Across the River and Into the Trees (2024) Review

the story: An old soldier tries to find a reason to live.

the rating: ****

the review: I've become somewhat of a Hemingway nut, in the past decade, stemming, ironically or not, from a depiction of Hemingway himself, in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, and have been steadily plugging away at his fiction (and some of his nonfiction, including, of course, A Moveable Feast), and he's become very easily one of my favorite writers as a result.  Across the River and Into the Trees, though, first came to my attention as a home video release (since its theatrical run was negligible), as it's not considered one of Heminway's essential works, and as such hadn't previously showed up on my radar.

So I collected the movie and ordered a copy of the book, and watched the movie and then read the book, and having read the book, rewatched the movie.  As these things tend to go, for those who aren't slavishly devoted to the narrative that "the book is better," I drew more from the movie the second time around, as a result.  

The movie changes things somewhat considerably, but it's the same story, all the same, and anyway, it's really a very fine excuse to spend some time with Liev Schreiber.

Schreiber has been one of my favorite actors since I first saw him, either in Scream or RKO 281, in which he plays Orson Welles as he constructs Citizen Kane, although it was probably another TV movie, one I'm fairly certain I'm in exclusive circles for remembering, much less very fondly, at all, called Since You've Been Gone, just an absolutely great, classic voice, and the knowledge of how to use it.  He's otherwise had a fairly obscure career, most notable as the second actor to play Sabretooth, in X-Men Origins: Wolverine.  

In some alternate version of history Schreiber is an acknowledged classic Hollywood lead actor with a rich catalog everyone knows.  

In this one?  You could do far worse than to appreciate him in Across the River and Into the Trees.  Which, by the way, is popularly considered one of Hemingway's worst efforts, but I enjoyed it as much as I have any Heminway, and as I've said, the film version is worth watching on its own merits, chief among them being perhaps the long-awaited true spotlight for Liev Schreiber.

They say Bogart wasn't really Bogart until he hit middle age, when he at last became a valuable commodity.  I don't see that being Schreiber's fate.  Today's Hollywood is far too finical for such things.  But that he found such a role, in such a film, is worth celebrating all the same.  The whole performance seems natural, a culmination of everything he's done so well before, everything he was always meant to be, but never quite found in other movies.  

I'm the kind of film fan who can appreciate a movie even if all that's worth recommending is the lead actor.  I can accept a good performance for its own regard.  Fortunately, the movie around Schreiber knows what it's doing, too, and although it's not Hemingway's version, it feels like classic Hollywood in ways that haven't been seen in probably half a century, an international setting (Venice) that's allowed to settle into the backdrop, as Schreiber embarks on his last fateful excursion, with a young lady who finds herself caught up in it, despite every reason not to be.  

Josh Hutcherson, playing a very different role than in a much wider release in 2024, The Beekeeper, is probably the chief beneficiary of the alterations Peter Flannery made to the story, in an expanded, wiser supporting turn than Hemingway envisioned.

Rebel Moon - Parts 1 & 2, A Child of Fire and The Scargiver (2023-2024) Review

the story: A farming village on a remote moon finds itself the target of the nightmarish Imperium military.

the rating; ****

the review: Usually a review, even here, covers one movie at a time, and I could certainly split my thoughts between A Child of Fire and The Scargiver individually, but Rebel Moon hit that sweet spot the internet loves so much, something it was supposed to like but ended up hating, so I'm going to simplify things and write about both films under a single umbrella.  Longish review short: Rebel Moon is better than you heard.

Actually, so the story goes, it began life as a project Zack Snyder pitched in the Disney Star Wars era, and anyone who watches or knows anything about Rebel Moon will find this very easy to believe.  Much of the general framework of the two films is Star Wars iconography, down to the stand-in lightsabers a few of the characters use.  

The very funny thing about all this, the reaction to Rebel Moon is that it addresses basically all the criticisms the internet has posed about Star Wars over the years.  It also handily combines the original, prequel, and sequel trilogies, nine films into two.

Star Wars fans worry that the original trilogy will lose its appeal to later audiences, who are growing up with films that look far more advanced than even the pioneering work done in 1977, 1980 and 1983, with or without the visual updates George Lucas has toiled away at for some thirty years.  The prequels are generally derided for trying to appeal to younger audiences a bit too much, with elements that are hard to take seriously and thus difficult to separate from the rest of the material.  The sequels generally find their criticism in either being too slavish to the original films or not coherent enough in what they were trying to do.

Rebel Moon was constructed in much the fashion of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, in that the two films Snyder produced were part and parcel of the same production schedule, and there was never any doubt that they were both going to be released, especially since, unlike the later Horizon saga, they had a guaranteed, streaming, agreement.  The results are much more like Jackson's work than Lucas and his successors, in that they deal with the material in a sober fashion first and foremost, plunging into a fictional landscape and taking it at face value, and assuming audiences don't need to be guided along in accepting it.  

This is to say, the story was in place, it didn't have silly elements (unless you choose to view them as such, as many internet responses have), and it looks completely modern, with a budget that subsequently needed good reviews and wide audience acceptance in order for there to be more entries, neither of which Rebel Moon enjoyed, and so the future is doubtful.

It's been described, other than the obvious Star Wars parallels, as another version of Seven Samurai, and that seems to have been enough.  But gathering a group of warriors is one of the oldest tropes in fictional.  Even in 1954, when Akira Kurosawa's film was released, Tolkien was in fact releasing his Lord of the Rings, which itself is a sequel to his own Hobbit, where another band of warriors gather, and that is to say nothing of Robin Hood's Merry Men, or King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table, the Greeks united in The Iliad, or Jason's Argonauts, which still includes the most famous member of any such band, Heracles, otherwise known as Hercules, spoken of even within The Iliad itself as the greatest generation of warriors...

So the pedigree is certainly there.  Even if you leave Rebel Moon at Seven Samurai itself, is that really such a bad thing?  Star Wars owes a debt, after all, to The Hidden Fortress, another samurai epic (Rian Johnson, director of The Last Jedi, acknowledges the debt he owed to the same genre in his entry).  By the second film, Scargiver, each of the warriors assembled is given an origin, after their spectacular calling cards in Child of Fire as they join the quest, which occasions one of the best, understated moments of the films as at least one character allows another origin to go unremarked, which makes up the bulk of the backstory most important to Rebel Moon...

Because it's Zack Snyder it's lush visuals all around.  No one does it as well as Snyder.  It's not even close.  He's been doing it since 300 and there's no one who even tries, and for years the excuse was, he stole his ideas from the comics he adapted, but Sucker Punch is full of the same verve (and is itself far better than suggested, and an obvious predecessor to Rebel Moon).

