A semi-amusing helping of 'Venom'

    Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is still walking around with a creature incorporated into his body, a symbiotic alien that lives in harmony with its biological human host. By the time of the third installment of Venom: The Last Dance begins, the character of Venom has become a reliable sidekick who provides straight-man Brock with comic jabs. Venom also uses his superpowers to help Brock confront enemies. 

   So what else is up with the finale of this purported trilogy?  

    I’ll give you the short-form answer:

-- Venom: The Last Dance may be more enjoyable than its two predecessors, not a great achievement, but ...

-- Amusing scenes crop up when Brock encounters a wandering hippie family led by a guitar-playing dad (Rhys Ifans). The movie makes good use of Cat Stevens’s Wild World and even better use of David Bowie’s Space Oddity. -- Knull, the self-proclaimed "god of the void,"  introduces the story by informing us of his need for the codex, a MacGuffin that will release him from imprisonment. Any time I hear the word “codex,” my eyes glaze over. Last Dance earns no exemption.

-- At one point, Brock finds himself riding with Venom outside a jet that's bound for New York. And you thought your airline experience was bad.

-- Here's a discovery: Venom, the symbiote, likes to dance. In this case, he takes the floor with Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu), a character who has appeared in all the alien movies and who this time turns up playing the slots in Las Vegas. The song: Dancing Queen.

-- Chiwetel Ejiofor again adds seriousness as General Taylor, a solider who doesn’t like symbiotes. Seriousness in a movie such as this is like water polo in the Sahara. Misplaced.

-- Juno Temple joins the cast as a scientist who’s interested in befriending and studying symbiotes. Temple doesn’t have much to do. Perhaps she’s warming up for future movies.

-- Stephen Graham, who appeared in the previous Venom movie, is now a symbiote who’s being studied at a top secret military facility.

-- Kelly Marcel makes her directorial debut. She also wrote the screenplay, as well the screenplays for two previous Venom movies.

    -- Did I mention that creatures called Xenophages turn up? Not into fine dining, they try to feast on symbiotes. 

    -- The movie eventually loads up on action and turns sentimental about the relationship between Venom and the Brock. It didn't strike much of an emotional chord with me, but then I had no great fondness for the first two movies.

   If you’ve never tapped into this corner of Marvel world, you may want to sit Dance out. If you’re a fan, you’ll probably find a reasonably amusing conclusion to the trilogy.  

 And if you’re just interested in movie culture, you may want to know that more Venom movies probably loom -- even if Hardy takes a pass.

He played some of the world's worst golf

 

If you look at the picture on the right, you might suspect that you're about to read about a movie set in the world of golf. You'd be half right. There's golf in The Phantom of the Open, a British movie comedy starring Mark Rylance, but most of the golf is bad enough to be laughable. Early on, we learn that Rylance's Maurice Flitcroft qualifies as a caring guy: He married his wife Jean (Sally Hawkins) even though she was pregnant with another man's child. That child (Jake Davies) grows up to become become Maurice's boss at a shipyard in the port town of Barrow-in-Furness.  Maurice and Jean have children together, twins played by Christian and Jonah Lees. The twins dream of becoming famous disco dances. Why not?  It's the '70s. Maurice, who's 46, has his own dream. He wants to compete in the British Open, even though he knows nothing about golf and has never played the game. Based on a true story, Phantom of the Open follows the exploits of Maurice who in 1976 actually made his way into the British Open, where he chalked up a miserably high score of 121, the worst in the tournament's history. Rhys Ifans signs on as the official who wants to boot Flitcroft from the sport.  The golf establishment is dutifully alarmed but the bumbling and unflappable Maurice assembles a fan base. Don't look for a life-changing experience, but Rylance and the rest of the cast keep director Craig Roberts' Phantom of the Open close to par.

Bob's Cinema Diary: 11/24/20 -- 'Mosul' and 'Last Call'

