Category Archives: Movie Reviews

Dec 05 2023
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Movie Reviews

She is Woman

Emma Stone puts a stridently fem-centric Franken-spin on a fabulously freaky tale

Poor Things
Starring Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo & Willem Dafoe
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Dec. 8

A young woman breaks free of stuffy Victorian society in this elegantly weird, delightfully far-out skewering of class, culture and carnality.

But Bella isn’t just any young woman—she’s the experimental creation of a mad-scientist surgeon that she calls “God.” Because to her, he is. Dr. Godwin Baxter gave new life to an anonymous woman he’d found after she’d committed suicide by jumping off a bridge to her death. He reanimated her lifeless body with electricity and the transplanted brain of a prenatal infant taken from her own womb. And he named her Bella, Latin for beautiful.  

Emma Stone is mesmerizing as Bella, a beautifully almost-grown adult when we meet her, just now to the point—with her developing brain—of learning how to eat, walk and talk. Willem Dafoe plays Baxter, his face a horrendous roadmap of scarry, maimed disfigurement from surgical experiments. Ramy Youssef (from the Hulu comedy series Ramy) is the earnest young med student hired to record Bella’s progress who finds himself falling in love with his endearingly odd subject. When a caddish Lothario (Mark Ruffalo) steals Bella away for his own lascivious enjoyment, it marks the beginning of her wide-ranging odyssey of self-discovery, of always wanting more and wanting better, and finding out who she is, what she wants and what makes her happy.

And that includes sex, and a lot of it. Sexual liberation, Bella learns, is just one of the freedoms of womanhood, and being whole as a woman. Be prepared: You’ll get an eyeful of body parts you might not be accustomed to seeing in movies with major, well-known actors.

Director Yorgos Lanthimos is known for his highly stylized, deliriously bonkers provocations in The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Favourite (which also starred Stone) and The Lobster. In this brilliant, black-comedy sci-fi parable—based on a 1992 satirical novel by Scottish author Alastar Grey—he creates a richly detailed wonderland for Bella to experience and explore and bring her ever-expanding mind up to speed with her body. She learns how to dance (in one of the movie’s most exhilarating scenes), develops empathy for the poor, absorbs philosophy, works in a Paris brothel (with a madam played by Kathryn Hunter, who portrayed all three witches in The Tragedy of Macbeth), and ultimately discovers her own mysterious past.

Frequently caustically funny, it’s hyper-visual and packed with marvelous detail. There are strange characters (including a man who walks like a crab, another with a claw for an arm), fabulous clothes, fantastical sights and expansive, period-piece sets, as if the movie has tapped into a brainstorm of gonzo ideas from Monty Python, Tim Burton and Wes Anderson. Seeing some of Dr. Baxter’s other “experiments,” like a chicken with the transplanted head of a dog, and watching some moments through a fish-eye lens, we know we’re in a skewed, wackadoo, off-kilter world, accentuated by an appropriately off-key, atonal soundtrack signaling that something’s…not quite right. But hey, look at that! And that!

Mark Ruffalo plays a caddish Lothario.

And you can’t help looking at Bella, as her innocence, candor, guileless self-expression and effusive embrace of femininity becomes threatening to men—the real “poor things,” pitiable, sometimes pathetically needy creatures. One of them even plans to surgically remove part of her female anatomy, which he thinks has made her hyper-sexed and uncontrollable.

This fem-centic Frankenstein-y tale is a daring parable about the rights of women in a world where men try to make them, mold them, possess them, use them, lock them up and contain them. In having none of that, Bella, who ultimately learns that kindness is key to countering life’s beastly cruelties, becomes a vibrantly potent avatar for female liberation and empowerment, in all its forms.

And Emma Stone, miles away from one La La Land, finds herself dancing up a lusty storm in another.

—Neil Pond

Nov 30 2023
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Movie Reviews, Uncategorized

Oh No, There Goes Tokyo

On the cusp of his 70th anniversary, Godzilla returns in a monster-mash throwback to his postwar roots

Godzilla Minus One
Starring Minami Hambe, Sakura Ando & Ryunosuke Kamiki
Directed by Takashi Yamazaki
Rated PG-13

In theaters Friday, Dec. 1

The O.G.’s back in town!

