Movie Reviews - 2019 posts

WARNING: SPOILERS

You know those pretty women in Terrence Malick movies that run ahead of the camera and look back and laugh? The ones that represent something just out of reach? Well, they’re well-rounded characters compared to Liv Tyler in “Ad Astra.”

She plays Eve (of course), the ex-wife of our lead, Roy McBride (Brad Pitt), who’s the son of a famous astronaut. What does she do in the film? Let’s see: She sends her hubby, or ex, somber video messages. She semi-haunts his memories while he’s in space, then shows up in the final frame for reunion and possible redemption. That’s her role. She represents where he’s gone wrong and how he might be saved. As for what she does/likes/is? Please. 

At one point, in one of those draggy selfie videos, she says, “I have my own life, I’m my own person, and I can’t just wait for you.” Actually: You don’t, you’re not, you can. And you do. 

A little Conrad
I wanted to like “Ad Astra” even though I’ve never been a huge fan of James Gray’s movies (“The Immigrant,” “The Lost City of Z”). And I did like it. Pitt is so underrated as an actor; he conveys so much with so little. And I liked the movie’s somber, thrumming tone. I liked its seriousness. It wants to be a great movie. According to IMDb, Gray described his movie thus:

If you got “Apocalypse Now” and “2001” in a giant mash-up and you put a little Conrad in there.

Wow, that’s reaching high. That’s reaching as high as an International Space Antennae.

But how bad is it that I want to correct even this quote? A little Conrad? Isn’t there already enough Conrad in “Apocalypse Now”? How about a little “Contact”: the search for the parent in the stars? That’s more like it. Plus “Apocalypse” is John Milius’ bag about man descending into savagery, his true state, while Gray wants to upend our heroic tropes. He wants to reveal the sad, gnawing emptiness at the heart of the strong, silent type. He wants to create a better model.

But yes, the tone is all “2001,” while the journey is right out of “Apocalypse”: the half-dead man sent on a mission to discover what happened to the great man at the end of the river. In this case, the great man is also his father, H. Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), sent decades ago to the other side of Neptune to head up the Lima Project—our search for intelligent life in the universe. Like Col. Kurtz, he may have gone mad. Unlike Col. Kurtz, it’s more than just PR to bring him back/down. Clifford may be sending anti-matter surges that could destroy all life on Earth, while Roy’s mission isn’t to “terminate the Colonel’s command,” as in “Apocalypse”; he’s being used by SPACECOM (basically NASA) to draw out his father so others can (one imagines) do the deed.

First the journey upriver. Roy starts it with Thomas Pruitt (Donald Sutherland), an old friend of his father, and they fly commercial to the moon. I like this bit: 

Roy: Can I have a blanket and pillow?
Flight attendant: Certainly. That'll be $125.

Unlike in “Apocalypse,” he keeps losing and gaining partners. He and Pruitt are attacked by pirates on the dark side of the moon—a great chase scene—and Pruitt’s heart isn’t up to it. Roy then takes the spaceship Cepheus to Mars, but en route, and over Roy’s objections, they investigate a Norwegian research lab, which has put out a distress call. It’s like investigating the Viet boat family but instead of disaster for them it’s disaster for Capt. Tanner (Donnie Keshawarz), who gets his face eaten by a lab baboon.

We get some good voiceovers from Roy. During the pirate attack: “Fighting for resources. What the hell am I doing here?” When Roy realizes the Cepheus’ second-in-command is scared: “Most of us spend our entire lives hiding.”

I also like the perfunctory psychological evaluations he has to keep taking. So near future. So now. But some of the dialogue rings false. When the mission begins, Roy tells Pruitt he thinks his father is dead. Then on the moon he suddenly says this: “My dad’s a hero. SPACECOM is trying to impugn a man who’s given his entire life to the program. I think it’s despicable.” Before, he barely seems to feel anything; now he not only feels but says all this? And to his SPACECOM handler? It felt off—like a tuba blast in the midst of a flute solo.

My biggest problem, though, is how the movie gives away early its biggest reveal—what Roy finds upriver.

The horror
At the beginning, working on the space antennae, Roy hears, “A perfect day to try to contact our distant neighbors out there in the heavens,” and I immediately thought, “How do we know we have distant neighbors in the heavens?” Later, looking over old video messages, Roy hears this from his father, “We’re about to answer the number one question: When do we find all the intelligent life out there—and we know we will,” and I immediately thought, “How do you know we will? Maybe there’s nothing.”

And that’s the answer. That’s the big reveal. It’s just us. I would’ve urged Gray away from some of this earlier chatter. You can’t push your audience into thinking the answer two hours before you give it.

That said, it leads to poignant moments:

Clifford: We need to find what science tells us is impossible. I can’t have failed.
Roy: Dad, you haven’t. Now we know. We’re all we’ve got.

Or this in voiceover:

He captured strange and distant worlds in greater detail than ever before. They were beautiful, magnificent, full of awe and wonder. But beneath their sublime surfaces, there was nothing. No love or hate. No light or dark. He could only see what was not there ... and missed what was right in front of him.

I also would’ve argued against the “trying to be a better man” thrust. Sorry, but that emotionless emptiness? That’s what makes Roy who he is. That’s why his BPM stays below 80. That’s why he’s good in a firefight, good landing a spacecraft during a surge, good at everything we’re watching the movie for. You don’t get both—but the movie wants to give us both. It’s like assuming Capt. Willard goes home to a happy ending after terminating Kurtz’s command.

Or how about a little Conrad? At the end of “Heart of Darkness,” its hero, Marlow, returns to England to give the bad news to Kurtz’s widow and winds up telling her Kurtz’s last words. No, not the real ones. Not:  “The horror, the horror.” He says: “The last word he pronounced was—your name.” God, that’s good. He tells her this romantic fiction to make the horrible reality more palatable. Gray (or the studio, with its notes) is telling a romantic fiction, too—about Liv, about betterment—but to us. They want to make us Kurtz’s widow.

Shame. The movie came so close.

WARNING: SPOILERS

I heard it was bad and the numbers on Rotten Tomatoes agree:

Look at that chronology, by the way. We’ve had nearly as many “Star Wars” features in the last five years (five) as in the previous four decades (six). No wonder this galaxy feels overdone. And of those 11 films, even crap like “Attack of the Clones” or “Solo” was considered fresh. “The Rise of Skywalker” is only the second film in the canon, after the sterile “Phantom Menace,” to get labeled “rotten” by the critics. Or by RT’s algorithms.

It’s really not that bad. You know what it seemed like to me? Another “Star Wars” movie. “Last Jedi” didn’t seem good enough to get a 90s rating and this one isn’t bad enough to rate in the 50s. They all just seem the same. That’s the real critique.

Errata
Why that subtitle? “Rise of Skywalker”? He’s barely in it and she’s revealed to be a Palpatine. Oh right. At the end, on Tatooine, after Rey (Daisy Ridley) buries the Skywalker lightsabers in the sand, a passerby asks her name, and she replies “Rey Skywalker.” Because I guess she’s carrying on his tradition rather than Palpatine’s. She’s the rise even as the others have fallen.

Sure.

One of the main criticisms is that it’s a “fan service” movie. Whatever its rabid fan base has objected to in the past, writer-director J.J. Abrams tries to correct here. So in “Last Jedi” Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran) keeps schooling Finn (John Boyega), who seems stupid and pointless. No worries. Now he’s “Force Sensitive” while she’s relegated back to cameo status. And hey, how come Chewie never got a medal with Luke and Han at the end of the original 1977 “Star Wars”? No worries. He gets it here—handed to him by Maz Kanata (Lupita Nyong’o) after Leia’s death. And good god, why does Luke Skywalker, the hero of this whole, long affair, flee to a distant planet, Ahch-To, after his nephew turns to the Dark Side? That doesn’t seem very heroic. Well, Luke agrees with us now that it was a bad move:

Rey: I saw myself on the dark throne. I won’t let it happen. I’m never leaving this place. I’m doing what you did.
Luke: I was wrong. It was fear that kept me here.

Except these corrections don’t correct anything. The original error still exists. Luke went from whining on a desert planet to moping on a water planet without ever gaining a wisdom commensurate with his powers.

Maybe the biggest change relates to Rey’s origins. From my “Last Jedi” review:

The movie does go off in some new directions—notably with Rey’s lineage, which isn’t related at all to the Skywalker/Kenobi clan. Thank god. She’s a nothing from nowhere. She’s the exceptional borne from the unexceptional. In this way, the Force is being democratized. Cf., the kid before the end credits who uses the Force to grab his broom.

Nope. She’s Palpatine. And the kid with the broom is forgotten.

Has the “Star Wars” saga become Palpatine’s now? He showed up in the second film, “The Empire Strikes back,” dominated the third, dominated the shitty prequels, and is resurrected here for its finale. Three generations of good guys (Obi-wan, Luke, Rey) battled his bad-guy surrogates (Anakin, Darth, Snoke, Kylo) before having to confront him—the true power. He’s like the Mitch McConnell of this galaxy. Cackle and all.

Palpatine seemed to die at the end of “Return of the Jedi”—tossed over the railing by Darth Vader in one of the worst edited scenes in movie history—but this is “Star Wars” so no one ever dies. Except Palpatine didn’t just survive in astral form as Obi-wan, Yoda and Luke did; he survived in corporeal form. He says the Dark Side is “a pathway to many abilities some consider to be... unnatural,” and I guess this is one of them. A few other questions: How did he wind up on Exegol if he’s unable to move? And if it’s an uncharted planet, how did it get named? Why do wayfinders help you find it, who created them, and why do just two exist? And how, physically impaired on this uncharted planet, does Palpatine secretly create the greatest armada of star destroyers the galaxy has ever seen?

He just does, it just did, they just do, they just did, he just does.

A few more. When did the Force begin to heal people’s wounds? Never seen that before. And Rey can just lift her hand to the sky and bring down a spacecraft? I remember when Luke had trouble summoning his light saber on Hoth. Was he a piker or something? In the prequels George Lucas tried to take away the magic of the Force by reducing it to midi-chlorians but Abrams wants to make it like Doug Henning magic: It can do anything.

Where have you gone, Bail Organa
We first see Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) cutting through armies to get to Palpatine, his true lord, and we first see Rey sitting in a midair lotus position trying to summon the spirit of the Jedis who came before her. He succeeds, she fails. Why? Because it’s the beginning of the movie? And she succeeds in the end because it’s the end of the movie? Did she learn something in the interim? Or were the other Jedis not paying attention before? Hard of hearing, we are, hmm?

Then the roller coaster begins. Searching for a thing (the wayfinder), with the bad guys hot on their tail (Kylo and the Knights of Ren), the good guys zip to this or that planet, encounter old allies (Lando/Billy Dee Williams) and local obstacles (quicksand), escape, get separated, assume someone is dead (Chewie), infiltrate the bad guys’ ship, blast Stormtroopers, nearly get blasted, escape by the skin of their teeth. Along the way, the hero learns who she really is. This intergalactic scavenger hunt leads to the finale, in which, while outnumbered rebel forces take on the spaceships of the Empire, Jedi and Sith battle for the soul of the galaxy 

Within this familiar storyline, what worked? For me, C3PO (Anthony Daniels), who has most of the film’s funny lines; the remains of the second Death Star on Kef Bir, reminding us that the past isn’t dead (it isn’t even past); and Kylo/Ben’s shrug after reacquiring his light saber during battle with the Knights of Ren. Loved that bit. 

But the new “Star Wars” is still weighted down by its predecessors. Lando, Leia, Luke and Han all make appearances. Our leads aren’t given enough room, or—save Rey and Ren—a reason to be. In the original trilogy, when Luke went off with Yoda, Han and Leia made up the love story. Here, Rey and Ren are the love story. So where does that leave Poe (Oscar Isaac) and Finn? Some fans wanted them to be a love story, too, but Abrams went the opposite route by creating Zorii Bliss (Keri Russell) for Poe and Jannah (Naomi Ackie) for Finn. So much for fan service. Those two are basically our only new characters in the movie, and neither is particularly memorable.

That’s an interesting experiment, actually: What memorable characters are introduced in each “Star Wars” movie? In the first we get Luke, Han, Leia, Chewbacca, C3PO, R2D2, Darth Vader, and Obi-wan Kenobi. That’s our whole universe right there. And in the sequel they added Yoda, Palpatine, Lando, and Boba Fett; and in the sequel to that, Jabba, Akbar, and the Ewoks. OK, Ewoks. But still a good run.

