'First Steps' revives the Fantastic Four

   I'm not sure what it means, but if you look at the photo above, the blue and white outfits worn by the Fantastic Four may remind you of pajamas you'd expect find at a kiddie sleepover. I mention it because it's not easy to take Fantastic Four: First Steps, the movie from which this photo was taken, too seriously. Consider that a good thing.

  This fourth Fantastic Four movie represents an upbeat improvement over its three predecessors, which may be enough to kick it into recommendable territory -- provided you have any interest in another Marvel movie.

 Given a 60's aura by director Matt Shakman and recast with Pedro Pascal and Vanessa Kirby in pivotal roles, First Steps has a welcome low-tech quality in which a robot looks more clunky than sleek. Sci-fi elements such as teleportation operate at rudimentary levels, as does a story that expeditiously introduces the Four while taking care of world-building.

  Joseph Quinn and Ebon Moss-Bachrach complete the Fantastic quartet. A ton of CGI effects turn Moss-Bachrach into The Thing, a powerhouse who can lift a Volkswagen bug as if it weighed no more than a pebble. Quinn's Human Torch blazes his way through numerous action scenes.

   I'm to going to waste space describing all the superpowers of the Four, but it's important to know that when we meet them, they're living as a family in a New York apartment that has a mid-century garnish.

   For the record, Pascal's Reed Richard (a.k.a. Mr. Fantastic) and Kirby's Sue Storm (a.k.a. Invisible Woman) are married and expecting a child, which leads to scene in which Sue gives birth aboard a spaceship while dealing with a zero-gravity environment.

   The newborn, a mixture of CGI and a real infant, becomes an important plot element. The world-devouring villain, Galactus (Ralph Ineson), offers to spare Earth if Sue gives him Baby Franklin. When Sue declines, the failure of the Four to stave off doom raises the ire of the world's populace. Sue chooses the one above the many.

   Looking like a sleek statue inspired by an awards show, Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) serves as Galactus's reconnaissance specialist. She surfs to new worlds, identifying planets that will feed her overlord's voracious appetite, although he's a bit tired of roaming galaxy after galaxy in search of nourishment. 

   The effects employed in the movie's finale are effectively realized, and Galactus's ominous-looking space ship reinforces the sense of doom facing Earth's inhabitants.

    Happily, First Steps doesn't overdo the interconnections that burden many Marvel films. You won't need a glossary to follow a plot designed for efficiency.

   I can't say that I was emotionally invested in First Steps. The movie's comic-book artifice makes it difficult really to fear for Earth's future, but a bit more than tolerable beats the heck out of terrible.

   On that level, First Steps satisfies.

Tom Cruise on another action-packed mission

 

 Let me get this off my chest about Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One. Any movie that's two hours and 43 minutes long and calls itself "Part One" wrinkles my brow. If two hours and 43 minutes isn't enough to tell a Mission: Impossible story, how did Citizen Kane manage to be so scintillating, colorful, and richly alive in a mere one hour and 59 minutes?

 OK, now back to reality.

 Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part I boasts some of the best action footage you'll see this year. Moreover, a strong cast adds enough nuance to keep the story from seeming like an excuse to vault from one dizzying set piece to the next.

 This edition takes a topical turn with writers Erik Jendresen and Christopher McQuarrie, who also directs, injecting artificial intelligence into the plot. 

 A brief explanation: An artificial intelligence called The Entity has the potential to control everything. Because AI knows no allegiances, many people want to control The Entity, either living in its good graces or harnessing it for evil.

  Not Ethan Hunt, the character played by Tom Cruise. Hunt, the IM agent who has been defying death since Cruise brought him to life in 1996 aims to kill The Entity. He has no interest in using it, which means he's the defender of humanity's right to be ... well ... human, a value that fits nicely with the series’ preference for stunts over CGI-created effects.

