The Friend: The best one imaginable

The Friend (2024) • View trailer

Five stars (out of five). Rated R, for profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 4.6.25

How do you explain death to a dog?

 

Writer/directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel have done a rare thing, in adapting Sigrid Nunez’s award-winning 2018 novel. They’ve retained the book’s heart, while making the story more accessible to a general audience.

 

Iris (Naomi Watts) reluctantly realizes that her massive canine companion likely won't
be able to handle a revolving door.

It’s immediately obvious that this film celebrates authors and the written word; the central character’s stream-of-consciousness narration is laden with epigrams, quotes from famous novels (and movies), philosophical musings and sardonic bon mots. All help paint an increasingly layered portrait of a soul in crisis.

Iris (Naomi Watts), a successful author, lives in a 500-square-foot, rent-controlled, upper-floor Manhattan apartment that she “inherited” when her father died. She teaches creative writing at a nearby college, silently enduring her students’ efforts to critique each others’ efforts; she seems not to pay attention, but misses nothing.

 

Her best friend and longtime mentor, Walter (Bill Murray), is an elder statesman in New York’s literary scene. We meet him during a lively dinner party, where he regales everybody with the saga of how — while jogging one morning — he glanced up a park hill and was transfixed by a “magnificent beast.”

 

Then, abruptly, he’s gone.

 

The subsequent funeral is well-attended by numerous friends, along with ex-wife No. 1 (Carla Gugino, as Elaine), ex-wife No. 2 (Constance Wu, as Tuesday) and his current widow (Noma Dumezweni, as Barbara). Elaine and Iris were college mates, back in the day, and Walter was their professor: an unapologetic, old-school womanizer.

 

His only child is a twentysomething daughter, Val (Sarah Pidgeon), fathered with yet another woman.

 

Despite the serial philandering, and a tendency toward condescension, Iris adored him. His absence worsens the writer’s block that has long delayed her next project: a collaborative effort with Val, to comb through Walter’s voluminous correspondence, in order to produce a book of essays. That project was suggested by Walter, as a means to take Iris’ mind off her long-unfinished next novel.

 

Iris goes through the motions, during the next few days, grief etched on her face. Then she’s summoned by Barbara, who has a “delicate matter” to deal with: getting rid of Walter’s dog, Apollo.

 

“You were his contingency plan,” she tells the genuinely surprised Iris, who knew nothing of this.

 

But the request is impossible. Iris has no pets, and if she did, it would be a cat. More crucially, her apartment building doesn’t allow dogs.

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire — Give 'em a call!

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for supernatural action/violence, mild profanity and suggestive references

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.22.24

Sometimes dreams do come true.

 

When 2021’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife proved successful, with its (mostly) new cast of younger characters, those of us who’ve adored this franchise since 1984 thought, Boy, wouldn’t it be nice if the new gang and the entire old gang got together in the next entry?

 

The inquisitive Ghostbusters — from left, Phoebe (Mckenna Grace), Podcast (Logan Kim)
and Ray (Dan Aykroyd) — are horrified by what Hubert Wartzki (Patton Oswalt) reveals
about the mysterious brass orb in their possession.

Well, it appears that the notoriously fickle Bill Murray decided that he couldn’t miss out on the fun this time. He, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson and Annie Potts have key roles in this Earth-shattering adventure.

But the planetary threat comes later. As was the case with Afterlife, director Gil Kenan and co-scripter Jason Reitman take their time with smaller matters that allow solid character development. The focus this time is on Phoebe Spengler (Mckenna Grace), who — following her family’s destructive Eccto-1 chase through New York City streets, in pursuit of a shimmering Sewer Dragon ghost — gets benched by the infuriated Mayor Walter Peck (William Atherton), because, well, at 15 she’s a minor. 

 

It gets worse. The contemptuous Peck — Atherton, at his snarling best — warns Callie Spengler (Carrie Coon), Trevor Spengler (Finn Wolfhard) and Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd) that he’s waiting for just one more excuse to shut down the Ghostbusters. 

 

He also wants to raze their beloved firehouse headquarters.

