The Greatest Showman (2017)

The Greatest Showman (2017): written by Jenny Bicks and Bill Condon; directed by Michael Gracey; starring Hugh Jackman (P.T. Barnum), Michelle Williams (Charity Barnum), Zac Efron (Philip Carlyle), Zendaya (Anne Wheeler), and Rebecca Ferguson (Jenny Lind): 

Surprising box-office hit (nearly $500 million worldwide!) is a zippy crowd-pleaser. Just don't expect historical accuracy. It's a light, frothy musical about how difference needs to be accepted and celebrated... um, by exhibiting those differences in circuses and carnivals and P.T. Barnum's weird-ass New York museum. 

The movie is sort of set in the 1840's and 1850's, though this never seems to be stated and there are several elephant herds of anachronisms and mistakes to muddy the temporal waters. Let's just say that the real-world events the movie was "based on" occurred between 1840 and 1860 and that the movie itself in set in "the before-time" or perhaps "Oldey Timey Days." They're Oldey Timey because no one has a cellphone.

To understand the lack of historical accuracy, simply note that the depiction of P.T. Barnum in a recent episode of DC's Legends of Tomorrow was more accurate. And that's a goddam show about time-travelling superheroes.

Hugh Jackman, Zac Efron, a distracted-looking Michelle Williams and the rest of the cast sing and dance up a storm in what is essentially the world's longest United Colours of Benetton ad. To fully enjoy the movie, avoid finding out what travelling act first made P.T. Barnum famous. It's a racist show-stopper to movie enjoyment! Lightly recommended so long as no one mistakes it for history.

Catching Up

Lemons Never Lie by Richard Stark (pen-name of Donald E. Westlake) (1971): Alan Grofield, occasional co-thief with Westlake/Stark's anti-hero Parker, gets one of his own adventures here, an often grim series of events clumsily but murderously orchestrated by a sociopathic heist planner with no idea how to successfully set up a big heist. Grofield, who needs money for his summer theatre company (!), turns down the seemingly incompetent Myers' offer to join his gang for a brewery heist, thus setting off a country-hopping series of criminal events. Details of the planning and execution of a competent heist not involving Myers are especially fascinating. Recommended.

Neighbors: written by Andrew J. Cohen and Brendan O'Brien; directed by Nicholas Stoller; starring Seth Rogen (Mac Radner), Rose Byrne (Kelly Radner), Zac Efron (Teddy Sanders) and Dave Franco (Pete) (2014): Amusing, raunchy tale of a battle between a fraternity run by Zac Efron and young couple Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen, who've just had a baby and now face the horrors of having a frat move in next to them. Could be sharper, but it passes the time. Lightly recommended.

The Giver: adapted from the novel by Lois Lowry by Michael Mitnick and Robert B. Weide; directed by Philip Noyce; starring Brenton Thwaites (Jonas), Odeya Rush (Fiona), Cameron Monaghan (Asher), Jeff Bridges (The Giver), Meryl Streep (Chief Elder), Katie Holmes (Mother), and Alexander Skarsgard (Father) (2014): Film adaptation plays fairly freely with Lowry's award-winning novel, but nonetheless remains a fairly enjoyable tale of a future dystopia. Jeff Bridges is solid as usual as the literal keeper of memories for a post-apocalyptic society which carefully regulates emotions and emotional attachments. Recommended.

The Superman Chronicles Volume 8: written by Jerry Siegel; illustrated by Joe Shuster, Fred Ray, Leo Nowak, Jack Sikela, Ed Dobrotka, Paul Cassidy, and others (1941-42; this collection 2010): Superman battles an unfrozen caveman and an electrically super-charged Lex Luthor in this volume of his early adventures. Jerry Siegel's interest in science-fiction tropes also manifests in a battle between the Man of Steel and an army of evil mermen, a ray that can age or de-age people, and the electricity-wielding threat of the Lightning Master. Stories written just before the United States entered World War Two feature the Man of Tomorrow battling saboteurs from Napkan (a thinly veiled Japan) and defeating the forces of aggressive European country Oxnalia (an even more thinly veiled Nazi Germany, complete with an Adolf Hitler lookalike as leader). Recommended.

Me and Orson Welles

Me and Orson Welles, written by Holly Gent Palmo and Vincent Palmo Jr., based on the novel by Robert Kaplow, starring Zac Efron, Clare Danes, Christian McKay and Zoe Kazan (2008): Having graduated from high school musicals, Zac Efron does solid work here as a high school student who manages to get himself cast in the career-making staging of Julius Caesar by Orson Welles and the Mercury Players in 1937 New York.

Christian McKay makes a convincing Welles, ego and talent and all, and Danes provides a light romantic touch as the troupe's assistant manager. Efron's character is complete fiction, but much of the events here are real, or at least reality-based: Welles's drastically shortened Caesar, performed in modern, Italian-fascist costumes, did indeed help take the young impresario's reputation to the next level.

And Welles was young -- in his early 20's -- and talented and something of a dick. Nonetheless, he inspired great loyalty among many of his actors, and we see that at work here, along with his genius, his manipulativeness, and his glory-hogging ways. Really, we only miss seeing Welles's famous appetite for food and drink, which would ultimately make him the gigantic, tragic figure of 1970's Gallo wine commercials and talk-show-host jokes about his mighty girth, but never about his mightier talent..

The rest of the cast does yeoman's work embodying the mostly real members of Welles's troupe on the cusp on stardom, of War of the Worlds, of Citizen Kane, and so on. One can see how Welles came to make Citizen Kane (for which he took too much creative credit), but also how he alienated the studios, leading to the tragically re-edited Magnificent Ambersons (still a great work in bowdlerized form) and decades of scrambling to make movies without much funding while taking well-paying roles in other people's movies (none more towering than Welles's Harry Lime in Carroll Reed's The Third Man, opposite his old Mercury pal Joseph Cotten). Highly recommended.