The prequels were horrible at this. Most of the new characters were dull (Qui-Gon, Padme, Mace Windu), and if anyone was memorable it was for all the wrong reasons (Jar-Jar Binks).  And the sequels added no one. I mean, no one. Apologies to all the Sen. Bail Organa fans out there.

That’s why “Force Awakens” was so exciting. It injected fun, new characters into the mix: Rey, Kylo, Finn, Poe, BB8, Maz Kanata and Snoke. Sure, they were derivative, but they popped. Then the sequel undercut them. In “Last Jedi,” newbie Rose Tico outperformed Finn while Vice Admiral Holdo (Laura Dern) outthought Poe. Is that why Zorii and Jannah were added here? To support rather than undercut? Still didn’t work. The bros had such promise four years ago but it feels like it mostly went unfulfilled. Poe winds up “leading the fleet” (yawn) while Finn is tossed the sop of “Force Sensitivity” so he has something to do.

I guess General Pryde is a new character, too, but he’s mostly memorable for being played by Richard E. Grant. The Knights of Ren could’ve been memorable if given more screentime. They could’ve been like the super-posse in “Butch Cassidy.” Instead, they barely register.

Exit through the gift shop
You know what this long saga has never been able to do well—except for right at the beginning? Show the appeal of the Dark Side. Yes, Darth Vader emerged through the smoke as his theme music thundered on the soundtrack, and later in meetings he choked out dissent; all that was cool. For two movies, we got it. Then Palpatine is revealed as the true power and everyone went “Yuck.” He’s constantly extending a grizzled claw to young Jedis and is shocked when they don’t take it. The Dark Side should feel like a clean surge of anger; it should feel like revenge or even justice. I mean, c’mon. So much depends on whether young Jedis (Ani, Luke, Rey) will be enticed by the Dark Side, so at least make it a little enticing. Instead they just make it dark.

Is this the end then? Nah, there’s still money to be made. But based on box-office receipts, interest is waning. I’d move Abrams off this; I’d get someone else to shepherd it into a new age. They need new blood both behind the scenes and on the screen. And the characters they have on screen should have a better reason for being.

Who is Rey? For most of her life, she lived a lie (a nobody from nowhere), and as soon as she found the truth she retreated into another lie (“Rey Skywalker”). Is that good? Start there. See if there are consequences—for her and for us. For nine movies, our various heroes have been pawns in Palpatine’s games. What happens when your common enemy goes? What happens when the roller coaster ride stops?

WARNING: SPOILERS

I didn’t think they’d pull it off again. They ended things so neatly in “Toy Story 3,” with Andy off to college, and Woody, Buzz, and the gang resurrected with Bonnie, making us believe, for a moment anyway, that we’ll all be needed and necessary forever.

Why go on from there?

Plus, in the interim, Pixar was bought by Disney and it’s not quite the same studio. Since “Inside Out” it's released:

• 2015: “The Good Dinosaur”—didn’t bother
• 2016: “Finding Dory”—disappointing
• 2017: “Cars 3”—didn’t bother
• 2017: “Coco”—pretty good
• 2018: “Incredibles 2”—potentially subversive but also disappointing

So I was against the idea of a “Toy Story 4” from the beginning. But they kinda pulled it off. It’s sweet, includes redemption of the villain, and, most important, it's funny.

A Toy and a Gentleman
This doesn’t mean there’s not a sameness to it all. Every “Toy Story” contains these two dilemmas:

1. How are the toys in danger?
2. Why is Woody (Tom Hanks) no longer useful?

The toys are in danger because of: 1) the creepy kid next door; 2) the creepy toy collector; 3) the creepy toys at the orphanage; and, here, 4) the creepy toys at the second-hand store.

And Woody is no longer useful because: 1) Andy prefers Buzz Lightyear (reflecting the historical moment when kids’ heroes stopped being movie/TV cowboys and became real-life astronauts); 2) his arm is torn off; 3) Andy goes to college; and 4) Bonnie prefers Jessie.

Here’s the thing about Woody, though. The less necessary he is, the more of a micromanager he becomes. So even though he’s been relegated to the closet, and his sheriff badge has been pinned on Jessie, he stows aboard Bonnie’s backpack for her orientation day of kindergarten in order to make sure she does OK. He becomes the invisible helpmate, the guiding hand. When another kid just up and takes the supplies Bonnie’s working with, at a table by herself, Woody, saddened and then determined, empties a nearby trashcan to replenish her supplies. From this, she creates a toy out of a plastic fork/spork, some googly eyes, and pipe cleaners for arms, and names him Forky (Tony Hale). This basically sets in motion the rest of the movie.

Forky becomes Bonnie’s new favorite. Except he doesn’t understand his raison d’etre. Or his raison d’etre is something else entirely, since he keeps trying to return to the trash. Only after much struggle from Woody does Forky stop trying to throw himself away. 

By this point, Bonnie and her parents are in an RV traveling the country before school starts again; and in historic Grand Basin, which is in the midst of “Carnival Days,” Woody spies the lamp of his one-time flame Bo Peep (Annie Potts) in the window of Second Chance Antiques. “Toy Story 4” cold-opened with the moment she was given away, and how Woody almost left Andy for her, but couldn’t quite do it. But now? With Andy in college and Bonnie relegating him to also-ran status? This is his second chance.

Inside the store, though, he doesn’t find Bo. He finds Gabby Gabby (Christina Hendricks), a vintage 1960s-era doll with a busted voicebox, who runs the joint with her creepy muscle, the Benson dolls—basically bow-tied ventriloquist dummies with large, lolling heads and useless arms. Gabby Gabby has never been a child’s toy since she was born with a busted voicebox. She thinks if it’s fixed, or replaced, she’ll finally find a child who will love her. And Woody’s voicebox works just fine.

Ewww. It’s like a doll’s version of organ harvesting—with Woody the target.

He escapes, of course, but, in the manner of “Toy Story” movies (all tentpole movies, really), our principles are scattered to the wind:

• Woody is with Harmony, the granddaughter of the antique store owner, heading through Carnival Days
• Forky, in the clutches of the Bensons, is being used as bait
• Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) is being offered as a prize at a carnival game

How do these small toys reunite in such a big, wide world? Woody meets up again with Bo Peep, who, porcelain aside, has remade herself as a shepherd-staff twirling martial arts action hero; Buzz teams up with two trash-talking fuzzy animals (Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele); and all of them converge at Second Chance Antiques, along with the movie’s best new character, Duke Caboom (Keanu Reeves), a Canadian knockoff Evel Knievel, whose slogan is “Yes, I Can-ada!” and whose dreams of big jumps are forever undercut by the haunting memory of being rejected by his first child, Rejean. “Re-jeeeaaaannnnnn!”

Bo knows all about Gabby Gabby—she was stuck there before going out on her own—but her careful plans are undercut by Woody and his desperate need to retrieve Forky for Bonnie. This leads to his kind of “Officer and a Gentleman” moment, when, like Richard Gere in the rain, he admits he has nowhere else to go. “It’s all I have left to do!” he cries. “I don’t have anything else!”

The end?
Bo is actually less sympathetic to this admission than Louis Gossett, Jr. was with Richard Gere: “So the rest of us don’t count?” she asks. Right. Sorry. Next time I won’t pour my heart out to you.

How much is Woody willing to give up for Bonnie? Almost anything—even his voicebox. He submits to the surgery, Gabby Gabby gets it, and, though her chosen child, Harmony, discards her, she eventually finds a girl as desperate for a doll as she is for a girl. Villain redeemed. Happy ending. (Except for those creepy Bensons. What terrors will they unleash in Second Chance Antiques with Gabby Gabby gone?)

Even as Gabby finds a home, Woody loses his. Or he decides to stay with Bo. He becomes a lost toy. Or as Buzz wisely says at the end: “He’s not lost. Not anymore.” 

It's a good ending. It's another ending that feels like an ending. But is it? “Toy Story 4” grossed more than $1 billion worldwide—more than any G-rated movie in history—so I’m assuming ... not. Plus it's not like there aren't questions to answer. Woody has always been about loyalty to the kid; so what will he be like without a kid to be loyal to? How will he recreate his own raison d'etre? Either way, they’ll be back. If a franchise keeps making $1 billion at the box office, it’ll keep going. To infinity and beyond.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Yeah, no.

You know what this movie’s about? Sure, at bottom it’s about who gets screwed. It’s about the underdogs momentarily screwing over the overdogs—the Wall Street boys—who screwed us all during the global financial meltdown and beyond. “This city, this whole country, is a strip club,” Ramon says. “You‘ve got people tossing the money, and people doing the dance.” She’s trying to make them do the dance for a change. At least that’s how the movie is being sold to critics and viewers. 

But what does it hinge on? J-Lo’s likes. 

At first, Ramona (Jennifer Lopez) inexplicably takes Destiny (Constance Wu), a nice Chinese-American girl, under her wing, and it leads to success and friendship; then, just as inexplicably, she takes Dawn (Madeline Brewer), a red-headed junkie, under her wing, and it leads to betrayal and incarceration. Both actions seem preordained but both are inexplicable. We don’t know why she cares about the lost child Destiny or why she risks everything on a volatile piece of work like Dawn.

Most of the characters in the movie aren’t worth a damn, but that’s not the problem. Tons of great movies have been made about people who aren’t worth a damn. The problem is that they’re not particularly interesting. What do they do once they scam the bad guys? They go shopping. They‘re all about as deep as a puddle. 

Let’s go shopping
The movie is based on a New York magazine article by Jessica Pressler, “The Hustlers at Scores: The Ex-Strippers Who Stole From (Mostly) Rich Men and Gave to, Well, Themselves,” and it’s framed with Destiny, in 2014, being interviewed by a journalist named Elizabeth (Julia Stiles).

Back in 2006/7, Destiny was eking out a living at a strip club named Moves; then she went under Ramona’s wing, who showed her all the right moves. Destiny became a pole dancer, and the money came rolling in. The high point, she says, is when Usher came in one night and partied with the girls. (Usher is played by Usher.)

Then the global financial meltdown hit and the party ended.

Did Destiny get married or just have a kid with a lousy boyfriend? Either way, she shows him the door. But now she’s caring for a daughter and a grandmother, so she goes back to Moves—but it’s different. Worse. Sex acts are common. Then she runs into Ramona again.

By now, Ramona and two other women, Mercedes and Annabelle (Keke Palmer, Lili Reinhart), go after rich men in bars, get their credit card numbers, then run up that bill. Sometimes the men are drugged, but what are they gonna say, Ramon asks rhetorically: “I spent $5,000 at a strip club—send help”?

Not sure why this scheme falls apart, to be honest. Other girls at Moves steal Ramona’s idea, so she moves the scam elsewhere—to hotels and their own homes. Do Mercedes and Annabelle fall away? The main point is that Ramona, normally so clear-eyed, can’t see what bad news Dawn is. Then there’s the shopping. Since they‘re buying high-end junk, nothing is saved for the rainy day that inevitably comes. It’s also boring. It’s the blank stealing from the blank.

Shooting blanks
You know who's more interesting? Rosie (aka Destiny) in Pressler’s article:

In the beginning, after work, Rosie would pick fights with her boyfriend, accusing him of cheating. “It fucked me up in the head a little,” she said of the window her job gave her into the male psyche. “The girls develop a terrible contempt,” one former Scores manager told me. “They stop believing men are real. They think: They are there for me to manipulate and take money from.”

And when it came to that, they all preferred the assholes. There’s something extra-satisfying about persuading a man who thinks you’re trash to spend his time and money on you. Preferably so much that in the end, they hate themselves. It’s like, Who doesn’t have any self-respect now, motherfucker?

At least they were worthy opponents. Not like the sad-sack losers who came in just to talk. “Like,” Rosie said, “I want you to look at me like I’m not one of those scumbag perverts.” Those guys had their uses, since you could string them along forever and extract payments for “rent” or “school.” But their weakness was pathetic. “I had so many damsel-in-distress stories,” Rosie said with a sigh. “Don’t tell me you love me. That means I know I can milk you for everything, and then some.”

We needed that sad-sack loser in here. Something. But then I guess the women would seem less heroic. 

