The Media Tourist

Director Christopher Nolan’s epic retooling of the iconic Greek legend deserves to be seen on the IMAX screen

The Odyssey
Starring Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway & Robert Pattinson
Directed by Christopher Nolan
R

In theaters Friday, July 17

Director Christopher Nolan’s bold, brawny and brutally impressive new take on one of the world’s oldest and tallest of tall tales puts a colossal cinematic crown on the legend of the Greek warrior king Odysseus and his 10-year journey home after the sacking of Troy.

The saga known as the Odyssey has been around since prehistory, passed along through songs and poems and ultimately attributed to the blind poet known as Homer. Its theme—of a husband and father trying to return to his wife and his son after a brutal war—resonates worldwide throughout art, literature, language and pop culture.

Matt Damon (above) leads the cast as Odysseus, the king of Ithica. Anne Hathaway gives a searingly strong—and potentially Oscar-worthy—standout performance his ever-faithful wife, Penelope, holding things down back at the palace, wondering when—and if—her king will have a homecoming. Should she give in and remarry, and move on?

Tom Holland breaks free of the Spider-Man movie web as Odysseus’ son, Telemachus, who sets out on his own trek to find his father—or find out what fate befell him. Robert Pattinson is the film’s hissable villain Antonius, who shakes things up as a smarmy suitor with his eye on Odysseus’ wife, and on the spoils of the royal throne.

There’s also John Leguizimo as Odysseus’ loyal servant, the blind swineherd Menelaus, Lupito Nynong’o as Helen of Troy, and Zendaya as the goddess Athena. Mia Goth is a disloyal maidservant, Charlize Theron is the seductive sea nymph Calypso, and John Bernthal plays the king of Sparta. Transgendered actor Elliot Page (formerly Ellen Page) is Sinon, who plays a pivotal role staging the Trojan horse attack. In a nod to the tale’s roots in oral tradition, the rapper Travis Scott makes an appearance as a bard, spreading an early version of the Odysseus legend.

The movie opens with the words “A tale of apparent magic,” and that’s true in more ways than one. In addition to the fantastical elements of the story, there’s also movie magic. Nolan, one of the most commercially successful and creatively ambitious directors in Hollywood today (his previous film, Oppenheimer, won seven Oscars and grossed nearly $1 billion), makes The Odyssey an immersive, transportive experience, more than just a story on a screen. Filmed entirely with new 70mm IMAX cameras, it’s a hyper-visual experience made to be seen as large as it was made, so don’t be stingy. Fork over the few extra IMAX bucks and behold its wide-ranging wonders.

Eschewing CGI and computerized effects for physical props and sets, and filming on location throughout the Mediterranean and beyond, Nolan takes us along for Odysseus’ legendary adventures—captured by a monstrous cyclops, clashing with giant woodland warriors, escaping from a sorceress (the terrific Samantha Morton) who turns men into animals, steering his longboat past the seductive song of the sirens, and navigating the treacherous passage between the whirlpool Charybdis and the multi-headed monster Scylla. We’re there for the siege of Troy, with Odysseus and his men packed like sardines into a wooden horse, their elaborate ruse to gain entry to the city and destroy it. There’s even a side trip to hell, where they encounter a blood-slurping legion of the undead.

It all comes to a head with a brutal showdown and Odysseus rights a few wrongs—and breaks out his trusty bow and arrows one final time.

It gets a bit too intense for young kids, hence the R rating. It’s suffused with magic and mysticism, but it can be ominous, scary and bloody. The music and sound, by Swedish composer Ludwig Göransson, is a perfect complement to the imagery, full of experimental, non-traditional orchestral noises and ancient instruments that enhance the mythic, meaty elements of the story.

But for all its dark wonders, this Odyssey grounds its nearly three hours of wide-ranging, high-seas, gung-ho adventure in a very human story about a bond between a father and his son, the enduring love of a husband and his wife, and the emotional toll wrought on Odysseus by years of war, wondering and wandering. It’s a story about loyalty, faithfulness, sacrifice, guilt and retribution. And at the end of his long road, Odysseus is tired, weary and worried about the path of destruction he’s been carving. “To burn the walls of Troy,” he laments, “was to burn the world entire.”

