The Media Tourist

The ‘game is afoot’ in the year’s sharpest, funniest, most entertaining movie puzzle

Knives Out
Starring Daniel Craig, Ana de Armas, Chris Evans, Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, Don Johnson & Toni Collette
Directed by Rian Johnson
PG-13

Somebody’s dead, it looks like a murder, and everyone’s a suspect.

Whodunit?

That’s been the setup and the starting line for many a movie, and sure enough, that’s how this one begins. But this insanely clever, thoroughly original all-star caper is full of razor-sharp surprises, and not the least are its wily, witty twists on the murder-mystery format.

For starters, we find out the “who” in the whodunit pretty early on—but, as you might expect, almost nothing in Knives Out is what, or how, you think it is. And the “who” is only the beginning of an even bigger mystery.

Ana de Armas & Daniel Craig

Daniel Craig trades his dapper James Bond British cool for a big ol’ slice of Southern-fried country ham to play Benoit (Ben-wah) Blanc, a private detective hired (but by whom?) to investigate the mysterious death of a wealthy mystery novelist, Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer, who reappears repeatedly in flashbacks). Thrombey was found one morning a week ago by his housekeeper (Edi Patterson), bled out in his bed, his throat slit with a blade in his hand.

Was it suicide…or was it murder?

“Everyone can lie,” says Blanc, often wrapping his loquacious drawl around puffs of a cigar. “Well, almost everyone.” He’s referring to Thrombey’s longtime caretaker and confidante, Marta (Ana de Armas), whom Blanc discovers has a “regurgitative reaction to mis-truthin’.” In other words, when Marta lies, she throws up.

Blanc and Marta—a puke-prone lie detector—become the movie’s central axis around which it spins the rest of its delightfully prickly tale, but to reveal much more would give far too much away. (It is nice to see Craig and de Armas working together in a preview of their next team-up, in April’s No Time to Die, the 25^th official James Bond film.)

This is the kind of movie where you need to pay close attention to everything—everything everyone says, everything that happens, and everything you see. Chances are, it will all come back around. Like the big coffee mug in the foreground of the opening shot—“My House, My Rules,” it reads. It may seem like just a cutesy coffee mug, but you’ll see it again, and it will mean something even…more.

You could call this a “family” film, in a way—because writer/director Rian Johnson (whose impressive resume includes the blockbuster Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the sci-fi mind-bender Looper and several TV episodes of Breaking Bad) has made everyone in Harlan Thrombey’s family a possible accomplice to his murder, naturally. Or at least they get drawn, in some way or another, into its tangled web, as Blanc and a pair of police detectives (Lakeith Stanfield and Noah Segan) spend days conducting probing interviews and combing through Thrombey’s maze-like country manor, full of hidden stairways, secret doors and promotional-oddity props—like a massive throne of blades—commemorating his murder-mystery novels. “Look around: This guy practically lived in a Clue board,” says one of the cops.

Everyone in the big, bright ensemble cast seems to be having a ball playing squabbling siblings, imploding in-laws and grousing grandkids. Jamie Lee Curtis is Thrombey’s real-estate mogul daughter, Linda, who remembers how fond her father used to be of writing cryptic notes and engaging her in games. Don Johnson is her husband, Richard, and the father of Ransom (Chris Evans), a slick, jaded playboy—and the only family member who skipped the funeral. Michael Shannon is Thrombey’s youngest son, Walt, steamed that his dad never gave him control of his $60 million publishing empire. Daughter-in-law Joni (Toni Collette) is a hippy-dippy lifestyle guru; her daughter, Meg (Katherine Langford), was getting her substantial college’s expenses funded by Thrombey’s monthly checks. Everyone thinks grandson Jacob (Jaeden Martell) is a weirdo, if not a neo-Nazi internet troll.

Almost everyone, Blanc finds, seems to have some kind of axe to grind, a secret to hide, some sort of reason they might conceivably have for wanting a piece of Harlan Thrombey’s sizeable fortune.

And when they all come together with the family attorney (Frank Oz) for the reading of Harlan’s will, that’s when the knives really come out.

