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MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – DEAD RECKONING PART ONE”: Big. Bigger. Biggest.

July 12, 2023 by butlerscinemascene

Hayley Atwell, Tom Cruise

“MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – DEAD RECKONING PART I” My rating: B (In theaters)

163 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

The latest “Mission: Impossible” is exactly what fans expect. Only bigger.

Great action sequences, a bit of suspense, gorgeous location photography, (mostly) pretty people to look at.

Yeah, there’s nothing here even remotely approaching valid human drama, but it’s summer, the season of amusement parks.  And “M:I – Dead Reckoning Part I” is the biggest roller coaster around.

The film (it’s been written by Bruce Geller, Erick Jendresen and Christopher McQuarrie and directed by McQuarrie) opens with a nail-biting sequence beneath the polar ice cap.  Sailors on a Russian submarine are testing a new artificial intelligence program providing sophisticated masking technology that renders the boat invisible to prying eyes.

But something goes terribly wrong.

Eavesdropping on a meeting of U.S. national security experts, we get the Cliff’s Notes explanation:

The Russkies’ A.I. has achieved sentience — it’s now referred to as “The Entity” — and has infected every digital corner of our world: computers, cell phones, satellites. There’s no way to hide from this new uncontrollable version of Big Brother, who knows everything humans are up to.

There’s a nice visual joke here…a vast office (think the warehouse at the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark”) is filled with thousands of government clerks using last-century typewriters to copy sensitive digital files onto paper lest The Entity decide to clean house.

Anyway, somehow our spy bosses learn that a special key — a literal, physical key — can be used to unlock and access The Entity.  The key comes in two parts that fit together to form a sort of three-dimensional, glowing cross (religious imagery, anyone?).

Except that the two pieces have been separated.  They could be anywhere on Earth.

So who do you call with an impossible task?

Enter Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, who with his M:I colleagues (Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames) has the will and wherewithal to track down the metallic MacGuffin and prevent the end of the world.

“Dead Reckoning” reunites Hunt with both his on-again-off-again flame Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), who comes out of hiding to pitch in, and the Black Widow (Vanessa Kirby), an amoral  dealer in secret technology.

And he has a new nemesis in Gabriel (Esai Morales), a psycho killer who serves as The Entity’s arms and legs. Apparently many moons ago, before Ethan joined the M:I, Gabriel brutally murdered the woman our hero loved. (We see all this in rapid-cut flashbacks.)

Oh, yeah, Gabriel has a sword-waving female sidekick (Pom Klementieff) so implacably effective that she could  be cousin to Schwarzenegger’s Terminator.

Pretty much stealing the film, though, is Hayley Atwell as Grace, an in-it-for-herself thief, pickpocket and con artist who has been hired by a mysterious figure to transport one of the key halves to a buyer.  Grace is the Han Solo of the piece, a self-serving sort whose greed is coerced by Ethan into something vaguely resembling patriotic virtue.

Once you get past all the explanatory dialogue, “Dead Reckoning” gets down to business, delivering an eye-popping set piece every 20 minutes or so.

A nuclear bomb threat at a crowded international airport. A destructive car chase through Rome (around the Coliseum, no less). Vicious brawls on the bridges and in the alleys of Venice.

And finally a runaway train ride through the Italian alps and a massive wreck over a bottomless gorge that approaches the destructive genius of Buster Keaton’s “The General.” 

This climactic sequence also provides Cruise with his wildest-haired stunt yet — riding a motorcycle off a mountain top and dropping like a rock into an alpine valley, only to be jerked up short by the parachute in his backpack (never go biking without one).

Cruise is famous for doing his own stunts, and the film is forever making it clear that, yes, this is a movie star risking his neck for our pleasure.

Lest all this come off as a case of look-at-me egoism, Cruise injects self-deprecating humor of a sort not seen before in the series.  Quite frequently Ethan looks befuddled, perplexed and incredulous…all of which makes our hero more vulnerable than the ubermench he’s portrayed in the past. 

Once unflappable, Ethan now flaps. A little, anyway.

At two-and-a-half-hours-plus “Dead Reckoning” almost wears out its welcome…I could have done with a bit less declamation between the exciting parts.

