'Marty Supreme' fires at close range

 

     Readers will hear a lot about director Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme, a feverish, energized look at a rising table tennis star (Timothee Chalamet) who adds new dimensions to the idea of abusing people as he relentlessly pursues Ping-Pong glory.

   Yes, that’s right, Ping-Pong.

   Chalamet's Marty Mauser wants to rule the sport of Ping-Pong, which during the 1950s, when the story takes place, was mostly associated with neighborhood rec centers or finished basements in suburbia.  Marty Supreme tries to do for table tennis what boxing did for Raging Bull; i.e., link the sport to a furious expression of character that says something about ... well ... I’m not sure what. 

   Operating at peak form, director Martin Scorsese turned boxer Jake LaMotta's story into a steaming brew of anger, suffering, and redemption. Watching Marty Supreme, I sometimes wondered why I was subjecting myself to its pummeling style. The movie can be funny, but it can also feel punishing.

    I say this because it’s difficult to watch Marty Supreme without wondering whether Safdie's assaultive style isn't competing with the movie's main character. The camera hovers so close to Chalamet’s face, you can practically count the pores in his skin. 

    Closeness, though, isn't the same as revelation, and it's not always easy to digest a movie when a director seems to be firing at point-blank range. Safdie favors close-ups and tight shots. His camera nearly pins his characters to the screen. 

    Fair to say, then, that there are two major performances in Marty Supreme: Safdie’s and Chalamet’s. The makes the movie less a character study than a showy display of acting and directorial bravado.

    If nothing else, Safdie can be bold. His movie includes shocking moments. You'll be talking about a scene in which a bathtub crashes through the floor of a flop-house hotel, and Chalamet's knife-edged intensity cuts through the entire movie. Chalamet's playing a character who improvises on the fly, and he pulls it off.

    Safdie offers Ping-Pong scenes as he charts Marty's desperate attempts to become a world champion and gain US recognition. A climactic match involves an appearance by Koto Endo, a real table tennis player, but Safdie doesn't overdo footage of Marty's matches. Marty's too busy being a jerk away from the Ping-Pong table, and you’ll be justified if you find yourself asking whether the movie is about Ping-Pong at all. 

      Marty isn't the least bit likable; he's the kind of guy who makes a remarkably distasteful wisecrack about the Holocaust and then excuses it because he's Jewish. He's a user who believes he's entitled to his devious ways.

      An oddball supporting adds pungent flavors. Wisely operating at a slower speed, Gwyneth Paltrow plays a fading movie star who sleeps with Marty.  

   Married to the entrepreneurial owner of a pen company (Kevin O'Leary), Paltrow's Kay Stone may be acting out her rage at her husband. Maybe Marty's primal energy and brashness turn her on. Marty wants the pen company to sponsor his effortsm, and his relationship with O'Leary's character becomes increasingly important.

   When we first meet Marty, he's working at a shoe store owned by his uncle (Larry "Ratso" Sloman). Sloman's Uncle Murray wants Marty to manage his store, but Marty won't settle for life as a retail schlub. He wants more. He wants everything. 

     Odessa A'zion plays Rachel, a married woman with whom Marty cheats. Rachel becomes pregnant, but Marty fears attachments will interfere with his single-mindedness. Rachel, by the way, is married to Ira (Emory Cohen), also a jerk -- albeit a less ambitious and talented one than Marty.

    Tyler Okonma (a.k.a., Tyler, the Creator) signs on as a taxi driver, a pal of Marty who helps him work his way through his many jams. 

    Director Abel Ferrara, a director who knows plenty about intensity, has a notable turn as Ezra Mishkin, a sleazy criminal with whom Marty gets crosswise.

     Mostly set in New York City, the movie treats New York as a seedy cauldron where Marty's sickness blisters and boils. 

     Perhaps as relief, the movie also travels to London, Tokyo, Paris, and Cairo as Marty ceaselessly scrambles for money to support his Ping-Pong quest, a search that improbably leads to a lethal episode in New Jersey. Pieces of the story break off in slabs.

      It's possible to view Marty Supreme as a twisted, go-for-broke comedy. Safdie treats Marty's stint as a halftime act for the Harlem Globetrotters as an opportunity to add laughs.

    Bouncing from one thing to another like a Ping-Pong ball slammed against a wall, Marty Supreme is fueled by Marty's frenzy and Safdie's whiplash editing, but a last-minute attempt at redemption struck me as unconvincing -- unless Safdie intended it as a kind of cruel joke in his formula-defiant effort. Whatever was intended, I didn't buy it as a point of rebirth and transformation.

