A lengthy doc about Elon Musk

   The documentarian Alex Gibney has never shied away from controversy. His filmography includes Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, Taxi to the Dark Side, and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Musk, a three-hour-and-45-minute look at the world's wealthiest man, continues Gibney's immersion in the universe of hot topics.

   Yes, you read that right. Musk runs for almost four hours, serving as a comprehensive look at a career that began with Zip2, a company that provided online business directories and city maps. Musk continued with a variety of tech enterprises, including the electric car company, Tesla. Musk also runs SpaceX, which designs rockets and missiles, and operates Starlink, a satellite internet service. 

   Unless you've managed to ignore the news, you also know that Musk led President Trump’s DOGE, a brutal government cost-cutting effort. He has spoken about the need to travel to Mars, a journey his detractors may wish he'd make sooner rather than later.

    Musk, who has denounced the documentary as a hit job, refused to be interviewed by Gibney. Taking matters into his own hands, Gibney used a computer-generated avatar of Musk to address the camera, creating the illusion that Musk is talking to the audience. Taken from recordings of Musk interviews and public statements, the voice and words we hear are real.

    Gibney raises a question with which many have wrestled: Is Musk a genius with a prescient eye on the future, or is he a marketing wizard who knows how to sell himself and his many companies while landing lucrative government contracts?

    The film begins at a point when Gibney admires Musk’s energy and talent and slowly reveals that much about Musk and be questioned. 

    Musk, for example, arrived after Tesla already had been founded. Martin Eberhard, one of the original founders, was pushed out of the company. Ruthless? Maybe, but Musk did develop Tesla at scale, establishing electric cars as a credible alternative to Detroit gas-guzzlers.

     Musk’s personal life is … well … complicated. He has been married three times, twice to the same woman. He has fathered 14 children with four women. Gibney interviews Justine Wilson, Musk's first wife, but his interview with Ashley St. Clair proves more revealing. St. Claire had a child with Musk. She says she refused a multi-million dollar payment to sign a non-disclosure agreement that asked her not to talk about him or his heirs. 

     For me, the movie began to drag when the subject of DOGE takes over. Perhaps it's a bit too fresh to need reiteration. Those who've followed Musk’s career closely may find that the movie repeats much of what they already know, but Gibney's useful compendium raises important questions about the conflation of money and power and what might be the unprecedented influence of tech oligarchs on government. 

      It should come as no surprise that the film isn't an ode to someone Gibney regards as heroic. By the end, you may find that technical advances have taken a back seat to Musk’s greatest creation: himself. He has constructed an identity he equates with innovation and visionary achievement. 

     Musk may want to make himself the hero of his own story, but Gibney refuses to play along. That's hardly a groundbreaking approach, but Gibney molds his material with verve, insight, and a clearly made case.

On a downslide in Hollywood

  Rosalind Eleazar, an actress familiar to Slow Horses fans, provides the best reason to see Misty Green, Chris Rock’s fourth film as a director. 

 Eleazar plays the title character, an actress and singer whose career has declined. Back in the day, Misty won an Emmy for her work in a hit series, but a younger generation knows her as someone their parents used to love. On top of that, Misty’s drug use and alienating personality have put a damper on a career that should be deep into its sweet spot.

  Instead, Misty does signing gigs and attends humiliating auditions. A winning smile can transform her face in an instant, but she can also be insulting and unpleasant. On the night before an audition, she’s likely to party hard enough to throw her attempts to land a role, even one that's beneath her talents, way off balance.

  If Hollywood weren't enough to deal with, Misty’s being tossed out of the luxe apartment a recently deceased lover said she could occupy. Her bipolar brother, an amazing Daniel Kaluuya, has just been released from jail. Needy and explosively childish, Kaluuya's Jay seems likely to derail in a burst of fury.

   Rock appears in the film as Jordan Green (no relation to Misty), a director who was embarrassed by Misty on a previous filming. She punched someone on the crew.

