The Phantom of the Open: Cheekily spirited

The Phantom of the Open (2021) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for brief profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang

Not quite two months ago, The Duke treated us to the delightfully dramatized account of disabled pensioner Kempton Bunton, and 1961’s “mysterious” theft of a famed Goya painting from London’s National Gallery.

 

Maurice Flitcroft may have been even more eccentric.

 

With son Gene (Christian Lees) bringing up the rear as caddy, Maurice Flitcroft
(Mark Rylance) blithely trudges to the next tee, oblivious to the catastophic score
that he's racking up.

In 1976, with no golfing experience, Maurice — by claiming to be a professional — audaciously conned his way into the qualifying competition for that year’s British Open Championship. After all, the event was “open” … right?

His resulting score was — and remains — historic.

 

And, just as Bunton’s eventual court case prompted British law to clarify the distinction between “theft” and “borrowing,” Flitcroft’s escapade thoroughly annoyed the snooty aristocrats who ran the British Open; they quickly changed the rules, in an effort to prevent any further “incursions” by undeserving members of the lay public.

 

Not that that stopped Maurice, during subsequent years.

 

His unlikely saga has been made into a cheeky dramedy — in the irreverent style that British filmmakers do so well — by director Craig Roberts and screenwriter Simon Farnaby, the latter adapting sports journalist Scott Murray’s 2010 non-fiction book of the same title.

 

Their film is highlighted by yet another richly nuanced performance from Mark Rylance, whose impersonation of Flitcroft is flat-out astonishing. 

 

Rylance is, without question, one of today’s finest, most artfully accomplished actors. I’ve no doubt that watching him in everyday mundane tasks — such as purchasing groceries — would be just as captivating as what he does on screen.

 

Roberts and Farnaby begin their film with a prologue that sketches Maurice’s earlier days. He meets and marries Jean (Sally Hawkins), and adopts her son Michael; they subsequently augment the family with twin sons Gene and James. 

 

Years pass. Michael (Jake Davies) has grown up to become the mature, business-minded “sensible” son — read: buttoned-down twit with a stick up his fundament — while Gene and James (twins Christian and Jonah Lees), clearly more in tune with their father’s Walter Mitty nature, have become limber disco dancers.

The King's Man: A royal good time!

The King's Man (2021) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated R, for strong, bloody violence, profanity and sexual candor

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.24.21

Fans of this series are apt to be mighty surprised — happily, one hopes — by this third entry’s unexpected shift in tone and style.

 

En route to Russia in a private train, Orlando (Ralph Fiennes, far left) shares what he
knows about Grigori Rasputin, while, from left, Shola (Djimon Hounsou),
Conrad (Harris Dickinson) and Polly (Gemma Arterton) listen attentively.

Whereas 2014’s Kingsman: The Secret Service and 2017’s Kingsman: Golden Circle are deranged, profane and gleefully over-the-top comic book burlesques, this new entry is only mildly naughty. It’s more accurately a sly bit of alternate history, with director/co-scripter Matthew Vaughn — and co-writer Karl Gajdusek — setting their cheeky Kingsman origin story against the very real horrors of World War I.

The tone is more akin to a Golden Age classic such as 1939’s Gunga Din … albeit with dollops of 21st century hyper-violence.

 

Key events are rigorously accurate: from the triggering assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which set the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy) against the Triple Entente (France, Russia and Britain); to the ghastly horrors of trench warfare that claimed the lives of an estimated 9 million soldiers.

 

Other films have depicted the latter more authentically — director Sam Mendes’ 1917 immediately comes to mind — but Vaughn, Gajdusek and production designer Darren Gilford convincingly establish a similarly grim tableau. One sequence, achieved with some clever CGI, is particularly effective: a bit of time-lapse legerdemain that reveals the impact of two years’ of war, as a pastoral Western European landscape transforms into a barren wasteland laden with mutilated corpses.

 

But this comes a bit later. The conceit of Vaughn and Gajdusek’s script is that this nation-shattering abattoir was orchestrated clandestinely, behind the scenes, by a nefarious cabal whose many members include Russia’s mad monk, Grigori Rasputin (Rhys Ifans). Their leader, known only as The Shepherd — he remains unseen, as with the early 1960s machinations of James Bond’s Ernst Stavro Blofeld — is motivated by an enraged hatred of England, for its centuries-old repression of Scotland.

