Tom Hanks stranded in a sci-fi desert

Sometimes movies are too idiosyncratic for the question I'm about to pose. It does, however, apply to Finch, the story of a robotics engineer (Tom Hanks) who lives alone in a post-apocalyptic world. Let’s revise that: Finch, the title character, isn't entirely alone. His companions include Goodyear, a dog he rescued, and a small robot named Dewey. So the question: Who precisely is this movie for? Finch knows he's dying from radiation poisoning. He must, therefore, create a robot to care for Goodyear once he's gone. He builds Jeff, a clunky-looking  robot that can learn to execute the requisite tasks. Finch, Jeff, Goodyear, and Dewey board an RV and head for San Francisco but never find a plausible and compelling groove for the story. Director Miguel Sapochnik treats Jeff as a source of juvenile comedy. He includes a bit of menace that may be too much for little ones. And he draws the movie's conclusion in maudlin strokes. To make matters worse, most sci-fi fans have been down this dystopian road many before -- and with better movies. Hanks can carry almost any movie but we're left wondering what brought such a gifted actor to a movie that feels  like a dim afterthought in the post-apocalyptic movie deluge.

Diana and deadening life among royals

 

   They eat the best foods but take no joy in dining. Surrounded by grandeur, they have become exemplars of stifling  insularity. A funereal solemnity embraces them, suggesting a form of social rigor mortis.

   These are the royals of director Pablo Larrain’s Spencer, a look at three days in the life of Princess Diana. Early on, the princess (Kristen Stewart) gets lost driving a small green sports car to Sandringham House, a mansion where the royal family plans to celebrate the Christmas holiday. With these royals, celebration plays more like commemoration.

   Larraín directed Jackie, a meditative 2016 movie about Jacqueline Kennedy. Larrain's fascination with the interior lives of iconic women pushes realism aside. Larrain introduces Spencer as “a fable from a true tragedy.”  

   No surprise, then, that Spencer becomes an increasingly  subjective chronicle of how Diana experiences the holiday with Stewart fully committing to the task of playing a woman desperate to reclaim her life.

   As Diana, Stewart talks in breathy gasps that, for me, evoked memories of Marlyn Monroe, another women locked in the gilded cage of expectation. Aside from her wardrobe and blonde  hair, little attempt has been made to make Stewart look like Diana, a move that wisely diverts attention from the external to the internal.  

   During three days at Sandringham, Diana is drawn to her old home, a now-deteriorating mansion not far from the royal estate. 

   The point, like many in Steven Knight's screenplay, becomes obvious: Diana longs to retrieve the self that she's supposed to  sacrifice on the altar of aristocratic duty.

   For Diana, everything is double-edged. Prince Charles (Jack Farthing) gives her a pearl necklace. The gift puts Diana in a suffocating chokehold that evokes comparisons to Anne Boleyn, the wife of Henry VIII who lost her head. Diana reads a book about Boleyn and even hallucinates conversations with Henry’s unfortunate second wife.

   The screenplay makes only one fleeting reference to Camilla Parker Bowles, Charles’s true love, but the point is clear. 

   We wonder whether Diana might have endured the burden of scripted confinement had Charles been an emotional partner rather than someone who, at least in this movie, pushes  his wife to accept a divided self. 

   Diana's supposed to project the royal image while realizing that her public posture never will fully accommodate her  buoyant personality. She must train her body to do things she hates.

   The rest of the characters reinforce the instructions Charles delivers to Diana as the couple stands on opposite sides of a large billiard table, another expression of Diana's terrible isolation.

   Timothy Spall portrays Major Alistar Gregory, whose sole duty involves protecting royals from prying eyes. His face molded into an impressive scowl, Spall talks softly but makes no attempt to conceal Gregory's authority.

  Jonny Greenwood, cinema's most original composer, creates an unsettling jazz soundtrack that drapes over the movie like a shroud and, at times, makes Spencer feel like an exercise in horror. 

   The score also underlines the impression that Spencer is driven, at least in part, by Larrain’s affinity for disharmonious notes. It also mirrors what's going on inside Diana's head.

