A popular musical reaches the screen

 

     Staged and restaged, Wicked has sustained an extraordinary level of popularity since the show debuted on Broadway in 2003. Wicked features songs with lyrics fans probably can recite from heart and its dancing goes heavy on stomping. Still playing on Broadway, Wicked has chalked up about $3.2 billion in ticket sales.

   Small wonder then that Wicked finally has made it to the screen with Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande in starring roles and a ton of emphatically expressed production value that sometimes seems to stand on equal footing with the main event, a story about two of Oz's fabled witches.

   Director Jon M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians) adds little by way of  nuance or depth to obviously stated themes about  racial prejudice, bullying, and sneaky authoritarian rule.

   Instead, Chu leans into colorful images, dazzling special effects, and the undeniable commitment of both stars. Much of the time, the combination works to create an unabashedly showy entertainment that may not rank among the great movie musicals, but has enough frivolous  kick to click. 

   Think of Wicked as a vibrantly ornate helping of fan service that may also will appeal to those who’ve never seen the stage production — and who welcome the movie's glossy references to trendy notions, adapted from the 1995 Gregory Maguire novel, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.

   The story revolves around the polarity separating two witches, Glinda (Grande) and Elphaba (Erivo). Glinda, of course, is the good witch, who in this telling is more popular than virtuous. Born with green skin, Elphaba is the scorned victim of bigotry who'll become the Wicked Witch. 

   The story's best twist: Elphaba's the character we root for.

   Wicked stands as a prequel to The Wizard of Oz, complete with origin stories about the Cowardly Lion and the creepy flying monkeys that have frightened several generations of children. But mostly the movie is a pop cultural lollipop, much of it set at Shiz University, a Hogwarts-like institution where students learn the art of sorcery. 

    Glinda arrives at the school ready to become the Big Girl on Campus — conceited, bratty, blonde, insensitive, and addicted to the color pink.  Accustomed to rejection, Elphaba never applied to the school, but her supernatural talents are recognized by Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), the school’s Head Mistress. 

   Peter Dinklage gives voice to Doctor Dillamond, the goat who serves as Shiz’s last remaining animal professor. A history teacher, Dillamond creates sympathy for animals, who are being stripped of the power of speech for reasons revealed in the movie's second half.

    Jonathan Bailey provides hunk appeal as Fiyero, a prince who attracts the attention of both Elphaba and Glinda and who might not be quite the empty vessel he initially seems.

   Ethan Slater portrays Bog Woodman, the resident Munchkin who crushes on Glinda but reluctantly agrees to date Elphaba's sister (Marissa Bode), a Shiz student born with a disease that keeps her in a wheelchair. 

   Grande finds comic and bitchy notes in Glinda’s flighty personality, and Erivo makes a moving Elphaba, an intelligent young woman fighting a battle with anger and resentment on one side and natural empathy on the other. The song, I'm Not That Girl, highlights her personality in an assertive but mildly mournful way.

   Eventually, the plot contrives to send Elphaba and Glinda to the Emerald City for an audience with the Wizard (an amusing Jeff Goldblum.)

   Chu and his team go all in during the Emerald City finale, concluding the movie on a soaring (literally) note, the culmination of what already has been a mega-display of production design.

   I’m not pressing Wicked into my book of cherished movie memories, but I had the feeling that this big-screen musical wasn't intended for me. Put another way: Not exactly my cup of tea, but Wicked had its pleasures -- most stemming from Grande and especially Erivo, who gives the movie a welcome helping of humanity.

    A note: Even though the movie runs for a sometimes taxing two hours and 41 minutes, the story is slated to conclude with a second helping next November.  Maybe I'm jaded, but I can't help wondering why an already lengthy running time wasn't sufficient. Guess we'll find out.