    Safdie (Uncut Gems) is no stranger to frantic levels of intensity. At times, I got caught up in Safdie's relentless pacing, even as I wished the movie would stop to take a breath. Marty Supreme didn't bore me, but Marty's aggression, along with some of the humiliations he experiences, left me with a sour aftertaste. 

   Or to reiterate: Instead of getting under your skin, getting in-your-face may just get on your nerves.*

*For the record: Director Josh Safdie, who co-wrote the screenplay for Marty Supreme with Ronald Bronstein, treated real-life Ping-Pong champion Marty Reisman's life as a springboard for a movie that fictionalizes much of its main character's world and some of the characters who inhabit it. Reisman died 2012 at the age of 82. The movie struck me as more a work of fiction than anything else, which is why I didn't mention any of this in the body of my review, but am adding it as an addendum for those who have read about the movie's connection to a real-life figure.

   

      

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.

   

'Dune: Part II': a stunning epic

 

 Huge in scale, long in the telling (166 minutes). and sporting arcane references from author Frank Herbert's landmark 1965 sci-fi novel, Dune: Part II has arrived. Don’t fret. Director Denis Villeneuve, who released Part One in 2023, delivers a movie with enough visionary heft and action to justify its epic scope.

  I thought Villeneuve's initial effort represented a marked improvement over David Lynch's 1984 sci-fi foray into Duneland, making the most of a drama steeped in intrigue and boasting enough bizarre-looking characters to sustain several otherworldly parade floats.

   More action-oriented than Part One and benefiting from cinematographer Grieg Fraser's stunning desert imagery, Part Two tells a story even non-fans should be able to follow as opposing planets in a vast galactic empire vie for control of melange, a rare spice that serves as an emblem of power.

   In this edition, we spend more time with the Fremen, desert dwellers of Arrakis, the planet where spice is mined and refined and where the heartless Harkonnen have become an occupying force.

    Much of the movie involves efforts by Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet) to earn a place among the Fremen. Paul wants to join their fight against the Harkonnen, led by the blubberous Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard).

   Eventually, the Baron unleashes his nephew Feyd-Rautha, a sneering, sadistic villain brought to frighteningly sharp life by Austin Butler.

    Villeneuve keeps a large supporting cast from swamping the various throughlines. A dust-covered Javier Bardem adds humor to his portrayal of Fremen leader Stilgar. Dave Bautista brings bulky menace to the role of Beast Rabban, another Harkonnen sadist, and a subdued Christopher Walken turns up as the emperor who presides over a vast planetary imperium. Josh Brolin returns as Paul's one-time mentor.

    With all that out of the way, let's get to the heart of the movie, provided by Chalomet and Zendaya, who plays the Fremen warrior Chani, a young woman dedicated to ridding the Fremen of oppressive colonial rule. 

     Paul, who earns the Fremen name Usul, and Chani fall in love, allowing the movie to raise questions about Paul’s loyalties. Is he for Fremen freedom or will he use their belief in him to augment his power? Can the aristocratic Paul be trusted by the justifiably suspicious masses?

    Much is made about whether Paul might be the messiah some of  the more fervent Fremen have been awaiting, allowing the movie to touch on additional issues concerning the dangerous ways religious and political aspiration can corrupt each other.

    The stakes may be starkly drawn, but characters are nicely shaded. Rebecca Ferguson returns as Paul's mother, encouraging his ambitious side and sometimes finding herself at odds with her son.

     Part Two thrives on scale, booming set-pieces (a gladiatorial battle with, alas, a crowd that looks CIG-generated), and the summoning of giant sandworms that live beneath the surface of Arrakis and are the source of melange, the spice with near-miraculous powers.

       For all its intricacies, betrayals, and plotting, the story retains its thematic resonance. What moral prices must be paid to control the spice.

      Now, after almost six hours of movie, Dune isn't finished. Questions remain for Paul, Chani, and the entire empire. Expect Part Three. I find that a bit dispiriting. If a story can't be told in six hours, maybe it's a miniseries.

      But the world of Dune remains intriguingly complex, full of characters whose roles shift and evolve. Credit Villeneuve with filling the screen with enough exotic flavor and bold action to keep Dune vividly alive through two helpings. 

      There's no reason to think he couldn't do the same in a third.

