instance, I ended up with exactly the reaction I always thought I would to Steven Spielberg's Lincoln.

Chalk this up to star Daniel Day-Lewis.  Beloved of Hollywood insiders but rarely outside of it, my first exposure to him was his Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York, which was a wildly entertaining performance.  Then it was There Will Be Blood, a film I thought I would greatly enjoy, and was one of my most anticipated experiences of 2007, which instead became perhaps my greatest disappointment that year, when my impression of Day-Lewis greatly soured.  He's the kind of actor who immerses himself in his work, who reinvents himself with every performance, or so the story goes, and yet the disappointment of Blood was how much obvious connective tissue there was to Gangs, and none of it positive.  It was as if he dialed in on the villainous tones but lost all intonation.  Where his Bill chewed all scenery in delicious fashion, his Daniel Plainview was a lethargic inverse whose total dominance of Blood was unearned, with no chance at being checked.  He was among the antiheroes who came to dominate critical taste in the last few decades not because he deserved to, but because critics had fixated on the idea and wouldn't let go.

Lincoln is certainly no antihero, today.  Although in his time he was.  Which is perhaps one of the reasons Day-Lewis ended up playing him.  Spielberg's take is a riff on the popular history book Team of Rivals, which centers on Lincoln's political acumen, which the subsequent film zeroes in on as he desperately seeks approval for the amendment that will guarantee freedom for slaves.  He stoops to all available levels in the process, which is not to say his cause was not worthy nor his tactics justified, but nowhere is the inherent mythic nobility on display, and yes, that clip shown at the Oscars in which Lincoln exhorts his cabinet in an impassioned demand to fulfill the vision "Now! Now! Now!" really the central lasting impression...

In choosing such a narrow focus, and perhaps in selecting (there was much development of the project along the way, and so it really was a choice) playwright Tony Kushner over, say, Aaron Sorkin, who had made politics a truly operatic affair in The West Wing and would later become as well known a screenwriter in film, there is no chance to discover the man even as the myth is gently exploded, so that man nor myth, as the man lunges in one direction or another, receives proper focus.  At times it seems Day-Lewis is up to the challenge, when Spielberg, Kushner, and the actor are up to the challenge of the folksy charm of the man, but in their efforts to wring drama from him, they lose sight of it, and the wrinkly profiles they find of Day-Lewis, which are so often fixated on, are subsequently lost to clearer gazes, late in the film, in which Day-Lewis instead looks like, well, Day-Lewis.

Surrounding this is a host of incredible talent, from Tommy Lee Jones perhaps for the first time sinking into his aging gravitas, Sally Field asking no quarter as Mary Todd Lincoln, David Strathairn doing all the heavy lifting, James Spader playful in all the right ways for a change, Hal Holbrook, and a trio of young actors on the cusp of greatness, if film would let them: Joseph Gordon Levitt, the acknowledged preferential favorite; Lee Pace, so versatile and yet forever taken for granted; and Adam Driver in a thankless glorified cameo, years before anyone truly recognized his talent.

And there are others, curiously the black actors (Gloria Reuban, David Oyelowo) in roles Spielberg has no earthly idea what to do with among them, worth picking out.

The whole affair comes off as more a companion piece to Spielberg's earlier and far more triumphant Amistad, with far less historic grandeur to its credit and yet so much more power and cinematic achievement...This was the point where Spielberg really started to worry about his continued standing in Hollywood royalty, where he stopped trusting himself and instead just started doing what he thought his peers wanted to see, all the more bizarre from a director who had previously made his name on things audiences seemingly demanded...So much of modern film ignores the American heritage so passionately embraced in the past, it's all the more a shame that the most famous recent example has no idea what it's really trying to accomplish, other than demonstrate saintly Lincoln in his last desperate push for history, above and beyond, y'know, ending the pesky war around it.

And yet Spielberg's peers have been so driven to distraction concerning political maneuvering, I suppose, in the grand scheme, it's only fitting that such are the results of the effort.

Space Jam (1996) Review

rating: ***

the story: Michael Jordan ends up playing basketball with the animated cast of Looney Tunes.

review: I didn't actually get around to watching this until this year.  Given how much my family enjoyed Looney Tunes, this seems a little absurd.  Given how much at least one member of the family was into basketball in the '90s, it's doubly absurd.  As it turns out, Space Jam is great as a time capsule for that '90s basketball era, as it's pretty entertaining otherwise.

If you honestly expect more than that, you're asking too much.  Michael Jordan was one of the cultural touchstones of the era, when athlete celebrities were all over the pop landscape.  You would be equally foolish to expect great acting from him.  That would be well beside the point.  Something I didn't know until watching it is that Space Jam also acts as a reprise of the old commercials Jordan and Larry Bird made back then.  Playing third fiddle to them, as always, is Charles Barkley (but don't tell my brother that), and a host of other recognizable players populate what's left after you add in Bugs Bunny and most of his well-known cartoon associates, as well as the aliens led a stooge voiced by Danny DeVito.

The result isn't high, or even close to it, but for sheer nostalgia's sake, it's good enough.  Normally nostalgia is about remembering a specific thing or elements of an era, but Space Jam achieves it by evoking and borrowing elements, which is a special kind of distinction.  I don't know if the filmmakers could possibly have been banking on this, and very likely it was the furthest thing from their minds, because in Hollywood, as in life, usually the next possible moment is the most important one, to capture immediate attention.  If something becomes a classic it's usually because it was instantly massively popular.  Space Jam wasn't a huge success, but it certainly had people talking, and it's become a kind of cult classic, which belatedly spawned a sequel (which, of course, I haven't seen yet, but soon!), which only time can tell if it evokes its era as successfully.

The other big surprise, for me, was Bill Murray.  In 1996, Murray was in the midst of a career transition.  He'd made his most popular '90s films already, and was years away from a critical revival.  You won't often see him as a selling point for Space Jam, in other words, because at the time, it just didn't seem relevant anymore.  But for me, in 2022, seeing him pop up in a supporting role can only be described as sheer pleasure, and the needed element in turning Space Jam from mere nostalgia to a repeatable experience.  