 

(You’d think the former team’s past accomplishments would have counted for something. But People In Authority never learn.)

 

Elsewhere, Podcast (Logan Kim) continues to help Ray Stantz (Aykroyd) become a YouTube influencer, with his weekly online explorations of everyday household objects that either are haunted ... or merely old. Ray is surprised, one day, when an opportunistic slacker, Nadeem Razmaadi (Kumail Nanjiani), turns up hoping to trade a box of his grandmother’s old possessions for fast cash. The contents include a mysterious, softball-size brass orb covered with ancient glyphs.

 

Still elsewhere, at the Paranormal Research Center run by Winston Zeddemore (Hudson), he and Lucky (Celeste O’Connor) — assisted by brainy newcomer Lars Pinfield (James Acaster) — have perfected next-gen equipment to extract and contain ectoplasmic essence.

 

As for Peter Venkman (Murray) ... well, rumor has it that if you want to get in touch with him, you leave a message on an answering machine somewhere (which, believe it or not, is the only way people can try to get Murray to accept a role, in the real world).

Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania — Diminishing returns

Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023) • View trailer

2.5 stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for mild profanity and relentless action violence

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 2.17.23 

Yeesh. What a mess.

 

This newest Marvel Cinematic Universe entry is a classic “kitchen sink” movie: Scripter Jeff Loveness has thrown everything on the wall, in the feverish, desperate hope that something will stick.

 

Kang (Jonathan Majors, right) makes it clear that if Scott (Paul Rudd) refuses to cooperate,
something very bad will happen to his daughter ... which he then will be forced to
re-live for eternity.

Paul Rudd’s Ant Man always has been a bad joke in his own series: a smug, defensive, self-deprecating bumbler cast adrift in adventures that suffer from a clumsy blend of smash-’em-up special effects and forced humor. They’re silly children’s films, completely at odds with the more traditionally heroic stance he displayed as a supporting character in Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: End Game.

(I still wince at the memory of the ill-advised tabletop toy train battle that climaxed 2015’s Ant Man. Ouch.)

 

Director Peyton Reed, determined to maintain the style of Ant Man’s two previous starring outings, has made this third adventure another silly children’s film.

 

Events begin with this family unit happily reunited, in the wake of Avengers End Game: Scott Lang (Rudd), his sweetie-pie Hope (Evangeline Lilly), their now-teenage daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton), Hope’s mother Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer) and father Hank (Michael Douglas).

 

Cassie has matured into an 18-year-old social activist: a timely nod to current events in this San Francisco setting. She also possesses her grandfather’s passion for science and technology, and — unbeknownst to Scott, Hope and particularly Janet — has been working with Hank to establish a connection to the molecular level of the microscopic Quantum Realm.

 

When Janet does find out, she’s horrified … because, well, y’see, she never explained what happened during the 30 years she was stuck in the Quantum Realm, or why it’s so dangerous.

 

(Yes, this is one of those contrived calamities that wouldn’t exist if characters actually talked to each other.)

 

Ah, but too late! Just as Janet frantically demands that Hank and Cassie cease their efforts, all five — along with the contents of Hank’s lab — are sucked into the weird landscapes and even weirder creatures of the Quantum Realm.

 

Which, sad to say, looks an awful lot like last November’s Strange World. Given that both films emerged under the Disney banner, one suspects a serious case of Looking Over Each Other’s Shoulders.

 

The Greatest Beer Run Ever: A heady brew

The Greatest Beer Run Ever (2022) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated R, for profanity and war violence

Available via: Apple TV+

By Derrick Bang

Fiction doesn’t hold a candle to this particular slice of dog-nuts truth.

 

In November 1967, on little more than a dare, 26-year-old John “Chickie” Donohue impulsively decided to bring some Pabst Blue Ribbon and Schlitz beers to the neighborhood buddies who were serving in Vietnam.

 

When the hell of war suddenly breaks out, Arthur (Russell Crowe, left) and Chickie
(Zac Efron) are torn between witnessing and recording events, and running for safety.

His subsequent four-month journey throughout that war-torn country eventually became a 2015 documentary short sponsored by (who else?) Pabst, and then a 2017 book co-written with New York Daily News reporter Joanna Molloy.