To cobble the story, Snyder in fact combines elements from all of the Star Wars trilogies.  He splits Han Solo into a number of different characters, including the one played by Charlie Hunnam in Child of Fire.  The lead character, Kora (Sofia Boutella) is as much the Rey of the sequels as she is Luke in the originals, or Anakin, or perhaps more accurately Padme (or both) in the prequels.  That's what's so fascinating.  The Imperium is the First Order from the opening of The Force Awakens, the bloody conqueror without mercy barging wherever it wants with guns blazing, much as audiences adored the vision of Darth Vader in Rogue One.  The farmers of Veldt are a version of the Lars moisture farm that can be understood, and faced with a problem that is far more urgent than foot soldiers looking for lost droids.  I'm not criticizing Star Wars.  Rebel Moon has more in common, in the final analysis, with Braveheart than Luke Skywalker.  

It's got Djimon Hounsou, carefully drawing on his appearance in Gladiator, as one of the warriors Kora assembles.  There's Anthony Hopkins voicing the robot that explains in simple terms why in this story they're treated like scum (we're left to assume, in Star Wars, that there are latent fears of the droid armies that once ran roughshod over countless worlds).  His is the role of narrator.  In most of his appearances he's silent. It's artful in ways that are usually reserved to Pixar.  Ray Fisher, one of Snyder's Justice League actors, is unrecognizable and yet charismatic in an otherwise thankless role, meant to motivate more than fill the screen.  Ed Skrein is the villain who looks like a Nazi but wears a suit, the real suggestion, perhaps, that in our current times the villains wear ties while the rest of us just try to get on with our lives.  Corey Stoll appears in Child of Fire as village leader, and if you didn't know it was him you probably wouldn't guess, but as with every time I see him it's easy to appreciate his presence.

Boutella has been a genre queen, somewhat quietly, for much of the past decade, although never appearing in something that has been an unqualified success, or a success at all, really, from Star Trek Beyond to The Mummy to Atomic Blonde.  I caught her in a small production called Settlers, a few years back, and I adored that film, and anyone who enjoys Rebel Moon, or even if you can't, would still be recommended to check it out.  Rebel Moon is filled with accents, which is something I personally enjoy.  She's understated and expected to sell her action role in much the fashion that has failed to connect with just about every other available example (she resembles very much Alicia Vikander's Lara Croft in Tomb Raider, or the lead in Terminator: Dark Fate, the latest cinematic attempt to revitalize that franchise).  That alone was always going to be enough to sink Rebel Moon's popular prospects.  

All the hate is from people who were going to hate the results anyway.  Snyder's Man of Steel and then Batman v Superman were incredibly unpopular online, and then the long campaign for Justice League: The Snyder Cut, which ended up producing actual results, left his reputation in tatters, which he unwisely attempted to capitalize on with director's cuts of both Rebel Moon entries.  I haven't seen those.  In this era such cuts have begun to take on the reputation of being inherently better than the original, studio, theatrical versions since they "fill out the story," although I've seen every version of Alexander, and that's my favorite movie, and there's no cut that's significantly better.  They're just different cuts.  There's a very old school of this sort of thing at this point, from the different versions of Brazil to Blade Runner, and I also have ones for Orson Welles' Mr. Arkadin, and a great many of his fans still lament the loss of the original Magnificent Ambersons to the cutting room floor...

The filmwork, the storytelling, the acting, it's all there.  Later audiences will surely have a version of Star Wars, at the very least, where if they don't want to watch nine movies can settle for two.  It's also its own thing.  All of these stories are.  By the time you realize how much Kora's life was manipulated, you can't help but be swept up in the tragedy of it, and the prospect of redemption, which is left dangling at the end of Scargiver.  Do we need to see that?  Will we ever?

I don't think that matters.  I think these movies sell themselves.  Ignore what you've heard.  These are well worth watching.

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) Review

rating: ****

the story: Pat Garrett hunts down his old friend Billy the Kid.

the review: I recently sat down making my way through three edits of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and basically, I loved it.  There's a lot of passion and history behind those edits, but what it boils down to is a film that's much more about Pat Garrett than Billy the Kid, and then, at that, less about his conflicted feelings and more about the sequence of events that led from the badge to the murder.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is nearly twenty years old at this point, and is unquestionably the greater cinematic achievement, but probably it would never have existed without Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.  Neither film spends a lot of time explaining the bona fides of their infamous outlaws, but plenty of time exploring the journeys the men who kill them take.  For Pat Garrett, there's precious little time spent sharing a screen, without bullets, with Billy.  Instead it's Sam Peckinpah indulging himself one last time in the lush visual language of the old west, including Pat's snazzy black duds that when updated with modern technology pop off the screen just as if he were Darth Vader hunting down Han Solo.

Which, by the way, there's plenty of that to be found here, too.  Kris Kristofferson's Billy is a visual template for Han, and James Coburn's Pat is given another possible origin for Han's famous cantina showdown with Greedo (Harrison Ford himself had another in an episode of Gunsmoke).  

Another valuable screen hand in Jason Robards casually points Pat in Billy's direction, but the reason I really cared about any of this is the enigmatic character known as Alias, who happens to be played by Bob Dylan.  Peckinpah apparently felt Bob was an unwanted studio mandate, which is insane.  I mean, if you have the young Bob Dylan in a western, wouldn't your first thought, as director, be nothing but abject gratitude?  Maybe Sam wasn't much for music, although Bob certainly was.  He composed "Knocking on Heaven's Door" for Pat Garrett, and it ends up featured in the movie's best scene.  He also fiddled around with the song that would become "Wagon Wheel" in the recording sessions, by the way.  His acting isn't much, but there isn't much asked of it.  Mostly he's just the one guy smart enough to be faithful to Billy but also convincing factor into Pat's plans, the middle ground that's essential to discovering where these legends fit together when the film itself doesn't bother.

Coburn is effortlessly cool and so much more appealing than Kristofferson, who spends the movie basically preening, assured that the peasants around him are in awe of the legend, when they really should admire Pat as much as we do thanks to Coburn.  These are all sketches, which is probably why the film had such a hard time finding appreciation on original release, why the studio had no idea what Peckinpah was trying to accomplish, which was nothing less than an ode to a dying era, both historically and as a film genre.  He's not asking that you find either title character heroic, which is why he never frames either of their narratives.  We are simply asked to bear witness.

Like so with the film itself.  It's an essential part of film lore.

Gladiator II (2024) Review

 the story: Nearly twenty years after Maximus took on Commodus with the fate of the Roman Empire at stake, his story unexpectedly concludes.

rating: ****

review: As someone who's enjoyed Ridley Scott's stream of historical epics since Gladiator, I figured I was in a good position to understand his vision for its much anticipated and also much delayed sequel.  From Kingdom of Heaven to Robin Hood to Exodus: Gods and Kings to The Last Duel to Napoleon, I found his meditations on the complexities of leadership brilliant.  Gladiator II, I determined, was much the same.

