Captain America: Brave New World — Oh, really?

Captain America: Brave New World (2025) • View trailer

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

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang

The bloom definitely has worn off the Marvel Cinematic Universe rose.

 

More than most, this new Captain America outing relies too heavily on details from previous MCU entries. Keeping a score card isn’t enough; nothing short of an annotated spread sheet would suffice.

 

When two American fighter pilots inexplicabgly go rogue, and start firing on Japanese
military vessels, Captain America (Anthony Mackie, right) and Falcon (Danny Ramirez)
know they must act quickly, to prevent a war.

The result here is something of a mess, with one engaging sub-plot overwhelmed by a far too complicated set of fresh crises. But that’s to be expected from a film with five (!) credited scripters, who seem to have competed with each other, in a contest to resurrect the most obscure MCU nugget.

That said, Anthony Mackie deserves ample credit for navigating the herculean task of holding this mess together as well as possible, and for capably replacing Chris Evans’ Steve Rogers as the new red, white and blue Captain America. Mackie’s Sam Wilson isn’t quite the same shield-slinger, though; he’s more a Cap 2.0.

 

Lacking Rogers’ super soldier serum-enhanced strength and agility, Sam has compensated with a set of vibranium and gadget-laden wings that would be the envy of Iron Man. Sam also has a fresh-faced partner: Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez, as playful as a puppy), a “Falcon-in-training,” last seen in 2021’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier TV miniseries.

 

As this overcooked saga begins, former military hawk Thaddeus Ross (Harrison Ford) has just been elected President of the United States. Elsewhere, Sam and Joaquin are tasked with retrieving a cannister of the metal alloy adamantium, stolen by the mercenary Sidewinder (Giancarlo Esposito) from Japanese scientists who’ve extracted it from the massive “Celestial Island.” 

 

(This “island” actually is the dead body of a celestial named Tiamut, now floating in the Indian Ocean, who was defeated by the Eternals in their eponymous 2021 film, which many of today’s viewers won’t know, because that film was a notorious flop.)

 

Cap and Falcon are successful, although Sidewinder survives to fight another day. Sam also gets an unexpected “attaboy” from the newly installed President Ross, who has long held a love/hate relationship with superheroes. At this moment, though, Ross insists that his views have changed, and he even floats the notion of re-establishing The Avengers.

 

(In the MCU, Ross’ behavior dates back to 2008’s The Incredible Hulk, when — then played by William Hurt — he oversaw a project with his daughter Betty’s boyfriend, scientist Bruce Banner, which went awry and transformed him into the not-so-jolly green giant. Ross went on a vengeful tear that ultimately disbanded and divided the Avengers in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War, which left Earth more vulnerable when Thanos subsequently wreaked havoc in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. And, much to Ross’ dismay, drove Betty into estrangement from her father.)

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.

The Call of the Wild: Bad dog!

The Call of the Wild (2020) • View trailer 
Two stars. PG, for dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 2.21.20

This certainly isn’t Jack London’s Call of the Wild.

To a certain degree, that’s good; among other things, the novel’s handling of Native Americans is a lamentable reflection of its 1903 origins.

As they spend more time in the wilderness of the Canadian Yukon, John Thornton
(Harrison Ford) senses that his canine friend Buck is responding to something
instinctively more powerful than his attachment to mankind.

But prudent adjustment on behalf of cultural sensitivity does not justify the insufferable Disney-fication of this otherwise classic saga. Although Harrison Ford does his best — as both narrator and human star — the story’s nobility has been lost in scripter Michael Green’s clumsy, tone-deaf and wildly uneven adaptation.

On top of which, the decision to rely on CGI fabrications — as opposed to actual dogs — is a serious miscalculation. That may fly with the wild animals in The Lion King and The Jungle Book; most of us aren’t intimately familiar with how lions, tigers, elephants and the like actually move. But we all know how dogs think, behave, walk, run and jump … and this film’s faux canines frequently look wrong, wrong, wrong.

No surprise, given that visual effects supervisors Ryan Stafford and Erik Nash “built” their canine star — Buck — from the athletic movements of a former Cirque du Soleil performer pretending to be a dog.

Are we to imagine that Hollywood lacks real dogs that could have served as models for London’s powerful, 140-pound St. Bernard-Scotch Collie mix?

Poppycock.