And now a thoroughly engaging film by director Peter Farrelly.

 

Given the larkish marketing art, and recalling the lowest-common-denominator oeuvre of the Farrelly brothers as a team — There’s Something About Mary, Dumb and Dumber, The Heartbreak Kid — one is tempted to dismiss this project as a similarly dopey comedy. That would be a mistake; we must remember that Peter Farrelly, on his own, brought us the Academy Award-winning Green Book.

 

While this new film doesn’t approach that level of quality, it’s nonetheless entertaining, thoughtful and sneaky: the latter due to an initially light-hearted tone that suddenly turns deadly serious in the third act.

 

Zac Efron, with the High School Musical trilogy now a thoroughly distant memory, is spot-on as Chickie: introduced at loose ends, between hitches as a Merchant Marine. He’s living with his parents and younger sister Christine (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis) in their upper Manhattan Inwood neighborhood, and doing little beyond hanging out with friends each evening at Doc Fiddler’s Saloon, where George “The Colonel” Lynch (Bill Murray, grizzled and irascible) holds court.

 

The Colonel and his patrons, dyed-in-the-wool supporters, are annoyed by protesters whose “antics” are broadcast all over the world; Chickie confronts it more directly, because Christine has joined the local anti-war brigade.

 

These early scenes — particularly Chickie’s argument with his sister — aren’t directed very well; there’s a strong sense that Efron and Serkis are “acting” and merely spouting lines, rather than sincerely inhabiting their characters.

 

Fortunately, matters subsequently improve, particularly when The Colonel — in a mild huff — growls, “I’d like to go over to Vietnam, track down all the boys in the neighborhood, and just give ’em a beer.”

 

“I could do that,” Chickie replies, a thoughtful look on his face.

 

That’s how it starts.

 

The French Dispatch: Impenetrable language barrier

The French Dispatch (2021) • View trailer

Two stars (out of five). Rated R, for graphic nudity, profanity and sexual candor

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.29.21

Although one can only marvel, gape-jawed, at the feverish, coordinated complexity of set and backdrop movement, carefully composed and choreographed actor placement, traveling camerawork and integrated miniatures — relentlessly, as this aggressively bizarre film proceeds — all this visual razzmatazz rapidly wears out its welcome.

 

Magazine editor Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray, left) listens while star journalist
Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright, right) defends his turn of phrase; both are ignored
by another staffer who serves more as background decoration, given that he never
has written a word.

A classic case of the tail wagging the dog.

There’s never been any doubt that Wes Anderson, as a filmmaker, is obsessed with eccentricity and kitsch; his cinematic visions generally occupy a universe several steps beyond traditionally heightened reality. When he succeeds, the result can be a bravura work of genius, as with The Grand Budapest Hotel.

 

When he slides off the rails, as with this one, we’re left with nothing but contrived and relentlessly mannered weirdness for its own sake. Which doesn’t work.

 

Worse yet, despite all the marvelous eye candy, this film is boring. Crushingly boring.

 

It looks like half of Hollywood wanders through this self-indulgent vanity project, sometimes for no more than a minute or so. You could spend the entire film just trying to identify everybody (and, at times, that’s more interesting than trying to follow the outré storytelling).

 

In fairness, the premise and narrative gimmick are delectable. In a setting that seems 1950s-ish, The French Dispatch is a widely circulated American magazine based in the French city of Ennui-sur-Blasé, lovingly overseen by quietly cranky, Kansas-born editor Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray).

 

If Anderson’s vision begins to feel like a love letter to the venerable New Yorker magazine, during its 1950s and ’60s heyday, well … that’s undoubtedly intentional.

 

As the film begins, Howitzer has just died. The staff journalists — hand-picked over the years, sometimes less for their writing chops, and more for the way they lend atmosphere to the voluminous offices — assemble to draft his obituary, and prepare the magazine’s final issue. We then watch the three primary feature stories crafted, over time, by writers who embedded themselves, and became part of their assignments.

