A 'Predator' movie takes a fun turn

     

     Predator: Badlands, the latest film in a long running series that began in 1987, skillfully mixes actors and CGI, employing enough computer-generated imagery to make the movie look like a teeming helping of animated sci-fi. 

    CGI notwithstanding, Badlands has a refreshing human element that keeps the movie from turning into another exploitative gook-and-gore festival -- which is not to say that you won't find oozing substances or clangorous action.

    Oddly, the movie's humanity comes from an android. Elle Fanning, the movie's best addition, appears as Thia, an android who lost her legs in a violent encounter that precedes her introduction into the movie. Thia's head and torso become a major character. Even if you consider her half a character, she exerts an outsized influence on the proceedings.

      You don't need to be well-versed in Predator lore to know that Yautjas -- warriors with fangs and strict codes of honor -- will figure heavily in the story. 

      This time, a Yautja named Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) becomes the film's hero. Dek reluctantly joins Thia, who understandably wants to retrieve the lower part of her body. She also hopes to reunite with Tessa (also Fanning), the twin "synth" sister she idolizes.

       Thia's rediscovery of her legs, by the way, becomes a source of cartoonish amusement when the legs take on a life of their own.

        For much of the movie, Dek carries Thia around like a backpack while he schemes to avenge his brother Kwei (Michael Homick), a Yautja warrior who was murdered by their father (also Schuster-Koloamatangi). Kwei intervened to save Dek from his father's wrath, showing the kind of weakness the Yautja loathe. Who knew? The Yautja have daddy issues, too.

    Working from a screenplay by Patrick Aison, director Dan Trachtenberg, who also directed the 2022 Predator movie, Prey, creates exotic backdrops through which his characters wander. Watch out for deadly flora: plants with poisonous spikes, deadly vines, and seed pods that explode like grenades.

    The movie also adds a near-Disneyesque twinkle when a creature named Bud. Cute despite bad teeth, Bud joins Dek and Thia on their adventures, which involve Dek's quest to bring home the head of The Kalisk, a beast no warrior has ever defeated. It's an honorable Yautja ambition that's supposed to help Dek attain warrior status.

     Trachtenberg tweaks the plot in ways that challenge expectation and allow him to delver the movie's message -- albeit without too heavy a hand. Cooperation can be more effective than individual action and clans needn’t be defined only by blood. 

       The movie's finale and epilogue are satisfying and it only takes an hour and 55 minutes to reach the finish line. The movie's softer tone (for a Predator movie) and PG-13 rating may displease hardcore franchise fans. But Badlands is more fun than I expected. That's enough of an achievement for a franchise movie that doesn't feel like its only aim is to ride the coattails of its predecessors.

  

Rolling into Bob Dylan's early days

 Timothee Chalamet does his own singing in A Complete Unknown, director James Mangold's lively look at the years Bob Dylan transformed from a folk music prophet into an electrified and electrifying musician who defied classification.

  Although his voice isn't quite as gritty as Dylan's, Chalamet comes close enough to keep the movie credible, and Mangold, who told Johnny Cash's story in Walk the Line (2005), adds enough rising-star power to make for a captivating entertainment.

  Chalamet and Mangold meet Dylan on his terms or their idea of Dylan's terms. A Complete Unknown isn't an interpretation of Dylan's work or life. It's a cultural chronology that begins in 1961 when Dylan -- formerly Bobby Zimmerman -- arrives in New York City. He was 19.

   Dylan has a mission: He wants to visit folk legend Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) who by then was hospitalized in New Jersey with Huntington's disease. He also catches the eye (and ear) of Pete Seeger, played by Edward Norton in a smartly shaded performance. 

    Seeger recognizes Dylan as more than a wannabe trying to worm his way into an already established milieu. That may have been partly true, but Dylan had the chops and imagination to pay his own way.

    Tagged as an original, Dylan also came to the attention of Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), an established folks star. Their musical and personal relationship seemed to mean more to her than to him.

     The movie also depicts Dylan's relationship with Sylvia Russo (Elle Fanning), an artist based on Suze Rotolo, a former Dylan girlfriend who passed way in 2011, long after the movie concludes at the fabled Newport Folk Festival in 1965.

    Dylan's shift from folk to rock causes a stir at Newport. Seeger struggles to persuade Dylan to use his star status to keep folk music in the forefront. Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) upholds the opposite view, urging Dylan to follow his gut.

   Norbert Leo Butz plays Alan Lomax, the staunchest of Dylan's opponents, a folk purist who tries to keep Dylan's band off the Newport stage.

   The movie includes 40 songs, many of them Dylan favorites that are fun to revisit, even if they're not sung by Dylan. Whatever you think of Chalamet's singing, it never sounds like he's serving up cheap covers of classic Dylan tunes.