OK, fine; the SFX grants Buck more insight, sensitivity and expressive personality than we’d likely get from an actual dog actor (although seasoned canine trainers likely would argue that point). But this anthropomorphization constantly feels false and phony; it was fine for the wholly animated pooches in Lady and the Tramp and 101 Dalmatians, but here it’s merely distracting.

Green’s script follows most of the significant plot beats in London’s novel, so we initially meet Buck as the pampered, wholly out of control pet in the genteel, staff-laden household of wealthy Judge Miller (Bradley Whitford). This prolog marks an inauspicious beginning by director Chris Sanders, who unwisely channels the dreadful 1960s Disney comedies that involved animals — often dogs — running amok and destroying furniture, spilling the contents of every container in sight, and generally making as huge a mess as possible … supposedly because this was the height of hilarity.

It wasn’t then, and it isn’t now.

The Secret Life of Pets 2: A tail-wagger

The Secret Life of Pets 2 (2019) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG, for dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.7.19

No sophomore slump here.

Scripter Brian Lynch hasn’t lost his touch, when it comes to depicting the quirks, tics, foibles and eccentricities of dogs and cats … and their owners. He and his team of Illumination animators obviously observed hundreds of canines and felines, because the results are even funnier than its 2016 predecessor.

Once pooches Max and Duke accept the presence of two-legged Ian, everything — most
particularly mealtime ‚ becomes a shared activity.

And if the four-legged behavior is slightly (?) exaggerated for the sake of entertainment value, that simply enhances the fun.

Lynch and director Chris Renaud have returned for this second round of critter comedy, the latter assisted by longtime animating colleague Jonathan del Val. They’ve embraced the “divide and conquer” approach to storytelling, introducing and then cross-cutting between four primary plotlines. They’re all delightful and ripe with well-timed comedy, along with — and this is important — a measured dollop of heart and poignancy.

And a rather uncompromising message. It’s safe to assume that Lynch doesn’t think much of circuses that showcase wild animals.

Primary pooches Max (voiced by Patton Oswalt) and Duke (Eric Stonestreet) remain the best of buddies, having settled into a comfortable routine with owner Katie (Ellie Kemper). Walkies in the nearby park constantly remind Max how nice it is, not to be mauled by grabby, grody, grimy children.

Then, disaster: Katie meets and marries Chuck, and — to Max’s horror — the inevitable occurs shortly thereafter. Things do indeed get rather grim for a few years, but when toddler Ian’s first word turns out to be “Max,” everything changes in a heartbeat. All those other little children may be pesky nightmares, but not Max’s boy.

Duke, ever the go-along-to-get-along sort, knew it would all work out just fine.

But with acceptance comes a new problem. Max, now terrified of everything in the big, bad world that seems designed specifically to endanger Ian, becomes a nervous, anxious, fretful helicopter pooch with a tendency to scratch himself raw. Cue a trip to a behavioral veterinarian — the waiting room sequence is to die for — and Max returns home trapped in a cone of shame.

Blade Runner 2049: Future imperfect

Blade Runner 2049 (2017) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated R, for violence, profanity, nudity and sexuality
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.6.17

I suppose we should be grateful that things haven’t deteriorated nearly as much as the original Blade Runner suggested ... given that it was set in 2019.

That said, the film’s envisaged weather anomalies no longer seem as unlikely.

Los Angeles Police Department Officer Kay (Ryan Gosling), pausing for a quick meal,
little realizes that he's about to be approached by a trio of seductive "doxies"
interested solely in the photographs that he has been studying.

It’s also amusing to recall that Ridley Scott’s magnum opus was a critical and audience bomb upon release in 1982: wholly bewildering to viewers who couldn’t wrap their brains around retro sci-fi noir, and who were disturbed by the notion of Han Solo/Indiana Jones playing such a morally conflicted character.

Funny, how things can change. Blade Runner now is regarded as one of the all-time great sci-fi classics, praised for the same distinctive vision and thoughtful narrative complexity that originally baffled folks. Scott has tweaked and re-edited the film more times than I can remember, fine-tuning it to match his original vision (which was compromised by unwelcome eleventh-hour editing, prior to release).

While his film didn’t necessarily beg for a sequel, the setting and core premise certainly invite fresh examination. Few filmmakers are better equipped to do so than director Denis Villeneuve, who helmed last year’s marvelously meditative Arrival, and co-writer Hampton Fancher, who helped adapt Philip K. Dick’s source novel into the first film. Fancher is assisted this time by co-scripter Michael Green, and they’ve definitely retained the brooding atmosphere that makes the setting so compelling.