   Cruise, who just turned 61, looks a bit longer in the tooth than he did when Hunt undertook his first mission. Still, longer in the tooth for Cruise, who does his own stunts, isn't quite the same as longer in the tooth for anyone else and he deepens Hunt by adding layers of doubt and regret.

    Two major additions add spark. Hayley Atwell signs on as Grace, a pickpocket who'll end up working with Ethan. Esai Morales portrays Gabriel, a villain who makes no bones about his evil designs on The Entity and who is connected to Hunt's past in ways that presumably will be explored in the next movie.

    A variety of actors make return visits, notably Rebecca Ferguson as Isla Faust, a sometime antagonist and sometime ally of Hunt whose smile suggests that she's crushing on him. Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg reprise their roles as part of the IM crew, and Henry Czerny shows up as a former IM boss who still keeps a hand in intelligence.

   Enough about the cast, which is large and which, over time, has developed characters that rival the Marvel Universe for interconnection and overlap. 

   In these moves, action goes a long way toward defining character, so it's worth mentioning of a few highlights. 

   Dead Reckoning opens with a tense prologue on a Russian submarine and then serves up a battle in the Arabian Desert, a suspenseful scene in Abu Dhabi International Airport, a clever Roman car chase in which Cruise and Atwell are handcuffed to each other in a Fiat, and  a white-knuckled motorcycle ride that finds Hunt driving over a cliff.

   A  literal cliffhanger of a finale puts us aboard a speeding train headed for a demolished bridge while leaning into vertiginous thrills.

   Much of what happens in the movie is motivated by the need to find two halves of a key that can unlock mysteries that the movie pretty much keeps to itself. Using a key as a MacGuffin seems less imaginative than we expect from Mission: Impossible movies, almost Indiana Jones-ish. 

   But everyone wants the key and we'll have to wait until next year to learn what it will reveal about The Entity.

   Now, it's time to offer an addendum to my opening paragraph.

   Look, I prefer forms of storytelling that are more economical and richer; I wouldn't want to call this IM screenplay a model of efficiency. 

  At the same time, I wasn't bored. Going in, I knew the movie was two hours and 43 minutes long, so I occasionally checked my watch to see how McQuarrie was handling all the globe-hopping as he barreled toward an ending.

   Reservations about length aside, I'll look forward to Part Two. My anticipation has less to do with learning the secrets of The Entity than with knowing that Cruise and his team can be relied on to deliver the action-packed goods -- with enough style and sophistication to keep the series humming at high levels.

 

A frustrated father and a troubled son

 In adapting his stage play, The Son, for the screen, director Florian Zeller finds emotional moments that ring true amid many that miss badly. Zeller, the French playwright who directed The Father (2020), explores what happens when a father (Hugh Jackman) -- divorced and remarried -- tries to keep his mentally troubled son Nicholas (Zen McGrath) from ruining his life. Jackman's convincingly exasperated performance reflects the difficulty of communicating with a kid who dissembles and has little insight into his self-destructive behavior. The New York-based story kicks off when Nicholas's former wife (Laura Dern) asks Jackman's Peter for help dealing with Nicholas, who has been skipping school. Peter and his wife Beth (Vanessa Kirby) take in the seventeen-year-old, a decision that's complicated by Peter and Beth's situation; they've recently become parents to a new infant son. Nicholas's increasing inability to cope diverts Peter's attention from work and the important Washington job he's about to land. During a trip D.C., he's lectured by his high-achieving, bullying dad, played by a briefly seen Anthony Hopkins in a powerful scene. Among the movie's problems: We don't really get to know Nicholas, partly because he keeps himself hidden and partly because he's reduced to a single dimension: The problem kid who resents his father for leaving his mother. The movie contrives to reach its expected conclusion with Zeller adding a misguided scene that just doesn't play. Too bad. The Son misses an opportunity to deal convincingly with a difficult but important subject.

