The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018): written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, segment "All Gold Canyon" based on a story by Jack London, segment "The Girl Who Got Rattled" based on a story by Stewart Edward White; starring Tim Blake Nelson (Buster Scruggs), James Franco (Cowboy), Stephen Root (Bank Teller), Liam Neeson (Impresario), Harry Melling (Artist), Tom Waits (Prospector), Zoe Kazan (Alice Longabaugh), Brendan Gleeson (Irishman), Chelcie Ross (Trapper), Tyne Daly (Lady), Saul Rubinek (Frenchman), and Jonjo O'Neill (Englishman):

On Netflix appears this early holiday gift from the Coen Brothers, an anthology movie set in the Old West. It's one Hell of an assembly. Beautifully shot and acted, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs plays with assorted tropes of the Old West, from singing cowboys to grizzled prospectors, from stagecoach rides to wagon trains, from bank robberies to traveling shows. 

The stories move from satire to bleak comedy to ironic tragedy and back again. Tom Waits stands out in a field of fine performances as that grizzled, tenacious prospector; so, too, Tim Blake Nelson as the eponymous singing cowboy and Harry Melling as a traveling performer. Highly recommended.

Spider-Man 3 (2007)

Spider-Man 3 (2007): based on characters created by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee; written by Sam Raimi, Ivan Raimi, and Alvin Sargent; directed by Sam Raimi; starring Tobey Maguire (Peter Parker/ Spider-Man), Kirsten Dunst (Mary Jane Watson), James Franco (Harry Osborne), Thomas Haden Church (Flint Marko/ Sandman), Topher Grace (Eddie Brock/ Venom), Bryce Dallas Howard (Gwen Stacy), James Cromwell (Captain Stacy), Dylan Baker (Dr. Curt Connors), Rosemary Harris (Aunt May), and J.K. Simmons (J. Jonah Jameson):

11 more years of superhero movies have made Spider-Man 3 seem a lot more charming now than it did at the time. The studio forced director/co-writer Sam Raimi to shoehorn 1980's Spider-Man villain Venom into a story that already had Sandman and Harry Osborn as antagonists for Peter Parker's spidery alter ego. And oh boy, what a clumsy shoehorn it is!

The result does strongly suggest that Sam Raimi pretty much said 'To hell with you!' at this point, forced to give us a tale of Peter Parker briefly 'going bad' under the influence of the alien symbiote/black costume. While he's bad, Peter Parker looks and acts like a sort of Emo Beatnik. He dances. He snaps his fingers. He plays the piano. Wow!

Sam Raimi's desire to be done with superhero movies also seems to be in full evidence. Spider-Man 3 opens and closes with a musical number. The motivations of villain Sandman are murky. A retcon of the murder of Peter's Uncle Ben has been inserted because everything has to be personal for superheroes. The Sandman himself generally looks and acts a lot like the sandstorms in the first two Brendan Fraser Mummy movies.

Oh, well. Tobey Maguire is still mopey and perky as Peter and Spidey. Kirsten Dunst's Mary Jane is now a thankless wet blanket of a role. James Franco just looks stoned all the time as Harry Osborn. As in Spider-Man 2, the action climax ends on a note of forgiveness rather than all-out punchiness. In today's superhero world, that last choice still seems fresh and important, and the makers of Spider-Man: Homecoming seem to have realized that with the ending of their NuSpider-man movie. In all, lightly recommended yet almost incongruously entertaining.

Characters Actors, Characters, Character...

That Guy Dick Miller (2014), The Interview (2014), 

and The Legend of Barney Thomson (2015)

Left Behind with James Franco

This is the End: written and directed by Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen, adapted from a short film by Jason Stone; starring James Franco, Jonah Hill, Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, Danny McBride, Craig Robinson, Emma Watson, and Michael Cera as themselves (2013): For an astonishingly raunchy comedy from the wags who brought us Superbad and Pineapple Express, This is the End is amazingly fastidious in its use of the Book of Revelation. It's certainly more "accurate" than end-times thrillers like The Seventh Sign, End of Days, or even the whole Left Behind franchise.