It's not at the same level as Gladiator or Last Duel, but it's not trying to be.  Its sole mission is to finish the original narrative.  Since Russell Crowe's Maximus dies at the end of Gladiator, how exactly a sequel was supposed to happen was always going to be a challenge.  The speculation always drifted in the direction of revisiting Maximus in the afterlife, which for those keeping score who still haven't seen Gladiator II, does not happen.  Rather, the plot follows two key players from the first film as they manage lives caught up in the further turmoils of empire.

Now, Ridley Scott was never playing strictly from the historical record.  He plays fast and loose with facts, as he did the first time around.  Faster and looser, actually.  But his point isn't really fact, but rather searching for heroes.  We don't live in an era chalk full of heroes.  Or rather, we don't spend a lot of time worrying about them.  We actually go out of our way to poke holes in the halos of past heroes, which reckless abandon.  It seems relevant, in such times, to find heroes in a more creative fashion.  Actually, when you stop to wonder why all the heroes are fictional superheroes these days, it begins to make a lot more sense.  Ridley Scott found himself with a Roman superhero the first time around.  Then he simply revisited as closely as he could.

You want spoilers?  The little boy from Gladiator grew up, and through circumstances found himself repeating much of Maximus's arc.  This isn't mindless duplication.  That boy turns out to be Maximus's own child, the product of an affair with the sister of Commodus, once again played by Connie Nielsen.  If you want the compelling reason to have a movie called Gladiator II once again hinge the plot on someone being a gladiator and trying to save the empire, it's really in the dramatic potential fully realized by how Nielsen's Lucilla reacts to the agonies that follow.

Actually, the title gladiator isn't even the one who most closely follows Maximus's arc, but rather the character played by Pedro Pascal, the latest actor beloved in TV roles but constantly struggling for respect in the movies (see: James Gandolfini, Bryan Cranston), who once again acquits himself well, in case you really doubt it.  The title gladiator is played by Paul Mescal, who in his breakthrough role was never going to challenge Russell Crowe, and again, didn't need to.  The draw here is the legacy, and the outcome. Derek Jacobi is the other returning actor from the first film, though he's mostly here as a link and a demonstration of the weakness of the senate, and old man on the sidelines trying desperately to make a difference, but it's just out of his grasp.

The true calling card of the movie is Denzel Washington.  This deep into the review, and it's only here I even mention him, because it really shouldn't be necessary.  Washington's presence is the true distinguishing feature of Gladiator II, its biggest claim to be more than just a sequel to Gladiator.  It's by definition at least as much a Denzel Washington picture just by his presence.  He's showy, but not in a Training Day way.  He's not always dialed in, and he doesn't need to be.  When he has something to do, you know it, and when he's trying to hide, you know it, and that's a new kind of role for Washington, and nothing that was part of Gladiator, and everything you need to know about Gladiator II and its vision of politics pivots around that description.  

It's great filmmaking by extension.  It's utterly gratuitous in its depiction of politics, the cheat code Maximus used in the first film removed, and all the dangers reinstalled.  There are consequential deaths.  There are rewarding deaths.  They're all shocking, effective moments, some of the most deft ever depicted in film, and for that, Gladiator II earns more than it needs to, since without a Russell Crowe to root for, you wonder why you should care, and that's the reception the movie's gotten, and again, again, this is beside the point.

The point is, the story is finally finished.  Good truly prevails, even though we know the empire's rot into oblivion soldiers on anyway.  In the story of Gladiator, Marcus Aerelius had a dream that seemed unattainable, and certainly so when the hero he hoped would help him gain it is dead at the end.  At the end of Gladiator II, the hero is still standing, and so, too, is the dream.  It pivots the narrative to definitive hope.  And that's the point.

These are the times we live in.  We need heroes, even fictional ones.  It doesn't hurt to have them grounded in some grand past in the real world, even if their stories are fictional.  This is a perfect coda, and perfect storytelling, even if it isn't perfect filmmaking.

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.

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! 

The Flash (2023) Review

the rating: ****

the story: Barry Allen attempts to rewrite his own history, and instead breaks the timeline.

the review: It's going to be completely impossible for anything resembling a reasonable popular consensus on the DCEU to exist for years, decades.  Its proximity to the height of the MCU created a huge distorting effect in much the way DC and Marvel in the comics have competed for top placement for sixty years.  Simply put, their coexistence could not be reconciled by the mere weight of pop culture.  The Flash is a last attempt to conclude the DCEU, in the most dramatic way possible, and to my mind a hugely successful one, although it has features that are admittedly hard to appreciate.

Chiefly, its special effects, especially the crucial depiction of the Speed Force, where Barry Allen watches outside regular time the effects of his speedy travels.  After the high water mark of Quicksilver's appearances in the X-Men movies, the superpower of speed was always going to be difficult to depict in a truly satisfying way.  Actually, The Flash opens with a scene that tops them, improbably saving the lives of a bunch of babies while looking like it's the last thing on his mind.  I work with babies.  This is the kind of scene that will win easy bonus points for me.  Otherwise, Barry looks unreal on his feet, in ways Spider-Man never did slinging through New York City in the Sam Raimi movies that set the new bar for the genre twenty years ago.  But it's because, dude's ability is running.  This is never going to look awesome.  Not if you're forced to depict it.  

There's really no way around that.  But the story itself is absolutely killer.  Geoff Johns first wrote this story in the breakthrough event comic Flashpoint, which has already been adapted twice, once in the Flash TV series (third season) and the animated movie Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox, which like the comic depicted Barry brutally electrocuting himself with lightning to try and get his speed back.  For me this is iconic material.  For me, when Barry has to say goodbye to his mom at the end of the film, it means more than Rocket Raccoon, the b-plot in his starring role for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, gets some kind of comeuppance.  It's earned.  

And around that, you've got Barry, the version of Barry Allen that could only exist as portrayed by Ezra Miller, essentially first and foremost essentially starring opposite himself.  And then you've also got Michael Keaton returning as Batman.  This was heavily promoted in exactly the opposite way as Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield showing up in Spider-Man: No Way Home (uh, spoiler?), since you can't hide such a crucial point.  In a lot of ways, it's almost the whole point.  We're in an age where seeing old stars in old roles is supposed to be the selling point.  This isn't even nostalgia but awareness that some franchises were abandoned, or changed, too quickly.  Keaton only made two Batman movies, and while one of them isn't as fondly remembered as the other, everyone was always bummed he didn't appear in the other two.  It's the same impulse that brought Connery back to Bond, eventually, at least for one more movie (even if it's technically unofficial), forty years ago.  This is really nothing new.

