The Beach (2000)

The Beach (2000): adapted by John Hodge from the novel by Alex Garland; directed by Danny Boyle; starring Leonardo di Caprio (Richard), Virginie Ledoyen (Francoise), Guillaume Canet (Etienne), Paterson Joseph (Keaty), Tilda Swinton (Sal), and Robert Carlyle (Daffy): Promising riff on Lord of the Flies, if Lord of the Flies were gene-spliced with Club Med, sputters out in the last 30 minutes. 

A bunch of almost universally white pleasure seekers travel to a hidden spot on an isolated island to enjoy the titular beach, located in the interior of the island around a hidden cove or possibly lagoon somewhere near Thailand. Leo di Caprio, a disaffected young America, narrates his search for something interesting, which he finds on the beach, travelling there with two French tourists, one of whom, Francoise, he has a crush on. 

Because this movie is at least somewhat about White People's Problems, the beach colony is led by Tilda Swinton, the whitest woman in the world. Things eventually start to go badly. But not that badly. Timeless' Paterson Joseph plays the only black guy on the island. Spoiler alert: he doesn't get killed! 

The whole thing is very watchable, but seems pretty weak tea given the credentials of director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire) and Alex Garland (Ex Machina, Annihilation), whose novel is adapted here by John Hodge. Lightly recommended.

Oscars and Monsters and Poor Career Choices

The Revenant (2015): adapted by Alejandro Inarritu and Mark L. Smith from the novel by Michael Punke; directed by Alejandro Inarritu; starring Leonardo DiCaprio (Hugh Glass); Tom Hardy (John Fitzgerald); and Domhnall Gleason (Captain Henry): Set in early 19th-century Montana and South Dakota, The Revenant is an odyssey of survival and revenge for guide Hugh Glass, played almost silently by Leonardo DiCaprio in a role that won him his first Best Actor Oscar. 

There's nothing wrong with that acting -- boy, does Glass suffer, and boy is he covered in filth and wounds for most of the movie! Alejandro Inarritu won his second straight directorial Oscar (the first was for the previous year's Birdman), and he certainly puts on a grimy, Sublime, haunting show of photography. Vaguely based on a true story, The Revenant is the Western as horror movie with more than a hint of a Republic serial re-imagined as being deadly serious yet, through the sheer accumulation of unfortunate events, almost comic as it reaches its end. 

Glass is a Beckett character, crawling through the muck, transforming into the vengeful 'dead' man of the title. Tom Hardy has never been better as pragmatic trapper Fitzgerald, Glass' nemesis in the movie (though not in real life). Some trimming might have helped -- by the time Glass and the horse go over a cliff, my suspension of disbelief had been exhausted. Recommended.

The Thing (1982): adapted by Bill Lancaster from the novella "Who Goes There?" (1938) by John W. Campbell Jr.; directed by John Carpenter; starring Kurt Russell (MacReady); Wilford Brimley (Blair), Keith David (Childs), Richard Dysart (Copper), and Donald Moffat (Garry): Alien (1979) was a great screech of cosmic horror mingled with body horror in the best Lovecraftian tradition. The Thing is its thematic sequel, taking fears of bodily invasion and transformation and making them even more horrifying and goopy. 

The Thing was adapted previously by Christian Nyby and Howard Hawks in the 1950's as a sort-of Cold War paranoia thriller with an evil carrot rather than an evil, well, disease. This version is truer to John W. Campbell Jr.'s 1938 novella in terms of location (Antarctica, not the Arctic of the 1950's version) and monster (a body-invading, endlessly replicating Thing rather than a vampiric, Frankensteinian Creature). The Hawks film was much truer to the character dynamics of Campbell's novella, where manly, competent men met a terrible threat with overwhelming, intelligent, manly camaraderie.

Here, our heroes are fractious as per the model of the Nostromo's crew in Alien. Given that the Thing could be any one of them (or even all of them -- it's just that invasive!), their paranoia is understandable. But they still team up to battle an alien invasion. One of the things that makes The Thing stand out even more now is the lack of references to the characters' lives outside Antarctica: one imagines that, remade today, there would have to be some motivations assigned to the characters for their resistance to the invasion. 

Because people don't do things in NuHollywood unless there's a wife or child involved. This lack of 'personal motivation' makes The Thing bracing in my estimation -- the men are trying to save the world with no possible hope of rescue or survival. And even the most grumpy among them realize the scope of the Thing's danger and set to work. It's almost like people can do things for the common good without specific personal motivation!

The actors (what a cast!) are great, the creature effects still chilling and awful, the scenery still Sublime, the whole thing still rousing and disturbing. What's weird is that The Thing is hopeful about humanity in a way few horror movies allow themselves to be. But avoid the dopey 2011 prequel! Highly recommended.

