The Mule (2018): inspired by a New York Times magazine article written by Nick Schenk; written by Sam Dolnick; directed by Clint Eastwood; starring Clint Eastwood (Earl Stone), Bradley Cooper (Colin Bates), Andy Garcia (Laton), Diane Wiest (Mary7), Laurence Fishburne (Unnamed DEA Agent), Taissa Farmiga (Clint's Grand-daughter), Alison Eastwood (Clint's Daughter), and Manny Montana (Axl?????):
The Mule is sort of awful and sort of fascinating, a meandering melodrama based on the true story of a 90-year-old Detroit florist who worked as a drug mule for the Mexican cartels.
All the family agita in the movie is entirely fictional and bathetically awful yet also underdeveloped. The drug-mule stuff is interesting until it turns into a ludicrous road movie in which star/director Clint Eastwood romps with buxom hookers and delivers life advice to DEA agents and Cartel higher-ups alike. It's somehow well-worth-watching and utterly disposable.
A scene in which our lovable mule calls a couple of African-Americans "Negroes," acts like he wasn't aware that it's not a term generally used in 2017 (when the movie is set), and then lectures them (like so many others) on their smartphone usage while helping change their flat tire is the most bonkers scene in the movie. Clint Eastwood, Twinkly Racist!
I'm pretty sure Larry Fishburne filmed all his scenes in about two hours, given that he's stuck in either the same hallway or the same office for all those scenes. Bradley Cooper is, well, Bradley Cooper. A fine cast does what it can. Recommended as a sort of car wreck.
Inferno (2016): adapted by David Koepp from the novel by Dan Brown; directed by Ron Howard; starring Tom Hanks (Professor Robert Langdon), Felicity Jones (Sienna Brooks), Omar Sy (Bouchard), Irrfan Khan (Harry Sims), Ben Foster (Zobrist), and Sidse Babett Knudsen (Dr. Elizabeth Sinskey): I actually think this is the best of the Tom Hanks/Ron Howard/Dan Brown movies. Tom Hanks's Robert Langdon is tired and bleary for much of the film (for good reason). The historical clues are almost perfunctory, as if the film-makers finally admitted that the whole point of these things, like a James Bond movie, is the globe-trotting scenery.
There's a decent twist at the two-thirds mark, the supporting cast is all solid, and Ben Foster finally gets cast correctly, as a squirmy, passive-aggressive billionaire who wants to kill 50% of humanity. Director Ron Howard even presents us with a couple of drug-induced visions for Langdon that are creepy enough to suggest that a Ron Howard-helmed H.P. Lovecraft movie wouldn't have been the botch that such a pairing initially suggested. A perfectly good time-filler. Recommended.
Sully (2016): adapted from the book by Chesley Sullenberger and Jeffrey Zaslow by Todd Komarnicki; directed by Clint Eastwood; starring Tom Hanks (Sully), and Aaron Eckhart (Skiles): "Sully" Sullenberger successfully landed a passenger jet on the Hudson River in January 2009. This film is excellent when it sticks to the landing and much less so when the screenplay tries to grind some ideological axe about how awful bureaucracies and government are, courtesy I assume of right-wing brain-trauma survivor Clint Eastwood.
The National Travel Safety Board investigation (nay, witch hunt) of Sully after the landing is pretty much entirely invented. It doesn't even make much sense: wouldn't the owner and/or manufacturer of the airplane want to roast Sully if anyone, given that the financial loss would be suffered there? Well, no, I guess, because Corporations Are People Too, and good people at that. Good, good people. Bad, bad bureaucrats trying to protect us. Bad! Tom Hanks is fine, as usual, and the landing sequence is tense and thrilling. All the other stuff is right-wing wankery. Lightly recommended.
The Last Waltz (1978): directed by Martin Scorsese; starring The Band (Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel, and Robbie Robertson), Martin Scorsese (The Interviewer), and many other musicians and writers that include Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Neil Diamond, Eric Clapton, Ronnie Hawkins, Muddy Waters, and others: Martin Scorsese's brilliant, occasionally problematic concert movie combines live footage of The Band's last performance with a whole lotta guests (including the jarring appearance of Neil Diamond) with interview sessions with the five members of The Band.
Scorsese clearly had a man-crush on guitarist Robbie Robertson, who dominates the interviews and seems to be in almost every shot of the concert, an impressive feat for someone who never sings lead vocals. The four non-Robertson members of The Band seem fed up with Robbie at times -- and they'd reunite as a foursome sans Robertson several years after The Last Waltz. Hmm.
You can see why Scorsese fixated on Robertson -- he's the most conventionally handsome of the group, and he's also the most loquacious. In any case, the film itself is essential viewing because of the performances of The Band, the anecdotes, and the astonishing array of guest players and vocalists. And even Neil Diamond is fine and, in the context of the movie, a reasonable choice to represent a particular type of music (Tin Pan Alley and its songwriters) on the movie's journey through an almost comprehensive list of musical influences on The Band.