  The approach is not without costs, the primary one being a sense of airlessness. From the opening, the message already seems clear: Life's being drained from this young woman. In a sense, nothing remains but for Larraín to tighten the vice grip of propriety around Diana's delicate neck.

  Because Spencer has a gloomy undertow,  an aura of unreality pervades the movie. In works such as Netflix’s enormously popular The Crown, royals don’t always seem like figures borrowed from a wax museum. Not here.

   Only Maggie (Sally Hawkins), Diana’s dresser, sees the princess as a human being and Charles sends her away, depriving Diana of even momentary possibilities for intimacy.

   Diana suffered from bulimia and Larraín uses her malady metaphorically, a dubious choice, I think. She can’t stomach the royal food that nourishes so much rigid conformity. When her liberating break-out arrives at the film’s end, she  takes her sons (Jack Nielen and Freddie Spry) for Kentucky Fried Chicken. Apparently, she’s willing to give up a seat at the royal table to consume the food of the people. 

   Larrain uses his considerable skills to create a change-resistant world in which, as someone puts it, there can be no past or future, only a ceremonial sameness. I guess that makes Spencer a sophisticated movie with a simple point: No one should be expected to endure the horrors of so much suffocating  isolation.

Too many ‘Eternals’ spoil this Marvel brew

      I saw Eternals a couple of weeks ago and instantly was struck by the inappropriateness of the title. Eternals? By the time I reached the parking lot, much about this overstocked comic book of a movie had faded into the hazy vault of dispensable memory.

    About those Eternals. Each of them is endowed with a power that can be employed to save humans from monstrous, water-dwelling creates known as Deviants. In a reasonably engaging prologue, we learn that the Deviants were defeated centuries ago by the Eternals but now have returned to make the world Deviant again. 

   Er, no, they don’t really have a slogan.

    The major news about Eternals takes us behind the camera. The movie marks the superhero debut of director Chloe Zhao, best known for the Oscar-winning and, in my view, somewhat over-rated Nomadland. 

   Watching a director with respected indie bona fides take the helm of a giant cinematic cruise liner breeds its own level of fascination — not to mention questions about whether two oppositional movie streams can co-exist.

   I’m not sure Eternals answers the question, but it left me with two thoughts: Congrats to Zhao for securing what I hope was a major payday and for orchestrating a complex narrative.

   Unfortunately, that narrative too often challenges coherence.

   Zhao works with a diverse cast of characters in pursuit of big-screen thrills. Brian Tyree Henry plays a gay Eternal with a husband and a son; Kumail Ali Nanjiani, Don Lee, and Gemma Chan add to the mix. Salma Hayek portrays an Eternal with authority over the other Eternals.

    Zhao shows that she can muster up impressive visuals. Some scenes look as if they might have been inspired by a John Ford Western, and there are references to Kubrick’s 2001. Other pulpy sights accompany this skewed mashup of mythological references.

    Although there are ten Eternals, Chan’s Sersi comes closest to being a central character. Sersi tries to organize the unruly Eternals into defeating the Deviants, which also means saving humanity.

    As the temperamental Thena, Angelina Jolie crops up from time to time, perhaps to remind us that she’s in the movie.

   Nanjiani brings sparks of life to the proceedings as Kingo, an Eternal who has become a Bollywood star. 

   Lia McHugh appears as Sprite, a character of perky annoyance.

   A love affair between Chan’s Sersi and Icarus (Richard Madden) adds a melancholic note while showing us that not all the Eternals are committed to truth, justice and the American way. 

   Oops. Wrong franchise.

   Eternals is another product of the Marvel universe, which seems to be striving to be infinite, a never-ending galaxy of movies and characters. 

   Eternals may be the first superhero movie in which two men kiss and scenes in which dialogue dominates can be found. But Externals also wobbles under an expository burden that operates like tow ropes on a fractured narrative. 

  Moreover, a two-hour and 37-minute length can feel as if it might be an acknowledgment of the ages of the Eternal characters. Zhao has made a long movie that feels long.

