The thief who lived in a toy store

   Roofman, the story of a thief who broke into McDonald's restaurants, gaining entry from their roofs and hauling off a small fortune, leans heavily on Channing Tatum. Tatum's challenge: to create a smart, appealing criminal who's considerate of those who fall into his sphere. 

   Tatum's Jeffrey Manchester doesn't use politeness as a branding gimmick. He's not trying to dub himself as  "The Thief who Cares." He's aware that he's stepping out of bounds, but has no desire to hurt anyone. 

   Based on Manchester's real-life story, Roofman requires Tatum to remain likable throughout. I'd say he succeeds in what might be his most memorably appealing screen performance yet.

    The story doesn't dwell on Manchester's larceny. Early on, Manchester is caught in North Carolina. He's sentenced to a whopping 45 years in prison, partly because of kidnapping charges stemming from one of his signature moves.

    If they happened to be present, Manchester locked McDonald's employees in store freezers. He sometimes gave them coats so they wouldn't freeze. In the movie, he calls 911 to arrange for their rescue as soon as he flees.

   Working from a screenplay he wrote with Kirt Gunn, director Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines) respects the basics of Manchester's story, but his movie intrigues with a tone that falls between unadorned realism and lighthearted absurdity.

  Once imprisoned, the keenly observant Manchester contrives a clever escape. He then flees to Charlotte, where he holes up in an unlikely spot, a Toys R Us store. 

    Manchester's ingenuity blossoms. He learns how to survive in the store by eating lots of candy. He sets up his own surveillance system using baby monitors while disarming the store's video recording capabilities. He builds a comfortable enough hideout to keep him in the store for six months, a long time to spend in the company of Tickle Me Elmo dolls.

   Eventually, Manchester ventures out of the store. He's attracted to one of the its employees (Kirsten Dunst's Leigh), a single mom who's struggling to make ends meet.

    Manchester quickly becomes enmeshed in Leigh's life, attending her church, donating toys (stolen, of course) to the church's Christmas drive, and eventually impressing her daughters. It takes time, but he even wins over Leigh's balky teenage daughter by buying her a seriously used car and teaching her how to drive.

   He's discovering the joys of family, and he's good at it, perhaps by way of atoning for having become estranged from his former wife and three kids.

   Additional support comes from Peter Dinklage as the martinet manager of the Toys R Us store. LaKeith Stanfield signs on as one of Manchester's former Army pals, a character who figures in some late-plot maneuvering. 

    Other actors come off as drop-ins. These include Uzo Aduba, as one of Leigh's churchgoing friends, and Juno Temple, as the girlfriend of Stanfield's character.

   Set in 2005, the movie includes a few retro touches, but Cianfrance gives it a lived-in feel that allows the chemistry between Tatum and Dunst to grow during the time that Manchester lives without being recognized. A hide-in-plain-sight kind of guy, he never alters his appearance.

  Manchester, of course, puts himself in a terrible bind. Using a fake name, he deceives people he cares about. The point is made without underlining. His ruse isn't without cruelty. Maybe that's Manchester's biggest flaw; he's sincere but not perceptive enough to fully understand the impact he's having on those he encounters. He's not good at consequences.

    Interviews with the real people from the Manchester tale pop up during the end credits, mostly confirming the story's slant about a good guy who committed crimes. Roofman isn't up for moral finger wagging. That may trouble some, but it makes Roofman a welcome oddity, an enjoyable movie that avoids the usual true-crime cliches.

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.

  

 

A ‘Hunger Games’ prequel lacks urgency

    

   Is there still an appetite for The Hunger Games? The makers of The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes presumably hope so. 

   Unlike the four previous movies, this prequel doesn't center on a young rebel who must survive and triumph in a lethal contest. Instead, it focuses on a different series regular, Coriolanus Snow, played here as an 18-year-old by Tom Blyth.