  

 

‘Gladiator II’: More but not better

 

    I’d been looking forward to Gladiator II, hoping director Ridley Scott would deliver an epic-scaled movie that provided a healthy dose of sword-and- sandal escapism while paying homage to an idealized version of bygone Roman virtues: honor and strength. 

  What I experienced was a mixture of involvement and disappointment, a movie that prioritizes spectacle as it labors to refresh the structure of the original movie, which made its debut 20 years ago.

   Gone, aside from a few references in flashback, is Russell Crowe as Maximus, an obvious necessity prompted by the fact that Maximus died in the first installment. He's replaced by Paul Mescal as Lucius, who we first meet on the eve of the Roman siege of Numidia, a North African Berber kingdom.

    David Scarpa’s screenplay introduces Lucius as an adult who was taken in by North African "barbarians” (as the Romans refer to its non-Roman subjects) as a child. The Numidians are ripe for conquest by Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal), a loyal Roman who’s devoted to imperial expansion and to the republican ways of the past.

    Early on, we get the whole Scott enchilada: big ships, catapulted fire balls, gory hand-to-hand combat, scaled walls, and flaming arrows. 

    It should surprise no one that the empire is evil. The cunning wickedness of Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus -- so important in the first movie -- has been replaced by Denzel Washington’s Macrinus, a conniving entrepreneur who owns and wagers on gladiators and angles to surpass those who belong to the senatorial elite.

    Returnees include Connie Nielsen as Lucilla, Maximum’s one-time lover.

   As if to differentiate this belated and somewhat boated sequel, two actors (Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger) play callow brothers who rule the empire, providing dual helpings of cruelty. 

   Plenty of action, much of it set in the Roman Coliseum, follows as the movie ratifies its status as a collection of CGI thrills. Digitally created super-monsters battle gladiators. These include vicious creatures that look like a combination of rabid dogs and monkeys and a rhinoceros the size of a small building.

    At one point, the arena is flooded for a simulated naval battle conducted while man-eating sharks ply the shallow waters. 

   Though obvious, the word "overkill" leaps to mind.

   I won’t bother you with details about a plot that includes reasonably predictable elements that echo developments in first movie. In case it isn't already clear, I'll summarize: After Lucius' wife is killed in the battle for Numida, he's captured and taken to Rome, where Macrinus purchases him and makes him a gladiator.

    The principal performances are all up to snuff. Mescal rages and looks muscular, a man contemptuous of his origins but not entirely freed of them, even as he seeks his vengeance for his wife’s death at Roman hands. 

   Playing a man of conscience, Mescal’s presence is missed when he's not on screen. The movie needed  more of his weight.

   In what becomes the movie's stand-out performance, Washington brings Shakespearean stature to a man of wit and cunning.

   Nielsen acquits herself well as Marcus’ wife, a lady with a "secret" that’s eventually revealed but which is obvious from the start.

   Although many of the movie's characters are based on real historical figures, the minority of viewers who are versed in Roman history in the 200s, may blanch at inaccuracies. 

   Those aside, Gladiator II finds Scott putting himself through the required paces. His battle scenes serve as crowdpleasers, much in the way battling gladiators served the Roman yearning for bloody escapism.

  I found the movie — which unfolds over two and a half hours -- a somewhat mechanical attempt to highlight a checklist of themes: Roman intrigue, Roman debauchery, the Roman taste for spectacle, Roman stoicism in the face of doom, and a buffed version of Roman virtue.

   Put it all together and you have a movie that finds  captivating moments amid a scattered, unexceptional plot. Gladiator II can't replicate the sorrows of the first movie or reach its noble heights.

   As a long-time spectator in the entertainment area, I'll turn my thumb sideways and move on.