From the trailer, and the talk, I thought we’d get more on the global financial meltdown, but that’s the part that’s skipped over. That's just another blank here. 

J-Lo is fine, but an Oscar nom? Ehh. Somehow “Hustlers” got 88% on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s written and directed by Lorene Scafaria (“The Meddler”), and it feels like some critics are not only pulling for women directors to succeed but pushing it a bit, too. This one isn’t exploitative, it’s not even sexy, but it's not particularly smart, either. It's often just as shallow as the culture it purports to expose.

WARNING: SPOILERS

The opening really pissed me off. I think it’s supposed to.

It’s 2004, and Mike Wallace—about 86 years old, two years from retirement—is interviewing a smug, top-of-his-game Bill O’Reilly. It’s Bill before the fall. Mike wonders why Fox News is increasingly popular and O’Reilly says it’s because they give people “straight talk.” Mike then shows footage of O’Reilly berating and insulting people on his show, telling them to shut up, etc. “That’s not an interview,” he says. “That’s a lecture.”

Mike: You say you’re a journalist.
O’Reilly: That’s right.
Mike: I say you’re an Op-Ed columnist, which is different.
O’Reilly: No, it’s not. You’re a dinosaur. You have to engage now. You have to challenge. You have to be so provocative. This is going to embarrass you, Wallace ... Playboy magazine wrote that Bill O’Reilly is the most feared interviewer since Mike Wallace. You’re the driving force behind my career, and I always tell everybody, “You got a problem with me? He’s responsible. If you don’t like me, go to Wallace.”

First, an Op-Ed columnist is not a journalist. Anyone can do an Op-Ed column: I have. All it takes is an opinion and a modicum of writing ability. True journalism—working a beat, working sources—is a profession. You have to be objective. You have to tell both sides of the story—often to a fault. The mere fact that O’Reilly says a journalist and an Op-Ed columnist are the same proves what a journalist he isn’t.

As for O’Reilly being Wallace 2.0? Give me a fucking break. O’Reilly was and remains a wholly political animal. I don’t know even where Mike Wallace stood politically. According to this doc, he almost became Nixon’s press secretary. That astonished me. He was also good friends with the Reagans. Yes, like O’Reilly, he thrived on being provocative and asking tough questions, but the goal was to extract information; it wasn’t to browbeat or get people to shut up. Just think about that. You’re interviewing someone and you tell them to shut up? To not give you information? O’Reilly’s shtick was to invite someone on with whom he disagreed politically and win. That remains the Fox News shtick. They’re like a little Hollywood studio: older craggy heroes, younger leggy blondes, villains, victory.

But we don’t hear any such objections here. Mike seems at a loss for words, O’Reilly seems triumphant, while the doc, produced and directed by Avi Belkin, holds on the moment and says nothing. Maybe the rest of it is some kind of answer.

Myron
Mike Wallace started out as a kid named Myron with bad acne who went on the radio because even in his twenties he thought of himself as a kid named Myron with bad acne.

He worked on his voice. Radio was the dominant form, TV the opportunity. He did it all: news, commercials, game shows. In the radio drama, “The Crime Files of Flamond” (1946-48), he played Flamond. He pitched Golden Fluffo shortening.

He didn’t start out as a journalist. Maybe that’s why he tried so hard. He was always trying to prove himself. He played reporters: in an episode of “You Are There” (“The Conquest of Mexico”); in the film “A Face in the Crowd.” Neither is mentioned here.

In the early days, we see him with an ever-present cigarette—which led to a regular gig as pitchman for Parliament cigarettes—but I assume the cigarette was emulating Edward R. Murrow. I assume he wanted to be Edward R. Murrow, who was the dominant newsman of the day. But Murrow only comes up here ... once? Is that right? As an example of the puff-piece interviewing style of the day that Mike Wallace, first with “Night Beat” (1955-57) and then “The Mike Wallace Interview” (1958-59), cut through? Really? Puff piece? It’s like “See It Now” never existed.

If you’d asked me what a documentary on Mike Wallace might contain besides “60 Minutes,” I would’ve said:

1. The Hate that Hate Produced”: a 1959 CBS report on the Nation of Islam
2. The Westmoreland debacle
3. “The Insider”

They don’t mention 1) at all. We get tons on 2). As for 3), we get the original “60 Minutes” report on Jeffrey Wigand/Brown & Williamson but nothing on Michael Mann’s Oscar-nominated movie—one of the best movies of the past 20 years—in which Mike Wallace doesn’t come off well.

The big reveal for me was how, when he went to CBS News in the 1960s, he was dismissed as an entertainer; he was not taken seriously by other reporters. But Don Hewitt took him seriously. “60 Minutes” was initially conceived as black hat/white hat reporting—Wallace was black, Harry Reasoner was white. (The doc doesn’t mention this.) For years, it floundered at the bottom of the ratings. What goosed it up until it became the most popular show on television? According to Belkin, Watergate. Everyone was tuning in, and because Mike had covered the Nixon campaign he knew most of the players and got access to them. We see a great interview with a perpetually sweating John Erlichman.

How true is that, though, that Watergate was the ratings breakthrough? “60 Minutes” doesn’t appear among the top 30 Nielsen shows until the 1976-77 season, several years after Watergate, when it’s tied for 18th with “Hawaii Five-O.” Then:

Why the 1979-80 season? Iranian hostage crisis? Either way, it remained in the Top 10 throughout the ’80s and was No. 1 again from 1991 to 1994. It’s still regularly in the top 20—an astonishing run—even if its ratings (as with all top network shows) is a fraction of what they used to be.

Why not talk about the cultural impact of the show? The proliferation of news-magazine shows, none of which were ever as good as “60 Minutes.” The parodies and satires and homages—particularly the brilliant 1984 SNL parody about the dangers of knockoff Chinese novelty-gag items, in which Harry Shearer, doing a brilliant Mike Wallace, confronts the corrupt, sweating, smoking attorney Nathan Thurm (Martin Short). Back then, if you were a shady business, it was a toss-up who you didn't want knocking on your door: the FBI or “60 Minutes.”

Who’s Who
What Belkin does really well? Telling Mike’s story through the responses he gets from the people he interviews.

So in the ’80s he interviews Barbra Streisand, who says “Fear is the energy behind doing your best work,” and it might have been true for him. So in the ’50s he interviews “Twilight Zone” producer Rod Serling, who admits spending all the time he does on his show, 12-14 hours a day, seven days a week, means giving “fewer hours to family,” and so it was for Mike, who was mostly an absentee father. So in the’80s he interviews “Queen of Mean” hotelier Leona Helmsley, who cries when he asks about the son she lost, and it leads to a section on the death of Mike’s son, Peter, age 19, while mountain climbing in Greece in 1962.

He interviewed everybody. The list is a Who’s Who of the second half of the 20th century, along with some legends from the first half (Eleanor Roosevelt, Bette Davis, Mickey Cohen), and some from the first half of this century (Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin). He did all the major events of the second half of the 20th century: JFK assassination, My Lai massacre, Watergate, Iran hostage crisis. Back in the ’50s, he gave us a warning for our time: “Take a look at the history of any nation which has lost its freedoms, and you’ll find that the men who grabbed the power also had to crush the free press.”

I’m curious how much research went into this doc. A lot of the interviews were part of the 2012 tribute “60 Minutes” did upon Mike's passing. Maybe too many? It's like you could just watch that instead.

I miss that we don’t have him around. Is that the point of the title? Mike Wallace is no longer here, and the charlatans are proliferating and getting more powerful. And when they need a safe place to spread their lies, they go on Bill O‘Reilly’s Fox News. Where no one is telling them to shut up.

WARNING: SPOILERS

“Knives Out” got great notices from critics out of the Toronto International Film Festival in September, as well as upon its release last month (RT: 97%), and it may be because it’s something we haven’t seen in a while: a smart, funny whodunit with an all-star cast. Its antecedents include the now-cult film “Clue” from 1984 and two mostly forgotten movies from the ’70s: “The Cheap Detective” (1978), starring Peter Falk, and “Murder By Death” (1976), starring everyone. I need to watch those again but I’m pretty sure this one’s better. Its mystery is better, the solution is better, and the whole thing is a kind of beautiful “fuck you” to the fears of the Trump base: Yes, illegal Latin Americans are taking over; and they will take over even though they’re nice and kind, and we’re devious and murderous. We’re the bad guys. They win.  

The movie opens on a shot of the coffee mug of acclaimed mystery writer Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), which reads:

MY COFFEE
MY HOUSE
MY RULES

And it ends on the same coffee mug, now in the hands of his nurse, Marta Cabrera (Ana de Armas), whose family is here illegally from Ecuador ... or Brazil? ... or Peru? Each member of the Thrombey family assumes a different country, and she, and the movie, never correct them. It’s a great bit. The Thrombeys—at their best—are people who imagine themselves solicitous but are not, caring but are not. They just have money. Or Harlan does.

Or did.

Piano man
It’s the morning after Harlan’s 85th birthday party, held at his large, gothic mansion, and in an attic room, rather than his own master bedroom, his housekeeper, Fran (Edi Patterson), finds him dead, his throat cut. Suicide is assumed. The police  arrive—Lakeith Stanfield, playing nondescript, even bored, and Noah Segan as unabashed Harlan Thrombey fan—and they question each family member.

It’s a whodunit, so of course everyone has a reason to be the who:

• Richard Drysdale (Don Johnson, welcome back), husband to Harlan’s eldest, no-nonsense daughter Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis), was having an affair, and Harlan called him on it
• Joni Thrombey (Toni Collette, brilliant), Harlan’s daughter-in-law to a deceased son, was double-dipping Harlan’s payments for daughter Meg’s college, and Harland was cutting her off completely
• Walt Thrombey (Michael Shannon), youngest son, who ran his father’s publishing house, was being relieved of his position 

But who’s that sitting in the chair behind the detectives—laying back in the chair, really—and occasionally plinking a single note on the piano there? Why, it’s Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), the famous Cajun detective, who was written up in The New Yorker. (In a flashback we see the issue, with its very New Yorker-esque illustration of Blanc. Kudos, production team.) Apparently he was hired by an anonymous person, with an envelope of cash, to look into the suicide. Which he assumes isn’t a suicide.

Soon, he’s wandering the grounds with the nurse, Marta, whom he anoints his Watson, and who seems nervous and distraught. She is, for two reasons: 1) if she lies she throws up—literally; and 2) she killed Harlan. Or she thinks she did.

Post-party, she and Harlan were in the attic room playing the board game Go, when the board got upended. In the confusion, her medical bag is mixed-up and the shot she gives Harland isn’t his meds but morphine to dull the pain: But 100 mg instead of 3—a lethal dosage. She tells Harlan. The master mystery writer reacts both oddly and typically: He begins to plot again. He says: Leave by the front door so everyone can see you, drive away, return on foot, climb the trellis into the attic, put on my robe, head down the creaky stairs and make sure people see the robe, return, leave by the trellis, etc. It will mean she’ll be safely away at the time of his death. Then he slits his own throat.

For a whodunit, I didn’t spend much time wondering who because I kept wondering how Marta didn’t do it. (I was also distracted by de Armas’ beautiful lips.) What new evidence would come to light? She looks even more guilty when the will is read and she gets everything. But everything. The family, solicitous to this point, telling her she’ll always be taken care of, is furious, and all but hound her from the house that’s now hers.

But we still assume she’s innocent. It’s not just that she apparently can’t lie; she seems like a good person. And she is—even better than she knows.

Ready? Again: spoiler alert.

The solution has to do with Harlan’s favorite grandson, the ne’er-do-well Ransom Drysdale (Chris Evans), who couldn’t even be bothered to make the funeral. But he’s there for the reading of the will, smirking throughout, and seems the one family member who doesn’t have metaphoric knives out for Marta. He drives her to a diner, they talk, etc. Is he trying to help her? No. The opposite. Because he did it.

Party night, Harlan told him he was cut from the will and Marta would get everything. Ransom, though, knew something about the law—or at least slayer statutes. If the benefactor was found guilty of killing the deceased, even involuntarily, they would get nothing. So Ransom switched labels on the bottles and then anonymously hired Blanc to investigate. Here’s the thing: Marta wound up grabbing the right bottle, because she knew the viscosity of the medicine inside, even though Ransom had mislabeled it. So Harlan wasn’t doomed. She was innocent even of the screw-up. 