All the actors come together to play versions of themselves, attending a Beverly Hills house-warming party at James Franco's when The Rapture occurs. But only Montreal's own Jay Baruchel, visiting from Canada and disdainful of Hollywood, is initially aware that the Rapture has occurred. He and best-pal Seth Rogen were out buying cigarettes.

Rogen missed seeing the Rapture because he was lying on the floor of a convenience store after an apparent earthquake. Baruchel saw it, though. Then chaos erupted and they fled back to Franco's house, where no one noticed anything amiss because nobody at the party got Raptured up...

Well, it's literally One Hell of a Buddy Comedy, though who the buddies and who the damned will be is in question until the final minutes. The various actors riff, often hilariously, on their personae. Michael Cera shows up early to play against perceived type -- he's a coke-snorting, bathroom-threesome, ass-slapping monster. Jonah Hill is a schmoozing hypocrite who secretly hates Jay Baruchel because he wants Seth Rogen to be his own best buddy. Franco is, well, Franco. Craig Robinson is loveable but befuddled at first. Danny McBride is a complete jerk.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles burns. Pits that lead to Hell open up across the globe to suck up the damned. Demons and spectres roam the Earth. Under siege, the guys barricade themselves inside Franco's house. But they're running out of food and water, and nerves are frayed. Luckily, they do have a lot of booze and recreational drugs.

As with many Rogen/Goldberg movies, improvisation and a certain aversion to tight editing lead to scattershot scenes and lines. If the two ever got really rigorous about being funny, they might be able to make a real comedy classic.

Still, this is a lot of fun. And it has a moral. And very funny exchanges about, among other things, what gluten is, and what particular Deadly Sin dooms one of the characters ("What was that, Vanity?" "Wrath?"). And a great exorcism sequence featuring a crucifix made out of kitchen utensils and the worst use of a blanket to put out a fire ever recorded on film. Recommended.

Raimi-fications

Oz the Great and Powerful: based on characters created by L. Frank Baum, written by Mitchell Kapner and David Lindsay-Abaire; directed by Sam Raimi; starring James Franco (Oz), Mila Kunis (Theodora), Rachel Weisz (Evanora), Michelle Williams (Annie/Glinda), Zach Braff (Frank/Finley), and Joey King (Girl in Wheelchair/China Girl) (2013): With Seth Rogen or even Jack Black as the titular con-man-magician-turned-Wizard-of-Oz, this film would have been much more entertaining for all its stretches of limp dialogue and simplistic sermonizing. Instead, we get James Franco as an earnest vacuum. His lack of affect (and effect) makes Keanu Reeves look like George C. Scott.

There are a lot of lovely visual effects. And once the film actually makes it to the Land of Oz, things do get moving, though a molasses-slow epilogue ruins some of that. Boy, though, Franco is a terrible leading man for this sort of movie. Why, Sam Raimi, why? Bruce Campbell, who has a minor speaking role, would actually make a funny Wizard. And as Raimi restages the climax of Army of Darkness (aka Evil Dead 3), which starred Bruce Campbell, for the climax of this picture, it would make things even funnier. But Franco can't even act in the middle of a battle-preparation montage.

And oh, the psychology. We learn the paper-thin motivations of the Wicked Witches, of Glinda the Good, of the Wizard of Oz. Truly this is a dark time for blockbusters now that everyone has to have a personal motivation for everything they do.

Applied to real life, imagine that every janitor was a janitor because dirt killed his father, every auto worker an auto worker because a car saved his life. It's all 21st-century Hollywood screenwriting crap, and the sooner we escape the terrible gravity well of simplistic personal motivation, the better. No wonder video games outgross blockbusters. Still, nice visual effects. Lightly recommended.

Evil Dead: based on the original film written by Sam Raimi, written by Fede Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues; directed by Fede Alvarez; starring Jane Levy (Mia), Shiloh Fernandez (David), Lou Taylor Pucci (Eric), Jessica Lucas (Olivia) and Elizabeth Blackmore (Natalie) (2013): Made with the participation of original (The) Evil Dead writer/director Sam Raimi, this Evil Dead makes some smart changes to the low-budget 1980's horror film that launched the careers of Raimi, his brother Ted, and star Bruce Campbell.