 

The generous application of flashbacks allows Murray plenty of screen time, as he fine-tunes each piece. His traditional advice, to each scribe: “Try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.” (You’ve gotta love that line.)

 

We open with a brief travelogue, as Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson), the “Cycling Reporter,” takes us on a guided tour of Ennui-sur-Blasé: along the way relating the city’s history, while proudly highlighting many of the seedier neighborhoods, and their often wacky inhabitants.

 

This entertaining sequence showcases the astonishing work by production designer Adam Stockhausen, supervising art director Stéphane Cressend and cinematographer Robert D. Yeoman, who (I hope) was paid by the mile, because he must’ve been run off his feet.

On the Rocks: Piquant, with a twist

On the Rocks (2020) • View trailer

3.5 stars. Rated R, for profanity and sexual candor

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.20.20

Folks love to speculate about what Bill Murray’s character whispered to Scarlett Johansson’s neglected young wife, at the end of writer/director Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation.

 

What's the best, subtlest way to follow a philandering husband? In a noisy, bright red
Alfa Romeo, of course!

Or, digging even deeper, whether the two of them might have been able to establish some sort of long-term relationship, perhaps on a father/daughter level.

 

Coppola gives us an answer, of sorts, in On the Rocks, an Apple TV+ exclusive.

 

This time, Murray’s Felix is father to Rashida Jones’ Laura, although we don’t meet him right away. Coppola spends a lengthy prologue depicting Laura’s routine: devoted wife to husband Dean (Marlon Wayans); full-time mother to young daughters Maya and Theo; a practical, down-to-earth approach to things.

 

It’s easy to mock certain aspects of the New York City lifestyle, and Coppola occasionally succumbs: notably when Laura bundles Theo into a stroller each morning, and then walks Maya to a tony private school, where they join a queue of similarly posh parents waiting for the teacher to show up. (Laura wears Vans sneakers while carrying a Chanel bag.)

 

In a running gag that gets funnier with each fresh exposure, Jenny Slate is a hoot as Vanessa, a self-absorbed chatterbox waiting in the same line; she discusses her personal life in hilariously tedious detail, oblivious to the fact that Laura isn’t paying attention.

 

But this is mere background gloss. Coppola’s focus is more relationship-oriented, as was the case with Lost in Translation. Dean has been working longer hours of late, trying to get a start-up business off the ground; he’s therefore not around as much, to handle his share of home chores. Laura is tired — indeed, Jones often looks wan and exhausted — and feels taken for granted. Disconnected.

 

She’s an author — who made the mistake of selling a book she hasn’t even started — and is crippled by a severe case of writer’s block. No surprise, since she spends so much time picking up actual blocks, toys and clothes that the girls abandon throughout their apartment.

 

Coppola is astutely gifted at recognizing the little gestures, comments and expressions that characterize a given thought, moment or desire; Jones deftly conveys this wealth of nuance.

Isle of Dogs: A tail-wagging triumph

Isle of Dogs (2018) • View trailer 
Five stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity and some violent images
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.23.18

This one is a treasure.

Wes Anderson’s films are eccentric — to say the least — but, over time, his unique brand of quirk has become ever more beguiling. Recall that 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel won four of its nine Academy Award nominations, and that Anderson has earned six nominations himself, dating back to a scripting nod for 2002’s The Royal Tennenbaums.

Twelve-year-old Atari, in an act of defiance against his guardian, the mayor of Megasaki
City, isn't about to let his beloved pet remain quarantined with all the other dogs on an
outlying "trash island."

One of the other six was earned when he helmed 2010’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, an engagingly warped adaptation of Roald Dahl’s droll little tale, presented via an insane amount of painstakingly detailed stop-motion puppet animation.

Anderson has returned to that form with Isle of Dogs, and it’s a work of even more incandescent brilliance: a thoroughly enchanting underdog fable for our time, and a similarly stunning achievement in puppet animation, and the jaw-droppingly detailed micro-sets they inhabit.

The only applicable descriptor — a term not to be used lightly — is awesome.

