Spider-Man: Far from Home (2019): CAST AND CREDITS: The first post-Avengers: Endgame Marvel movie quickly skates over the ramifications of that movie's ending, which I think will soon be one of those 'Now let us never speak of those five years again!' things in upcoming Marvel joints.
Tom Holland makes a good Peter Parker. Marvel has wisely emphasized Peter's mechanical and problem-solving genius, a welcome nod to Peter's status as a very clever fellow in the classic Steve Ditko/Stan Lee comics of the 1960's. Hey, that guy beat the Sandman with a goddam vacuum cleaner!!!
Pretty much all the actors are charming, and Jake Gyllenhaal's Mysterio is a hoot. Even the tweaking of Mysterio's origin is funny yet convincing, though I sort of miss the idea of a character who was a visual and special effects movie guy. Maybe because he could have teamed up with Joe Simon and Jack Kirby's Stuntman.
The whole thing plays like one of those Roger Moore James Bond movies where everything stays pretty light and jokey while Bond travels from country to country destroying priceless artifacts and occasionally landmarks. Recommended.
Everest: based on a true story and written by William Nicholson and Simon Beaufoy; directed by Baltasar Kormakur; starring Jason Clarke (Rob Hall), John Hawkes (Doug Hansen), Michael Kelly (Jon Krakauer), Emily Watson (Helen Wilton), Keira Knightley (Jan Arnold), Josh Brolin (Beck Weathers), Robin Wright (Peach Weathers), and Jake Gyllenhaal (Scott Fischer) (2015): Enjoyable movie based on the true story of a disastrous couple of days on Mount Everest in May of 1996. Journalist Jon Krakauer's terrific Into Thin Air (1998) documented the affair, and while the movie isn't based on that book, Krakauer does appear as one of the characters.
The movie mainly follows the efforts of the first commercial Everest climbing company on the Nepalese side of the mountain as it returns to Everest and proceeds over six weeks of preparation towards another ascent of the peak. Jason Clarke plays the founder and first guide of the New Zealand-based company, while Emily Watson runs things at Base Camp. Jake Gyllenhaal plays the head of a newer, rival climbing company. Much of the rest of the cast, including Josh Brolin and John Hawkes as two American climbers, is involved with Clarke's team, as is Krakauer, who is covering the climb for Outside magazine.
I could maybe have used a bit keener characterization. There are a lot of characters, and some are given scant time to stick in our minds. The main characters stand out, though, whether it's Clarke's Rob Hall, who may be too sympathetic to the burning desire of his climbers to summit, or Gyllenhaal's goofy, somewhat reckless counterpoint to Hall. Brolin manages to invest his almost-stereotypical Texan with an increasing amount of frailty and indecision as the film progresses. Hawkes is typically fine, as is Watson.
But Everest is the protagonist of Everest. There are a satisfying number of Sublime moments in the shot selection, interspersed with the sweaty, nervous efforts of climbers spanning crevices on extension ladders, falling, wheezing, and struggling like Beckett characters just to crawl somewhere. The section of the film covering the disastrous efforts to reach and return from the summit of Everest are especially tense and thrilling. You know things have gone sideways when a massive storm comes straight up at you.
Much of the film really is factual, including two incidents that seem like pure Hollywood invention, one involving a pair of satellite phone calls and the other involving the improbable survival of a seemingly dead character. I'd have liked more Sublime. And I think the movie could have spared a few more minutes for some necessary exposition in order to provide context for some of the climbers' decisions.
Hypoxia causes bad decision-making, and those making decisions during the summit were clearly afflicted by it at points. There's human error involved throughout the disaster, along with dreadful timing as a massive storm heads straight out of the Indian Ocean towards Everest on the day of the summit. But some of that human error was clearly the result of Nature defeating Man, and not simply Man Screwing Up. At the summit of Everest, 30,000 feet above sea level in the jet stream, the human brain is far out of its element. There's a reason they call this elevation The Death Zone. Recommended.
Zodiac (The Director's Cut): adapted by James Vanderbilt from the non-fiction book by Robert Graysmith; directed by David Fincher; starring Jake Gyllenhaal (Robert Graysmith), Mark Ruffalo (Inspector David Toschi), Anthony Edwards (Inspector William Armstrong), Robert Downey Jr. (Paul Avery), Chloe Sevigny (Melanie), Brian Cox (Melvin Belli), Elias Koteas (Sgt. Jack Mulanax), Dermot Mulroney (Captain Marty Lee), John Carroll Lynch ( Arthur Leigh Allen) and Donal Logue (Captain Ken Narlow) (2007): What I consider to be director David Fincher's finest film, and one of the ten best American movies of the last ten years, is a crime procedural about the hunt for the Zodiac, a San Francisco-area serial killer of the late 1960's and early 1970's. In its calculated retro-look, Zodiac is both an homage and an addition to the ranks of great 1970's docudramas that include The French Connection, Serpico, and All the President's Men.