From Bond to Zod
My interest in the movie kind of waxed and waned with my perception of Blanc. Initially, with his piano-plinking ways, he seems formidable and I was intrigued. Halfway through, he seems an overrated dullard—missing the blood on Marta’s shoe; listening to music as chaos and cops erupt behind him—and I got a little bored. Then he wraps it all up in a beautiful package. 

All the actors seemed to have a gas playing against type. James Bond gets to be the Southern detective with an accent as thick as molasses, Captain America is the spoiled SOB who plots murder, while Gen. Zod is the cringing, browbeaten, talentless youngest son.

That’s part of the appeal of the movie, too. You know that Lloyd Dobler speech from “Say Anything”: “I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed”? That’s kinda this. It’s not a movie based on a comic book, or video game, or novel, or another movie. It’s not a reboot or a sequel. It hasn't been processed to death. Writer-director Rian Johnson (“Brothers Bloom,” “Looper,” “Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi”) simply thought it up and made it run. 

And that ending: Marta, on the second-floor balcony of the Thrombey estate, “My Rules” coffee mug in hand, and looking down, not angrily but curiously, at the spoiled Thrombey clan below, who are slowly realizing that the tables have turned on them. Forever. Most movies out of so-called liberal Hollywood aren’t exactly liberal; they’re “a good man with a gun kills many bad guys with guns.” This one is liberal. Gloriously so.

Encore.

WARNING: SPOILERS

About halfway into “Parasite,” which won the Palme d’or at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, and which has a red-hot 99% rating on Rotten Tomatoes—with, I believe, only Armond White, the nutjob film reviewer now with The National Review, giving it a thumbs down—I suddenly had this thought: “Oh, right. I’m not a huge fan of Bong Joon-ho’s movies.”

I don’t dislike them, I just never see what the big deal is. “The Host”? Fine, but... “Snowpiercer,” the same. Never saw “Mother.” My favorite may be “Okja,” even though it made my wife, who’s hypoglycemic, a vegetarian again, so we’re forever searching for other sources of protein for her. But I still liked it. Enough.

I liked this enough, but it didn’t resonate enough for me. I kept having questions about the film’s logic. When the family pulls off their scam: “Why couldn’t they do this before? They seem expert at it.” When the maid returns in the rain. “Why are they letting her in? Why not ask what she left behind and get it for her?” When the rich mother reveals the source of her son’s first-grade trauma: “Why are we seeing this flashback after the bunker reveal? Wouldn’t it have had more power before then?” Meanwhile, I waited to care about anybody.

I suppose I did—in the way movies force us to empathize with main characters, no matter how awful they are. Here, I worried our grifters would be caught. But it annoyed me that I felt this way. My brain kept going, “No, let them get caught” even as my stomach urged them: Be careful. The rich family will be home any minute! 

Stink bug I
At first, I thought they were simply squatters in their dingy little basement apartment, but my wife thinks they were legit renters; they just scammed everything else: wi-fi, fumigation. They’re folding pizza boxes for a local restaurant when the government is spraying the street for bugs. So ... close the windows? No, says the father, Kim Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho), it’ll kill the stink bugs. 

(Soon, Ki-taek will be the stink bug.)

The plot kicks in when a friend of the son brings over a large ceremonial rock, a sign of good fortune, then asks the son, Ki-woo (Choi Woo-sik), to take over teaching English to a rich, female private student while he’s studying abroad. Ki-woo wonders why he doesn’t just get a fellow university student to do this; a college education would seem to be a requirement and Ki-woo doesn't have it. Turns out the friend likes the private student, who’s basically a 10th grader, and doesn’t trust his fratboy colleagues, but does trust Ki-woo. More than that. He doesn’t consider him a threat. It’s one of many not-so-veiled class insults in the film.

So with the help of his sister, Ki-jung (Park So-dam), Ki-woo creates a fake diploma; and when he shows up for the job interview, he’s suddenly collegiate-looking. The dopey haircut is gone. He not only gets the gig, he gets the girl, Da-hye (Jung Ji-so), the student, who develops a quick crush on him. Meanwhile, the mother, Park Yeon-kyo (Jo Yeo-jeong), seems to trust him implicitly; and when she mentions the need for an art tutor for her younger son, Da-song (Jung Hyun-jun), he brings Ki-jung into the scam.

This keeps happening. The sister manipulates things to get the chauffer fired and her father, Ki-taek, hired. That just leaves the efficient housekeeper. They use a peach allergy to convince the richies she has TB. Bye bye, Moon-gwan (Lee Jeong-eun). Hello, Chung-sook (Jang Hye-jin), their own mother. Now they rule the roost. Surreptitiously.

A lot of the movie is about the gullibility of the very rich, who, according to the Kim father, don’t have wrinkles; they have money to smooth everything out. He says this when the four are drinking the Park’s expensive whiskey while the family is away on a camping trip. They don’t even get that it’s pouring rain outside and the family may soon return. But the big shocker that evening is the return of the efficient housekeeper, who says she left something behind. Turns out: Her fugitive husband, Geun-se (Park Myeong-hoon), who’s been hiding in an old basement bunker for years. The two have-not groups clash; and when Moon-gwan takes video of the Kims bumbling down the stairs together and calling each other by family names (Dad, etc.), she gets the upper hand. Then it becomes a battle for primacy—for who gets to service the richies. 

Stink bug II
The basement-bunker reveal intrigued me. Was it metaphor—like the black man in the basement in E.L. Doctorow’s “The Book of Daniel”? Or a reminder that no matter how hard up you may be, there’s always someone who has it worse? You’re not the bottom, they are.

I think Joon lets it get away from him a bit. He goes big. The torrential rain floods the city, including the Kim’s place, and they wind up in a shelter with the rest of the masses. But calls still come; they still have to service the Parks. Ki-taek becomes increasingly resentful and angry, particularly as he overhears the Parks’ conversations about how badly he smells. (He’s the stink bug.) The son seems increasingly doubtful, while the sister becomes more amused.

In the battle for basement primacy, the old housekeeper is accidentally killed, while her convict husband emerges during a lawn party for the Park boy and unleashes havoc. The rich father calls for Ki-taek’s help but instead Ki-taek stabs him. Afterwards, we get a voiceover from Ki-woo. We learn his sister was killed and his father went on the lam. The cops never found him but Ki-woo suspects where he is. His father is now the man in the basement. 

Even as I write that, the movie begins to resonate a little more for me. Particularly since there’s a kind of dream narrative, where the son imagines himself becoming rich, and buying the house, and freeing his father from its basement. That’s the dream. But one imagines eventually—or metaphorically—the son will simply take his place. He’ll wind up in the basement of the rich man’s house, feeding on scraps. While the rich? The rich won’t even know he’s there.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Joaquin Phoenix should get an Academy Award nomination for the laugh alone.

Early on, we learn that Arthur Fleck has a condition that produces involuntary laughter, often to situations that don’t warrant it. Something depressing or tragic happens, and the laugh comes. And it’s not welcome. Arthur chokes on it and gasps for air afterwards. He’s pained. It’s reminiscent of the way most of us throw up. This Joker isn’t laughing like an insane criminal mastermind; he’s vomiting laughter.

Phoenix should get an Academy Award nomination for the run alone. We see him running a lot in this movie—toward violence, away from violence—and it’s often desperate, gangly, comic. It’s a chin-high, knees-high gait. Even when he’s wearing normal shoes, he runs like he’s got clown’s feet.

Phoenix’s Joker is small, scrawny, timid. We wonder how he’ll become big enough to inspire fear. Then he does. Then he is.

It’s a “worm turns” movie. Is that a problem? We tend to root for the worm in those, and the worm here is a killer—Bernie Goetz in clown makeup. Bigger question: If they do a sequel, and it’s far enough along in the storyline that Bruce Wayne has become Batman, will we root for Batman? Or will our allegiances still be with this guy?

Some people get their kicks
At the start, Arthur just wants to bring joy into the world. Unfortunately, he lives in Gotham City circa 1981, which is like New York City circa 1981, which basically means murder, assault, porn, general lawlessness.

Arthur experiences it daily. He works for the oddest temp agency in the world—a cramped, second-story walk-up that farms out men dressed as clowns to hospitals, kids parties, etc.—and one day he’s spinning an “Everything Must Go” sign outside of a decrepit business when some punks knock him down and steal his sign. When he chases them into an alleyway, they beat the shit out of him. Later, the boss asks him why he left his post, and where’s the sign, and well I guess he’ll have to take it out of his paycheck then. Arthur accepts it all with a laugh. That’s life.

It’s certainly his life. He tries to make a kid smile on the bus; the boy’s mother berates him. He tries to talk to his therapist/parole officer, but she’s just going through the motions—her life sucks, too—and eventually he tells her “You don’t listen, do you?” We’ve all seen the Joker’s masterful dance down the stairs in the trailer and on the poster, but what makes it brilliant is the prologue: trudging up those same stairs at the end of another sad, hopeless day. At the top is a sad, cramped apartment he shares with his shut-in mother, Penny (Frances Conroy of “Six Feet Under”), and together they heat up meals and watch a low-rent talk show host, Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro), who’s neither funny nor accessible but is somehow beloved, and whose theme music is “That’s Life.” Arthur loves him. He’s who he wants to be.  

Cringingly, Arthur tries his hand at stand-up and doesn’t seem to understand what a disaster he is. Nor does the audience. Does it applaud? WTF? He also begins seeing a single-mom neighbor (Zazie Beets), but this seems off, too. She’s way above his pay grade, and when he acts oddly she simply smiles her beautiful smile. Eventually we realize the applause and the relationship are all in his head. He’s delusional. His stand-up routine is so bad, in fact, it becomes a running gag on Murray Franklin’s show. Murray, his hero, mocks him, and as he watches, behind Arthur’s eyes you see steel go up, with a flame behind it.  

Arthur’s delusions are like his mom’s, who keeps insisting that her former employer, billionaire Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen), will save them. Because? Because he’s a good man, she says, and he cares about them. Arthur discovers the true reason in a letter: He’s Thomas Wayne’s illegitimate son. Batman and Joker half brothers? Nice twist, I thought, and it leads to a supercreepy scene at Wayne Manor. Arthur, standing outside the gate, talks to like a six-year-old Bruce (Dante Pereira-Olson) and urges him closer. Between the bars, he lifts Bruce’s mouth into a gum-heavy smile. An unnamed Alfred (Douglas Hodge) swoops down and breaks it up, but that’s a helluva first meeting between superhero and villain. Particularly since there are still sympathetic elements to Arthur. It’s sad to watch him on the outside—the unwanted, outcast son.

Except it’s a lie—or another delusion. At Arkham Asylum, Arthur gets the records on his mom and discovers: 1) he was adopted, and 2) she used to beat him so severely he became developmentally disabled. So he’s not the son of American royalty; he’s the fucked-up kid of a fucked-up mom.

Is he too sympathetic? His worm-turns moment is like Bernard Goetz but without the racism. After the alleyway beating, Arthur is given a gun by a colleague, Randall (Glenn Fleshler, the serial killer in the first season of “True Detective”), and during a hospital gig it clatters to the floor. He’s fired. Returning home in clown gear on a near-deserted subway, he witnesses three drunk Wall Street types harassing a woman and the vomit-laughter starts. Now they pick on him. Now they’re beating him—it’s the alleyway all over again—but out of nowhere, a gunshot, and blood splattering, and one of the Wall Street assholes goes down. Then two. Then—chasing him through several cars and out onto the platform—all three. Afterwards Arthur runs his gangly run away from the crime scene and into a dingy men’s room. He’s breathless. Is he worried? No. Slowly he begins to dance. He’s becoming who he was meant to be. 

You know what he’s not becoming? Whatever version of the Joker we’ve seen before. The Joker has sometimes been scarred, sometimes not, but he’s always been an insane criminal mastermind. Here, he can’t even spell. Here, he only achieves power because he becomes an underground celebrity after the subway killings. His followers, who begin to dress like him, act out,  and protest, think his subway killing was class-related. It’s not. He was just mad as hell and wasn’t going to take it anymore. He was just tired of trying to do good in a no-good world. 

Once he gets a taste, though, he doesn’t stop. He smothers his mom with a pillow, kills Randall—twice his size—with a knife, and shoots Murray Franklin in the head on live TV. What do his victims have in common? They all “deserved” it. Heavy quotes around “deserved.”