The movie climaxes on Barry's fight against himself, a third version who couldn't let go.  It's not really the fight with Zod, the deaths of Batman and Supergirl, although this part of the movie is directly addressing the DCEU, the controversial way Man of Steel ended, the "original sin" that needed erasing a decade ago.  Most MCU movies only ever have the one kind of ending.  Guardians 2 had "Mary Poppins," which is what redeems it for some fans.  That's a rare exception.  Usually the villain is meant to be the villain, and the hero just needs to defeat them.  They don't really learn anything.  They just move on to the next one.  For a long time, that formula worked, and a DCEU trying a different narrative was cognitive dissonance: "That's not what these kinds of movies should be doing!"  They're supposed to be emotionally simplistic.  Their ambition is just building to Thanos!  

In a lot of ways, the implosion of the DCEU resulted in something far more interesting.  The Flash might have been envisioned in its basic shape this way all along, but it has far greater symbolic meaning.  You get to see all those digital cameos, and even the official ones, because this is an ending.  Its story takes on greater resonance for it.  Barry needs to let go, and figure out that it's better that way.  Same, The Flash.  Same.

Asteroid City (2023) Review

the rating: ****

the story: Young achievers are unexpectedly at the heart of an unlikely alien encounter.

the review: So I've really gotten into Wes Anderson, finally, and predictably it's just when critics have gotten over him.  I mean, they've been over him for at least a decade, and I didn't get into him, really, until a few years ago, so it's not that surprising.  Of course I had to see Asteroid City.  Of course it was likely that I would enjoy it.  I expected to like it more, but I definitely liked it.  The appearances of Tom Hanks and Steve Carell actually created a kind of uncanny valley, that breaks the typical mold of total control on Anderson's part.  Most actors who appear in his films fit the mold perfectly; Hanks can't help but be Hanks, and the same is true of Carell.  Everyone else (Owen Wilson is atypically absent, but Jason Schwartzman, another longtime collaborator, is back in a starring role) very much fits in nicely.

"You can't wake up if you don't go to sleep."

That's how the movie ends.  This is not a spoiler.  Just as Amsterdam ends with each of the principle characters reciting the eponymous city name to the audience, and Cradle Will Rock builds to the climactic moment from the 1937 play it's built around, Asteroid City concludes with the cast of stage actors reciting this line.  How much you appreciate the movie is likely tied to how much thought you put into it.  The movie preceding it plays out along two separate tracks: one is a presentation of a play, and the other as if the play were happening in reality and not on a stage.  Schwartzman's character pulls himself out of the play when he struggles to understand why his character chooses to burn his hand on a grill, and so clearly Anderson's intent is for his audience to figure out his intent, too.

"You can't wake up if you don't go to sleep."  There will be plenty of speculation about it for those interested, and so maybe this review isn't really the place for it, but the story pretty happily busies itself with the story of Schwartzman's character in the story trying to have an honest reckoning with himself and his young family, something he's been avoiding for the past few weeks.  Eventually an alien shows up (an absolutely perfect moment, a perfect marriage of Anderson's best live action and stop-motion instincts).  Around all this, as Anderson movies tend to go, a niche community (well, in this case, two) is explored, although it's not really the point, but how the community(s) reacts to circumstances.  

Me, I'd choose, if forced, to interpret the point of Asteroid City to warn against comforting complacency, that in order to make progress you have to challenge yourself.  But this isn't possible unless you're first willing to admit your complacency.

At any rate, Hanks and Carell are the signifiers that although this acts and behaves like a typical Anderson movie, it really isn't.  He is very obviously trying to make a point.  It's very possible this will raise Asteroid City's value for me, later, when I will have more fully digested the results.  But it's certainly another excellent effort on his part.

Marlowe (2023) Review

the rating: ****

the story: Private detective Philip Marlowe searches for a dead man.

the review: Some movies get dismissed by critics seemingly without their ever having watched them at all.  I assume Marlowe was simply because it was another Liam Neeson movie in the era of Taken, when he's chosen to star in an endless series of movies of that ilk.  The other reason would be the pointless crusade of the media to protect Old Hollywood by immediately rejecting anything that could possibly evoke it.  Raymond Chandler's Marlowe was of course the character Bogart played in The Big Sleep, one of his Big Three roles alongside The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca.  

At its heart Marlowe is of course evoking classic film noire, but not as obviously as, say, the Sin City movies.  It isn't shot in black and white, for instance.  The storytelling beats are all there.  The end of the movie evokes Maltese Falcon, even Raiders of the Lost Ark, making a joke of the whole idea of the maguffin, since the real point was exploring the nasty secrets of Hollywood (apparently no way to make a living making movies these days).  Having recently rewatched The Third Man, I couldn't help but think of Marlowe as more that kind of movie, although of course its inversion, since Third Man famously stars Orson Welles, whom we don't see until about the third act, whereas Neeson is obviously the star of Marlowe and its "third man" is another very capable Mexican actor doomed to be ignored by mainstreatm modern Hollywood (hello, Die in a Gunfight!), who just so happens to sound like Brad Pitt.  The whole point of casting Neeson in a movie like this is to draw on the Taken mystique, to find Marlowe credible in all his story beats.  But Marlowe is otherwise nothing like Taken.  In fact, most of Neeson's Taken movies try to find some interesting variation.  I remember Unknown finding interesting things.  Marlowe has more in common with A Walk Among the Tombstones than Taken.  But critics want Neeson to star in another sad Irish epic like Rob Roy or Michael Collins, or Schindler's List.  Forget that they ignore stellar work in Silence, A Monster Calls.

The director is the reliable Neil Jordan, the screenwriter William Monohan, neither of whose work deserves such casual dismissal.  Neeson has Jessica Lange and Diane Kruger as his dames to kill for, the likes of Danny Huston (born for this role, possibly his best iteration of it, in such a pure state), Alan Cumming, even Colm Meaney, Adawale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (playing the role Dennis Haysbert did in the second Sin City, but a heroic version).

This is a version of classic Hollywood, sure, but the version that was possible to make in 2023.  You don't win any points by claiming "they did it better back then."  There are so many versions of so many stories told over so many thousands of years, you don't win points by stating, "they did it a hundred years ago."  Characters like Marlowe are liable to disappear if they don't resurface every now and then.  Eventually no one will care Bogart played him.  If he's no longer relevant, it doesn't matter.

This is an excellent way to bring him back around again.  If the critics want to contradict themselves and claim there's no point bringing Marlowe back and that it's just another forgettable post-Taken movie for Neeson...It's their loss.  For the art of film, this is everyone's gain.  A movie I was very pleased to press "play" again when there were things I missed.  

