Spike Lee issues call to disarm

A showy Chi-Raq breaks genre boundaries. Some of it even works.

Say this about director Spike Lee: At 58, the man's no less risk averse than when he was a much younger filmmaker.

Lee bravely models his new movie, Chi-Raq, on Lysistrata, a comedy by Aristophanes that dates back to 411 BCE, not exactly a period known for its hip-hop atmosphere.

Aristophanes' central conceit involved the efforts of Lysistrata to persuade women to stop having sex with their husbands and lovers as a way of forcing them to bring peace to a society enmeshed in the Peloponnesian War, a conflict that lasted for about 27 years.

Lee, who wrote the screenplay with Kevin Willmott, finds his Lysistrata (a dynamic Teyonah Parris) conspiring to withhold sex from Chicago gangbangers who are contributing to the horrifically high rate of homicide among young black men.

Using a splashy graphic (a map of the U.S. composed of drawings of rifles and revolvers), Lee opens the movie to Nick Cannon's Pray 4 My City, a harsh but hopeful rap anthem.

Chi-Raq, of course, is the name given to Chicago's mean streets, not the city of great architecture, abundant culture and commercial bustle, but the city where gun violence reigns and even the youngest children aren't excluded.

Lee effectively makes this divided-city point by contrasting images of stately downtown Chicago with neighborhood scenes that focus on a far less affluent kind of life.

Lee reduces the Greek chorus to a one-man show put on by Dolmedes, a dapper and sometimes sarcastic Samuel L. Jackson. Jackson's Dolmedes puts the story in perspective.

That perspective includes information presented early on about how fatalities from Chicago's murders outnumber American lives lost in Iraq and Afghanistan. The story, we'll learn, will be focused on Englewood, one of the city's more dangerous neighborhoods.

What unfolds is a movie of desperate parts, some successful, some less so. Part agitprop, part melodrama, part broad comedy, and part soulful lament, Chi-Raq exists in its own world. You'll either enter that world or turn away.

But if you stay, you'll see a movie that, in addition to everything else, offers a vigorous display of female power, particularly as expressed by Parris, who comes closer than anyone else to dominating Lee's large ensemble cast.

Lee employs many talented actors in what often feels like a wild, theatrical experiment. In addition to offering the opening song, Nick Cannon plays the leader of a gang called the Spartans. As if to absorb all the city's misery, pain and fury, Cannon's character has taken the name Chi-Raq.

Wesley Snipes appears as Cyclops, the orange-clad, one-eyed leader of the Trojans, a rival gang.

Jennifer Hudson plays Irene, the mother of a daughter gunned down by a stray bullet; Angela Bassett plays Miss Helen, a woman who surrounds herself with books and serves as the movie's voice of sanity.

In an unexpected turn, John Cusack turns up as a priest modeled on real-life Rev. Michael Pfleger, an activist who works out of Chicago's St. Sabina Church.

In a lengthy sermon, Cusack rips through a monologue that excoriates the society from whose soil Chicago's violence grows, as well as the community that must rise up to put a stop to it. It's an impressive piece of work that sometimes sounds like a hortatory condensation of Michelle Alexander's important book, The New Jim Crow.

Not all of the bits work and some are ridiculously conceived, notably a scene in which a general wearing Confederate flag underwear (David Patrick Kelly) mounts a Civil War cannon as he lusts after Lysistrata at a National Guard armory. Lee's at his funniest when he nails character, not when he tries to create comic situations.

It's difficult to imagine that Chi-Raq -- the first production from Amazon Studios -- will shatter any box office records. It can be too didactic for its own good, and it's possible that a straightforward story about the impact of gang violence might have been more powerful than Lee's ultra-stylized shout-out of a movie.

But Lee and Willmott, who wrote the satiric C.S.A.: the Confederate States of America, have gone their own way in arguing that the U.S. needs to wake up and do something about violence that is ravaging places that -- more than ever -- need a sense of community.

And at a time when we're again despairing over another mass shooting, this one in San Bernardino, Ca., there's definite value in shining light on Chicago's overlooked carnage

Whether anyone heeds Lee's call to disarm remains to be seen.

Another look at a morally bankrupt LA

Director David Cronenberg visits the land of palm trees, money and greedy ambition.

It's impossible for a director as talented as David Cronenberg to make a movie that doesn't boast a few interesting wrinkles.

The opening of Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars -- a movie written by novelist Bruce Wagner -- has an eerie, otherworldly dimension that lets us know that the guy behind the camera has an edgy gift.

We feel a bit dislocated by the sight of passengers riding a bus at night. Who are they? Where are they headed? We feel as if the movie is about to awaken from a dream.

It does -- and that's the trouble.

The promise of Cronenberg's opening quickly evaporates as a muddled series of LA-based story lines emerges.

We begin to realize that Maps is taking aim at Hollywood with all the trappings such a project suggests: amorality, rampant egotism, wanton sex, obscene amounts of money, half-baked guru figures and, yes, even incest.

Meeting the movie's characters can feel like paging through a yearbook of sickos, the presumed intention here.

Benjie Weiss (Evan Bird) is a child actor who starred in a monstrously successful hit TV show. At 13, Benjie's already a veteran of rehab. He's also an obnoxious little tyrant and one of the least likable characters I've seen in a film in some time.

Benjie's parents (John Cusack and Olivia Williams) aren't much better. Mom manages Benjie's career, and endures the humiliations her son heaps on her. Dad writes self-help books and also does the kind of body work that's supposed to release buried pain with a push here or a contortion there.

Actress Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore) is trying to restart her career by vying for a part in a remake of a movie originally made by her late mother, now something of a Hollywood cult figure. In what amounts to one more perverse twist, we learn that mom sexually abused Havana as a kid.