Bob's Cinema Diary: 2/12/21-- 'Minari,' 'Land' and 'The World to Come'

     Like most reviewers, I'm being inundated with streaming opportunities. In a normal moment, it would be possible to give more space to the movies that you'll find in these cinema diaries. But I've decided that it's better to call attention to these movies than to ignore them and sometimes, a special movie -- in this case Minari -- finds its way into a diary post. 

 I've included Minari in this edition of the Cinema Diary because the movie was a hit on the festival circuit, has turned up on many 10-best lists, and already has received considerable attention. I gave it honorable mention status.

Minari

In Minari, writer/director Lee Isaac Chung tells the story of a Korean family trying to start a farm in Arkansas during the 1980s. In his warm but realistic endeavor, Chung focuses on family dynamics. Dad, a deservedly praised Steven Yeun, dreams of making a go of farming, which -- for him -- means taking a stab at being his own man. Mom (Yeri Han) goes along but is more skeptical about the chances for success. Grandma (a scene-stealing Yuh-jung Youn) arrives to help young David (Alan Kim as the couple's son) and Anne (Noel Cho as the family daughter). Chung astutely avoids rising-immigrant cliches. Mom earns money in a chicken processing plant and Dad receives help from a strange Pentecostal neighbor (Will Patton). Youn and Kim play a perfect and often unexpected grandma/grandson duet and Yeun delivers a performance that brims with both frustration and hope. Don't expect a Rocky-style aspirational pep talk. Fair to say, then, that Minari eschews nostalgia and, though set in the 1980s, feels very much alive in the present.

Land

Watching Land, a movie marking the directorial debut of actress Robin Wright, I kept asking myself what might have motivated Wright to pick this story about a woman who withdraws into nature's harsh isolation. Edee (Wright) moves into a remote cabin in Wyoming with little experience in how to negotiate life in the wilderness. We'll eventually learn what prompted Edee's withdrawal from society, but it's not too difficult to guess where her motivation lies. Before heading for the hills, Edee tells her sister (Kim Dickens) that she no longer can bear life around people. Most of the movie involves watching Edee struggle to survive. She must learn to hunt, gather enough wood to keep from freezing, find ways to feed herself and adjust to taking care of bathroom needs in an outhouse. At one particularly low point, Edee is rescued by a native-American woman (Sarah Dawn Pledge) and another wilderness denizen (Demien Birchir). Watching Edee nearly freeze to death gives you the shivers, but Land never seems to gather the kind of thematic momentum that would have justified Edee's battle with unforgiving nature. It doesn't help that Edee has moved into the wild less for purposes of discovery than for what can seem like a punishment. 

The World to Come

In The World to Come, Vanessa Kirby portrays Tallie, a 19th- century farm woman who lives an emotionally Spartan existence with her husband Finney (Christopher Abbott). The movie focuses on a friendship between two women that quickly blossoms into love. Abigail (Katherine Waterston) plays another resident of this unforgiving environment. She's married to Dyer (Casey Affleck). They've lost a child and evidently whatever passed for love in their relationship. The men in director Mona Fastvold's movie are a sour lot. Finney is an unapologetic chauvinist who tries to guide his wife's behavior with Old Testament pronouncements. The morose Dyer seems lost and lugubrious. The women ultimately realize their passion for each other but it doesn't take much foresight to know that things won't proceed toward a sunny conclusion.  An atmosphere of hardship and deprivation serves as a backdrop that heightens the  longing both women experience. A surfeit of narration (mostly from Abigail) tends to substitute for drama and although the performances are fine (notably Waterston's), the movie left me wondering whether Tallie and Abigail were not only being constrained by their husbands but by Fastvold's stark conception of the movie. 

Powerful acting in an uneven movie

    Hungarian director Kornel Mundruczo's White God stands as one of the most riveting movies of 2014, a political allegory that made you gasp and left you wondering how its many scenes with dogs had been filmed

    A drama of shocking immediacy, Mundruczo's Pieces of a Woman marks the director's English-language debut and provides an opportunity for Vanessa Kirby to give one of the year's most emotionally naked performances.