Blanc seems so close to solving the mystery, but something about it continually baffles him. All the pieces are there, but something is missing; something just doesn’t fit. “A strange case,” he tells Marta. “A case with a hole in the middle—a doughnut.” At one point, even the doughnut hole seems to have another doughnut, with another doughnut hole, inside it.

Knives Out is great, galloping, fast-paced fun, and it harkens back to classic murder-mystery tropes that stretch across the decades. But it also launches a timely, pointed contemporary message in Marta’s character and her immigrant family, which becomes an important subplot—and a running gag of scathing social commentary as the Thrombeys, who claim to love Marta as one of their own, can’t ever recall which South American country she’s from. Is it Uruguay? Or Paraguay, or Brazil?

One scene offers a telling glimpse of a rerun of Angela Lansbury in the 1980s TV series Murder: She Wrote, overdubbed in Spanish. This is a movie that has quite a bit more than just murder and mystery on its mind.

“The game is afoot,” says Blanc, clearly relishing the challenge of digging into the Thrombey puzzle. You’ll relish it, too. The most entertaining movie puzzle of the year, it’s also a film with some of the sharpest edges where you least expect them.

And like the coffee mug suggests, it plays by its own rules. Whodunit? Oh, you’ll find out. But you’ll have even more fun filling in the doughnut holes.

In theaters Wed., Nov. 27, 2019

Disney’s coolest royalty returns for strong showing of sisterhood & girl power  

Frozen II
Starring voices by Idina Menzel, Kristen Bell, Jonathan Groff and Josh Gad
Directed by Chris Buck & Jennifer Lee
PG

When it comes to Disney royalty, you can’t get much cooler than Elsa and Anna.

The plucky ice queen and her spunky little sis were, of course, the stars of 2013’s Frozen, the animated musical blockbuster that took home two Oscars and broke worldwide box-office records. It set off an earworm bomb with “Let It Go,” its soaring signature song. And its success has now led to Disney’s first-ever theatrical sequel to an animated “princess” film.

Even though it’s been six years, Frozen fans won’t have any trouble picking up the storyline. For one thing, the gang’s all here, just where we left them in their mythical, fjord-shore Scandinavian-like hamlet of Arendelle. Idina Menzel returns to voice the now young-adult Elsa, still dealing with her mystifying powers to create and control ice and snow. Her sister Anna (Kristen Bell) didn’t get any magical gifts, but she proves herself indispensable in other ways, as she did in the first movie.

Olaf buddies up with Kristoff’s reindeer, Sven.

And of course, there’s Olaf (Josh Gad), the goofball snowman, and Kristoff (Jonathan Groff), Anna’s loveably bumbling suitor.

When Elsa hears a haunting, song-like voice calling from the distant northlands—the forbidding, mist-shrouded Enchanted Forest—the group sets off to find out where it’s coming from, and why. Maybe it’s a clue to Elsa’s mysterious magical abilities. Maybe it will lead them to answers about what really happened to Elsa and Anna’s parents, said to have perished in a shipwreck. Maybe it will be an opportunity to right some long-time political, cultural and historical wrongs.

Maybe the journey will set up several big musical numbers!

The plot gets a little thick and tricky, especially for younger viewers, who may get somewhat antsy and bogged down in the slower parts and just want to see Elsa and Anna do their sisters-united thing, or belt another big song, or see something slap-sticky funny. Some of the moments can be dark and gloomy and confusing. “Why is she crying?” asked one tyke in a seat behind me to her mommy, during one particularly somber scene. “Where’s Olaf?”

But mostly, Frozen II certainly fills the bill, especially for fans who’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting for a frosty follow-up. It’s big, even epic-feeling, especially once our travelers enter the Enchanted Forest, where they encounter powerful nature spirits, a race of indigenous people, a time warp and exotic creatures—including a tiny, cute, combustible salamander and towering “earth giants” the size of mountains.

