X-men: Dark Phoenix (2019)

X-Men: Dark Phoenix (2019): written and directed by Simon Kinberg; based on characters and situations created by Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Len Wein, Dave Cockrum, Chris Claremont, John Byrne, and otrhers; starring James McAvoy (Professor X), Michael Fassbender (Magneto), Jennifer Lawrence (Raven), Nicholas Hoult (Beast), Sophie Turner (Jean Grey/ Phoenix), Tye Sheridan (Cyclops), Alexandra Shipp (Storm), Evan Peters (Quicksilver), Kodi Smit-McPhee (Nightcrawler), and Jesicca Chastain (Vuk):

X-Men: Dark Phoenix wasn't terrible. Certainly not enough for all the now-cliched Internet agita about it. Spoilers ahoy!

I wonder if it suffered at the box office in part because it uses Hollywood's ubiquitous Daddy-Daughter trope in a negative sense. Young Jean "Phoenix" Grey is abandoned by her father after Jean accidentally kills her mother because she hates the music Mom is playing on the car radio. Professor X chooses not to tell Jean that her father is still alive after the accident. This seems to me to be a good idea as Jean is only 8 and is traumatized. He slips up by never telling her as a teen or adult that her father is alive, but in his defense, Professor X is a busy man!

The main problem is that once Disney's acquisition of Fox was imminent, Disney clearly told Fox to change the ending of Dark Phoenix because it was similar to the ending of Captain Marvel -- Jean Grey was supposed to destroy a giant alien spaceship that had come to try to acquire the Phoenix Force for itself, saving the Earth and (seemingly) sacrificing herself in the process. This led to reshooting the climax a year after filming had originally ended.

The film-makers changed this woman vs. spaceship battle to a battle between the aliens on one side and the X-Men and human soldiers on the other side, all on a prison train. 

Because nothing says epic sci-fi confrontation more than a battle in and around the apex of 19th-century travel technology.

Of course, this led to an interesting plot hole. Is the spaceship still in orbit? Because the answer would seem to be 'Yes,' given that we saw the aliens come to Earth in the now obligatory meteorite-like landing pods.

So it goes.

Perhaps needless to note at this point, there's no Daddy-Daughter issues in the original comic book Dark Phoenix Saga. Jean's parents are loving and accepting of her mutant powers, and when she gains the Phoenix powers, the saga plays out as a cautionary tale about absolute power corrupting absolutely, along with self-sacrifice. Realizing that the Phoenix Force could never be controlled, Jean commits suicide. Or does she? That was a story for another day!

Lightly recommended.

The Snowman (2017)

The Snowman (2017): adapted from the Jo Nesbo novel by Peter Straughan, Hossein Amini, and Soren Sveistrup; directed by Tomas Alfreson; starring Michael Fassbender (Harry Hole), Rebecca Ferguson (Katrine Bratt), Charlotte Gainsbourg (Rakel), Jonas Karlsen (Mathias), Michael Yates (Oleg), J.K. Simmons (Arve Stop), and Val Kilmer (Rafto): 

Or, How Not To Adapt A Best-Selling Thriller. There's a lot of talent to waste in this movie, from director Tomas Alfreson (the superb Let the Right One In) to Michael Fassbender, Rebecca Ferguson, and Charlotte Gainsbourg in the cast. They also waste a perfectly good Norwegian thriller in the Jo Nesbo novel.

One problem is that everyone is miscast. Everyone. Val Kilmer was so miscast that his perceived problems speaking after treatment for tongue cancer caused the producers to dub his lines in what seems like an homage to some SCTV parody of bad dubbing. So that's distracting, as is Val Kilmer's obvious poor health. Rebecca Ferguson does her best with an underwritten sidekick to Michael Fassbender's colossally miscast Harry Hole.

One can note the attention to detail of the movie in its use of the detective's name, 'Harry Hole.' In Norwegian, 'Hole' is pronounced 'Hou-lay.' But a lot of Norwegians speak English and read English, so the hilarious English pronunciation of Harry's last name is a recurring irritant to the detective. In the movie, though... in the movie they just use the English pronunciation. It's distractingly hilarious every goddam time!

At points the movie keeps too much of the plot apparatus of Nesbo's densely packed novel. At others, the changes made range from dubious to completely infuriating (the murder of a character who doesn't die in the novel is the most infuriating of these moments). Pretty much all the detective work of the novel has been expunged. Also, the snowmen the killer leaves as clues aren't that scary. Neither is the killer when he appears. Who is the killer? All I'll say is that the nationality of the person playing the character seems like some sort of accidental clue.

