He seeks revenge in 'Monkey Man'

   

 Dev Patel makes his directorial debut with Monkey Man, a movie that sometimes looks like an Indian variation on the orchestrated frenzy we find in John Wick movies. 

  Whatever Patel is trying to accomplish in Monkey Man, he’s in a hurry to do it. The rushed immediacy and rapid-fire editing of early scenes allow little time to relax.

   A minimal storyline soon emerges. Kid (played by Patel) hustles to survive on the mean streets of an Indian City where wealth and luxury contrast with abject poverty.

  Kid knows how to live with pain. He earns money in bare-fisted fights in which he wears a gorilla mask. Usually, he’s beaten to a bloody pulp in front of jeering crowds who bet against him.

  The movie's real agenda emerges in a fragmented flashbacks to Kid's life as a child. Kid, we learn, aims to avenge the death of his mother (Adithi Kalkunte). She was killed by a brutal police chief (Sikandar Kher) for resisting his sexual advances during a raid aimed at dispersing the poor community where she lived.  

  Kid’s mother represents a near fairy-tale innocence that connects Kid to a lost past, as well as to mythology that references Hanuman, a Hindu deity. 

  At times, the narrative feels as if it's bouncing off walls.. At one point, Kid acquires a sidekick (Pitobsh Tripathi) who adds comic leavening but quickly vanishes.

  Patel wisely slows his freight train of movie down when a badly battered Kid finds refuge with a guru figure (Vipin Sharma), who takes him on a drug trip and encourages him to connect with this noble warrior self — or some such. 

 Throughout, Patel creates a character fueled by seething, concentrated anger that makes Kid immune to distraction.

  Kid shows some humanity when he takes care of a street dog that appears during scenes in which he lands a job at a  posh nightclub, which also functions as a high-end brothel where his enemies engage in debauched amusements.

     A final showdown offers two pivotal confrontations. The Wick movies allow us to feel the exuberance that the filmmakers put into concocting increasingly creative action sequences. Here, that feeling comes across as tight-jawed resolve.

     References to the city’s impoverished underside are vivid but fleeting. The movie also weaves its way through political references involving a corrupt leader (Makrand Deshpande) who claims allegiance with the common folk.

   If Patel wanted to blend culture and genre, he does so successfully in a scene in which Kid trains on the heavy bag to the beat of an encouraging village drummer.

  The movie's unevenness occasionally creates a sense of jagged freshness but the frantic action comes with a price. Kid may be discover the person he was meant to be, but we're left wishing we had something more substantial to take from the movie's violent onrush.

'The Green Knight' casts an eerie spell

   

   Alluring and visually arresting, The Green Knight takes place during the time of Arthurian legend but hosts no knights in shining armor. The armor is tarnished, as are the lives of most of the movie’s characters.

   Although it boasts a fair measure of squalor, mud, and brutality, Green Knight hardly qualifies as realistic. Based on the 14th Century poem, Gawain and the Green Knight, the story lives entirely in the realm of legend.

  The Green Knight of the title appears early in the movie so there’s no spoiler in telling you that he’s a creature with a tree-like body and a head made of bark. He creaks when he moves. Know this, though. As writer/director David Lowry treats The Green Knight, he's no joke -- and neither is a movie that haunts, unsettles, and holds us in its visionary grasp.

   The story follows a simple enough outline.

   On a Christmas morn, The Green Knight (Ralph Ineson) shows up at King Arthur’s court. He addresses the Round Table, asking whether anyone will accept the challenge he’s about to throw down. Perhaps motivated by ambitions to become a knight, only Gawain (Dev Patel) responds.

   Here’s the bargain: Whatever Gawain does to The Green Knight, he’ll have to submit to the same fate a year later. Gawain beheads the Green Knight, who picks up his detached cranium and departs, laughing as rides his horse into the mist.

   If the general arc of the story is straightforward, the details sometimes blur the border between mystery and confusion. Scene-to-scene, Green Knight becomes increasingly strange as Gawain — once a carousing youth who liked to drink and womanize — tries to demonstrate his honor.

  After a year of being treated royally, he heads (you’ll pardon the pun) for his promised rendezvous with The Green Knight.