The town is Tokyo, and the O.G. is the original Godzilla. This is the 37th movie about the rampaging reptile since he first lumbered onto movie screens back in 1954. So O.G. might also stand for “old Godzilla.”

Except, in Godzilla Minus One, the Godzilla saga rewinds, back to the beginnings and a “youthful” GZ, long before Japan’s iconic, dependably durable all-terrain mega-monster would go on to face off with Mothra, Rodan, Ghidorah or King Kong. Before he became a Hanna-Barbera cartoon in the 1970s, or fed in the imagination of Steven Spielberg as the fledgling director was stewing on Jaws and Jurassic Park.

And before heavy metal musicians saluted him in song. “Oh, no, there goes Tokyo,” sang Blue Öyster Cult in “Godzilla,” a 1978 cult classic.

Here, we’re taken back to Godzilla’s early days, in the years immediately following World War II in the 1940s, as Japan faces another crisis—a monstrous beast in the ocean, activated and energized by the fearsome destructive atomic power of the bombs that had turned Tokyo into rubble, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, leaving millions homeless and demoralizing a defeated nation.  

How bad can it get in Tokyo? How low can things go? Well, Godzilla’s arrival makes things even worse—“minus one,” a calibration below zero, on the underside of losing just about everything.

But this Godzilla is more than just a creature feature; it’s built around a very “human” story of battle-weary war survivors, in particular a former kamikaze pilot (Ryunosuke Kamiki) seeking redemption—and closure from psychic wounds that continue to haunt him. Now, post-war, he’s helping a young woman (Minami Hambe)raise an orphaned infant in the decimated city and working on a mine-sweeping crew to clear thousands of leftover explosives—before Godzilla gives everyone a new reason to fear what’s in the water.    

The movie reminds us of Godzilla’s cinematic roots in the unbridled destructiveness of a wide-ranging conflict that ended in nuclear mushroom clouds, and how the creature has always been a metaphor for the monstrousness of forces beyond our control—or sometimes, even our comprehension. Godzilla may be a monster, but he’s also a subject that invites our sympathy, as a primal “innocent” creature drawn into conflict, relying on his instincts to survive.

You probably won’t recognize any of their faces, but the cast of this all-Japanese production (subtitled in English) has plentiful credits on TV and film in their homeland. This gives it an authenticity lacking in many other Godzilla flicks, which were peppered with Anglo actors (like Raymond Burr, Bryan Cranston, Matthew Broderick, Elizabeth Olson and Sally Hawkins) to broaden their appeal. It’s Godzilla back on his home turf, rip-roaring again in his original element, back in the day when he and Tokyo were just beginning their long “relationship.”

Everything happens here around four key episodes of Godzilla coming on like a wrecking ball, trampling people, toppling buildings, snacking on train cars like candy bars, rocking battleships like they were bathtub toys and topping things off with the firepower of his “atomic blast” breath. He puts the thunder in thunder thighs in the spectacular, super-size monster mayhem that you’d expect to see from the King of the Monsters.

But it might also surprise you, and move you, with its level of heart and emotion, poignancy and inspirational uplift. Godzilla Minus One reminds us that just like ol’ ‘Zilla keeps getting knocked down but coming back for more, the human spirit is likewise remarkably resilient—even after atomic bombs or facing down beasts from beneath the sea.

—Neil Pond

Nov 29 2023
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Movie Reviews, Movies

Dream Weaver

Nicolas Cage is at his Cage-iest in twisty tale of dreams run amok

Dream Scenario
Starring Nicolas Cage
Directed by Kristoffer Borgli
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Dec. 1

Sigmund Freud said that dreams are “the most profound when they seem the most crazy.” The late, great psychoanalyst has been gone for some 90 years, but I suspect he might have some thoughts, if he were still around, about Nicolas Cage popping up in other people’s snoozy noggins.

Cage’s character in Dream Scenario, a rumpled college biology professor “nobody” named Paul Matthews, is as surprised as everyone else when he finds out people—thousands of them—have been seeing him in their dreams. He always appears as a benign figure passing through, not speaking or doing much of anything; it’s like he’s photo-bombing their nocturnal Instagram feeds. As reports of his invasive dreams make news, he becomes a media sensation and goes viral on the internet. Nobody knows why it’s happening, but suddenly, the whole world knows about Paul, and he likes it.

