The Media Tourist

Frisky murder-mystery ensemble comedy ‘Amsterdam’ has a serious undertone of truth

Amsterdam
Starring Christian Bale, Margot Robbie & John David Washington
Directed by David O. Russell
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Oct. 7

A trio of friends from the waning days of World War I forms the hub of this freewheeling screwball yarn of camaraderie, conspiracy, art, beauty and making love, not war.

Director David O. Russell, who also wrote and produced the film, corrals an all-star cast for his quirky caper comedy, which unspools in 1933 as a pair of World War I veterans and a wealthy socialite artist find themselves drawn into a murder mystery, one possibly connected to a deeper, nefarious political plot.

Christian Bale is Burt Berendsen, a physician who served on the battlefields of World War I, now treating the pain and reconstructive needs of other veterans while planning a big WWI reunion of all the servicemen who returned to New York City. Things begin to get messy and mayhem-ic when he and his lawyer pal, Harold Woodsman (John David Washington), are asked to investigate the suspicious death of their highly decorated former commanding officer (Ed Bagley Jr.).

Then they get blamed for the murder—well, actually, for another murder. How can they clear their names?  

Soon enough, they are reconnected with Valerie Voze (Margot Robbie), whom they met some 15 years earlier when Burt and Harold were both recovering in a Belgium war hospital where Valerie was working as a Red Cross nurse. The two GIs were awestruck to find out their gorgeous Florence Nightingale had an unusual hobby, using all the bloody shrapnel and bone fragments taken from their battered flesh to make pieces of art, transforming their brokenness into strangely beautiful curios.

Then the three of them ventured together to Amsterdam, on a mission to get Burt a glass eye to replace the one he’d lost in combat. The capital city of the Netherlands was a blissful, dream-like high, a respite of peace after war, one they didn’t want to end.  

You probably won’t see another movie this year with so many stars twinkling, twirling, popping and pinging around each other. There’s musical superstar Taylor Swift, as the hyper-paranoid daughter of the deceased officer. Zoe Saldana plays a coroner who opens Burt’s eyes (actually, his eye) to true love. Rami Malek is a suave, wealthy businessman whose huffy-stuffy upper-crust wife (Anya Taylor-Joy) becomes positively mushy at the thought of meeting a famous military hero (Robert De Niro). And hey—there’s Chris Rock, Mike Myers and Michael Shannon!

With a leading character who has only one real eye and a fake eyeball, we’re reminded that looks—what we see and choose to see—can be deceiving. We’re prompted to look carefully at people and things, to discern who’s who, who’s what and what’s really going on.

Viewers will see, when the film opens and then after it ends, that what’s going on in this lively, light-footed lark is based (somewhat) on something very serious—namely, a dangerous rise of fascism after World War I, which eventually seeded the horrors of Nazi Germany, the Holocaust and another world war. On that level, Amsterdam is a cautionary tale about extremists and anarchists looking to overthrow the government and subvert America’s democratic process—“patriots” who would sabotage the election process to install their own dictator-like leader. You only need one eye to see the contemporary parallels with today’s political turmoil.

Director Russell loves star-packing his movies, including American Hustle, Silver Linings Playbook and Joy. This one reunites him with a couple of his favorite actors, Bale (who also appeared in American Hustle and The Fighter) and De Niro (also in Hustle, plus Playbook and Joy). Both screen veterans provide eccentric anchors for the colorful tale as it spins and weaves its rich tapestry of parasitic cuckoo birds, Aryan supremacy, Black history, American fascists, eugenics, high-ranking corruption and fat-cat industrialists, drawing them all into its dark-comedy swirl. It’s Robbie, however, who becomes the story’s heart-and-soul centerpiece, with her character reminding us that we’re all damaged in some way, everyone is hurting inside or out, and kindness, not hate, is the balm for our wounds, our scars and our brokenness.

At one point, she, Burt and Harold perform a French song, a little ditty that a puzzled listener has troubling following. “It’s not supposed to make sense,” Valerie says. “We just made it up.”

This mostly made-up period frolic has a kernel of harsh historical truth at the center of its merrily crowded, retro-rollicking tale of friendship, bonds that last a lifetime and places in the heart—not to mention extinct birds, body parts as reappropriated art, and an ensemble of endearing oddballs. It’s a lot, but it’s also a lot of frisky fun.

Just try to hold on to your glass eye.