   It’s not exactly a pleasurable trip. Gawain encounters vandals on the road who leave him for dead. Barry Keoghan has a compelling turn as The Scavenger, one of the thieves who attack Gawain. 

    Gawain also meets a woman who says that she’s St. Winfred (Erin Kellyman). She wants him to retrieve her skull from a pond. He says she already has a head. It looks like I have a head, but — trust me — I don’t, she tells Gawain. 

   When he meets a nobleman (Joel Edgerton) and his wife (Alicia  Vikander),  sexual currents begin to flow.

   Sarita Choudhury appears as Mother/Morgan Le Fay, a witch, a seer and Gawain's mom, dual faces of the same character. 

   Sean Harris's King Arthur can seem riven by doubt. For the record, the movie refers to him only as King. He's also Gawain's uncle.

   I haven’t even mentioned the talking fox that becomes Gawain’s companion.

   That may sound Disneyesque, but again take heed: Nothing about Green Knight has a family oriented feel. Lowry not only wants to tell a mythical story, he wants to create a mythical reality — and he comes very close to succeeding at a task that could have gone terribly wrong.

     Lowry nicely fits the characters into the environment. 

    As Gawain, a bearded Patel winds up with a tortured face you might see on a religious icon. 

   The Green Knight may be an angel of death — or at least that’s how I saw it.

    There were times when I wished Lowry had restrained the impulse toward mystery — at least a bit. The dialogue often seems whispered as if the characters are living in a secret world that we can’t totally penetrate. 

      You need to be comfortable with that feeling to go along with Green Knight. For the most part, I was and I did.

    Reservations? Some. Dimly lit images make you long for the presence of a bit of clarifying light — even though electricity had yet to be invented. I understand the impulse to place a mythical tale in a naturalistic environment, but enough is enough.

    Various sections are titled but the headings sometimes flash by too quickly for easy reading.

    Viewers may be puzzled by the movie’s ending, which is subject to interpretation, but the overall message speaks with power. The world may be forbidding, but Gawain can’t escape the most essential condition of the human contract: He must die.

   What is the honor that Gawain sought to achieve on his journey? Perhaps nothing more than being ready when the time of departure arrives. In the end, debts must be acknowledged: Payment is due.

   

Dickens with buoyancy and bounce

     Be of good cheer. Director Armando Iannucci (In the Loop, Veep, and The Death of Stalin) has taken a crack at Charles Dickens' David Copperfield. You say you've had your fill of Dickens. Not to worry. Iannucci and a first-rate cast very likely will change your mind.
     Lively and engaging, The Personal History of David Copperfield reflects Iannucci’s understanding that the enduring appeal of Dickens has as much to do with the humor that derives from sharply drawn characters as with the ripe melodrama that often punctuates his stories.
     Adopting an infectiously playful spirit, Iannucci and his co-writer Simon Blackwell insist that the Copperfield story can be fun, which may explain why Personal History  plays with the energy of a musical -- only without
anyone doing anything as silly as bursting into song.
     Perhaps inspired by Hamilton, Iannucci creates a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic Copperfield. The casting works to give the story a universalist spin without becoming preachy or self-conscious. 
     Dickens, of course, was interested in the social issues of his time, many of which (class distinctions and maltreatment of the poor) show up in Copperfield and remain relevant in our moment of widespread distress.
     But Iannucci grabs hold of something to get us and his hero through his wrenching trials. David Copperfield remains a beacon of determination and, as played by Dev Patel, a hero who shows amusing flashes of self-awareness and pluck. 
     If the acting in Personal History were a meal, it would be a feast of tasty comic supporting performances.
     Peter Capaldi's    Mr. Micawber is a charming rogue of a fellow who shamelessly compiles debts. With a brood of a family to support, Micawber constantly courts the possibility of being thrown into debtor's prison. 
     Tilda Swinton, at her imperious best, plays Copperfield's aunt,  a woman who shares her estate with the addled Mr. Dick (Hugh Laurie), a man who has convinced himself that a beheaded king of yesteryear; i.e., Charles I, somehow has managed to transfer all of his thoughts into Mr. Dick's head. 
     A terrific Morfydd Clark tackles two roles. She appears as Copperfield's mother and later returns as Dora, the lovable but clueless beauty who captures Copperfield's heart.
     The movie begins with Copperfield on a stage, telling his story to an audience. In this theatrical setting, Iannucci launches Copperfield's journey down a road that leads to his exploitation, his strange schooling, and his associations with the always tipsy Mr. Wickfield (Benedict Wong) and his down-to-earth daughter (Rosalind Eleazar). 
     Darren Boyd portrays Murdstone, a villainous creep who -- at one point -- becomes Copperfield's stepfather and tormenter, banishing the boy to misery in a bottle factory.
     No Copperfield would be complete without a Uriah Heep and Ben Whishaw more than does him justice, creating a character of such transparent unctuousness that he practically oozes off the screen.
     At one hour and 59 minutes, Copperfield might be a trifle long but Iannucci moves briskly, often dispensing with such matters as exposition or transitions. 
     He creates the illusion of an episodic story told as if it is unfolding -- with embellishments, of course -- from Copperfield's memory: The result proves as generously entertaining as anything you might see in this strange and often dispiriting season.