Hmmm…. Maybe that’s a cautionary message this ancient tale holds even for our world today, and where it might be headed.

Even when The Odyssey was weeks away from opening, it had already sparked a clamorous backlash and a bit of burning of its own from critics who wanted to harp on its casting (too ethnically diverse, they said), its authenticity (those longboats look more Nordic than Greek) and its dialogue (Telemachus refers to his father as “dad,” and there are several f-bombs).

But such reproach is but a handful of small stones thrown at a towering achievement. Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is an epic movie for an epic story, an odyssey in more ways than one, and a movie that’s going to be watched, discussed and lauded for a long time to come—in alignment with the ever-malleable story of Odysseus itself, which has endured for 2,500 years.

And hey, it’s probably the only film you’ll ever see with a rapper, Zendaya as a goddess, Spider-Man, a 50-foot-tall cyclops in a cave, and a bunch of pigs that used to be guys.

—Neil Pond

Rollicking, randy all-star-cast comedy puts a naughty spin on “The Wizard of Oz”

Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass
Starring Zoey Deutch, Ken Marino, Jon Hamm & John Slattery
Directed by David Wain
R

In theaters Friday, July 10

A multi-layered concept comedy with a motley crew running all over Los Angeles, Gail Daughtery and the Celebrity Sex Pass is the latest absurdly raunchy, ridiculously hyper romp from director David Wain.

Wain’s previous films—like Wet Hot American Summer, Role Models and They Came Together—skewered big-screen tropes with satire and a smirk, and this one’s in a similar vein. It follows a young Midwestern hairstylist, Gail Daughtry (Zoey Deutch), who takes a fish-out-of-water trip to sunny California.

You see, Gail and her fiancé, Tom (Michael Cassidy) made a far-fetched deal, sort of, agreeing that if either of them could have a booty call with their celebrity crush, the other would be free to do the same—in other words, a celebrity sex pass. When Gail finds Tom bonking Jennifer Aniston in the back room of a bookstore, she heads to Tinseltown to hook up with actor John Hamm and “level the playing field.”

Yes, it sounds crazy. And it is, packed with bawdy jokes and bonkers celebrity cameos. In addition to Aniston and Hamm, who play themselves, there’s Henry Winkler, Weird Al Yankovic and Penn Gillette. And isn’t that Paul Rudd as a wedding guest, giving a wink to the camera? Yes, it is!

Actor/comedian Richard Kind is a cab driver. Elizabeth Perkins and Elizabeth Banks have cameos you might miss if you get up to get popcorn. Hamm’s Mad Men co-star, John Slattery, plays a version of himself, one that’s surprisingly well-versed in the art of self-defense. Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s Jo Lo Truglio is an inept thug. There’s a map-of-the-stars salesman (Michael Ian Black) and Fred Melamed’s a mailman, narrating the tale looking into the camera…and sometimes into the mailbox. There’s a guy (Robert Herjavec) from Shark Tank! Reno 911’s Thomas Lennon is a rock-star hairdresser, the master of the whip curl, who knows how to use his curling iron as a weapon. Sabrina Impacciatore, from The White Lotus, hams it up as an evil mastermind.

But the real standout here is Deutch. The daughter of actress Lea Thompson and director Howard Deutch embodies the movie’s enthusiasm, its embrace of wide-eyed adventure and its self-assurance that all the wacky comedy is hitting a bullseye. She “sells” it, hammering home the silliness with dynamic self-confidence. She’s come a long way since Disney’s The Suite Life on Deck in 2010!

There’s also a fateful briefcase switcheroo in an airport, a plot to collapse the world economy, bad guys chasing good guys, an abandoned Wild West set and a roll of 35mm camera film that becomes an inspirational touchstone. It feels like It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World meets with The Naked Gun, with a Mad Men reunion to boot.

On one level, it’s a sweeping, sexed-up mock-tail toast to Hollywood, with actors playing themselves, paparazzi (The Residence’s Ken Marino, who also co-wrote the movie) lurking in the bushes, bodyguards, a movie pitch and agents from Creative Artists Agency. To top it off, it’s also a loopy salute to one of the most classic films of all time.