The setting’s persuasively chilling authenticity, in turn, comes courtesy of production designer Dennis Gassner and visual effects supervisor John Nelson, carrying forward the arresting tableaus designed for the first film by Douglas Trumbull and David Dryer. No other word suffices: This new film looks amazing.

And very, very unsettling.

The story is again based in Los Angeles, although the narrative expands to include the entire state. Every square inch of land in Central California has been covered by massive hydroponic facilities necessitated by a climate shift — nothing but furious rain, dust and snow storms — that has destroyed any semblance of a natural growing season. Such enhanced output also is required to feed an expanding population with an exponentially huge homeless faction: The disenfranchised no longer camp out merely on sidewalks; they also squat in apartment corridors, jeering at those fortunate enough to have their own residences.

Advertising has run even further amok, further amplified by a salacious element that suggests the complete absence of spiritual content. There’s a sense of society’s very fabric coming unstitched, with order barely maintained by officers working for the immense police department building that looms above all else.

Well ... almost all else.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens — Everything old is new again

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, for intense sci-fi action and violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.18.15

No question about it: J.J. Abrams definitely is one with The Force.

The writer/director/producer who so smartly revived the Star Trek franchise has done the same with Star Wars.

With nasty First Order storm troopers hot on their heels, Rey (Daisy Ridley) and Finn (John
Boyega) do their best to survive long enough to get a valuable little droid into the hands of
good-guy Resistance fighters.

After the most recent trilogy prompted a blend of disappointment, disgust and outright hostility — Jar Jar Binks, anyone? — fans could be excused the raised-eyebrow wariness that initially greeted news of fresh doings in that galaxy far, far away. But maybe there really is something to the all-pervasive Force, because — for several months now — we’ve been part of an escalating global awareness that Something Great was in the offing.

Indeed.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens isn’t merely a 30-years-later continuation of the universe-spanning saga that (technically) left off back in 1983, with Return of the Jedi. Abrams and co-scripters Lawrence Kasdan and Michael Arndt have delivered a new chapter that simultaneously advances the ongoing narrative, while strongly evoking, echoing and honoring everything that we loved about that wonderful debut, back in 1977.

Abrams sought out the best: Kasdan will be recognized as the writer who worked on both The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi (not to mention Raiders of the Lost Ark). He lives and breathes this stuff; he also understands the delicate art of imitating Hollywood’s Golden Age serials — with their alternating dollops of melodramatic angst and cliff-hanging action scenes — without crossing the line into overly broad farce.

And, as befits the 30-years-later scenario, we’ve been granted a fresh — and fresh-faced — cast of new characters, possessing varying capabilities, and thrust into ghastly events with either reluctance or grim resolve. At the same time, fans will cheer the return of old friends, whether human, droid or Wookie.

It can’t have been easy to deliver a film that will please both newcomers and longtime fans with light-sabers drawn; Abrams and his crew pulled it off, and then some.

The Age of Adaline: Refuses to grow up

The Age of Adaline (2015) • View trailer 
2.5 stars. Rated PG-13, and much too harshly, for a single suggestive comment
By Derrick Bang

I’m a sucker for romantic fantasies.

I may be the only person in the country who fell under the spell of last year’s Winter’s Tale, which remains woefully under-appreciated. Nicholas Cage and Meg Ryan still work their magic during the fourth (fifth?) viewing of 1998’s City of Angels, and the 2009 adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife — although not perfect — captivates nonetheless.

Despite decades of cautious, low-profile activity that has kept her safe, and out of public
view, Adaline (Blake Lively) allows herself to fall in love with Ellis (Michiel Huisman),
thereby granting him tacit access to the carefully guarded details of her life. We can't
help thinking that this is unwise...

As for the 2007 adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Stardust? Simply delightful.

All of which makes me one of the ideal target viewers for The Age of Adaline ... and, therefore, one of many doomed to disappointment.

This is an extremely difficult and delicate genre. One false step — a contrivance too many, a tone too maudlin, a tragedy too melodramatic — and the whole endeavor collapses like an improperly cooked soufflé.

Scripters J. Mills Goodloe and Salvador Paskowitz definitely have a clever premise here. Their execution, however, leaves much to be desired. Director Lee Toland Krieger isn’t much help either; his oeuvre centers around snarky, modern-era gender battles such as The Vicious Kind and Celeste & Jesse Forever. Krieger, apparently operating outside his comfort zone, hasn’t the faintest idea how to make this eccentric drama work.