The idea that you can only beat an all-knowing artificial intelligence by falling back on the analog technology of yesteryear is introduced but never explored.  (Actually, that might make for a great episode of “Black Mirror.”)

And of course the film ends with The Entity still in control of the digital world…this is only Part I, you know.

But, hey, it’s advertised as a thrill ride and it delivers.

| Robert W. Butler

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WHAT I’M WATCHING

July 5, 2023 by butlerscinemascene

Jeremy Allen White, Ebon Moss-Bachrach

“THER BEAR” (Hulu):  Everything you’ve heard about Season 2 of ”The Bear” is true. The show is off-the-charts wonderful.

Over 10 episodes we follow Bassett-eyed Carmy (Emmy-winner Jeremy Allen White) and his misfit band of chefs as they struggle to turn their former sandwich shop into a high-end restaurant. Along the way Carmy finds romance with old flame Claire (Molly Gordon), opening up the possibility of a stabilizing relationship in his peripatetic life.

Around that through line, though, the showrunners and writers devote individual episodes to the experiences of peripheral characters.  The pastry chef Marcus (Lionel Boyce) is sent to Europe to study his craft at the elbow of a British baker (Will Poulter); it’s his first time abroad and an education in all sorts of ways. 

Even more compelling is the next-do-the-last episode in which Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), the sad, sour-tempered bozo who seems to infect everything he touches, is farmed out for a week to one of Chicago’s Michelin-starred eateries.

 At first Richie  rebels at the grunt work he’s assigned (a whole day polishing forks?) but little by little he starts to understand the pride with which employees of a great restaurant go about their jobs.  On his last day he peels mushrooms with the joint’s founder (Olivia Colman, no less), soaking up kitchen wisdom  and returning to The Beef a changed man.  It’s simply a brilliant transformation.

But that’s not even the season’s high point.  No, that would be Episode 6 (“Fishes”) which consists entirely of a flashback to the family’s last Christmas before brother Mike (Jon Bernthal) committed suicide. It is one of the greatest hours of TV I’ve ever seen, with an unbelievably furious appearance by Jamie Lee Curtis as the clan’s coming-apart-at-the-seams matriarch.

 Cooking a holiday meal for a crowd can prove traumatic for even the most even-keeled of us…when you’re a raging alcoholic boiling over with resentment and guilt it’s an atomic device just waiting to go off. Curtis is terrifying and achingly sad…the perf has “Emmy” stamped all over it.

And the episode is crammed with heavy-hitting guest stars like Sarah Paulson, John Mulaney, Bob Odenkirk and Gillian Jacobs in addition to clan members like Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt), preggers sister Natalie (Abby Elliott) and her too-decent-to-be-human hubby, Pete (Chris Witaske). 

The whole thing is played at breakneck speed with  rattattatt overlapping dialogue and emotional pyrotechnics…raising the question of how many awards one episode of TV can possible earn.

Kate Box, Madeleine Sami

“DEADLOCH” (Prime): This Aussie whodunnit is an absolute hoot, a parody of the hugely popular “Broadchurch,” only this time with a gender bending approach that somehow manages to be screamingly funny without dipping into overt political incorrectness.

Like “Broadchurch” this murder mystery unfolds in a small town beside a huge body of water. Deadlock is a Tasmania burg on the shore of the redundantly-named Deadlock Lake, from which dead bodies keep washing up to disturb revellers at the food-forward Feastival.

Kate Box (she played the rogue lawyer’s Girl Friday in the Aussie hit “Rake”) stars as police chief  Dulcie Colllins who, like about 80 percent of the women in town, is gay, Her partner (Alicia Gardener) is the New Age-y town veterinarian, a raw abrasion of emotional neediness and lesbian militancy.

As the bodies pile up it becomes clear that Deadlock has a serial killer problem (hmmm…all the victims were hetero men with histories as sexual abusers) the authorities send in big-city detective Eddie Redcliffe, a foul-mouthed bull-in-a-china-shop sort who is like every drunken, donut-scarfing cop ever depicted…with the novel exception that Eddie is a woman.