Mosul

Mosul, an Iraq-based story that charts the activities of a squad of renegade warriors, takes us into familiar war-time movie turf: Buildings demolished by explosions, civilian lives destroyed, and homeless children wandering bombed-out streets. I don't mean to be callous but it's important to note that director Matthew Michael Carnahan isn't exactly breaking new cinematic ground. Mosul is more of an addition to the canon of intense war movies in the spirit of Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down. At the same time, it should also be said that Mosul commands attention because of its fresh perspective; the movie tells its story from the viewpoint of Iraqis whose lives have been shattered by war. Set in 2017 and based on a New Yorker article, Mosel pits  a group of rogue fighters against the by-then staggering fighters of Isis. The group's leader (a convincingly tough Suhail Dabbach) has concocted a mission whose purpose doesn’t become clear until the final going. Early on, the team is joined by a young Kurd (Adam Bessa) who gradually blends into the squad, known as the Nineveh SWAT team. Shot entirely in Arabic, it's not always easy to tell who the SWAT team is fighting. But that may be the point: Order has so broken down that it's not always possible to discern who is a friend and who, foe. By the end, you'll know why the men have persisted in their self-defined mission, a touch that seems intended to justify their hardness.  An atmosphere of chaos precludes deep character development. Still, there's something to be said for a movie that tries to shed an American perspective. The fighters in Mosul aren't battling to preserve freedom or for any other abstraction: They're fighting in hopes that they can keep their loved ones alive.

Last Call

When I was young, I regarded Dylan Thomas as the greatest of all poets. But time marched on and took my taste in poetry along with it.  Thomas, though still a worthy poet, appealed to me because he lived hard and died young, a romantic notion to which only the young are naive enough to subscribe. Last Call, a movie from director Steven Bernstein, both feeds and debunks the Thomas myth. Shot in black-and-white with interludes of color, the movie centers on the performance of Rhys Ifans as Thomas, a dissolute artist who spends much of his time in the US in the White Horse bar in Greenwich Village. He also ventures onto college campuses,  reading his poetry (declaiming might be a better word) to adoring college girls. Bernstein adopts what might be called a "poetic" approach to the material. We see Thomas's hallucinations as he spends his day drinking 18 double scotches in the White Horse, giving each drink a name. Enthusiasm marks an early drink, for example. We also see various figures from Thomas's life, notably his severely neglected wife (Romola Garai), the man arranging his tour (Tony Hale), and the doctor (John Malkovich) who understands that Thomas has entered a death spiral. More significantly, Rodrigo Santoro plays the bartender who pours Thomas's scotch and occasionally jabs at the great man's leaky ego. Although the movie runs for about an hour and 48 minutes, it can feel longer because it's like spending a day in a bar. Inebriation proves a mixed drink flavored with charm, intellect, wit, and cruelty. Ifans sometimes seems to be mumbling — albeit quite intelligently. Malkovich adds a serving of wry cynicism, bringing his trademark enunciation to the proceedings. Still, hanging out with drinks -- even those who achieved legendary status -- seldom proves enlightening.  

A whistleblower tries to stop the Iraq war

The filmmaking isn't flashy, but Official Secrets tells a compelling story.

In 2003, Katherine Gun did her best to stop Britain from entering the Iraq war. As a British intelligence employee with a specialty in translation, Gun violated the country's Secrets Act so that she could reveal a controversial email. The email instructed those working at Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) to look for information that could be used to pressure U.N. Security Council members to vote for a resolution authorizing the war.

Although Gun's leaked email was published by The Observer, it obviously didn't stop British participation in a war that was being carefully engineered and for which the "intelligence'' books were being cooked.

Directed by Gavin Hood (Eye in the Sky) and starring Keira Knightley, Official Secrets tells Gun's story in straightforward fashion, taking us inside a whistleblower's anxiety-riddled world. Things don't go smoothly for Gun, who eventually was put on trial for violating the Official Secrets Act of 1989.

Knightley and Hood don't add much by way of over-dramatized flourish to the portrayal of Gun, a woman who lived with her Muslim husband (Adam Bakri) in London. After making her momentous decision, Gun tormented herself. Would she get caught? Had she done the right thing?

Written by Sara and Gregory Bernstein, Official Secrets boasts a strong supporting cast. Matt Smith appears as Observer reporter Martin Bright, the journalist who fights to publish the explosive email. Matthew Goode portrays one of Bright's colleagues and Rhys Ifans signs on as the Observer's wild-eyed U.S. correspondent, a reporter who works hard to confirm the authenticity of the email Gun leaked.

Conleth Hill portrays the editor who struggles about publishing a story that could derail a war effort his paper previously supported. Late in the movie, an understated (what else?) Ralph Fiennes shows up as Ben Emmerson, the barrister who defends Katharine.

Official Secrets doesn't always make for rousing cinema but it serves as an important reminder of what can happen to those who realize that secret government objectives sometimes should be subordinated to higher values, one of them being the truth.

Oliver Stone tackles Snowden's story

Joseph Gordon-Levitt's performance clicks, but Snowden doesn't reach powerhouse levels.