     Anyone who's up to speed on the previous Hunger Games movies — and I can’t imagine others will be interested — knows that Snow will become the coldly cunning president of the dystopia author Suzanne Collins creates in her YA novels. Donald Sutherland played Snow in the earlier movies.

     Based on a Collins novel published in 2020 and directed by series vet Francis Lawrence, the movie seems an odd duck, a kind of extended backstory that reaches the screen 10 years after the last movie.

    Despite its Songbirds title, you may be surprised to learn that the movie sometimes feels like Hunger Games, the Musical.  Lawrence showcases several musical numbers by Rachel Zegler (West Side Story), who plays Hunger Games contestant Lucy Gray. 

     Zegler’s Lucy enters the games with Coriolanus as her mentor, the tribune assigned to guide her through the violent Hunger Games spectacle. We see enough of the games to get the point; they’re brutal and unforgiving and … well … a tedious nod to expectation.

     The story eventually illuminates Coriolanus's inner struggle;  his capacity for love and empathy bumps up against the brutal imperatives of his ruthless ambition.

    The supporting cast includes a notable contribution from Peter Dinklage who brings tormented depth and sadness to the role of a professor who instructs tribunes. Jason Schwartzman plays the game emcee, but the movie lacks the satirical spark that boosted the earlier movies and gave Stanley Tucci's performance its verve.

      Josh Andres Rivera has a nice turn as Sejanus Plinth, a rich kid who befriends Coriolanus. Although Plinth’s family can buy his safety, a sense of justice turns him into a rebel. 

       Viola Davis appears as Dr. Volumnia Gaul, the person charged with spicing up the televised games, which, in their 10th year, have begun losing viewers. The decline invokes the story’s major question: Why are The Hunger Games necessary?

      The movie offers one answer; franchise-hungry Hollywood may have another.

       A plodding story becomes more interesting in the final going but not without raising another issue: length. At two hours and 37 minutes, the last segment asks the audience to stay involved past what feels like amore natural ending.

      I wouldn't say that Songbirds is dreadful, but like its lynchpin performer Jennifer Lawrence, it probably should have moved on. What's the point? The idea of exploitative TV as a social control mechanism seems like a dragon that already has been slain — or is that some other franchise?

             

          

Dinklage gives 'Cyrano' wit, heart, and bite

   Some characters never vanish. Consider Cyrano de Bergerac. The witty, eloquent outsider has been pining for Roxanne  since Edmond Rostand's play debuted in 1897. 

   Feelings of inadequacy keep Cyrano from confessing his love for Roxanne. Instead, he tries to win her for Christian, a handsome soldier who lacks the necessary poetic skills for inspired wooing. Cyrano writes beautiful letters for Christian.

    A variety of versions of Rostand’s play have made it to the screen. Steve Martin appeared in Roxanne (1987) and Gerard Depardieu proved memorable in Cyrano de Bergerac, a 1990 French version. A 1950 entry starring Jose Ferrer and Mala Powers -- the first one I saw -- occasionally turns up on TV.

     Typically,  Cyrano believes that his large nose excludes him from harvesting the fruits of love.  He lives in a world in which appearances matter.

    In director Joe Wright’s addition to the de Bergerac canon, Peter Dinklage makes a smart, cocky Cyrano who believes that his diminutive stature (not his nose) overrules his consummate wit and intelligence -- not to mention his skill with a sword.

      Cyrano, therefore, demurs when it comes to courting the beautiful, brilliant Roxanne (Haley Bennett) -- albeit not without a measure of resentment.    

       The first requirement of  any production of Cyrano: The actor who plays Cyrano must be good. 

     Dinklage proves a worthy Cyrano. An opening scene in which Cyrano banishes a bad actor from the stage brims with gusto and imagination, giving Dinklage the entrance the character deserves.

     Not surprisingly, Wright hasn't neglected the movie's looks. Period trappings are gorgeously rendered and cinematographer  Seamus McGarvey floods the screen with color. 

       All good, but Cyrano is also a musical based on a stage production written by Erica Schmidt, who also wrote the screenplay for the movie.