  Rock has scenes in which he’s sharply funny. A rant on why he hates civil rights movies sounds as if it could have been lifted from one of his stand-up sets. Overall, though, I wondered whether the part should have gone to someone else.

     Important to the story’s development, Jordan is set to direct a reboot of Dreamgirls. The lead role of Deena would be perfect for Misty. Will she even get a shot at it? 

    Misty deals with racial obstacles in Hollywood and goes toe-to-toe with those who dismiss her as abrasive. But she’s a complicated character, so much so that it’s difficult to tell where Hollywood’s insulting treatment begins and Misty’s self-destructive tendencies leave off. 

    The supporting cast includes Adam Driver, as a marginal Hollywood director whose life has become more about drugs and high-dollar pimping than moviemaking. Anna Kendrik plays Misty’s friend, another actress, but one who has her eye on a suitor who can provide financial security. 

  Amy Landecker bristles in a small role as the venomous widow who gives Misty a week to vacate her late husband’s apartment.

   Overall, Misty may not be the movie that delivers the definitive work on Hollywood's transactional ways. But it makes room for pungent moments about after-hours Hollywood, and it captures the way the odor of failure can drift into self-abasement.

     Misty Green threatens to shatter into disparate pieces, even as it operates in loose fashion, a ramble through Hollywood with a chip on its shoulder that gives Eleazar room to create a memorable character at a moment of peak anguish.

   

  

  

A grim look at the American West

A Prayer for the Dying takes a grim look at a doom-struck western town that’s trying to expand in the years just after the Civil War. Director Dara Van Dusen, an American who lives in Norway and trained at the Polish National Film School in Lodz, has made one of the year’s darkest films, telling the story of a town residents struck by a lethal plague of diphtheria -- not that things were going all that well before that. Jacob (Johnny Flynn) does triple duty. He’s the bicycle-riding sheriff, undertaker, and pastor of the sparsely populated town. John C. Reilly, in another fine performance, plays the town’s doctor. Kristine Kujath Thorp portrays Jacob’s wife, a mom who breaks down emotionally when illness claims her child.  The movie tests one’s endurance — at least it did mine.  But if you stick with Prayer, you may find that it gets under your skin.  The film’s naturalistic images and dusty earth tones become a mask that Van Dusen peels away as she builds toward images of hellish horror. By the end, a locomotive becomes a monster surrounded by the red smoke of encroaching fires that threaten to consume everything. All of this gloom makes Payer for Dying difficult to recommend, but it also points to the work of a talented filmmaker who’s bold enough to present an unforgiving vision without apology or attenuation.

A president flees a rebellious militia

   Samuel L. Jackson teams with Michael Kinnaman in The Beast, a political action thriller boasting ample explosions, gunfire, and ... well ... not much else.

  Under the direction of Renny Harlin, Jackson portrays a US president who finds himself on the run in his heavily fortified car when a rebel militia tires to take over the country.

    As a Secret Service agent wounded during an early-picture fight, Kinnaman remains dazed in the backsea as Jackson communicates with the central command that tries to guide him to safety.

    The president, a military veteran who has known combat, calculates risk while fretting about the safety of his wife, the woman he credits with turning his life toward public service.

    President or not, Jackson’s dialogue contributes to the movie’s solid “R” rating, but neither he nor Kinnaman can keep this one from becoming anything more than another blood-soaked grindhouse junker.

 

Sorkin takes another run at Facebook

    Judging by Aaron Sorkin's The Social Reckoning, few the world's ill can't be linked to Facebook. An overstatement on my part to be sure, but Reckoning scowls at Facebook for abetting dangerous political extremism, wrecking young lives with cyberbullying, and allowing Jan. 6 rioters to post about their assault on the Capitol.

   Social Reckoning isn’t entirely wrong in its assertions, but Sorkin, working from his own screenplay, has drained much of the suspense from a story built around two characters, a Wall Street Journal reporter (Jeremy Allen White) and a Facebook whistleblower (Mikey Madison).