Listen for a few new voices, including Evan Rachel Wood (taking over for Jennifer Lee as Elsa and Anna’s mother, Queen Iduna, from the first movie); Sterling K. Brown as a loyal Arendelle soldier; Martha Plimpton as the leader of the tribe the travelers encounter; and Jason Ritter as Ryder, a young tribesman who befriends Kristoff.

Returning Frozen directors Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee create some spectacular scenery and segments. Nudging the seasons just a bit, from winter to fall, gives the film’s pallet a striking new color shift—beyond ice and snow—to explore. You can tell there’s a lot of money on the screen, in expensive, extensive computer animation, like an impressive nighttime sequence when Elsa lights up a raging ocean with streaks and bursts of florescent colors to tame an elegant, translucent “water horse.” Or when Anna awakens the lumbering earth giants, taunts them into chasing her, hurling massive boulders—and doing exactly what she hoped they would do.

And not surprisingly, everyone gets a song. Just like in the original film, composers Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez (who also won an Oscar for the score for Disney’s acclaimed Coco) wrote seven new tunes for Frozen II. And while, alas, there’s probably not a new “Let It Go” singalong among them, all of the songs are expertly crafted, sturdy Disney-musical showpieces. Menzel, the Tony-nominated Broadway star from Rent, Wicked and If/Then, knocks anything she sings out of the park, so it’s no surprise Elsa is given some big, soaring ballads, like “Into the Unknown” and “Show Yourself.”

Anna/Bell belts out “The Next Right Thing,” another ballad, and everybody joins in on “Some Things Never Change,” a peppy Broadway-style opener which sets the stage for things to come, as does the soothing lullaby, “All is Found,” sung by Queen Iduna to her two young daughters.

But a true standout goes to Groff, as Kristoff, who sings “Lost in the Woods” as a campy, ’80s-video-style power anthem, compete with a background chorus of oohing and ahhing reindeer. Groff, also Tony-nominated for his Broadway work (he was King George III in Hamilton) and known for his starring role on TV’s Glee, delivers the goods while the intentionally cheesy visuals play like a clip of vintage Bryan Adams on MTV. Kids might giggle, but mom and dad will totally dig it. It’s a trippy Frozen II treat.

Anna and Olaf take a trip on an ice boat.

And Gad, who provides running comic relief as the hyperactive, babbling magical snowman Olaf, is a font of commentary on practically everything, including how he’s become more self-aware. Or, as he puts it, “the ever-increasing complexity of thought that comes with maturity.” (In one cluelessly cheeky moment, he offers a critique of Elsa’s singing. “She’s a bit pitchy,” he observes.) Olaf’s whimsical “When I Am Older” is also a highlight, in which he walks through a “haunted” section of the forest, and all sorts of boo-riffic oddities keep popping and poofing up around him.

While not quite as fresh as the original, Frozen II still stands tall with its own proto-feminist message of strong girl power and sisters doin’ it for themselves—and each other—in a fantasy fairy-tale world where magic is real, the past shapes the present, memories have power and “lands and people” can be “connected by love.”

It’s a message that little girls, in little Elsa crowns and little Anna dresses, will soak up like little sponges—and one that we all need to hear, no matter who’s doing the singing.

In theaters Friday, Nov. 22, 2019

Adam Driver drives home timely message in true tale of Washington corruption

The Report
Starring Adam Driver & Annette Bening
PG-13
Directed by Scott Z. Burns

The Report is a crackling political-intrigue thriller about how the U.S. Senate spent years dogging the CIA about the agency’s covert use of torture to extract information from detainees after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

It’s a true story, and it centers around a young Senate staffer, Daniel Jones (Adam Driver), and his painstaking, five-year crusade to comb through more than six million online documents for a study that the CIA—not surprisingly—did everything it could to quash.

Annette Bening is Sen. Dianne Feinstein

Working under the direction of U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (Annette Bening) in a windowless, bunker-like basement office, Jones and his small team discover a web of deceit, deception and cover-up. It’s all linked to the CIA’s “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” (EIT), an outsourced paramilitary program of extreme human-rights abuse, including waterboarding, sexual humiliation, mock burial, sensory deprivation, beatings and enemas. The agency used the techniques in attempts to force “confessions” from more than 100 Middle Eastern men whom it suspected might have ties to the 9/11 terrorism, or information about upcoming attacks.