It's also interesting that the whole movie pivots around Michael Jordan's real life attempt to switch sports from basketball to baseball, which was quickly reversed with little help from cartoon shenanigans.  In hindsight it makes the results all the more relevant.  Bugs, meanwhile, was struggling, too, with whether it was still important that there was a Bugs Bunny anymore.  On TV, there was a new generation of his ilk in Tiny Toons, while The Animaniacs was busy making the argument that even they weren't headlining the conversation.  While Disney constantly reshuffles Mickey, Bugs at one point had such a radical redesign, around this time, you wouldn't even have known it was him without being told.  He and his friends now existed, if at all, in hybrid movies like this, or in the classic cartoons.  One thing Mickey never got was a movie like this, though.

Space Jam should never be confused for great filmmaking, but it's a rewarding curiosity, on a number of levels.

Unforgiven (1992)

rating: ***

the story: A gunslinger comes out of retirement.

review: This is one of those movies that looms large in aficionado circles, but has never particularly interested me.  So I gave it another chance, and at least I can say I'm starting to enjoy Unforgiven.

I think mostly it's the kind of movie that's celebrated for what it meant rather than what it was.  It was Clint Eastwood's final western (which, remarkably, remains true in 2019, and given his ever-advancing age, even if he remains as active as ever, isn't likely to ever change), and made at a time when westerns had somewhat definitively lost their role in the continuing lore of cinema, which made it instantly iconic if nothing else.  This is not to say it isn't a good movie in and of itself, but that those fans who particularly identify with it (as fans of anything will do) are prone to exaggerating its worth.

I recently watched a slew of westerns, including a few of Eastwood's, and on the whole, I'm less interested in watching Unforgiven again than Pale Rider or Outlaw Josey Wales (which Unforgiven might be considered an unofficial sequel to, and all but functions as such).  Among them was also the far less celebrated The Quick and the Dead, which in hindsight seems like a deliberate rephrasing of Unforgiven, but a bit more on that in a moment.

What's most interesting about Unforgiven is perhaps the idea that Eastwood's character isn't really a hero so much as an opportunist the audience has every chance to root on, so of course we're going to, while Gene Hackman's sheriff perhaps isn't as much a villain as he's made out to be, even though as far as the narrative goes, he certainly is.  There's an unreliability to the whole thing that's pretty interesting to think about.  Hackman's sheriff is perhaps most intriguing as a guy trying to do the right thing but badly botching it, which is something observers of politics would have plenty to say about, and as such there's an allegorical worth to the movie that's perhaps its best feature.

But strip away the legacy and it's a pretty rote experience (which is why I rated, a while ago, The Fugitive much the same way, because when it comes right down to it, the only thing that really stands out about it is Tommy Lee Jones, and pretty much just the "I don't care" line, which is admittedly brilliant, and brilliantly undermines the whole movie in the process, and leads to a whole movie with him as the acknowledged lead, but no one really cared about that, ironically).  We don't even get a proper ending, but rather screen text.  This is really just an exercise in setting up Eastwood's later career as an aging star.  (Clearly it worked.) 

But what's so interesting, really, is the Quick and the Dead connection.  Lots of commenters have said that Sharon Stone is blatantly playing Eastwood's Man With No Name (though it would be interesting to hear fresh perspectives, now that Charlize Theron uses the exact voice in her action roles), but Gene Hackman plays a more bombastic version of his evil sheriff, and it plays much better the second time, without any confusion about what he is, and Leo DiCaprio plays a better version of the kid who's trying to make a name for himself, with the same basic notes being made there, too.  It's harder to think of Russell Crowe's presence in Quick and the Dead, and perhaps the entirety of his popular career, without thinking of Eastwood, once you begin thinking about it.  (It's worth arguing that even Eastwood borrowed the persona, possibly from Charlton Heston.)

In Unforgiven, you have a few notable supporting players.  Saul Rubinek, who never quite broke out, for instance, and more notably Morgan Freeman, who was on the verge of exploding (which he would, two years later, in The Shawshank Redemption).  And then there's Richard Harris.  Harry Potter fans like me will forever be seeking out the original Dumbledore's earlier days, and here's an interesting one, as he portrays English Bob, who perhaps most accurately sums up the film as a depiction of American savages, barely grasping the concept of civilization, something a lot of westerns tried to illustrate, but seldom as, well, savagely. 

Into the Ashes (2019)

rating: ***

the story: Vicious thugs end up getting their comeuppance.

review: If it weren't for the performance of Robert Taylor as the sheriff whose son-in-law goes on a revenge rampage, I wouldn't be talking about Into the Ashes.  I watched the movie at all because it was another of James Badge Dale's string of minor 2019 releases, the best being Standoff at Sparrow Creek and Donnybrook, which like the latter also costars Frank Grillo.   Grillo has been a fascinating career to follow recently, too, and he gives a different kind of performance, in the same basic role, than he does in Donnybrook.  (A far cry from my first distinct memory of him, in Warrior, where I assumed he was a real-life MMA fighter cast to give authenticity to training sequences.) 

Dale, meanwhile, has such a minor role in this one that he doesn't spend too much time creating a distinct character, which is the opposite of what he did for Donnybrook.

But as I said, I'm talking about Into the Ashes at all because of Robert Taylor.  I know, who?  There's an earlier Robert Taylor, but this one is the guy who starred in the latter-day western TV series Longmire.  Late in the movie he settles into a low drawl that totally transforms the performance, and becomes the best reason to watch, and talk about, the movie.

Because suddenly you're watching the western Harrison Ford never quite made.  Ford did make a kind of western, Cowboys & Aliens, but even as it was being billed as "Indiana Jones Meets James Bond," the movie was much more centered on Daniel Craig than Ford's grizzled rancher.  The Harrison Ford being channeled in Into the Ashes actually comes circa Blade Runner 2049, one of the many times in recent years Ford has revisited an iconic role.  As in Cowboys & Aliens, Ford's work in Blade Runner 2049 is a relatively minor one, all considered, but in it he seems at last totally comfortable as an older person.  If he'd made a western (I suppose he still could), it would be Into the Ashes, exactly as Taylor does it.