‘Bones and All’ difficult to digest

    If you simply described the premise of Bones and All, a story about two cannibalistic teenagers trying to find their place in society, it might sound like an ordinary horror film with lots of coagulated blood and amped up tension. 

   In the hands of director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name) the movie turns into something different, an indie-spirited accumulation of strange scenes that suggests deeper meanings, “suggest” being the operative word. 

   But suggesting and saying aren’t the same thing, and for most of it two-hour and 10-minute running time, I kept waiting for Bones and All to find something. I'm no sure what. Not some on-the-nose declaration of purpose but perhaps a door that swings open, inviting us to drop beneath the surface.

   Instead, Guadagnino suspends his movie in a low-rent limbo where nearly everything seems drab, unappealing and only potentially meaningful.

  Those looking for color will find it mostly in the blood that stains the faces of the movie’s young cannibals after they chow down.

   Without making too big a fuss about it, Guadagnino lets us know that the film, based on a YA novel by Camille DeAngelis,  is taking place during the ‘80s. Working phone booths. A TV repairman’s truck. (Yes, kids, people once had their TVs repaired). Music on the soundtrack. It's all from the '80s.

  In the film’s best performance, Taylor Russell portrays Maren, an 18-year-old cannibal kid who’s abandoned by her father (Andre Holland), a caring man no longer able to cope with his daughter’s proclivities. Every time she bites, they must uproot.

  Once dad is gone, Maren sets out on her own. Early in her journey, she encounters Sully, played by Mark Rylance with a vaguely southern accent, a long braid, and skin-crawling creepiness. Sully wants to teach Maren how to live as an “eater,” which is how those driven by irresistible flesh-eating urges refer to themselves. He also craves company.

  After wisely splitting from Sully, Maren meets Lee (Call Me By Your Name star, Timothee Chalamet), another “eater. 

   Unable to find niches in the “normal” world, the two travel around the country in Lee’s pick-up truck. During one encounter, they meet a couple of good-ole boys, also eaters (an unrecognizable Michael Stuhlbarg and David Gordon Green). 

  Stuhlbarg’s character explains the title. Ominously, he tells Maren and Lee that they won’t be full-fledged eaters until they consume a body “bones and all.”  

   There’s before bones & all and after, he says, signaling what I took to mean full and gleeful submission to one’s cannibal self. 

   Unlike the movie’s two main characters, these two are barbaric eaters. Or maybe they just don’t like leftovers.

  In another encounter, Maren meets her institutionalized mother (Chloe Sevigny), who presumably passed the macabre genetic heritage of “eating” to her daughter. Mom, by the way, had herself locked up so that she wouldn’t victimize anyone else. 

  The supporting cast fully embraces these whacky roles. Chalamet charts his own weird course.

  The movie attempts to redeem itself by showing that Maren and Lee don’t really want to be “eaters,” although they take different approaches to their unexplained  “affliction.” 

  Maren adopts a moral stance: She’d rather not kill. Lee says he has no choice. It’s not clear, though, whether Maren can choose to be a more acceptable kind of carnivore.

  Guadagnino doesn’t cop out on gore and those who are squeamish about such things should probably find another movie about two outsiders roaming a lonely, creepy world. 

   If you’re wondering whether Maren and Lee eat regular food, they do — at least until the need to feed on human flesh overcomes them. I guess the movie wants us to see them as a couple of kids desperately in need of connection. 

  The movie's saving grace, such as it is,  lies in Guadagnino’s understanding of the sadness of outcasts.

   And, yes, it takes talent to draw us into this bizarre world and accept (or at least adjust to) its terms, so much so that we forget to step outside and consider what we’re watching. 

   Should we do that, we might see Maren and Lee as needy kids who also happen to be killers who can’t control themselves. 

   When these kids get hungry someone dies. Just sayin’.

Great cast, less-than-great satire

 

    A massively destructive comet — five to 10 kilometers wide — barrels toward Earth. It's scheduled to hit Earth in six months, destroying all of the planet's life. Extinction looms.

   Writer/director Adam McKay thinks that’s funny -- in a satirical way, of course. But whether everyone else is laughing remains to be seen -- not because audiences are likely to be shaken by the prospect of global demise but because McKay plucks too much low-hanging fruit. He takes bold swings at familiar targets — the media can be easily diverted by celebrities, for example.

   McKay (The Big Short) knows how to find absurd twists in serious subjects. He makes wide-ranging comedies with a free-form feel. Here, he offers what might be regarded as mini-takes on a major theme that suggests current climate concerns: Wake up or be doomed. 