   I know I’ve omitted some of the Eternals and I should say that the movie might have been fun had the Eternals done nothing but show up at key points in human history, which is what early scenes promise.

   If we’re lucky, Eternals will be a one-off. But don’t count on it. When Marvel makes a mess of a movie, it also drops seeds that seemed destined to sprout in some future multiplex harvest. 

   Besides, critics have little choice when it comes to the ongoing Marvel parade, so it pays to keep an open mind.

A Western with contemporary kick

 

    The history of the Hollywood western has been a massively white affair, hardly a revelation to anyone who has spent more than a few years watching movies. Director Jeymes Samuel may have had that in mind while directing The Harder They Fall an almost entirely Black helping of genre tropes set in the Old West -- or Samuel's version of it.

   Samuel, who's British, has assembled a first-rate cast that includes Jonathan Majors, Idris Elba, Regina King, Zazie Beetz, Delroy Lindo, and LaKeith Stanfield.

  A revenge saga at heart, the movie wastes no time putting its brutal cards on the table. When he was only eight, Love watched Buck murder his mother and father. Buck then carved a small cross on Love's forehead.

   The movie takes place with the now-grown Love leading a gang of thieves who rob from other thieves. Nat also wants to avenge  the death of his parents. He's out for blood.

   Samuel embellishes the movie's genre ploys with rap music, jazz, and, most unusually, a modern dance interlude set in a saloon. Jay-Z and Kid Cudi's My Guns Go Bang turns up, not a tune you'd expect to find in a western -- and some of the more profane language obliterates the line between historical and contemporary talk.

    The melding of approaches is part of the point: The Harder They Fall is no throwback; it's intentionally styled to be of the moment; i.e., it’s fluent in the language of 21st Century cinema. 

    So, no, John Wayne couldn't ride into this movie and find a comfort zone.

   Although Majors's Love  is the main character, the movie has an ensemble feel and Samuel makes sure not to shortchange the female cast members. King portrays Trudy, a tough-talking, no-nonsense assistant to the soft-spoken but no less menacing Buck. 

   Beetz appears as Stagecoach Mary, an independent woman who provides Nat with a love interest -- but never plays second fiddle to him.

   Not only is the music anachronistic but so are some of the movie's gender variations. Danielle Deadwyler plays Cuffy, an outlaw of ambiguous gender identity. 

   The  story advances toward the all-Black town of Redwood City where Buck, newly sprung from prison by Trudy and cohorts, plans to establish his empire. The revenge-hungry Love has other plans.

   Samuel's over-reliance on looming close-ups can be annoying and the plot tends to trip over itself here and there. But the movie has a quality of the unexpected that fends off dullness and the actors all work at peak form, many operating in both comic and serious veins.

   The movie makes one brilliant satirical joke when Nat and his crew head to an all-white town to rob the local bank. The town  has been drained of color by a production team with a cutting sense of humor. 

   I don't know the history of the movie's characters who are based on real people, but it's clear that Samuel, who co-wrote the screenplay with Boaz Yakin, has taken great liberties in order to produce a no-holds-barred western that blazes across the screen, sometimes falling off its horse, but always creating a strong vibe -- presuming there was such thing as a "vibe" in the Old West.

A wobbly mixture of horror and comedy

    If director Edgar Wright were a painter, his palette would be a riotous blur of colors, one bleeding into another.

     Just that kind of dizzying impact may have been what Wright was aiming for with Last Night in Soho, a mixture of horror and thriller tropes that alternates between contemporary Soho and the district during the 1960s.

   I called Last Night a horror film, but that’s not quite accurate. Although it spouts a fair share of blood, the movie also has a bouncy spirit that goes against the horror grain. It's upbeat horror.

   The story follows Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) from the country to London where she hopes to prepare herself for a career as a fashion designer.  Obsessed with the 1960s, Eloise enrolls in a school where the students seem to be moving at a faster social pace than the one to which she's accustomed.