When Jones completes his nearly 7,000-page report, it concludes that not a single one of the detainees coughed up any credible information—and one died, in effect tortured to death. Not only did the CIA violate time-honored, international Geneva Conventions principles about human rights and treatment of prisoners, but its multimillion-dollar EIT program failed to produce any useful information, contrary to everything the agency had told—and sold—the public about its so-called “War on Terror.”

Jon Hamm plays the White House Chief of Staff.

The head of the CIA (Ted Levine) does everything he can to discredit Feinstein, Jones and the report. The White House chief of staff (Jon Hamm) isn’t really interested; he has bigger election-year fish to fry. And Jones finds himself the target of criminal charges when the CIA turns the tables in a nasty twist that illustrates just how down-and-dirty Washington politics can be.

Matthew Rhys, channeling some of the stealth he cultivated playing a KGB spy on six seasons of TV’s The Americans, has a couple of scenes as a New York Times political reporter who cautions Jones about going public with his findings. “Some people will think you’re a hero,” he tells him, “and some will probably think you’re a traitor.”

Fans of TV’s Dexter will enjoy seeing Dexter himself, Michael C. Hall, as a toe-the-line CIA staffer, along with The Affair’s Maura Tierney. Tim Blake Nelson plays a military physician with objections about the abuse he’s witnessing. A high-end lawyer friend (Corey Stoll) gives Jones some free advice, telling the young Senate staffer that he can’t even begin to afford the super-expensive legal help he’s going to need.

But the real star of the show, clearly, is Driver. After a string of solid roles—in films including BlacKkKlansman, Logan Lucky, Inside Llewyn Davis, Lincoln, Frances Ha, Paterson, as Kylo Ren in the Star Wars franchise, and a heart-rending co-lead opposite Scarlett Johansson in this year’s acclaimed Marriage Story—he’s now a sturdy leading mainstream man. With no car chases, foot races, spaceships, explosions or gunfire, the “action” in The Report often plays out in the features on Driver’s expressive face, a long, oval pallet—the glowering intensity of his dark eyes, the scowling frown of his lips—for the dueling cross-currents of passion, fatigue and frustration that defined a trying half-decade of Daniel Jones’ life.

After crafting top-notch screenplays for other fact-based films, including The Informant! and Contagion, plus The Bourne Ultimatum, Scott Z. Burns—who also wrote this screenplay—makes his major-feature directing debut, and it’s a zinger. He builds a dense, immersive drama out of real-life characters and events from the not-so-distant past, cracking into the maddening machinations of Washington to unravel a chronic chain of corrosion and corruption under the George W. Bush administration—and he doesn’t let W’s successor, Barack Obama, completely off the hook, either.

The Report is a movie about big issues that matter, things that resonate beyond the scope of its story—about “who we were, who we are, and who we aspire to be,” to quote from a clip the movie uses from the late Sen. John McCain. And it’s impossible to miss its connections to contemporary events, especially given all the drama, controversy and constant news churn created by the current White House administration. When the movie gets around to whistleblowers, blocks of blacked-out, “redacted” text, elected officials who act not because of right or wrong, but because it’s what they think will help them win votes and elections… As the saying goes, what goes around, comes around.

“You ever wonder why history repeats itself?” asks Bening’s character, Sen. Feinstein. “It’s because we don’t listen the first time.”

History may repeat itself, but The Report suggests that, hopefully, there will always be someone, like Daniel Jones, to remind everyone the importance of listening, remembering—and never giving up in the fight for what’s right, especially against a system that seems impossibly stacked, packed and racked against them.

“You can’t torture people, lie about it and hide it from history,” Jones says. Thanks to his report, this story didn’t end that way. And thanks to The Report, we have Adam Driver in a great movie that shows just what a finessed, finely tuned, focused—and perhaps award-winning—actor he’s become.

In select theaters Nov. 15, 2019