Stompin’ on a dream
This is the part of the film that has some critics worried—and, I have to admit, it does leave a bit of a bad taste. It’s not just that the villain is the hero, and the father of the hero—usually a saintly figure himself—is an asshole here: a rich loudmouth who begins a tone-deaf run for mayor at a time of vast wealth inequality. It’s that the screenwriters and director Todd Phillips (“Road Trip,” “Old School,” the “Hangover”s) stack the decks in Arthur’s favor. He kills Randall but not Gary (Leigh Gill), who never harmed anyone. Is that the next step? First you do it in self-defense (subway assholes); then you get those who deserve it (Mom, Murray, etc.); then it’s just anyone. We just don’t witness the final step.

I assumed he would kill Thomas Wayne, too, but Bruce’s parents get it during the Joker riots. They leave a movie theater, see the chaos going down, and Thomas, like an idiot, directs them into a dark alleyway, where a clown-masked rioter calls out his name, he turns, boom. Then Martha gets it—pearls flying—and young Bruce stands stoic over their bodies, and ... you know the rest.

(A nice touch: the movies on the marquee are Brian DePalma’s “Blow Out” and the George Hamilton satire “Zorro, the Gay Blade,” which places the scene squarely in 1981 while reminding us of Batman’s superhero progenitor. Zorro inspired the creation of our Batman; leaving “Zorro” inspired the creation of this Batman.)

Anyway, yes, the movie is problematic, but for me there’s enough humanity here to save it. Most everyone in this world feels real: his social worker, the woman on the bus, the two detectives pursuing him (Shea Whigham and Bill Camp). One of my favorite scenes is with the Arkham asylum aide (Bryan Tyree Henry of “Atlanta”), who is simply trying to be helpful and slowly realizes Arthur can’t be helped, then tries to put the brakes on. It’s a great, understated scene.

The character who feels least real? Murray Hamilton, ironically. De Niro starred in the movies that inspired this one, including “Taxi Driver” and “The King of Comedy,” and once seemed more real than movies allowed. Now that’s Joaquin Phoenix. The torch has been passed.

WARNING: SPOILERS

It goes pretty fast for a three-and-a-half hour movie. Surprising since the movie itself isn’t rushing through anything. It moves leisurely. It’s got an old man’s pace—befitting its storyteller.

No, not director Martin Scorsese, who just turned 77, and who can still make movies as clipped and zippy as his own much-imitated speaking style. I’m talking the title character. The movie opens with a single-shot pan down the hallway of a nursing home, which eventually turns a corner and settles on an aged Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), sitting in a wheelchair in an alcove and talking about his past. To whom? One might think it’s Charles Brandt, the former Delaware attorney general who, six months after Sheeran’s death in 2003, published the book on which the movie is based. Except that book, “I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank ‘The Irishman’ Sheeran & The Inside Story of The Mafia, The Teamsters, & The Last Ride of Jimmy Hoffa,” has been pretty much debunked, and anyway we never see Brandt. We don’t see anyone. Sheeran is sitting by himself and talking to himself—or talking in his head. He’s all he’s got anymore.

Could his story have been shorter? My friend Jim felt that. He’s from Jersey, loves Scorsese, but near the end I caught him fidgeting. As soon as the movie he was over, bye, he was outta there. An hour later he shot me this email:

Loved seeing those actors, especially Pacino and De Niro, liked it, coulda got ’er done in 2 ½ hrs.

Jim wanted less of the last half hour—after the death of Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino). Once that happened, he felt, the story was over. He’s right in a way. But Scorsese is interested in the other story, too, the effect of all this crime on the man. Plus, when introducing characters throughout the movie, Scorsese will often freeze-frame the shot and let us know when and how that character died. Usually it’s brutally. John Irving did the same thing in “The World According to Garp,” telling us the how and when each of his characters dies, leading to this last great sentence: “Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.” That’s where I assumed Marty was leading us with the extended denouement: to the terminal case of Frank Sheeran.

And that’s the one he doesn’t give us. He shows Frank buying a coffin. He shows him estranged from his family—his four girls—one of whom tells him that growing up they could never come to him with a problem. If they did, he would overreact and hurt people. Scorsese shows us FBI guys visiting Frank, trying to get more details on the Hoffa case. But then this too goes away. Everything goes away. The nurse taking his blood pressure (Dascha Polanco) doesn’t know from Jimmy Hoffa. Frank is more and more irrelevant, more and more alone, until he asks the departing nurse to leave the door open to let a little light in. 

And that’s where Scorsese leaves him: an old man in a wheelchair, alone, with no connection to anyone or anything. He leaves him in purgatory.

Love that. As for the movie itself?

Not Irish enough
I had trouble getting past the CGI and (believe it or not) the casting. De Niro’s the reason the movie even got made—he’s been pushing to do it, with himself in the lead, since the book was published—but he’s wrong for the role. It’s not just that Sheeran was 6’4”, 250, and De Niro isn’t, and Sheeran was Irish while De Niro, while part Irish, is the most iconic Italian-American actor of his generation. It’s that Sheeran was Irish among the Italians. He was an enforcer for the Italian mob in Philly, so you really want to feel that ethnic difference: How he is one of them and not; how he’ll never be one of them; and how maybe he has more in common with Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa, who was, after all, half Irish. But we don’t get this. It’s the “Raging Bull,” “Goodfellas” and “Casino” crew, but with one guy pretending—kinda—to be Irish-American.

What could someone like Liam Neeson have brought to the role? That’s what I kept wondering. Neeson is also 10 years younger than De Niro, who’s 76, so the CGI wouldn’t have had to work so hard. Here, it works way too hard. Things happen when you age that CGI can’t erase. Your lips get thinner; your mouth may curl inward; you lose any spryness in your step. We watch Frank, a 20-something WWII vet, moving like a 70-something worried about breaking a hip. It takes you out of the film. The farther back we went, the worse it got. At time, he looked like Robin Williams, other times Kevin Kline. At one point, so much of De Niro’s age and humanity had been erased that I flashed on Tom Hanks in “Polar Express.”

The production values, on the other hand, were amazing. Did our mob visit any business that’s still in existence? It was all Stuckey’s and Howard Johnson’s and Sunoco. It was famous mob-hit locations: Umberto’s Clam House in Little Italy, where Crazy Joe Gallo (standup comic Sebastian Maniscalco) bought it; the Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Township, Michigan, the last place Jimmy Hoffa was seen.

There’s a scene in 1975 where Frank is driving through Detroit neighborhoods to the house where Hoffa will get whacked. I came of age at that time, in Minneapolis, and goddamn if it didn’t feel like a Midwest neighborhood in 1975. But perfectly. The Coens were able to do the same with a 1960s lake in “A Serious Man.”

The early stuff—how, as a trucker, Frank met Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci), delivered stolen, cut-rate meat to Felix DiTullio (Bobby Cannavale), and got in good with those boys—was OK, even if the CGI was distracting, and even though we’ve kind of seen it before. But I like how characters came and went. They seem central until they’re not. Like when was the last time we saw mob boss Angelo Bruno (Harvey Keitel)? At the testimonial?

It’s once we’re introduced to Hoffa, and get into national politics with the Kennedy boys, or at least Bobby (Jack Huston, sounding just like him), that I became truly interested. Has Scorsese done this before? Brought us the national and international import of the mob? In the past, he’s stayed in the neighborhood.

Pacino’s still got energy, and he’s paired against up-and-comer Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano (Stephen Graham, Al Capone in HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire,” and Graham goes head to head with Pacino like not many can. Their argument in prison was riveting. BTW: Is it an agreed-upon fact that Sam Giancana helped elect Kennedy in ’60 or is that still supposition? Feels like supposition, and the why of it here feels shaky. Giancana wants the mob back in Cuba, now run by Castro, so he needs the attempted coup that Kennedy launched in April 1961—the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation. Sure. Except that was planned in Ike’s term; Kennedy just came in at the tail end, then launched it without air cover. Are the theorists claiming Nixon wouldn’t have launched it against Castro? Tricky “Pink down to her underwear” Dick? President “Sure, let’s go into Cambodia” Nixon?

The movie has Frank running guns down to Florida for the operation, where he briefly meets David Ferrie (Louis Vanaria), weird eyebrows and all. First thought: Hey, Pesci’s character from “JFK”! Second thought: So is this their linkage between the mob and the assassination? When we get the assassination again, we get it the way most people got it in 1963—on television. Frank, Hoffa and others are at a diner when we hear the “flash out of Dallas” and Walter Cronkite’s heartbreakingly professional reporting. Everyone’s shocked and distraught except for Hoffa. He’s quiet. He seems to be ruminating. Did he know? Did he know who knew? Was he in the room where it happened?

Not ‘Goodfellas’ enough
I could’ve done without some of the daughter stuff. Leave in Frank busting the grocer’s hand in front of Peggy (Lucy Gallina, eventually Anna Paquin), but take out the stuff about her not liking Russell and liking Hoffa. Pesci’s cast against type here—he’s calm, wise and understanding—but his fixation on the kid is a little weird. You need to know why the Frank is estranged from his daughters and that’s it.

I also would’ve trimmed down some of Frank’s attempts to get a post-prison Hoffa to back off from trying to regain control of his union. These are interminable. Of course, since all of this is being filtered through Frank’s mind, maybe he’s constantly replaying those scenes to justify what he did—killing his friend the way he did—but it doesn’t mean they don’t get dull. And was anyone else confused by the slow-mo assassination of one of the union/mob guys by the nondescript black guy? It seems like we’re in the early-to-mid 1960s, then we get this, and everyone in the scene is dressed like early ’70s, and ... I don’t quite get what it connects to.

I’m glad I saw it. It’s not “Goodfellas” but it adds to the pantheon. Leaving the theater, I even thought what a double-bill it would make with “Goodfellas.” Same director, same stars, but an old man’s pace rather than the cocaine-fueled rush of “Goodfellas.” That said, tough to watch any three-and-a-half hour movie on a double bill. Particularly at my age.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Has any pop music act represented its times as much as the Beatles and yet remained as timeless as the Beatles? They were the biggest act of the 1960s; they defined it and altered it. They altered us—the way we dressed, wore our hair, what we smoked and thought; what we thought of this thing called rock ‘n’ roll. They helped change the name; they took out the roll and left the rock.

At the same time: “Yesterday,” “Let It Be” and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” all feel fresh 50 years later.  

I was born in January 1963, and when I was about 5 years old I was staying with family friends in Michigan. One day the mother was working in the kitchen and overheard me and her son, B.G., in the bedroom arguing. “Mine’s longer,” I said. “No, mine’s longer,” B.G. said. We kept going back and forth in this manner, and she kept growing increasingly worried, until one of us declared, “Well, if I pull mine, mine’s longer.” That’s when she decided enough was enough, and she stormed into the bedroom ... to find B.G. and me kneeling in front of the mirror and pulling our hair down toward our eyes. The Beatles brought that. Long hair stayed the cool thing for decades after they brought it over.

At the same time: “Help!,” “Here Comes the Sun” and “The Long and Winding Road“ all feel fresh 50 years later. 

A shadow hanging over me
“Yesterday,” a magic-realism movie written by Richard Curtis (“Love, Actually”) and directed by Danny Boyle (“Trainspotting,” “Slumdog Millionaire”), is better than I thought it would be. Some of the relationships feel real enough. It’s got enough Boyle to make up for the Curtis.

Jack Malick (Himesh Patel) is a struggling musician playing nowhere gigs around Lowestoft in Suffolk County, England. He's managed by longtime friend Ellie Appleton (Lily James), who is obviously in love with him. He just as obviously doesn’t seem to notice. Or maybe he thinks shagging his manager is too #MeToo. Or maybe he’s just got his eyes on the prize—singing his songs and playing his music. Trouble? His songs aren't that good. “Summer Song,” his standby, is good enough to make you pause for a second but then it just dissipates around you. It’s actually the perfect song for his status. You get why it’s his standby and you get why he’s going nowhere.