   She should have known. Her grandmother (Rita Tushingham) already warned her about London's ability to swallow and destroy a naive young person.

   In an effort to escape the hard-partying atmosphere of her dormitory, Eloise rents a room in a house run by a landlady (Diana Rigg) who may be up to more than we expect. 

   Once ensconced in her new digs, Eloise begins to dream of life in Soho during the swinging Sixties. 

   If this is a dream, it vividly transports Eloise back to the time that long has fascinated her and gives the movie one more twist, this one involving time travel. 

   In its '60s segments, Eloise begins to follow the life of Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy), a young woman who hopes to establish herself as a singer in London's fabled West End.

   The line between Eloise and Sandie begins to blur and the movie then contrives to teach Eloise that there’s more to the ‘60s than music and fashion. The ‘60s devoured dreams and dreamers, even slashed them to death.

   To achieve its cautionary goals, the story introduces a slick Londoner (Matt Smith) who promises to help Sandie achieve stardom. Let's just say he's not true to his word.

  Meanwhile back in the present, a fellow student (Michael Ajao) sees that Eloise is troubled. He tries his best to help but has no real grasp of the fact that Eloise's life includes increasingly harrowing trips to the 1960s.

  Terence Stamp drifts through the proceedings, a brooding threatening presence.

  A slick stylist, Wright (Baby Driver) has made a movie that eventually fails to be either amusing or frightening enough to save itself from being a muddled mashup that doesn't always track.

   And exactly what's at the heart of Wright's metaphorical assault on the '60s? Most likely it's youthful naïveté, low-hanging fruit that's too ripe for the picking.

   If you lived through the ‘60s, you may want to push aside the horror and attempted social commentary and simply enjoy the memories evoked by the movie’s soundtrack.

  Although there’s another danger here, as well. You may find Peter and Gordon’s A World Without Love running uncontrollably through your head. 

   Peter and Gordon? If you don't already know, don't ask.

A movie about a movie that didn't happen

  Director Vanessa Lapa grabs hold of an unsettling subject in her documentary Speer Goes to Hollywood. Lapa tells the story of how the man known as Hitler's architect entered discussions with British screenwriter Andrew Birkin who was to write a screenplay about Speer's life. Interest in Speer was prompted by the fact that Speer had written a bestseller called Inside the Third Reich. 

  Much of Lapa's movie involves some 40 hours of interviews that Birkin conducted with Speer. These are delivered by voice actors, a fact that left me feeling bit letdown when I read in the end credits. Viewers may think they're listening to Birkin's tapes, which may have been too degraded to use. 

   Stanley Kubrick evidently considered Speer's story, but only if any resultant movie did nothing to lionize the high-ranking Nazi.

    British director Carol Reed communicates with Birkin through various stages of the screenplay's development, reminding him that he may be involved in a whitewash of a Nazi who was convicted at Nuremberg for using slave labor. Speer served 20 years.

   Almost all of Speer's comments are attenuated. He wanted to build. Hitler gave him his opportunity. He didn't know about genocidal plans involving Jews. He rose to the position of Minister of Armaments and War Production.

    What emerges is a portrait of a slippery man who put ambition before morality but the film's historical footage tells its own story. Scenes of the Nuremberg trials feature the defendants chatting with one another as if they might be at a reunion. Scenes of Nazi brutality feel freshly horrific. 

    Watching Speer Goes to Hollywood enables us to  understand why a serious filmmaker might consider a movie that explored the power of blind ambition -- and that seems to raise the key question about Speer. 

   Did he blind himself to Nazi horrors or did he ignore them? Regardless of the answer, Lapa's documentary puts Speer's vanity, his capacity for compartmentalizing, and his delusions on disturbing display.

  Lapa shows us a man whose inflated self-regard may have protected him from a story that would have submerged others in the deepest pools of remorse and despair.*

*I recently (Nov 18) received this comment from Andrew Birkin and decided that it belonged with the review and not in the comments section. 