“So, I’m finally cool?” he asks his two teenage daughters. “I wouldn’t go that far,” his oldest tells him.

The movie drops in a lot of ideas—astral projection, the Mandela Effect, a collective subconscious, dream travel—as everyone tries to figure out what’s going on. Does it have anything to with Paul’s scholarly interest in the complex “herd mentality” of ants, or the way zebras visually meld into larger groups as an adaptive survival strategy? Where does the art-rock band Talking Heads, and David Byrne’s big, oversized suit, fit in? Can Paul capitalize on his newfound celebrity status as “the most interesting man in the world”?  

Things take a turn for the worse when his presence in dreams abruptly becomes more involved, much darker and far more troubling. One young woman (Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’s Dylan Gelulla) wants Paul to reenact in person her recurring erotic dreams in which he seduces her. Other people have nightmares, with Paul appearing as a menacing, stalking, traumatizing figure. Even he begins have nightmares in which he’s terrorized by…himself. His students think he’s a monster; one of his daughters tells him her friends “call you Freddy Krueger.”

With his world crumbling around him, Paul goes on the defensive about his dream double appearing in everyone’s nocturnal reveries. “That man,”, he says emphatically in an online video, “is not me!”

Crazy, right? It gets even crazier when a tech company invents a gizmo, based on Paul’s “dream epidemic,” that lets users control which dreams they want to “visit,” and what messages—or products—they want to plug in dreamers’ minds. (And it comes with a “no nightmare guarantee.”) As Paul navigates the darker flip side of his short-lived fame, he becomes an almost tragic figure, a victim of something he can’t and couldn’t control, something he doesn’t understand. 

It’s a dark comedy, but it has flourishes of horror and sci-fi, like an edgier Twilight Zone or an episode of Netflix’s Black Mirror. (One of the producers is Ari Aster, who directed the unsettling mind-benders Midsommer, Hereditary and Beau is Afraid.) Cage’s Paul Matthews fits in snugly with the impressively broad range of other “unconventional” characters the eclectic actor has played in “crazy” films like Adaptation, Pig, Ghost Rider, Renfield, The Wicker Man and Mandy.

But this crazy-train tale also tunnels into your head with some pointed, thought-provoking satire about the undesirable side effects of fame, the addictive nature of technology and the sublime mysteries of the mind, where ids and egos sometimes run free, or run amok. What are dreams? Are we responsible for them? What do our nocturnal wanderings say about us? Sigmund Freud might even have called Dream Scenario “profound.”

It’s just too bad he’s not around to see it. I’d sure like to hear what he’d have to say.

—Neil Pond

Nov 22 2023
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Movie Reviews, Pop Culture

Wishful Thinking

Disney’s latest misses the mark for good ol’ House of Mouse magic

Wish
With voices by Ariana DeBose, Chris Pine and Alan Tudyk
Directed by Chris Buck & Fawn Veerashuthorn
Rated PG-13

In theaters Wednesday, Nov. 22

In this fairytale fable timed to Disney’s 100th anniversary celebration, a plucky teenager wishes upon a star and starts a revolution in a magical kingdom ruled by a duplicitous sorcerer. Disney has turned wishing on stars into a corporate mantra; the company’s theme song—from 1931’s Pinocchio—is, as you know, “When You Wish Upon a Star.” Wish is cute and sometimes even clever, but it feels more like a feature-length piece of Disney marketing than a standalone new cinematic chapter, with plentiful wink-wink callbacks to House of Mouse classics (Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs) and greatest-hit ingredients copped from the tried-and-true Disney-flick playbook.

Ariana DeBose does a capable job as the voice of Asha, a 17-year-old girl whose brownish Mediterranean skin and cornrowed hair signal Disney’s continuing movie march toward more inclusiveness in its anything-but-white female “princess” characters. She belts out several showtunes with the same gusto she brought to Hamilton on Broadway and 2010’s West Side Story (which won her a Supporting Actress Oscar). But none of the mostly meh musical numbers in Wish seem destined for Disney greatness, much less Academy Awards (like Frozen’s “Let It Go,” The Little Mermaid’s “Under the Sea” or Aladdin’s “Whole New World”).