Misery (1990): adapted by William Goldman from the novel by Stephen King; directed by Rob Reiner; starring Kathy Bates (Annie Wilkes); James Caan (Paul Sheldon); Richard Farnsworth (Sheriff Buster), Frances Sternhagen (Deputy Virginia), and Lauren Bacall (Paul's Agent): Kathy Bates deservedly won a Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Annie Wilkes, self-proclaimed "number-one fan" of historical romance writer Paul Sheldon. And James Caan is really good as Sheldon in a role that confines him to bed and wheelchair for much of Misery's running time. 

This is one of a handful of the sharpest adaptations of a novel by Stephen King, alternately funny and horrifying in a way that replicates King's prose. King signed off on Rob Reiner directing after the success of Reiner's previous King adaptation, Stand by Me, the movie from the novella that gave a name to Reiner's production company (Castle Rock). William Goldman and Rob Reiner tone down some of the novel's more gruesomely baroque moments (bye-bye lawnmower!), but there's still lots of body horror to go around. Bates' Wilkes is a menacing but at times oddly sympathetic character -- it seems at times that she's fully aware of what a monster she is. Highly recommended.

Sisters (2015): written by Paula Pell; directed by Jason Moore; starring Tina Fey (Kate Ellis) and Amy Poehler (Maura Ellis): What a dreadful movie, dreadfully wasting a talented cast in a misbegotten attempt to put smart comic actors Tina Fey and Amy Poehler in a raunchy attempt to duplicate a Judd Apatow film. Or maybe Seth Rogen's Neighbours. It's awful. An immensely talented cast is awful. The writing is awful. The desperate mugging and improvising by the cast is awful. There are laughs scattered throughout, but it's agony to reach them. Possibly the worst 'major' movie of 2015. Not recommended.

Gods of Egypt (2016): written by Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless; directed by Alex Proyas; starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Horus); Brenton Thwaites (Bek); Elodie Yung (Hathor); Bryan Brown (Osiris); Chadwick Boseman (Thoth); Gerard Butler (Set); and Geoffrey Rush (Ra): That none of the major characters are played by Egyptian, Persian, or Arabic actors stirred something of a media firestorm. The moviemakers may have welcomed this -- Gods of Egypt wasn't going to get any buzz for actually being good. What the Hell happened to Alex (The Crow, Dark City) Proyas in the last 15 years? Great Osiris! 

The set design and CGI are the most interesting things in this movie which, like Disney's Aladdin, riffs without credit on those two old Thief of Baghdad movies by centering its story on a thief (Bek) who gets caught up in wacky supernatural adventures. The cast keeps a straight face. They should get awards for that. Not the worst big-budget, CGI spectacular ever made -- its dopiness is pretty much in line with about a hundred other gods-and-monsters movies from the 1960's and 1950's. 

The movie would be much more interesting if the Egyptian gods all had their animal heads for the entire running time rather than just when they're fighting. And given that the gods have gold running through their veins (and I assume arteries), what's their body temperature? For reasons unexplained, the great serpent Apophis looks an awful lot like a Dune sandworm on steroids, marking the sandworm's second unlikely cameo in an 18-month period (the first being in The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies). Lightly recommended.

Churchill's Secret (2016): adapted by Stewart Harcourt from the novel by Jonathan Smith; directed by Charles Sturridge; starring Michael Gambon (Winston Churchill), Romola Garai (Nurse Millie Appleyard); and Lindsay Duncan (Clemmie Churchill): Prime Minister Winston Churchill suffered at least two debilitating strokes in June 1953, two years after being re-elected in 1951. The public didn't know this until decades later, as it was covered up. This partially fictional film details Churchill's recovery, with the narrative focused through a fictional nurse who cares for Churchill at his ancestral estate while he convalesces. It's a typically fine BBC/PBS production with beautifully modulated performances throughout, most notably by Romola Garai as the fictional Nurse Appleyard and Michael Gambon as Churchill.  Churchill's warts -- especially his problematic family life -- are on full display, though the entire effort really serves to humanize him. Recommended.

The Magnificent Seven (1960): adapted from the Akira Kurosawa film Seven Samurai by William Roberts; directed by John Sturges; starring Yul Brynner (Chris); Eli Wallach (Calvera); Steve McQueen (Tanner); Horst Buchholz (Chico); Charles Bronson (O'Reilly); Robert Vaughn (Lee); Brad Dexter (Harry); James Coburn (Britt); Vladimir Sokoloff (Old Man); and Rosendo Monteros (Petra): By my count, this is the second major Hollywood MetaWestern (after Shane). That is, what seems like an elegy for the vanishing American West of the late 19th century -- so vanishing that most of the action takes place in Mexico! -- is also an elegy for the American Western movie. In 1960, Westerns were well on their way out. The Magnificent Seven celebrates their strengths while also pointing the way towards the relatively brief renaissance of the grittier, grimier, more morally ambiguous Spaghetti Western that would soon rise and then quickly fade.