Indeed, he’s about to give up—just declared so to Ellie—when there’s a worldwide power outage. It’s like the world is rebooting, and in the sudden dark, biking home, Jack is hit by a bus and flies through the air. I assume it’s the flying through the air that saves him, or unalters him, because when he wakes up in the hospital, sans two front teeth, the world is altered. Slightly. I like the slightly. So British. A Hollywood movie would have him waking up in a world in which the NAZIS won World War II, but here it’s just little things. Well, not really “little.” It’s that life is the same, but there’s no cigarettes, Coca-Cola, or the Beatles.

The Beatles thing he realizes first. In the hospital, he makes a lame “When I’m 64” joke but Ellie doesn’t get it. Why 64? she asks. He doesn’t get why she doesn’t get it. Later, with their friends, she presents him with a new guitar—his got smashed in the bike accident—and while his joshing friends request “Summer Song,” he decides that a beautiful guitar deserves a beautiful song and plays “Yesterday.” Ellie tears up. Where did THAT come from? she asks. He’s confused all over again. He tells them—Paul McCartney, Beatles—but they don’t know it or them. In fact, they think he’s bragging about the song he wrote:

Carol: Well, it’s not Coldplay. It’s not “Fix You.”
Jack: It’s not bloody “Fix You,” Carol, it’s a great, great work of art.
Carol: Wow, somebody suddenly got very cocky.

The movie’s tag line is about how Jack is the only one who remembers the Beatles but it’s more than that; they never existed. His Beatle albums are all gone—Bowie’s there, but not them—and there’s nothing on Google, just the bug with the double e. Poof. Did they just play some gigs in Liverpool and Hamburg and that was it? Did they never get to Hamburg? Did John and Paul never meet? We don’t know. Just that. Poof. Gone.

All this creates what Jack calls “a dilemma.” Should he pretend he wrote all these songs, or ... Or nothing, it turns out. The “or” is never explored. Instead, he writes down as many of their songs as he can remember and begins playing them and taking credit for them.

I love the indulgence of family and friends here, who think they’re getting the next “Summer Song.” My favorite scene may be when he tries to play “Let It Be” for his parents and keeps getting interrupted—friends come over, phones ring—and they keep messing up the title: “Leave it Be”; “Let Him Be.” He’s trying to get them to hear greatness and they’re not hearing it.

That’s actually one of the unspokens in the film: How most people don’t recognize greatness. It’s not just family and friends. An Ipswich TV host is mostly amused by Jack, who works in a warehouse; and so even as Jack plays “In My Life,” beautifully, the host doesn’t hear the beauty and keeps joking about the day job. It’s up to the few who hear, and know, to push Jack up and out: first, a local producer, Gavin (Alexander Arnold, who could play Stephen Merchant’s handsomer son); then Ed Sheeran, who taps Jack to open for him on a worldwide concert tour. They go to Russia, where Jack plays—seemingly out of nowhere—“Back in the U.S.S.R.,” which goes viral, and which nobody really questions. There’s a toss-off about the anachronistic use of “U.S.S.R.” but nothing further. Like: Is it an anti-Putin message? Suggesting Russia under Putin is the same as the old Soviet regime? That might’ve been fun to go there. But the movie doesn’t.

Instead, Jack winds up under the wing of Sheeran’s nefarious manager, the too-aptly named Debra Hammer (Kate McKinnon), who wants him to put out a double album. Despite being the talent, Jack is led along, stunned. His output is finite, after all—not even the entire Beatles’ oeuvre, just the stuff he remembers—so he should parcel it out, a few songs a year, rather than all at once. But he’s passive. He even lets Ed Sheeran change “Hey Jude” to “Hey Dude.” Admittedly a funny scene, but c’mon. Stand up for Paul here. Or Jules.

The further Jack rises, the more guilt-ridden he becomes. He also loses Ellie. Because he’s shagging women all over the world? Nah. She just kinda drifts away. She feels like she’s not needed and winds up with someone who needs/wants her: Gavin. Meanwhile, we see two people—a man in Russia and a woman in Liverpool—who keep eyeing Jack suspiciously, as if they know where this music came from. They do. And together they visit Jack backstage—they present a yellow submarine as a calling card—and confront him about it. (How do these two find each other, by the way? The movie never answers that.) What I like is they’re not villains. They’re not even angry; they’re grateful that he’s brought the Beatles music back. They missed it so. They also present him with a scrap of paper with an address on it. I knew immediately what it was. It’s shocking Jack hadn’t pursued it.

It’s John Lennon’s address. John (Robert Carlyle), 78 now, lives by the ocean and does his artwork and seems completely cool with how his life turned out. There was no Mark David Chapman shooting, of course, because there were no Beatles. It’s quite poignant. This John is less rebel John, not to mention hoodlum John, than peacenik John. He’s wise. He doesn’t know who Jack is but he gives him life advice:

You want a good life? It's not complicated. Tell the girl you love that you love her. And tell the truth to everyone whenever you can.

Great advice ... which just happens to speak to the movie’s immediate dilemmas: Jack’s been lying to the world while never telling the girl he loves that he loves her. So he does both at the 11th hour. Before a huge concert crowd, he admits he didn’t write the songs he’s been singing—that four guys named John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr wrote them. Everyone boos. (You know crowds.) But then he says he’s going to upload his album to the internet so everyone can listen to it for free. Everyone cheers. (You know crowds.) And in front of this huge crowd, with her beautiful face up on the big screen, he tells Ellie that he loves her. Everyone cheers again. Even Gavin. Sap. 

But what dreck. Does it have to be before a huge crowd? Does love not matter unless millions see it? Besides, does he really love her? We do—it’s Lily James, she’s fuckingn adorable—but he’s been blinkered throughout. I don’t really trust his 11th-hour conversation.

That said, Patel is great as Jack. He sings beautifully and seems lost, humorously lost, for much of the movie. Lily James is lovely as ever but given little to do. I liked Joel Fry as Rocky, Jack’s ne’er-do-well friend who becomes his roadie. Sheeran was both good and a good sport. McKinnon was over the top.

Looks as though they’re here to stay
So it's not bad but it's not enough. It's better than ”Summer Song“ but not nearly ”Let It Be.“

Example: When Jack owns up and mentions the four Beatles by name, I'm curious what happens next. Does the media descend upon John, Paul, George and Ringo? Are they all alive? If so, what do they say? What could they say? “He’s a bit daft, really. John was me mate 60 years ago, and we palled about in a skiffle group and wrote some thingees, but that’s it. I’m a retired teacher now. Never even heard of Ringo. Sounds like a cowboy.” The movie gives us John, but it doesn’t even ask about Paul, George or Ringo.

And shouldn't you tell the rest of the world that data went missing? Shouldn't you gather the historians? ”For some reason, you have Pepsi, but the original thing that’s based on, Coca-Cola, is gone. You have the Rolling Stones, but the original thing that’s based on, the Beatles, they’re gone.“ It’s like a knockoff world. Original content doesn’t seem to matter. It's like Google’s algorithm. 

Shit, I haven’t even gotten to causality yet. That's the part I figured would bug me most and it did. The Rolling Stones were a band from London who didn’t even think about writing their own songs until they saw John and Paul, already famous, go into the corner of a restaurant and knock out one in 30 minutes. That’s when they went “We can do that,” and did. So in this alt-universe, what caused the Stones to wake up? What caused them to wear their hair in the Beatles/Astrid fashion, or to make it in the U.S. when no British rock band had the temerity to do so? How are the Stones still the Stones? How is Bowie still Bowie? How do you have all the things that followed the Beatles without the Beatles?

You know the butterfly wings that cause the hurricane on the other side of the world? Losing the Beatles is losing the hurricane. The ramifications would be endless.

Oh, and the world never is righted again. The movie just leaves us with a few of their songs. It leaves us with Jack playing ”Obla-di Obla-da" before a group of kids, who sing along. That's our happy ending. Life goes on, bra.

WARNING: SPOILERS

This thing pissed me off right away. It pushed my buttons.

We begin in 1975, with little Jean Grey in the back of the family car. On the radio we hear a country song, Glen Campbell’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” which is an unnecessary bit of foreshadowing. Dad says it’s a classic, but little Jean doesn’t want to listen to it. So with her mind she switches stations and we hear Warren Zevon belting out, “Aw-wooooooo, werewolves of London.”

Me: Wait a minute, that didn’t come out in ’75. It was later. Right?

Right. 1978.

So why did they use it? For the “Aw-woooooo!” part?

Probably.

Idiots.

I’m not two minutes in.

The movie nearly won me back. Unable to control her powers, Jean causes the car to veer into the opposing lane, into a truck, and both parents are killed. For Jean, not a scratch. A young Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) shows up at the hospital and invites her to his academy for gifted students. She’d doubtful, he’s kind.

Jean: You think you can fix me.
X: No. Because you’re not broken.

It's a nice scene. But then they blow it again. God, do they blow it. 

Last Stand 2
Have to say: It was ballsy of them to return to the Jean Grey/Dark Phoenix storyline since that’s the plot of “X-Men: Last Stand” and “Last Stand” basically ruined everything in the X-Men universe. It killed off Prof. X, Scott and Jean, stripped Magneto of his powers, and left the filmmakers nowhere to go. So they went backward and rebooted the series as a 1960s prequel: “X-Men: First Class.” Then in “X-Men: Days of Future Past” (the best of the bunch), they created an alternate timeline in which mutants were outed in the 1970s—a brilliant maneuver since it allowed them to bypass the mess of “Last Stand” and do whatever they wanted with the characters again.

And what do they do? Return to the mess of “Last Stand.” Cue face palm.

Worse, who do they tap to write and direct it? Simon Kinberg, the guy who wrote “Last Stand.” It’s his first feature-film directing credit. Maybe his last, given the box office.

It is interesting comparing the two movies. In “Last Stand,” Prof. X is not at all regretful that he created psychic barriers in order to save young Jean from the immensity of her own power. “I don’t have to explain myself—least of all to you” he sneers at Wolverine. It’s a line so out of character I assumed it wasn’t Prof. X speaking but Mystique or someone. Nope: him. He says he had to choose the lesser of two evils and went with that one and he’s not regretful.

In “Dark Phoenix,” Prof. X is continually regretful. He apologizes like a zillion times. Plus what he does isn’t nearly as bad. In “Stand” he created psychic barriers to control Jean because she was too powerful. In “Phoenix” he creates psychic “walls” to protect her from unending trauma: the fact that she caused the death of her mother and in the aftermath her father (who survived) didn’t want her. That’s why Prof. X raised her himself. And he gets no end of shit for it.

Raven (Jennifer Lawrence) is particularly bad. She’s a nag. Did no one see this? Were they all so blinded by #MeToo and the need for strong female characters that they let J-Law become a harridan? 

In this timeline, it’s 1992, the X-Men are celebrated rather than feared, and Prof. X has a direct line to the president. Manned space flights are still happening, so maybe the Challenger disaster didn’t, but either way the latest space flight encounters a solar flare and the X-Men are shot into space to save them. But Jean (Sophie Turner of “Game of Thrones”) gets caught in the flare, kinda dies, then comes back to life. Back home, the other mutant kids begin to call her Phoenix. She begins to drink a lot of wine. A sure danger sign.

Even before the wine drinking, Raven questions Prof. X (invariably pouring himself a bourbon—another danger sign) on what they’re doing: the bigger risks they’re taking. “Please, tell me it’s not your ego,” she says. “Being on the cover of magazines, getting a medal from the president. You like it, don’t you?” Maybe he is drinking too much, because he can’t answer these charges. Me, I’d go, “Bigger risks than what—taking on Apocalypse? And I don’t create the disasters. They’re there, and we do what we can, and nobody has to go if they don’t want to. You can opt out.” Instead he says it’s better than being hunted, which it is, but otherwise he’s kinda mute. 

And it’s not enough for Raven. “It’s not our life, it’s his,” she tells Hank McCoy/Beast (Nicholas Hoult). “What do you think the X in X-Men stands for?” And when she finds out about the psychic walls? Hoo boy. 

Raven: What did you do to her, Charles?
X: I ... saved her.

And later:

Raven: What did you do?
X: I protected her.
Raven: From the truth. There’s another word for that.

I’m not sure what that word is. Lying? Either way, Jean goes off, finds her father, discovers that he didn’t want her, gets angry. And in a confrontation with some of the X-Men, she kills Raven, who, with her dying breath, tells Hank that she loved him. It’s almost like the torch is being passed to a new generation of X-Men with grudges against Prof. X:

Hank: This is your fault, Charles. It’s your fault that she’s dead. ... She saw what the rest of us didn’t.
X: And what was that?
Hank: This whole time, we’ve been trying to protect these kids from the world, when really we should’ve been protecting them from you.