Birkin writes: 

   I only just read your very perceptive review for Vanessa Lapa's "Speer Goes to Hollywood", which nevertheless makes a number of false assumptions based on Lapa's film and her publicity pitch. The Hollywood Reporter has recently posted an addendum to their review for the same movie, as follows: Addendum: Birkin has gone on the record to point out that Lapa’s film takes liberties with the material he recorded, and the director has acknowledged to some journalists that the lines read by the actors are compressed from the conversation on Birkin’s tapes and incorporate material from other interviews. 

   I should be most grateful if you would consider doing the same, although of course using whatever words you see fit. 

   I can send you a time-coded list of Lapa’s main inaccuracies, as well as my response to a recent Q&A between Lapa and P J Grisar, with my own comments, from which you are free to quote or follow up as you wish. I would post them here but assume there isn't room. Glenn Kenny is currently writing a piece for the Roger Ebert website, where he recently reviewed the film, and Variety has invited me to write a first-person article about the whole wretched saga.  

   "Thank you for your consideration" as studios are wont to chirp come Oscar time. Andrew Birkin "gone on record" hyperlinks to my statement on the wsws.org website over a year ago. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/03/13/birk-m13.html

My reply:

I thought Birkin deserved to have his words used, not mine. I will say, though, that I received no exposure to any publicity pitch from the director or anyone else. I've never spoken to her and only watched the movie as it was provided to me. The Q&A to which Birkin refers appeared in The Forward on Oct. 26, 2021 under the headline, “How a notorious Nazi almost got a Hollywood biopic — and why Kubrick refused to direct.” 

Movie can't match its serious subject

 Amanda Seyfried stars as a children's book author trying to cope with severe depression in A Mouthful of Air, a movie based on a novel by Amy Koppelman. Koppelman also directed the movie and wrote its screenplay. As a look at depression that can lead to suicide, Mouthful of Air falls short on insight and dramatic heft. Seyfried portrays Julie Davis, a doting mother and children's book author who lives on Manhattan's Upper Westside with her devoted husband (Finn Wittrock). Julie's mother (Amy Irving) offers help after Julie attempts suicide, as does a concerned psychiatrist (Paul Giamatti). A scene in which Julie's sister-in-law (Jennifer Carpenter) accuses her of selfishness has some power, as does the occasional tension that develops between Julie and Wittrock's Ethan. Julie's second pregnancy and a move to the suburbs has everyone walking on eggshells around the fragile Julia. Although the movie has a tough ending, it seldom digs as deeply as its subject demands. Animated examples of Julia's work don't help either.

Wes Anderson's insular ‘Dispatch’

     Wes Anderson is an artful filmmaker and master miniaturist, a director who knows how to situate his films in the rich stream of cinema history. He's idiosyncratic and hardly ever seems to make a film in which his main objective is to soothe an audience. These are admirable traits and also the reasons why I always scold myself when I can't fully get behind an Anderson film.

   That's the case with The French Dispatch, a movie  apparently intended as a tribute to great magazine journalism. 

   Bill Murray plays the editor of the French Dispatch. Headquartered in the city of Ennui along the Blasé river, the Dispatch has built its reputation on the power of the written word and the idiosyncratic journalistic eye.

    Murray articulates two rules for those who work for the Dispatch. Don't cry and write in a way that makes it seem as if you did it on purpose.

   The plan: When Murray's Arthur Howitzer Jr. dies, the paper dies with him -- perhaps Anderson's way of acknowledging the disappearance of Great Editors; i.e., editorial titans who knew how to work with "difficult" writers -- and had never heard of focus groups, much less consulted one.

    An anthology divided into three parts with a prologue, the movie focuses on the Dispatch, a New Yorker-like publication complete with a table of contents and drawings. The meat of the movie involves three Dispatch feature pieces presented in black-and-white, color, and mixtures of the two.

    First among them, The Concrete Masterpiece, a story in which an art maven (Tilda Swinton) talks about a brilliant rebel painter named Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio Del Toro). 