'Hotel Mumbai' simulates a terrorist assault

In November 2008, terrorists attacked the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower Hotel in Mumbai, leaving 30 people dead before the invaders were gunned down. Hotel Mumbai tells that story in a vivid, gut-wrenching style, turning into a 2019 version of a disaster movie -- albeit one based on a real event. As the violence erupts, we meet a variety of people who are trying to save themselves and others, and, as is the case with such movies, we’re left to wonder who’s going to make it out of the besieged hotel alive. Nazanin Boniadi and Armie Hammer play a couple who has left their infant child in their room with a nanny (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) after heading to the hotel's lounge for a drink. Dev Patel portrays a Sikh waiter who almost gets dismissed for the day for wearing sandals instead of regulation footwear. Anumpam Kher appears as the head chef, a martinet in the kitchen but a man whose concern for the welfare of the hotel's guests takes on a new dimension as the movie progresses. Perhaps to further enhance the movie's international flavor, Jason Isaacs does duty as a Russian who regards the hotel as a sexual playground. Directed by Anthony Maras, Hotel Mumbai creates plenty of tension. The situation alone is enough to infuse the movie with a pulse-pounding drive. I'm certainly not the first to say this, but the comment seems unavoidable: Even a deftly made movie about a terror attack can leave you wondering exactly why you're putting yourself through what becomes a cinematic ordeal. Killing innocent people proves revolting, but do we need another helping of body-count cinema to remind us of that?

A helping of neo-noir set in India

Director Michael Winterbottom keeps an audience in the dark for long stretches of The Wedding Guest, a thriller in which a mysterious Englishman (Dev Patel) is hired to spirit a woman (Radhika Apte) away from an arranged marriage in Pakistan. Apte's Samira definitely does not want to participate in such a marriage, but she's in for a surprise when she arrives in New Delhi. She's supposed to be delivered to her boyfriend Deepesh (Jim Sarbh), the guy who paid for her abduction. He has other ideas. I've already told you too much about the plot because there are two principal pleasures to be gained from Winterbottom's The Wedding Guest. The first involves discovering the noirish twists buried in a story that explores the limits of trust and the way men may underestimate women. The second involves the movie's inadvertent function as a travelogue with Patel and Apte providing an excuse to explore various corners of Pakistan and India -- from Lahore to Delhi, Jaipur, and Goa. Film-savvy audiences soon will catch onto Winterbottom's attempts to earn neo-noir credentials as Patel and Apte's characters go on the run. Patel overdoes his character's pragmatic stoicism, and I eventually tired of the waiting game that Winterbottom plays with us. We know there will be betrayals, but the characters and their stories never prove quite as rich as the backdrops against which Winterbottom watches their fates unfold.

A harrowing childhood journey

Another movie based on a true story, Lion can be heartbreaking, but it also can lag.

In a way, Lion risks setting itself up for failure -- or at least for a major letdown.