   Madison’s Frances Haugen began as a true-believing coding engineer intent on saving Facebook from abandoning its professed desire to become the world’s town square.

   By the time the movie opens, Facebook already has attained trillion-dollar status, and Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong) has become an autocratic sphinx mired in capitalist tunnel vision.

   Much of the movie follows the guidelines of a journalistic procedural as White’s Jeff Horwitz, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting, tries to get the goods on Facebook.

   Madison’s Haugen holds the key to Horwitz’s success; Haugen has access to important computer files, but she’s wary of breaking the law by giving them to Horwitz. She initially alerts Horwitz to the story, expecting that his investigative skills will be sufficient to obtain the needed evidence.

    Sorkin has a knack for depicting work-place vibes. The supporting cast rounds out Facebook’s headquarters. Billy Magnussen portrays the smiling head of PR.  Bill Burr plays a hard-boiled former employee, now a consultant who tries to steer Zuckerberg toward social responsibility. Betty Gilpin signs on as Horwitz’s brusque boss.

    The main events, which take place between 2019 and 2021, are undergirded by scenes devoted to a rehearsal in which a crisis manager (Wunmi Mosaku) tries to humanize Zuckerberg for a pending Congressional hearing, no easy task with a man whose deadpan expression never seems to have been interrupted by anything as foreign as a smile.

    The story culminates with a Congressional hearing at which Hougen testifies, leaving us to assume that the problems the movie raises are the bedrock on which Sorkin has built an old-fashioned expose.

     Facebook, the movie contends could have been more responsible, but it would have come with a cost. If the company had refused to post obviously false or inflammatory content, it would have had to accept a one percent loss in profits, one exec says. Zuckerberg declined.

     As is the case with many Sorkin efforts, Reckoning bolsters a talky screenplay that brims with the kind of clever repartee that distinguishes the Sorkin brand, but here can feel a bit formulaic.

     White plays Horwtiz as a good guy and persistent reporter. Madison ably depicts a young woman who’s wrestling with her conscience, but, by the end, it’s difficult to feel as if the movie has reckoned with anything more than a point of view that’s clearly established at the outset.

     Enough of this. I needn’t tell you that Facebook, now Meta, still operates as do the company’s other businesses, which include Instagram, Messenger, and What’sApp.

     As for Zuckerberg, he was one of the tech honchos who late last month was  summoned to the White House to discuss AI … er … I mean Super Intelligence. It all makes you wonder whether any movie involving tech ethics can avoid feeling like yesterday’s news.

'Verity': Not enough trashy fun

     

  

There’s nothing wrong with good, trashy fun. That’s what I hoped to get from Verity, the fourth big-screen adaptation of a novel by the widely read Colleen Hoover. After some initial optimism, my hopes steadily dissolved. A cast composed of Dakota Johnson, Anne Hathaway, and Josh Hartnett seemed ready to deliver a story that makes room for sexual attraction, deception and blurred identity lines. In her fifth movie this year, Hathaway portrays Verity Crawford, a popular author whose stories  are told from the villain’s point of view. Johnson plays a struggling novelist who’s chosen to finish one of Verity’s books after an automobile accident leaves the author unable to walk or talk. Hartnett plays Verity’s husband, Jeremy, a charming enough fellow who develops a relationship with Johnson’s Lowen after she moves into the couple’s sleek Vermont home. Research, you know. We also meet Crew (Brady Wagner), the eight-year-old surviving Crawford twin. His sister Harper (Sienna Kulovitz) drowned in a canoeing accident. Cue the guilt and add a secret autobiography Verity had been writing. Director Michael Showalter offers glossy images and tries to add layers of suspense. Immobile through much of the movie, Hathaway still manages to register. So does Hartnett, but Johnson’s performance tends toward dullness. Oh well, the initial glamor loses its luster, and a plethora of melodramatic third-act plot twists wreck what's left of the movie's waning plausibility. As for samples of Verity’s writing ... oh, hell, let's just move on.