Chris Pine, best known for his roles as Capt. Kirk in the rebooted Star Trek movie franchise and Gal Godot’s cohort in a pair of Wonder Woman movies, appears to relish his chance to be a preening bad guy as Magnifico (below), who hoards the heartfelt “wishes” of his people in his castle like a collection of blue bubbles, effectively robbing the citizenry of their hopes and dreams.

There’s a talking goat (Alan Tudyk) and a voiceless little fallen star that looks like a cross between a Pokemon and the Pillsbury doughboy. They may become plush toys in Disney’s ever-growing arsenal of movie merchandise, but they don’t make near enough impression to become part of the sidekick hall of fame alongside Flounder, Olaf, Jiminy Cricket and Tinker Bell.  

The animation combines an old-school technique (watercolors, especially in backgrounds) with modern computer wizardry, but the result sometimes looks curiously odd and out of place, neither here nor there—and comes across more as cost-cutting than innovation. It’s a peculiar choice for a company that became known as a pioneer of cartoon animation.

The movie’s message also gets lost in the muddle of a plot that mostly tells us, instead of showing us, how important wishes really are. In one of the songs, a woodland creature notes that we’re all “shareholders” in the stars, interconnected parts of—and partners in—an ongoing cosmic mystery. For a century now, Disney has made its multi-generational audience feel like partners in the mysteries of movie magic. I just wish Wish had a bit more of it.

—Neil Pond

Nov 21 2023
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History, Movie Reviews

Viva La France

Joaquin Phoenix steps into history as France’s most famous despot

Napoleon
Starring Joaquin Phoenix & Vanessa Kirby
Directed by Ridley Scott
Rated R

In theaters Wednesday, Nov. 22

One of history’s most famous love stories was written in blood. In this expansively, elaborately expensive epic historical biopic, Joaquin Phoenix stars as the French emperor whose military conquests were a brutal backdrop for the domestic battles he waged with his wife, Josephine (Vanessa Kirby).

Director Ridley Scott creates a sumptuous, spectacular saga about Napoleon Bonaparte, the Corsican soldier in the French army who rose quickly within its ranks in the late 1700s to become one of the most wide-ranging military commanders in all of Europe. History remains somewhat divided on Napoleon, with assessments falling along a spectrum of opinion ranging from despotic megalomaniacal dwarf to brilliant military strategist. But this movie mostly splits the difference in favor of a sprawling period-piece portrait of a complicated, obsessive leader and his muddy, bloody times.

The movie establishes its battleground bona fides in the opening 15 minutes, during the close of the tumultuous French Revolution. Marie Antoinette meets her end at the guillotine, a horse gets its head blown off by a cannonball, and Bonaparte reaches into the hole to pull out the steed’s heart—as a souvenir for his mother. War is hell, and Napoleon, his face spattered with fresh blood, develops an early taste for it.

The battle scenes are dynamic, visceral, impressively boom-boomy and gruesomely gorgeous; in one, Napoleon’s army corners retreating Russians on a frozen lake, then fires cannonballs into the ice from a wooded hillside. Bloodied bodies flail helplessly as they sink slowly into the freezing, deathly depths in a winter ballet of red-smeared carnage.

But for Napoleon, all’s fair in love and war. When he isn’t opening his bag of tactical dirty tricks to fight the Austrians, the Russians or the British, he comes home to spar with Josephine. He throws food at her at the dinner table, bonks her in the bedroom like a rabid bunny, scolds her for her infidelity while he’s away doing war stuff (conquering Egypt), and ultimately leaves her for another woman when she’s unable to bear him an heir. But she, somehow, loves him after all that, remaining a central part of the story, an essential part of his story. And he remains obsessed with her. Napoleon is crushed to find out that all the gushy letters he’s been dutifully writing to Josephine have been stolen and sold. And this was centuries before Ebay!

Vanessa Kirby stars as Empress Josephine.