You don’t have to dig deep to see the connections to The Wizard of Oz. Gail is the Kansas girl, like Dorothy Gail in the 1939 film, who ventures into a place full of wonder and danger, on a mission with a posse of characters, trying to avoid pursuers—and wearing a pair of ruby red slippers. If you have trouble figuring out who, exactly, is standing in for the Tin Man, the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion, Dorothy’s dog Toto, the Wicked Witch and the flying monkeys, stick around for the credits.

As for the Wizard himself, well, you’ll make the connection when one of the characters admits his insecurities about pretending to be someone he’s not, living “behind the curtain” of his fame—and certainly when he drops in later, via hot-air balloon.

Of course, in The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy didn’t sing about being “off to see the Wizard” to hop into the sack with him. But Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass doesn’t want us to think too hard about that, or about anything. It just wants to nudge us into some chuckles at its outlandish premise, its random randy-ness, its cavalcade of in-jokes, and its weird, wonderfully wacky spin on someplace way, way over the rainbow—where sex with the stars is a thing, some dreams really do come true, and Weird Al Yankovic hops off his golf cart to chase interlopers away with an Uzi.

–Neil Pond

Johnny Knoxville and crew fire a final salvo of gonzo stupidity

Jackass: Best & Last
Starring Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, Preston Lacy & the rest of the Jackass crew
Directed by Jeff Tremaine
Rated R

In theaters Friday, June 26

It’s so painful, you gotta laugh. The new Jackass movie—the fifth film to spin off the gonzo prank series that started two decades ago on MTV, later becoming a pop-culture franchise—is a final-bow salvo of slaps, slams and other shocks that fans of the show have come to expect.

It is—supposedly—the parting shot from creator Johnny Knoxville and his cast of Jackass collaborators, mixing new material with stunts that never aired in previous movies or on TV. And ending with a giant grocery cart, filled with the cast, rolling slo-mo through explosions, pelted by debris, and ultimately plunging over a cliff to the tune of Frank Sinatra singing “My Way.”

It’s a ballsy move to open the same weekend as Toy Story 5, but Jackass has always been ballsy—in more ways than one. Like the bit when Knoxville, in a clip from his 2013 movie Bad Grandpa, airs out his alarmingly distended (artificial) “old man” parts in a male strip club. And speaking of toys, there’s a bit from 2011 with a little toy car that becomes, ahem, lodged in the colon of Ryan Dunn, one of the show’s original collaborators.

Jackass has always courted discomfort, built on a foundation of dangerous, pointless and sometimes unhinged—and frequently scatological—setups meant to surprise, shock and awe. Like strapping Steve-O into an overly “full” porta potty and sloshing it up and down on bungee cords suspended between two massive cranes, or a group of Jackasses bottoms-upping mega-doses of laxative, then playing a game of Twister. In another moment, we watch Sean “Poopies” McInerney trying to walk on a balance beam with a shock collar attached to his, well—it’s inside his underwear.

Oh, and there’s a four-foot-tall robot, giving a rectal exam.

The barrage of self-inflicted abuses includes an early staged clip that caused MTV to temporarily cancel the show, as Knoxville, dressed in escaped-convict orange, goes into a hardware store and begs for help to saw through his handcuffs. It ends up with a confrontation by Los Angeles police.

There’s something perversely entertaining in watching other people willing to abuse themselves strictly for entertainment—especially when they look like they’re having such a great time doing it. Part of the appeal is being “in on the joke,” unlike a lot of the onlookers while they’re filming—like the customers at a L.A. food stand who watch as “guest star” Brad Pitt is whisked into a black van, apparently kidnapped. Cut to the inside of the vehicle, with Pitt and the Jackass crew laughing hysterically at the disruption they’ve just caused.

Knoxville and his cohorts (including co-creator, and longtime director Jeff Tremaine) know that their creative anarchy fills a certain niche and a need, lodged deep in our primate brains. Like Maximus (Russell Crowe) taunting the cheering arena crowd in another movie, Gladiator: “Are you not entertained?