Mirroring the investigation, the film's pace is slow and deliberate. As the movie only shows Zodiac crimes for which there were witnesses, the first known Zodiac killing is discussed but never shown. And what we are shown of the killings is horrifying but not gratuitous. There's far more gore in an average episode of CSI. Or Dirty Harry, for that matter, itself based partially on the Zodiac killings.
This is a film to be savoured and mulled over. Fincher gets fine performances from his entire cast, though I think Mark Ruffalo -- as (real) Inspector Dave Toschi, gives both the best and the most period-accurate performance. Ruffalo looks like a 70's actor in this film, a slightly more conventionally handsome Gene Hackman. Everyone else is good as well, with Jake Gyllenhaal, as the editorial cartoonist-turned-amateur-sleuth Robert Graysmith, playing the straight-arrow heart of the movie (it's his book that the film is based on).
The opening scene, set to Donovan's "Hurdy Gurdy Man", is one of the most striking set-pieces I've seen in any film. And Donovan's daughter, Ione Skye, has an uncredited cameo later in the film. Weird stuff. The Zodiac too is weird: a mixture of the malign and the banal and the lucky, the killer is accurately portrayed as a windbag who craves media attention. His interactions with celebrity lawyer Melvin Belli (played with smarmy, self-satisfied gusto by Brian Cox, the first movie Hannibal Lecter) look like rehearsals for every ridiculous Nancy Grace and Geraldo Rivera moment of the past 20 years. Belli even appeared in an episode of the original Star Trek, "And the Children Shall Lead", as evil alien angel Gorgon!
Whatever and whoever he was, there's nothing Luciferian about Zodiac, nothing of Hannibal Lecter. John Carroll Lynch (Marge's husband in Fargo) nails his few scenes as the prime suspect in the case, an angry white guy with a really awful trailer full of awful stuff.
The Director's Cut DVD also gives the viewer about three hours of new documentary material on the Zodiac investigation, much of it shot and edited in the style of Errol Morris. This, too, is riveting stuff, and the filmmakers play fair: the documentary material raises doubts about the film's conclusion as to who the Zodiac really was. Highly recommended.
Source Code; written by Ben Ripley; directed by Duncan Jones; starring Jake Gyllenhaal (Colter), Michelle Monaghan (Christina), Vera Farmiga (Goodwin), and Jeffrey Wright (Dr. Rutledge) (2011): Duncan Jones (son of David Bowie, whose birth name was David Jones) directed the excellent science-fiction character study Moon, starring Sam Rockwell. Here, he gives us a science-fiction thriller based mostly on the revelation of character under pressure.
Jake Gyllenhaal plays an American soldier whose mind can be dropped into someone else's mind for the purposes of finding out the details of an imminent terrorist threat. A commuter train has already been destroyed as a prelude to some greater catastrophe, and it's into the last eight minutes of that commuter train's existence that Gyllenhaal will be repeatedly plunged, replacing the mind of a schoolteacher killed in the blast.
Jones and screenwriter Ben Ripley wisely keep the explanation of how this process works to a minimum because either the explanation will make no sense, or it would take ten minutes of Basil Exposition to explain it. They even make the lack of explanation a minor plot point -- Gyllenhaal's character gets thwarted repeatedly by the scientist in charge of the project, who basically touches on a couple of points (parabolic calculus! quantum mechanics!) in a way that seems almost a parody of the Architect's ramblings in The Matrix Reloaded.
In any case, Gyllenhaal can be repeatedly sent into "the Source Code", the project's term for a weird mesh of time travel and mind-swapping. We're told repeatedly that the past can't actually be altered and that only information can be gathered to help the present. But is this true? And why can't Gyllenhaal's character remember how he came to join the project?
The obvious genre antecedents for Source Code are Groundhog Day and the Star Trek: TNG episode "Cause and Effect", with a little 12 Monkeys thrown in. Jones keeps the movie moving at a brisk clip, with the reiterations changing enough each time so that the movie becomes neither repetitive nor boring. Gyllenhaal is solid as the baffled soldier, Michelle is perky as a train passenger/love interest, and Jeffrey Wright and Vera Farmiga do nice work as the scientist and Captain running the project (dubbed 'Beleaguered Castle', a solitaire reference that plays out in the movie and also seems to allude to the importance of cards to the classic brainwashing thriller The Manchurian Candidate). Highly recommended.