       Yes, a musical. I didn't mention it earlier because I've hardly thought about the music since I saw the movie.

       The tunes by Bryce and Aaron Dessner (lyrics by Matt Berninger and Carin Besser) can feel almost prosaic, unlike what we might expect to hear in 17th Century France. Perhaps this is because the lyrics are tailored for actors who aren't all singers. Maybe the music had more impact when performed live on stage.

     Whatever the case, the actors sketch their characters with ease and flair. It's the performances not the music that stick.

     Bennett creates a vibrant Roxanne,  a woman of beauty and wit. Ben Mendelsohn earns his villainous stripes as the conniving Duke De Guiche. Kelvin Harrison Jr. winningly portrays a clueless, handsome, and, ultimately, noble Christian.

    Bashir Salahuddin plays Cyrano's friend and confidant, a comrade who appreciates Cyrano's gifts.

     Like its main character, the story endures. It's not for nothing that it has been re-told so many times. Even with its farcical moments and darker turns, Cyrano always retains some charm. 

     So, if you’re looking for a single reason to see Cyrano, try this: Dinklage's portrayal -- angry, rueful, and sad -- is bound to earn him a well-deserved Oscar nomination. 

     The music may not burn its way into memory, but Dinklage gives Cyrano a taste of bitterness that stings.

A thriller about some really awful folks

 

    It must say something about us, but most of us take at least some delight in watching movies about aggressively unprincipled people who enrich themselves at the expense of others.

    In I Care a Lot, Rosamund Pike plays Marla Grayson, a woman who specializes in bilking the elderly by becoming a legal guardian for them. Marla's ideal candidate is a reasonably healthy older person who will live long enough for Marla to drain his or her assets in what amounts to a shockingly cruel helping of court-sanctioned elder abuse.

   As played by Pike, Marla not only excels at her job, she delights in working with corrupt nursing home folks to generate profits for her company. 

   Eiza Gonzalez plays Fran, Marla's live-in lover and devoted assistant, a woman who has learned the tricks of manipulation from a master. The banter between the two amounts to a crash course in insensitivity.

     Screenwriter/director J. Blakeson sets us up to root against Marla. Who, after all, favors stealing from the helpless? 

    Yes, Marla  preys on the defenseless, but there’s always energy to be found in a well-calibrated scheme and Marla prides herself on dotting every "i" and crossing every "t." 

    The story takes an important turn when a nursing home official identifies an easy mark for Marla -- for a cut, of course.

    Snatched from her home, Dianne Wiest's Jennifer soon finds herself in a facility where she's more prisoner than resident. To Marla, Jennifer is a human ATM, a source of wealth that can be tapped for years.

    Jennifer? She's fed drugs, deprived of her cell phone, and stuck in a nightmare.

   Adept at working the legal system, Marla knows how to convince judges that she's a savior to those who otherwise might perish in isolation. Her office is slick. She dresses to kill and all but licks her lips at the prospect of another scam.

   I won't tell you more, but after a while, we learn that Jennifer may not be quite as helpless as we've been led to believe. 

   Blakeson adds a sinister businessman to the mix. Peter Dinklage plays a gangster who wants to liberate Jennifer from the senior facility where she's being held.  No fair telling why. Know though, that Dinklage's character offers Marla $150,000 to give up her claim.

    No dice, says Marla. She wants more.

   At first, Dinklage sends his lawyer (Chris Messina) to "reason" with Marla. When that doesn't work, he resorts to other methods, allowing Blakeson to up the story’s ante and toy with our rooting interests. By the end, we're not sure that any of the movie's principal characters qualify for redemption.

    Blakeson written a tasty scam movie,  infusing it with the kind of sizzle that sets it apart from more perfunctory efforts and he locks Pike and Dinklage in an exhilarating cage match in which neither is shy about going for the jugular.

    Oh, by the way, the movie may make cost you some sleep when you begin to think about what might happen to elderly folks when age robs them of independence — and others are all-too-eager to take advantage of the situation.