   I suppose it's arguable that Chalamet is impersonating Dylan, but that insults his effort. It's quite a feat, playing an enigmatic genius, imp, poet, and artist.

  The screenplay for A Complete Unknown was written by Mangold and Jay Cocks based on the book Dylan Goes Electric! by Elijah Wald; Dylan fans may know where fact leaves off and fiction begins. In interviews, Wald has called the movie "poetically accurate."

   As it happens, I witnessed Dylan's moment of transition. As a young reporter, I covered a concert Dylan gave at a Syracuse, NY arena then known as the Onondaga War Memorial. During the first half of the concert, Dylan appeared alone on stage and sang the songs that had breathed new life into folk music.

    In the concert's second half, Dylan was joined on stage by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Half the crowd cheered; the other half screamed its disapproval, "Bring back the real Bob Dylan," I remember hearing someone yell.

   Dylan pressed on, like, say, a rolling stone.

   I don't know if Bob Dylan, who's now 83, ever has been knowable. Mangold suggests he was ambitious, difficult, and creative, cruel at times, and caring, at other times. If Dylan's career is about anything, it's about resisting definition. 

   Maybe that's why Mangold can't and probably didn't want to offer a definitive portrait. Instead, he highlights touchstones in a career that produced the only songwriter ever to win a Nobel Prize for literature. 

  Mangold, Chalamet, and the rest of the cast bring what could have been a dusty time capsule of a movie to life. That was more than enough for me.

   

Angelina Jolie returns as Maleficent

Maleficent: Mistress of Evil: a mixed and not entirely successful offering.

Let’s start at the end. Before it’s done, Disney’s Maleficent: Mistress of Evil indulges itself in a mega-helping of Disney cuteness that’s designed to please those who love their movies served with heavy doses of syrup, the kind that leave audiences with a corn-fed glow.

In this sequel to the commercially successful first edition, Angelina Jolie returns as Maleficent, the witch who detests humans -- aside from Aurora (Elle Fanning), the human daughter she raised. Maleficent has inviting ruby red lips, but you wouldn’t want to dance cheek-to-cheek with her lest you be impaled on cheekbones that jut outward like ski slopes.
In this edition, the creatures of the moors (fairies, mushrooms, and trees that spring to life) are threatened by the human kingdom where Princess Aurora (Elle Fanning) is scheduled to marry Prince Philip (Harris Dickenson).

The early, amusing part of this second helping plays like a fairy tale version of Meet the Parents. Maleficent opposes the marriage but agrees to have dinner with the royal family: good King John (Robert Lindsey) and his not-so-good wife Ingrith (Michelle Pfeiffer).

With prodding from her faithful, shape-shifting companion Diaval (Sam Riley), Maleficent does her best to be civil. Jolie shines when Maleficent struggles to suppress her venomous impulses.

The original movie went big on revisionism. The sequel follows suit. Most of the time we find ourselves rooting against the humans, whose destructive ambitions reach full bloom in the person of Queen Ingrith. Pfeiffer delivers her lines with as much sarcasm as she can muster. But because the dialogue isn’t all that good, the impact of the Queen Ingrith's archness feels dulled.

En route to its happily-ever-after, the movie sets off a war. Wounded as she flees that early-picture dinner, Maleficent is rescued by another winged creature with horns. Chiwetel Ejiofor's Connal presides over a cave-dwelling civilization of creatures who look like Maleficent but don’t have her super-powers.

Some of these creatures -- notably the war-mongering Borra (Ed Skrein) -- are fed up with living in exile from treacherous humans. They want to make war on the residents of the palace. The pragmatic Conall opposes such engagement, acknowledging that humans severely outnumber the non-humans.

If a fairy tale movie threatens a great battle, it surely must deliver one. Mistress of Evil whips up a CGI-fueled spectacle in which the fairy tale creatures are attacked with a concoction made from flowers that ...

Never mind. Nothing here makes a great deal of sense, but director Joachim Ronning mounts the final assault on a large scale as the humans threaten to pull off a fairy genocide.

So, to what does all this amount?

Another mash-up. Part cartoon, part action movie, part romance, and part fairy tale, Maleficent doesn't quite stake out enough turf in any of those categories totally to succeed. But it's been tailored to please its audience and probably will.

You either can view that as an accomplishment or a capitulation or (as I do) a mixture of both.

Still, when you get right down to it there’s this: Pfeiffer’s Ingrith is no match for Jolie’s Maleficent. That means every moment Jolie's off-screen (and there are too many of them) leaves us eager for her return.

Do we really care whether Aurora and Philip are able to marry or would we rather look at Maleficent with her majestic wings, flowing horns and towering cheekbones? You know how I’m voting.