Phoenix, who also appeared in director Scott’s Gladiator, is center stage here as one of history’s most consequential and controversial characters, bratty, petulant, temperamental and dictatorial, maybe even batshit crazy; he’s The Joker in a pointy, bicorne hat. “You think you’re so great because you have boats!” he fumes at a British ambassador about England’s naval superiority. Kirby, a distinguished British actress, is elegantly stoic as Josephine, who sticks by her man even when his outbursts reduce her to tears.  

The movie notes that Napoleon staged some 60 battles, only losing seven of them—one of which was at Waterloo, a defeat so infamously disastrous it became shorthand for almost any decisive, game-over setback. The historical Napoleon himself became a sort of pop-cultural, comical shorthand—an avatar for domineering behavior, overcompensation for a less-than-imposing stature. (Even though we don’t know how tall Napoleon actually was in real life, the movie suggests he could use a few inches, notably when he requires a boost to peer into an Egyptian sarcophagus and view a mummy’s ancient face.) He’s been the subject of countless movies, including one as early as 1913, and widely parodied, in Bugs Bunny cartoons and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Minions and Night at the Museum.

But this Napoleon is no cartoon, no joke and certainly no dry, dull history lesson. It brings to the big screen a bold new take on the enduring tale one of history’s most endlessly fascinating figures, the forever controversial Frenchman who dominated so much of the known world—and the woman who conquered his heart back home.

—Neil Pond

Nov 20 2023
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Movie Reviews, Music, Pop Culture

Take a Bow

Bradley Cooper channels superstar conductor Leonard Bernstein in splendid new biopic

Maestro
Starring Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan
Directed by Bradley Cooper
Rated R

In limited theatrical release Wednesday, Nov. 22; on Netflix Dec.

You don’t have to know much, or anything really, about Leonard Bernstein (who died in 1990) to fall under the spell of Maestro, the majestic musical biopic about the superstar composer and conductor who won seven Emmys, two Tonys and 16 Grammys, wrote the Broadway musical West Side Story, composed symphonies, operas, chamber music and choral masses, and became the first American conductor to lead a major orchestra. He was also the first conductor to take classical music to the general public via television, and he led, at one time or another, almost all the world’s most prestigious symphony orchestras.

He was the famous “face” of classical music for decades.

The film shows Bernstein’s vibrant, exuberant life through the complicated, clouded prism of his relationship with his wife, Felicia Montealegre (a splendid Carey Mulligan).

Bradley Cooper, who both directs and stars, is nothing short of amazing, morphing (with the help of a prosthetic nose) into the demanding role as the charming, chain-smoking Bernstein, a live-wire, wild-haired musical genius with a voracious, nearly insatiable appetite for life and love. “I want a lot of things,” he says; he wants to write, to conduct, play piano and make a musical bridge for his creativity to become manna for the masses.

He also wants to love both men and women. Which is ok, to some extent, with his wife…until it isn’t. Mulligan gives a searing, carefully nuanced performance as the Chilean-born TV and Broadway actress who sacrificed much of her own career to support her husband’s rising star and become his muse, rearing their family while dealing with his ongoing attraction to other men.

Cooper was previously lauded for his directorial debut, A Star is Born, which received multiple Oscar noms and a pair of Grammys. But Maestro is his magnum opus, a superbly crafted demonstration of his full confidence on both sides of the camera as it sprawls across the decades, from the black and white New York City of the ‘40s through the colorfully swingin’ ’60s, into the go-go haze of the ‘70s and the cocaine-fueled ‘80s. There’s already Oscar buzz for both Bradley and Mulligan (who was herself also previously Oscar nominated, for the stinging #metoo slap of Promising Young Woman.)

You know it’s the holidays when Snoopy placidly floats by a window in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade—just after Lenny and Felicia’s scathing domestic disagreement in the family’s Park Avenue penthouse apartment. I loved the scene where an elderly Bernstein grooves in a nightclub, drunk or coked up or maybe just high on life, to Tears for Fears’ “Shout.” To cop a line from that song, Cooper “let it all out” to become Bernstein so completely and convincingly, I did a double take when images of the “real” Bernstein came onscreen during the credits.