Oliver Stone's Snowden turns out to be a reasonably straightforward procedural about a young man who drank lots of patriotic Kool-Aid before learning that it gave him moral indigestion. We are, of course, talking about Edward Snowden, whose explosive 2013 leak of classified information exposed a mass NSA surveillance operation that included ordinary US citizens.

Now resident in Moscow, Snowden has become one more figure around which Americans can divide. Some view him as a hero who did his country a great public service. Others see him as a traitor.

By the end of Snowden, it's clear that Stone wants to place Snowden on the heroic side of the ledger, even including him in a final series of images.

Whatever you think of him, Snowden hardly projects the personality of a calculating villain intent on damaging his country, something we already learned from Citizenfour, director Laura Poitras's Academy Award winning documentary about how Snowden leaked his information to the press and, subsequently, to the world.

The talented Joseph Gordon-Levitt portrays Snowden as a one-and-done whistleblower; he captures Snowden's persistence and intelligence, and charts his course from an apparently conservative patriot to a man at odds with his own government.

In this version of the Snowden story, Zachary Quinto appears as single-minded Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald; Tom Wilkinson breathes a bit more life into Ewan MacAskill, another Guardian journalist; and Mellisa Leo plays Poitras as a filmmaker who tries not to add to Snowden's already huge pile of problems.

For the most part, these characters remain underdeveloped, but Stone uses scenes in the Hong Kong hotel room where Snowden and the journalists were ensconced to punctuate a story that traces Snowden's development from a solider (he enlisted after 9/11, but was discharged after he both broke legs) to a rising star in the nation's intelligence apparatus.

Rhys Ifans brings suggestions of evil to the role of Corbin O'Brain, a fictional CIA character who hires Snowden. The young man's intelligence impresses O'Brain, partly because hje believes that the future of warfare isn't on battlefields but in rooms full of tech wizards who know how to hack and protect data.

A teleconferencing scene in which O'Brain confronts Snowden about a violation of CIA rules finds O'Brain towering over the young man on a huge screen, and, I'm afraid, serves as an example of Stone's fondness for overstatement, which he mostly keeps in check here -- unless, of course, you believe there could be more sides to the Snowden story.

Nicolas Cage shows up as a jaded CIA cryptographer Snowden meets during his training; Cage's character later reappears to add an exclamation point of approval to Snowden's decision to fight the power.

Perhaps to keep Snowden from turning into a vaguely fictionalized version of Poitras's documentary, Stone focuses much attention on the relationship between Snowden and girlfriend Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley).

Stone captures the tension that ripples through a relationship in which one of the partners (Snowden) never can talk about his day at the office.

The screenplay by Stone and Kieran Fitzgerald sometimes resorts to position-paper dialogue, and the movie lacks the dense intrigue of Stone's JFK or the undertow of rank corruption that filtered through Stone's Nixon.

I suppose that's another way of saying that a certain thinness keeps Snowden from feeling like a major statement about the ways in which the government may have violated the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which protects individual privacy.

The story often benefits from Stone's ability to create momentum, but if Stone wanted to shake us to the core about the perils of a government that's using security as a pretext to widen its control over us, I don't know that he gets the job done.

Perhaps Snowden isn't an epic enough character around which to build a powerhouse drama. As Snowden himself might attest, it's the debate he hoped to foster that matters, not him.

Emma Bovary arrives on screen -- again

Though not without its virtues, this Madame Bovary falls short.

The story of a blossoming woman stuck in a lifeless marriage in a provincial French backwater certainly has the potential to speak to modern audiences as both an early feminist drama and a biting social critique of bourgeois narrowness.

Begin there in thinking about the latest adaptation of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, a semi-successful attempt to transfer Flaubert to the screen.

Bored and filled with inchoate romantic longing, newly married Emma Bovary tries to divert herself with wanton material acquisitions (fine dresses and fancy furnishings) that mire her in debt. She also engages in affairs that she hopes will provide an escape route from her country-doctor husband, a decent fellow of simple tastes and limited ambition.

There's no faulting the production values that director Sophie Barthes brings to the task of adapting Flaubert for the screen. Working with cinematographer Andrij Parekh, Barthes creates the feeling of isolation and monotony that awaits Emma on the dawn of each day, the numbing emptiness of life at the bottom rungs of the middle class.

Given the standard of her time, Emma is supposed to be happy to have a husband and provider, but she's reluctant to resign herself to a compromised existence far from the civilities of Rouen, the city that beckons and taunts her with its opera and high culture.