Blues Brothers 2000 (1998) Review

rating: ****

the story: The band gets back together.  Again!

review: The original Blues Brothers was so iconic, and so closely identified with John Belushi, it was always going to be a tall order to make another one without Belushi, who had been dead for years by the time production began.  Blues Brothers 2000 became, as a result, a poster child of unwanted sequels.  It does not deserve such a reputation.

Filling in for Belushi are John Goodman and Joe Morton, who are nothing like the brash Belushi, but who nonetheless step into the act with Dan Ackroyd in such fashion that you really have to be committed to hating the results to hate.  Morton, a reliable hand who has never gotten his due in general, has an actual plot behind his character, an arc that culminates in a tent revival scene that has one show-stealing (and for me, movie-defining) song, "John the Revelator," leaning heavily into the supernatural elements that allowed the original band to survive all manner of '80s mayhem without a second's thought.  Watching Ackroyd in all this is to reconcile Blue Brothers with Ghostbusters, a logical leap that should also not be so difficult to manage.

But the real charm of Blues Brothers 2000 is that it actually features blues music!  The music here isn't just memorable pop songs from days past, but blues acts getting to sink their teeth into their craft.  You have the likes of B.B. King, Bo Diddley, Dr. John, and even Eric Clapton putting on appearances, plus Erykah Badu immersing herself deep into a character role, and Blues Traveler!  One has the idea that the whole point of the movie is celebrating these and other acts, to give back after the first one, and this is a most worthy cause.  To watch this one is to experience the world the brothers celebrated in the first one.  Is that really so hard to love?  These are both movies that are elaborate excuses to enjoy some good music.  They happen to have different vantage points, even if on the surface they look exactly the same.

I think it's well worth revisiting.

Red Tails (2012) Review

rating: ****

the story: Tuskegee airmen perform heroics during WWII.

review: Until Top Gun: Maverick exploded at the box office last year, I was, like many other filmgoers, overlooking one of the original joys of Star Wars: the X-Wing run down the Death Star trench.  It's easy to forget the appeal of the sequence when the focus so often shifts to the world-building, the characters, the tension of the moment, but really, it's a holdover of the fighter pilot era best defined by WWII, and by the release of the original Top Gun, fast receding into the past.  Incredibly, George Lucas never featured that exact kind of storytelling again, until Red Tails, which he developed much earlier than its release date suggests, but kept getting turned down by studios (yes, even though it came from George Lucas), he contends, because it features an almost entirely black cast.

Lucas himself doesn't direct Tails, though by all accounts of his filmmaking career it's extremely difficult to imagine he stayed far behind during production (he's credited with direct involvement only during reshoots).  In effect this was his big goodbye to the world of film, before Disney kicked off the new Star Wars era without him.  The whole thing is basically one long excuse to immerse deeply into the dog-fighting Luke Skywalker experiences for just one moment in 1977, though its grounding in the all-black squadron history subsequently unearthed is probably far more personal to Lucas than it might be supposed, given his childhood memories of the black community around him and the black woman he married later in life.  Star Wars fans who always complained there wasn't enough black representation in the saga would have you believe otherwise, but Lucas himself never had a problem with black people.

The actors in Tails would be a highlight in any film, and by this point had been, including Cuba Gooding, Jr., whose breakthrough performance in Jerry Maguire was a tough act to follow, and basically he tried everything and never found traction.  He's joined by Terrence Howard, one of the modern era's great actors, frequently sabotaged by the reputation of being difficult to work with.  Howard appears in a very similar movie, Hart's War, which covers a sequence omitted in Tails of what happens to a black soldier in German captivity.  They're surrounded by an embarrassment of riches, including Leslie Odom, Jr. (later associated with Hamilton), Michael B. Jordan, Nate Parker (whose Birth of a Nation was crippled by allegations made against him), and David Oyelowo, whose least rewarding performance, to date, for me anyway, was MLK in Selma.  Otherwise, as Tails again proves, he's an overlooked treasure, easily the star just below Howard and Gooding of the movie.

The politics of what films gain recognition are so byzantine it's sometimes impossible to navigate, but something like Red Tails is worth the effort to discover.

Reign of Fire (2002) Review

rating: ****

the story: Dragons are accidentally awakened in the modern world, and subsequently are the subject of a desperate quest to eliminate as mankind struggles to survive.

review: This is the of film you're maybe not sure what to think of initially, if you're like me, but years later realize what an improbable phenomenon it really is.  Here I'm thinking of it in terms of Matthew McConaughey, whom I've grown to appreciate more and more over the years, and how even now he's never done anything even remotely close (unless you count Free State of Jones) to it since, and he's basically a supporting player to Christian Bale the whole time.  Bale has made a career of the unexpected, and since Reign has certainly covered genre material quite heavily (Batman, Terminator: Salvation), so it's not as difficult to reconcile with the rest of his career, but in hindsight it might be easier to view as a rare original role in one that with Batman and Salvation sought to myth-build so eagerly.

Besides that, it's another movie featuring Gerard Butler before 300, when he was still mostly anonymous.  For me, it was also one of the films from this period to feature Alexander Siddig, a standout from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, although he has few enough lines, and the original reason I sought Reign out in the first place.  The film is directed by another Star Trek veteran, Rob Bowman, whose next and most recent production, Elektra, ended up defining his Hollywood career.

Watching Bale and McConaughey grapple with the dragon problem, and each other, Bale's guilt for having unleashed them (in his mind) to begin with, also rings true with Bale's later career, also filled with such roles, and as such is essential viewing as to how it took shape.  The bald pate McConaughey sports doesn't really hide his essentially heroic nature, though as in his critical breakthrough role in True Detective, he's his rogue self trying to let the hero out when other people (Bale, in this instance) can't see it.

And it's a movies about dragons!  Since most of the action takes place at night, the film doesn't have to worry about the effects holding up, since they were designed to pop effortlessly, and so they certainly hold up to modern expectations.  Critics typically hate genre films that don't blunt their stories with comedy, but then they also hate comedy, which is to say, they don't like genre films, so Reign was always going to have a tough crowd.  Even in 2002, franchises were so important to success, but Reign concludes its epic in the one movie, so there was no hook other than the spectacle on display, and mostly the human drama generated by Bale and McConaughey, which should have been enough, and is, if you let it, and it shouldn't be that hard to manage.

It's a textbook definition of a lost gem.

Savage Salvation (2022) Review

rating: ****

the story: An ex-military ace seeks revenge on the system that allowed his wife to overdose.

review: Such are the times that star actors can see their movies swallowed into a void.  Robert De Niro costars in this, but his presence didn't prevent such a fate for Savage Salvation, which also features John Malkovich and stars Jack Huston.