Zac Effron brings pop-a-top cheer to Vietnam troops

The Greatest Beer Run Ever
Starring Zac Efron
Directed by Peter Farrelly
Rated R

In select theaters and on Apple TV+ on Sept. 30

There’ve been a lot of movies about the war in Vietnam, and some of them have rightfully become classics: Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Born on the Fourth of July, Casualties of War, The Deer Hunter, Platoon. They all plumbed the intense human drama, the moral and ethical complications and the horrific realities of a prolonged conflict that cost nearly 60,000 American lives, plus with more than 3 million civilians and soldiers in North and South Vietnam.

There’s that league of masterpieces, then there’s The Greatest Beer Run ever. In beer terms, this movie’s a bit frothy and lite.

Zac Efron stars as “Chickie” Donohoe, a hawkish, mouthy New Yorker who decides to deliver some back-home barroom cheer to the neighborhood lads serving and fighting in Southeast Asia. He says he’s going there to hand-deliver them cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon from the local pub.

It’s 1967, and Chickie is a staunch supporter of the U.S. involvement in the war; he thinks protesters are “Commie bastards” and scumbags, undermining the heroic efforts of G.I.s to spread the American way. He thinks TV shouldn’t report “bad news,” only the great things our guys are doing. He’s a good-time-Charlle boozehound who freeloads off his parents, doesn’t follow through on anything and has made it so far on his cocky charms.

Even though his friends and his family tell him his idea is foolish, stupid, colossally dangerous and likely impossible, Chickie sees his beer run as his way of supporting the troops. “Everyone’s doin’ something,” he muses. “I’m doin’ nothing.”

So off he goes, with a bag full of brewskies.

Director and writer Peter Farrelly is best known for the raunchy comedies he made with his filmmaking brother, Bobby, including Dumb and Dumber, Shallow Hal, There’s Something About Mary, The Heartbreak Kid and a 2012 contemporary twist on The Three Stooges. He branched out in 2018 into more “serious” fare with The Green Book, which brought him a trio of Oscars.

Like Green Book, which was based on a true story—a Black classical pianist and his streetwise Italian driver find common ground on a trip across the Deep South in the early 1960s—Beer Run is also based on real retro events as detailed by the real-life Chickie in a 2020 book.

Efron, the former High School Musical Disney star, went on to big-screen roles in The Greatest Showman, the movie remakes of TV’s Baywatch, Steven King’s Firestarter and the musical Hairspray, and he played notorious serial killer Ted Bundy in Netflix’s Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile. He gives Chickie a kind a contagious, dunderheaded likeability; some of that might be mojo of the moustache he appears to have borrowed from Tom Selleck or Burt Reynolds. 

It’s a somewhat whimsical, fanciful tale, about a young, preppy-looking American guy who hops off a U.S. Merchant Marine freighter into the hot zone with a sack of suds. And Farrelly leans on his light-touch comedy chops for running gags, bro banter, punchlines and scenes that point out the tall-tale absurdity of it all. But the movie’s tone is all over the place; the comedy often clashes with the raw, visceral realities of war, and the watered-down production values feel like hammy Hollywood hokum. There’s little “movie magic” to plunge viewers in the mud, blood and teeming turmoil of a country ripped apart by war.

But there’s plenty of magic in that duffel that Chickie dutifully totes around everywhere he goes. At one point, a soldier asks him how many beers are in there. “A bunch,” he replies. Indeed—it seems to be a bottomless pit of boozy sorcery, an endless well of pop-top refreshment. Chickie hands out Pabsts all over Vietnam, on the streets, in barracks, on the battlefield, even tossing them from a helicopter. It’s like Felix the Cat’s Bag of Tricks, a cartoonish stunt. Maybe Jesus had a Chickie bag full of loaves and fishes at the Sermon on the Mount.

The movie brings up issues of relevance, then and now—about lying government officials, the role and responsibilities of the media, a nation divided and Vietnam’s caustic toll. Chickie’s eyes are gradually opened to what’s really going on, watching in shock as a prisoner of war is tossed from a military chopper, or seeing first-hand the dirty work keeping the war machine humming. He comes to realize that, hey, maybe sending American troops to get involved in a civil conflict halfway across the globe, under the ruse of “fighting Communism,” isn’t such a swell idea. His bag of beer doesn’t change anything in Vietnam, or about Vietnam. It does, however, wash away Chickie’s delusions.