Elle Fanning receives a showcase

Sometimes, critical standards need to be twisted a bit. That's how I felt about Teen Spirit, a somewhat flimsy Max Minghella-directed variation on a Star is Born theme that places Elle Fanning in a starring role. No one is going to confuse Fanning's Violet with a character from Chekhov, but Teen Spirit bounces its way into theaters with a tailwind of energy behind it and a commanding performance from Fanning. A young woman living on the Isle of Wight, Fanning's Violet wants to sing. Her singing voice -- yes, it's really Fanning's -- proves stronger than anything Violet might say in normal conversation. Fanning makes it clear from the start that Violet isn't happy living with her Polish immigrant single mother (Agnieszka Grochowska). While singing to a sparse audience at a local bar, Violet meets an unlikely mentor, a disheveled Croatian (Zlatko Buric) who once was an opera star and now seems to be a drunk. Initially timid about the possibility, Violet quickly decides to enter a local talent contest. The winners will appear on a nationally televised talent show called Teen Spirit. Minghella fully embraces the absurdity of a story in which an opera star helps fashion a rock idol. He wisely refuses to wink at the brazen obviousness of any of the conceits in the screenplay, which he also wrote. Look, I'm not arguing that Teen Spirit ascends the ladder of greatness; I am saying that the highly energetic Teen Spirit gives Fanning a well-deserved showcase and that she takes full advantage of it. She creates a character who -- as her coach advises her -- sings from the heart.

Mary Shelley: Life before Frankenstein

Elle Fanning does credible work as Mary Shelley, the 19th-century author of Frankenstein. But Saudi Arabian director Haifaa Al-Monsour (Wadjda) loses out by attempting to walk a fine line between a well-adorned period piece and an emotionally turbulent tale populated by Mary Shelley and two poetic geniuses. Shelley's life changed when she met Percy Bysshe Shelley (Douglas Booth). Still a teenager, Mary defied her father (Stephen Dillane) to begin a relationship with Shelley, who already had a wife and daughter. Predictably, Mary's views about fidelity came into conflict with the Romantic poet's open attitudes toward sex and free-style living. Shelley's advocacy of counter-cultural values can seem a bit forced, although a rumpled Booth does his best to convey the poet's live-for-the-moment enthusiasms. The movie moves toward a gathering at the home of Lord Byron (Tom Sturridge), another Romantic poet, as well as an insufferable cad who comes across as someone who'd get himself into deep trouble in the age of #MeToo. Aside from being insensitive to anyone else's feelings, Byron exploits Mary's gullible half-sister Claire (a spirited Bell Powley). Mary Shelley clearly delineates the prejudices faced by 19th-century women with aspirations beyond landing a husband. Al-Mansour's movie also serves to introduce Shelley to those who only know her work, many through big-screen adaptations. But Al-Monsour doesn't solve the major problem faced by those who make movies about writers: their work -- Frankenstein doesn't emerge until the movie's almost over -- usually surpasses their lives, even when lived with the kind of stress, tumult, and suffering that supposedly helped Shelley create her masterpiece.

Too restrained for its own good

Sofia Coppola's The Beguiled : lost in an arty haze.

There's an alarming gap between style and substance in Sofia Coppola's new movie, The Beguiled, a remake of a 1971 Clint Eastwood film about a wounded Union soldier who finds refuge in a Virginia school for girls during the waning days of the Civil War.

In a sense, Coppola has taken grade "B" material and given it an "A"-grade artistic gloss that sometimes threatens to suffocate the movie's dramatic life.

Not surprisingly, the soldier's presence among these women prompts turmoil as students and teachers try to adjust to a male presence. Some of the students -- notably a character played by Elle Fanning -- are just beginning to discover their sexuality, making the movie a hothouse of suppressed and overt desire, as well as of trust and mistrust.

Too often, though, The Beguiled is a hothouse in which someone forgets to turn up the heat.

Three performances stand out. Colin Farrell plays soldier John McBurney as a cagey fellow with anger simmering beneath a solicitous surface. An excellent Nicole Kidman brings subtle levels of calculation to the role of headmistress Martha Farnsworth, the woman who washes the soldier's partially naked body when he's brought to the school.

Kirsten Dunst's excels as Edwina Danny, a teacher for whom McBurney represents liberating escape from an impending spinsterhood.

Coppola eliminates one of the characters found in director Don Siegel's earlier version, an enslaved woman. That means that Coppola mostly ignores the perverse undercurrents of racism. If you wanted to push the point (and some have), you could call it an elegant form of denial.

Coppola's overly decorous approach elevates atmospherics. Her movie includes a couple of gruesome events but doesn't seem entirely committed to them. No more can said without spoilers.