She’s played as a sort of smoking human fireplug by Madeleine Sami, who at times seems to have based the performance on Alex Borstein’s memorable turn as Susie Myerson in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” Well, if you’re gonna steal, steal from the best — this a gut-busting firecracker of a performance.

The show’s creators and writers (Kate McCartney, Kate McLennan) have a lovely time filtering the usual murder mystery elements through a sieve of gay awareness.  There are some moments that had me on the floor…like the women’s choir whose voices sound absolutely heavenly until they get to  the lyric about touching yourself.

“Deadloch” is more a case of concentrating on the journey than on the solution.  But that journey is a well worth it.

| Robert W. Butler

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“RUN RABBIT RUN”: Babadooked

July 5, 2023 by butlerscinemascene

Darah Snook, Lily LaTorre

“Run Rabbit Run” My rating: C+ (Netflix)

100 minutes | No MPAA rating

The folks who made the Netflix thriller “Run Rabbit Run” cannot get out from under the big shadow cast by 2014’s “The Babadook.”

Both films are from Australia, both are about a single mother whose child exhibits threatened/threatening behavior, both ride a fine line between the supernatural and the  psychological.

But whereas “The Babadook” got under your skin (thanks to a klller perf from Essie Davis as a terrified parent), “…Rabbit…” is more clinical than involving.  It definitely is not scary.

And if it’s not scary, what’s the point?

Sarah Snook (late of HBO’s “Succession”) plays Sarah, a divorced obstetrician with an adorable young daughter, Mia (Lily LaTorre).

Sarah starts getting reports from school that Mia is exhibiting troubling behavior.  Like, she’s drawing horrific scenes on the back of her classroom artwork.  Then the child fashions a hand-torn rabbit mask from construction paper and refuses to take it off (she looks like a bad dream in the wake of a “Donny Darko” viewing).

And then Mia begins insisting that she is not Mia, but rather Alice, Sarah’s younger sister who more than 30 years earlier disappeared from the family’s remote farmhouse.  

Sarah is freaked…clearly she has been suppressing memories of that traumatic experience, and Mia’s insistence that she is Alice is triggering some disturbing flashbacks.

Hannah Kent’s screenplay tosses out all sorts of possibilities — ghostly possession, reincarnation, guilt-triggered dementia — but never settles on any of them.  Moreover, the deep, dark secret at the heart of the old mystery is so obvious that only the densest viewer will fail to see it coming.

Director Daina Reed tries to compensate with oodles of atmosphere, especially once Sarah and Mia decamp to the long-empty house where Sara grow up. Bonnie Elliott’s cinematography finds all sorts or creepy possibilities in the commonplace  and the landscape — the house is perched on a cliff over a broad river (all sorts of ways for a child to go missing) — is eerily dreamlike.

Your final response to “Run Rabbit Run” is likely to be “Is that all there is?” 

| Robert W. Butler

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“ASTEROID CITY”: Eccentricities

June 26, 2023 by butlerscinemascene

Scarlett Johansson, Jason Schwartzman

“ASTEROID CITY” My rain: C+ (In theaters)

105 minutes | MPAA rating: PB-13

“Asteroid City” may be the most Wes Anderson movie ever.

This is a mixed blessing.

Like his last outing, the fragmented New Yorker magazine parody “The French Dispatch,” this is a meta-heavy concoction that leaves the viewer tickled by its cleverly crafted literary conceits but waiting for some sort of emotional edge to emerge from all the whimsey splattered across the screen.

In the decade since his deliriously amusing and unexpectedly moving “Moonrise Kingdom,  Anderson has cleverly exploited a story-within-a-story format (reaching a high point with “The Grand Budapest Hotel”) but only at the expense of often turning his characters into cartoons rather than people we care about. 

“Asteroid City” begins with a 1955 TV broadcast.  An officious host (Bryan Cranston) informs us that this program (recorded in grainy black-and-white) will take us behind the scenes of the creation of a new dramatic work by one of America’s great playwrights. We see theater legend Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) pecking away at his typewriter, and then the scene shifts to full color.