Broadly delivered satire buries 'Digger'

 

   Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Digger dances on the knife’s edge between farce, satire, physical comedy, environmental pleading, and silliness, all sketched in broad comic strokes that border on self-parody.

    An unrecognizable Tom Cruise portrays a bloviating oil baron who dwarfs the other characters, turning them into padding that fills an over-stuffed movie that proves heavy-handed as it evokes memories of better out-sized satires. Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant Dr. Strangelove comes to mind.

    Cruise's Digger Rockwell finds himself mired in an environmental crisis. One of his Greenland rigs has unleashed a massive chunk of ice that will flood Europe, leaving multitudes dead in its wake.

     Deeply hidden by a major application of prosthetics, Cruise puts on a show, igniting an  outburst of ego, crudeness, and boisterous behavior; Digger becomes a grotesque absurdity, a bully devoted to the aging, incontinent cat that shares  his bed.

     As you might guess, Digger allows Cruise to pull out all the stops, creating a larger-than-life figure who has more regard for profit than for the planet. An unashamed boor, he eventually delivers a super-charged monologue in which he declares himself to be the monster everyone really wants. 

    Rant about global warming if you will, but no one wants a world without heat and transportation, and other comforts reliant on our increasingly ravenous demands for oil.

     The supporting cast includes Riz Ahmed as Ganesh, an environmentalist who breaks the horrific news to Digger. John Goodman signs on as President Compson, a politician suffering from bloated rhetoric and a terminal case of rectal cancer. Michael Stuhlbarg plays the vice president, and Sandra Huller appears as Emma Rockwell, Digger’s half-sister and the head of an environmentally conscious company that Digger finances as a salve to Emma's conscience.

     Sporting a ridiculous Dutch Boy wig, Jesse Plemons plays a character whose function becomes clear as the movie progresses. I mention the hair not only because Plemons looks ridiculous but because, like much of the movie's choices, it seems like an excuse to add another sight gag.

       I won’t describe the trick the movie plays on the audience, except to say that it has a meta quality and revisits the theatricality Inarritu explored in Birdman, a movie about an actor seeking a second wind.

       Crowded with detail, transparent artifice, and more than a few puzzling moments, Digger —written by Inarritu along with Sabina Berman, Alexander Dinelaris, and Nicolas Giacobone — is a no-holds-barred satire that can be seen as a major act of cinematic daring from Inarritu. 

       But Inarritu's proverbial Big Swing results in small payoffs, moments of visual cleverness augmented by Cruise’s centerpiece performance. And for all the movie’s ambition, its most resonant moment arrives during its eerie end credits, not exactly the place where a movie ought to hit its best notes.

    Inarritu injects a few moments of mordant humor — jokes about an answered prayer,  for example — but a  strong cast can’t save the movie from its teeming excesses. Digger suggests that if we remove the protective scrim of illusion, we’ll see the dark truth about who we are and where we’re headed. 

       Fair enough, but Inarritu can’t seem to push beyond cartoonish caricature that fails to pierce the conscience. Too often, it just lands with a thud.

Man and dog in the Alaskan wilds

  Mixing emotion and action, Heart of the Beast casts Brad Pitt as a retired special forces soldier who becomes stranded in the Alaskan wilds after his seaplane crashes.

   Director David Ayer, who directed Pitt in the 2014 World War II drama Fury, leads the way as a spare Cameron Alexander screenplay teams Pitt's James with another combat vet, his beloved dog Odin.  

  Pitt's portrayal of a strong but psychologically damaged warrior proves convincing throughout. For his part, Odin's service in Iraq and Afghanistan has left him with titanium teeth and a prosthetic leg. 

   James' only human interaction comes  early when he reluctantly encounters a retired gold miner (J.K. Simmons) roaming the wilderness where James is camping. After an evening of beer and terse conversation, Simmons’ character departs, never to be seen again. 