   But turning his movie into a parade of scenes that recall movies such as Network and Dr. Strangelove doesn't work to his advantage. Don't Look Up is a movie infused with trace elements of better predecessors.  

   McKay employs a large cast, turning a team of big-name actors into ensemble players. The list: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Cate Blanchett, and Meryl Streep. 

   He finds room for Ariana Grande and Kid Cudi -- not to mention Jonah Hill, Timothee Chalamet, and Mark Rylance.

   As much as it has one, DiCaprio and Lawrence occupy the film's center. Looking plump and nerdy, DiCaprio plays Randall Mindy, an astronomer who teaches at a Michigan university. 

   Lawrence appears as Kate Dibiasky, one of Mindy's grad students, Kate discovers the comet that's hurtling toward Earth.

   Duly alarmed, Mindy and Dibiasky travel to Washington to inform the president, a preoccupied hack played by Streep. Streep's Jeanie Orlean worries about saving a jeopardized Supreme Court nominee who has been caught in a porn scandal. Hill plays her patronizing chief of staff.

    Frustrated, Mindy and Dibiasky turn to the media, a morning TV show hosted by an aggressively genial team (Tyler Perry and Blanchett) who spend more time on a celebrity break-ups than on looming catastrophe.

     And when they do turn to the comet, they try to establish Mindy as a lovable scientist with what just might be a whacky theory. 

    Blanchett's Brie Evantee struck me as a riff on the character played by Faye Dunaway in Network, an ambitious, amoral, thrill-seeking woman who turns Mindy's head away from the loyal wife he's left in Michigan with their two teenage sons.

    Mindy eventually breaks ranks with the power brokers to give a Howard Beal-like speech intended to shock an over-entertained public out of its slumber.

   After much hemming and hawing, the US opts to send a tough-guy astronaut (Ron Perlman) into space to blow up the comet. McKay also introduces a tech company entrepreneurial genius (Mark Rylance in a gem of a performance) who has his own ideas about how to save the planet.

     McKay knows how to mine (perhaps over-mine) scenes for amusement and, as the movie progresses, the satirical strokes become bolder and more alarming -- at least that must have been the intent. The populace divides over whether the comet is actually on its way or whether it's another hoax. 

   The anti-comet folks adopt a slogan ("Don't Look Up") and wear red baseball caps. Remind you of anything?

    If you see the movie, stay through the credits for an epilogue that ties up a loose end that otherwise would have been left dangling.

    Did I laugh? Occasionally. Were some of the performances dead on? Sure. After all, McKay’s working with a great cast.

     But Don’t Look Up could be a case of misguided effort: It's possible that reality already is so ripe with extremes that it no longer can be satirized — or perhaps satirical efforts must be so keenly focused that absurdity is handled piece-by-piece. 

    As for the whole ball of wax? Well, as someone once said of a particularly brazen tabloid. It can't be parodied. All you have to do is quote it. Sounding as if you’re quoting it — which often is the case with Don’t Look Up — isn’t enough.

     

Wes Anderson's insular ‘Dispatch’

     Wes Anderson is an artful filmmaker and master miniaturist, a director who knows how to situate his films in the rich stream of cinema history. He's idiosyncratic and hardly ever seems to make a film in which his main objective is to soothe an audience. These are admirable traits and also the reasons why I always scold myself when I can't fully get behind an Anderson film.

   That's the case with The French Dispatch, a movie  apparently intended as a tribute to great magazine journalism. 

   Bill Murray plays the editor of the French Dispatch. Headquartered in the city of Ennui along the Blasé river, the Dispatch has built its reputation on the power of the written word and the idiosyncratic journalistic eye.

    Murray articulates two rules for those who work for the Dispatch. Don't cry and write in a way that makes it seem as if you did it on purpose.

   The plan: When Murray's Arthur Howitzer Jr. dies, the paper dies with him -- perhaps Anderson's way of acknowledging the disappearance of Great Editors; i.e., editorial titans who knew how to work with "difficult" writers -- and had never heard of focus groups, much less consulted one.

    An anthology divided into three parts with a prologue, the movie focuses on the Dispatch, a New Yorker-like publication complete with a table of contents and drawings. The meat of the movie involves three Dispatch feature pieces presented in black-and-white, color, and mixtures of the two.

    First among them, The Concrete Masterpiece, a story in which an art maven (Tilda Swinton) talks about a brilliant rebel painter named Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio Del Toro). 