 

Meanwhile…

 

Following a brief 1902 prologue set during South Africa’s Boer War, during which we meet Orlando, the Duke of Oxford (Ralph Fiennes), and his young son Conrad (Alexander Shaw), the story flashes forward a dozen years. Fiennes excels at this sort of refined, crisply authoritative figure; Orlando is unapologetically aristocratic but also mindful of his station, and the need to behave honorably for the common good.

 

As a result of events during that prologue, he’s also a devoted pacifist: a philosophy that increasingly puts him at odds with the impetuous Conrad (now played by Harris Dickinson), who — like so many young men of his era — wishes to prove his bravery in “glorious battle.”

Official Secrets: Thou shalt not lie

Official Secrets (2019) • View trailer 
4.5 stars. Rated R, for profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.13.19

This fact-based drama could not be better timed.

More than ever, we must be reminded of the imperative necessity of speaking truth and integrity to power.

Once exposed and arrested, Katharine Gun (Keira Knightley) is allowed a brief visit from
her husband, Yasar (Adam Bakri). In a touching act that feels genuine, he brings her a
thick jacket, because he knows the jail cell will be cold.

Along with the value of the Fourth Estate, and its role in exposing the filthy secrets of power-mongers who believe they can get away with anything.

And of the foolishness of reflexively relying on a crutch such as Spell check.

Director Gavin Hood makes smart, thoughtful films that don’t get near enough attention in the mainstream market. Folks who stumbled across 2015’s Eye in the Sky were mesmerized by its intriguing depiction of a wartime conundrum — do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of a few? — as it related to the potential civilian fatalities that would result from a drone strike targeting a suicide bomber.

Hood’s film had the intensity of an intimate stage drama, and it was comforting (if naïve) to imagine that the civilian/military chain of command actually might ponder such consequences. At the end of the day, though, Eye in the Sky — however provocative — remains a mere philosophical exercise, because it’s fictitious. 

That’s not the case with Official Secrets. 

Hood’s newest film isn’t merely a depiction of actual events; it illuminates an impressively brave act that should be a humiliating footnote in this country’s reckless 2003 invasion of Iraq. Instead, the incident is all but unknown on this side of the pond … which, frankly, is shameful.

It made far more noise in England, where — to this day — people debate whether Katharine Gun is an honorable patriot on par with our own Daniel Ellsberg … or a traitor to her country.

That should be enough to get you into a movie theater. Better still, Hood and his co-scripters — Gregory and Sara Bernstein, adapting Marcia and Thomas Mitchell’s nonfiction book, The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War — have crafted their film with the clever precision of a multi-act suspense thriller.

Somewhere toward the middle, you’ll begin to wonder: How the hell could we not have known about this?

Add a terrific ensemble cast of top-notch British actors, and you couldn’t ask for more.

Snowden: A man adrift

Snowden (2016) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated R, for brief nudity and frequent profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.16.16

Oliver Stone’s films have polarized viewers for three decades — ever since 1986’s Platoon — and this one won’t be any different.

Indeed, it’s difficult to find a recent public figure who has divided opinion as much as Edward Snowden (although a current presidential candidate comes close).

Having assembled their information into a series of revelatory articles ready for publication,
the team of unlikely conspirators — from left, documentarian Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo),
Edward Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), and Guardian journalists Glenn Greenwald
(Zachary Quinto) and Ewan MacAskill (Tom Wilkinson) — discuss, via teleconference,
how best to release the stories.

Stone’s dip into these tempestuous waters — he also co-wrote the script, with Kieran Fitzgerald, based on material gathered from books by Luke Harding and Anatoly Kucherena — isn’t likely to change any minds. Neither will this film’s slant surprise anybody familiar with Stone’s über-liberal proclivities. No question: This is a sympathetic, strawberry-lensed portrait of  — depending on your point of view — one of our country’s most heinous traitors, or one of its most conscientious whistle-blowers.