Huston's the reason I made sure to watch.  The latest of a storied Hollywood family, he's struggled to find footing since Ben-Hur, which otherwise suggested to me a new talent worth following, but few enough starring roles to show for it.  Most of the story beats of Salvation are well-trodden material, so it's not something you watch for originality, but I've certainly never let it get in the way of spending time with quality actors.  De Niro is in subdued mode, and for him Salvation is No Country for Old Men, Hell or High Water territory.  You wait for Malkovich's part to amount to something, and on that score the end twist is telegraphed, as Huston discovers the system is all too happy to exploit individuals without much concern to the consequences.  Waiting for that to play out is more suspenseful than the revenge rampage Huston undertakes, or the withdrawal scenes he appears in.

With so little to show for his career to this point, Huston had a lot riding on whether or not he could carry Salvation, and to my mind he does, and for that reason watching him find a context in the rampage, how he carries himself is worth the experience.  The greater narrative around all of this, the eponymous concept, both when the body of his wife is baptized and when he himself sinks into the water at the end, it gives depth to the rampage that can sometimes be relegated only to the original impetus, since the reward tends to be reduced to mere memory, rather than consequences or some greater goal, which in this case is finding peace, from a community that both supports him (De Niro) and betrays him (Malkovich), as well as beyond it.

Where Huston goes from this point I'm as eager as ever to find out.

Angry Neighbors (2022) Review

rating: ****

the story: A writer seeking to lead a secluded life feels infringed upon by a neighbor's ongoing development project.

review: Not being overly involved in the streaming world (previously I was never overly involved in the cable world), I still participate in physical media, which is why I frequent Redbox kiosks, which is why I knew about the existence of Angry Neighbors, which exists well outside the mainstream despite starring Frank Langella.  Langella's career is been that way all along, of course, rarely appearing in movies people have actually seen, but otherwise being well-respected.  The closest he's come to a starring role with critical acclaim is probably Frost/Nixon.  I had recently seen him in the Jim Carrey TV series Kidding, and Angry Neighbors, on a superficial level, resembles those results closely enough where I would endorse it for that alone, a quirky production featuring Langella.  (The last time ones of his films got noticed was Robot & Frank, in which he stars opposite, obviously, a robot.)

The only chatter surrounding Neighbors stemmed from the original source material, which drew on the woes of other pampered residents of wealthy waterfront property, which was of interest mostly to them.  Everyone else was left to scratch their head over the title, which surely evoked Grumpy Old Men if anything, and yet Langella's antagonist doesn't show up until the end (it turns into a metaphor of lost youth, I think), and he instead plays off others caught up in his struggles, including Bobby Cannavale playing the foreman in charge of the worksite unhappily afflicting him.

There's also, of course, Langella's dog, who speaks to him in the voice of Cheech Marin, personifying his closed world.  If Langella and the narration and style of production weren't pitched enough, Marin's part cements the film's intentions.  I have no idea why Neighbors would drop straight into obscurity (except, perhaps, allegations against Langella, which is such an old Hollywood story one wonders why the studios still get away with it except for the existence of endlessly compliant press).  Spend some time in Langella's company.  Don't worry if anyone else is, or if his character would approve of your choices.  This would be an excellent one.

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1989) Review

rating: ****

the story: Baron Munchausen dooms and then saves a European city thanks to his fantastical adventures.

review: I first saw The Adventures of Baron Munchausen in college some twenty years back, but eventually it took a backseat to other Terry Gilliam films (The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus and The Man Who Killed Don Quixote became my favorites, and Brazil became better known to me among his earlier efforts).  So in revisiting it, I've rediscovered it.

Munchausen, incredibly, based on a real historical figure, albeit one known for his incredible tales, which were themselves eventually written into fiction, was a famously troubled production that became a box office bomb, and so if you know of it at all, it's because of Gilliam, or your general interest in cult films.  And yet it was filmed in a decade full of fantasy productions chasing Star Wars, and is probably the best of them.  Probably?  It is.  It absolutely is.  How could the results be any different, with Gilliam at the helm?

Conceptually and artistically, there are few filmmakers who rival Gilliam's vision.  In order to achieve it, he usually goes all the way to hell and back (which is why Man Who Killed Don Quixote went into production twice, the first time producing only the documentary Lost in La Mancha, in which the epic collapse of the film is chronicled).  His old Monty Python colleague Eric Idle, who costars in Munchausen, had already gleamed such a reputation when he agreed to appeared in the film.  

Aside from Dox Quixote itself, it's hard to find a better, more natural story to showcase Gilliam's gifts than Munchausen, in which the world of the fantastic is superimposed on the real world by a charismatic and yet disconnected lead character, who in this case eventually has everyone believing in the same reality, mostly because there are supernatural elements that are so mythical they become accepted for reality, such as Idle's speedster.  (Although Idle's real talent is of course his voice; along with John  Cleese, who also hails from Monty Python, he has one of the most naturally hilarious voices of the past fifty years in film.)

The lead is played by John Neville, a fairly unknown commodity otherwise who nonetheless fills the fantastical shoes of Baron Munchausen regardless of depicted age (a sliding scale on par with all the other loose elements of reality).  He's got Gilliam's Brazil lead actor Jonathan Pryce, Oliver Reed (later best known for the role he died playing for Gladiator), Uma Thurman, and Sarah Polley, still just as a child, supporting him, plus a Robin Williams uncredited performance that seems like a preview of his Genie from Aladdin in hindsight.  

In fact, if I had never seen Tarsem's masterpiece The Fall, Munchausen would now stand as my favorite film in the fantasy genre.  Where Tarsem eclipses Gilliam, here, Gilliam would rally later to catch up (his Don Quixote was worth the wait).

Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (2022) Review

rating: ****

the story: Grindelwald tries to trick his way to political power, with Dumbledore standing in the way.

review: I've been struggling with how to view this one since its theatrical release earlier this year.  I continued to struggle after reading the screenplay published last month.  A large part of this is that Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore was caught up in the continuing scandals surrounding J.K. Rowling, Ezra Miller, and Johnny Depp, which dampened interest in its predecessor, The Crimes of Grindelwald (which is otherwise my favorite movie in the Wizarding World cinematic saga, barring Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire).  Depp's legal hassles continued into production of Secrets, as so he was replaced as Grindelwald by Mads Mikkelsen, and Rowling, previously lone scripter of the Fantastic Beasts films, was joined by Harry Potter veteran screenwriter Steve Kloves.  After being unabashedly wowed by Crimes, I knew I wasn't with Secrets on first viewing, and second viewing didn't change that, and reading the screenplay didn't, and I began to wonder, were my reservations justified?  Or was this simply a different movie experience?

I kept trying.  Eventually my conclusion was that this is perhaps the first film in the saga where the human drama is more important than the wizarding drama.  I understood this on one level.  It's the first time the material has acknowledged what had previously only existed in Rowling's tweets, that Dumbledore is gay, and his relationship with Grindelwald is complicated by that, and by extension, his ability to fight him.