   Imprisoned for murder, Rosenthaler uses a prison guard (Lea Seydoux) as a model. Adrien Brody enters the story as an art dealer who wants to exploit Moses's work -- and is, therefore, outraged when Rosenthaler produces frescos on the prison's walls. How the hell can those be sold?

   The best and most genuinely bizarre of the three pieces, The Concrete Masterpiece features Del Toro as a genius who seems to have separated himself from the constraints of ordinary morality. 

   Next up, Revisions to a Manifesto featuring Timothee Chalamet and Frances McDormand. McDormand plays a writer caught up in what looks like the student rebellion of 1968. She develops a relationship  -- as a kind of mentor and sexual partner -- for Chalamet's character, leader of a student revolt. She also crosses  an ethical line, helping Chalamet's character write a manifesto. 

   By the time of the second movie, I found myself asking just how much quirkiness and intricate detailing I could tolerate. 

   OK, part three, The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner. Jeffrey Wright portrays a writer who's working on a profile of a chef. Listening to Wright's delivery of the segment’s abundant dialogue has its rewards. But Private Dining Room, which also makes room for animation and crime, seems crowded to the point of indulgence.

   Almost every Anderson movie has a finely etched quality as well as a whimsical sense of humor and French Dispatch is not without those qualities. Still ....

   I wouldn’t say that Anderson has chiseled the life out of his movie; it's more that the chiseling almost becomes the life of an intricate inward-looking movie that carves out a place for itself — but not always for an audience. 

   Is it possible for a movie to talk to itself?

A look at an artist obsessed with cats

 

  In the well-leafed pages of art history, you’d be hard-pressed to find references to an artist whose sole preoccupation was with cats. Louis Wain was such an artist, a man who drew anthropomorphic pictures of cats for newspapers. He became popular for adding humor and color to the day’s drab news.

  In The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, Benedict Cumberbatch immerses in eccentricity as an oddball artist who became increasingly deranged as his life progressed. Wain’s art also became more interesting and adventurous as he aged and retreated into his own world. 

  If you like psychedelic cats, Wain's your man. He might have been first on the block. Look it up.

  Some believed Wain to be schizophrenic. Maybe he was simply demented. Or maybe he fell somewhere on the spectrum of personalities destined to inhabit worlds most of us are content  to visit only in biographical movies.

  Director Will Sharpe makes use of a deeply committed performance from Cumberbatch to bring the artist to life in ways that can be amusing, although the movie never quite makes a case for its existence.  

   Put another way, Electrical Life teeters on the edge of success without ever quite falling over. 

   The story’s key event involves Wain’s marriage to Emily (Claire Foy), a match that scandalized Wain’s five sisters, women who regarded Emily as beneath the family’s station.

   Class distinctions aside, the union enables Wain to separate from his sisters, establishing an independent residence with a woman who tapped into his heretofore neglected capacity for happiness.

   Emily had been working for the family as a tutor to the daughters of the Wain sisters, a group presided over by Caroline (Andrea Riseborough), the oldest and most severe of the sisters.

   Wain's obsession with cats begins when he and Emily save a stray. Life seems good, but as we know, Victorian stories seldom escape misery.

   Emily’s early death from cancer left Wain alone and bereft. Her departure also abandons the movie to Wain's eccentricities and hallucinations, some of which Sharpe brings to life with mixed results.

   The story also highlights Wain’s financial ineptitude; he didn’t seem to care whether publishers took advantage of him. He never bothered to copyright his work. He's the artist of cliche; i.e., one who couldn't be bothered with contracts or terms of compensation.

    Lest we get lost in all of this, a  narration is provided by Olivia Colman, who has been charged with contextualizing the Victorian England in which Wain labored. She also helps clarify the movie’s title: Wain became obsessed with the new science of electricity.

   Several images at the end of the film have hallucinatory beauty that may not exactly fit the rest of the movie but make a pleasurable appearance nonetheless.

   Overall, Electrical Life wavers as it seeks a tone that matches Wain’s eccentricities. The story wears out as it moves through Wain’s massively disheveled life.

    Who knows? I might have liked it better if I weren't a dog person.