Really, Brainiac? Because he tried to shield a little girl from tragedy?

Anyway, a distraught Jean, with Raven’s blood on her shirt like she’s Lady Macbeth, seeks out Magneto (Michael Fassbender, looking gorgeous), who’s running a commune. She wants to know how he turned to good. He wants to know whose blood that it is. (He, too, loved Raven, you see.) When he finds out, he’s Magneto again.

Eventually, he and his team, including Hank, assemble to kill Jean, while Prof. X and his team assemble to save her. Meanwhile, aliens, led by Vuk (Jessica Chastain), try to entice her to their side. But really they want the power the solar flare gave her. “It’s the spark that gave life to the universe,” Vuk says. “It destroyed everything it ever came into contact with. Until you.”

The battle includes an absolutely horrific scene where a smiling Jean uses her powers to make Prof. X walk, puppet-like, up the stairs to her and Vuk. Then we get the apology parade. From him. “I was trying to protect you—I was trying to keep the pain away,” he says. It’s only when Jean enters his mind that she sees all the good, realizes the X-Men are her family, and fights Vuk and the aliens to protect her family. She disappears in an explosion in the form of a Phoenix. In the aftermath, Hank takes over the Xavier Academy, it’s renamed in honor of Jean (not Raven?), and the movie ends, as “Last Stand” ended, with Magneto playing chess. At least this time he’s doing it with Prof. X at a café in Paris. If you’re going to do it, that’s the way to go. 

50th of 58
The movie was a disaster—with both critics (23% on Rotten Tomatoes) and audiences. There have been 12 X-Men movies, and the worst any of them did at the domestic box office was 2013’s “The Wolverine,” which, trying to overcome the absolute disaster of “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” managed to gross only $132 million. This one? Half that: $65 million. That’s shocking for a modern superhero movie. Currently, “Dark Phoenix” ranks 50th among 58 Marvel movies. The only movies that did worse at the box office include: the 2015 “Fantastic Four,” the second “Ghost Rider,” the third “Blade,” the two “Punisher”s, “Elektra” and “Howard the Duck.”

So are we just tired of it? Do we have, if not superhero fatigue, X-Men fatigue? (Probably.) Is Sophie Turner not the box-office draw Hollywood thinks she is? (She’s not the box-office draw Hollywood thinks she is.) Was it a mistake to return to this story so soon? (Oh yeah.) Was it a mistake to hire the screenwriter for “Last Stand” to write and direct it? (Fuck yeah.) 

The movie even writes its own epitaph. Before the big battle, Magneto tells Prof. X the following:

You’re always sorry, Charles, and there’s always a speech. But nobody cares anymore.

Truer words.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Not to spoil everyone’s fun but the homophobic bullies from the beginning of the movie get away with it. It’s a horrific scene and nothing happens to them. They’re still out there. I mean, I’m glad most of the Losers are OK, but .... the fuck?

Same with the girl beneath the bleachers. That happens and nothing. Poof. No crying mother on TV. No demands from the town council to investigate. “Kids are missing again. Why does this seem to happen every 27 years?” Silence.

I actually got pissed off at the town of Derry, Maine, in this thing. Bullies roaming free, a murderous clown showing up every 27 years, and where are they? The only one who’s doing anything is the township’s lone black guy living in its library attic. Is he conferring with law enforcement? Would you? And not just in a #BlackLivesMatter way. Sheriffs aren't exactly bright spots in Stephen King's work. Years ago, for MSN, I ranked the top 5/worst 5 Stephen King adaptations, meaning I had to watch all of them, which is pain enough for anyone, and I noticed so many incompetent sheriffs and evil trucks that it became a question for each of the ranked movies: Evil truck or incompetent sheriff? No evil trucks here, but the Derry sheriff is so incompetent he doesn’t even exist. We never see him. Kids are being killed again and where is he?

Fucking Derry. 

Well, at least it’s got a Chinese restaurant now. That’s progress. But mostly for the fortune cookie bit, I imagine.

Sans Batman, Robin, Starlord, Mysterio and Black Panther
In my review of “It” I wrote that every parent in town was worth zero: “Less than zero. There are no adults in the room. The kids have to be the adults in the room.” Now the kids are the adults in the room.

Great casting, by the way. They all look like older versions of the younger actors.

So it should’ve been Amy Adams. I mean, Sophia Lillis is a dead ringer. The press/marketing says the kids got to request who they wanted to play them, and Sophia said Jessica Chastain and Chastain said yes. First, I don’t buy the press reports. Warner Bros./New Line is going to entrust casting for their billion-dollar property to teenagers? Besides, everyone’s going to want the movie-star version of themselves and it’s not going to be sustainable. Apparently that happened. According to IMDb, here’s who the kids requested and who they got:

• Sophia (Beverly) wanted Jessica Chastain and got ... Jessica Chastain
• Finn Wolfhard (Richie) wanted Bill Hader and got ... Bill Hader
• Chosen Jacobs (Mike) wanted Chadwick Boseman and got ... Isaiah Mustafa
• Jack Dylan Grazer (Eddie) wanted Jake Gyllenhaal and got ... James Ransone (Ziggy of “The Wire,” season 2)
• Wyatt Oleff (Stanley) said Joseph Gordon-Levitt and got ... Andy Bean
• Jeremy Ray Taylor (Ben) wanted Chris Pratt and got ... Jay Ryan
• Jaeden Martell (Bill) wanted Christian Bale and got ... James McAvoy

BTW, and assuming they had influence: Thank you, Finn Wolfhard. Hader is one of my favorite actors. I think he’s going to win an acting Oscar someday if he doesn’t give it up. He’s also perfect for a grown-up Richie. Now if only he could’ve been Jewish.

As the movie opens, it’s 2016, and most of the Losers have left Derry. The further away they got, the more the horrors of Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård) dimmed, until they basically forgot him. Impossible, right? Well, it’s not normal forgetting. “Something happens to you when you leave this town,” Mike tells them. “The farther away, the hazier it all gets.” He’s the only one who remembers since he’s the only one who stayed. He’s been researching the evil ever since.

Once Pennywise returns, Mike alerts them, and they all return, somewhat confused. The only one who doesn’t come back is Stanley. He’s just too scared. But he knows, somehow, they all have to be together to make it work. So, as he says in a letter near the end of the movie, he removes his piece from the gameboard. He kills himself.

I like that their first reaction to remembering and encountering Pennywise again is to get the fuck out of Dodge. But Mike convinces Bill to stay, and Bill convinces some of the others. And what has Mike learned after 27 years of research? Apparently an ancient Native American ceremony might kill the evil. Why didn’t it kill Pennywise before? The final answer is that, oops, it doesn’t really work, but that’s third-act stuff. In the meantime, each Loser has to find a personal item (on their own) for the ritual (that doesn’t work). But it leads to some good, scary scenes—particularly Beverly visiting her old apartment and encountering a kind old lady (Joan Gregson), who, we see, is Pennywise, skittering insectlike behind Beverly’s back. So creepy. Felt very “Twin Peaks.” These personal journeys also create flashbacks that allow us to see the kid versions of the Losers again.

In the meantime, the school bully from the first movie, Henry Bowers (Teach Grant), who’d been pushed to his apparent death, is actually alive and living and in a mental asylum. He’s also grown to seed. When he sees a red balloon signaling the return of Pennywise, he teams up with his now-zombie toadies to wreak revenge upon the Losers. Why is he in thrall to Pennywise who killed his friends? Who knows? Bullies will bully. He actually stabs Eddie in the cheek—the cheek the creepy pharmacist had recently pinched—then shows up at the library and is about to kill Mike when Richie splices his head open with an axe. Or something. To me, Bowers is a subplot we didn’t need. The movie’s long enough already. 

Question for people who read the novel: Did the little boy die in the Hall of Mirrors or is that another Pennywise illusion to fuck with Bill? That’s the thing: When is the horror an illusion (fortune cookies morphing into monsters, a giant Pennywise terrorizing a carnival) and when does it have real-world repercussions? At time, it almost felt like the Losers were invulnerable to Pennywise. He would fuck with their minds but leave no physical wounds. Anyone know why? Other than they’re the stars?

All of this leads us back to the abandoned Neibolt house, which was dilapidated in 1988-89, and now looks like ash, but is somehow still standing there on the corner next to nice homes with manicured lawns. (The Derry township can’t even condemn a fucking property right.) They go down the well, through the sewers, and into the creepy spot from the finale of the last film (a pile of circus props and kids toys). But that’s not enough. From there, they keep descending: down a sewer, crawling and scraping to get to a specific subterranean locale for the incantation that doesn’t work. They’ve basically arrived defenseless into Pennywise’s lair. It’s a wonder only one of them dies. Bye, Eddie. See ya, Zig. 

There’s a running gag throughout the film in which fans of Bill say they liked this or that book of his but never the ending. Apparently it’s a criticism Stephen King heard a lot. He even gets to say it here, to Bill, in a great cameo as the most unimpressed of Maine shopkeepers. And while the ending to this film isn’t great (it goes on too long), I liked the ending to Pennywise. Since he has to abide by the rules of the shape he’s in, they decide to make him small by escaping through a narrow aperture. But he doesn’t bite. Then they realize there are other ways to make someone feel small. They’ve felt it all their lives. So they taunt him and insult him until he becomes small enough that they can rip his heart from his chest and crush it.

OK, so it’s not great. I mean, Pennywise can have his feelings hurt? But at least it’s using brains rather than fists.

Sans Eddie and Stanley
Other complaints. In the novel, the kids’ portion was set in the 1950s, and the adult portion in the 1980s. In the movie, it’s 1980s and 2010s, but they didn’t always update properly. The flashbacks to 1980s Derry look very 1950s, while Bill’s childhood bike is a Schwinn? Why not a BMX like in “E.T.”? Plus when he repurchases it from Stephen King’s grousy Maine shopkeeper, what does he say as he rides it down the street? Right: “Hi-yo, Silver!” That’s a ’50s kid, watching Clayton Moore’s Lone Ranger, not an ’80s kid. Certainly not after the Klinton Spilsbury version.

“It Chapter Two” is scary enough—I watched much of it through splayed fingers—just not as scary as the first. Which makes sense. They’re adults now. The world, and clowns, are much scarier when you’re a kid. Plus we don’t see Pennywise much. Plus they keep giving us the horror in the sigh after the horror doesn’t appear. Like that’s supposed to still shock.

Here’s a question: Will the township of Derry become nicer without the evil nearby? Or is the evil we see the townspeople commit—from horrific bullying to sex abuse—unrelated to Pennywise? I assume the latter. There’s a real sense here of things we can’t escape. Our heroes all leave the horrors of Derry and wind up in similar situations. Momma’s boy Eddie winds up married to a woman just like his mom—and played by the same actress. Beverly, abused by her father, winds up abused by her husband. Even Ben, chubby and brutalized in Derry, who manages to turn himself into a trim, hugely successful architect, is creating open-spaced buildings in reaction to the claustrophobia he felt in Derry. As for Bill? He becomes Stephen King, and relives the horror all the time. With, one imagines, evil trucks and incompetent sheriffs.

At least the movie gives them all (sans Eddie and Stanley) a happy ending. Beverly winds up with Ben, who’s now gorgeous and rich. Richie had his standup, Bill his writing, and Mike finally gets to leave Derry. Good for him. And good riddance. Has there been a more worthless town in movie history?

WARNING: SPOILERS 

What a disappointment.

I get why screenwriter/star Mindy Kaling created up-and-comer Molly Patel (Kaling), who gets a dream job writing for iconic female late-night host Katherine Newbury (Emma Thompson), since Kaling was an intern for Conan O’Brien and the sole woman and person of color on the writing staff of “The Office” back in 2005. She knows this stuff.

I just don’t get why the female late-night host. If Kaling was a rarity in writing rooms, Newbury didn’t exist. Not in the early ’90s, when her show supposedly started, and not today, when all the late-night slots are taken by Stephen, Seth, two Jimmys and a James. If you’re riffing on the sexism of the industry, as this movie does, why create a character that makes the industry seem progressive in comparison?