And Taylor looks like Ford (except, maybe, the hair, but why quibble?), and I can't help but wonder if that was all completely deliberate.  Before I got swept up in the idea, I even thought the filmmakers were deliberately looking for a bargain basement Ford, but Taylor is a relatively known commodity.  I have no idea if he did the same sort of channeling in Longmire, never seen it and probably never will.  But by the time we're following Taylor's sheriff basically more than anything else (sort of making the movie in the same spirit as No Country for Old Men or Hell or High Water, with Tommy Lee Jones and Jeff Bridges, respectively, in similar roles, but here perhaps at its best, even if the other elements aren't), it no longer really matters.  Taylor is fulfilling what Ford had done, but would probably never do this way.

And maybe doesn't have to, really, now that Taylor has. 

The Great Gatsby (2013)

rating: ***

the story: Nick Carraway becomes swept up in the epic life of Jay Gatsby.

review: Leonardo DiCaprio has frequently been a brilliant actor.  Not always.  And it's always strange to discover the exceptions.  The Great Gatsby is one of them.

Baz Luhrmann does the Moulin Rouge version of the F. Scott Fitzgerald classic, and Spider-Man, I mean Tobey Maguire, is our host.  Maguire's casting, and performance, in the film is one of the textbook examples of failing to escape a well-known role.  Maguire had a career as someone other than Spider-Man, before he put on the spandex, but then he did and now, because he's an actor of limited range, it's going to be hard to see him as anything but Spider-Man.  And I find it difficult to believe that Lurhmann didn't on some level comprehend that.  Maguire has voiceover work in his Spider-Man movies, too, so it's even harder to understand.  He plays Carraway as the same Peter Parker dork persona, and Luhrmann dresses him as the same Peter Parker dork persona. 

And then in strolls DiCaprio, and by now it's clear that he's developed a worn-in face, but the voice, if he isn't careful, is that of a child actor who...just has a career that's inexplicably continued.  And that's Leo DiCaprio if he hasn't bothered to sculpt a performance.  And that's his Gatsby.  Anytime he opens his mouth, it's just Jack from Titanic in an alternate reality.  Which I suppose was half the point of casting DiCaprio in the role.

Carey Mulligan is Daisy Buchanan.  Mulligan was the It Girl at the time, but displays little reason for being It in the role.  Isla Fisher has a thankless tiny supporting role (as she tends to have), and Jason Clarke is in it, too.

The real reason, the only reason to watch this version of The Great Gatsby is Joel Edgerton's Tom Buchanan, is Joel Edgerton.  Following his Hollywood breakthrough performance in Warrior (2011), The Great Gatsby was Edgerton's first real chance to shine, and he obviously threw himself at the opportunity.  His even better performance in Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014), I suspect, has something to do with this one.  Edgerton's somewhat blank face has always been his biggest drawback, but his voice and his sheer acting talent, when he's been allowed to shine, are undeniably huge assets.  He clearly seized this opportunity.  He's the only one in the movie who simultaneously loses himself in the time period and dominates the screen every time he appears.  Some would call it overacting, or simply dismiss him as a ham.  Those I would call clueless idiots.  In another era, he would've instantly become a huge star.  In this one he's settled back into a fairly anonymous career in the years since. 

So the Jay Gatsby of this version?  Is its Tom Buchanan.

Doctor Strange (2016)

rating: ***

the story: An arrogant doctor loses the use of his hands, but his mind becomes greatly expanded.

review: The MCU Avengers cycle is a full-blown phenomenon that has come to define the modern cinematic era, and the twenty-three movies to date that comprise it have seemingly explored just about every kind of superhero movie imaginable.  Doctor Strange did it with magic (although it's also one of the few outright examples of superpowers in the franchise, too).  That's the main calling card here.

A lot of fans saw too many parallels between Stephen Strange and Tony Stark.  One of the few criticisms fans have leveled against these films is that the plots tend to be the same: brilliant individual has a fall, builds themselves back up, defeats villain in spectacular fight.  And the villain tends to be fairly uninspired (with a few exceptions).  But you can level the plot critique against just about any story.  I tend to think the specifics are worth considering.  Strange and Stark are only tangentially worth comparing at that level.  Stark may be a tech genius, but he's also building on a family legacy.  Strange is a brilliant physician.  They both may possess out-of-control egos, but Strange is far more likely to use his skills to actual benefit than Stark, who initially just wants to make easy money, without caring about the consequences.  For Strange, he may alienate colleagues, but he's undeniably saving lives.  He believes he can save more lives if he can just perform his research undisturbed.  Essentially, Stephen Strange is House on a grander scale.  (It's really hard not to envision the producers using the Hugh Laurie breakout role as a pattern for Strange, and how they determined Benedict Cumberbatch to be the best pick for the role.)

Then Strange goes on the journey to becoming Doctor Strange, and the visuals take over.  Clearly the movie itself was inspired as much by Inception as the Harry Potter films, and letting the blend of them run wild.  Too wild, really, however awesome the results.  The characters never really treat them as anything but meaningless backdrop.  They're audience eye candy, nothing more.  But still hugely notable.

Doctor Strange is the "Sorcerer Supreme," but he is also, essentially, a superhero wizard.  And that's the role he fills in the MCU.  The ending features a nifty time-repetition that the character's later crucial appearance in Avengers: Infinity War suggests is how he discovers the only way to beat Thanos (in all fairness, that's probably the best sequence of this film, watching Strange repeatedly confront what is otherwise a pointless CGI effect just as doggedly each time, so it would probably have been just as pointless to repeat the sequence, especially when we know Strange can't win this time).

Cumberbatch has a meaty role to play in this appearance (he doesn't have nearly as much to work with in later appearances to date), and is once again thoroughly Cumberbatch.  Rachel McAdams is probably the most credible female supporting player, having often played this type where others in the MCU felt hamstrung in similar roles.  Tilda Swinton is perhaps about as perfectly cast as she's ever been as the Ancient One, Mads Mikkelsen letting his eyes do all the work in the way he so creepily often does.  Benedict Wong is the kind of actor who doesn't need much to make an impact.  Benjamin Bratt has a tiny role that makes you kind of wonder why they even bothered.  Chiwetel Ejiofor is the most baffling case.  He went from starring in the highly acclaimed 12 Years a Slave to this rather than, say, Black Panther (who instead is played by Chadwick Boseman, who is an utter charisma void).  I don't get it. 