A chorus of cardboard-thin supporting characters pops in and out; this is Chickie’s movie, based on Chickie’s book, based on something Chickie did 50-some years ago, and everyone else is just along to shore up his chummy chronicle. Some two decades removed from the Roman-arena battlefield of Gladiator, Russell Crowe plays a gruff, weary war photographer. His size is, ahem, formidable, but his duties are small, just like the iconic Bill Murray’s portrayal of the flag-waving WWII-veteran bartender back at Chickie’s favorite Manhattan watering hole.

Don’t look for The Greatest Beer Run Ever to get any champagne toasts at next year’s Oscars. It’s a tidy little diversion, an over-simplified story about a shallow fellow who finally follows through on something and learns something else—something many Americans already knew—in the process. It didn’t end the war, but Chickie’s beer run changed his way of thinking.

It’s no Apocalypse Now or Full Metal Jacket, but it has just enough uplifting Green Book DNA to make this sudsy, somewhat superficial tale go down easy, like a foxhole quaff from one of the lukewarm ales rattling around in Chickie’s duffel bag.  

So, drink up. This beer’s on Chickie!

Mia Goth stars in director Ti West’s stylish slasher-flick prequel

Pearl
Starring Mia Goth, David Corenswet & Tandi Wright
Directed by Ti West
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Sept. 16

Wondering how an innocent farmer’s daughter becomes a raging homicidal maniac? Well, then, Pearl’s your girl.

Director Ti West’s carnage-packed, candy-colored creepshow is a prequel to X, his horror hit from earlier this year, which featured the character in an advanced age in the late 1970s, lusting for her youth and lost sexuality while preying on an amateur film crew secretly making a dirty movie out behind her barn. Former model-turned-actress Mia Goth played double roles in X, and she now returns as the younger Pearl.

For anyone who saw X (and that’s probably not a lot of you), Pearl fills in the early years and reveals the twisted roots of the young woman who’ll eventually become lethally handy with an axe and a pitchfork. (And a pet alligator.) If you didn’t see X, well, just sit back and watch the lurid nightmare unfold.

Set in 1918, it’s a slasher-flick homage to lavish, big-screen Technicolor spectacles of yesteryear, with overt winks to The Wizard of Oz, rah-rah musicals, war movies and classic Hitchcock. There’s even a nod to the modern world, as characters mask up a la COVID to prevent the spread of the Spanish flu, fearful of bringing the invisible invader into their homes.

Pearl is a war bride whose husband is away fighting “over there,” while she stays at home with her unyielding, German-immigrant mother (Tandi Wright) and invalid, wheelchair-bound father (Matthew Sunderland). Something’s not quite right with Pearl, and she knows it. “I’m worried there may be something really wrong with me,” she tells her sunny sister-in-law, Misty (Emma Jenkins-Purro). “I’m not a good person.”

A cooked pig crawling with maggots becomes a metaphor for the rot that eventually eats away the “good,” and the normal, inside of Pearl.

So, what turns her into a psycho? Maybe it’s being cooped up and confined, like the cow and the goat in their pens, inside a quarantined house with an overbearing mother and an unresponsive father. Maybe it’s because she feels no one ever hears her prayers, and the religious zealotry she’s been force-fed tastes bitter and empty. Maybe it’s her conflicted, confused feelings of sexual repression, and her marriage to a husband she knows she may never see again. Perhaps it’s her boiling-over frustration at being stuck in the middle of an American nowhere (actually, the movie was filmed in New Zealand), with dashed hopes of ever getting out and experiencing the bigger world, in Hollywood or perhaps even Paris.

And then there’s the obsessive tug of Pearl’s dreams, her fantasy of becoming a “follies” girl like the ones in the newsreels she sees at the local picture show. At an audition for a touring dancing troupe, she steps onstage, onto the “X” that’s been taped on the floor to show her where to stand—a mark that sets her identity, secures her place in the world, and seals her destiny of destruction. (It also shows that the anxieties—and crushed hopes—of contestants on contemporary TV talent completions, like The X Factor, America’s Got Talent or American Idol, certainly aren’t anything new. But will any of those wannabe’s become psychos? Guess we’ll have to wait and see.)

David Corenswet plays the dashing movie-theater projectionist who flatters Pearl, telling her she can be anything she wants to be, go anywhere she wants to go. He also introduces her to his bed, and to pornography, stirring the tangled, matted mess of psychological, pathological madness in her head. (And suggesting that overheated fantasies of being up on the silver screen or the stage, becoming famous, can really mess up impressionable young minds.) When Pearl stops her bicycle to dry-hump a straw man in a cornfield, it’s a crazily carnal twist on Dorothy’s meeting with the scarecrow en route to Oz. Only there’s no Yellow Brick Road on Pearl’s highway to hell.