I say this because the movie's opening act is so compelling that I wondered whether director Garth Davis would be able to sustain its harrowing trajectory. In the early going, Lion feels as if it's en route to becoming a classic movie about an endangered boy, something on the order of the great Brazilian film, Pixote -- if a little less harsh.

Working from a true story, Davis introduces us to five-year-old Saroo (a wonderful Sunny Pawar), a poor Indian boy who's separated from his family after he falls asleep on a decommissioned train. Saroo winds up in Calcutta where his life takes on a Dickensian flavor: He's homeless and defenseless.

Saroo is too young to explain himself to strangers who live 1,600 miles from where his journey began. His difficulties are further complicated by his inability to speak Bengali. He speaks only Hindi.

Even a helpful gesture from a kind stranger works against him. One such bit of help lands poor Saroo in a children's home where cruelty and abuse are the orders of the day.

Cute without being cloying, Pawar anchors this part of the movie -- along with Davis's terrific use of the Indian countryside and the squalid depravations of Calcutta. Watching a totally confused and frightened five year old trying to negotiate the teeming crowds at Calcutta's railways station makes for heartbreaking viewing.

The movie makes a major shift after its Indian sequences. As the result of a charitable intervention, Saroo is sent to Australia where he's adopted by two well-meaning and loving parents, convincingly played by Nicole Kidman and David Wenham. After about a year, Saroo's new parents adopt another Indian boy who has a more difficult time adjusting to life in Tasmania and who's played as a young adult by Divian Ladwa.

The movie's second half deals with Saroo as a young man portrayed by Dev Patel. At this point, what had been a terrific movie becomes a merely good one with the story turning its attention to Saroo's increasing desire to discover his roots. He begins having flashbacks to the early years of his childhood in India, which include memories of his older brother Guddu (Abhishek Bharate) and the mother (Priyanka Bose) he adored and who adored him.

Bharate's Guddu has some responsibility for the way in which Saroo becomes lost, adding another level of poignancy.

During Saroo's period of self-discovery, he turns to the Internet to try to determine precisely where he came from. He stops paying attention to his girlfriend (a superfluous Rooney Mara), and shuts out his parents, refusing to tell them what he's doing. Patel conveys Saroo's torment, but this portion of the movie drags and also misses opportunities to develop additional scenes that might better have dramatized Saroo's struggle as a person suffering from spiritual homelessness.

None of this is to say that you should avoid Lion, which has a payoff that's designed to jerk real tears. And toward the end, Davis does a skillful job of blending Saroo's childhood memories with his adult quest.

Put in terms that risk a bit of reductionism, I'll conclude with this: Lion's Indian segments are a four-star knockout; the rest ... well ... give it three stars.

Are all geniuses created equal?

The Man Who Knew Infinity tells the story of an Indian math whiz who encounters the British establishment.

The less familiar you are with the story of Srinivasa Ramanujan, the more likely you are enjoy The Man Who Knew Infinity, the story of an Indian mathematical genius who was forced -- because of deeply embedded British racism -- to beat his head against the wall of Great Britain's academic establishment.

Director Matt Brown opts for prestige, hallowed-halls packaging with a cast that features Dev Patel, as Ramanujan, and Jeremy Irons, as G.H. Hardy, an established mathematician who insists that Ramanujan provide proofs of his discoveries.

The movie's most interesting thematic wrinkle centers on the difference between two approaches to mathematics -- Ramanujan's intuitive grasp of mind-bending theories -- and Hardy's more dogged, academically respectable plodding. Hardy isn't entirely dismissive of intuition, but he also believes in dotting every "i" and crossing every "t."

As played by Dev Patel, Ramanujan claims to be channeling information about the universe from God. Hardy seems to view Ramanujan's approach as a form of unacceptable romanticism.

Gradually, Hardy comes to respect Ramanujan and lobbies for his admittance to the inner circle of recognized mathematicians who have done significant work at Trinity College.

Mostly set in the early 1900s, the movie emphatically underscores the bigotry that once pervaded British academic circles. Few of Trinity's dons believe that an otherwise uneducated Indian from Madras could develop ground-breaking proofs on his own.