This is not a movie that expects much from its audience, and so it doesn't really try much, aside from visually.  It slides by on mumbo jumbo.  Why Strange is as good at magic as he is at surgery, not particularly explained.  It just sort of happens.  But if you don't care, you get a movie that does just about what it needs to.  And at that, it's about as good or better than the average MCU film.  It knows what it really needs to accomplish, and at least nails that.  Knowing what Strange does in other movies is just kind of icing on the cake. 

Stardust (2007)

rating: ***

the story: A young man seeks to win the heart of a beautiful woman by seeking a falling star.

review: The idea of new cult movies seems to have fallen by the wayside in recent years, possibly because the MCU Avengers cycle has effectively made geek cinema mainstream in just about every iteration imaginable.  But Stardust is about as liable a contender as anything that's been released in the last fifteen years, in large part to a cast that has kept on giving, and a writer and a director whose legacies keep expanding.

The cast.  Oh, the cast!  You've got Charlie Cox as the lead character, Tristan.  Cox eventually found another spotlight in the Netflix series Daredevil.  Henry Cavill, in a much smaller role as Tristan's romantic rival (in Tristan's imagination, anyway, insofar as Tristan ever really had a chance), is perhaps the biggest easter egg in the movie, nearly unrecognizable as a fop with blond hair.  He would, of course, later take on the role of Superman.  Ian McKellen, at this point only a few years removed from his career-defining role as Gandalf in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, is narrator.  Mark Strong, who would become a much better recognized supporting actor across a dizzying array of films, plays a would-be king.  Rupert Everett is in there, unrecognizable.  Ricky Gervais is easier to spot.  Claire Danes is the falling star.  Michelle Pfeiffer is the witch who wishes to be young again.  Sienna Miller is the girl Tristan thought he deserved (an oddly low key role, considering this was Miller's heyday).  Peter O'Toole, looking surprisingly frail, is in there.  And Robert De Niro.

Ah, De Niro.  This was the period where De Niro was finally coming to grips with his father.  Robert De Niro, the most famous tough guy of modern cinema, was the son of a gay man.  He'd directed The Good Shepherd (2006), a kind of allegorical film about his father, and then appeared in Stardust as a pirate who is secretly gay.  The gay aspects of the character are kind of parody, but the role is unexpected for De Niro, so seeing him this way is itself kind of reason enough to see Stardust.  I suspect part of the cult appeal for it comes from the LGBTQ community.

The writer of the book from which Stardust is derived is Neil Gaiman, who also wrote the epic Sandman comic book series.  Stardust was his first major screen adaptation.  The director is Matthew Vaughn, whose geeks credentials have expanded since. 

The results aren't as magical as all that.  You'd want a contender for The Princess Bride, but it just isn't there.  The presence of all those stars is just about enough compensation, though, with De Niro leading the pack.  McKellen sets the tone with his storybook narration.  Princess Bride is a storybook that spirals hilariously out of control.  Stardust remains storybook.  But it's still a good modern storybook.  Few enough elements compete with De Niro.  One is the collection of dead brothers.  The other is the goat who becomes a man (somewhat unconvincingly).  There's also Strong's undead duel with Tristan.  If there had been more of that, there'd be a better chance at truly comparing the results to Princess Bride.

Not that there has to be a comparison.  As its own thing, Stardust lightly sparkles.  And then, again, you see yourself drawn to all those stars...

Iron Man (2008)

rating: ***

the story: Tony Stark is Iron Man.

what it's all about: I've never found Iron Man to be a particularly good movie.  It opened the same year as The Dark Knight, which to my mind was a great movie.  And of course it gave birth to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), which eventually became the only superhero movie franchise(s) anyone really took seriously.  I liked Iron Man 2 a great deal, but the first one?  I never felt particularly compelled to watch it again, and in fact it took me ten years (yesterday) to do so again, and my impression of it didn't at all change.  This is odd for a number of reasons.  One isn't really that it took me so long to rewatch it, but that I really didn't feel like doing so for so long.  Instant desire to rewatch was something I had for Dark Knight.  I couldn't get enough of Dark Knight.  I like superhero movies.  I like superheroes in general.  Yeah, I'm a DC guy.  By this I mean I tend to like DC superheroes and DC storytelling.  It's not just the superheroes but the storytelling, too.  Marvel doesn't often think of its superheroes in the same way DC does.  At the movies, there's really just Logan and the two Amazing Spider-Man movies.  Then there's stuff like the cartoonish logic of Bryan Singer's first two X-Men, Sam Raimi's first two Spider-Man flicks.  Ironically by the third one, which looked the most cartoonish, he finally went somewhere real.  So of course fans hated it.

Fans loved Iron Man instantly.  Visually it already looked timeless.  It still looks timeless.  The look of the armor matches up exactly in credibility with what you see in Avengers: Infinity War, ten years later.  That's pretty good.  It looks totally different than anything superhero movies had done before.  That was what made Raimi's Spider-Man pop, what made audiences "believe a man can fly" in 1978.  In that sense, of course the MCU took over the popular imagination.  It did something no one had seen before, and that always hooks the masses. 

But in terms of storytelling...It's awful.  Just...awful.

Tony Stark is sold as a tech genius.  Great!  Fantastic!  In 2008, Steve Jobs was a cultural icon!  Totally legit!  But...Tony Stark isn't sold as a Steve Jobs tech genius.  He's sold as...a weapons manufacturer.  And that's all he's known for.  And...when he says he won't make weapons again...that's it.  He's apparently done.  Forever.  And yet...We see his private lab, and he's got robots working for him.  He's got J.A.R.V.I.S., the virtual assistant who would later merge with the android Vision.  The rest of the world?  Doesn't have those robots.  Doesn't have J.A.R.V.I.S.  I think Siri wasn't a thing yet, in 2008.  Alexa wasn't a thing.  And of course, Tony famously keeps Iron Man to himself. 

Logistically this is idiotic.  In every single sense.  It only makes sense if you're trying to explain how Iron Man happens.  But in the real world, Iron Man makes no sense.  At all.  So you have to either accept the insanity of it or you can't.  And you see how idiotic the whole plot is.