But the film isn’t merely fun to watch; it’s also powered by a genius storyline co-written by Anderson, Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman and Kunichi Nomura (the latter a Japanese writer, DJ, radio personality and occasional actor who made brief appearances in Lost in Translation and, yes, The Grand Budapest Hotel).

As often is the case with animated films, it’s difficult to praise the “acting” per se, since the characters aren’t flesh and blood. And yet there’s no doubt that Anderson — alongside animation director Mark Waring, and puppet master Andy Gent — has coaxed impressively sensitive performances from his many stars. Line readings perfectly match facial expressions and body language; double-takes and comic timing are delivered with the impeccable mastery of a stand-up veteran.

In short, we couldn’t be more engaged if these were “real” performers ... which would be impossible, of course, since dogs don’t talk.

But you may come away from this film thinking they do.

The Jungle Book: Family-friendly adventure

The Jungle Book (2016) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG, for dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 4.15.16

The CGI tiger in 2012’s big-screen adaptation of Life of Pi was quite impressive.

This one is better.

Although Mowgli (Neel Sethi) often is puzzled by the rule-laden lectures he constantly
receives from Bagheera, the boy is about to discover precisely why some of these
lessons are so important.

Indeed, the myriad faux animals in Disney’s fresh take on Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book are rendered with jaw-dropping authenticity. Many viewers likely will spend much of the first act trying to decide which (if any) of the critters are real — either in close-up or distant group shots — and which are genius computer animation.

I was convinced that a darling little tree frog was real, as it hopped out of some water, until it brushed itself in an adorable — but decidedly unfroglike — manner. At which point, I simply abandoned the exercise and settled comfortably into an exhilarating experience that Kipling himself never could have imagined.

Justin Marks’ screenplay owes more to Disney’s animated 1967 adaptation than Kipling’s nine short stories about the “man cub” Mowgli, and his adventures with the various creatures — benign and dangerous — that make their home in the Indian jungle. Fans of the earlier animated film will be pleased to see Marks hit all the narrative and character high points, most notably those concerning the fatherly panther Bagheera, the free-spirited bear Baloo, and the utterly malevolent tiger Shere Khan.

Mowgli is played to impressionable, young-kid perfection by 12-year-old newcomer Neel Sethi, introduced during a bravura chase through the jungle, which is choreographed for maximum breathtaking excitement by director Jon Favreau and editor Mark Livolsi. It’s an impressive prologue: a pell-mell blend of running, jumping and tumbling through jungle undergrowth, up and down trees, and across small canyons.

I can’t imagine how Sethi and Favreau did it, and — of course — that’s the magic of movies. (For starters, the kid must have the world’s toughest feet.)

Back-story eventually reveals that a toddler-age Mowgli was found by Bagheera (voiced by Ben Kingsley), who brought the child to Raksha (Lupita Nyong’o), one of many wolves belonging to a pack led by alpha male Akela (Giancarlo Esposito). Although subsequently raised in the way of the wolves — most particularly the chanted law, “The strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack” — Mowgli cannot help the blossoming human ingenuity that enables him to “do tricks” (Bagheera’s term) that simplify certain tasks.

Such “tricks,” alas, are met with suspicion by the jungle’s many other creatures.

Rock the Kasbah: The day the music died

Rock the Kasbah (2015) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated R, for profanity, violence, drug use and sexual candor
By Derrick Bang

Bill Murray has been Hollywood’s magic bullet for a little over than a decade now, ever since delivering such a memorable performance in 2003’s Lost in Translation.

See anything you like? Richie Lanz (Bill Murray) is unsurprisingly awed by his first glimpse
of Merci (Kate Hudson), little realizing that she'll soon become a business partner.

His presence automatically enhances the quality of a given film, no matter how small the role. As a star, he can elevate familiar and otherwise mediocre material (as with, say, St. Vincent); as a supporting or bit player, his scenes are standouts. (Olive Kitteridge and Zombieland come to mind.)

There’s something about Murray’s deadpan expression that speaks volumes, but defies ready description. World-weary but not defeated. Smugly condescending, but not to the point of cruelty. Skeptical but, nonetheless, open-minded.