The film opens with a quiet conversation between them, in which Dumbledore explains that he has moved past their youthful ideas, and this offends Grindelwald, because of course he hasn't, and has become a notorious figure in the wizarding community as he presses on with them.  The conversation, and the film, and the series (this is Dumbledore's second appearance in them, after Crimes), still ignores how Dumbledore could ever have shared them, except by extension through the complicated nature of his sister Ariana, and her death, which ties into the character of Credence Barebone, whose story began in the first film, and whose true lineage was revealed in Crimes, but explained here in Secrets: he's Aberforth Dumbledore's son.  Dumbledore is his uncle.

Grindelwald has been manipulating Credence, as we saw him operating throughout Crimes.  He trades on fear in order to achieve his goals.  He also won Queenie Goldstein to his side last film, shattering a relationship with muggle baker Jacob Kowalski.  Dumbledore maneuvers against Grindelwald as best he can throughout Secrets.  He recruits Jacob, an unlikely ally as ever, as well as the Scamander brothers, Newt and Theseus, as well as others.

Newt was ostensibly the star of these films, certainly in the first one, until Dumbledore appeared in Crimes and then dominated Secrets.  And it might seem as if Newt indeed takes a definitive backseat, here, especially with the near absence of Tina Goldstein, the American wizard he fell in love with previously (some reports are that Katherine Waterston's participation was diminished, this time, due to her stance against Rowling).

And yet his unabashed enthusiasm for the title beasts, and his otherwise bashful demeanor, remain the heart of these films, as he gets to spend time with his brother as an actual colleague for the first time, which along with Jacob and Queenie and learning the truth of Credence's existence moves original stories from the first film along nicely.  Newt and Theseus have the best sequence of the film as they enact another of Newt's trademark beast-centric performances, this time scuttling like a crab.

Eddie Redmayne's star has dimmed in recent years.  I'm hard-pressed to think of his work outside these films, and yet the films themselves remain clearly affectionate of his unique charms.  Callum Turner, as Theseus, has become a more distinguished actor (for me, anyway, as I discovered in Emma.), so it's nice to see him in an expanded role.  Alison Sudol has been a standout as Queenie from the start, and I doubt anyone could've been more quintessentially American for the time period than Dan Fogler's Jacob, who has threatened to steal all of the movies.

But is there any real doubt that Jude Law's Dumbledore is the center of Secrets?  He had better be, getting his name in the title!  By the time Dumbledore and Grindelwald duel, we've seen Dumbledore do everything possible to avoid that moment.  When it's suggested he become the new leader of the wizarding community, the moment becomes the heart of how to interpret the movie around it.  No attention is called to Dumbledore, until he's pulled from a crowd as it happens, and he talks his way out of it, the way Harry Potter once convinced the Sorting Hat to place him in Gryffindor, and the moment passes.  No one argues the point.  No one draws attention to him at all.  It happens.  And the story moves on.

How to interpret it, and the whole film, rests on how comfortable you are with the rapid ascent of Grindelwald, and his just as rapid descent.  As viewers we're privy to nearly every beat of how this is accomplished, so relentlessly, throughout the movie.  The opening scene of Crimes was said to be distractedly dizzying, when Grindelwald breaks out of prison, and yet this is a whole movie in which, to accomplish what it needs to, the viewer has to accept two hours of logic that makes internal sense, and yet also feels as if, in a different reality, would have played out over several films.  Possibly.  The studio has been expressing doubt for years.  I follow a website that breathlessly reported every negative aspect of production, cheering on the possibility of failure.  Was this what it was always supposed to be?

And perhaps so.  This is what we never got to see with Voldemort, after all.  The other arcs feel so natural, this must always have been in the cards, surely?  Crimes ends dramatically with Grindelwald having split the wizarding community in half.  Secrets suggests winning the right allies makes even the impossible possible (from criminal to candidate, which even the Star Wars prequels didn't dare attempt; Palpatine appears the innocent even after his drastic transformation).

And...the more I live with this, the more comfortable.  At no point does the film dwell on Grindelwald as a real threat, except as Dumbledore's opposite number.  This is all supposed to build (like the Star Wars prequels) to a legendary duel, against which the one that happens in Secrets is mere prelude.  In some respects, there are notes in Secrets that feel like a possible concluding note (Jacob and Queenie marrying), should the studio decide to end the series early.  And yet Dumbledore acknowledges Newt as a valuable ally, even as Grindelwald has lost his (Credence, whose arc concludes here, too), which ought to sound...ominous.  The fight isn't over.  Grindelwald only becomes more dangerous, once more on the loose, nothing left to lose, and he has already endlessly proven his inventive resilience.  

The conclusion, for me, of how to view Secrets of Dumbledore is as a quiet success, in much the character of Newt himself, watching as all the drama around him boils down to Dumbledore and Grindelwald, as they're forced to confront the reality that they will one day have to fight each other.  Forget everyone else, every thing else.  This really does hinge on that conversation, at the start of the film.  And that's actually refreshing.

One Shot (2021) Review

rating: ****

the story: A suddenly high value terrorist suspect is the subject of a highly coordinated extraction.

review: The concept of a film being, or appearing to be, one continuous tracking shot has apparently now reached the point where it can be taken for granted.  The likes of Birdman, 1917, Russian Ark, and Crazy Samurai have been joined by One Shot, which if it has been greeted at all, then as a glorified cinematic first-person-shooter experience, and yet the results are as thrilling as any other attempt of the technique yet attempted.

Part of the problem is that it stars Scott Adkins, best known as a stuntman or as the lead in direct-to-video releases, the bargain basement of the medium.  As far as I know, this is my first Adkins film, and I found him to be a riveting action hero, very much akin to Cole Hauser's performances in the TV series Yellowstone, the new "alpha male" template of popular entertainment, though Adkins achieves it mostly by surviving against all odds, being the de facto lead character, and engaging in at least one brawl that calls on his stunt experience.

Supporting him are Ashley Greene (billed here with her married name Ashley Greene Khoury) and Ryan Phillippe, a long way away from his potential as a new leading man some twenty years back, and not even getting to play a particularly heroic part (a glorified bureaucrat who stands in Adkins' way to get the job done).

The story is compelling and the odds are long.  The alleged terrorist in sympathetic in apparently the same way as the lead in The Mauritanian, claiming innocence deep into the film.  It doesn't even particularly matter to the actual terrorists arriving in a horde to break him free if he's what he appears to be.  They need him; it's that simple.  And so they throw their massive numbers (don't spend too much time worrying about how they amassed so many without anyone noticing), and it becomes a Black Hawk Down war incident.  Of course we'll route Adkins on!  We haven't had a guy like him in ages, and he's as close to an everyman there's ever been, although he's never less than compelling.