Even as a weapons manufacturer, taking away everything else, Tony Stark makes no sense as a huge celebrity, appearing on every major magazine cover, as depicted in the film.  Weapons manufacturers aren't celebrities.  Name one.  The only "name" weapons developer I can think of is Oppenheimer, and he was never celebrated like this.  When Iron Man 2 shows a vintage video of Tony Stark's dad, it's clearly a pastiche of...Walt Disney.  Hilarious, considering the first two Iron Man movies were distributed by...Paramount.

But even the conceit of Tony being captured in the midst of a weapons demonstration...in the field of engagement...That's stupid.  I'm really sure that would never happen.  And then he gets captured.  And he's got shrapnel in his chest, so the bad guys...have the ability to give him tech that needs to be inserted onto/into his chest.  That can also be modified to power a suit of armor he makes.  Because.

This is the sort of nitpicking fans routinely give movies and/or TV shows they hate.  Usually, I try really hard not to do it, because nitpicking usually is even more idiotic than what these fans are attempting to portray as idiotic.  It's insipid.  It's a poor way to analyze something.  In this instance, though, these were problems I noticed immediately.  I don't normally instantly have these sorts of problems.  I hate how Singer uses Professor X as a macguffin in the first two X-Men movies.  Both times the exact same way.  It's lazy storytelling, something that needs to happen in order to move the story along because no one bothered to think the story through.  In other words, I'm not talking about nitpicking at all (mindlessly being annoyed by story elements while attempting to portray yourself as smarter than the people who developed them), but bad storytelling.  I always hate bad storytelling. 

And Iron Man is, again, beyond anything else, bad storytelling. 

The worst thing?  Even as it completely rejuvenates Robert Downey Jr.'s career, making him far more popular and relevant than he's ever been...Iron Man completely wastes and trashes Jeff Bridges in the process.  How does that even happen???  And you can sort of tell that it motivated him to seek better material, as suddenly he went into a whole career renaissance (Crazy Heart, True Grit, Hell or High Water) with material that was nothing like his lifeless role in Iron Man, the grizzled iconoclast Tony Stark only wishes he'll become, the culmination of everything Bridges had done before.

And Terrence Howard?  Marvel has Terrence Howard, and...nope.  Not in Iron Man 2.  How does that even happen???  Faran Tahir, who would turn up as a Starfleet captain in the 2009 Star Trek reboot, lamented playing a terrorist in Iron Man.  Do you think he ever changed his mind?  In Iron Man 3 they change the whole idea of Tahir's role, giving the lead-up to the Mandarin to a sham played by Ben Kingsley.  They try and pretend real terrorists were never a part of the story.  Yeah!

Gwyneth Paltrow plays Pepper Potts, the Tony Stark assistant who in 2018 would probably be cheering on #MeToo, but instead becomes a slow-burning love interest, who puts up with all of Tony's antics...because.  They never even try to develop her character, not in Iron Man, not in any other appearance.  Clark Gregg, in his first appearance as S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Phil Coulson, is mostly asked to dance around the joke of what S.H.I.E.L.D. actually stands for aside from a very elaborate excuse for an acronym.  Leslie Bibb plays a hot chick who's also a reporter for Vanity Fair, which is one of those inexplicable magazines smitten with weapons manufacturer Tony Stark.

Really, it's only Downey Jr. and Bettany who appear fully-formed and presentable for future appearances.  Good solid foundation, sure, but...

We learn late in the movie that Bridges' character was in cahoots with Tahir all along, that he set up Tony to die, as he did his father, to kill the golden goose, because...That part is never really made clear.  It would make sense if it were because either Stark had figured out what he was doing, but...Yeah.  Not in this movie.  Not in any movie.  He just likes to do away with tech geniuses, I guess.  The movie goes out of its way to prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that not only is Tony the only person capable of creating the tech he does, but that Bridges' character isn't even in the conversation.  In the era of Steve Jobs?  Bill Gates?  Steve Wozniak???

The funny thing about all this is that 2011's Green Lantern actually borrows a lot of Iron Man's story elements, and does them better, and fans insist to this day that it's a badly made movie, full of plot holes.  Really???  In the interests of full disclosure, Green Lantern is based on a DC superhero, and so you can call bias if you like, but for me it's still storytelling.  Green Lantern has great storytelling.  Iron Man doesn't.

So Iron Man 2 follows it with infinitely better storytelling.  Fans disagree.  But the insanely popular MCU happens anyway.  I can't possibly be upset about that.  There's still good material that results from it, the Captain America movies notably. 

I'd hope that in the years to come, anyone looking to revisit the whole thing recognizes the first one in the sequence for what it is: a ridiculous mess. 

Howl's Moving Castle (2004)

rating: ***

the story: A young woman inadvertently stumbles into a great conflict.

what it's all about: The films of Hayao Miyazaki are routinely rated as some of the best of the modern era.  Miyazaki is a Japanese animation director.  Whether or not you consider his work part of the overall Japanese anime scene may affect whether or not you've seen his work.  I've long known about his reputation, but until recently catching Howl's Moving Castle my practical experience with Miyazaki was limited to Princess Mononoke, which to my mind is easily associated with the overall Japanese anime scene, which I've determined after a number of movies is not really my thing.  As it turns out, Howl's Moving Castle isn't much like the overall Japanese anime scene.  But I'm still not convinced about Miyazaki.

Like Pixar, Miyazaki seems to get a free pass from critics.  If he's got something new, chances are more than good that critics will love it.  I can appreciate general admiration.  I've got actors and directors I'll always be interested in.  The problem becomes if you like a specific movie regardless of its own merits.  I don't think Pixar is a perfect movie engine, and I now have two experiences with Miyazaki that have failed to overly impress me. 

Don't get me wrong; Howl's Moving Castle earns a lot of points from me for being a clear break from the anime scene.  Its instincts are almost completely different, and generally they are quite charming, too.  In fact, charm is Howl's greatest advantage.  It's clearly an inventive work, even if it's based on a book.  (Can we please retire the nonsense of adaptation somehow not equating with creativity?)  It's got some truly fun characters in it, too. 