Goth is a British actress who had a notable supporting role in Emma (2020)—and got her movie start in the notorious two-part Nymphomaniac (2013), an erotic opus about promiscuous sexuality. In a bravura, gutsy performance, she pulls off the trick of making us feel both sympathy and revulsion for Pearl, whose severe emotional damage creates monstrously scary impulses. Is she crazy? Oh, yeah. Is she unhinged enough to lash out at anyone, or anything, that gets in the way of her dreams? For sure. Even farm animals—and prenatal alligators—aren’t safe.

Yes, it’s violent. It’s bloody. It’s meant to be disturbing. But this super-stylized shocker has a wild, freakishly compelling story—about how mental illness and instability can turn almost anyone into a monster, in 1918 or today. And it’s all packaged with a stylish cinematic flourish and flair, and a splatter-y caution that echoes ancient folktales, about children longing to “leave the farm” for the big city.     

“Seems there’s something missing in me that the rest of the world has,” Pearl says at one point. “All I really wanted is to be loved.”

Something may be missing for Pearl, but Goth has certainly found it, in a horror franchise that now plans its third chapter, MaXXXine, about her character from X as the sole survivor of Pearl’s rampage in that film. (Stay through the credits to see the teaser.)

In her case, “X” indeed marks the spot.

Disney’s ‘Pinocchio’ dusts off the age-old tale of the puppet who wants to be real

Pinocchio
Starring Tom Hanks, Luke Evans and the voices of Joseph Gordon-Levitt & Benjamin Evan Ainsworth
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
Rated PG
Streaming Sept. 8 on Disney+

A classic fairy tale comes to magical life once again in this tall tale of a wooden puppet who longs to become a real boy.

Pinocchio, the little Italian marionette, has been around for quite a while—almost 250 years, in fact. His roots are in a novel published in the late 1880s by Tuscan author Carlo Gilodi, and his story “came alive” for American audiences with the beloved 1940 animated Disney film that’s still considered an unqualified House of Mouse-terpiece and a high-water mark for golden-age, hand-illustrated cinematic storytelling.

Following the vintage blueprint of the 1940 version, the new Disney version makes a few notable tweaks; some new things are added, some old things axed for this eye-catching combo platter of live performance and state-of-the-art computer animation. Pinocchio purists may flinch, but hey, the 1883 novel ends with a real downer—the little puppet is hanged and executed. So just keep that in mind; even Disney-fied, this is an existential “hero’s journey” cloaked in danger and a descent into darkness. Ol’ Walt felt the original Italian folktale was too harsh and off-putting, especially for his sunshine factory, so he scrubbed it up considerably in 1940.

This new-nocchio features the venerable Tom Hanks as Geppetto, the aging woodcarver and clockmaker who fashions a “boy” puppet to fill the void of what is presumed to be the death of his young real-life son. After wishing upon a star—that his creation of pine could somehow come to life—his cottage is visited by the ethereal Blue Fairy (Cynthia Erivo), who grants the wish. Pinocchio (voiced by British newcomer Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) becomes sentient and animated, able to move without strings, but naïve to the ways of the world, its temptations and its treachery. So, Jiminy Cricket (voiced by Joseph-Gordon Levitt), a dapper little insect onlooker, is appointed the role of Pinocchio’s conscious, an important barometer to help him steer right instead of wrong.

The Blue Fairy tells Pinocchio that if he wants to be truly real, he must show himself to be “brave, truthful and unselfish.” And, as almost everyone knows, if he ever tells a lie, his nose will know—and grow and grow and grow.

Which, as it turns out, comes in handy.

And so begins Pinocchio’s wild adventures—kidnapped by a pair of street scallywags, a sly fox misleadingly named “Honest John” (voiced by Keegan-Michael Key) and his scraggly alley-cat cohort; sold as a novelty into puppet slavery to the greedy, bloated showman Stromboli (Italian actor Giuseppe Batson); escaping, only to find himself on Pleasure Island, where its cornucopia-carnival of anything-goes “pleasures” turn out to be only temporary.

And then Pinocchio ends up in the belly a fearsome sea creature known, appropriately enough, as Monstro.

How and this all wraps won’t be any surprise to anyone familiar with the tale, but one of Disney’s new tweaks is the ending—perhaps not as satisfying as a lot of people would wish, and that’s all I’ll divulge about that. But the story’s overtones about honesty, heroism and the importance of good behavior are very much intact. And kids: Stay in school!