These are still the clean-cut cowboys of the 1940's and 1950's Western. But the early scenes that introduce protagonists Steve McQueen and Yul Brynner focus on how these two gunslingers really have nowhere to go in the increasingly civilized American West -- the only job available for McQueen in the American border town at the start of the movie is as a grocery clerk. When three Mexicans from a village annually looted by bandido Calvera and his men meet with Brynner to offer him money to solve the Calvera problem, Brynner accepts. And has little problem rounding up the other six members of his merry band.

The rest, as they say, is movie history. There's almost no blood or gore in the film. However, Sturges stages the deaths of those Magnificent Seven who don't survive the final battle with Calvera in various, almost mournfully abject ways, never moreso than with one gunslinger who collapses into an upright fetal position against a wall. It's not that much of a cinematic leap from The Magnificent Seven to the more graphic and downbeat The Wild Bunch, set even later in the Western period and offering a continuation and an amplification of this movie's elegaic qualities while also offering a revisionist take on Western morals (and clothing styles).

This is a fine movie -- stylistically still very much a last gasp of classical Hollywood cinema. The cast does lovely work, from Brynner and McQueen as the greatest of the enlisted gunslingers to Horst Buchholz as a young gunfighter from Mexican heritage. The musical score by Elmer Bernstein is also pivotal. This is the rare remake of a foreign film (Kurosawa's Seven Samurai) that works beautifully on its own. Highly recommended.

Foul Play (1978): written and directed by Colin Higgins; starring Goldie Hawn (Gloria Mundy); Chevy Chase (Tony); Burgess Meredith (Hennessey); Brian Dennehy (Fergie); Dudley Moore (Stanley Tibbetts); and Billy Barty (MacKuen): Foul Play's writer-director Colin Higgins also wrote Silver Streak and Harold and Maude, and was writer-director of 9 to 5. That's a pretty solid resume for Higgins, who died at the age of 47 in 1988. And Foul Play is still a lot of fun. Foul Play was slightly retooled to be a star vehicle for both Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase, the latter coming off his single, hyper-popular-break-out year on Saturday Night Live. I'm pretty sure Chase's pratfalls in this movie were written for him. 

The movie itself is quite charming, though there are a couple of jarring bits of violence amidst the goofball stuff. And there are Hitchcock homages galore. Burgess Meredith slathers it on a bit too thickly as Hawn's lovable Irish neighbour. Billy Barty and Dudley Moore have terrific supporting roles (this was Moore's American movie debut), with Moore's work pretty much getting him 10 and Arthur. I still think Dan Brown stole the Albino in The DaVinci Code from this film. I mean, there's even a papal assassination plot and an anti-Catholic organization in this movie! And Billy Barty! Goldie Hawn is super-cute. Chevy Chase is Chevy Chase. Recommended.

Gatsby!

The Great Gatsby: based on the 1925 novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald; adapted by Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pearce; directed by Baz Luhrmann; starring Leonardo DiCaprio (Jay Gatsby), Tobey Maguire (Nick Carraway), Carey Mulligan (Daisy Buchanan), Joel Edgerton (Tom Buchanan), Elizabeth Debicki (Jordan Baker), Amitabh Bachchan (Meyer Wolfsheim), Isla Fisher (Myrtle Wilson) and Jason Clarke (George Wilson) (2013):

I expected to dislike Baz Luhrmann's version of The Great Gatsby. Instead, I pretty much dug it. It's not the novel, but movies never are, and Luhrmann's departures from the text, while sometimes a bit iffy (the frame story exudes wonkiness at times), work for the most part in interesting ways. It's certainly the first adaptation that gets the Jazz Age frothiness and buzz of the early 'Party' sections pretty much right before the narrative plunges into darkness. Or drives into it at unsafe speeds.

Luhrmann adds a certain amount of Hollywood sentimentality to the mixture, which is probably inevitable for any film adaptation not done by Stanley Kubrick or Peter Brook. Leonardo DiCaprio's Gatsby comes off as much more sympathetic than the character in the book, despite the film's assignation of an extra dose of criminal behaviour to Gatsby. Tobey Maguire is really a perfect actor to play an observer like Nick Carraway, and the film increases that passivity by removing most of his interaction with Jordan Baker. Nick's repressed homosexuality, strongly implied in the novel, is nowhere to be found.

The reduction of scenes spent with the Wilsons makes both of them more sympathetic, and Carraway by extension as well, with Nick's harsh descriptions of the working class excised from the film. The snobbishness and racism all come from that brutish old-money polo player Tom Buchanan.