    While flying through mountainous terrain en route to his next camp site, James suffers a heart attack. The resulting crash leaves James and Odin (played by four German Shepherds) 58 miles from the nearest road. 

   Thus begins a survival trek that presents a succession of perilous obstacles: swirling rapids, a grizzly bear, and a pack of wolves among them. 

    Ayer’s opening — a woman in a pickup truck (Anna Lambe) encounters Odin on a lonely road — suggests a possible ending, but the real story here is one of man/dog bonding. 

    Filmed in New Zealand, Heart of the Beast makes the most of forest and mountain scenery for a wilderness drama that should speak loudly to those of us who have experienced and valued canine friendship.

A creative, chaotic 'Forgotten Island'

    Forgotten Island, DreamWorks latest animated feature, operates at peak creative levels, offering a parade of vividly colored, fantastical creatures that pop off the screen, often with boosts of comic energy.

    Beginning in the Philippines in the 1990s, the story -- written and directed by Joel Crawford and Januel P. Mercado (Puss in Boots: The Last Wish) -- introduces two schoolgirls: rebellious Jo (H.E.R.) and studious Raissa (Liza Soberano). Mischief-prone best friends, Jo and Raissa constantly being sent to the principal's office.

     Motivated by folk tales told by her grandmother (Dolly de Leon), Jo dreams of a magical island of Nakali. Her soon-to-be realized dream allows the movie to make ample use of Filipino lore.

    Grandma passes on, but the girls remain best friends until high school graduation when Raissa announces that she’s headed to Caltech. For her part, Jo -- still a dreamer -- is left working for a chicken franchise, sometimes in a chicken costume. Throughout the movie, she has bad luck with fire.

     On the night before Raissa is supposed to depart for college, the girls find a portal-opening sand dollar that transports them to the island of Nakali. Their principal task awaits. They want to re-enter the portal and return home. I bet you guessed that would be theirs and the story's destination.

      On Nakali, the cast of animated characters expands, beginning with Raww (Dave Franco), a weredog that provides comic relief. We also meet Batiba (Jenny Slate), a character who refuses to  venture outside her home. Batiba trades return trips from Nakali for visitors' memories. Other people's memories are the only life she knows.

     As the story unfolds, additional characters enter: Prince Mermahn (Kevin McCann) flexes his muscles and indulges his vanity. King Truffle Wuffle (Ronny Chieng) appears as a ruler of the Duwende, fierce but small warriors who hate being called cute.

  Then there’s three-eyed Bungi (Manny Jacinto), a big-bellied man/baby whose umbilical cord must be cut before he can join the group, which Raww dubs “The Wild Pack.”

    Villainy arrives in the form of Mananggal (Lea Salonga), a demon vampire that sometimes splits in half at the waist, doubling her powers.

     I’m way past the point of knowing what the youngest audience members can tolerate, but Manangga is treated as a scary monster. It also gave me pause that Jo carries a knife, although she only uses it for utilitarian purposes.

     I list the characters partly to recognize the movie's voice talent and because the real fun of Forgotten Island involves the appearance of new characters, each showcasing the directors' visual invention.

     Fortunately, the relationship between the girls rings true  -- or true enough for a cartoon world. They don’t always get along because Raissa is advancing in life while Jo frets over losing those close to her.

      The frenzied action and fast-pacing won’t be to everyone’s taste, and energy and abundance can easily tip into sensory overload. 

     One of the storytelling devices the movie employs involves the girls' loss of memory about their first night on Nakali. Various characters fill in the blanks in numerous flashbacks that complicate the movie's already dense structure.

       OK, at 109 overextended minutes, the whole thing is too complex, but the directors provide an emotional spine that keeps the richly realized, if sometimes unwieldy, helping of animation from blowing off the screen. 

      Put another way: We'll be lucky if any other of this year's animated features boasts this much visual imagination.