And this being Disney, in the modern enlightened age of flagrant self-promotion, you’ll even get a wink-wink, yuk-yuk reference to actor Chris Pine (who’s starred in five Disney movie projects, including Into the Woods and A Wrinkle in Time), and a cuckoo display of characters from other classic Disney films, from Snow White to Roger Rabbit and Toy Story. 

Erivo, the Oscar-nominated British actress who’s played slave activist Harriet Tubman and musical legend Aretha Franklin, shines (literally) in her one scene as the Blue Fairy, a beacon of light belting out the memorable tune from Disney’s 1960 version that became a an Oscar winner—“When You Wish Upon a Star.” Another familiar song from the classic animated version is “High-Diddle-Dee-Dee (An Actor’s Life for Me),” and Pinocchio sings “I’ve Got No Strings” while he’s prancing on stage with a squad of can-can marionettes. But Jiminy Cricket is robbed of his signature song, “Give a Little Whistle,” which is a bit of a bummer.

Luke Evans—most recently starring in Hulu’s Nine Perfect Strangers—has an enhanced, singing/dancing role as the coachman, who drives kids to their fates on Pleasure Island, and Lorraine Bracco is the voice of Sofia, a helpful seagull.

Director Robert Zemeckis knows movie magic—he took us Back to the Future in two movie sequels, marooned Tom Hanks in Cast Away and gave the world Forrest Gump. His stylish new spin on Pinocchio is a dazzling display of filmmaking, a seamless integration of hyper-realistic FX and human actors. Appropriate, I’d say, for a story about a wooden boy who longs to become real.

An artful new spin on an old, old tale, it likely won’t become a new-age Disney classic—not so long as the 1940 original is around, anyway. But this solidly fanciful fable vibrantly, creatively dusts off the years from pop culture’s most famous puppet.

And I’m not just pulling your strings.

The little yellow nubbins return for more squatty shenanigans

Minions: The Rise of Gru
With the voices of Steve Carell, Russell Brand, Taraji P. Henson, Michelle Yeoh & Alan Arkin
Directed by Kyle Balda
Rated PG

In theaters Friday, July 1

The fifth installment of the popular animated franchise featuring the small, scene-stealing yellow nubbins goes back to the ‘70s to uncover the riotously funny roots of its central character, the comedically earnest wannabe-villain, Gru. It’s both a sequel and prequel, connected to the preceding Despicable Me flicks and continuing the spotlight on the slapstick shenanigans of Gru’s mini army of squatty accomplices.  

We meet Gru (voiced again by Steve Carell) as a roly-poly schoolboy, where he’s mocked by his classmates for his career aspirations to be the best bad guy of all time. At home, he retreats to his basement—his lair—where dozens of chattering little Minions merrily do his pint-size bidding.  

A recent opening in the ranks of the Vicious Six, a cadre of supervillains, gives little Gru a possible entre to the bad-guy big leagues to earn his evil bona fides. What could possibly go wrong?

A lot—especially when Gru’s efforts to impress the Six with his stealthy thievery backfires and puts him in peril, spurring the Minions to come to his rescue.

Animator-turned-director Kyle Balda revives the lively, full-throttle comic-book style of the previous films (three Despicable Me flicks and their 2015 spinoff, Minions) with this rockin’ retro riff on the music, culture and movies of the mid-1970s as Gru and the Minions find themselves in the middle of a mighty—and mighty hilarious—misadventure.

Youngsters won’t get a lot of the references, but their parents—and grandparents—will dig the groovy sounds and sight gags, which place the story in San Francisco in 1976. There are nonstop in-jokes about the time and place, from rotary telephones to motorcycle daredevil Evil Knievel and kung-fu fighting. The city’s famous streetcars are used for comedic effect, and both Chinatown and the sea lions of Fisherman’s Wharf are incorporated into bits.

The funny flies fast and furious, equally applied to teeny tiny details and major story blocks—a mention of S&H Green Stamps, a cover of Mad magazine, an 8 track tape self-destructing (Mission: Impossible style) after playing its secret message, a sequence that pays homage to the tomb raiding of Indiana Jones. The funky, feisty bad-ass-ery of Bell Bottom (voiced by Taraji P. Henson), the motorcycle-mama leader of the Vicious Six, is a throwback to the “blaxploitation” movies of the era, like Foxy Brown, Cleopatra Jones and Coffy.