Now we’re watching Earp’s play, “Asteroid City.”  Except that what we’re seeing is waaaaay too big to be contained by a theater stage.  The yarn unfolds in the middle of a vast desert peppered with cacti and the occasional animated roadrunner. Everything seems to be have been dusted with orange sand and bathed in Day-Glo colors  The town’s buildings (gas station, diner, cabin court) seem real enough, but the Monument Valley-ish buttes in the background look like something out of an elaborate pop-up book.

The plot — to the extent that the film has one — goes like this:  Dozens of travelers (drivers with car problems, a  busload of adolescent science nerds and their chaperone)  are stranded in Asteroid City when an alien spaceship descends over the burg’s main attraction, a meterorite crater. This close encounter of the third kind brings a whole lot of armed soldiers; everything goes into lockdown until the authorities can figure out what to do.

But here’s where the meta comes in:  The characters stuck in Asteroid City periodically wander out of the play and into the black-and-white backstage area; now they are actors discussing their performances or preparing to make their entrances.

It works the other way, too.  At one point Cranston’s narrator stumbles into the full color Asteroid City set, looks panicked and quickly sidesteps his way out of the film frame.

Yeah, clever. But we’ve got to care what happens in Asteroid City to fill in the other half of the equation, and we don’t. There are numerous characters whose stories might be compelling, but Anderson’s off-the-cuff style keeps us at arm’s length.

Still, it sometimes looks as if the entire membership of the Screen Actors Guild was hired for the project:  Jason Schwartzman (as a widowed war photographer on a trip with his brainiac teenage son and a trio of young daughters — like the “Sesame Street” version of Macbeth’s three weird sisters); Scarlett Johansson (as a glamorous but vacuous movie star vacationing with her adolescent daughter), Jeffrey Wright (an Army general),  Tom Hanks (the Schwartzman character’s wealthy father-in-law), Rupert Friend (a singing cowboy on tour with his band).

That’s just scratching the surface.  Look also for Hope Davis, Liev Schreiber, Maya Hawke, Matt Dillon, Steve Carell, Bob Balaban, Tilda Swinton, Fisher Stevens, Willem Dafoe, Margot Robbie and, in an inspired bit of casting I won’t give away here, Jeff Goldblum.

There’s some loopily lovely stuff — periodically a car chase between crooks and cops, guns blazing, rips down main street and out into the distance…apparently they’re on an endless loop. And every now and then a loud boom is accompanied by a mushroom cloud blossoming on the horizon.

But “Asteroid City” is eccentric without ever being truly engaging.

| Robert W. Butler

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“STAN LEE”: Mr. Marvel

June 23, 2023 by butlerscinemascene

“STAN LEE” My rating: B- (Disney +)

86 minutes | No MPAA rating

Some day someone may make a documentary about the world of Marvel that tackles all the really interesting questions raised by Stan Lee and his comic book (and later, movie) empire.

“Stan Lee,” though, isn’t that movie.

Directed by David Gelb and narrated by the late Stan Lee himself (his voiceover appears to have been culled from numerous interviews over the years), the movie  drops no big revelations.  

Lee’s rise to comic book fame and his late-in-life gig as the grand old man of comic books (doing cameos in Marvel movies)  have been well documented over the decades; serious Marvel fans will find much of this doc old news.

Moreover, the film comes perilously close to starry-eyed idol worship.  Probably that could not be avoided since this is essentially Lee giving us his life story — the project is from his point of view, after all.

You’ve gotta give Lee credit for sheer creativity and for recognizing the possibilities of a much-maligned medium.  

“Comic books can have tremendous impact,” he tells us. “You can convey a story or information faster, more clearly and more enjoyably than any other way short of motion pictures.”

Lee dreamed up dozens of now-iconic fictional characters, and bucked the conventional wisdom by addressing real-life social issues in his stories. His output over the decades has been staggering.

The film refers briefly to some of the controversies raised by his career — particularly whether Lee (who wrote the early comics) downplayed the contributions of artists like Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby in the creation of the Marvel characters.  The film has snippets of an ‘80s  radio broadcast in which Lee and Kirby almost get into verbal fisticuffs, but director Gelb isn’t interested in digging too deep.

The doc makes the case — without actually saying so out loud — that Lee may have had a greater impact on modern arts and entertainment than any individual since Walt Disney.