     Familiar for having played Princess Margaret in The Crown, Kirby portrays Martha, a young woman who loses her baby during a home birth. The 23-minute scene in which Martha goes into labor was recorded by cinematographer Benjamin Loeb in a single agonizing shot. 

     Kirby's character, the baby's father (Shia LaBeouf), and a midwife (Molly Parker) are all caught up in a fraught, anxious moment. Taking place before the opening credits, the scene sets a high bar of intensity that the movie will have trouble topping. 

     Before the birth sequence, Mundruczo sketches the relationship between Martha and LaBeouf's Sean. He works in construction; she works in an office. He's a brusk jokey guy who knows that Martha's mother (Ellen Burstyn) thinks her daughter can do better.

    Clearly psyched about becoming a father, Sean's bustling energies and his sympathetic behavior during the protracted labor sequence keep us from dismissing him as entirely "boorish," a term he later uses sardonically in describing himself to Martha's mother.

     Martha, however, turns out to be the movie's driving force. Sean spins like a helpless wheel around Martha's increasingly distant behavior. At one point, he forces himself on her sexually, another scene that has generated much discussion.

    On one level, Pieces of a Woman deals with relationships, family, and grief. On another level, it's about acting, the way actors navigate heavy emotional waters, leaving themselves exposed as they deep dive into what feels like unprotected waters.

     But that doesn't mean that Pieces of a Woman succeeds as a drama. An uncompleted bridge becomes one of Mundruczo's several visual symbols, along with apple seeds. Whatever Mundruczo intended to convey with these visual metaphors feel labored. The movie's at its best when it's being literal and physical rather than symbolic.

    Another current animates the story. Burstyn's character wants her daughter to press charges against the midwife. Martha resists, opening the door for Burstyn to deliver a short monologue about having been a Holocaust baby. She follows by making an offer to Sean, which I didn't buy -- not on either side of the transaction.

         Anyone who ever has experienced or knows someone who has experienced the death of an infant during childbirth probably should think twice before seeing a movie that may strike them as too realistic, too evocative of a terribly painful experience.

    Those who approach the movie on a more neutral footing will find  a performance in which Kirby establishes herself as a master of mood and self-containment. It's as if she's in one movie and everyone else in another, which makes sense because Martha travels through the story in a state of extreme alienation. She's separated from everyone by an experience that can't be rationalized or even explained.

    Pieces of a Woman stands as a collection of scenes -- some quite powerful -- that demand a lot from its cast without ever totally cohering for us.

     

A journalist documents the crimes of Stalin

     In Mr. Jones, Polish director Agnieszka Holland turns her attention to a little known story about a Welsh journalist who worked to expose Joseph Stalin’s murderous crimes in Ukraine. 

      James Norton portrays Jones, a dedicated reporter who early on is dismissed from his job as secretary to prime minister Lloyd George (Kenneth Cranham), a man who tried to ignore Jones’s admonitions about the growing threat of Nazism. 

     After losing his job with George, Jones began working independently, turning his attention to the Soviet Union. He wanted to interview Stalin, an ambition that exceeded the reality of the young journalist's connections. 
     Upon arriving in Moscow, Jones sought help from New York Times journalist Walter Duranty (Peter Sarsgaard), a Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter who showed no interest in exposing the truth about Stalin’s treatment of farmers in Ukraine. As depicted here, an imperious Durante seems too immersed in his dissolute life to challenge the official line.

        It's worth remembering that in the pre-war days in which the story unfolds, some western enthusiasts on the left were lauding the Soviet experiment as an estimable march toward progress. 
           Vanessa Kirby impresses as a writer who tries to warn Jones that he's treading on dangerous ground by insisting on traveling to Ukraine.

       Mired in a variety of intrigues and storylines, the movie often feels scattershot, further muddled by scenes involving George Orwell (Joseph Mawle),  who's working on the novella, Animal Farm.  