Which is a shame, because stars Blake Lively and Michiel Huisman are very good together. Their line deliveries sparkle, the tension between them crackles, and — despite the overwhelming odds against — we genuinely want their star-crossed relationship to catch fire and endure.

But Krieger, Goodloe and Paskowitz keep getting in their own way. Every time we succumb to Lively’s melancholy charm and radiant incandescence, we’re yanked out of the moment by a particularly tin-eared line of dialogue, or another load of pseudo-medical gibberish from the off-camera narrator.

Let’s start with that narrator.

Never has a film been less in need of off-camera commentary. Apparently unable to perceive any of the gentler, more satisfying ways of conveying essential information, Goodloe and Paskowitz have their omniscient observer (Hugh Ross) bury us beneath paragraphs of laughably technical codswallop.

Perhaps they were inspired by Jim Dale’s wonderfully arch commentary throughout each episode of TV’s lamentably short-lived Pushing Daisies. Trouble is, that show’s tone is overtly whimsical and deliberately exaggerated, whereas Adaline exists in the real world. And in the real world, pedantic explanations are boring and inappropriate.

The Expendables 3: Way past their prime

The Expendables 3 (2014) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated PG-13, despite relentless violence, brutality and profanity
By Derrick Bang

What an overcooked, overlong, overloud waste of time.

Any semblance of the modestly clever, “aging Dirty Dozen” scenario — which the first film in this series possessed, to a minor degree, back in 2010 — has been buried in an endless, mindless fusillade of bullets, bombs and badly delivered, grade-Z dialogue.

Little realizing that their mission is about to go pear-shaped, Barney (Sylvester Stallone,
right) leads comrades Toll Road (Randy Couture) and Lee Christmas (Jason Statham) to
their unscheduled appointment with a notorious arms dealer.

I note star Sylvester Stallone’s credit for this film’s story, with further input from scripters Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt. The notion that three whole people were required to write this laughable mess, frankly, defies belief.

Okay, granted, we’re not talkin’ Shakespeare here. This series’ sole raison d’être is to gather a bunch of aging A-, B- and C-level action stars, feed them tough-guy one-liners, and set them loose against some power-mad villain with delusions of world domination. Cue the aforementioned bullets, bombs and badly delivered dialogue.

But the cartoonish qualities, admittedly present back in 2010, have devoured this tedious excuse for a threequel. The first film’s modest efforts at actual characterization — such as Charisma Carpenter’s presence as Lacy, tempestuous wife of Lee Christmas (Jason Statham) — have been jettisoned. Carpenter is a no-show here, as is any layering that might make us care a whit about these anti-heroes.

They’re simply well-muscled point-and-shoot stick figures who have no more actual screen presence in this chaos, than the army of uncredited stunt doubles who actually perform all of these crazed action scenes.

Well, that’s not entirely true. Mel Gibson makes a memorably crazed über-villain as psychotic arms dealer Conrad Stonebanks; Gibson knows how to chew his way through all this nonsense. In great contrast to Stallone’s morose, stone-faced non-performance as primary hero Barney Ross, Gibson enthusiastically embraces every aspect of Stonebanks’ bad-bad self. More power to him.

Newcomer Antonio Banderas also is a hoot as Galgo, an insecure chatterbox who threatens to bore everybody to death with his ceaseless prattle. Banderas’ performance — and patter — are an amped-up echo of his comic voice work as Puss in Boots, in the animated Shrek series; the irony is that this approach succeeds better than most everything else in this pinball machine of a movie.

Ender's Game: Well played

Ender's Game (2013) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rating: PG-13, for violence and dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.1.13

Celebrated sci-fi author Orson Scott Card was 26 when his first work, a novella titled “Ender’s Game,” was published in the August 1977 issue of Analog. In 1985, with much more ambitious plans for that tale’s young protagonist — and with the security of a rapidly blossoming literary career — Card expanded his debut effort into a novel that won both the Hugo and Nebula awards.

While Petra (Hailee Steinfeld) watches warily, the thuggish Bonzo (Moises Arias) angrily
warns Ender (Asa Butterfield) to stay out of his way. But Ender isn't one to remain on
the sidelines, which Petra senses immediately; things are destined to get quite ugly
between these two boys.