 I’m not just talking about Marvel’s box office clout. Back in the day Lee and company broke with comic book convention by giving us superheroes with flaws and anxieties; they also broke the unspoken color barrier (Black Panther) and made sure women were well represented among the supernaturally gifted.

In recent years “serious” filmmakers like Martin Scorsese have decried the dominance of Marvel movies, accusing the brand of dumbing down the audience with a diet of silly super powers and last reel smackdowns.

You won’t find even a hint of that controversy here.

The film is good looking and has a surprising amount of archival material (Lee apparently was a home movie enthusiast). And to illustrate those scenes for which there are no photos or films, Gelb has relied on dozens of intricately detailed dioramas (say, of the bustling Marvel offices) through which his camera wanders.

| Robert W. Butler

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“CHEVALIER”: Native son

June 17, 2023 by butlerscinemascene

Kelvin Harrison, Jr.

“CHEVALIER” My rating: C+ (Hulu)

109 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Revolution. Racism.  Romance.

As a black man in the court of Louis XVI,  Joseph Bologne (aka the Chevalier de Saint-Georges) experienced a lifetime of triumphs and tragedies…enough to keep a half dozen other men fully occupied.

Why, then, is the movie based on his life so…well, uninvolving?

The historic facts alone  are pretty overwhelming. 

Born to a French planter and his slave on the Caribbean isle of Guadaloupe, young Joseph displayed musical precocity at an early age and was sent to Paris to study at a prestigious academy.

His dark skin set him up for much abuse; by his late teens (as an adult he is portrayed by Kelvin Harrison Jr.) he had a reputation as so ferocious a swordsman that few dared insult him openly.

His musical career faced the same prejudicial barriers; fortunately Joseph  found a powerful patron in the queen, Marie Antoinette (Lucy Boynton), who sponsored many public performances of his works (in some quarters he was known as “the black Mozart”) but could not secure for him the coveted position of director of the Paris Opera. He just wasn’t white enough.

As a member of an abused minority Joseph gradually embraced the egalitarian ideas that would lead to the French Revolution and the beheading of his royal benefactor. Happily the film ends well before that grim event.

Still, that’s plenty to work with.  But screenwriter Stefani Robinson and director Stephen Williams don’t seem to know just what to think of their protagonist…he’s a musical genius, yes, but he’s also just as spoiled and dissipated as the young French nobles with whom he hangs. 

In lieu of really understanding the Chevalier, the film turns to an interracial romance — one based on fact.  Joseph falls for the young wife (Samara Weaving) of a boorish, jingoistic and, yes, racist military man (Marton Csokas). The big issue is whether the two lovers will ever be able to bring their relationship out of the shadows.

Now all this would be fine if — and it’s a big if — the film were able to generate any real erotic or romantic heat.  We have to care desperately that  the two lovers to find happiness.

Uh, sorry. No.  The emotions on display here are as dulled and blunted as the production design and costumes are dazzling. After a while the eye candy cannot disguise the emotional hole at the film’s center.

Still, it’s glorious to look at. Take what you can get.

| Robert W. Butler

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“FLAMIN’ HOT”: Spice of life

June 11, 2023 by butlerscinemascene

Jesse Garcia

“FLAMIN’ HOT” My rating: C+ (Netflix)

99 minutes | MPAA ratiung: PG-13

It must be a sign of late-stage capitalism, this influx of movies celebrating commercial products.

There’s “Air” (about the creation of the Air Jordan athletic shoe), “Tetris” (about the conquest of the world by a video game), and now  “Flamin’ Hot,” the origin story of a mouth-burning variation of Cheetos.

Actually these films aren’t so much about the products themselves as the people who thought them up. 

In the case of Eva Longoria’s “Flamin’ Hot” (it’s her directing debut) that would be Richard Montañez, a Mexican American whose rags-to-riches story — laid out in countless motivational talks and a 2021 autobiography — begins with an impoverished childhood and a stint dealing drugs. 

After nearly a decade as a janitor in a California FritoLay plant, we’re told, Montañez convinced his bosses to use his homemade spice blend on its products, thus opening up a whole new market:  the country’s growing but overlooked Hispanic demographic.