The first is to come up with a weirdly plausible new reason for the inevitable trip to a cabin in the woods: four of the five characters are staging an Intervention/Drug DeTox for the fifth, Mia, who appears to have a heroin problem. The second is to alter the tone to one of more seriousness, or at least more angst, for the first two-thirds of the film. The Evil Dead is far less loopy than sequels Evil Dead 2 or Army of Darkness, but next to this Evil Dead, it looks like a Warner Brothers cartoon.

Are there problems? Of course. The addition of a dog to the cast of probably doomed characters goes nowhere, possibly because the filmmakers shied away from graphic violence involving a dog as either victim or perpetrator. The characters are a little shrill at points, though this may be intentional -- certainly, the issues of the various characters are intentional, as is at least one resolution to those issues. The angst tends to overwhelm any attempts at witty or blackly comic dialogue, though. Diablo Cody (Juno) was apparently brought on as a script doctor to add such wit, but it isn't all that apparent what her contributions are.

Gore and violence come in increasingly rapid, escalating waves as the film progresses. Nail guns (an homage to Raimi's Darkman?) and electric meat cutters do some terrible stuff. Several characters take levels of physical punishment that would have made Bruce Campbell's Ash proud. If you're going to be a character in an Evil Dead movie, you've got to be able to take a beating and keep on punching back. The film bounces ideas from all three previous installments around, sometimes in newly effective ways, though I wish they'd worked the overwrought tape recording of the archaeologist into something other than the closing credits. I love that guy.

Through it all, the Book of the Dead remains indestructible and weirdly attractive to otherwise intelligent characters in search of bathroom reading. Even barbed-wire wrapping and annotated warnings from some previous reader of the tome can't stop the high-school teacher from reading an incantation out loud. Stupid teachers! The filmmakers finally jettison most of the serious dramatic tone for the final twenty minutes, cutting loose in a manner more consistent with the series as a whole. Frankly, it's a relief. And the identity of the survivor or survivors comes as something of a surprise. Recommended.

Stop the Planet of the Apes, I Want to Get On

Rise of the Planet of the Apes; based on Monkey Planet by Pierre Boulle and the movie Planet of the Apes, written by Rod Serling and Michael Wilson; written by Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, directed by Rupert Wyatt, starring Andy Serkis (Caesar), James Franco (Will Rodman), Freida Pinto (Caroline Aranha), John Lithgow (Charles Rodman), Tyler Labine (Robert Franklin), Brian Cox (John Landon), David Oyelowo (Steven Jacobs) and Tom Felton (Dodge Landon) (2011): Superior popcorn entertainment.

This second reboot of the long-dormant Apes franchise begins at the beginning, as a Big Pharm companies Alzheimer's research inadvertantly creates a drug that permanently (and genetically) creates super-intelligent primates. Dr. Will Rodman raises the first chimp 'accident' secretly at his home; Caesar (impressively motion-capture-performed by Andy "Gollum" Serkis) loves his human family but eventually starts to chafe at being a chimp among humans.

Various shenanigans put Caesar in a nightmarish animal sanctuary with a bunch of normal primates and Franco on the verge of creating a more stable anti-Alzheimer's drug. Cue more animal testing! Disastrous, disastrous animal testing. For people, not animals, because Franco has now created a super-chimp drug that can be aerosolized. Huzzah!

I was happily surprised to see a summer blockbuster that builds to its big-CGI climax, that gives us characterization (albeit much of it focused on a CGI chimp), and that gives us at least something vaguely intellectual to chew on. The whole thing is a bit of a throwback to both its grandparent, the original Planet of the Apes, and to science-fiction movies of the 1950's, before visual effects overwhelmed the story sense of much of Hollywood.

The primates -- all, so far as I know, CGI and not animal actors -- are really nicely created by Peter Jackson's WETA effects shop. Caesar and several others -- especially Maurice the oranguatan (the name is an homage to the actor who played evolved orangutan Dr. Zaius in the original movie series) -- look startlingly real.

More importantly, they're given the sort of personalities that CGI creations usually lack in any movie not made by Pixar. This isn't a great movie. The science and logic lapse at points, Franco and Pinto don't really have a lot to do, and the ending is 'Wait for the sequel!' abrupt. But after several dismal summers of blockbusters, this movie is the real deal, and almost as refreshing a reboot as 2009's Star Trek. I want more apes! Recommended.