Every character in The Beguiled, I suppose, must react to a war-time situation in which norms have been upset, but the movie could have used a little more of the bile that ultimately begins to flow.

A look at women of the last century

Annette Bening occupies the center of a rich, anecdotal movie.

The house in Santa Barbara, Ca., constantly is being renovated. Its owner, a 55-year-old woman with a teen-age son, rents out rooms. The tenants include a mechanic who's a little long in the tooth to be called a hippie, a young woman recovering from cervical cancer, and a teen-age girl who occasionally slips into the house to sleep with the owner's son. By this I mean, she actually sleeps with the owner's son, forcing the boy to subdue his raging hormones as she looks for a safe place from her sometimes promiscuous exploits.

If you were around during the 70s, this all may have a vaguely familiar ring -- loosey-goosey social arrangements that approximate the intricacies of family: a single parent who often find herself at a loss when it comes to child rearing, sexual exploration and an overall sense of being too harried to search for deeper meaning.

Dad? He's not in the picture, having left for New York to start a new life.

That's the environment that director Mike Mills creates for 20th Century Women, a movie that manages to create a feeling for how life felt in 1979.

Normally, that might seem too narrow a gauge to hold our interest, but Mills has made a movie dominated by the shambling flow of the jangled lives of the women who populate it.

The result is rich, funny and warm -- although about three-quarters of the way through you may find yourself wondering whether Mills will be able to bring all these ingredients to some sort of a boil.

If that never happens, there are plenty of compensatory moments along the way: When the car of the owner of the house catches fire in a parking lot, she responds by inviting the firemen to dinner. And when her son points out that this is not exactly a normal response, she can't understand why her behavior might be considered odd.

Annette Bening gives the movie's anchor performance as Dorothea, a cigarette-smoking mother who winds up parenting a teen-age son (Lucas Jade Zumann) rather late in life. Unsure how to handle the young man, Dorothea seeks help from her cancer-conquering tenant (Greta Gerwig) and from Julie (Elle Fanning), the girl who becomes a near-constant visitor.

Supposedly based on Mills's own upbringing, 20th Century Women benefits from the actresses who grace it. Playing an aspiring photographer, Gerwig brings a mixture of confusion and vivaciousness to the movie, and Fanning perfectly captures the incipient world-weariness of a young woman whose sexual behavior has out-paced her emotional ability to deal with it. Fanning's character is a mass of contradictions; she's exploring her womanhood before even leaving the backpack stage.

Needless to say Dorothea's experiment doesn't entirely work. After Jamie goes clubbing with Gerwig's character, Dorothea wistfully muses that she'll never see that side of her son, a teen-ager trying to negotiate a separate social world for himself.

It's possible that the other actresses were inspired by the gifted Bening, whose Dorothea presides over the house, tries to maintain her composure and allow her son a degree of freedom he hasn't really sought.

In his best role in a long time, Billy Crudup plays a mechanic, the man in the house who tires to keep his poise. He, too, seems to be stuck in an emotional limbo.

Finding his way proves difficult for young Jamie, whose life is guided by three formidable but sometimes floundering women. We're told the story through Jamie's eyes.

Enjoyable in pieces -- and I don't mean that as a slam -- 20th Century Women makes a simple request: It asks us to spend some time with these appealing characters. They engage us in a series of gestures and responses that, like life itself, can charm, amuse and confound.

A gangster epic that falls short

Ben Affleck tries his hand at a large-scale, Prohibition era movie.

In Live By Night -- Affleck's second adaptation of a novel by author Dennis Lahane after 2007's Gone Baby Gone -- the director broadens his reach with a gangster story that begins with crime in Boston and moves to Prohibition rum-running in Florida.

But once Live By Night leaves Boston for Tampa, Fla., the movie goes South, as well, losing both focus and authenticity. Put another way, Live By Night represents a step backward from Affleck's work in both The Town and in Argo.

In look and in scope, Live by Night qualifies as a big, rambling gangster movie with Affleck at its center. Affleck plays Joe Coughlin, an ordinary guy who returned from World War I determined never to be bossed around again. As a result, Joe becomes an outlaw, probably not the occupation his police official father (Brendan Gleeson) had in mind for his son.

Joe quickly gets crosswise with Albert White (Robert Glenister), the head of the Boston's Irish mob. How could it be otherwise? Joe has been carrying on an affair with one of the mobster's mistresses (Sienna Miller). Joe's in love with Miller's Emma Gould. Let's just say she's more pragmatic about the relationship.

After a stint in jail, Joe winds up in Tampa where he takes over the rum-running business for the head of the Boston Italian mob, one Maso Pescatore (Remo Girone). Joe has two ambitions: to support himself and to avenge himself on Albert White, who also has moved to Florida.

Back in Boston, White not only nearly beat Joe to death; he also took out his rage on Emma.