Today, the so-called “Ender series” encompasses — are you sitting down? — a dozen novels, a dozen short stories and roughly four dozen comic books (some adapting existing novels, some with entirely new material).

Obviously, fans can’t get enough.

More significantly, for our purposes, those same fans — and the general public — will thoroughly enjoy director/scripter Gavin Hood’s big-screen adaptation of the novel that started it all.

The South African-born filmmaker is an impressively shrewd choice for this material, having burst onto the scene with 2005’s Tsotsi, which traces a week in the life of a young Johannesburg street thug who wrestles with his conscience after finding a baby in the back seat of a car he steals. The grim drama won that year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, and Hood — a USC film school grad — went on to an eclectic career as a director, writer and actor.

Ender’s Game also focuses strongly on the warring conscience of a boy, while contemplating several big-ticket philosophical issues that include state-sanctioned child abuse, planetary resource depletion and the novel’s most controversial theme: the notion of meeting a bully’s brutality with a savage response designed to prevent ALL subsequent attacks.

The setting is a futuristic Earth, decades after our planet just barely repelled an invasion by an insectoid alien race dubbed the “Formics.” Expecting that these swarming monstrosities have returned to their home world in order to mount an even larger assault fleet, Earth’s united military force has pinned its hopes on a multi-national “Battle School” designed to train our best and brightest military tacticians:

Carefully selected children.

Young minds are much more agile and adaptable; we know this in our own real world. It therefore stands to reason that young minds weaned on a diet of strategy-laced computer games might be nurtured into becoming the next Patton, Napoleon or Hannibal.

(Needless to say, this rather disturbing notion — and the possibility that modern nations might be acting on it — is a helluva lot more timely today, than it was back in 1977. Among his many other talents, Card deserves credit for scary prescience.)

42: You know the number

42 (2013) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rating: PG-13, for dramatic intensity, profanity and unpalatable language
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 4.12.13

42 is an unabashed valentine to baseball great Jackie Robinson: an old-style film laden with the sort of calculated sentimentality that Frank Capra delivered back in the day.

Relying on the split-second timing and sprinting ability that have made him a
sensational — and crowd-pleasing — base-stealer, Jackie Robinson (Chadwick
Boseman, left) delights in messing with the minds of pitchers who, after a few rounds
of this, sometimes lose their cool completely.

The pacing is leisurely and graceful, with unhurried takes granting us time to absorb the story and appreciate the performances. Writer/director Brian Helgeland and editors Peter McNulty and Kevin Stitt avoid the staccato pacing and smash-cuts that have become a 21st century norm, preferring instead to let events unfold in a manner that reflects the poetry of baseball itself.

Honestly, I found it quite refreshing.

Although Helgeland has taken pains to be faithful to the firestorm that erupted in 1947, when Robinson became the first player to break Major League Baseball’s infamous color line, the approach here is — at the risk of unintended irony — acutely black and white. All the positive (i.e. progressive) historical figures are extraordinarily virtuous, their memories honored here by behavior that is, for the most part, nothing short of saintly.

The racist crackers, on the other hand, are one-dimensional and mostly anonymous: a redneck sheriff here, a small-town gaggle of thugs there. The one exception, almost startling in a film that until this point has (rather unrealistically) avoided much blatantly racist language, comes from Alan Tudyk’s portrayal of Philadelphia Phillies manager Ben Chapman. No doubt Helgeland felt safe with this choice of highly visible villain, since by all accounts the actual Chapman’s on-field behavior was even worse than what we witness here.

But that’s getting ahead of things.

Although characters too good to be true often don’t work in our increasingly cynical age, this film gets its crucial dramatic juice from the sublime lead performance by Chadwick Boseman, an actor, playwright and stage director whose screen work thus far has been confined mostly to TV shows such as Lincoln Heights and Persons Unknown. I suspect that’s about to change, because Boseman never puts a foot wrong here.

It’s difficult to convey the mesmerizing, deeply stirring lightning in a bottle that emanates from a genuinely inspirational person: the breathtaking whoosh that erupts when a truly electrifying individual strides through a door and sucks all the air out of a room. We feel it in the presence of a gifted politician or preacher, or when a commanding actor takes the stage during a live theatrical performance.

Boseman has that sort of presence, and Helgeland coaxes truly fine and sensitive work from this young actor. Boseman’s line readings are heartfelt and well timed, but that’s only part of it; he carries himself in a manner that suggests the brave self-assurance that Robinson himself must have displayed, every waking minute during this tempestuous point in his career.