And why make her British? And starchy and out-of-touch? Yes, apparently off-camera Johnny Carson was abrupt and unavailable, but on-camera he was the epitome of sly charm—and we don’t see that from Newbury. Yes, Carson got famously out-of-touch near the end of his 30-year reign, leading to Dana Carvey’s blistering “I did not know that ... Wild, weird stuff...” imitation, so I guess that’s a good avenue to explore, but you need the other elements. You need someone who seems funny. Was Ellen DeGeneres too busy for the role? Lily Tomlin? How about Julia Louis-Dreyfus or Tina Fey—aged 10 years? Thompson’s a pro but I saw nothing about her character that would make me think she’d been a national comic treasure for almost 30 years.

Not very PC
I must’ve seen the trailer a zillion times during the Seattle International Film Festival. It was playing the Centerpiece Gala, a prestigious slot, but the more I saw the trailer the more I worried. That’s the best they’ve got? What’s in this not-very-funny trailer?

Yep. “Late Night” is supposed to be about funny people and it’s not very funny.

Newbury gets off some zingers but overall she’s entitled and out-of-touch. She thinks she doesn’t have to keep up-to-date to keep an audience. New writers are told: Nothing happened after 1995, not the internet, and certainly not social media, so don’t mention any of that. Plus she’s sexist. Her writing staff consists of eight Yalie white men. Her personal assistant, Brad (Denis O’Hare), tells her, “I think you have a problem with living female writers on your staff,” and when it becomes an issue, he’s ordered to find her one. And there, across his desk, is Molly Patel, who works at a chemical plant, and has never done standup or comedy writing of any kind; she’s just a fan of the show. But she gets the gig. Because she’s a woman.

Also because she gets off this line.

Brad: A TV writer’s room is ... It’s not very PC. It can be a pretty masculine environment.
Molly: Oh, I saw most of the writers. I’m not overly worried about masculinity.

It’s one of the movie’s last funny lines.

That sets it all up. Molly is young, non-white, kinda hip; Newbury is old, very white, and decidedly unhip; and the movie’s trajectory is for Newbury to open up enough to Molly’s ideas to save both of their careers.

Except the stuff Molly comes up with? The worst. We get a recurring on-the-street bit called “Katherine Newbury: White Savoir,” where she helps two black dudes hail a cab, a fat woman buy clothes (I think), and some other dude get fries by complaining on social media. This is what turns the show from soporific into “a viral sensation.” I remember my father used to complain about movies in which some fictional Broadway show would get a standing ovation opening night when it was so bad it would probably close in a week, and this is the modern version of that. Even if people got the joke, and there isn't much of one, Newbury would be skewered more than celebrated for “White Savoir.”

As for that politically incorrect writers room? I wish. These guys are sweethearts. There’s a cute monologue writer (Reid Scott of “VEEP”), an older, empathetic, I’ll-be-fired-any-day-now dude (Max Casella), a lothario (Hugh Dancy), a fat guy (Paul Walter Hauser), and some non-descripts. At one point, they wonder over this “diversity hire” but they kind of whisper it. Mostly they’re there to support Molly. When a story breaks that Katherine slept with the lothario, cheating on her Parkinson’s-ridden husband Walter (John Lithgow), they all seem shocked. They soul search. “I thought she really loved Walter,” says the “VEEP” dude, betrayed. It comes off more like a consciousness-raising session.

You like us again; you really like us again
The story about the affair sets up our third act. Katherine takes a sabbatical, then says she’ll return to hand over the show over to the douchey standup the network wants (Ike Barinholtz); Molly says no, she should acknowledge the affair and fight for her show. They argue. Molly’s fired. “VEEP” dude shows up at her house to buck her up. Then Katherine does what Molly suggested, wins back the crowd, wins over the network president (Amy Ryan), keeps the job, and shows up at Molly’s new apartment to woo her back. A year later, everything’s hunky dory.

I didn’t like anybody in it. No, not true. I mostly didn’t like our female leads. It’s basically another example of female storytellers (Kaling and director Nisha Ganatra) giving us flawed, unsympathetic female characters and sympathetic, supportive male ones. Which is fine, but the flaws should be interesting. “Late Night” sets up the usual false dichotomy of Hollywood films: High culture is snooty so let’s wallow in the YouTube muck. These are our only two options.

O’Hare, who’s been in everything, is good, as is Casella. I particularly liked Lithgow’s Walter. There’s a scene when Molly attends a party at Katherine’s and finds Walter upstairs alone playing the piano. She listens. They talk. It’s nice. I didn’t want to leave that room.

WARNING: SPOILERS

I keep wondering when a Chinese movie will break out and do well in other markets. They’re killing it in China, with six homegrown movies in the last four years that have grossed north of half a billion dollars; but these things don’t travel well.

Why does the world come to Hollywood movies and not Chinese movies? Because they’re in English, which much of the world speaks? Because they offer a kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy that feels universal? Because the U.S. is a microcosm of the world and that’s reflected in our movies, while China isn’t, and that’s reflected in theirs?

Last February, I saw “The Wandering Earth,” China’s entry into the big-budget sci-fi blockbuster realm, and was thinking, “They still haven’t nailed special effects, but they’re closer. But oy, the story.” I mean, how many people besides scientists have to be insulted in this thing? From my review:

There’s a million-to-one shot to save the Earth and our Chinese heroes are in favor of rolling those dice. Every other country? They just want to return to their underground homes to spend their last precious hours wallowing in grief. The Brits wallow in drink while the Japanese contemplate hara-kiri. As for the U.S.? We don’t seem to exist. We’ve been expunged.

With “Ne Zha,” an animated movie based on a classic Chinese character, they’ve nailed the special-effects part. I was thinking, “Wow, the animation looks great. As good anything Pixar or DreamWorks does.” 

But oy, the story.

Nurture over nature
I lived in Taiwan for two years but I still can’t begin to wrap my head around Chinese mythology. This one basically begins in the clouds, where a pig man and a jaguar man battle against ... I don’t even remember. But the battle results in two pearls—a spirit and a demon—being loosed upon the earth. I don’t want to go into too much detail, because I can’t, but basically the underwater dragons convince jaguar-man to get pig-man drunk so they can get steal the spirit pearl, and either through happenstance or by design, the demon pearl winds up in Ne Zha, the newborn of Li Jing and Madam Yin. The distraught parents are informed that this means he’ll only live to his third birthday.

It also means he’s a demon, but the parents do what they can to raise him right anyway. In the village, though, he’s feared. That makes sense—he has a demon’s power and sensibility—but they assume the worst, too, blaming him for things he doesn’t do. He’s a misunderstood demon.

There’s a good scene where village boys conspire against him. One suggests setting up a Rube Goldbergesque series of traps, involving a rotten wood bridge, a beehive, etc., where the only avenue of escapes leads to another trap, which leads to another trap, and so on, until the hapless Ne Zha is forced to flop into a rancid mudpit. The boys are totally game for this and decide the only improvement is to add burrs and their own pee into the mudpit. At which point the planner reveals himself to be Ne Zha and we see the village boys go through the Rube Goldberg machine and wind up in the nasty mudpit of their own making.

That’s the sorta demon part. The misunderstood part is when he’s accused of kidnapping a little girl to eat her. That was actually a different demon, a water demon, whom Ne Zha battles in the village and on the beach, where he’s joined by the tall, graceful, horned Ao Bing. The two play hacky-sack on the beach as well. Ao Bing is Ne Zha’s first friend.

He’s also the son of the Dragon King, and infused with the power of the stolen spirit pearl. It’s his father’s wish for him to use his powers to raise the dragons from their underwater prison. To do so would mean the end of the village. Or something.

All of this comes to a head on Ne Zha’s third birthday, when Li Jing tries to sacrifice himself for his son. Ne Zha refuses to let him, and in accepting his destiny (early death) becomes more than his destiny (a demon). He becomes the hero no one thought he would be.

A bowlful of snot
That’s the part of the movie that could travel well: nurture over nature; controlling your own destiny. Everyone in the world digs that. But to get there you have to go through a dizzying array of Chinese folks legends, none of which are really explained for the neophyte or 外国人。 

My wife had a problem, too, with how one-note it all is: relentlessly loud with few pauses. I was more turned off by the frequent scatological humor—although the Chinese kids who sat in front of us for a Sunday matinee at Pacific Place in downtown Seattle certainly enjoyed the fart jokes. That was cute—the kids more than the fart jokes. I missed how they took the scene where Ne Zha is forced to swallow a bowlful of the water demon’s snot; I was too busy shielding my eyes.

There’s also a running gag with a brawny villager who has a fearful girlish cry. It’s funny the first time; by the 10th, it feels a lot more homophobic.

But they’re closer.

WARNING: SPOILERS

These types of movies—the machinations involved in getting to a party, troubles therein and lessons learned—are usually reserved for high school or college kids (most recently: “Booksmart”); but as you’re watching “Good Boys,” you’re thinking, “Yeah, why not 12-year-olds?”

Answer: 12-year-olds generally aren’t the actors 18-to-22-year-olds are. Particularly when it comes to comedy.

These kids are alright, though. Maybe with a better director, or better editor, we would’ve seen fewer bumps. Anyway, I laughed a lot. And smiled. And remembered. 

Heroes’ journey
Max, Lucas and Thor (Jacob Tremblay, Keith L. Williams and Brady Noon) are best buds who call themselves “the Beanbag Boys” because they like lounging in beanbags in a tent in Thor’s room and talking their talk. Periodically, they’re interrupted by Thor’s little sister, Annabelle, who appears out of nowhere, creepily, like in a horror movie. It’s a good bit.

As the movie opens, they’ve just started sixth grade, and each has his own dilemma:

• Max likes a girl, Brixlee (Millie Davis), but doesn’t know how to let her know beyond talking to her—which is way too scary
• Thor wants to try out for the school musical “Rock of Ages” and fit in with the popular kids—wishes that are mutually exclusive
• Lucas’ parents are getting divorced, so he’s becoming even more of a straight arrow than he normally is

At the local park, the cool kids (sadly, with slicked-back hair, like Spike Fonzarelli) take our boys into the woods and offer a beer. The goal is to sip it. The record is three sips. No one has been able to sip a beer more than three times. Max manages but Thor can’t, and he’s subsequently labeled “Sippy Cup.” Leads to a good line during school lunch when someone mocks him:

Does this look like a sippy cup? No, it's a fucking juice box! Because I'm not a fucking child!

Language aside, these kids are the good boys of the title. They’re innocent and rather sweet-natured. Max is invited to a kissing party, at which Brixlee will be in attendance, and he worries about never having kissed anyone. So he and the others use Max’s dad’s drone to spy on the neighborhood high school girl, Hannah (Molly Gordon, Triple A of “Booksmart”), to maybe see her kissing with her douchey boyfriend. Instead, Hannah captures the drone and won’t give it back. The boys then steal her purse, which includes ecstasy in a childproof vitamin container, and a swap is suggested. But Lucas balks at trafficking in drugs, they try to steal the drone back, but it’s crushed by an oncoming car. Now they have to buy a new one before Max’s dad (Will Forte, who played Molly’s dad in “Booksmart”) returns from a business trip. This involves a trip to the mega mall 4+ miles away—all the while pursued by Hannah and her friend Lily (Midori Francis), who, at one point, offers a good “T2” chase parody.

Occasionally, screenwriters Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky (“Bad Teacher,” “The Office”) and director Stupnitsky (making his directorial debut) push the envelope too much, as when Lucas dislocates his shoulder and the boys ram him into a metal trash bin to shove it back into place. Sometimes they don’t push it enough. None of these boys, for example, think of having the high school girls teach them to kiss? They are good boys. At that age, that would’ve been my first, last and only thought.

Plus the movie goes on too long.

Tampon (n.)
But it’s funny. I like the Kwiki-Mart scene. I like Sam Richardson, who played Richard Splett on “VEEP,” as the bored cop to whom Lucas keeps confessing everything. I like Lucas’ high-pitched squeal. I like the boys trying to make sense of the world. “That's a tampon,” Max says with authority. “Girls shove it up their buttholes to stop babies from coming out.” 

Ultimately the boys prove their mettle—Max kisses the girl and Thor takes an unprecedented fourth sip of beer—but they’re already beginning to outgrow what united them. Each wants different things. There’s melancholy in this. You can’t help but think about your own boyhood friends and the paths taken.