The producers have also added this whole sub-plot with the Oslo police getting new laptops because... um... is this an advertisement for computers? What a mess. Not recommended because it's not funny enough often enough to be Fun-Bad. Though the suspension of disbelief required to accept that Michael Fassbender is a weathered, exhausted, alcoholic cop on the brink of suicide really is quite gigantic! But hey, at least they filmed in and around Oslo, albeit with an almost-all-non-Scandanavian cast for the major characters. Almost!

Needs More Quicksilver

X-Men: Days of Future Past: adapted by Simon Kinberg, Matthew Vaughn, and Jane Goldman from the comic-book story by Chris Claremont, John Byrne, and Terry Austin; directed by Bryan Singer; starring Hugh Jackman (Wolverine), James McAvoy/Patrick Stewart (Charles Xavier), Michael Fassbender/Ian McKellan (Magneto), Jennifer Lawrence (Raven/Mystique), Ellen Page (Kitty Pryde), Peter Dinklage (Trask), Shawn Ashmore (Iceman), Halle Berry (Storm), Nicholas Hoult (Beast), Omar Sy (Bishop), Evan Peters (Quicksilver), Daniel Cudmore (Colossus), Bingbing Fan (Blink), Adan Canto (Sunspot), and Booboo Stewart (Warpath) (2014):

A relatively sprawling movie adapted from a 34-page comic-book story from the early 1980's which itself took its title from a Brian Eno album, X-Men: Days of Future Past follows up the good work done by X-Men: First Class in making X-Men movies enjoyable again after the debacle that was the Brett Ratner-directed X-Men: The Last Stand and the twin thuds of the solo Wolverine movies.

Brian Singer, who directed the first two X-Men movies that really kicked off the Marvel Movie Juggernaut starting in the year 2000, returns to the series with his limited colour palette and earnest tone. Well, mostly earnest. The best scene in the movie features some very funny super-heroics set to Jim Croce's "Time in a Bottle."

It's the best scene from any Bryan Singer movie, ever, and so show-stopping that the rest of the movie seems somewhat workmanlike by comparison. If anyone had said before the movie's release that the mutant speedster Quicksilver would steal the movie in a good way, I think that person would have been committed. But he's great. The movie needs more of him. Hell, the X-Men needed more of him by the conclusion.

Time travel drives the plot here. The original comic-book story predated both Back to the Future and The Terminator movies, so save your comments on who's stealing from whom. Wolverine, everybody's favourite veiny Canadian mutant, must travel from the dystopic near-future to the early 1970's to save mutants and humanity alike from a dire fate at the hands of a bunch of levitating sand-crawlers that disgorge endless streams of killer robots. Once in the past, Wolverine teams up with the young versions of Professor X and Magneto; in the future, they stand together despite their differences in the past.

Jennifer Lawrence is given a lot to do this time, as the plot hinges on what her character. Mystique, decides about her path in life. Sometimes she's in her scaly blue body-suit and sometimes she looks like Jennifer Lawrence. So it goes. Much super-heroing and angsting ensues, all of it in the mode that Chris Claremont, John Byrne, and Dave Cockrum brought to those 1970's and early 1980's X-Men adventures.

Not everything works, and the plot could use about one fewer transAtlantic trip towards the end, but enough works to make things pretty enjoyable. Peter Dinklage is a bit wasted as a one-note villain, but he does what he can. And the design on the future Sentinels really is top-notch. They're actually scary. Recommended.

The Wrong Man

12 Years a Slave: adapted by John Ridley from the memoir by Solomon Northup; directed by Steve McQueen; starring Chiwetel Ejiofor (Solomon Northup), Paul Giamatti (Freeman), Benedict Cumberbatch (Ford), Paul Dano (Tibeats), Michael Fassbender (Edwin Epps), Lupita Nyong'o (Patsey), Alfre Woodard (Mistress Shaw) and Brad Pitt (Bass) (2013): A terrific film with terrific writing, directing, and acting throughout. This should really win Oscars for director, picture, adapted screenplay, actor (Ejiofor), supporting actor (Fassbender), and supporting actress (a harrowing Lupita Nyong'o). Will it? Probably not. Nonetheless, I think this is probably the best drama of at least the last five years. Certainly the most affecting, harrowing, and moving movie.

Really, there's not a lot more to say. There's a lot less on-screen violence and blood than most reviews lead one to believe. It's the skill of the writing and direction that make this so. In a weird way, Ejiofor's Solomon Northup, a free Northern African-American kidnapped and sold into slavery in the early 1840's, is the ultimate real-world Hitchcock hero, the ultimate Wrong Man. And McQueen deploys the principles perfected by Hitchcock to augment our identification with Northup, our horror at his situation, and our loathing of the system he's trapped within.