Joe's romantic life moves on when he falls for the sister of a Cuban rum runner (Zoe Salanda). His crime dealings also put him in contact with the local sheriff (Chris Cooper), a man who claims to be incorruptible but who ignores the criminals who thrive in his midst, as well as the local chapter of the KKK, which is lead by a sneering sadist named RD Pruitt (Matthew Maher).

In all matters violent, Joe receives help from his pal Dion (a bulked up Chris Messina).

If all this weren't enough, an additional subplot introduces the sheriff's daughter (Elle Fanning), a young woman who's corrupted before turning to evangelism.

Affleck loads up on gangster glamor, vintage cars and a variety of locations that create the impression that the movie wants to enter the big-time gangster pantheon.

Affleck also doesn't skimp on gun play and harsh violence, which he punctuates with double-barreled blasts of portentous dialogue about fate, justice and the way things tend to come back to haunt a person in unexpected ways.

As Joe, Affleck appears in nearly every frame, but this is one of his more subdued performances, maybe because he's also overseeing the logistics of a large-scale production with a big cast and tons of atmosphere, much of it confined to a crime-riddled section of Tampa during the 1930s.

Intermittently intriguing, Live by Night doesn't pack the intended wallop. Its ideas seem to grow artificially from a story that badly needed paring down. In the end, Live By Night feels more like a well-appointed imitation of a gangster epic rather than the real thing.

High style, low-down movie

Director Nicolas Winding Refn's foray into the world of modeling bores until the gore arrives.

Glossy but vacuous The Neon Demon might move you to say that director Nicolas Winding Refn has an eye for compelling images, but you may also find yourself wondering whether his movie connects to a brain.

Senseless as it is stylized, Neon Demon takes us into Refn's idea of the intensely competitive world of high fashion modeling.

Let's just say Refn exaggerates to maximum levels, punctuating his movie with scenes that surely were intended to shock. If lesbian necrophilia weren't enough to set the mood, Refn throws in some cannibalism because ... well ... in Los Angeles, it's a model-eat-model world.

With its coolly conceived lighting design, its anesthetized performances and a mood that vampires might find a bit chilly, Refn serves up a drama that focuses on Jesse (Elle Fanning), a rootless young woman who arrives in Los Angeles to pursue a modeling career.

Jesse tells others that prettiness constitutes her only attribute. She's convinced she can make money from her looks.

Sixteen-year-old Jesse projects a midwestern aura of innocence that's supposed to be irresistible. As Jesse herself sums it up, everyone wants to be her, so much so that women will starve themselves on the chance that they might become second-rate imitations of her.

The faint aroma of critique rises from this purple-hued carcass of a movie, something about society's preoccupation with the way women look, beauty over substance -- and a limited idea about beauty, at that.

Refn -- the director of the over-rated Drive and the less-admired Only God Forgives -- is as guilty of dehumanizing his characters as any modeling agency or fashion photographer. What meaning can necrophilia have in a movie in which everyone looks half dead?

Despite what appears to be a rapid rise to the top of the modeling heap, Jesse maintains her residence in a sleazy Pasadena motel where the rooms are covered with fading floral wallpaper. At one point, a mountain lion invades her room. Oh, the dangers that lurk in Pasadena. Oh, the attempt to surprise the audience with an art grenade.

Keanu Reeves plays the motel's sleazy manager, one of those small roles that makes you wonder whether he dropped by the set for an afternoon. Reeves carries a knife into one of the movie's more chilling scenes.

Jena Malone portrays a make-up artist with a crush on Jesse. Two additional models (Bella Heathcote and Abbey Lee) are Jesse's competition. They're heanto plastic surgery. Think of them as fashion cyborgs.

It's not easy to tell whether Refn is aiming for satire or horror. If it's the latter, the biggest horror involves the movie's monotony, a steady beat of boredom interrupted only by late-picture servings of gross-out violence, one such episode involving an eyeball.

Perhaps it's fitting. The eyeball is the only thing Refn rewards with this nonsensically slick bit of rot.

Music, heroin and fatherhood on the fringe

A look at the relationship between a musician and his daughter.

Jazz pianist Joe Albani, who went by the name of Joe Albany, died in 1988 at the age of 64. Albany spent most of his adult life as a musician and heroin addict, not always in that order.

No slouch wannabe, Albany established his reputation playing with such greats as Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. That alone might have made for a good movie.

But Low Down, which only touches on Albany's jazz life, turns out to be another kind endeavor, one that focuses on Joe's faltering attempts at fatherhood.

Based on a memoir by his daughter, who also had a hand in writing the screenplay, Low Down introduces us to Albany during the 1970s.