 

A look at the life of Humphrey Bogart

 

Here's an odd thing about Humphrey Bogart -- or at least about how I see one Hollywood’s greatest stars. For me, Bogart isn't dead. Never will be. I know he passed away in 1957 after a bout with  esophageal cancer. But hardly a month goes by when I don't see Bogart on Turner Classic Movies. He’s always available, even if only on small screens. I know Bogart from his movies -- from The Petrified Forest (1936) to Angels With Dirty Faces (1938), and The Roaring Twenties (1939). Then came High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon (both 1941) and a slew of other films, 75 in all.  I haven't even mentioned Casablanca, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, or In a Lonely Place. The Bogart that intrigues me regularly turns up as Duke Mantee, Rick Blaine, Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, Roy "Mad Dog" Earl, Fred C. Dobbs, and Philip Francis Queeg. He was all those guys, but he was still always Bogart. 

   The documentary Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes summarizes the actor's life and screen work, beginning in 1957 with Bogart's funeral. The rest is flashback. Working with Bogart's estate, director Kathryn Ferguson delves into Bogart's relationships with four wives, all actresses. She provides insight into Bogart's quick temper, as well as his fabled romance with Lauren Bacall. Bogart was 45 when he married the 20-year-old Bacall.

Canadian actor Kerry Shale substitutes his voice for Bogart's in a narration that captures Bogart’s spirit -- smart, rebellious, serious about his work.

 A framework for psychological evaluation emerges; Bogart came from a family that was rich when he was born. His mother wasn't especially affectionate. 

  If you're a Bogart fan, you should watch. You’ll learn things or refresh your memory: It took Bogart 40 years to establish his big-screen career. You'll find abundant clips from his filmography and some remarks from director John Huston on Bogart’s less-than-admirable brush with the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee.

  Now, it's back to Turner Classic Movies where, for me and many others, Bogart lives on.

Cousins on a heritage trip to Poland

 

  Jesse Eisenberg directs himself and Kieran Culkin in A Real Pain, a movie about two cousins who take a heritage trip to Poland. The trip's planned culmination involves a visit to the house where the cousins' late grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, once lived. 

   Before reaching their destination, the men travel with a small tour group to the site of the Warsaw ghetto, various spots in the city of Lublin, and to Majdanek, the death camp constructed not far outside the Lublin city limits. 

    Notably, the trip was financed by the cousins' grandmother; she must have wanted these sometimes self-absorbed men to get a taste of their bitter family history. They do, and we get a movie that's not weighted by the self-seriousness we might expect. The cousins don't always know how to react during their potentially unsettling travelogue.

   As it happens. I've been to many of the places the cousins visit -- although for different reasons. I can tell you from experience that it's impossible to find yourself at some of these sites without being struck by conflicting impressions.

   You think, "I'm OK. The sky has a preternatural clarity. So how do I reconcile that with the feeling that I'm walking through a mass graveyard?"

  Some commentators have discussed A Real Pain in terms of Jewish characters who are three generations removed from the Holocaust. Can they relate to what they're seeing? If so, how? Is humor allowed? Can they enjoy a meal in the luxury car of an express train without remembering the  boxcars that transported so many Jews to their deaths?

   The relationship between the two cousins begins to take shape at the airport before their flight to Warsaw. Born two weeks apart, the cousins were close as kids but drifted apart. Jittery and ill at ease, Eisenberg's David is married. He has a son and a stable job. Charming, quick-witted. and emotionally unsettled, Culkin's Benji is at loose ends. 

   The movie's title deserves unpacking: Benji can be a  pain when it comes to ignoring proprieties. He often masks his hostility by insisting that he's being playful. The Holocaust -- more referenced than explored -- provides another source of pain. And David's concern about and estrangement from his cousin gnaws at him.

   In Poland, David and Benji are joined on their tour by Jennifer Grey, as a woman readjusting her life after a divorce, Kurt Egyiawan, as a convert to Judaism who survived the Rwandan genocide; and Liza Sadovy and Daniel Oreskes, as a married couple who want to learn something about their roots. 

   Will Sharpe portrays a British tour guide who, at one point, becomes a target for Benji's sarcasm. The guide has information, but Benji senses he doesn't feel the story in his gut.