His characters always seem on the verge of saying something along the lines of “Show me what you’ve got; I’m ready to be amazed” ... even as his glance implies serious doubt that the person in question has anything, let alone anything amazing.

In short, Murray is a guaranteed treat.

But not even he can save this film.

A closing-credits text blurb explains that Rock the Kasbah honors Setara Hussainzada, the “girl who danced” during her 2008 performance on Afghan Star, Afghanistan’s answer to our own American Idol. Merely singing on live TV in that country is highly dangerous for women; to do so brands them as blasphemers in the eyes of fundamentalists, who are inclined to view killing such “transgressors” as wholly justified.

But to compound the felony by dancing? Unthinkable.

Okay, Hussainzada’s courageous act definitely demands a story, and scripter Mitch Glazer has embraced that challenge. But rather poorly, as it turns out. Rock the Kasbah hasn’t the faintest idea what it wants to be — comedy, drama or rock-hued homage — and not even a director as talented as Barry Levinson can create a pearl from this tone-deaf grain of sand.

St. Vincent: Quite a character

St. Vincent (2014) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, for sexual candor, mature thematic content and occasional profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.24.14

Bill Murray gets more emotional complexity out of a dangling cigarette, than most actors could generate via three pages of dialogue.

Intending to teach an all-important work ethic to young Oliver (Jaeden Lieberher), Vincent
(Bill Murray) orders the boy to mow the yard ... despite the fact that actual blades of grass
are long gone, leaving nothing but dirt and dust behind.

He fires on all cylinders in this cheerfully caustic dramedy from writer/director Theodore Melfi, as polished a feature debut as one could hope for. (While he also co-wrote and directed Winding Roads back in 1999, that never made it past the film festival circuit ... so it doesn’t really count.)

Murray’s sterling presence aside, this film also boasts the best curmudgeon/trusting little boy dynamic since Billy Bob Thornton terrorized young Brett Kelly, in Bad Santa. But this film’s Jaeden Lieberher is a much stronger actor ... in his first film role, no less.

Cranky old coots are a cinematic staple going all the way back to W.C. Fields, who quite notoriously admitted to liking children “if they’re properly cooked.” More recent examples include Jack Nicholson, in As Good As You Get, and Clint Eastwood, in Gran Torino.

The hallmark of a truly sublime performance, however, comes with an actor’s ability to embrace and re-invent a timeworn cliché: to utterly own what once was a stereotype, and make it his own. Murray’s work here is just that sort of revelation.

His Vincent is a crusty, ill-kempt slob who occupies an equally dilapidated house in one of Brooklyn’s fading Sheepshead Bay side streets. An average afternoon involves several losses at the local racetrack, where quietly dangerous loan shark Zucko (Terrence Howard) warns about past-due debts, after which Vincent kills the rest of the day on a well-worn stool at a bar where everybody knows his name. And that he drinks too much.

Meals are an afterthought. The one treasure in Vincent’s life is his fluffy white cat, Felix, who definitely dines better than his master. Even after-hours sessions with his favorite stripper, a Russian “exotic dancer” named Daka (Naomi Watts), are more formality than pleasure; Vincent can’t even be bothered to stop smoking, or remove his clothes, while, ah, doing the nasty.

We’re somehow unsurprised to see that Daka is quite pregnant, not that this has slowed her strip club routines. Much. Yet. Watts has a great time with this feisty role, mangling the English language with straight-faced aplomb. Daka also is the only person who routinely stands up to Vincent, giving as good as she gets.

The Monuments Men: An unfinished sculpture

The Monuments Men (2014) • View trailer 
Three stars. Rating: PG-13, for relatively mild war violence, and fleeting profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 2.7.14

What a disappointment.

Despite the considerable charm of George Clooney and his fellow scene-stealers, this is a flat and uninvolving film.

Knowing that time is running out, Stokes (George Clooney, foreground) and Granger
(Matt Damon, right) scramble to protectively wrap artworks prior to moving them to
safety. They're assisted by, background from left, Epstein (Dimitri Leonidas), Garfield
(John Goodman) and Savitz (Bob Balaban).