When we first meet Ramanujan, he's a 25-year-old shipping clerk with a wife (Devika Bhise) who he must leave behind when he travels to England. The difficulties of this long-distance relationship are exacerbated by Ramanujan's overly possessive mother. She hides the letters her son lovingly writes to his bride.

Irons makes Hardy's insistence on playing by well-established academic rules credible, but Patel has difficulty getting beyond the trademark avidity he has been bringing to the screen since he appeared in Slumdog Millionaire.

The movie derives added tension from a social and personal question: Can Ramanujan retain his confidence while he's constantly being berated by one or another of Cambridge's elite? He arrives in Britain expecting to function as an equal to the school's academicians. He views them as colleagues, but quickly is pushed into subordinate roles.

Hardy's friend and fellow mathematician Edensor Littlewood (Toby Jones) supports Ramanujan. Jeremy Northam fills a small role as Bertrand Russell, the famed playwright and mathematician who warns Hardy against restraining Ramanujan.

There aren't many surprises in the arc of Brown's story, whose major accomplishment involves introducing Ramanujan's name to uninformed audiences -- albeit in a decorous fashion that never quite stirs the imagination.

Only Yesterday

Director Isao Takahata's Only Yesterday, an animated look at a 27-year-old woman who can't quite shed the anxieties and inhibitions of her fifth-grade self, was released in Japan in 1991. The movie is now making its journey through the US, and it surely was worth the wait. Only Yesterday, which I saw in a dubbed English-language version,* tells a story that easily could have been presented as a live action feature. Voiced by Daisy Ridley, Taeko takes a leave from her job to travel into the country to pick flowers on a commercial farm. The story flashes back and forth between Taeko's country trip and her childhood, which is presented gently but realistically. The movie's childhood scenes include the cruel teasing that Taeko and other girls receive over menstruation, and delineate her relationship with a stern and indifferent father. Almost always hidden behind a newspaper, Dad won't let Taeko participate in a theatrical event for which she has been chosen. Takeo's relationship with her mother and two older sisters also is marked by contentiousness. In the country, Taeko meets Toshio (Dev Patel), an entirely decent fellow who's devoted to conserving the land. Toshio might be a romantic interest for Taeko -- if she can overcome her tendency toward self-isolation. American audiences who remember Takahata's The Tale of Princess Kaguya (2914) should find, in this earlier film, a story that's animated with care and occasional fanciful touches. Takahata serves up splashes of nostalgia along the way, but the real reason to see the film, adapted by Takahata from a manga, is its understanding of the child that lives within Taeko, sometimes bringing back treasured or troubled memories and sometimes keeping her from realizing her fullest potential.

*In Denver, the movie will show alternately in dubbed versions and the original Japanese.

'Chappie' is ... finish the rhyme yourself

A robot with consciousness gets lost in another junkyard of a movie.

Chappie -- a movie about a robot with the same consciousness as humans -- never seems able to resolve a rash of internal conflicts. Is it unashamed B-movie trash? Is it a goofy send-up that turns a robot into a silly child? Is it a descendant of Short Circuit or of RoboCop? Is it something else entirely?

Because it never answers these questions Chappie turns into another junkyard of a movie that takes what might generously be called a casual approach to logic.

For director Neill Blomkamp (District 9 and Elysium), the third time hardly qualifies as a charm.

So what do we get?

Blomkamp's story about a robot who's given consciousness and then is captured by thugs features:

-- An over-amped Dev Patel as an engineer who has figured out how to make a fully conscious robot.
-- Then there's Hugh Jackman as a brooding former military man who wants to make the ultimate fighting robot, but whose creation has been put on hold.

-- And don't forget Yo-Landi Visser and Ninja, South African rappers who belong to a group called Die Antwoord. They appear as a team of tattooed miscreants who are softened to the point of redemption by their contact with Chappie.

-- Sigourney Weaver, in an entirely negligible role, plays the head of a company that builds police robots for the city of Johannesburg.

When the movie opens, the city's crime rate is down and the robot cops seem to be functioning with great efficiency.

This germ of an idea could have provided the basis for an interesting merger of sci-fi and police procedural.