   Anyone who has seen Culkin in Succession knows he can dazzle with a quicksilver wit that conceals irritations that spill into torment. His character is aptly described by David as someone who can light up a room upon entry and then find ways to piss on everyone and everything in it. 

   Eisenberg wisely resists overdramatizing, particularly when the group visits Majdanek. They and we know what happened there. Images of barracks, ovens, and a gas chamber speak for themselves. 

    For Jews, responding to a trip to Poland involves memory, history, emotion, and an appreciation for the role distance and time play in shaping perception. Eisenberg's film doesn't always reflect that complexity but it knows these characters and allows them to bring their own sensibilities on a journey that leaves them to consider where they've been, and perhaps, where they're going.

    But that would be another movie.

     

     

Christmas Eve with a large family

 

Movies about families gathering for holiday celebrations tend toward nostalgic recollections or satirical pokes at low-hanging fruit. Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point takes a different approach, although it’s not clear what that might be. Employing a teeming ensemble of actors, the movie  chronicles an evening in the life of a large Italian-American family: kids, teenagers, adults, and what’s left of an older generation. Absent a central character, director Tyler Taormina turns his Long Island-based movie into a heap of asides that feel as if they may have been drawn from personal experience. Homage is paid to family tradition, but the teenagers eventually slip away, seeking the familiarity of a world their parents don’t understand. A packed soundtrack (from Sinatra to The Ronettes) seems keyed to evoking smiles of recognition. Set in the early years of the 21st century, the movie also includes mother-daughter tensions and disagreements about whether it’s time to move mom into a nursing home. Perhaps to solidify its indie cred, the movie casts Michael Cera and Gregg Turkington as two cops who sound dissonant comic notes. If you attend this densely populated party, look for performances by Maria Dizzia, Tony Savino, and Francesca Scorsese.  To summarize: The movie resembles a Christmas meal at which everyone overindulges. Put another way, all of this gets to be too much. Enjoyable in bits and pieces, Christmas Even in Miller’s Point did for me exactly what a real evening like this might have accomplished. Halfway through, I was ready to go home.

Hugh Grant takes a turn at horror

 

   Two young Mormon women on a mission knock on the door of a man who seems amenable to hearing their pitch. Acting the kindly older gentleman, the bespectacled fellow invites the evangelizing duo into his home for talk and a piece of freshly baked blueberry pie. 

 You needn't know much about movies or have seen the trailer for Heretic to guess that a downward spiral awaits.

  Notable for allowing Hugh Grant to display a smug, intellectualized form of evil.  Grant's Mr. Reed almost immediately begins challenging the faith of his visitors (Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East), missionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

    Mr. Reed revels in his well-honed mental agility. He claims to have spent years searching for the one true religion. He delights in debunking every religious idea he assumes the young missionaries take for granted. Mr. Reed even references Mormon material in his attempt to undermine the women's faith. 

    Grant seems to be having as much wicked fun as Mr. Reed. He delivers lengthy monologues, one of which is based on the idea that the game Monopoly qualifies as an apt metaphor for religion. He references Radio Head's music and speculates on how popular culture might one day evolve into religion. Could Jar Jar Binks be a holy figure in the future?

     All of this unfolds with an irreverence that's more witty than outrageous, and as Mr. Reed declaims, the personalities of the two women begin to clarify. Thatcher portrays Sister Barnes, who wasn't raised as a Mormon, smartly parries with Mr. Reed. Sister Paxton seems more reluctant to engage.

    Both women, of course, are terrified when they realize they’re locked in a house where Mr. Reed slowly reveals his sinister intentions. Oh, and by the way, no shy wife putters around the kitchen, as Mr. Reed initially claims, a ploy to calm any rising anxiety the women are sure to feel.

     Directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, co-writers with John Krasinski of A Quiet Place,  deftly set things in motion as we wait for the movie to bare its horror fangs. When we learn that Mr. Reed’s isolated home contains secret chambers, the aroma of conventional horror becomes too prominent to ignore.

     No fair telling more. Know, though, that Heretic stands a cut above typical Hollywood helpings of blood and guts. Too bad a wobbly third act feels like a betrayal of the  unease created of earlier scenes, which -- at least by horror standards -- prove refreshing. Heretic is at its creepy best when Mr. Reed wields his most powerful weapons: verbal assaults on his prey's sense of security.

A coal man's troubled conscience

   

   A  drama of tormented conscience, Small Things Like These cloaks a tough-minded story in the somber light of a forbidding Irish winter. In his first screen performances since his Oscar-winning turn in Oppenheimer, Cillian Murphy directs his energies inward to play Bill Furlong, a family man who earns his living delivering coal to locals in the small town of New Ross.

   Bill lives modestly with his wife (Eileen Walsh) and five daughters. By nature an observer, Bill eventually learns what's happening at the local convent, the place that houses both the town's Catholic school and one of Ireland's notorious Magdalene laundries, now-defunct institutions where abused unwed mothers provided unpaid labor.

    A perfectly cast Murphy concentrates a growing sense of anguish in Bill's beneficent face as awareness of what transpires in the laundry takes its toll. At the end of each day's work, Bill scrubs his hands vigorously, a hard scrapple metaphor for trying to wash away sights that can't be unseen. 

      Set in 1989 during the week before Christmas, Small Things Like These employs flashbacks to shed light on Bill's past, a mixture of small disappointments and substantial grief. One Christmas, Bill’s mother gave him a hot water bottle instead of the jigsaw puzzle he wanted, but Bill’s real torment comes from knowing that his unwed single mother, who died young, barely escaped the Magdalene laundries.

      Bill’s sensitivities were nourished by a woman (Michelle Fairley) who took Bill and his teenage mom underwing. Among other things, Fairley's Mrs. Wilson helped Bill develop an enduring taste for Dickens, an author who knew how to drown a story in a sea of troubles.

     The plot conspires to bring Bill’s adult conscience to a boil when a young woman (Zara Devlin) who has been exiled to the laundry’s coal shed asks for help. Bill is moved but doesn’t know what to do.

      The head nun (a terrific Emily Watson as Sister Mary) knows Bill has penetrated the convent’s "secret." She tries to salve Bill's conscience with a fat Christmas bonus. 

     Aware that money always presents a problem for her struggling family, Bill's wife encourages him to go along to get along. The town has spent years ignoring the laundry. No one wants to upset the prevailing order.

       Mielants and screenwriter Enda Walsh aren't interested in big emotional effects. Spare as it is poignant, Small Things Like These turns a novel by Claire Keegan into a revealing big-screen story about one man who wrestles with the price of denial in a dreary town where most consider it wise to keep their eyes averted and their mouths shut.

Liam Neeson plays an aging thug

 

It's been more than a minute since I bothered with a Liam Neeson movie. In films such as Nonstop and Taken, Neeson proved a reliable action star. His movies tended to mire him in formula, the reluctant savior who eventually kicks ass. I’d had enough — until now. I decided to check on Neeson with Absolution, a thriller about a former boxer who spent most of his post-ring life toiling as a gangster for a Massachusetts drug boss (Ron Perlman). Looking grey as a New England fog, Neeson's character suffers from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which means he's losing his memory -- and sometimes his temper. Dreary and depressing, Absolution includes scenes in which the boxer hallucinates about being on a boat, finds a bit of tenderness from a woman (Yolanda Ross), and tries to reconcile with his estranged daughter (Frankie Shaw) and his grandson (Terrence Pulliam). Eventually, Neeson's character is forced to seek absolution for sins of violence and family neglect through an explosive outburst in which he attempts to right his many wrongs. Neeson turns down his star wattage and looks forlorn as a man on the cusp of death; he creates a real character, but director Hans Petter Moland, who directed Neeson in 2019's Cold Pursuit, keeps the movie on a slow track, steering it into territory that feels more dispiriting than driven.