The one-time banger became FritoLay’s director of multicultural marketing. And, like, rich.

As scripted by Lewis Click and Linda Yvette Chavez, the film is equal parts outrage, uplift and comic schtick. 

The film is narrated by Montañez (Jesse Garcia), who strains to make a joke of the forces allied against him…much of this dialogue sounds like it was plucked from a second-tier ethnic standup comic. If you don’t think it’s amusing in the first 10 minutes you probably should look elsewhere for entertainment.

We see (briefly) his childhood and his encounters with a violent, disapproving stepfather (Emilio Rivera), his teen years hanging with the neighborhood toughs, and finally his marriage to the ever-loyal Judy (Annie Gonzalez) and his acceptance of a responsible if unglamorous job at the potato chip plant.

Montañez is hard working and ambitious.  But we’ve already seen what It’s like to grow up in near poverty in a society that treats you as a second-class citizen, and the factory brass can’t imagine that a lowly broom pusher might have something important to offer.

Still, at home Montañez uses his wife and kids as guinea pigs to perfect his heady blend of traditional Mexican spices. And one day, when he’s sure he has a formula that his fellow Hispanics will gobble up, he risks all by making a phone call to the boss-of-bosses,  Pepsico chief Roger Enrico (Tony Shalhoub).

The rest, as they say, is history.  Or is it?

A couple of years back The Los Angeles Times looked into Montañez’s claims that he was the inventor of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and reported that according to people who worked for Frito-Lay at the time, the chile-heavy formula was developed by employees in Texas.  

Montañez’s genius, apparently, was marketing to his fellow Hispanics and in thinking up new products for the Flamin’ Hot brand (among them a neon orange version of Mountain Dew).

Well, you don’t go to the movies for Gospel truth.

“Flamin’ Hot” is more important for societal reasons than artistic ones.  Like the product it celebrates, the film is aimed squarely at Mexican Americans. It’s filled with jokes and observations that will resonate with that audience, as does its celebration of ethnic pride and can-do attitude.

Who can argue with that? Any film that makes a big chunk of the population feel good about themselves should not be too easily dismissed.

| Robert W. Butler

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“THE OLD WAY”: A prairie “Dexter”

June 8, 2023 by butlerscinemascene

Nicolas Cage, Ryan Keira Armstrong

“THE OLD WAY” My rating: B- (Hulu)

95 minutes | MPAA rating: R

It’s gotten so that every Nicolas Cage movie is met with equal parts hope and dread.

Will Cage deliver a one-of-a-kind, borderline brilliant performance along the line of 2021’s “Pig”? Or will it be yet another weary entry in his “don’t-send-the-script-send-the-paycheck” marathon?

Director Brett Donowho’s good-looking oater “The Old Way” is a bit of both.

Lord knows it doesn’t start with a whole lot of promise.  In a prequel we meet gunfighter Colton Briggs (Cage), who has an Eastwood squint and a ridiculous ‘stache apparently harvested from the late Wilford Brimley’s upper lip.

Briggs is a hired gun in a range war involving a cattle baron with a penchant for flowery speechifying (Carl W. Lucas’ screenplay periodically slows for displays of frontier loquaciousness) and a bunch of struggling settlers.  The upshot:  Just about everybody but Briggs and a newly orphaned boy lie dead. Time to move on.

Twenty years later Briggs is running a general store in a tiny burg.  He’s traded in his guns and facial hair for a civilians’ suit and derby hat; just outside town he has a modest ranch where he lives with his wife (Kerry Knuppe) and 12-year-old daughter Brooke (Ryan Kiera Armstrong).

Initially it appears that Cage is in his take-the-money-and-run mode…his features are sullenly passive (at best he looks like he’s fighting a constant migraine) and Briggs’ interactions with his daughter perfunctory at best.  No warmth wasted. In short, the one-time gunfighter now appears to be a terribly boring bean counter. (This non-performance is deliberate, as we shall see.)

One evening father and daughter return home to find their  wife/mother  murdered and the place occupied by a weary U.S. marshal (Nick Searcy at his folksy best) and his posse.  The lawmen have been chasing outlaw James McCallister (Noah Le Gros), who with a trio of bad actors has broken out of prison. 