Garth Hudson and Rick Danko don't speak much. Richard Manuel and Levon Helm do get some interview time, and both -- especially the charismatic, soft-spoken Helm (aka The Only American In The Band) -- are fascinating. Highly recommended.
In the Heart of the Sea (2015): based on the non-fiction book In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick; written by Charles Leavitt, Rick Jaffa, and Amanda Silver; directed by Ron Howard; starring Chris hemsworth (Owen Chase), Benjamin Walker (Captain Pollard), Cillian Murphy (Matthew Joy), Brendan Gleason and Tom Holland (Old/Young Thomas Nickerson), Ben Whishaw (Herman Melville), and Michelle Fairley (Mrs. Nickerson): Ron Howard turns the astonishing true story of the early 19th-century Nantucket whaleship Essex's losing confrontation with a pissed-off male sperm whale into an intermittently faithful, intermittently ridiculous movie. The performances are all solid but unspectacular, hampered by the often stilted and/or dogmatic dialogue that often seems shot through with jarring linguistic anachronisms.
A frame narrative set 30 years after the Essex lost a TKO to the whale is historically ridiculous. And the movie creates a false dramatic narrative in which the Nantucket powers-that-be want to hush up the whaley cause of the Essex's sinking (in reality, they didn't) and the cannibalism in the lifeboats necessitated by being adrift at sea without food for weeks (again, no cover-up -- cannibalism was pragmatically acknowledged by sailors as something that could very well happen because of the realities of life at sea). Oh, well. History sucks!
This is the sort of movie in which a cargo hold that should be filled with empty barrels to carry home all the whale oil is instead shown as empty throughout the movie so as to visually demonstrate how unsuccessful the whaling expedition has been. I guess in the universe of the movie, the whales bring their own barrels.
The portion of the film stretching from the Essex's departure from Nantucket to its first encounter with the angry whale is really pretty good. Unfortunately, Howard and the screenwriter veer sharply away from history after the sinking of the Essex to turn the movie into a high-toned version of Jaws: The Revenge with a bit of Castaway thrown in. Oh, well.
The filmmakers also conflate the whale that sunk the Essex with another story about a partially white sperm whale from about the same time period dubbed Mocha Dick by whalers. Ace reporter (well, information-starved novelist) Herman Melville eats this stuff up in the completely fictional frame narrative. We also get some anachronistic environmentalist discussions. In the world of the movie, oil is discovered in Pennsylvania nine years earlier than it was in our universe. Hey, it's an alternate history movie! Lightly recommended.
Invictus (2009): adapted by Anthony Peckham from the non-fiction book by John Carlin; directed by Clint Eastwood; starring Morgan Freeman (Nelson Mandela) and Matt Damon (Francois Peinaar): Engaging sports movie about newly elected South African President Nelson Mandela's attempts to forge unity in his country with the nation's Springboks national rugby team and South Africa's 1995 hosting of the Rugby World Cup. Morgan Freeman as Mandela is excellent and convincing, and Matt Damon is Matt Damon with an Afrikaaners accent as Springboks captain Francois Peinaar.
The movie is quite faithful to actual events. Clint Eastwood's direction is unobtrusive, and the whole thing goes down pretty smoothly as the earnest Stanley Kramer movie it would have been if it had been made in 1955. A cast of mostly unknowns does solid work in the supporting roles. Traditional and traditionalistic South African songs war with goopy, gloppy, awful Western-muzak-sounding songs on the soundtrack, to an occasionally jarring comic effect. Mandela's favoured 1875 English poem which gave the movie its title was by William Ernest Henly, by the way, though most of us think it was by Rudyard Kipling. The more you know! Recommended.
 |
| The Saint of Killers |
Preacher: The Complete Series (1995-2000): written by Garth Ennis; illustrated by Steve Dillon, Carlos Ezquerra, Richard Case, Steve Pugh, John McCrea, and Peter Snejberg; covers by Glenn Fabry; available in ten volumes, six volumes, or three Absolute editions as well as in the original comics:
Ah, Preacher. Irish-born comics writer Garth Ennis and artist Steve Dillon, with whom Ennis forged many a fine John Constantine Hellblazer story prior to Preacher's debut in 1995, gave the world a comic-book series that combined splatterpunk, Westerns, dark fantasy, low comedy, satire, social commentary, and a lot of speeches. It's super.
And 20 years after it first appeared, Preacher still has the ability to shock and amaze. It's one of a handful of truly great, epic-length fantasy comic book narratives.