The screenplay by Barthes and co-writer Felipe Marino must make omissions and condensations, and although I haven't read Madame Bovary since college, it struck me that Barthes and Marino have done a defensible job of focusing Flaubert's story for the screen. Flaubert devotees may disagree, particularly when it comes to the omission of Emma's child.

In this edition, Emma Bovary is played by Mia Wasikowska, who -- I think -- only intermittently fixes our attention. Some reviewers have pointed out that Wasikowska is perfect for the role because she makes no effort to elicit our sympathies. Still, Wasikowska's performance can be seen in as a study in only sporadic connection.

Employing a variety of accents and styles, the supporting cast acquits itself well enough.

In a generally subdued atmosphere, Rhys Ifans stands out as Monsieur Lheureux, a merchant who senses Emma's vulnerability, sells her as much luxury merchandise as possible (on credit) and then pushes her into a ruinous, debt-riddled corner.

As Charles Bovary, Henry Lloyd-Hughes plays a character who, by definition, is a bit of a cipher. Ezra Miller portrays Leon, a youthful law student who falls for Emma. Under different circumstances, he would have made a good match for her.

Emma initially rebuffs Leon. She does, however, have an affair with the disreputable Marquis d'Anderveilliers (Logan Marshall-Green). Of course, Emma expects too much of the relationship.

Paul Giamatti brings his usual avidity and a bit of grubbiness to the role of Monsieur Homais, an ambitious pharmacist who pushes Dr. Bovary into performing a supposedly ground-breaking operation on poor, club-footed villager. The operation, of course, does not go well.

Not without its virtues, Madame Bovary dwells on Emma's suffocating provincial surroundings, perhaps to emphasize that the constraints of her rote existence have alienated her from her natural self.

If Barthes succeeds in creating a plausible 19th century environment, she also manages to dull the movie's edge. The damp streets and uninviting interiors aren't enough to carry the day.

By the end, I felt as if I were re-familiarizing myself with elements of Flaubert's plot without penetrating the agonizing and acutely observant heart of a great story.

New life for 'Spider-Man' franchise

Fresh faces reinvigorate a familiar comic-book yarn..

A moody teen-ager is bitten by a spider that's been subjected to genetic enhancement. After the bite, the young man begins to develop strange powers. Suddenly, he's stronger than he should be. Streams of silken material shoot from the palms of his hands, further boosting his powers by allowing him to swing from high places or to leap from tall buildings without hitting the ground. It's as if he's able to make his own bungee cords.

A simple spider bite leads to a momentous destiny: The young man makes the transition from Peter Parker of Queens, N.Y., to Spider-Man.

Because most moviegoers and Marvel Comics fans already know all this, you may be asking yourself why we needed another movie to tell us how Spider-Man began his crime-fighting career, a movie that covers old ground rather than one that continues where the Spider-Man series left off in 2007.

Within the first few minutes of The Amazing Spider-Man, you may forget such questions, and realize that you're enjoying visiting familiar turf, this time with new faces and with a different sensibility than the one director Sam Raimi brought to the Spider-Man movies, a sensibility that's both edgier and a bit more complex.

The Amazing Spider-Man remains a comic-book movie, but in the hands of director Mark Webb, who's making the leap from a small independent film (500 Days of Summer) to a summer blockbuster, Spider-Man receives new life, something that might have been impossible with a movie called Spider-Man 4.

I saw The Amazing Spider-Man in Imax and 3D. But what I most liked about this version had little to do with the movie's extravagant effects or with watching Spidey leap from one Manhattan skyscraper to the next.

For me, the fun of this new edition of Spider-Man involved the way Webb and the movie's writers stake out their own turf, tweaking the characters to give them a different feel and adding more emotional complications.

Essentially, this edition of Spider-Man is like two movies in one. The first is a pure origins story in which Peter Parker acquires his superpowers. The second story gives Spider-Man his first real challenge, pitting him against The Lizard, a mutant creature derived from an experiment by a brilliant, one-armed scientist (Rhys Ifans) who has been working on something called cross-spieces genetics.

Events in the first part of the movie should serve as touchstones for most viewers. While he's still a boy, Parker loses his parents when -- for mysterious reasons -- they're forced to flee their New York home. Young Parker is left in the care of his aunt (Sally Field) and uncle (Martin Sheen).

When Parker enters high school, Andrew Garfield (The Social Network) takes over the role. The 28-year-old Garfield might be credible in grad school, but never looks as if he belongs in high school.

I know. I know. It's only a movie, but still ...