At the time, he was living a marginal life in the kind of seedy Los Angeles dives that writer Charles Bukowski memorialized, single-room occupancy hotels where the clientele was sometimes too drunk or stoned to notice much of anything.

Director Jeff Preiss, who worked as the cinematographer on the Chet Baker documentary Let's Get Lost, tells the story through the eyes of Albany's 13-year-old daughter Amy (Elle Fanning).

Albany -- played by John Hawkes -- bobs in and out of the story, sometimes sober, sometimes not. At times, he allows heroin to disconnect him from music, yet we never doubt his seriousness as an artist.

Hawkes (The Sessions, Martha Marcy May Marlene and Winter's Bone) is too good an actor to serve up a series of junkie cliches. He gives us a father who's gentle and bright with his daughter and who's imbued with a kind of tolerance for himself and others.

Joe obviously has little idea about how to be a father, but he leaves no doubt that he loves his daughter, and Fanning does justice to a teen-ager who's trying not to be overwhelmed by her father's indulgences or by an alcoholic mother (Lena Headley), made viperous by booze and bitterness.

Obviously, Amy isn't living a normal teen life; she's exposed to prostitutes and to a strange but gentle fellow (Peter Dinklage) who lives in the basement of the dump where her dad crashes.

If there's a surprising performance here, it's given by Glenn Close, who plays Joe's mother and Amy's grandmother, a tough woman who chain smokes, takes no guff, and takes care of her granddaughter when her father can't. She appreciates her son's talent, but fears for him.

Fanning observes her father, his friends and the life he's fallen into with baffled curiosity, and Hawkes can feel almost airborne as Joe floats through some awfully dreary days.

The movie floats a bit as well; it's steeped in a kind of '70s filmmaking style in which the truth of every scene often takes precedence over any narrative arc.

I don't know what else to say to give you an idea about this movie, but it might help if I conjectured a bit. I think John Cassavetes would have liked and admired Low Down -- at least, I hope he would have.

A look a cheesy world that's pretty 'gouda'

Boxtrollscan be both distinctive and amusing.

The folks who made the popular animated movies Coraline and ParaNorman are at it again. The Boxtrolls falls a trifle short of previous Laika Studios work, but still manages to be both entertaining and distinctive, an expression of the appealingly cracked thinking we've come to expect from Laika.

This time, Laika imagines an inherently absurd world in which status in the town of Cheesebridge is signified by white, stovepipe hats that look as if they've been borrowed from Dr. Seuss.

True to the town's name, cheese has become the currency in which the status-hungry deal. Nothing in Cheesebridge exceeds the privilege of gathering in a tasting room to sample fine cheeses with other White Hats.

Loosely based on author Alan Snow's Here Be Monsters, The Boxtrolls focuses on a boy named Eggs (Isaac Hempstead-Wright) who lives among the Boxtrolls, lumpy-looking creatures who wear cardboard boxes and who run around the city scavenging from garbage piles.

For nourishment, the trolls pop multi-colored insects as if they were M&Ms. They also collect discarded objects from alleys as a way of furnishing their underground home.

Of course, the Boxtrolls have a nemesis. An exterminator named Archibald Snatcher (Ben Kingsley) plans to eliminate all trolls. In true fairy tale fashion, he libels the poor creatures, blaming them for capturing and killing children.

Unwilling to wait for an elevated status, Snatcher sometimes gains entry into society's loftier regions by dressing in drag and posing as Madame Frou-Frou, a singer in full chanteuse regalia.

Snatcher hopes to shed his disguise and become a bona fide member of the White Hat society so that he, too, can feast on fine cheeses with Lord Portley-Rind (Jared Harris).

A cheese obsessive himself, the snooty Lord Portley-Rind pretty much ignores his young daughter (Elle Fanning).

Left to her own devices, Fanning's Winnie meets Eggs, and the two eventually join forces to save the Boxtrolls and bring balance to a world gone lopsided in its quest for status.

The world we discover in The Boxtrolls tends to be darkly hued, a look that isn't helped by 3D, which proves entirely superfluous in establishing the Dickensian mood directors Anthony Stacchi and Graham Annable seem to be after.

I would have preferred a less action-oriented finale, but The Boxtrolls, with musical numbers by Eric Idle, has a fair share of off-kilter charm.

Be sure to stay put for the end credits, which are both amusing and instructive.

'Maleficent:' A new take on an old tale

Sleeping Beauty for the 21st century -- beautifully crafted, but not always captivating.

Angelina Jolie can be positively wicked as Maleficent, an aggrieved fairy seeking revenge against the king who stole her wings.

Maleficent, of course, is the title character of Disney's reworking of the Sleeping Beauty story, a tale the studio told in a classic helping of 1959 animation.