Jackass: Best & Last opens with Knoxville, in a 1998 bit that never aired, shooting himself in the chest point-blank with a handgun and padded only with a T-shirt and a Kevlar vest. A warning comes onscreen: “Do not attempt this. It’s extra stupid and could kill you.”

Knoxville survived that early brush with danger, and death, and stunts of jaw-dropping stupidity became the show’s calling card. And Jackass became a kind of institution, a daring dose of unruly chaos to spice up the pedestrian mundanity of modern life, a vicarious way to live outside the prim and proper, watching others do what we’d never dare.

“The worse an experience is,” says Steve-O watching Knoxville get flipped into the air and knocked unconscious by a bull, “the better it looks onscreen.”

Laughter may be good for the soul, but Jackass: Best & Last gives us a final reminder that it can be hell on a body. Especially when toy cars, bulls and porta potties are involved.

—Neil Pond

Director Steven Spielberg’s eye-popping new sci-fi drama about a decades-long government coverup of alien encounters

Disclosure Day
Starring Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth & Colman Domingo
Directed by Steven Spielberg
In theaters Friday, June 12

Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor take the leads in Disclosure Day, director Steven Spielberg’s new epic sci-fi thriller about the unraveling of a massive government conspiracy covering up evidence that we are not alone in the universe.

The top-notch cast also includes Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, Colman Domingo and Wyatt Russell.

Blunt gives a performance that’s among her all-time best as Margaret Fairchild, a Kansas City meteorologist who suddenly develops amazing and alarming abilities, like speaking in foreign languages and reading minds. O’Connor is Daniel Kellner, a mathematics whiz turned whistle-blower determined to reveal what he knows about a covert global cybersecurity force that’s quashed nearly 80 years of proof about extraterrestrial “close encounters.”

They both become targets of a massive, rip-roaring manhunt to round them up and shut them down. What else do they have in common? Well, you’ll find out—but I won’t spoil it here.

Colin Firth is Noah Scanlon, the head of the coverup, convinced that the mind-blowing reality about aliens would “tip the balance” of a world already on the precipice of nuclear self-destruction. Eve Hewson (Bono’s daughter!) is Kellner’s girlfriend, a former novitiate in a monastery who plays a significant role in helping spread, well, another kind of word from on high. Colman Domingo, who makes almost every film he’s in better by just being in it, is the head of the movement to rip open decades of secrecy, to have a reckoning, a day of disclosure when the truth will be made known to everyone. Wyatt Russell is Jackson, Margaret’s romantic partner, who doesn’t understand—at least at first—what’s going on.

Spielberg, who launched the very idea of “summer blockbusters” back in 1975 with Jaws, has made some of the top-performing, most widely beloved and critically lauded movies of all time. Sometimes it feels here, with his first film in four years (since The Fablemans), that he’s looking into the skies and beyond the way he did in E.T. The Extraterrestrial and Close Encounters of the Third Kind—with awe, empathy and hope.

And the soundtrack, by his longtime collaborator John Willams, drives home the gamut of emotions. It’s no wonder Williams has received more than two dozen Grammys and five Oscars.

Disclosure Day has it all—thrills and chills, danger and derring-do, and the beating heart of a love story. It’s got a pulse-pounding train scene that can match anything Tom Cruise has done in the Mission: Impossible world, and its heady thoughts on how the existence of extraterrestrials might mesh with the Bible will certainly stir some discussion. (Plus, three main characters are named Noah, Margaret and Daniel.)  

Its suggestion that communication with aliens is closely aligned with music, mathematics and nature will likely mean you’ll never look at that bright red cardinal at your bird feeder, or on your windowsill, the same way again. It’s a movie that makes you think about what’s up here, what’s down here, and how it might all be connected. About childhood and crop circles, secrets and lies, the past and the future, and the multi-faceted experience of our very existence.

Spielberg has crafted another cinematic triumph, a moving picture that’s moving in more ways than one, one that reminds us again of the eye-popping, jaw-dropping magic and the majesty of a big story playing out on big screen, pulling us in, making us feel. Head down to the multiplex, folks, because it certainly feels like blockbuster time again.

—Neil Pond