Perhaps Cronenberg wanted to find the truth in these characters by pushing them to extremes. They are capable of showing traces of humanity, but they seldom stray too far from their inner monsters.

The ingredients in Cronenberg's pot eventually are brought together by the arrival in Los Angeles of Agatha (Mia Wasikowska), a character whose role in the drama gradually reveals itself.

Craziness seldom needs embellishment, but that doesn't stop this story from showing us that at least two of its characters (Benjie and Havana) are haunted by ghosts. They are unsettled by dead people.

Cronenberg's collage of tawdry ingredients has some sharp and telling moments -- the faux chumminess between Havana and a rival actress, for example -- but the movie never really rises to the level of strong satire or true trash.

Maps to the Stars wanders instead through a haze of developments that feel as if they're being dragged across the screen in hopes of leaving an indicting stain.

Two additional comments:
-- Robert Pattinson, who appeared in Cronenberg's Cosmopolis -- another movie that didn't really work -- plays a chauffeur who aspires to be a screenwriter and actor.

-- Moore holds nothing back in her portrayal of an actress whose life is marred by desperation, psychological torment and character flaws. Did anyone think the recent Oscar winner couldn't give this kind of performance?

Maps to the Stars seems to want to tell us that Hollywood is less a place than a contagious disease. But spending time with the folks who've caught this disease isn't as revealing as you might imagine.

Look, I'm a Cronenberg fan. I consider him to be one of the smartest directors I've ever met, and I've admired much of his work. I look forward to seeing his next movie, and plan to regard this unrewarding Day of the Locust descendant as a detour.

It's definitely not in the bag

The Bag Man continues the apparently endless attempt to bring film noir back to life.

Enough.

I've had it with neo-noir, particularly when the attempt turns hollow and pointless, as is the case with the new thriller The Bag Man.

A battered-looking John Cusack stars as Jack, a hitman who's sent on a mission by a mysterious and apparently powerful man named Dragna (Robert De Niro). Jack's asked to travel to the Louisiana bayour, pick up a bag, hide out in room 13 of rundown motel, and wait for Dragna to pick up the bag. Jack will be richly rewarded for his efforts, but there's one catch: He's not allowed to look in the bag.

En route to the movie's less-than-surprising finale, Jack also must kill a variety of folks who are trying to kill him.

At the motel, he finds himself increasingly entangled with a woman named Rivka (Rebecca Da Costa), who may be plotting against him or who may just be an innocent bystander in Jack's murky drama that, too often seems to be trying to be weird only to establish some sort of strange bona fides.

The motel, for example, is managed by an unkempt and freakish looking man in a wheelchair (Crispin Glover).

Director David Grovic seems to be trying to leaven the proceedings with splashes of humor, but this dreary, derivative thriller can't compensate for Cusack's one-dimensional performance or for a story that gives us almost nothing about which we're able to care.

And the bag trick? We've seen this sort of thing before in Robert Aldrich's 1955 Kiss Me Deadly and in Quentin Tarantino's 1994 Pulp Fiction. Both Adlrich and Tarantino used it to better effect. Here, it's just one more detail in a movie of very little consequence.

Pity poor Poe. It's come to this

A thriller that drowns in a sea of silly melodrama.

Edgar Allen Poe may not have lived the happiest of lives, but at least he didn’t have to endure The Raven. We're not talking about Poe's famous 1845 poem but about a darkly hued thriller built around Poe's final days.

Drenched in overbearing melodrama, The Raven feels increasingly -- though never enjoyably -- ridiculous.

Too bad because the movie springs from a clever idea. An impoverished and somewhat desperate Poe (John Cusack) discovers that a mysterious fiend is replicating murders taken from various of Poe's exceptionally macabre short stories.

This life-imitates-art scenario turns Poe into a kind of harried detective: When his fiancee (a bland Alice Eve) is kidnapped by the killer, Poe must race around the cobbled streets of Baltimore trying to save his damsel in extreme distress.

Even before Poe becomes distraught over his fiancee’s disappearance, he’s depicted as cynical and depressed. Neither his work nor his love life seem to be going particularly well. Poe is having trouble selling stories to the Baltimore newspaper that printed many of them, and his fiancee’s socially conscious father (Brendan Gleeson) vigorously opposes his daughter’s relationship with the drunken, resourceless writer.

Poe eventually joins forces with the Baltimore policeman (Luke Evans) who's investigating the case of the kidnapped fiancee. After an initial period of mistrust, Poe and policeman work together to prevent Poe's fiancee from becoming another of the author's lovers to meet with a tragic end.

Director James McTeigue (Ninja Assassin and V For Vendetta) probably didn’t realize it, but The Raven -- with its mixture of heated dialog, gothic gloom and anachronistic language -- might have made a terrific comedy. McTeigue and his cohorts evidently thought they were taking a serious journey into the dark corners of Poe’s psyche at a time when society seemed increasingly hungry for cheap, violent thrills.

Miscast as Poe, Cusack’s performance is marred by occasional over-the-top tantrums and by Cusack's inability to add the proper bite to Poe’s caustic turns of phrase, a skill the author put to good use as a prolific literary critic. Sarcasm needs to savored, not spewed in asides, as if one is trying to say something memorable while racing to catch a train.

Even the usually fine Gleeson, who’s stuck playing an ogre of sorts, may not want to press this performance into his otherwise splendid book of professional memories.

In showing the movie's murders, the filmmakers avail themselves of gory effects that happily were unavailable to Poe. An example: At one point a giant swinging blade cuts a literary critic in two, thus echoing a scenario dreamed up by Poe for The Pit and the Pendulum.

Writers don’t necessarily lead the happiest of lives, but Poe deserved better than The Raven gives him, a thriller so botched that when its secrets are revealed, its tempting to greet them with a dismissive shrug.