There's really no point to giving too much away about the narrative. That narrative's ability to go roaring off in various unexpected directions is one of the charms of Preacher (and perhaps the occasional frustration). The world of Preacher is a nightmarish, bloody, tragic one.
And Dillon, along with the occasional guest artist for the Preacher mini-series and one-shots that explain things outside the main narrative, renders all the horror and grace in his clear and elegant and straightforward art. It's the right take for this sort of thing: Preacher is as straightforward and straight-shooting as its titular hero Jesse Custer.
And it's one of the marks of Ennis' ability to take the piss out of himself that late in the narrative Jesse's one true love mocks the fact that he shares his initials with Jesus Christ.
But anyway, pardner...
Jesse Custer is a conflicted preacher in the small, crappy Texas town of Annville when thing begin. Something happens to give him the power to compel anyone to do anything with the power of his voice. And when he learns the truth about God, he sets out to find God.
For God has abandoned his Throne in Heaven, apparently because He fears Jesse's newly created power. And He fears Jesse's mission: to bring God to justice for all the pains and horrors God has inflicted on his Creation.
With Jesse will be the love of his life, sharp-shooting Tulip O'Hare, whom Jesse abandoned to become a preacher five years earlier to save her life from an imminent threat. But she doesn't know that when she runs into him again, so she starts off right pissed at him.
With Jesse will also be a roguish sidekick and newly met best friend, Cassidy the nearly century-old Irish vampire. Cassidy has the strength of 50 and an addictive personality to match -- not to blood, which he's not all that happy about needing, but to whiskey and beer and cigarettes and hard drugs. He comes along because Custer gives him a new sense of purpose and a chance to be a Good Guy for once. Or does her? Well, therein lies one of the threaded plots of Preacher.
Against Jesse are the hosts of Heaven and Hell. More dangerously on Earth, there is the most powerful secret organization on Earth: the Grail, dedicated to preserving the bloodline of Christ (whose death on the cross was faked) and orchestrating a global apocalypse that will put it in charge with Christ's descendant as the world's leader. Controlled and managed entirely by the Grail, of course.
Leading the Grail forces against Jesse and company will be Herr Starr, a German-born, power-mad grotesque. And there will be other grotesques arrayed against Jesse, though it's their spiritual grotesquery that's the problem. There will be innocent grotesques and heroic grotesques as well.
Chief among the lovable grotesques will be the young man Cassidy dubs Arseface, who has a permanently disfigured face from the plastic surgery that came after his unsuccessful suicide attempt on the day Kurt Cobain died to inspire he and his more ultimately more successfully suicidal friend to kill themselves.
And there's the mysterious Saint of Killers, a seven-foot-tall cowboy whose guns bring death to anyone and anything in the universe, and whose story is a tragic one of redemption undone and Hell unleashed. Will he be Jesse's enemy or ally in the search for God and answers?
The 70+ issues of Preacher travel America, with a brief foray to France. For the most part it's the American South, and Texas in particular. Ennis has noted that he wanted to write a modern Western with some elements of the Westerns of Clint Eastwood, but with a hero who's as much John Wayne as Eastwood. All of this wrapped up in supernatural horrors, natural horrors, human horrors, and the occasional moment of Grace, too.
Are there flaws? Sure. But when the story ends, one wants more even as one is satisfied at a good story, well-told. So far, the AMC TV adaptation of Preacher seems to have thrown away everything from the comic except the names of the characters in search of its own lesser vision. But the comic is the real stuff. Highly recommended.
Sinister: written by Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill; directed by Scott Derrickson; starring Ethan Hawke (Ellison Oswalt), Juliet Rylance (Tracy), Fred Dalton Thompson (Sheriff), and James Ransone (Deputy) (2012): From the producers of the Paranormal Activity movies (which I mostly enjoy) comes another supernatural tale pitting dumber-than-average humans against the forces of darkness.
The title, as with the similar Insidious, has no specific relevance to the movie. It's a generic horror title, so don't start watching with the expectation that the monster's left-handed or anything.
Ethan Hawke plays a formerly best-selling true-crime writer who needs a bestseller to pay the mortgage. Juliet Rylance plays his wife, who's never in the house during the day but doesn't seem to have a job, either. Their older boy suffers from a combination of Night Terrors and sleep-walking, which seems a bit odd to me given that Night Terrors generally involve sleep paralysis, but I'll go with it. Their younger daughter likes painting on walls.
Hawke's character cleverly moves the family into a house where a brutal multiple murder took place about a year earlier. Ah ha, but he doesn't tell his wife! And as his wife apparently neither speaks to anyone in town or is in any way curious as to why they moved where they moved, she doesn't find out the truth until fairly late in the movie.