With her cheek bones built to harrowing heights by make-up whiz Rick Baker, Jolie flashes predatory white teeth and keeps a cool sense of menace about herself.

She's striking and also a bit freaky looking in headgear that gives her a devilish pair of horns.

Director Robert Stromberg, production designer on movies such as Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland and Sam Raimi's Oz the Great and Powerful, creates an encompassing visual environment while telling the Sleeping Beauty story in a way that gives it a bit of feminist spin -- and provides us with the inside scoop on a story we thought we knew.

Early scenes introduce us to Maleficent as a child (Isobelle Molloy), a happy fairy girl who establishes a relationship with a human, a boy named Stephan (Michael Higgins).

Stephan will grow up, discover ambition, and steal Maleficent's wings, thus enabling himself to become king of the humans and forcing his childhood flame to turn toward evil.

The Sleeping Beauty of this tale -- Elle Fanning's Aurora -- is a smiling, blonde-haired girl who seems carefree and guileless -- and not nearly as intriguing as Maleficent.

Aurora's father, of course, is the grown Stephan. As king, Stephan (Sharlto Copley) insists on keeping his daughter away from the palace until after her 16th birthday.

To that end, Aurora is raised in a secluded forest cottage by three comically addled fairies (Imelda Staunton, Juno Temple and Lesley Manville).

All of this has to do with the vengeful curse that Maleficent put on Aurora at her christening: In a fit of icy rage, Maleficent condemned Aurora to prick her finger on a spindle at age 16. She'd then fall into a death-like sleep from which she could be roused only by the kiss of true love.

It's just here that the story takes an unexpected turn, about which a little must be said.

During her time in the woods, Aurora develops a relationship with the watchful Maleficent, and the movie raises a question that generates interest without much suspense: Will Maleficent stick to her guns or will she soften as she gets to know Aurora? How bad a badass is Maleficent really?

The tale seems to have been calibrated to maximize CGI: There are many odd-looking creatures, some of whom may a bit scary for the youngest kids.

Stromberg does a nice job with a character named Diaval, a crow that Maleficent transforms into a variety of different creatures, all of them charged with doing her bidding.

Some movies are pure stinkbombs; others are total winners; still others are decent in their way, but may not scale the intended heights.

That seems to be the case with Maleficent, a movie that engages fitfully and flies high at times. Beautifully crafted as it is, Maleficent doesn't consistently provide the desired level of captivation.

An unexpected coming-of-age story

Elle Fanning sparks complex coming-of-age story, Ginger & Rosa
In Ginger & Rosa, British director Sally Potter delivers a story that relies as much on character as on burnish and style.

Putting aside the dizzying style of movies such as Yes and Orlando -- the director lends her considerable talents to a complex coming-of-age story that's bolstered by its political backdrop (the world trembles in the midst of the Cuban missile crisis) and its principal performance, an open-hearted look at troubled adolescence from the gifted Elle Fanning.

Fanning allows us to peek behind the walls of adolescence, to see a girl who's struggling with a boatload of issues.

No point being coy: Fanning's Ginger must come to grips with the fact that her iconoclastic father (Alesandro Nivola) refuses (in nearly every way) to conform to the contours of parenthood.

Nivola's Roland seems to regard fatherhood as a socially imposed inconvenience. He became a conscientious objector during World War II and went to prison. Now, he tries to encourage every spark of radicalism he sees in Ginger. As played by Nivola, Roland comes across as sincere -- if keenly lacking in self-awareness.

It's hardly surprising that Roland doesn't get along with Ginger's beleaguered mother, nicely played by Christina Hendricks of Mad Men fame. She's the one who has had to hold down the fort while Roland lives by principle.

In the early going, it seems as if the story is going to focus solely on the friendship between Ginger and Rosa (a convincing Alice Englert). The girls both were born in 1945, and their mothers went into labor at the same time.

They're bonded British babies in the age that began with the explosion of nuclear bombs in Japan, an event Potter uses -- somewhat portentously -- to start the movie.

Fanning and Englert play teen-agers who are forced to think about the seriousness of the world's situation while trying to navigate choppy adolescent waters. At one point, they soak in a bathtub together, reading tabloids and trying to shrink their jeans into form-fitting tightness. Ginger fancies herself a poet. Rosa's less inhibited, more of a free-spirit.

Both girls essentially are rudderless, but they deal with their drift in different ways. Ginger seeks solace from her mother's gay friends (Timothy Spall and Oliver Platt), a couple that's visited by a staunchly political American buddy (Annette Bening).

Absent a father in her life -- he split long ago -- Rosa becomes infatuated with Ginger's dad to a disastrous and disturbing degree.

Roland moves out of the house he shares with Hendrick's Natalie and sets up shop in a garret. He never seems to understand that his devotion to principle masks a stunning level of irresponsibility.

