Strictly a one-note horror flick that got less and less scary the longer it lingered. There were a few humorous touches a la Weapons, Zach Cregger’s vastly superior prior film, but there was too much of the resident evil that kept getting bigger and bigger until the game was over.
Watched as a postscript to the current Broadway production, this was a delightful recap of the play’s improbable journey from London workshop to cult classic film, interspersed with a biography and interview of Rocky’s creator, Richard O’Brien. It ran off the rails in the last half-hour when it morphed into the story of the film’s midnight life and the shadow casts that flocked to it. Those people just weren’t that interesting.
Classic Penguins A survey of English-language literature–Penguin Classics, get it?–in 75 minutes, not just featuring full frontal male nudity but flaunting it. The stream of corny jokes and physical gags was leavened by unpredictable audience participation, including, at our performance, a show-stopping impersonation of Victor Frankenstein by my wife. For what it was, it couldn’t have been any better. A-
The Rocky Horror Show The songs are nonpareil, the story a hoot, and the stagecraft added a dimension a film couldn’t match. The singers were all brilliant, and Lorna Courtney’s Janet was mesmerizing. The message–”Don’t dream it – Be it” (spelled out in neon letters)–remains powerful. The audience call-backs were occasionally fun but more often distracting, and I could have done without Frank-N-Furter’s wig, which made him more repulsive than seductive. Amber Grey’s Riff Raff was also several steps down from Richard O’Brien. But the cast, the audience and I all had a great time. A
Just In Time I didn’t like Bobby Darin going in, and after seeing Just In Time liked him less. Act One was fun, with music and memories, engaging backups and dancers, and the story of Darin’s ascent to commercial success. Act Two was a downer and a dud. There was nothing new from the backups and dancers, Sandra Dee was no match for Connie Francis, the music was derivative and trite, and Darin’s self-obsession and cruelty to others made him an unsympathetic self-pitier as his life fell apart. Sensing the audiences’s emerging depression, the show contrived a boffo revival performance at the Copa, but it was hardly Queen at Wembley. The play used up my favorite Darin number, the unoriginal “Beyond the Sea,” at the outset, leaving few musical highlights as Darin, an okay but uninspiring Jeremy Jordan, sloughed from so-so rocker to faux Sinatra. The best musical moment by far was Ariana Madix singing “Who’s Sorry Now?” B-
PS: I understand the drive for inclusive, color-blind casting, but having a large Black man play Murray the K did nothing for the play, especially when every other role was typecast with a reasonable lookalike, from Darin and Sandra Dee to brother-in-law Charley Maffia.
Rather remarkable how the filmmakers mixed cartoon and human worlds, making both equally realistic, albeit totally absurd. Also remarkable how they brought both sets of characters to an emotional climax, capped and released by the Clash singing “I Fought the Law.” Will Forte and John Cena were pleasures to watch and Wiley Coyote was somehow sympathetic despite being crazy and destructive. There was something for everyone here, including inside jokes I’m sure I missed, although my background as a lawyer helped.
If you just don’t get something, an endless series of talking heads saying how great it is won’t make it happen. A rapid-fire montage of unrelated birds and bees as a visual background was more distracting than useful–how do you “film” poetry? At least now I know who Mary Oliver was, although I’m no more inclined to read her.
A sweet short story about a long-forgotten poet working for the Post Office who gets noticed and has a brief moment with a younger generation. The story plays out on Willem DaFoe’s expressively grizzled face and for me was a welcome return to normality from Spiderman. Also welcome was the simpler world these denizens of Greenwich Village inhabited.
In an effort to monitor the zeitgeist, I double-featured two of the year’s hottest-at-the-box-office movies yesterday. Spider-Man: Brand New Day bored me out of the theater one hour into its Odyssey-like length. I couldn’t understand the mumbo-jumbo, the all-too-similar action scenes kept arriving like clockwork, and the love interest lacked mystery. In all, it was cartoon-like. We’ve read of the young crowd’s fascination with Obsession, which I can understand due to the relatability of the characters, especially the two leads. One has to wait a long time for something to happen, and when it does the payoff is still a ‘B.’ I have seen both films to talk about, but don’t think that will be happening too much.
Reminiscent of The Odyssey in its length, focus on one man, beautiful cinematography, muddled philosophy and lack of narrative drive, this film does nothing than another Kurosawa didn’t do ten times better sixty years ago. Students of 16th-century Japanese history might appreciate the obscure references, but again like The Odyssey, it was Greek to me. Also, the prisoner never earned his place in the film’s title.
Forgetting for a moment how Christopher Nolan’s movie compares to Homer’s poem, let me react to the film itself. First, it is encompassing–visually, aurally, dramatically. Despite its 280-minute length (with no introductory throat-clearing), I never considered looking at my watch. That said, it could have been shortened 20-30 minutes without losing much. The scenes with the suitors were weak and repetitive . There was one episode in which Odysseus’s men landed on an island and were repulsed by a troop of armored robots that could have been excised completely. The sack of Troy went on forever and maybe was even shown twice. In fact, the fighting and battle scenes wore me down and were ineffective–certainly not what I had come to see. Then there was this disconcerting oddity: at every stop Odysseus kept losing men, yet when they got back on their ship every oar was still manned.
Now moving on to how the movie clashed with my memory of The Odyssey, I go back to all the battles. I think of The Iliad as the book about fighting, and The Odyssey as the book about our hero’s journey home, his “odyssey.” Perhaps to make his points that war is bad and violence degrades humanity Nolan foregrounds the Trojan War and the deception of the Trojan Horse (taken from the Aeneid!), which takes away the lyrical beauty of the poem that recounts Odysseus’s wanderings across the wine-dark sea and the witches and god-adjacents he encounters. Then there is Odysseus himself: Matt Damon plays him as a stoic super-hero, which overshadows the wiliness Homer gives his hero. In fact, there is little to no character development in Odysseus, Penelope, Telemachus or any character despite the many years that elapse. As a result, perhaps, we feel no emotional bond with them, although that may also be partly attributable to our preexisting familiarity with the plot.
The other difficulty Nolan faces is how to dramatize mythic encounters involving “real” people. We are not on a Star Wars alternate universe; we are on Greek islands with warriors returning from a historical battle. If we are able to sufficiently suspend disbelief, we still feel no danger because we know how Odysseus escapes Polyphemus and resists the Sirens’ call. All we can do is weigh how the movie depicts familiar events. It’s almost more like looking at paintings in a gallery. Ultimately, I have to think The Odyssey should not be made into a movie. I also have to think that Nolan was trying to embed modern messages into the story, but heroic Matt Damon was too dull a blade for this purpose. On the other hand, there was Charlize Theron!
I don’t know about the beautiful part, but Lebanon under siege was definitely a sad backdrop for a charming romance between unfortunately mismatched lovers. The secondary characters were amusingly overdrawn, which set off the achingly real relationship between the beautiful and accomplished Yasmina and the effervescent but slightly goofy Nino. At the end, though, I mourned as much for Beirut as the couple.
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