A massive music store—called Criminal Records—is a false front for the Vicious Six, where Gru is admitted by playing a record (appropriately enough, Linda Ronstadt’s “You’re No Good”) backwards in a listening booth. (And yes, kids, those used to be a thing.) The clerk at the store gives Gnu a super-handy smart-goo grabber he’s invented, one that he’s nicknamed “Sticky Fingers.” A torture device is a giant turntable and endless replay of The Tramps’ “Disco Inferno.”

Gru dances to a self-stylized version of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising,” and the familiar strains of “Funkytown,” The Carpenters’ “Goodbye to Love,” and Mott the Hoople’s “All the Young Dudes” all provide pop-cultural grounding as well as sonic hooks to whatever’s happening onscreen. You’ve never heard The Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” until you hear it, and see it, performed in a cemetery by a choir of Minions. One particularly zany sequence, on a wild-ride commercial airline flight, is scored to Strauss’ graceful “Blue Danube” waltz—making an in-joke nod to the bedazzling sights of outer-space travel in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

That record store clerk (voiced by Russell Brand) will show up again—actually, he’s shown up before—in the Despicable Me-verse. Eagle-eye fans of the franchise will spot plenty of other details, and some characters, that they’ll recognize from previous films.

Other voices are provided by Jean-Claude Van Damme, who plays Jean Clawed, a baddie with massive lobster claws for hands. Lucy Lawless is Nunchuck, a nasty nun with awesome nunchuck skills. Master Chow (Michelle Yeoh) is a mild-mannered massage therapist who schools the Minions in the ancient art of combat. Alan Arkin has a sizeable presence as Wild Knuckles, an ousted member of the Six who becomes a reluctant mentor to young Gru. There’s also Danny Trejo and Dolph Lundgren, and Gnu’s mom certainly doesn’t look like Julie Andrews, but the iconic Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music star once more returns to the role. Rapper RZA is an Easy Rider-style biker.

French animator Pierre Coffin (who directed three previous Despicable Me movies) again supplies all the hyper-expressive, yip-yappery gibberish of the Minions in a made-up mashup of childlike nonsense babble with occasional bursts of French, Spanish or English.

The younger set likely won’t catch the many flashback cues or be much interested in how much care, creativity, comedic precision and meticulous animation craftwork went into the filmmaking process; it all looks gorgeous, by the way, as its zooms through its brisk, 90-minute runtime. But I can guarantee little ones will tee-hee at the mild bathroom humor, get gob-smacked by the giddy, over-the-top onslaught of visual pop and pow, giggle at the crazy antics of the Minions and rev up to the gonzo-goofball pace of it all.

Another Minions movie? You might be tempted to say “Meh” and take a pass. But you’d miss the undeniable charms churned up by this zippy, laff-riot fun factory and these little banana-colored bumblers. In today’s darkening world of disease, war and division, the Minions again offer the opportunity to come together and bond in a bright yellow light of rampant imagination and unbridled silliness.

And well, yeah—the timeless amusements of butt cracks and fart noises.

Dinos roar to close out the franchise, but the iconic ‘Jurassic’ movie series has almost overstayed its welcome

Jurassic World: Dominion
Starring Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Jeff Goldblum, Laura Dern & Sam Neill
Directed by Colin Trevorrow
Rated PG-13

In theaters June 10, 2022

You want dinosaurs? Well, here you go!

The sixth and final installment of the dino-rama started by director Steven Spielberg in 1993 is chock full of roaring, rampaging reptiles. They rise like leviathans from the roiling sea; they gallop over the plains and swoop out of the sky; they cause highway accidents and accost campers in parks. And you thought mosquitos, sharks and bear attacks were anything to worry about?

In Jurassic World: Dominion, dinosaurs are no longer contained in exotic tropical-island zoos or research facilities. They’ve busted out of their once-experimental, bio-engineered bubbles and now live as “wild animals,” causing a ruckus across the globe. As the movie opens, a newscast notes “37 dinosaur-related deaths reported last year.”

Forget fossils. These living, breathing alpha predators have become a disruption, a new notch in the food chain, a black-market commodity and a global challenge to humankind’s abilities to coexist and adapt.  

But dinosaurs aren’t the biggest problem. Instead, it’s the shady company BioSyn, which has been genetically making and replicating them, and possibly planning something even darker and more diabolical.