The issue itself also frustrates fence-sitters. Civil liberties types, with a healthy respect for George Orwell, fear the totalitarian potential of an unchecked government Big Brother. Those favoring security — at any cost — argue that such a position is naïve, at a time when headlines are dominated by the grotesque behavior of terrorists who operate outside of national boundaries.

In fairness, Stone’s film carefully takes no position in that particular argument. The primary goal of any mainstream drama, even one drawn from actual events, is to give a (hopefully) talented cast the opportunity to inhabit engaging characters involved in a compelling storyline.

In this respect, Snowden succeeds, in great part because of Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s thoroughly convincing portrayal of the title character. Viewers exiting the theater may not agree with Snowden’s actions, but the emotional and philosophical journey that gets him there is presented thoughtfully and persuasively (assuming, of course, that we accept Harding and Kucherena’s vision of the man).

Thematically, this film echoes Stone’s depiction of Ron Kovic, in 1989’s Born on the Fourth of July. In both cases, we’re introduced to young, true-blue American patriots — believers in baseball, motherhood and apple pie — who shed their idealism slowly, reluctantly, but then completely ... and only after coming to the conclusion that People In Authority have lied to them, and to everybody, for too long.

Stone opens his film in a plush Hong Kong hotel in the spring of 2013, as Snowden takes his first meeting with documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo) and Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto); they’re soon joined by the Guardian’s defense and intelligence correspondent, Ewan MacAskill (Tom Wilkinson). They’ve assembled to help Snowden “finesse” the disclosure of his stolen classified documents, in a very public manner that will prevent the U.S. government from spinning the revelations into something insignificant.

And, not incidentally, to minimize the chances that Snowden might get kidnapped and/or killed.

(Poitras actually preceded this film by two years; her 2014 documentary on Snowden, Citizenfour, won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, along with a slew of other national and international honors.)

Alice Through the Looking Glass: Not such a much

Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016) • View trailer 
3 stars. Rated PG, for fantasy peril
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 5.27.16

This film conclusively demonstrates that it’s extremely difficult — if not impossible — to replicate Tim Burton’s signature brand of whimsy.

Mere moments after having traveled through the looking-glass, Alice (Mia Wasikowska)
clumsily triggers a crisis that "all the king's horses, and all the king's men" will have to
repair. Which is par for the course, for this film's dim-bulb Alice.

It’s not merely a matter of Burton’s directorial finesse; he’s also a shrewd judge of source material, and how it should be shaped. Either he carefully selects equally talented screenwriters, or he’s actively involved in how a script reaches its final draft; either way, the result — time and again — is weirdly droll, oddly endearing and invariably, if improbably, entertaining.

And — here’s the important part — meticulously structured, and consistent within its own fantasy universe.

None of which can be said about Alice Through the Looking Glass. Linda Woolverton’s script is a mess; her slapdash plot begs, borrows and steals from sources as varied as H.G. Wells, Frozen and the Back to the Future trilogy.

James Bobin’s direction is uninspired and lifeless. Somebody apparently thought he’d be right for the job, on the basis of his having helmed the two most recent Muppets movies. At the risk of stating the obvious, human characters need more directorial guidance than Muppets, who get most of their personality from their unseen “muppeteers.” Alice (Mia Wasikowska) and her various co-stars get very little guidance here.

Granted, this sequel to Burton’s Alice in Wonderland looks equally fabulous. Dan Hennah’s production design is opulent, imaginative and richly colorful: no surprise, as he’s a veteran of all three Hobbit chapters. Oscar-winning costume designer Colleen Atwood is a carryover from the first Alice, and her efforts here are equally creative, often amusing and sometimes flat-out beautiful; Alice’s kimono-style outfit is particularly fetching.

And, yes, the special effects are excellent, if overused ... and that’s part of the problem. As just one example, Bobin wastes an awful lot of screen footage with repeated sequences of Alice sailing through the “oceans of time,” and repetition does not make such journeys more interesting. Quite the opposite.