Bonus material insists there are points in which the footage breaks tracking, and yet it's virtually impossible to tell with the results.  If that's the only reason you choose to watch, fine, because it's impressive filmmaking by default, all the more given the constant fighting that necessitates constant choreography without ever bogging down.  Details lost in narrative are picked up everywhere else.

This is not a B movie.  In a different time it would've been a massive hit.  It should develop a following eventually.  It deserves one.

The Contractor (2022) Review

rating: ****

the story: A Green Beret is drummed out of the service, but ends up right back in the thick of it anyway.

review: Quite unexpectedly, a spiritual sequel to Hell or High Water.  Chris Pine stars as the Green Beret, who ends up drafted into a black ops outfit, although the results are less military maneuvering and more a spy game, in which Pine discovers he can't trust the outfit that recruited him.  Along the way, he's got to figure out if he can trust a colleague played by Ben Foster, his costar in High Water, which ought to be considered one of the key selling points of The Contractor.

Pine's charisma was a little long in coming to be recognized by filmmakers, but eventually, with his casting as Kirk in the J.J. Abrams Star Trek reboot, he at last became a movie star, and yet it ended up becoming a recurring problem: directors still had a hard time figuring out what to do with him.  Hell or High Water found a perfect fit, the rare antihero (a bank robber) who was actually sympathetic, a response to the Great Recession that cast the whole idea back to the feel of the Great Depression, or even Robin Hood.  Foster was the unambiguously less sympathetic cohort then, and he is again here, although he has a better shot at redeeming himself this time around.  Less so Kiefer Sutherland, in a rare bid to reclaim some of the shine he himself earned somewhat belatedly in the TV series 24, cast squarely as the villain.  Eddie Marsan, whose career often veers between such roles, has one of his welcome turns among the angels, although it's an unfortunately brief one, while Gillian Jacobs has a similarly thankless nod as Pine's wife.

But the compromise is worth it, as The Contractor works best as an atmospheric tour of Pine's troubles, spending little time worrying about things like dialogue, as he struggles along the labyrinth of doubt, accented frequently by the bum knee he needs to periodically inject just to keep functioning.  This is an aging action hero, after all, forced to control uncomfortable realities at every turn.

I think, given time, the results will garner greater interest, if only as a companion to Pine and Foster's previous work together.  At the moment it needs struggle against a shifting market, between a box office that is increasingly geared almost exclusively to big budget blockbusters and streaming services either desperately competing for the same aesthetic or proudly boasting the opposite, with everything else in between being ignored, such as the notion that movie stars exist and can carry their own material, same as they ever did.  

And Chris Pine, despite every adversity, is still standing, thank you.

The Irishman (2019) Review

rating: ****

the story: An aging Frank Sheeran reflects on his life highlighted, among other things, by a close association with Jimmy Hoffa.

review: Martin Scorsese ignited a firestorm of controversy when he lamented the current state of filmmaking while releasing The Irishman, which was done on the streaming platform Netflix rather than exclusively in theaters.  Scorsese is a filmmaking master, so the fact that he had to use Netflix at all is either high praise for Netflix or faint praise, and an indictment of current pop culture's appreciation for talent on the level of Scorsese.  Much of the initial reception of The Irishman centered either on this or the de-aging CGI work stars Robert De Niro and Al Pacino experience to tell the stories of Sheeran and Hoffa.

To get that other point out of the way, the de-aging only matters if you really think it has to.  Because it shouldn't.  It should have no relevance to your appreciation of the results.

The results of the film itself have often been described as an elegiac response to Scorsese's career, often exploring the life of mob figures, in pop culture most famously in Goodfellas, which for me has long been the least interesting of his films, the most obvious, least nuanced, which should otherwise not be words associated with a filmmaker of his caliber.

It's a long film, but it doesn't really feel like it is.  I had previously read the book upon which it's based, which is sometimes itself considered somewhat a work of fiction, as it ultimately turns on whether or not you believe Sheeran's confessions, about being responsible for Hoffa's disappearance (by being his assassin) or even the suggestion that he played a role in JFK's assassination (by helping ship the weapons responsible).  The latter is heavily downplayed in the movie, but the Hoffa angle is clearly the focus, other than Sheeran's relationship with Russell Bufalino, a mob figure who ages along with him, whose aging is itself the most visible element of the film's true message, a meditation on aging, on the rare instance of Hollywood allowing the elderly to be the point of a drama without necessary fixating on the inevitable death, but rather the decline itself.

Bufalino is played by Joe Pesci, a familiar figure from the Scorsese catalog, playing well against type as a restrained figure, possibly because he's the one most reflecting that element, a figure being chauffeured on his final rounds in a road trip that helps begin the film's journey.  Some critics have focused on the significant lingering shots that begin and end the film, but I think it's inside the car with Pesci, Robert De Niro, and the actresses playing their wives, as Pesci asserts his no-smoking policy that's just as promptly ignored, and Pesci doesn't pitch his usual fit...

De Niro is the star, and oddly, when we see him at his oldest he looks his least convincing.  I don't even understand how that's possible.  He's the obvious target for criticizing the de-aging effects, but the scene where his younger self stomps someone, which some say looks least convincing, is most important as the moment Sheeran's daughter realizes she wants nothing to do with him.  

Pacino doesn't sell Jimmy Hoffa so much as deliver another Al Pacino performance, and since it's been so long since we've gotten one of those, who's to really argue about this?  The idea of Hoffa, now, means the mystery of the disappearance, which is what the film features, because his image as the ultimate union boss is no longer relevant.  

Arguably, the real draw here is of course getting to see De Niro and Pacino act together.  After decades of being described as the best actors of their generation, they shared the screen in Heat, which ended up being better known for the wide ensemble around them, and then Righteous Kill, which no one counts.  Here it's almost all De Niro and Pacino, delivering their signature performances.

Which is not to say there isn't plenty of talent around them.  Besides Pesci there's Ray Romano, Bobby Cannavale, Anna Paquin, Harvey Keitel (another Scorsese veteran, his De Niro before De Niro), Jesse Plemons, and Jack Huston, playing and sounding like Bobby Kennedy but otherwise recognizable.  Someday he'll be considered a major selling point all his own, given the opportunities.  

So much of the past fifty years has been chasing The Godfather, and arguably Scorsese has been doing exactly that for much of his career, and The Irishman is probably the closest he'll ever come, with a story that follows real events and therefore carrying more than just great acting and mob intrigue, and on that score weighing nicely against the iconic Marlon Brando performance, the breakthrough Pacino.  

It's too early to say for certain.  But it's another great film from Scorsese.  Not his best.  For me those are Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Departed, Silence.  But darn close.  In the conversation.  The one that matters.