A lot of its appeal for me is that Howl's is basically an Oz story.  No, not Oz as in Judy Garland, or even as in the horribly unappreciated Return to Oz.  Oz as in the L. Frank Baum books.  I finally read through all of them a few years back, and I was thoroughly enchanted.  If you've seen Howl's then you already have an idea about what Baum's Oz was like.  That's what I mean.  But where Baum was always light on his feet, Howl's is leaden. 

As example I'll spend the remainder of my review talking about Howl himself.  Maybe this is really a criticism of the Hollywood dubbing of the movie, but even the appearance of Howl himself is a criticism of Miyazaki's vision.  Howl is one of the few characters in the movie who looks like he was ripped directly from a manga, a Japanese comic.  Manga and anime are virtually indistinguishable in their instincts.  In the Hollywood dubbing, Howl is voiced by Christian Bale.  In 2004, Bale had yet to reach the height of his fame.  He was one year away from playing Batman.  He was best known for American Psycho, four years earlier.  I have yet to see that one.  I wonder if he uses a voice similar to the one he employs for Howl.  If so...

The problem most people have with Bale's Batman is his voice.  If Bale had used that voice as Bruce Wayne, too, there would have been a real problem.  He doesn't.  As Howl, it's basically as if Bale had used his Batman voice the whole film.  It's not appealing.  As an entire performance, it's distracting.  By way of contrast, Billy Crystal as the fire demon is terrific.  I couldn't even place the voice until I saw Crystal's name in the credits.  I was convinced it was Kevin Spacey.  In 2004, Crystal was already ebbing in popularity.  Actually, the fire demon is Crystal's last notable role, not counting the Monsters, Inc. sequel.  In contrast, Bale's career grew considerably following Howl's. 

Bale's Howl is not only a bad performance, it's bad casting.  He doesn't sound anything like you'd expect Howl to sound like, based on his design.  With this one element, it becomes harder to see why Howl's is seen as anything other than an imaginative experience.  There's certainly nothing wrong with imaginative films experiences.  As an animated film, though, vocal performances are crucial.  Even if it's not a celebrity, it can't be distracting in a bad way.  Crystal is an example of a vocal performance being distracting in a good way; Emily Mortimer and Lauren Bacall are examples of vocal performances that don't draw attention to themselves so much as exist as elements of the movie.  They work, they're functional, and that's all you need to know. 

In sum?  Interesting.  Could have been better.

Selma (2014)

rating: ***

the story: Martin Luther King Jr. prepares his historic march for voting rights in Alabama.

what it's all about: I think in hindsight, Selma is where the culture truly started to fracture.  Selma is far more about the budding Black Lives Matter movement, the politicization of it, than MLK's march.  It's somewhat clear that that's the whole reason the movie was made at all, and why critics lined up to state how great and timely it was.  To state this is not to say BLM is meritless, but to say that as a matter of civil discourse, such a cultural response to a film, and the cultural divide it helped spark, is far more damaging than anything MLK confronted, and is in fact why BLM exists at all, why MLK's actions seem to have amounted to nothing but an annual holiday.  It doesn't even seem to matter that the march spurred exactly the results MLK wanted.  For committed activists, results don't matter.  For such people, it becomes about social revolt. 

Ironically, there's a moment in Selma where Malcolm X, shortly before his assassination, has finally stepped from out of the shadow of such reasoning, and MLK struggles to believe it. 

No, Selma is not worth the hype.  It's worth a look as a glimpse, of the times it reflects, even as a reflection of the times in which it was made.  But it is not good filmmaking.  MLK himself is not even the central figure.  The central figure of this movie is simmering rage, which again, reflects not the story itself but what director Ava DuVernay is really talking about, in intentionally incendiary ways.  It's a tone poem, of sorts, to further stoke the flames of social division.  And not much more.

The worst thing about it is the second-most lauded thing about it, the performance of David Oyelowo as MLK.  If this had been a movie about Frederick Douglass, there wouldn't be much of a problem with his performance.  Douglass has been lost to history as a person.  As a champion of black rights, he remains as well-known as he ever was, but all we have are photographs.  This was long before the advent of film, of recorded voices.  But the same is not true of MLK.  Everyone who knows MLK knows what he sounded like.  We certainly know what he looked like.  DuVernay chose an actor who looks nothing like MLK, and who chose to sound nothing like MLK.  He may turn in a competent performance, but Oyelowo seems to have chosen to dismiss the source material as much as DuVernay herself.  These are two fundamental strikes against the quality of the production. 

Tom Wilkinson, Tim Roth, they both turn in Tom Wilkinson and Tim Roth performances, as Lyndon Johnson and George Wallace, respectively.  What I mean is, they look and sound like Tom Wilkinson and Tim Roth.  It's a pattern.  DuVernay has no interest at all in anything but her metaphor.  Wilkinson is Wilkinson as Benjamin Franklin, too, in John Adams, but again, it doesn't matter as much in John Adams, because we definitely retain no cultural memory of Benjamin Franklin as a person.  LBJ, meanwhile, was certainly a Texan, and by most accounts a lot like Trump, with a lot more sympathetic coverage, an abrasive personality.  But yeah, with a Texas accent.  Which Wilkinson does not give LBJ. 

And yet, DuVernay, and Oyelowo, and Selma itself were almost uniformly called great.  How again?

There's very little art to it at all.  The movie begins with MLK already declared a cultural hero.  There's token reference to his personal failings, but mostly to represent his struggle with LBJ.  The only real complaints about the film are in fact about LBJ, how DuVernay depicts him almost exclusively as a villain.  Although really, his actions are little different than Lincoln's leading up to the Emancipation Proclamation, even as depicted.  It may be worth noting that Douglass eventually decided Lincoln was less the hero than history has since decided.  The first demagogue lost for perspective in this struggle, perhaps.

Oprah Winfrey appears as a token representative of the struggle MLK is working against, voting rights.  She's depicted saintly, of course, until the movie thinks it can get away with her lashing out.  About the one performance that's just about what it needs to be comes from Cuba Gooding Jr., once (and once) a critical darling.  He appears as a lawyer.  If Selma is so tepid about actually featuring MLK, it could easily have given Gooding an expanded role.