The old marshal wants to take down the McCallister gang — but by the book.  A wrathful Briggs has other ideas.

In one blood-curdling scene Briggs points a pistol at his sleeping child; if she’s dead, he will have one less thing to worry about on his quest for revenge.  Instead he decides to bring her along.

Noah Le Gros, Ryan Keira Armstrong

“The Old Way” almost makes a fetish of recycling ideas from other films.  The killer-turned-domestic notion has been pulled directly from Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven.” Revenge yarns are a staple of the Western genre. And stories in which an adult killer is teamed with an innocent child are legion (for starters there’s “The Professional” with Jean Reno and then-tweener Natalie Portman; also, Eastwood’s “A Perfect World” in which escapee Kevin Costner leads a little boy on a Texas crime spree; not to mention the two versions of “True Grit”).

But then halfway through Lucas’ script suddenly shifts into focus.  Over a campfire Briggs admits to Brooke that for most of his life — his marriage being the sole exception — he has never felt emotion.  Not love, not fear.  Maybe hate. To survive he has learned to fake normal behavior.

And suddenly we’re watching “Dexter”-on-the-prairie.

Well, that explains Cage’s undemonstrative performance.

It gets better.  Briggs’ particular brand of psychopathology seems to have been inherited by Brooke. Maybe you noticed she didn’t shed a tear over her dead Mommy? And now she’s asking her old man for shooting lessons.

Needless to say, these father-and-daughter avengers will get the chance to settle scores.  And it turns out that the murder of Briggs’ wife wasn’t random…James McCallister is seeking his own revenge for a 20-year-old killing.

“The Old Way” (the title refers to McCallister’s desire to settle things in a classic gunfighter fashion, on the street at high noon) is a bumpy if fascinating ride. The screenplay is filled with seemingly unnecessary moments (in a long monologue a customer at Briggs’ store explains how his apple tree bears poisonous fruit due to its proximity to an outhouse) that are later revealed to have important relevance to the developing story. Sneaky.

Cage and young Miss Armstrong manage to make us care about a couple of individuals who are emotionally unapproachable, and the locations and production design feel real enough.

In the end “The Old Way” is minor Cage in a minor film, but lovers of Westerns and sleight-of-hand acting will find it a tolerable amusement.

| Robert W. Butler

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“THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING”: Arabian nights

May 24, 2023 by butlerscinemascene

Idris Elba, Tilda Swinton

“THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING” My rating: B+ (Amazon Prime)

104 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Love stories have always been a staple of the movies, but really effective romantic films — I’m thinking “Somewhere in Time”-level  heart grippers — are surprisingly rare.

To the list of swoonworthy cinema we must now add “Three Thousand Years of  Longing,” a romantic/erotic fantasy from director George Miller (the”Mad Max” and “Babe” franchises) that begins with pure escapism and gradually works its way into your guts.

This adaptation of A.S. Byatt’s 1994 novel The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye (the screenplay is by Miller and Augusta Gore) stars the chameleonic Tilda Swinton as Alithea, a Brit academic whose specialty is the art of storytelling.  In pursuit of new tales Alithea has traveled to Istanbul for a conference of her fellow narratologists.

As a souvenir of her trip she purchases an old blown-glass vial from a cluttered shop; back in her hotel room she pops the top of her new find and with a smokey whoosh a huge genie (or djinn) fills her suite.

This fantastic creature (Idris Elba) quickly adapts to his new environment, shrinking to human size and learning Alithea’s English language (a surprising amount of the film’s dialogue is presented in ancient Greek and other languages without benefit of subtitles— just one of many ways in which the film insists on immersing the viewer in new and evocative states of mind).

What follows is a sort of riff on “1001 Arabian Nights,” with the Djinn relaying to the fascinated story lady his experiences over the last three millennia…much of which was spent in various lamps and bottles where the unsleeping Djinn had plenty of time to contemplate notions of freedom.