Who better to get in the dino drama than all the characters from all the Jurassic movies? It’s a reptile-romp reunion as Laura Dern and Sam Neill (who starred in the original Jurassic Park and its two follow-ups) re-enter the franchise, alongside Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard (from the two newer Jurassic World flicks). Jeff Goldblum, who straddles both the Park and the World, returns for more dry comic relief as chaos theorist/mathematician Dr. Ian Malcolm. Another familiar face: B.D. Wong’s pioneering dino scientist, who’s having second thoughts about the havoc he’s helped to unleash on the world.

Isabelle Sermon reprises her role from two previous films as Maise Lockwood, the now-teenage granddaughter of one of the engineers whose bold DNA breakthroughs helped create the the original dinosaurs of Jurassic Park. The fact that she is also a bio-engineered clone, like the dinosaurs, makes Maise immensely valuable for genetic research—and exploitation.

Colin Trevorrow (who directed 2018’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom) returns to the director’s chair and throws even more characters into the mix. DeWanda Wise is a tough-cookie pilot who gets involved in the adventure when Maise is kidnapped. Campbell Scott is a hissable villain at the helm of BioSyn, and Mamoudou Athie has a key role as a young rising star there.

It’s a packed movie, with a lot going on and a lot on its mind—the dangers of cloning, the responsibilities of science, our fragile ecosystem, corporate avarice, animal abuse and human hubris. Do dinosaur moms love their dinosaur babies? Where can you buy dino kabobs? Some of those things are addressed, true, in previous Jurassic movies, but they’re really hammered home here. And it’s certainly not a coincidence when a conversation brings up the Greek god Prometheus, whose legend is a mythological caution about the perils of “playing god.”

Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s a kick to see all the cast members from previous films together. “Wow, this is so trippy,” says Goldblum’s character, and he’s right; it’s a trip, among other things, down memory lane. The movie is full of nods and throwbacks and strains of its own cinematic DNA, like a fateful salute to the greedy, bumbling programmer played by Wayne Knight in the original, and when a fearsome Giganotosaurus attack puts everyone through a scene almost identical to the classic, frightful T-Rex encounter from 1993.

But much of the time, it feels like it’s stuck in its own nostalgia loop, with scenes and setups that don’t break new ground as much as retread it. And it just doesn’t feel very awesome anymore. When Spielberg’s Jurassic Park hit the big screen nearly three decades ago, it was a groundbreaking movie milestone, a benchmark of technological advancement and a gob-smacking wellspring of awestruck wonder. No one had ever seen dinosaurs depicted so realistically. But that was 29 years ago, and we’ve been treated to five subsequent films, each reflecting the newest advances in combining actors with digital dino danger. There certainly are a lot of dinosaurs, more than ever (plus a bonus menace of giant flying locusts) in Dominion. But now, seeing them doesn’t seem like such a big deal. We’re kinda used to it.

It’s a fitting, flashy, action-packed finale for a franchise that introduced the world to a new era of dinosaur movies—and became a hot property entertainment franchise with sequels, spinoffs and even theme-park rides. Our fascination with dinosaurs may never become extinct, but most good things eventually come to an end, and even Jurassic Park couldn’t stay open forever.

“Let’s finish this,” says Laura Dern’s character at one point.

By the time Dominion stomped and romped across the finish line at a somewhat belabored two and a half hours, I pretty much felt the same way.

Jessie Buckley navigates a nightmare of toxic masculinity

Men
Starring Jessie Buckley and Rory Kinnear
Directed by Alex Garland
Rated R
How to Watch: In theaters May 20, 2022

The so-called “battle of the sexes” takes a weird, wild turn in this smart, savage broadside about the abhorrent behaviors of men.

In this horrifically hallucinatory tale, a grieving young woman retreats to the English countryside after witnessing a terrible incident—she watches her husband plummet to his death from the top of their urban London high rise.

Harper (Jessie Buckley) is haunted by the memory of her husband hurtling to the ground, but also by her vivid recall of him screaming that life wasn’t worth living without her. He threatened to kill himself if she went through on her plans to divorce him.

Then she did, and he did. Was his death a suicide, an accident or a departing flourish of frustration about not getting what he wanted? And was Harper somehow responsible?

The troubled widow heads out of town to a quaint countryside village to clear her head. Maybe a week alone in a sprawling rental manor, far away from the city and its reminders of the trauma she’s just experienced, will help settle her jangled nerves.

But, oh, is she ever wrong.

Even though she’s alone in the manse, Harper is never truly alone, and her trauma continues to deepen, intruding into her consciousness with jarring flashbacks. Every man she encounters in the village unsettles her in some way, reconnecting her with the emotional shock of her husband’s violent death.

