A Complete Unknown: Not come Oscar time!

A Complete Unknown (2024) • View trailer

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

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang 

Director James Mangold’s mesmerizing depiction of Bob Dylan’s early years is laden with electrifying moments.

 

Early on, Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) is the self-assured, veteran stage performer,
and Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) is just a nervous kid ... but that dynamic changes
quickly, and quite dramatically.

The first comes quickly, when a scruffy 19-year-old leaves Minnesota for New York’s Greenwich Village, with little more than a guitar and the clothes he wore, in order to visit Woody Guthrie, with whom he had become obsessed after reading the legendary folk singer’s autobiography.

It’s January 1961: a quietly intimate moment in the hospital room where Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) has long been under care for Huntington’s disease (for which there was no treatment, at the time). His frequent visitor is Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), who has learned how to understand his longtime friend’s mostly unintelligible attempts at speech. Young Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) appears in the doorway; Seeger invites him inside.

 

Guthrie spots the guitar slung against Dylan’s back, and gestures for a song.

 

The young man obliges.

 

Like ... wow.

 

Movie magic at its finest.

 

A similarly powerful scene comes much later; it involves a cigarette passed between two people standing on opposite sides of a chain-link fence: unexpectedly sweet, intimate ... and sad.

 

Mangold and co-scripter Jay Cocks based their film on Elijah Wood’s 2015 non-fiction book, Dylan Goes Electric: Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night that Split the Sixties. The result is rigorously authentic to actual events — warts and all — allowing for occasional fabrications for dramatic purposes. The time frame is brief, from early 1961 to the galvanic, game-changing evening of July 25, 1965, during Dylan’s closing set at that year’s Newport Folk Festival.

 

To say that Chalamet fully inhabits this performance is the worst of understatements. It isn’t merely an uncanny replication of Dylan’s look, posture, mannerisms and the cadence of his mumbled, almost whispered speaking voice. Chalamet also sings and performs more than 40 songs during the course of this rhapsodic film, often sounding more like Dylan than the man himself.

 

The dramatic arc here will be familiar to those who’ve followed the careers of artists who burst explosively onto the scene, and then become pigeon-holed. Some are content to stay in such boxes, cheerfully riding the money machine; others — the genuinely talented — chafe at public expectations.

 

The resulting weight can be crippling. What, if anything, does an artist owe his public?

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny: A (mostly) fond farewell

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for intense action violence and fleeting profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.30.23

This slam-bang adventure opens with a prologue that finds Harrison Ford’s surprisingly youthful Indy battling Nazis as they loot Berlin, prior to the city’s fall in the spring of 1945.

 

We briefly wonder: Has director James Mangold resurrected unused footage left over from a previous film?

 

Trying to keep an eye on his, larcenous, long-estranged goddaughter, Helena (Phoebe
Waller-Bridge) proves increasingly difficult for Indy (Harrison Ford), particularly with
a bevy of bad guys hot on their heels.

But no, this is CGI “youthifying” to a truly astonishing degree. (The illusion cracks a few times, fleetingly, but only if you watch very closely.)

This fracas establishes what will become the story’s ongoing clashes between Indy and the nefarious Dr. Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), over possession of the Antikythera, an artifact also known as the Archimedes Dial. For reasons unknown when the story begins, the famed Greek mathematician broke the mechanism into two halves, one of which is stashed on a train bearing the Nazis’ stolen plunder.

 

Cue an action-packed melee within and atop the aforementioned moving train, between Indy — accompanied by his overwhelmed Oxford colleague, Basil Shaw (Toby Jones) — and scores of Nazis led by the hissably unpleasant Col. Weber (Thomas Kretschmann). Voller, on the sidelines, has his own agenda.

 

(It’s a shame that what ultimately becomes a mano a mano skirmish between Indy and Weber, atop the train, features many of the same stunts, moves and details employed by Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, Part One, due in two weeks. Did these two production teams spy on each other?)

 

Cut to Aug. 3, 1969, the day the Apollo 11 astronauts are feted with a New York City ticker tape parade; and also the final day of teaching at Hunter College for an older, wearier and somewhat disillusioned Professor Jones. Not that any of his students will notice, since they have absolutely no interest in archaeology.

 

But one surprise visitor does: Basil’s daughter — and Indy’s goddaughter — Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), whom he hasn’t seen for years. She’s full of praise and questions, the latter quickly turning to the long-unseen partial Archimedes Dial. Believing her interest to be sincere, Indy reveals that it is indeed in his possession.

 

Elsewhere, in a posh hotel room, Voller and his neo-Nazi associate, Klaber (Boyd Holbrook) — along with their hulking man-mountain, Hauke (Olivier Richter), and a few other lackeys — have a chilling encounter with the Black porter (Alton Fitzgerald White) who delivers breakfast. Voller is contemptuous; White’s expression, body language and reply are sublime.