Instead, Blomkamp vents his impulse for rampant action coupled with moments of oddball comedy in which the innocent robot refers to the shady characters who are trying to teach it their felonious ways as "mommy" and "daddy."

Chappie trying to mimic the strut and speech of the street-wise gangstas who have taken control of him seems puerile.

These ploys may have been intended to be amusing, but to me, they looked dumb, particularly because they're repeated ad nauseam as the movie builds (or perhaps stumbles) toward the moment when Johannesburg's robot police force is hacked and criminals run unimpeded throughout the city's streets.

One more thing before we leave the world of artificial intelligence behind.

I'm sick of seeing real newspeople in works of fiction. Chappie opens with CNN's Anderson Cooper narrating a feature about the way robots have helped reduce crime in South Africa. Cooper sets the stage for what's to come, but it's time newspeople gave more thought to the ways in which they're used to lend an aura of authenticity to otherwise preposterous movies.

Such participation may give a movie an air of credibility, but it doesn't necessarily do the same for the participating newspeople.

Back to Chappie.

At times, Blomkamp tosses an idea at us, say when Chappie -- who's rather lithe for a robot and is voiced by Sharlto Copley -- wonders why Deon bothered to make him in the first place if he's doomed to expire when his batteries, which can't be replaced, run out.

Just what we needed, a reminder of another movie, a bit of A.I.-like poignancy?

Chappie, by the way, ends in a way that seems to open the door for a sequel. I couldn't help thinking that a second movie might be more interesting than the one I just watched.

That doesn't mean I'm advocating for another helping. Take it as a statement about the inadequacies of this first installment.

Another stay at the Marigold Hotel

Judi Dench and Maggie Smith highlight a less-than-wonderful return trip to India.

When it movies do reasonably well at the box office, one go-round no longer seems sufficient.

So it's hardly surprising that director John Madden and the ensemble cast of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel have reunited for a sequel, this one appropriately titled The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. And second best, it most certainly is.

Three years after the original, Sonny (Dev Patel) has joined with the reliably acerbic Muriel (Maggie Smith) to try to interest an international franchiser in their small Indian operation, selling it as a charming spot where the elderly can enjoy their golden years at a low cost.

The movie never seems to question whether expansion and franchising are consistent with maintaining the hotel's rumpled charm, but a movie such as The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel never strays too far out of an audience's comfort zone.

Among the new but hardly pressing questions: Will Douglas (Bill Nighy) overcome his shyness and finally confess his growing love for Evelyn (Judi Dench)?

Called upon to be diffident, Nighy loses access to the wit that has marked his best work. For her part, Dench continues to bring warmth and dignity to a role that otherwise might be at home in a sitcom -- sitcom sensibilities being the operative force here.

Meanwhile, Sonny and his fiancee (Tena Desai) are planning their engagement party and wedding -- albeit not without obstacles stemming mostly from Sonny's insecurity. He frets about a potential rival.

Norman (Ronald Pickup) continues to work out the details of his relationship with Carol (Diana Hardcastle), and Madge (Celia Imrie) flirts with two Indian suitors.

Also added to the mix is a miscast Richard Gere, who plays a man who says he's writing a novel after the collapse of his marriage.

Lest he be left out of the romantic stew, Gere's character is smitten by Sonny's mother (Lillete Dubey) in what amounts to a pro forma and sparkless attempt at romance.

What was the point of adding Gere anyway? The reason people might want to see this movie rests almost entirely on their affection for characters they already know -- not on the expectation that newbies will arrive.

Less distracting is David Strathairn: He's briefly seen as the owner of a chain of hotels that may want to add The Marigold to its burgeoning empire.

The script even finds a way to return Douglas's miserable but estranged wife (Penelope Wilton) to the proceedings before all the loose ends are neatly tied.

You know from the start that any movie set in India must include energetic Bollywood-style dancing, which this one does, although it tries to leave us with a slightly reflective aftertaste.

For my money, Dench and Smith provide the major reasons to make a second trip to Jaipur, India, that and any incidental travelogue pleasures the journey may offer. Put it this way: Aging seldom has been made to seem more colorful.