All of this builds to the inevitable dramatic blow-up, which hits like that early-picture nuclear explosion, a histrionic blast set off by the conflicts Potter implants in her story.

It's difficult not to wonder whether Potter's screenplay hasn't put a little too much on both its and Ginger's plates. The threat of global annihilation coupled with a host of daddy issues suggests nothing if not an over-reach. But a strong cast keeps Ginger & Rosa from losing its moorings, and Fanning gives the movie an emotional life so credible, it's safe to call it a rarity.

A star on the road to nowhere

Director Sophia Coppola books first-class on a journey that goes nowhere.

Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere opens to the sound of a well-tuned Ferrari engine. The sleek black car -- I'm guessing a price tag that tops $150,000 -- enters the frame, disappears and then re-emerges. It soon becomes clear that this expensive, carefully calibrated vehicle is circling a track. More significantly, the car’s impressive arsenal of capabilities seems at odds with any functional imperative: Car and driver are going nowhere.

You get the idea, I'm sure. Coppola’s excessively languid portrait of Johnny Marco, a movie star played by Stephen Dorff, is about to introduce us to a life that seems to have lost all sense of purpose.

As the picture unfolds, we learn that Johnny, the driver of the car in Coppola’s opening, has taken up temporary residence in the Chateau Marmont, a Los Angeles hotel where celebrities command apartment-sized living spaces while protecting their privacy.

Johnny takes advantage of this privacy in a variety of less-than-creative ways. Early on, he hires two blonde pole dancers to cavort for him. (They bring portable poles.) He wanders through the parties that seem to emerge effortlessly around him. In moments that feel acutely vacant, Johnny plants himself on the sofa, smokes cigarettes and swigs beer from a bottle, surrounded by whatever passes for his thoughts.

So what’s the point and should we care?

How you answer those questions goes a long way toward determining how you’ll react to Somewhere, which either can be viewed as an immersive portrait in the life of a movie star whose success has allowed him to lose touch with reality or as an enervating act of directorial indulgence in which interminable pacing masquerades as insight.

I fall somewhere between these two extremes.

If Somewhere remains watchable, it’s partly because Dorff makes Johnny semi-sympathetic. He’s capable of moments of genuine tenderness, and he has fun with his 11-year-old daughter, Elle Fanning’s Cleo. Thankfully, Johnny doesn’t lord it over people who work at the hotel. He’s not prone to rampant displays of ego -- or of anything else for that matter.

Johnny’s tendency to indulge his impulses (ordering every flavor of gelato in a posh Italian hotel during a publicity tour) sometimes puts him on a level playing field with Cleo, although – truth be told – Cleo often seems more mature than her father, not to mention more in touch with reality.

While driving Cleo to a figure skating lesson, a suspicious Johnny wonders whether an SUV might be following his car.

“There are kind of a lot of those in LA,” Cleo observes, reminding Johnny (and us) that she’s in touch with a reality that her father mostly manages to evade.

Coppola, who grew up around the movie business, presumably knows a thing or two about Hollywood. Johnny’s dutiful but detached attitude toward publicity seems credible, but Coppola extends Johnny’s sense of detachment to nearly everything. In the plush cocoon in which Johnny resides, life has turned into the equivalent of 24-hour room service. Ask, and it shall be delivered.

Perhaps to give us a sense of the way time seems to expand in such an insulated environment, Coppola holds shots for a very long time, far past the point where they have anything more to reveal. And she (purposefully, we presume) tells no story because story would be antithetical to a world in which luxury begins to feel like sensory deprivation.

At one point, Johnny attends a session where a couple of effects artists make a mold of his head. Quietly, he vanishes inside the hardening mask; it’s part of a process to make him look like a 90-year-old for his next role. It’s as if Johnny’s being buried alive, consumed by the demands of a profession he doesn’t seem to enjoy.

A movie about a pointless existence becomes meaningful to the extent that we identify. Johnny’s world of over-saturated luxury is not one that most of us have experienced, and when we step back, we may wonder why this star seems to have no passion for acting.

Is it the fault of a business that has no passion for anything but commerce? Is he just a jerk, as the anonymous text messages he occasionally receives claim? Is there nothing about fame that he enjoys?

I went a long way with Somewhere, hoping that Coppola, whose work (Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, and Marie Antoinette), I’ve mostly liked. I hoped that Coppola finally would reward my patience. But rather than feeling for Johnny, I began to experience the same sort of numbness that encases his life.

Despite an ending that may suggest otherwise, Johnny remains on the road to nowhere – as Coppola’s opening shot suggests. That’s a valid point, I suppose, but it infects the entire movie. Before Somewhere concludes, you may find yourself wondering why you’ve been given a first-class ticket on a journey with no real destination.