Anyway, the supernatural forces in this movie really enjoy recording everything on Super 8 film. Then they stick the Super 8 projector and carefully labelled film canisters in the attic for the next family to find. Yes, there are a series of serial murders taking place across America. As one of the murders involved setting fire to a car inside a garage in the dead of night, I'm a little unclear as to how the house in that case survived for someone else to move into. I assume they had really good fire suppression installed. But not monster suppression, more fools they!
Sinister is nicely photographed. Much of the horror comes from the voyeurism of watching (fictional) snuff films along with Ethan Hawke. But boy, is everybody in this movie dumb except for Sheriff Fred Dalton Thompson and Vincent D'onofrio in a cameo as an expert in occult mythology and iconography. There's probably a pretty good movie to be made about D'Onofrio and his trusty coffee-dispensing sidekick Jessica, but I'm not sure these filmmakers could make a movie about what happens when smart people deal with occult forces, and do so by actually going to a library instead of relying solely on the Internet for potentially life-saving information. Lightly recommended.
The Awakening: written by Stephen Volk and Nick Murphy; directed by Nick Murphy; starring Rebecca Hall (Florence Cathcart), Dominic West (Robert Mallory), Imedla Staunton (Maud Hill) and Isaac Hempstead Wright (Tom Hill) (2011): Broody ghost story set in 1921 follows the efforts of professional debunker Rebecca Hall to solve the mystery of whether or not a boy at a boarding school in the North of England was a-scared to death by a ghost.
World War One is the major intertext here, as Hall lost her fiance and several of the teachers fought in the conflict and came home with both physical and mental wounds. Hall's character also has a somewhat bizarre past, as she was adopted after her parents were killed and she was mauled by lions.
Debunking and debunkers are again portrayed as sad bastards screwing it up for everyone else, which seems to be the default setting of every fictional movie that ever dealt with debunkers. Given the real-world cost that awful, awful 'psychics' such as Sylvia Browne exact when they insert themselves into police investigations (which Browne has never once actually helped solve) and the lives of the bereaved (whom Browne has put through the wringer on numerous occasions by describing horrible modes of death for victims who in fact did not actually die the way she described), it would be nice if a movie dealt with this fairly important aspect of debunking: namely, that it keeps 'psychics' from doing terrible things to innocent people in the name of publicity.
In any case, once you realize that Hall's character is indeed another sad orphan who really wants to believe, you know where the movie is going. Well, sort of. The final major plot twist verges on O. Henry Playhouse territory, though it is somewhat foreshadowed. Enjoyable and atmospheric. Lightly recommended.
Trouble with the Curve: written by Randy Brown; directed by Robert Lorenz; starring Clint Eastwood (Gus), Amy Adams (Mickey), John Goodman (Pete) and Justin Timberlake (Johnny) (2012): Once you get through the hilarious scene of octogenerian Eastwood talking to his bladder, this is a slight, pleasant movie about an old baseball scout, father-daughter issues, and how wily old baseball scouts are way better than computers at locating baseball talent, even though in the real world they actually aren't. Lightly recommended.
J. Edgar: written by Dustin Lance Black; directed by Clint Eastwood; starring Leonardo Di Caprio (J. Edgar Hoover), Armie Hammer (Clyde Tolson), Judi Dench (Annie Hoover) and Naomi Watts (Helen Gandy) (2011): There's a good movie locked up inside this movie. That movie would be a period piece about the Lindbergh baby kidnapping and its status as the first great event of the Celebrity Age. When J. Edgar focuses on that story, as told by J. Edgar Hoover, things are good, albeit historically inaccurate.
Unfortunately, we're also stuck with the increasingly exhausting frame tale, in which Hoover recounts the early history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to a succession of FBI agents over the course of a decade. Leonardo Di Caprio is fine as Hoover, but the longer we stay in the frame tale, the more we see how astonishingly lousy is the age make-up on Di Caprio and Armie Hammer (The Winklevoss twins in The Social Network, and Hoover's longtime companion Clyde Tolson here).
Seriously. This movie has the most jarringly bad age make-up I've seen in years. That the movie apparently takes place in an alternate universe in which men and women age at vastly different rates doesn't help things -- Naomi Watts gets a few wrinkles added over the course of 30 years while Hoover turns into the Grinch.
But it's Hammer's make-up that steals the show. Because the Hammer of the late 1960's doesn't really look human -- he looks like one of the alien lizard people from Alien Nation. It's ridiculous. The tedium of the frame tale (which really takes up half the movie and thus doesn't really constitute a frame) gets force-multiplied by the inaccuracies that even a cursory glance through Wikepedia (or a passing knowledge of American history) will reveal.
In the end, this is something of a disappointment, especially after the excellence of Eastwood's last period drama, The Changeling. As if to hide as much of the awful make-up as possible, Eastwood keeps the lights low for long stretches of the movie. It's a game try. Not recommended.