The clothing, the hairdos, the rapid-fire, rat-a-tat-tat dialogue, the changing look of the changing times—all spot-on. And the orchestral concert-hall performances, with Cooper approaching something that looks like ecstasy as he “feels” the notes and slices through the air with his baton, the sound coursing through him—well, it will course through you as well, sweeping you up and away in the grandiose, transcendent power of music. Bravo!, maestro!

—Neil Pond

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Nov 15 2023
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Movie Reviews, Movies

Reality Bites

Two Oscar-winning actresses do a delicate dance around a dicey subject built on tabloid fodder

May December
Starring Natalie Portman & Julianne Moore
Directed by Todd Haynes
Rated R

In limited release Friday, Nov. 17; on Netflix Dec. 1

A Hollywood actress preps for a provocative, ripped-from-the-headlines role in this deliciously dark exploration of sexual manipulation, forbidden love, deep-dish obsession and the porous boundary between entertainment and reality. Taking its title from the shorthand phrase for a relationship with a wide age gap between partners, May December pairs two formidable Oscar-winning actresses in a delicate dance around a dicey subject: a scandalous liaison and the sexual exploitation of a child.

Natalie Portman stars as Elizabeth, a well-known TV actress who comes to the small Southern town of Savannah, Ga., to spend some time with the real woman she’ll be playing for “reel” in a movie about a decades-old chapter from her disreputable past. Julianne Moore is Gracie, a character closely based on Mary Kay Letourneau, the infamous schoolteacher who was sentenced to seven years in prison in the ‘90s for inappropriate sexual relations with one of her students, a 12-year-old boy that she pleaded guilty to raping when he was a sixth grader.

Like Letourneau, Gracie and her student/lover later married and started having children. He’s 36 years old now as we meet him as the movie opens, a dad with twins about to graduate from high school and another—born while Gracie was in the hoosekow—enrolled in college. Clearly Joe (in a solid, heart-wrenching performance by Charles Melton) is carrying the emotional baggage of a lost youth, an emotionally stunted man-child thrust into adulthood too soon. And unlike the Monarch butterflies he raises as a hobby, Joe can’t emerge from his confining, life-defining cocoon of fate with Gracie. There’s no way he can leave his past behind, spread his wings and just fly away from it all.

As Elizabeth researches her role, she tries to get inside Gracie’s head, to understand what makes her tick. Gracie, herself lost in her own cocooned concocted fantasy of a wholly consensual, misunderstood relationship, resents the intrusion of show biz, shining the glare of its spotlight into her life. And Joe is caught in the middle, where eventually a line is crossed and Elizabeth discovers that she and Gracie may not be that different, after all.

Director Haynes, a lauded filmmaker whose previous work includes Carol, Mildred Pearce, Dark Water and biopics on Bob Dylan and Cher, walks this precariously tense familial tightrope (there’s even a bar band doing a ragged rendition of Leon Russell’s song 1972 hit “Tight Rope”) with dollops of subversive humor, analogies for predators and prey, and scathing swipes at America’s apparently insatiable appetite for true-crime programming, boldly biting the Netflix hand that feeds his project. A scene in a dress shop, in which fitting-room mirrors resemble the myriad reflections in a carnival funhouse, suggests that fabrication and real experience have become nearly indistinguishable from each other, conveniently merged for our carnivorous consumerism, our entertainment and amusement.

Even though Moore tends to chew the scenery here and there, taking her performance over the top into meaty melodrama and campy cheese, she does convey the skewed reality of a woman who did the crime and did the time, but now spends her days refusing to confront any of it or the damage it caused. Portman is the audience’s surrogate, looking into a situation and trying to understand it, then being pulled deep into it.

Together, they pull you into this tawdry tale based on taboo fodder, elevating it in the process to something much more profound, and more unflinchingly honest.