There’s the overly chatty, socially clumsy owner of the manor; then a scarred, naked man, who follows Harper home from a walk in the woods, appearing to stalk her. There’s a bratty, foul-mouthed teen; a lecherous vicar; a thug from the pub; and a boorish, smugly dismissive constable.

And the men all look the same; for one thing, they’re all played, in a brilliant—and, in one case, CGI-enhanced—multi-character performance by Rory Kinnear (who’ll be recognizable to James Bond fans for his recurring franchise role as the head of MI6). Is the movie suggesting that all men are really, down deep, just the same? That no matter how any man looks, behaves or appears, it’s only a superficial coating, a thin disguise over who he really is? Is Men saying that lust, the drive to procreate and an egotistic need to dominate are the hard-wired motivators of any man…or every man?

The woods around Harper’s manor are creepy. The village is creepy. The absence of other women is creepy; except for a lone policewoman, there aren’t any other females around, anywhere. And the men are all creepy, existing on a spectrum of micro-aggressions that will soon become major aggressions, and creating a rising tide of oppressive, noxious masculinity that seems to permeate the very air that Harper inhales.

They invade the sanctity of her solitude, figuratively and then literally. They oppress her with their demanding haughtiness, insult her with their crude comments and threaten her with their primal yearnings. They intensify her crippling sense of guilt and deepen her psychic wounds. The teen, hiding behind a plastic trick-or-treat mask of Marilyn Monroe, insists to a disturbed Harper that she join him in playing a schoolyard game. The house owner chides her for eating an apple (“forbidden fruit”) off a tree in the yard. The vicar, who piously notes Harper’s culpability in her husband’s death, attempts to rape her.

It’s no wonder that her friend back in London (Gayle Rankin, who played the wrestler Sheila the She-Wolf on TV’s Glow) advises Harper on a FaceTime call that the only way to deal with these guys is take an axe from the woodpile and, well, hit ‘em where it hurts. Cut off the problem at its root, so to speak.

Buckley, the Irish actress most recently in The Lost Daughter, seems to relish playing characters who live beyond the surface of the mainstream, or inhabit its enigmatic, unfathomable underside—like the murderous nurse Odetta Mayflower in TV’s most recent season of Fargo, or the unnamed woman navigating the freakish, reality-shifting scenario of I’m Thinking of Ending Things. As Harper, she pilots a course teetering on madness, awash in wonder, awe and bewilderment…and ultimately, spiraling into a living nightmare.

Men is the third feature film from British director Alex Garland, whose two previous movies—Ex Machina and Annihilation—were trippy sci-fi hybrids exploring the terrors in the breached boundaries of the known and the unknowable.

And there’s certainly a lot of unknowable spread throughout this film, interwoven with elements of ancient folklore, religious allegory and dreamlike symbolism—and that’s before things erupt in a wild, galloping grand finale of all-out horror and the undercurrent of masculine menace becomes a flood of jaw-dropping WTFs. Men may be several things, but as Harper runs an obstacle course of toxic masculinity, it becomes a bizarro indictment of abhorrent behaviors, tapping into an ancient vein that’s been coursing through civilization since time began.

The naked bloke turns into an embodiment of the Green Man, a mythological figure whose representations appear around the world, representing nature’s eternal cycles of life, death and rebirth. (And ain’t it just like a man, to try to take credit for the work of “Mother” Nature?) When Harper inflicts a grievous wound on one of the men, the same wound appears on all of them. (You’ll never look at a front-door mail slot, or a butcher knife, the same way.) And finally, in a slimy, gross-out sequence during which the men suddenly have the, ahem, genitalia of women, they “birth,” well…different iterations of themselves. And the film’s central premise becomes clear: The unchanging, ever-repeating nature of men is to perpetuate their masculinity, to continually assert themselves in violent, assaultive ways, and to forever feel a pathetic need to control women, minimalize their roles and usurp them.

Maybe some viewers will be turned off by the movie’s sudden shift into goop and gore. Maybe you’ll interpret it all as a truly feminist horror fable. Maybe you’ll remember the 1990s best-seller, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, about the fundamental psychological differences between the genders. Maybe you’ll recognize the Elton John ballad, “Love Song,” which plays over both the beginning and the end of the movie. “Love  is the opening door,” he sings. “Love is what we came here for.”

Yeah, love may open the door. But if you’re on the other side, and especially if you’re a woman in the English countryside, in a creepy village where all the guys embody manhood’s worst, most loathsome attributes, it’s also probably a good idea to have a knife handy—or an axe.