Bob's Cinema Diary: 1/10/20 -- Three Christs and Song of Names

Three Christs

Three Christs focuses on a psychiatrist who in the 1950s studied three paranoid schizophrenics, each of whom believed that he was Jesus. Although Three Christs derives from a true story, the movie winds up feeling contrived and unconvincing. A miscast Richard Gere portrays Dr. Alan Stone, a psychiatrist who in the picture's early going arrives at a Michigan state hospital to conduct his study. Peter Dinklage, Walton Goggins and Bradley Whitford portray Dr. Stone’s patients, men who have convinced themselves that they are the true Christ. Stone isolates the trio of faux Christs from other patients to determine if they can get along with one another. Stone wonders: If one Jesus is confronted with another, would one of them have to admit that he's deluded. Everyone, of course, knows that the New Testament tells the story of a single Jesus. Director Jon Avnet needed a villain. The closest he comes is Dr. Orbis (Kevin Pollack), the psychiatrist who heads the hospital and who seems to value procedural correctness over sensitive treatment. Charlotte Hope plays Becky, the young woman who becomes Dr. Stone’s research assistant. Julianna Margulies appears as Stone’s wife, a character who adds little to the story. Of the three Christs, Dinklage gives the most interesting performance. Eloquent and nearly regal in bearing, his Canadian-born Joseph Cassel thinks that he should be sent to England. Tragedy looms as Avnet presents Stone as a man who sides with his patients in a way that the hospital establishment mostly mistrusts. He's adamant in his opposition to electroshock therapy, for example. Beneath all the drama, we find a romanticized notion about how the patients help to cure the doctor of his heretofore unacknowledged delusions. The point seems forced, a notion more accepted than discovered by a movie that flirts with intriguing issues but feels like it might have benefited from the intensifying claustrophobia of the stage.

The Song of Names

Based on a novel by classical music critic Norman Lebrecht, The Song of Names aims for high seriousness but fades from the screen without making the expected impact. The story centers on a gifted Jewish violinist who's played at various ages by Luke Doyle, Jonah Hauer-King and Clive Owen. Sent to England from Poland to escape the Nazis, young Dovidl is raised by an English family that goes to great lengths to respect his Jewish heritage. After a rocky start, the supremely confident Dovidl makes friends with Martin, the son of the man who agrees to shelter Dovidl while nurturing the youngster's musical talents. As the two age, Martin develops a belief in Dovidl and promotes his career. On the eve an important concert, the now-grown Dovidl vanishes. After 35 years, Martin (played as an adult by Tim Roth) tries to find his former friend. Director Francois Girard uses Dovidl's disappearance as a source of mystery while the movie shifts between the war and post-war years and the 1980s. Little catches fire with Dovidl's story becoming secondary to Martin's search. The result: A movie that tries to deal with the Holocaust, musical genius and personal transformation fails to plumb any of those areas with sufficient depth. The historical backdrop and the music provide a bit of elevation, but the movie strikes only a minor chord.

Melissa McCarthy, crude again

The Boss breaks no new ground for its star.

In The Boss, Melissa McCarthy portrays a tycoon who has been ranked the 47th richest woman in the world, a self-absorbed striver who loses everything after an insider-trading scandal and then stages a comeback.

Too bad McCarthy's foul-mouthed Michelle Darnell doesn't make her way into the top 47 funniest characters in movies. She's not even close.

Teaming with her husband, director Ben Falcone, who directed her in the equally lame Tammy, McCarthy tries to spice up a one dimensional comedy with intermittent helpings of slapstick and even heavier doses of crude humor.

McCarthy reportedly created the movie's main character when she was a member of The Groundlings, a Los Angeles comedy troupe. Let's just say that McCarthy, who co-wrote the screenplay with Falcone and Steve Mallory, hasn't come up with the most imaginative ways to put this character into a 99-minute movie.

After a stint at a federal prison, a newly impoverished Michelle takes up residence with a former assistant named Claire (Kristen Bell) and Claire's daughter Rachel (Ella Anderson).