—Neil Pond

Nov 02 2023
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Movie Reviews, Pop Culture

Love Me Tender

‘Priscilla’ tells a melancholy tale of the little girl who married a king

Priscilla
Starring Cailee Spaeny & Jacob Elordi
Directed by Sofia Coppola
PG-13

In wide theatrical release Friday, Nov. 3

Like the B-side to a smash hit record, Priscilla flips the familiar Elvis Presley story to put the focus on someone other than Elvis. Cailee Spaneny (most recently seen in HBO’s murder mystery Mare of Easttown) is a revelation as the young Army brat who meets Presley when she’s only 14. (“Just a baby,” he tells her, almost admiringly, when she reveals to him her age.) Euphoria hunk Jacob Elordi plays Elvis, early in his ascent to the top of the world as he begins to woo the wide-eyed 9th grader while still a G.I. stationed overseas in Germany, then finishing his military service and skirting her away to Graceland, his Memphis mansion.

As she’s done in other films (like Marie Antionette, Lost in Translation and The Beguiled), director Sofia Coppola explores the experience of another young woman in an off-balance power dynamic. It’s a curious (and yes, admittedly creepy) relationship as Priscilla is swept away by the singing superstar, 24 at the time, only to become increasingly dissatisfied as a virtual captive in his castle. At six-foot-five, Elordi is considerably taller than Presley was, and his Elvis literally towers over the diminutive Spaeny, more than a foot shorter; their scenes together make a striking visual metaphor for the disparity of a grown, worldly adult man with an adolescent plucked from the nest of home, family and familiarity.

Priscilla is an arty, elegant film, a moody, often melancholy exploration of the girl who left her initially skeptical parents and eventually became Presley’s wife in 1967, when she was 22. (It’s based on Priscilla’s own 1985 memoir, Elvis & Me.) We’re transfixed as young Priscilla settles into her new habitat, a garishly ornate, male-dominated kingdom of sycophantic hangers-on, frenzied fans and a pill-popping husband who introduces her to drugs and tries to groom her into his expectations. Elvis is a control freak who chooses her clothes, dictates her makeup and hair style, and forbids her to accompany him on tour or movie sets. “Keep the home fires burning,” he tells her, while Priscilla comes to suspect he’s carrying on affairs with his Hollywood costars—like Swedish bombshell Ann-Margaret and Nancy Sinatra, Frank’s daughter—and possibly other women as well.

Elvis also has a mean, petulant, unpredictable streak; “I’ve got my mother’s temper,” he tells her after impulsively hurling a chair her way, missing her head by inches. And he has, um, intimacy issues in the bedroom.

As Pricilla’s rock and roll fantasy unravels (leading to their divorce in 1973), we come to see that Elvis and ‘Cilla have something in common; they’re both prisoners. He’s shackled to his fame, while she’s his bird kept in a gilded cage, a little girl lost in a dream, staring wistfully out Graceland’s windows to see what’s on the other side. Priscilla is her story, certainly, but it also surely chips away at the fabled mythology of the complicated superstar with whom she spent more than a decade of her young life.

—Neil Pond

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Oct 31 2023
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History, Movie Reviews, Movies

Civil Righter

Bringing an anti-discrimination fighter on the sideline of history into the spotlight

Rustin
Starring Colman Domingo
Directed by George C. Wolfe
PG-13

In theaters Nov. 3, available on Netflix Nov. 17

Half a century before he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in 2013, Bayard Rustin made his mark as a ferociously dedicated anti-discrimination crusader. Though he’s been marginalized by history and somewhat shuffled into the sidelines of the bigger Civil Rights story, Rustin organized one of the largest peaceful protests ever, which in 1963 drew a crowd of some 250,000 to a massive demonstration on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and provided the stage for Dr. Martin Luther King’s monumental “I have a dream…” speech. And it led, nine months later, to the passing of the landmark legislation of the Civil Rights Act, officially prohibiting discrimination based on sex, race, color or national origin.

Rustin’s planning for that historic day in D.C. is the framework of this stirring biopic (produced by Barack and Michelle Obama) starring Colman Domingo. The versatile Tony-winning stage actor—who’s also appeared on TV’s Fear the Walking Dead and Euphoria—gives a dynamic, Oscar-baiting star turn as the pacifist leader whose behind-the-scenes activism was often hampered by his open homosexuality, his former ties to the Communist Party and his non-mainstream (Quaker) religious background. As if being Black in America in that tumultuous era wasn’t perilous enough by itself, Rustin was sometimes slurred as a “pervert and a traitor.”