The Amazing Spider-Man: Keeps on swinging

The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) • View trailer
Four stars. Rating: PG-13, for action violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 7.6.12

I dunno about the rest of you, but if a geeky, under-nourished kid in my high school class suddenly made an impossible, ceiling-scratching leap to slam-dunk a basketball with enough force to shatter the backboard — in front of dozens of witnesses, no less — and then, a few days later, media outlets began to report a mysterious, unusually strong and limber “vigilante” prowling the streets of my fair city ... I do believe it’d be fairly easy to connect the dots.

As his new powers begin to kick in, Peter Parker (right, swinging on the
pole) finds that he cannot fully control his movements; hyper-strength
turns intended gentle gestures into savage punches and kicks that
destroy furniture and put holes into walls. This proves helpful, however,
when Peter is set upon by a group of thugs in a subway.

I mean, really; Lois Lane might be excused for her repeated failure to see Superman behind Clark Kent’s glasses, but a gymnasium filled with teenagers will get mighty suspicious when rail-thin Peter Parker pulls off a stunt like that.

As it happens, Peter is cavalier about his newly acquired talents in all sorts of ways, but that’s kinda cool; as this re-booted Amazing Spider-Man repeatedly demonstrates, the whole concept of a “secret identity” isn’t something that would come naturally. This film’s writers — James Vanderbilt, Alvin Sargent and Steve Kloves — take a looser, messier approach to the Spider-Man mythos, which better reflects the way an angst-ridden teen might adapt to such a situation.

Or so it seems, anyway.

Andrew Garfield — well remembered from Never Let Me Go and The Social Network — is by far this new film’s strongest asset. His Peter Parker is gangly, clumsy, socially inept and wholly overwhelmed by events completely beyond his comprehension. In short, he’s the perfect dweeb, and therefore an ideal underdog: a kid we hope can get the girl and defeat the villain ... not necessarily in that order.

Garfield stammers, stutters, blushes and evades his way through most conversations and interactions, both as we first meet his hapless, hopeless “normal” self, and later, after being bitten by the radioactive spider that unleashes all sorts of havoc within the poor lad’s body. The immediate result may be increased strength and agility — not to mention “sticky” fingers and toes, the better to scuttle up vertical surfaces — but such newly acquired talents certainly don’t come with an instruction manual.

Watching Garfield’s Peter attempt to adapt to these changes — whether trying to dodge irritated thugs on a subway, or reacting with surprise as his adhesive fingertips yank the keys from his laptop keyboard, making typing all but impossible — is a helluva lot more fun than my embarrassed memory of Taylor Kitsch’s idiotic John Carter trying to make sense of Mars’ lesser gravity, by bouncing like a demented rubber ball.

Although what I’m inclined to call Spider-Man 2.0 more or less follows the core elements of the mythos established by Marvel Comics, this film’s scripters take a few liberties. Thus, the early loss of Peter’s parents is tied somehow to a mysterious research institute called OsCorp, where Dr. Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans), investigating cross-species DNA as a possible means of regenerating his right arm, once worked alongside Peter’s father.

The Five-Year Engagement: Can't commit

The Five-Year Engagement (2012) • View trailer
Three stars. Rating: R, for profanity, sexual candor and fleeting nudity 
By Derrick Bang

The engagement itself staggers along for five years, and it takes about that long to watch this film.

Or so it seems.

The morning after a delightful engagement party, which allows Violet (Emily
Blunt, left) and Tom (Jason Segel, second from left) to announce their pending
marriage, they're surprised to discover that his best friend, Alex (Chris Pratt),
and her sister, Suzie (Alison Brie), spent the night together. Truth be told,
Alex and Suzie are equally surprised by the situation.

A sweet, amusing and saucy romantic comedy is buried somewhere within the leaden mess of The Five-Year Engagement, which occasionally flickers into life and reveals The Film That Might Have Been. With the benefit of tighter editing and the objectivity needed to jettison some of the wandering narrative detours that just hang on the screen, like limp laundry, director Nicholas Stoller — who co-wrote the script, with star Jason Segel — might have delivered a decent result.

But at 124 minutes, this inexcusably self-indulgent exercise in slow torture feels interminable. The story goes on and on and on and on, until we’re ready to scream at the contrivance of yet another emotional roadblock that separates our two main characters, and thus prevents the film from finally grinding to its fitful conclusion (a wholly predictable outcome, I might add).