The biggest irony of all this is that none of this, in any other context, would merit such a harsh review.  If this had been made, say, in the early '90s, like Spike Lee's far superior Malcolm X, it might be different.  Although there was considerable civil unrest then, too, it hadn't yet been politicized, turned into a permanent wedge in society.  There was still a chance, even with the once militant figure in Lee's movie, to look for common ground, a positive rallying point.  Films had come a long way from Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, the tepid Sidney Poitier breakthrough icebreaker in which a black man merely asks to be accepted by a single family.  Now we get a satire like Get Out, in the current climate.  Coincidence? 

Of course, if it had been made then, it would've been for TV, and been little noted.

There are better movies to try and heal old wounds with.  But now we seem to get only ones that want to rub salt into them.  Selma, alas, the first movie to significantly feature MLK, is one of them.  Never really thought I'd see the day.  Much less with Martin Luther King Jr., of all people. 

As a reflection of the times in which it was made, Selma is a useful mirror.  As filmmaking, it's junk.

Ben-Hur (1959)

rating: ***

the story: Ben-Hur witnesses the rebellion against an empire begin.

what it's all about: After watching the 2016 version recently, I felt compelled to watch Charlton Heston's 1959 Ben-Hur, which I suppose I must have seen when I was a kid, since watching the famed chariot race sent vague memories firing through my head, memories that had rattled there since I first saw it, actually.  I just didn't remember watching the movie itself  Like a lot of people, I grew up watching Heston in the later Ten Commandments, thanks to an annual Easter broadcast.  Ten Commandments, although clearly filmed thanks to the success of Ben-Hur, ended up supplanting it in the popular culture.  Today, both Ben-Hur and the 19th century book upon which it was based have been somewhat lost to history.  Again, the massive failure of the 2016 version is evidence enough of that.  Critics will claim it's because the new one simply can't match up with the old one.  Having seen it (again), I will venture to say the new one doesn't have that much competition.

The 1959 version is long, like Ten Commandments.  It actually skips out on the kind of context storytelling the 2016 version explores, the full history of the foster brothers who end up competing in the chariot race.  Heston skips right to his Roman rival returning home and slowly realizing the old adage, you can't go home again.  It's almost funny to watch Heston in it, because he carries none of the gravity he brought to Ten Commandments, which I suppose is testament enough to his acting and his ability to bring different approaches to different characters (and also his increased profile).  Still, he and the movie equate well of themselves.

The gravity, actually, comes from a Star Wars connection, much as I'd read into the 2016 version, where I thought I saw a new version of source material George Lucas seemed to draw on for the prequels.  Yet the 1959 version reads a lot like a rebellion against an empire (as I noted above), full of Romans who sound English saying "rebellion" and "emperor" exactly as Star Wars characters would in the later original Star Wars trilogy.  It can't be coincidence, right?  Lucas was born in 1944,and so that would've made him fifteen in 1959, plenty impressionable enough for a big hit movie coming into his imagination.  Everyone knows Hidden Fortress helped form the basis of Star Wars in the 1977 first film of the saga, but it seems to me that Lucas borrowed heavily from Ben-Hur as he conceived the rest of it.

This is a movie that is what it is, and watching it again, I'm still inclined to consider the 2016 version better worth a rewatch, but that doesn't make the Heston film less memorable. Watching it I can even see little musical cues John Williams likely borrowed for Star Wars, too.  For these associations alone, it will remain fascinating, worth revisiting in the future.  The chariot race, which critics insisted looked far more realistic than its 2016 counterpart, doesn't hugely hold up, by the way. You can tell where parts were filmed separately and then spliced together.  It kind of takes you out of the moment.  But that's okay.  There are other things to love about it.

Ben-Hur (2016)

rating: ***

the story: A contemporary of Jesus has a major problem with his adopted brother.

what it's all about: Hard to believe that Ben-Hur, in general, has traditionally been one of America's favorite stories.  A Civil War general wrote the original book, which was one of the most successful books in American history, and Charlton Heston starred in the famous 1959 movie adaptation, which was one of the most successful movies in American history.  Then someone decided to make another movie of it, and that was released in 2016, and...it was not one of the most successful movies in American history.  It was kind of a massive flop.  In hindsight it's really easy to tell why: you may have noticed the massive cultural gap that's developed in the last few decades, that's only gotten wider in recent years.  No doubt Hollywood saw the modest success of religious films like God's Not Dead, and thought they could get another Passion of the Christ blockbuster hit with another Ben-Hur, because after all, the massive success of two previous iterations...But that just wasn't the case.  The God crowd is leery of blockbusters, and the art crowd is leery of God.  So: a massive flop.

Does the movie really deserve it?  Hardly.  I mean, the biggest star in the movie is Morgan Freeman, who puts in a supporting role, which means the lead goes to relative unknown Jack Huston, the latest spinoff of the Huston family that's been featured in Hollywood throughout its history.  This is his big break; he has nothing much to compare his work in Ben-Hur against.  The guy playing his brother has no shot at all of being or becoming a name from a movie like this, and so it's really completely on the movie itself to sell its merits, and you don't realize how often you judge movies on the talent involved rather than on the movie itself until you contend with a movie like this, which seems like it should be a big deal but already doesn't have much to go by.  So there's that.

But again, the story itself, which demonstrably has considerable pedigree.  The most famous element of the story is the showdown between Ben-Hur and his adopted brother in a chariot race.  Critics who bashed the movie claimed the 2016 version doesn't measure up in this regard, that the race looks fake and therefore makes the whole endeavor pointless.  But the thing is, it really is pretty cool.  I have yet to see the 1959 version.  I somehow doubt it really measures up to 2017 standards, much less 2016 (standards always advance in an evolving craft like filmmaking).  The thing is, the chariot race is clearly what inspired the podrace in Star Wars - Episode I: The Phantom Menace.  And the thing is, George Lucas seems to have been inspired by Ben-Hur with the whole Star Wars prequel trilogy.

Think about it.  At one point, Ben-Hur tracks down his mother, whom he was forced to leave behind years ago.  This same element can be found in Star Wars - Episode II: Attack of the Clones, when Anakin Skywalker memorably seeks his mother, whom he finds tortured near to death by the Sand People.  The trilogy rounds out with Star Wars - Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, as Anakin clashes with his metaphorical brother, Obi-Wan Kenobi, just as Ben-Hur must clash with his metaphorical brother.  This is no coincidence.  Hollywood picked up on Lucas's allusion right away; the year after The Phantom Menace was released, the so-called "sword and sandal" genre was memorably resurrected with Gladiator, another ode to the days of the Roman Empire. 