 

Alas, Voller’s men crash Indy and Helena’s reunion, demanding the Archimedes dial. Worse yet, during the ensuing fracas, Helena reveals her true stripes: She’s a career con artist, liar and thief. She snatches the dial, manages to elude everybody, and — to Indy’s disappointment and horror — swiftly departs the country in order to sell the artifact to the highest black market bidder in Tangier.

Beckett: Solid acting, inept script

Beckett (2021) • View trailer

2.5 stars (out of five). Rated TV-MA, for violence and dramatic intensity

Available via: Netflix

By Derrick Bang

Although the bulk of director/co-scripter Ferdinando Cito Filomarino’s “innocent on the run” thriller generates considerable suspense — and John David Washington throws everything into his lead role — the story eventually collapses under the weight of its overly complicated narrative.

 

Beckett (John David Washington) and April (Alicia Vikander), enjoying their vacation in
Greece, playfully concoct fictional back-stories for the other tourists they spot.
Alas, things won't remain casual and carefree much longer.

Even worse, this is yet another frustrating film that stops abruptly, rather than concluding appropriately. Yes, one key issue is resolved, but Filomarino and co-scripter Kevin A. Rice leave several other hanging chads twisting in the wind, giving us no means of separating good from evil, or determining Who Was Behind It All.

On top of which, a running thread of soul-shattering grief and personal responsibility is disagreeably mean-spirited.

 

(On a trivial note, Beckett is a terrible title. Something along the lines of Nightmare in Greece would be far more appropriate.)

 

American tourists Beckett (Washington) and girlfriend April (Alicia Vikander) are vacationing in Greece: a gorgeous, architecturally stunning setting granted lavish exposure by cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom. Beckett and April are very much in love; their cute, flirty banter fuels a lengthy prologue that overstays its welcome.

 

Depending on one’s tolerance for such things — in fairness, it’s not as if Washington and Vikander are hard to watch — you’ll either get increasingly nervous, waiting for some awful unexpected shoe to drop … or you’ll become annoyed by the way Filomarino seems to be vamping for time.

 

(I favor the latter.)

 

Eventually, though — finally — that shoe does drop.

 

In the aftermath, Beckett walks along the imposing Vikos Gorge, near a small town in Northern Greece, trying to piece together what actually happened. His probing curiosity is interrupted by a hard-edged blonde (Lena Kitsopoulou) who, without warning, pulls out a gun and starts shooting. One bullet punches through his left arm; in abject terror and confusion, Beckett takes panicked flight through the mountainous Tsepevolo countryside.

The Predator: A bloody good time

The Predator (2018) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated R, for strong bloody violence, gore, relentless profanity and vulgar sexual references
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.14.18

Revived sci-fi action franchises have done pretty well lately.

Chris Pratt and a fresh team breathed welcome new life into the Jurassic Park series, and now director/co-scripter Shane Black has done the same with an updated Predator. He and co-writer Fred Dekker acknowledge the 1987 original, while cleverly welding their story to a can’t-miss formula that hearkens back to 1967’s The Dirty Dozen.

When a captured Predator regains consciousness and realizes that it's about to become a
laboratory experiment, it reacts with understandable fury. (Unfortunately, our heroes
won't get their act together for several more scenes.)

The result is 107 minutes of skillfully paced suspense, divided into distinct “chapters” that involve audience-pleasing characters, all played well by an ensemble cast that blends familiar faces with several newcomers. The dialogue is sharp, the action frequently laden with droll banter: no surprise, coming from the guy (Black) who made his mark with 1987’s Lethal Weapon and, more recently, ensured that Iron Man 3 was far better than its sophomore-slump predecessor.

Too bad Black undercuts all this good stuff by making his new Predator so unrelentingly gory. 

We’re talking splatter-porn levels of abattoir grue more appropriate to trashy zombie flicks. Black signals such sensitivities right out of the gate, when an early human victim — suspended upside-down from a tall tree limb, as befits Predator custom — is sliced in half, after which the camera lingers needlessly on his entrails, as they slowly drip and slide to the ground below.

Seriously?

That’s merely the beginning. Black and Dekker gleefully succumb to all manner of slicing, dicing, severed limbs, eviscerations, disembowelments, decapitations and more, often depicted via grody-to-the-max close-ups. I fully appreciate that a Predator entry must be violent, but there’s such a thing as too much … particularly when such excess damages an otherwise shrewdly assembled thrill ride.

That aside, there’s no denying that Black hits the sweet spot that blends macabre humor, fast-paced thrills and edge-of-the-seat suspense.

The film opens with a space battle between two small fighters; the targeted ship escapes and crash-lands on Earth, right where retired Special Forces army ranger-turned-mercenary Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook) is leading a clandestine op against some Mexican drug cartel baddies. He alone survives the subsequent assault by the ferocious whatzit that emerges from the craft; better yet, McKenna escapes with the alien’s helmet and weapon-laden armband.