Stoller and Segel previously collaborated on 2008’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall, another comedy of love’s labors that adopted a similar kitchen sink approach to its core storyline. The problem, in both cases, is a lack of focus; Segel, the writer, needs to be reined in and persuaded that he’s not necessarily the best judge of what works for Segel, the actor.

We’re introduced to Tom (Segel) and Violet (Emily Blunt) on the happiest day of their made-for-each-other relationship, as he honors the one-year anniversary of their first “date” — actually a midnight kiss at a New Year’s Eve party, where they met — with a proposal. Actually, he intends to surprise her with a adorably elaborate setting for this proposal, but he’s not good at keeping secrets, and fumbles the approach.

Except.

There’s a world of difference between an actor fumbling dialogue, in character, and an actor merely fumbling dialogue. Pay attention to this opening scene, as Segel and Blunt navigate these first few pages of script. The line deliveries are awful, the timing equally poor; the sequence plays more like a first rehearsal — and a bad one, at that — than a take preserved for use in the finished movie.

Much of The Five-Year Engagement suffers from such clumsiness, as if Stoller abdicated his directorial responsibilities and let random set visitors vote on which take to accept. However it happened, the result is a film that repeatedly starts, stops and stalls without warning, like a junker that can’t quite make it off the used-car lot.

Pirate Radio: Rock on!

Pirate Radio (2009) • View trailer for Pirate Radio
Four stars (out of five). Rating: R, for profanity, fleeting nudity and brief drug use
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.4.09
Buy DVD: Pirate Radio• Buy Blu-Ray: Pirate Radio [Blu-ray]

Richard Curtis apparently invades my thoughts.

The writer-turned-filmmaker responsible for co-creating BlackAdder and Mr. Bean, who wrote Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill, and who placed his directorial debut (Love, Actually) on my list of all-time best holiday movies, has the magic touch with respect to what I find most enjoyable about cinema.

"The Count" (Philip Seymour Hoffman, with bottle) and Dave (Nick Frost,
right) enthusiastically participate in a round of verbal characes: a regular
evening activity that's about to turn very strange once the unseen "Thick Kevin"
starts giving the clues.

Sharp dialogue. Clever plotlines. Ensemble casts well laced with eccentric characters. And a wry, slightly arch tone that shows Curtis' unerring understanding of what Americans find amusing about the British ... while, at the same time (one assumes), similarly pleasing UK viewers.

John Cleese recognizes this technique as well, and he even discussed it during his recent appearance at the UC Davis Mondavi Center: The British know they're mildly stuffy and oddly constipated when it comes to art, food and simply enjoying life, which is why — as a nation — they so marvelously, scandalously bust loose every so often. And then, such desires temporarily quelled, they again retreat behind a bland mask of genteel conservatism.

All stuff and nonsense, of course. But our British cousins do so love to cultivate such an image.

Pirate Radio, only Curtis' second film as writer and director, is a delightful Robert Altman-esque riff on an actual cultural phenomenon that both cheered and scandalized England during the latter 1960s.

You may recall, on a side note, that some American criminal entrepreneurs skirted gambling and drinking restrictions during Prohibition by running casinos on ships anchored just outside jurisdictional limits. Well-heeled customers were ferried from shore to these well-appointed salons of sin, and law enforcement couldn't do much about it. For a time.

Well, believe it or not, England — land of The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, not to mention scores of other seminal 1960s bands, and birth of the British wave of rock 'n' roll — did not cater, at the time, to its own young (or old and hip) music fans. Not a single legitimate British radio station played rock in the '60s; the music was, in effect, banned by silent decree from government-controlled BBC radio. The "old guard" fuddy-duddies in Parliament simply didn't allow it.

As a result, a few enterprising rebels anchored ships in the North Sea, beyond the range of government control, with the sole purpose of broadcasting "demon rock" to a nation hungry for its own emerging sound. And the obvious irony, of course, is that well over half the nation — young and old, men and women — tuned in to these stations, in effect silently breaking an unspoken law every time they turned on a radio.

Only in England, right?