So in a lot of ways, Ben-Hur in 2016 was bringing things full circle, finally giving modern audiences another look at rich source material.  Actually, the God elements are the least convincing of the movie, and seem to have been written with one particular audience in mind anyway.  Depending on your ability to look past them, you don't even have to worry about them.  The rest of the material stands up on its own, even if today it feels more like a curiosity than a vital piece of the culture.

But the thing is, you don't even have to look at it as a Star Wars thing or a God thing, but as a Civil War general's attempt to reconcile, well, the Civil War, and the America that existed at that time, a period of social strife, when slaves were being freed and struggling to find their place in society again.  Slavery is key to the imagery of Ben-Hur in any context; the galley sequences are clearly evocative of slave ships, since they're an image the author conjured out of thin air, as he presented them.  The 2016 movie is actually less about the God elements and more about attempting to unite diverging segments of the population, which makes it all the more ironic that the filmmakers decided to include divisive God elements and not particularly artfully, because they were only going to make the intended results impossible.

But all this still means this movie is fascinating, something worth thinking about, watching to see how well it really succeeds, how well it speaks to the past, present, and future.  It's ambitious, and usually ambitious these days means superheroes or aliens, not a chariot race.  It's certainly a movie I'll be returning to in the years ahead.  I'm still not sure what to think about it myself, whether it succeeds on its own merits or merely the rich thoughts it provokes, and everything it evokes.  I think it's pretty good.  But, I'll have plenty of opportunities to find out for sure.  I think it deserves that much.

The Fugitive

***

directed by: Andrew Davis

starring: Harrison Ford, Tommy Lee Jones, Sela Ward, Joe Pantoliano, Andreas Katsulas, Julianne Moore

Released in 1993.

Based on the classic '60s TV series that famously drew huge ratings to finally catch the "one-armed man" who killed Richard Kimble's wife, The Fugitive is best known today as a classic '90s thriller, one of several such blockbusters to star Harrison Ford.  It also helped launch the popular career of Tommy Lee Jones.  In fact, it's the rare moment where the intended star and in fact title character might be said to have the movie stolen from out of under him.  Jones was so popular (he earned a Supporting Actor Oscar) that he earned a spin-off, U.S. Marshals, which was pointedly far more about his character than another fugitive like Kimble.

The Fugitive, like the Humphrey Bogart Maltese Falcon, is a classic example of Hollywood managing to buck the apparent rule that remakes can't at least match the original (Cecil B. DeMille accomplished this himself with the remake of his own The Ten Commandments, with the later Charlton Heston version becoming the one perennially broadcast at Easter).  If it hasn't already, the movie will eventually replace the legacy of the series.

That's the strength of the basic archetype.  This kind of story is told all the time on TV, usually within a single episode.  The original series was a rare instance of a single plot sustaining a continuing arc, something far more common in the modern era.  It'd be like Prison Break being made into a movie.  The pursuit really is a give-and-take between the sequences, Jones convincing us that his duty is the only thing that matters and Ford helping us believe that he's innocent.

None of it is very deep, but it's iconic.  Now that it's been told twice you can just as easily imagine someone else doing the story again, and maybe finding something a little greater in it.  The strength of this version will always be what it always was, Ford and Jones, but even Jones has since become ubiquitous that The Fugitive alone isn't completely necessary to keep his legacy intact.

But just for the record, it's a heck of a ride while it lasts.

The Absent-Minded Professor

***

directed by: Robert Stevenson
starring: Fred MacMurray

Released in 1961.

I watched a lot of classic Disney films, both animated and live-action, growing up, movies made well before I was born.  One of the more memorable of the live-action efforts was The Absent-Minded Professor, which is perhaps better known for the odd scientific breakthrough known as Flubber, made more obvious by the title of its sequel, Son of Flubber, and Robin Williams remake, Flubber.

Flubber is flying rubber, something any kid could easily embrace as a concept, but Fred MacMurray, a famous star in his day for movies like Double Indemnity and the TV show My Three Sons, for slightly more sober uses.  (If you're still having a hard time picturing him, MacMurray also served as the visual basis for Captain Marvel, the same superhero who would later inspire Elvis Presley's late career wardrobe.)

"Slightly more sober" in this instance apparently means enabling his vintage Model T to fly and making basketball games far more interesting by sticking Flubber on the bottom of the players' sneakers.  This means that the team bounces all over the place (like Gummi Bears), an incredible display of aerial acrobatics, and easily wins a crucial game.

So, not very sober at all, but far more sophisticated than simply wadding it into a ball and launching it recklessly into the air, which is what a kid would do.

It's harmless Disney fun, memorable and a fine vehicle for MacMurray.  If you can get your kids to acknowledge that the world existed before computer animated films, The Absent-Minded Professor remains reliable family entertainment.

The Exorcist

***

directed by: William Friedkin
starring: Linda Blair, Ellen Burstyn, Max von Sydow

Released in 1973.

One of the iconic horror movies of the second age of the genre, when the focus shifted from monsters to the human relationship with these monsters, The Exorcist led to a whole cottage industry of movies about satanic possession.  It shocked audiences by using a little girl as the victim and the extreme depiction of the results.

Actually, the little girl, portrayed by Linda Blair, remains what most people know about it.  For me, it's about the visuals, and the visual I care best about is Max von Sydow, a leader of the sober authoritarian school of acting, blessed with one of the most distinctive voices in film.  There's a famous shot of his approach to the girl's home that is equaled for me only by Road to Perdition, a film ruled as much by great acting as great cinematography.

Otherwise I don't really care too much for The Exorcist.  Clearly it was really all about sensationalism, hinged around the things the little girl does.  Sure, on one level it's about the extreme amount of disrespect possible from true evil, but it ends up being depicted by everything you never thought movies would do with little girls.

Thankfully we later got young actors with actual dignity in horrors films with The Sixth Sense, basically the complete opposite of The Exorcist, something more akin to Max von Sydow.