The Djinn’s astonishingly colorful yarns feature the likes of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (he observed their love story from just a few feet away), a slave girl who with the help of the Djinn bewitched the Sultan Suleiman, and a 19th-century  proto-feminist who with the help of the Djinn (who also became her lover) went on an inventing spree worthy of Leonardo.

The Djinn (Idris Elba) and Sheba (Aamito Lagum)

Each passage has been spectacularly designed by Roger Ford, evocatively captured by cinematographer John Seale (“Witness,” “Mad Max: Fury Road,” “The English Patient”) and perfectly performed by an international cast.

Always lurking in the background, though, are two inescapable issues.  

First, to gain his freedom the Djinn must grant his new owner three wishes — and Alithea is too smart a cookie not to anticipate the unforeseen fallout generated by a carelessly worded request.

Second, there’s a slowly pulsing undercurrent of sexuality constantly at work.  Must of this has to do with the vibes given off by the shirtless Elba, who really doesn’t have to work at exuding sexual power.  Then there’s the fact that both characters spend the film in fluffy hotel bathrobes.

And finally there’s the weird magic of Swinton, an eccentric-looking actress who can turn her gaunt frame, pale complexion and lank red hair into formidable tools of seduction — all without ever obviously going for it.

What does it say about us (or about me, anyway) that the most effective love stories are those rooted in fairy tales, science fiction and spiritual yearning?

That’s a topic for another day.  Right now I’m considering watching “Three Thousand Years of Longing” one more time.

| Robert W. Butler

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“THE MOTHER”: Gal with gun

May 22, 2023 by butlerscinemascene

Jennifer Lopoez, Lucy Paez

“THE MOTHER” My rating: C- (Netflix)

115 minutes | MPAA rating: R

“The Mother,” the latest example of gals-with-guns cinema, starts out preposterous and in no time at all has worked its way into full-bore absurdist “Roadrunner” mode…the big difference being that a “Roadrunner” cartoon has a sense of humor. 

Here’s a film about international criminals, a former army sniper and the FBI written by three scribes (Misha Green, Andrea Berloff and Peter Craig) who offer no indication that any of them has ever met an international criminal, an army sniper or a federal agent.  

Basically “The Mother” is a mess of plot points and attitude copied from other movies (Schwarzenegger’s “Commando” appears to have been a major influence) and held together — barely — by Jennifer Lopez’ seriously strained charisma.  

Lopez plays the title character, whose name we never do get.  She’s an Afghan vet with three dozen sniper kills, and as the film begins she’s being debriefed in a safe house by a couple of FBI agents. Seems our girl has spent several years as the consort/muscle of a couple of international arms dealers (Joseph Fiennes, Gael Garcia Bernal), and now she’s decided to turn them in.

Oh, yeah, there’s a catch…she’s preggers, presumably by one of her criminal cohorts. But the bad guys are on to her and she barely survives a massacre at the safe house, undergoes an emergency caesarean, turns her newborn daughter over to an FBI agent (Omari Hardwick) for placement in a good home, and moves to an isolated  cabin in Alaska where she can kill a variety of critters and stay off her criminal colleagues’ radar.

Short story long, she’s called back into the fray when her daughter, now 12 years old, is kidnapped by the evil ones.  She’s able to rescue the girl in a bloody shootout, but now the two are on the run.  She can’t take the girl, Zoe (Lucy Paez), back to her Midwestern home (Ohio, we’re told, though in this alternate universe Ohio has mountains); their  only hope is to hide out in the snowy north until the danger passes.

Zoe suspects that her nameless protector is her birth mother, which doesn’t stop her from behaving like your typical suburban tween, throwing temper tantrums and pouting. 

Before the dust settles The Mother will have wiped out a small army of mercenaries. 

Despite the obviously wretched dialogue, the production was able to attract some serious talent, not just Fiennes and Bernal but also Oscar nominee (for “Sound of Metal”) Paul Raci and multiple Emmy winner Edie Falco.

But what’s really depressing is the name behind the camera. “The Mother” was directed by Niki Caro, whose earliest efforts (“Whale Rider,” “North Country”) suggested a major talent in humanist cinema. “The Mother” is technically polished, but hasn’t a shred of the emotional truth of those early landmarks.

| Robert W. Butler

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