The wild ride of ‘Emilia Perez’

 

     Hints of mad surrealism blow through Emilia Perez, a film from French director Jacques Audiard that stars Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez, and transgender actress Karla Sofía Gascón.  

     The central conceit of Audiard's story shouldn't work at all. The story's animating twist involves a brutal Mexican drug lord (Gascon) who makes a late-life decision to -- brace yourself -- become a woman. 

    Clearly, Audiard (A Prophet, Rust and Bone) has something bold in mind, and he creates an intoxicating hybrid, a musical drama full of stylized flare and operatic emotion.  

   The story begins by introducing us to Saldana's Rita, a whip-smart attorney who plays second fiddle to her less than competent male boss. Unhappy with her status and income, Rita's ready for a change.

   A macho drug lord who's also a husband and loving father, Gascon's Manitas Del Monte contacts Rita and asks her to arrange for his disappearance, an ironic request in light of Manitas' role in "disappearing" others. 

   Once taken for dead, Manitas will complete his gender transition, a process he's already begun with a regimen of hormones.

   After accepting Manitas’ offer, Rita faces a myriad of problems. Manitas' children and wife (Gomez) must believe that he's dead and their financial futures must be secured. Rita also must make Manitas' new life plausible and possible.

   Filmed mostly in a Paris studio, employs sets that take us to Mexico City, London, Bangkok, and Switzerland.  Emilia Perez becomes a high-speed, cinematic ferris wheel that knocks us off our bearings. In a way, the movie is about the sense of disorientation it breeds.

   In addition to being well paid for her services, Rita  becomes part of the world created by the newly emerged Emilia Perez as the movie explores a provocative question: Can Emilia shed the criminality that scarred Manhitas' soul? Can his insides be reborn along with his transformed exterior?

   A skeptical Israeli doctor (Mark Ivanir) performs the surgery that changes Manitas' identity. Initially, Manitas’ move seems like an extreme way to evade capture. But, no, Manitas sincerely wants to become the person he believes he was born to be.  

   Performing musical numbers with angular acuity, Saldana commands the movie until Emilia emerges. She claims to be a cousin of Manitas' who insisted that she care for his family should anything happen to him. Unrecognizable to Manitas' former wife and two children, "Aunt" Emilia still knows how to be the center of any environment in which she finds herself.

    Eventually, Emilia moves the family to a beautiful home in Mexico City where the film broadens its scope. Emilia, who dotes on the children, dedicates  her life to locating the bodies of people who have been murdered by the cartels. 

      Stability, if not a happy ending, seems to loom but Gomez's Jessi has passions of her own: She yearns to restart a relationship with Gustavo (Edgar Ramirez), a guy with whom she once had a torrid affair. 

    The movie was shot in a studio in Paris with Audiard employing sets that are supposed to be located in Mexico City, London, Bangkok, and Switzerland. Audiard can't solve all the structural issues raised by so many disparate pieces, but there's a plus side here, as well.

     Different elements bump into one another in ways that reinforce the movie's insistence on charting its own course. Tunes by Camille Dalmais and Clement Ducol bring propulsive energy to a movie that doesn't so much bend genre conventions as ignore them.

     Saldana and Gomez give striking performances, but the movie belongs to Gascon, who embodies a character in desperate need of resolving gender and moral contradictions. 

    It's a copout, I suppose, to say that Emilia Perez isn't for everyone, but it's worth noting that the movie divided audiences when it premiered at last May's Cannes Film Festival. I understand those who found the movie somewhat indigestible and wondered whether it could have used more musical numbers.

   But for me, Audiard's audacious approach trumped many of the movie's problems. Audiard asks us to take a wild ride with him. Why not be adventurous and take the dare?