After accompanying Anderson's Rachel to a meeting of a Girl Scout-like organization called The Dandelions, Michelle devises a money-making scheme. She'll form her own group ("Darnell's Darlings") and sell brownies for profit. Her kiddie sales force will receive 10 percent commissions.

Meanwhile, Michelle's nemesis, another tycoon played by Peter Dinklage plots to reduce her burgeoning brownie empire to rubble.

Among the movie's bad ideas -- and there are many -- two standout. One involves a no-holds-barred fist fight between the Dandelions and Darnell's Darlings. The other centers on a climactic sword fight (no, I'm not kidding) between Dinklage's Renault and Michelle.

Somewhere along the line Kathy Bates turns up as Ida, a woman who helped Michelle on her meteoric rise and who agrees to lend financial support to her new enterprise.

If you step back from this McCarthy dominated mess, you may realize that she had an opportunity to use this character as a Trump-like launch pad for one hell of a satire.

Instead, the movie's principal strategy (streaming profanity in inappropriate places) feels so familiar, it's a non-starter.

McCarthy boasts a new short, red hairdo, but little else about her work in The Boss feels fresh. Michelle may be more upscale than some of McCarthy's previous characters, but McCarthy's doing another variation on the same-old joke. At this rate, she's likely to turn herself into a one-woman formula.

Music, heroin and fatherhood on the fringe

A look at the relationship between a musician and his daughter.

Jazz pianist Joe Albani, who went by the name of Joe Albany, died in 1988 at the age of 64. Albany spent most of his adult life as a musician and heroin addict, not always in that order.

No slouch wannabe, Albany established his reputation playing with such greats as Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. That alone might have made for a good movie.

But Low Down, which only touches on Albany's jazz life, turns out to be another kind endeavor, one that focuses on Joe's faltering attempts at fatherhood.

Based on a memoir by his daughter, who also had a hand in writing the screenplay, Low Down introduces us to Albany during the 1970s.

At the time, he was living a marginal life in the kind of seedy Los Angeles dives that writer Charles Bukowski memorialized, single-room occupancy hotels where the clientele was sometimes too drunk or stoned to notice much of anything.

Director Jeff Preiss, who worked as the cinematographer on the Chet Baker documentary Let's Get Lost, tells the story through the eyes of Albany's 13-year-old daughter Amy (Elle Fanning).

Albany -- played by John Hawkes -- bobs in and out of the story, sometimes sober, sometimes not. At times, he allows heroin to disconnect him from music, yet we never doubt his seriousness as an artist.

Hawkes (The Sessions, Martha Marcy May Marlene and Winter's Bone) is too good an actor to serve up a series of junkie cliches. He gives us a father who's gentle and bright with his daughter and who's imbued with a kind of tolerance for himself and others.

Joe obviously has little idea about how to be a father, but he leaves no doubt that he loves his daughter, and Fanning does justice to a teen-ager who's trying not to be overwhelmed by her father's indulgences or by an alcoholic mother (Lena Headley), made viperous by booze and bitterness.

Obviously, Amy isn't living a normal teen life; she's exposed to prostitutes and to a strange but gentle fellow (Peter Dinklage) who lives in the basement of the dump where her dad crashes.

If there's a surprising performance here, it's given by Glenn Close, who plays Joe's mother and Amy's grandmother, a tough woman who chain smokes, takes no guff, and takes care of her granddaughter when her father can't. She appreciates her son's talent, but fears for him.

Fanning observes her father, his friends and the life he's fallen into with baffled curiosity, and Hawkes can feel almost airborne as Joe floats through some awfully dreary days.

The movie floats a bit as well; it's steeped in a kind of '70s filmmaking style in which the truth of every scene often takes precedence over any narrative arc.

I don't know what else to say to give you an idea about this movie, but it might help if I conjectured a bit. I think John Cassavetes would have liked and admired Low Down -- at least, I hope he would have.