     Other plot threads flutter in the winds of a movie that doesn’t become memorable until Jones reaches Ukraine. There he discovers the horrific famine that Stalin inflicted on the populace as punishment for their resistance to collectivization.

     Stalin stole and sold their wheat to finance a five-year plan meant to catapult the Soviet Union into modernity.  Images of terrible suffering, brutal cold, and even famine-induced cannibalism are so hauntingly vivid they tend to put the rest of the movie to shame.

'Hobbs & Shaw': more preposterous action

Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham star in an action spinoff that wears out its welcome.

Fast and Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw attempts to expand the reach of an amped-up series that began in 2001 with a Rob Cohen-directed movie about street racing. The original movie, modest by current standards, marked a surprising entry into that summer's big-screen sweepstakes, a refreshing blend of speed and grit.

The series, which long ago made the leap into franchise territory, now has spawned a slightly demented offspring, one that’s far enough afield from its cinematic parents that it feels obliged to proclaim its lineage. I’m cynical enough to view Hobbs & Shaw as a superfluous mutation, an attempt to squeeze more mileage out of a series that never seems to run out of road.

Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw teams Dwayne Johnson's genially muscular Hobbs with Jason Statham's sneering Shaw. The two characters have history, which is another way of saying they don't get along. Both, of course, have cropped up in previous Fast & Furious movies. This time, they’re the main event.

A largely irrelevant plot brings these bickering battlers together for a job that Hobbs immodestly refers to as "saving the world." In this case, saving the world involves preventing the spread of a bio-engineered virus that could wipe out most of humanity. The virus hardly matters because even the characters don't seem to take the plot all that seriously.

Idris Elba signs on as the movie's bad guy, which is how his character introduces himself. "I'm the bad guy," he says, cueing a laugh line by signaling the movie's wish to play a genre-mocking game -- some of the time, if it not entirely.

On the less jokey side of the ledger: An evil corporation has weaponized Elba's character, turning him into a human with robotic capabilities that approach super-heroism. He supposedly represents a new rung on the evolutionary ladder.

As it turns out, Shaw's character has a sister (Vanessa Kirby) who's also trying to save humanity, an occupation that's always in large demand in summer movies. In the movie's early scenes, Kirby's Hattie steals the virus by embedding the capsule that contains it in her palm.

The Fast and Furious franchise always has made room for bold women. Kirby's Hattie carries on the tradition; she's a genuine butt-kicker who needs little assistance from the affable Hobbs or the dyspeptic Shaw.

Remember the virus? We're told, it eventually will go ... well ... viral. The clock ticks away.

Director David Leitch and his team don't pay much attention to this or any other clock, allowing the movie to unfold over a distended two hours and 15 minutes.

Hobbs & Shaw works its way toward a finale on Samoa without making it seem as if anything vital is at stake, aside from the filmmakers' ability to engineer ridiculous chase sequences and other impossible feats. The action is outlandish but not all of it is thrilling.

If you're of a mind, you may want to view the movie's Samoan finale as a statement -- albeit one that's delivered with as much ham-fisted panache as the barbs traded by Hobbs & Shaw. Hobbs reunites with his estranged brother (Cliff Curtis). They use Samoan weapons to ward off high-tech baddies. Can simple humanity triumph?

The movie includes an appearance by Helen Mirren, as Shaw's imprisoned mother, superfluous aside from suggesting participation in future movies. There also are a couple of cameos from actors I won’t name lest I spoil the surprise.

Look, I have no need to believe anything that happens in this kind of entertainment, but I'd like, at a minimum, to feel a sense of sustained involvement. That's not easy when a movie’s action, though abundant, isn't necessarily about creating excitement but about impressing us with the filmmakers' ingenuity. A little of this sort of thing goes a long way, and Hobbs & Shaw offers more than a little -- way too much, in fact.