Suspecting a potentially hostile de-briefing back in the States, McKenna ships the alien tech home, where it unintentionally winds up in the hands of his adolescent son, Rory (Jacob Tremblay, well remembered from Room). He’s a spectrum child, on the border of autistic, and also — thanks to Tremblay’s gifted performance — one of the film’s strongest assets.

Due to Rory’s insatiable curiosity and savant-like talent for pattern recognition and puzzle-solving, he begins to figure out how this strange stuff functions.

Logan: Beneath contempt

Logan (2017) • View trailer 
No stars (turkey). Rated R, and generously, for relentless profanity and strong, brutal violence
By Derrick Bang

Discussing the big-screen adaptation of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, back in late 2014, gave me the excuse to indict Suzanne Collins’ reprehensible source novel as a complete betrayal of her characters, and of her readers: a needlessly nasty finale that cruelly (and pointlessly) killed major supporting characters while turning resourceful Katniss Everdeen into a sniveling victim.

When their attempt to enjoy one restful night is interrupted by a squadron of gun-toting
killers, Logan (Hugh Jackman) and Laura (Dafne Keen) do their best to survive.

It was the most senseless, deliberately mean-spirited betrayal of a heroic franchise — by its original author, no less — that I’d ever encountered.

Until now. This film is even worse.

Logan doesn’t merely trash the long-beloved character of Wolverine, played here (for the ninth time!) by Hugh Jackman; director James Mangold and his gaggle of co-writers defecate all over the entire X-Men franchise and, by extension, the broader Marvel superhero universe. All this, with the apparent blessing of the parent company, given the familiar pre-credits Marvel Entertainment logo.

Shame on everybody involved.

Whereas 2014’s exciting X-Men: Days of Future Past cleverly employed backwards time travel as a means of re-booting the franchise — with smiles all around during the unexpectedly happy ending — Logan takes the opposite approach, moving the action forward to 2029. The tidings are grim: All of Logan’s X-Men comrades are dead, via some horrific event that apparently involved both Charles Xavier/Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and an evil scientific genius named Dr. Zander Rice (Richard E. Grant).

I say “apparently,” because while the film repeatedly references this ghastly occurrence, we never get details.

A despondent Logan, his once-invulnerable body being poisoned by the adamantium enhancements to his skeletal frame, is drinking his days away while earning chump change as a limo driver. His lair, across the border in Mexico, also serves as a hideout for Xavier, stricken with Alzheimer’s, senile dementia or some other brain disorder. Their sole companion is the albino mutant Caliban (Stephen Merchant), who fears that he’s doing little but watching his two friends die. Slowly.

Unlike the rival DC universe, which occasionally indulges in such canonical mischief by branding the results “imaginary stories” or “elseworlds tales,” Mangold makes no such reassurances here. This is the way things are ... and they’re about to get worse.

A Walk Among the Tombstones: Well-executed noir

A Walk Among the Tombstones (2014) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated R, for strong violence, disturbing images, profanity and fleeting nudity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.19.14

Veteran novelist Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder hasn’t been seen on the big screen since all the way back in 1986, when Jeff Bridges played the character in director Hal Ashby’s lamentably sloppy adaptation of the series’ fifth book, 8 Million Ways to Die.

Having persuaded TJ (Brian "Astro" Bradley, right) to accept the offer of a hot meal,
Scudder (Liam Neeson) is increasingly amused by the kid's determination to somehow
help out with the developing investigation.

Director/scripter Scott Frank has done a far better job, with A Walk Among the Tombstones (tenth novel out of 17, for those keeping track). Frank economically blends Scutter’s essential “origin story” with this book’s core plotline, and the result is a brooding, thoughtful detective thriller firmly set in the modern noir genre.

Frank certainly knows the territory. I praised his scripting chops just last week, noting his involvement with some of the genre’s best modern authors: James Lee Burke (Heaven’s Prisoners), Elmore Leonard (Out of Sight, Get Shorty and even TV’s woefully under-appreciated Karen Sisco) and now Block.

Frank’s scripting chops are measured, intelligent and — most important — faithful to the tone and atmosphere of whichever author he sources. The result always has been a compelling, tightly wound thriller, and his handling of A Walk Among the Tombstones is no exception.

Bridges looked much too young and exuberant as Scudder, back in the day; this film’s Liam Neeson is a far superior choice. He radiates just the right amount of world-weary melancholy, Scudder being a classic flawed and tragic figure: a man never able to forgive himself for past sins, yet forever struggling to do just that.

He’s also a rather unusual knight errant: an alcoholic ex-cop gone private, but not quite. Scudder can’t be bothered with a license, and he doesn’t advertise his services; as he explains, Neeson’s wry smile wrapped around the words, he “does favors for friends.”

His concept of “friendship” is both broader and looser than most, and this particular case begins with a request from Peter Kristo (Boyd Holbrook), a semi-regular in Scudder’s Alcoholics Anonymous group. The potential “client” actually is Peter’s brother Kenny (Dan Stevens), whose wife was just kidnapped and brutally murdered ... after the ransom was paid.