   Imprisoned for murder, Rosenthaler uses a prison guard (Lea Seydoux) as a model. Adrien Brody enters the story as an art dealer who wants to exploit Moses's work -- and is, therefore, outraged when Rosenthaler produces frescos on the prison's walls. How the hell can those be sold?

   The best and most genuinely bizarre of the three pieces, The Concrete Masterpiece features Del Toro as a genius who seems to have separated himself from the constraints of ordinary morality. 

   Next up, Revisions to a Manifesto featuring Timothee Chalamet and Frances McDormand. McDormand plays a writer caught up in what looks like the student rebellion of 1968. She develops a relationship  -- as a kind of mentor and sexual partner -- for Chalamet's character, leader of a student revolt. She also crosses  an ethical line, helping Chalamet's character write a manifesto. 

   By the time of the second movie, I found myself asking just how much quirkiness and intricate detailing I could tolerate. 

   OK, part three, The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner. Jeffrey Wright portrays a writer who's working on a profile of a chef. Listening to Wright's delivery of the segment’s abundant dialogue has its rewards. But Private Dining Room, which also makes room for animation and crime, seems crowded to the point of indulgence.

   Almost every Anderson movie has a finely etched quality as well as a whimsical sense of humor and French Dispatch is not without those qualities. Still ....

   I wouldn’t say that Anderson has chiseled the life out of his movie; it's more that the chiseling almost becomes the life of an intricate inward-looking movie that carves out a place for itself — but not always for an audience. 

   Is it possible for a movie to talk to itself?

Sand and sci-fi in other-worldly ‘Dune’

     Here's the essence of what needs to be said about director Denis Villeneuve's long-awaited adaptation of Dune, the 1965 Frank Herbert novel that has acquired classic status among    many sci-fi enthusiasts.   

   Far more comprehensible than David Lynch's 1984 version, as well as more visually expansive and better acted, Villeneuve's Dune seems designed to please the novel's legion of fans. If it does, that's no small achievement.

    Beyond that, the movie shouldn't overly confound those who know nothing of the Dune universe. It also stands as a worthy testament to what the visual imagination can achieve when trying to bring a complex work of fiction to the screen.

   Herbert's lengthy novel may have made a better mini-series than a feature, but Villeneuve's version (actually only half of the story) benefits from being seen on the largest screen possible in a theater with a sound system geared to rattling brains inside pop-corn munching skulls.

   Villeneuve successfully creates a fantasy world in which vehicles resembling helicopters flutter multiple sets of wings and vast expanses of a desert planet stretch endlessly toward the  horizon. It's possible that Dune makes the most expressive use of sand in any movie since Lawrence of Arabia.

  Still a word of caution: There's something inherently frustrating about a two-hour and 35-minute movie that ends by telling us we've just witnessed "the beginning."

   The thing that separates Dune from other sci-fi ventures is it's pervasive strangeness, an otherworldly quality reflected in the movie’s costume design and in the names of its characters. 

   Young Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet) may be the longed-for Kwisatz Haderach. (Don’t ask).

   Paul's mother  Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) is the concubine of Paul's father Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac) and a member of the Bene Gesserit, women with special powers.

   Stellan Skarsgård appears as the obscenely bloated Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, the story's villain.

   I'll torture you with no more of these names. I mention them because they suggest that Dune is more than a hunk of sci-fi with rich ecological and anti-mechanistic ambitions. A distinctive cult flavor evokes comparisons with works such as Lord of the Rings, at least in the impact Dune has had on devotees. 

  Two additional characters register in the movie's sea of eccentricity. Jason Momoa plays Duncan Idaho, an engagingly robust warrior on whom Paul has a man crush. Josh Brolin portrays Gurney Halleck, Paul's combat instructor. Each adds manly heft.

   The plot amounts to a mash-up of mythologies, the most notable involving expectations that a messiah figure will provide some form of salvation. 

    Early on, the House of Atreides — one of many — has been assigned custodianship of the planet Arrakis. Arrakis, we learn, is the source of the spice melange, essential to interplanetary travel, longevity and more.

  Previously, the planet was ruled by the Harkonnen, foul warriors who exploited Arrakis and its native population, the Fremens. A fierce desert-like people who know how to live with the planet's terrifyingly enormous sand worms, the Fremens add Middle Eastern flavor.

   Of course, it doesn’t take long for us to understand that the House of Atreides is under grave threat. Perhaps the woman Paul dreams of -- the Fremen warrior Chani (Zendaya) — will help save the day if Villeneuve gets to make the rest of the story. 