There's a nearly wordless scene involving the aftermath of a near-lynching that is as perfect a visual metaphor for the horrors of slavery as anything in any film I can think of -- and the metaphor remains a literal scene of horror as well, one focused on the suffering of a character we've grown to admire and the brave kindness of one person.

There are a lot of other great scenes. There's a soundscape that sometimes menaces the viewer-listener in a manner reminiscent of the non-diegetic industrial-slaughter-house sounds of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, though the sounds here are those of a steam engine heard from within the hold by the kidnapped men and women.

There's Fassbender, as a horribly explicable monster; and Benedict Cumberbatch, as a slave-owner who knows that what he's doing is wrong; there's Lupita Nyong'o, making dolls from corn-husks, whose unsurpassed excellence in picking cotton protects her from exactly nothing in the way of Fassbender's monstrosity. There's Brad Pitt as a Canadian who is just good enough without being super-heroic or being made the focus of the film's goodness, the White Saviour.

There's a scene at the end that Spielberg and most other modern film-makers would have botched with over-length and crushing mawkishness, but which everyone involved here gives us sparingly and underplayed and movingly perfect because the movie knows how to pull back just that little bit to give its characters and its world their necessary emotional space. This is as about as good as a serious movie gets. Highly recommended.

Personal Best, Personal Beast

A Dangerous Method: adapted by Christopher Hampton from his play "The Talking Cure" and the book A Most Dangerous Method by John Kerr; directed by David Cronenberg; starring Keira Knightley (Sabina Spielrein), Viggo Mortensen (Sigmund Freud), Michael Fassbender (Carl Jung), Vincent Cassel (Otto Gross), and Sarah Gadon (Emma Jung) (2011): If you'd turned to someone 30 years or so ago after watching Scanners and told that person that David Cronenberg would soon become one of the world's greatest actors' directors, you'd have been laughed out of the theatre. But he did, and after eliciting career-best performances from Viggo Mortensen, Peter Weller, Jeremy Irons, and Ralph Fiennes, in A Dangerous Method he makes Keira Knightley look good, partially by making her look terrible.

As Carl Jung's patient-turned-mistress Sabina Spielrein, Knightley looks for most of the movie like she needs a sandwich. A lot of sandwiches. Her gauntness enhances her performance, though it is distracting at times -- how much of this is method and how much of this is madness? Still, it's like nothing she's ever done: for the first time on-screen, Knightley isn't lovely but dramatically inert.

Fassbender and Mortensen have the much less showy roles as the more outwardly controlled Jung and Freud, respectively. But they do a lot with those roles -- Mortensen exudes disappointment at times, while Fassbender, one of the more controlled actors out there, uses that control and reserve to good advantage as the outwardly respectable Jung, who is inwardly and sexually on the brink of his great voyage into the collective consciousness and unconsciousness of the human race.

The movie charts the deteroriation of Freud and Jung's relationship at the dawn of psychoanalysis, as they go from master and apprentice to rivals dismissive of each other's theories of the human mind. But Sabina, who eventually becomes a psychoanalyst herself, has her own theories which seek to combine the approaches of the two -- and as she reminds Jung at the end, he used Freud's theories and practices to cure her of her psychiatric ailments.

Cronenberg's direction remains mostly transparent and unshowy throughout -- he's always been more for mise-en-scene anyway, and the composition of many shots ranges from lovely to subtly disturbing. I don't know that this is a great movie, but it's a very good movie on a difficult-to-film subject. Recommended.

Prometheus Unbound by Basic Logic

Prometheus: written by John Spaihts and Damon Lindelof, based on characters and concepts created by Dan O'Bannon, Ronald Shusett, Walter Hill, and Ridley Scott; directed by Ridley Scott; starring Noomi Rapace (Liz Shaw), Michael Fassbender (David), Charlize Theron (Meredith Vickers), Idris Elba (Janek), Guy Pearce (Weyland), and Logan Marshall-Green (Charlie Holloway) (2012): The prequel to Alien (but only Alien and not the sequels or attendant Predator prequels), Prometheus looks fantastic and moves beautifully. I wasn't bored, and I didn't look at my watch for the whole two hours. Admittedly, that had something to do with the extremely comfortable theatre seats, but still...

On the other hand, Prometheus is a hilarious mess when it comes to science, character motivation, and basic plot logic. Somehow, this enriches the experience. You'll have a lot to talk about when you're done. Boy, howdy.