A large ensemble cast rounds out the story as various politicians, union heads and Black movers and shakers swirl—often contentiously—around Rustin. There’s Jeffery Wright as combative Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell; lauded stage and screen star Audra McDonald is NAACP leader Josephine Baker; British thespian Amil Ameen plays MLK, the young firebrand Baptist preacher who became a Civil Rights icon. But Chris Rock seems a bit misplaced; the well-known comedian never really feels comfortable (or believable) in the stern and serious groove as Black activist Roy Wilkins.

The movie itself is mostly standard fare as biopics go; it’s a bit wordy, dialogue-heavy and stagey, like a play that decided to become a movie instead. But it gives plenty of room for Domingo—in real life an openly gay actor—to shine as the Black idealist on the margins of the Civil Rights movement, who believed in freedom for all through Gandhi-esque nonviolence even in the face of violence. Rustin, who’s conspicuously missing a molar from a beating by a cop, later tells someone else to hit him on the other side of his mouth, for “symmetry.”

Rustin hails this little-known racism fighter who worked from the sidelines to harness the power of peace to make walls fall, move mountains and work toward a world-changing “symmetry” of equality for everyone.  

—Neil Pond   

Oct 26 2023
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Movie Reviews, Movies, Pop Culture

A Robo-Slasher Freak Show

Hit videogame franchise makes for disappointing horror flick

Five Nights at Freddy’s
Starring Josh Hutcherson, Piper Rubio and Elizbeth Lali
Directed by Emma Tammi
PG-13

In theaters and streaming on Peacock Oct. 27

Based on a hugely popular videogame franchise, this misguided monster mash is a muddled fright-night mess about buried trauma, lost childhood, disappearing kids, ghosts, and a group of animatronic animals going rogue at an abandoned pizzeria. Think Chuck E. Cheese as a crazy creepshow.

Hunger Games actor Josh Hutcherson stars as Mike, a down-on-his luck security guard at a long-abandoned pizza parlor, Freddy Fazbear’s, where night work has an unusually high turnover rate. Elizabeth Lail (from TV’s Once Upon a Time) plays a helpful cop with a deep secret, and young newcomer Piper Rubio is Mike’s little sister, Abby, at the center of everything with a copious amount of crayon artwork “from beyond.” Matthew Lilard, a solid character actor in dozens of TV shows and movies for more than two decades, chews the scenery in his small but pivotal part.

Mike wrestles with nightmares about something that happened long ago…maybe it’s got something to do with the haunted pizzeria and its fatal fun-zone arcade? Do ya think?

How does one movie tie all that together? Well, in the case of this off-kilter robo-slasher backed by horror producer Jason Blum, not very well. It seems aimed at young teens and diehard gamers, with a handful of jump-scare jolts and only a tepid degree of real terror; the dialogue is often stiff and (unintentionally) laughable, the actors seem to forget they’re in a horror movie, and this wannabe fright flick fumbles and stumbles sustaining tension or dread in its cavernous “spook house” setting—like a particularly odd scene in which little Abby makes a play fort for a sleepover with the overstuffed Frankenbots.

Hey, there’s Mary Stuart Masterson, all grown up from the ‘80s and early ‘90s and her starring roles in Fried Green Tomatoes and Some Kind of Wonderful. And is the animatronic band really jiving to Lou Reed, and Johnny O’Keefe’s 1950s rockabilly hit “Wild One”? And singing The Romantics? Yep, and I gotta give the movie some props for making “Talking in Your Sleep,” the group’s biggest hit, sound even more ominous than it did back in 1983.  

The creatures—a motley, distressed-looking ensemble that resembles shipwreck survivors washed ashore from the island of misfit toys, or mangy mascots for teams playing in a Twilight Zone league—will be familiar to fans of the videogames. But everyone else will likely feel like they’re being introduced to murderous, mangy, misunderstood Muppets. Maybe that’s because they’re full-size creations designed by the late Muppet-master Jim Henson’s iconic puppetry company.  But I don’t remember Kermit the Frog ever opening his mechanized maw and chewing up someone’s face, Saw-style.

Five Nights at Freddy’s adds up to two hours of a clunky, junky pizzeria freak show, with an odd mix of toppings, extra carnage and served super cheesy.

—Neil Pond

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