    Villeneuve's epic left me looking forward to more and eager to learn how much sway Dune still holds in the pop-cultural imagination. I know people, now quite grown, for whom Dune was a formative read of youth.

     That wouldn't be me. Perhaps that's why I watched Villeneuve's richly realized world with appreciation, even if I sometimes felt more like an impressed tourist than someone who had fully invested in this sci-fi saga.

 

A giddy (maybe too much so) ‘Little Women’

A great cast elevates Greta Gerwig's helping of Louisa May Alcott's oft-told story.

Greta Gerwig has directed the seventh version of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women to reach the big screen. First published in 1868, Alcott's novel has passed through so many generations that I remember my mother mentioning it to a female cousin of mine who's now in her 80s.

As a member of the generation that grew up watching black-and-white movies on TV, I’ve seen director George Cukor's 1933 version, which starred Katharine Hepburn as Jo March. As a reviewer, I admired the 1994 version in which Winona Ryder portrayed Jo under Gillian Armstrong's direction.

So much for my Little Women bona fides.

In Gerwig’s version, we meet the sisters of the title after they’ve already become adults. Putting chronological storytelling aside, Gerwig moves the narrative backward and forward in ways that struck me as initially confusing but probably will present less of a problem for Little Women devotees who don't need a scorecard to keep up with the characters.

Gerwig and editor Nick Houy proceed at the kind of frantic pace that you might expect from someone who was trying to stay one step ahead of a tax collector. This distractingly giddy tone is augmented by Alexander Desplat’s score, which — truth be told — sometimes seems intent on becoming as prominent as one of the characters.

Eventually, the story begins to cohere, thanks in no small part to the fine cast that Gerwig has assembled.

Saoirse Ronan lands the role of Jo and brings every bit of ambition and hurt to a character who has become a women’s lit staple.

Early on, Jo -- who aspires to be a writer -- brings a story to a publisher (Tracy Letts). Although Letts' character accepts the work, the movie's main point is made: Women should secure their future by marrying. The world doesn't have much use for strong, independent-minded women who want to forge their own way.

As Letts' character puts it, a woman's story either should end in marriage or death.

Ronan captures Jo’s growing determination — not to mention her resistance to the advances of the young man who loves her (Timothee Chalamet's Theodore Laurence). The movie includes one of the great scenes of rejection when Jo tells Theodore that they'd make a terrible match. This time, it's the guy who's crushed.

Florence Pugh, seen earlier this year in Midsommar, gives the movie’s most surprising performance as Amy, the sister who paints and connives and who, of course, ultimately loves Jo and all her sisters. Relationships strain but the bonds of sisterhood prevail.

Neither Ronan nor Pugh imprisons her performance in period trappings. Both seem as if they exist both and in the present and in the 19th Century; the story takes place during the Civil War and is set in motion by an absentee father. Mr. March (Bob Odenkirk in a piece of unexpected casting) has gone off to be a chaplain to the Union's troops, leaving the sisters and their mother (an excellent Laura Dern) to keep the home fires burning in Concord, MA.

Emma Watson plays Meg, the sister who seems to have totally adjusted to the idea of home and hearth. Jo pushes Meg to assert herself as an actress but Meg insists that she finds her fulfillment in domesticity.

Sister Beth (Eliza Scanlen) plays piano and is assigned the thankless task of providing the movie's great tragedy when she contracts scarlet fever.

Early on, there's a suggestion that Jo might find happiness with Friedrich Bhaer (Louis Garrel), a French professor of languages, but she pushes him aside when he insults her writing.

Chris Cooper has a nice turn as Mr. Laurence, grandfather to Chalamet's Theodore, who everyone calls "Laurie." And Meryl Streep turns up as Aunt March, a woman who sometimes plays the role of family scold but who takes Amy to France for painting, culture, and grooming for marriage.

At times, Gerwig puts speeches about female assertion into the mouths of the characters, making points that already have been dramatized. It's a form of underling that the movie didn't need and which seems like an unnecessary bow to contemporary gender demands.

None of this is to say that the period isn't well-represented. Cinematographer Yorik Le Saux, production designer Jess Gonchar and costume designer Jacqueline Durran all should be credited for first-rate work.

Like so many before her, Gerwig clearly loves the material. Many will love the movie back. Forgive me for being someone who would have liked it more had Gerwig, especially in the early going, not seemed to be straining to keep the movie lively.