Billions of years ago, aliens start life on Earth. Well, maybe they start animal life on Earth because there's definitely vegetable life on Earth in the scenes we see. In truth, what they do makes no evolutionary sense, so I'm instead going to say that billions of years ago, an alien visiting Earth got drunk, passed out, and fell into Niagara Falls. Billions of years later and thousands of years ago, giant aliens left star maps all over the world pointing to a particular solar system.

And in the year 2091, a nefarious trillionaire named Peter Weyland (yes, the Weyland corporation, as of 2091 not yet joined with Yutani) sends a mission on the starship Prometheus to that star system for his own sinister purposes. The archaeologist who figured out the whole star map thing, Liz Shaw (Noomi Rapace), goes along, as does her partner/life-partner, a bunch of cannon fodder, an annoying business woman (Charlize Theron), a curious robot (Michael Fassbender), and an accordion-playing captain (The Wire's Idris Elba).

And in case you're wondering, the planet (well, technically a moon) they land on is not the planet from Alien. This is LV-223; that was LV-426. I note this to save you a lot of time trying to figure out how things ended up like they did for the beginning of Alien on this planet. It's not the same planet. Though if you want to believe they are the same planets to simulate our confused discussion at the end of the film, you'll have a good time coming up with scenarios that put the fossilized, gut-busted Pilot back in that funky space chair surrounded by giant eggs.

In any case, the Prometheus arrives at LV-223. Rather than survey the entire planet, it lands at the first visible structure. Against the Captain's warnings that sundown is coming (a warning that really only makes a huge amount of sense if the Captain's last mission was to the Planet of the Vampires), the scientists proceed to rush into the structure. Needless to say, shenanigans ensue, many of them caused by the simple fact that this is the dumbest crew of any Alien movie, dumber even than the crew in the godawful Alien Resurrection.

The pacing and visual design really carry this movie. It looks great. It moves like a rollercoaster. And Rapace (Lisbeth Salander in the original Swedish Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), Fassbender as curious robot David, and Elba as the Captain put in strong performances. Fassbender especially stands out, his character ultimately sympathetic despite the crappy things he does, or is ordered to do. There are clever character bits throughout related to David's fascination with Lawrence of Arabia and the Captain's interest in Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. Theron is suitably icy playing, well, Paul Reiser in Aliens.

References and allusions are shovelled into the movie willynilly, and perhaps even higgily-piggily. Scott's own directorial efforts Alien (natch) and Blade Runner, Aliens, The Thing, several Doctor Who serials, the nightmarish Space: 1999 episode with the crazy-ass tentacle monster, David Cronenberg's The Fly, H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, Quatermass and the Pit...it goes on.

Does anyone connected with the writing of this movie show the faintest understanding of how evolution works and how DNA develops? Hell, no. But to paraphrase a line from another Ridley Scott movie, I was entertained. Recommended.

Jane Eyrehead

Jane Eyre; adapted by Moira Buffini from the novel by Charlotte Bronte; directed by Cary Fukunaga; starring Mia Wasikowska (Jane), Michael Fassbender (Rochester), Jamie Bell (St. John Rivers), and Judi Dench (Mrs. Fairfax) (2011): Everyone in this good-looking but increasingly dumb-as-it-goes-along adaptation of Charlotte Bronte's 1847 English 101 staple is a lot dumber and less interesting than their counterparts in the novel. And I'm not a big fan of the novel. But it does look great!


Structuring the movie as a frame tale with a lengthy flashback of a middle section is the smartest thing the movie does, though it did cause me some confusion initially as to when Jane was fleeing across the moors to the house of repressed clergyman St. John Rivers and his two nice sisters. Poor old St. John Rivers gets reimagined as Sexual-Harassment Panda by the filmmakers and a weirdly creepy looking Jamie Bell, something of a disservice to the doomed, repressed, but well-meaning character of the novel.

Mia Wasihowska does yeoman's service as Jane, though the British accent occasionally seems to cause her to swallow her dialogue whole. In no recognizable universe is Wasikowska 'plain' as Jane is meant to be, which pretty much throws one of the proto-feminist concerns of the novel right out the window: the Rochester/Jane relationship isn't a meeting of like minds that overcomes class and physical impediments, but rather a relationship of two good-looking people who eventually hook up. Oh, those crazy kids!

Michael Fassbender is suitably Byronic as Rochester, though he too gets dumbed down. The central Gothic horror of the novel -- the madwoman in Rochester's attic -- virtually disappears in this narrative. So too does the family relationship of St. John Rivers and his sisters with Jane, a relationship that better explains Jane's late-movie generosity with that family. Judi Dench plays Judi Dench playing Judi Dench. Lightly recommended.