The fault lies with the graceless script, which leaves the impression that we’re watching the Reader’s Digest condensed version of a much longer miniseries. This two-hour film dips only briefly into a dozen or so potentially fascinating incidents, any one of which could have been expanded into a taut, exciting narrative; as it is, we get only the “calm” bits, leaving the impression that all exciting scenes were confiscated and dumped elsewhere.

Clooney deserves the blame; aside from starring and producing, he also directed and co-wrote the script with longtime colleague Grant Heslov. They’ve done a poor job of adapting the 2010 nonfiction book by Robert M. Edsel and Bret Witter: The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History.

Edsel also co-produced the 2006 documentary, The Rape of Europa, which covered the same territory in a vastly more satisfying manner.

Part of the problem is Clooney’s apparent desire to transplant the droll Ocean’s Eleven vibe into this grim World War II setting, while also conveying the barbaric behavior of Nazis who cheerfully practiced human and cultural genocide. It’s a bit jarring to smile at some witty banter between Bill Murray and Bob Balaban at one moment, and then, in the next, be confronted by barrels containing gold fillings extracted from the teeth of thousands of holocaust victims.

Mostly, though, I lament the utter absence of suspense. This is a fascinating, fact-based story that should have kept us at the edge of our seats. Clooney’s film, however, is a jokey affair that meanders throughout Western Europe: more travelogue than drama.

The saga begins in 1943, when Harvard art historian Frank Stokes (Clooney) briefs President Roosevelt on the pressing need for the Allies to avoid destroying European civilization, in their efforts to save it. By this, Stokes means that more care must be taken to preserve the cultural heritage of these various countries: their art and museums; their churches, cathedrals and synagogues; their architectural marvels.

As Edsel mentions, in the press notes, the Allies very nearly destroyed, entirely by accident, da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” in August 1943.

Moonrise Kingdom: Casts a gentle glow

Moonrise Kingdom (2012) • View trailer
3.5 stars. Rating: PG-13, and needlessly, for fleeting profanity
By Derrick Bang

All kids — particularly those who read books — dream of having adventures in faraway lands, ideally with exotic companions. Adults rarely figure into such fantasies, except as vague background entities, and the imagined adventures generally exist in a heightened reality that might look familiar, but isn’t quite our workaday world.

Having ditched the adults in their lives, Suzy (Kara Hayward) and
Sam (Jared Gilman) ponder a map of tiny New Penzance island, to
work out the best route to a sheltered cove that will become their
runaway home from home. Sam, you'll notice, is properly equipped
for a long hike. Suzy ... not so much.

We grow up, we get “serious” — not always a good thing — and cast aside such childhood reveries.

Clearly, filmmaker Wes Anderson escaped that fate and remains firmly in touch with his inner child. Moonrise Kingdom offers ample proof: It’s a droll, stylized, kid-oriented fable about misfits, underdogs and blossoming young love. By turns adorable and unapologetically weird, this film nonetheless charms from beginning to end.

That’s not always the case with Anderson’s eclectic oeuvre. Every engaging hit (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums) has been followed by self-indulgent junk that verges on the unwatchable (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Darjeeling Limited). That’s an occupational hazard for a filmmaker so clearly obsessed with exaggerated characters who play out their anxieties in tightly enclosed little worlds that can tilt far left of center.

Greet a neighbor cheerfully on an average morning; if he regards you gravely and replies, a propos of nothing, that the howling wolves kept him awake last night — and the nearest wolf is hundreds of miles away — then you’re dealing with a Wes Anderson character.

Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward) and Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman), both 12 years old, live on New Penzance, a tiny island off the coast of New England. The year is 1965, as an on-camera narrator (Bob Balaban) meticulously informs us, and we’re a few days away from a cataclysmic storm that will wreak havoc along the entire coast.

Although precociously intelligent and a gifted camper and woodsman, Sam — an orphan — is dismissed as an outcast, constantly humiliated by the other kids in his foster home. Even as a Khaki Scout, in an element where he should shine, Sam is taunted by his young peers.

Scoutmaster Ward (Edward Norton) clearly has a soft spot for Sam, but that’s not enough to prevent the boy from feeling isolated and deeply lonely.