Most importantly, the movie really moves, bouncing around just this side of irreverence to the source material. The softening of the narrative makes one of the film's major points -- Gatsby's delusional complicity in his own destruction, and the critique of the American Dream implicit in that delusionality -- less prominent, but it's still there. Indeed, I could argue that the film's frame story shifts some of that delusional obsession onto Nick Carraway, who may ultimately have missed the point of the story in a way similar to Gatsby.

The performances throughout are top-notch. DiCaprio makes a winning, obsessive, ultimately fragile Gatsby; Carey Mulligan is especially fine as Daisy, that object lesson on not turning women into Objects to be Won; Joel Edgerton really does a lovely job embodying the ideological and social ugliness of Tom Buchanan.

As with most film adaptations of complex novels, there are a number of Coles' Notes moments in which the film tells you a bit too much of what you're supposed to think about something (that famous eyeglass billboard gets about three too many lines of metaphoric explanation), but that pretty much goes with the territory of adaptation, especially given the budgetary scale of this film. But, you know, it's pretty good. Nobody embarrassed himself or herself. And boy, that set design and those costumes. Recommended.

Rubber-faced Aliens of the FBI

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.

In Dreams Begin Responsibilities

Inception, written and directed by Christopher Nolan, starring Leonardo di Caprio (Cobb), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Arthur), Ellen Page (Ariadne), Tom Hardy (Eames), Ken Watanabe (Saito), Dileep Rao (Yusuf), Cillian Murphy (Fischer), Tom Berenger (Browning) and Marion Cotillard (Mal) (2010): A gleaming, machine-tooled puzzle box of a movie which has justifiably spawned a plethora of theories about what's "real" in its narrative (and justifiable complaints that it didn't snag Christopher Nolan a Best Picture or Best Director nod).

One's assessment of what's real hinges on one's assessment of the film's somewhat Byzantine explanation of how dreams work. Do you take at face value the "infinite subconscious" and the accelerated time of the dreams or don't you? Are the emblematic names of a couple of characters coincidental, aimed only at the viewer, or aimed at the "realness" of the dreamscape itself?

Nolan's tale of a group of dream thiefs hired to implant an idea in the head of the new head of a multinational conglomerate falls down only, I suppose, in the realm of emotional depth and richness of characterization. But the actors are all so good at combining competence with a sort of post-James-Bond bitchiness that the whole affair goes down smoothly, though the James Bondian third level of the dream world bogs down a bit in pyrotechnics and too much gun-toting action.

South Park accurately skewered the gobbledygook of the dream-world dynamics (Ellen Page has an occasionally thankless role as a sort of reverse-Basil Exposition, repeatedly getting DiCaprio's Cobb to explain how things work, sometimes at credibility-stretching moments). Nonetheless, the movie is a serious fun machine, and DiCaprio has really started to grow on me as an occasionally dewy eyed action hero. Recommended.

Out of the Past

Shutter Island, adapted by Laeta Kalogridis from a novel by Dennis Lehane, directed by Martin Scorsese, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Michelle Williams, Ben Kingsley and Max Von Sydow (2009-2010): Scorsese's best film in a decade or more is a slightly overlong and a bit overbaked but still fascinating thriller.

The year is 1954, and DiCaprio plays Teddy Daniels, a U.S. Marshal sent to a high-security psychiatric facility on the otherwise unpopulated Shutter Island to discover how a female patient managed to disappear from a locked room. Only a once-a-day ferry connects the island, 11 miles off the East Coast, to the mainland. Where did she go? And why is everything and everyone so gosh-darned sinister?

Scorsese has created a loving homage to the first cinematic wave of film noir, the murky post-WWII thrillers that eventually became their own sub-genre of movies. The psychological and physical damage of World War Two to returning American soldiers was a prime constituent of first-wave noir, and it is here as well. The liberation of Dachau marked then-soldier Daniels for life; the murder of his wife in a fire set by an arsonist further damaged his psyche. And now he's on an island of severely damaged men and women, and severely creepy doctors and nurses.

Even Daniels's partner Chuck (Ruffalo) is a mystery, having just joined Daniels for this assignment. The chief psychiatrists, played by Kingsley and Von Sydow, seem weirdly menacing and unhelpful. The warden sounds crazier than the inmates. A hugely destructive storm traps everyone on the island. What will happen next? And what does a cryptic note left by the vanished patient, referring to a "Rule of Four" and a "67", really mean?

Paranoia seeps into everything. The landscape and settings drip with Gothic menace even in broad daylight. Daniels begins to see a larger conspiracy at work, one that reaches to the top levels of government. And what's inside the heavily guarded lighthouse? I guessed the major plot twist half-an-hour into the film, but that only added to my enjoyment of the way the whole thing unfolds, and the other twists that come along. Highly recommended.