Webb does a good jog guiding Garfield through the awkward transition from Peter Parker to Spider-Man, even if he's a bit repetitive in showing us how Parker learns to use his superpowers. An early scene in which Peter's powers get the best of him on a subway car is one of the movie's most creative.

These high-school segments lay the movie's moral groundwork with Sheen's Uncle Ben setting ethical standards for young Peter.

I'm giving nothing away to tell you that Uncle Ben is killed by a fleeing felon, leaving Peter to develop on his own while Field's Aunt May frets about the fact that her nephew frequently arrives home looking much the worse for wear. Spider-Man is not immune from taking his lumps.

Garfield makes an edgier Spider-Man than his predecessor, Tobey Maguire, and he also suggests more complexity as he nurtures his crush on Gwen (Emma Stone), a whip-smart fellow student at a Queens high school. Gwen's father (Denis Leary) happens to be a New York City top cop who takes some convincing that a lizard-like monster is terrorizing Manhattan.

When it came to the monster portion of the movie, I was a bit skeptical myself. I didn't find The Lizard all that impressive, and a protracted action-oriented finale needlessly extends the movie's length.

But Garfield and Stone give Spider-Man a credible emotional life that fits with Peter's longing for his absent father, and in its overall impact, Spider-Man more the passes summer movie muster.

Here's hoping, though, that the next episode gets Peter out of high school and into a milieu where Garfield not only will be able to act the part, but to look it, as well, especially when he's not wearing Spidey's trademark mask.

A few laughs in this long engagement

Jason Segel and Emily Blunt star in an uneven but sometimes winning romantic comedy.

What happens if she receives the career offer of a lifetime, but he must take a backward to keep the relationship going? That entirely possible post-feminist question gives The Five Year Engagement a nice boost in the romantic comedy department: The movie takes a fairly realistic look at how one man's eager accommodations gradually turn into seething resentment.

Five Year Engagement has something else going for it: Jason Segel and Emily Blunt. They're both playing life-sized characters, and for once, we get to hang out with two people who actually seem to enjoy each other's company.

Segel co-wrote this comedy with Nicholas Stoller, the same partner with whom he wrote Forgetting Sarah Marshall. This time the duo -- Stoller also directed -- creates a movie that has an easy-going appreciation of oddball touches, but which also is burdened by its two-hour length, some dry spells and a fair amount of repetition.

The story begins in earnest when Segel's Tom gives up a premier sous chef's job in San Francisco to follow his fiancee to a research assistant's post at the University of Michigan.

In Michigan, Segel's Tom is forced to take a job for which he's obviously over-qualified, making sandwiches at Zingerman's Deli, evidently a fabled Ann Arbor institution.

Tom tries to make the best of things, even going native at point. He takes up hunting and grows an unruly set of Michigan-style mutton chops as if to prove to himself that he not only likes Michigan but fits into a stereotypical mid=American lifestyle.

The story's central problem -- Tom's increasing unhappiness -- can make it seem as if the screenplay is spinning its wheels in much the same way as Tom does, being pleasant and stuck at the same time. And at times, Five Year Engagement feels like a rough draft in which the authors couldn't bear to part with anything.

Tom's on a downward career spiral just as Blunt's Violet is beginning to find real career fulfillment under the tutelage of a psychology professor played by Rhys Ifans.

The love affair between Violet and Tom contrasts with another relationship. Violet's sister (Alison Brie) marries one of Tom's former kitchen colleagues (Chris Pratt). Pratt has the movie's grossest moments and also its funniest moment, which involves a Spanish love song.

Because the good parts of Five Year Engagement are very good, you long for what might have been had Stoller and Segel applied a bit more discipline to their task.

Violet's fellow grad students (Randall Park, Mindy Kaling and Kevin Hart) are supposed to provide on-going comic relief, but don't always rise to the occasion. (When it comes to satirizing the academic community, the movie's a bit of a dud.) Chris Parnell, as a fellow faculty spouse and one of Tom's few friends, earns some laughs, as does Brian Posehn, as a shaggy pickle aficionado and one of Tom's co-workers at Zingerman's.

Despite a plethora of quirky touches, Five Year Engagement doesn't always feel daringly original. When Violet almost strays from her loyalty to Tom, the script turns schematic. It tries to balance things by putting Tom in a compromising position. And Stoller's more exaggerated attempts at humor (a semi-serious joke involving a crossbow) represent bad notes sounded loudly.

After two movies together, Segel and Stoller have shown real potential, a promise that badly needs to be fully realized. Maybe the third time -- if there is one -- will be the absolute charm.