In a nutshell, Boseman’s performance is inspirational in the same way that Robinson himself must have stirred so many people, back in 1947.

Cowboys & Aliens: When genres collide

Cowboys & Aliens (2011) • View trailer for Cowboys & Aliens
Four stars. Rating: PG-13, and rather generously, for intense sci-fi action and violence, brief partial nudity and a fleeting crude reference
By Derrick Bang

Scientist and sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke once observed that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Scott Mitchell Rosenberg had plenty of fun with that concept, in the 2006 graphic novel he created and chaperoned with artist Luciano Lima and writers Fred Van Lente and Andrew Foley. The basic premise is so beguiling, that it's amazing nobody else thought of it first: What if, instead of repeatedly bothering post-WWII Earth, extraterrestrials had arrived 100 years earlier?

Having tracked an unknown whatzis to its rather unusual lair, cattle baron
Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford, left) and wanted train robber Jake
Lonergan (Daniel Craig) ponder their next move ... while both men wonder if
the strange gadget on Jake's left wrist will prove helpful.

Surely the average citizens of our Wild West would have believed themselves beset by demons who wielded magic beyond their comprehension.

Director Jon Favreau's big-screen adaptation of Cowboys & Aliens takes numerous liberties with that original graphic novel; a press-gang of six (!) credited writers has shaped this rootin', tootin' saga around its two big-name stars, while also moving the core plot in different directions. But the story's foundation remains the same: How would 19th century folks have reacted to such a threat?

While Favreau sends up hoary film western conventions with a few chuckles here and there — the sort of levity he also brought to his two Iron Man films — Cowboys & Aliens is, at all times, a much grimmer saga (grim enough to test the boundaries of its PG-13 rating). We're quite removed from the cute, inquisitive outer-space visitors of Steven Spielberg's E.T.; the aliens in this tale are brutish, nasty and Up To No Good. They think nothing of kidnapping hapless Earthers and then studying them at great length.

And you can forget about the eyebrow-raising rectal probes discussed with such insistence by obsessed modern "victims" of alien abduction; these extra-terrestrials go straight to vivisection and cellular disintegration. Not nice folks. At all.

But that's getting ahead of things. Favreau's film opens as a man with neither memory nor name (Daniel Craig) wakens one morning, in the sun-blasted land just outside the small New Mexico town of Absolution. It's 1875, and our protagonist hasn't the faintest idea how he got there, or how he wound up with such a peculiar bracelet-type gadget around his left wrist.

The latter won't come off, and its purpose remains hidden.

Shortly after wandering into Absolution — following a brief encounter with three would-be bounty hunters — our stranger learns that he's Jake Lonergan, and that he's wanted for all sorts of crimes. He encounters a young woman — Olivia Wilde, as Ella — who seems unusually interested in him; he also realizes that the entire town is in thrall to local cattle baron Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford), whose ne'er-do-well son, Percy (Paul Dano), is an untouchable thorn in everybody's side.

Until Jake touches him, anyway. Quite a solid touch, at that.

Morning Glory: Partly Cloudy

Morning Glory (2010) • View trailer for Morning Glory
3.5 stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for fleeting profanity and mild sensuality
By Derrick Bang

I’ve got good news for those who’ve waited years for a smart, personable young starlet to inherit the Romantic Comedienne Throne left vacant ever since Meg Ryan flamed out after 1998’s You’ve Got Mail.

Good news, in the form of two words: Rachel McAdams.

Whether appealing to his integrity, brow-beating or begging, the perky and
persuasive Becky (Rachel McAdams) can't get Mike (Harrison Ford) to climb
off his high horse long enough to become an active participant in her
morning TV show.

She fits the job requirement to perfection, and tosses in a few charming ingredients all her own. Her fireball performance in Morning Glory can’t help being the center of attention; hands down, she’s always the most interesting person in the room.

Her career-driven character in this story is endearing despite our frequently wanting to strangle her: playfully erotic while somehow tantalizingly unapproachable; whip-smart and savvy although possessing not the slightest clue about how to put her own best foot forward. Hard-charging, yet vulnerable. Dedicated, determined, loyal and utterly oblivious to negative vibes that would send lesser mortals shrieking to a safer realm.

The “realm” in question here is the dog-eat-dog world of a fourth-ranked television morning show: the happy-chat purgatory that disgorges perky “infotainment” delivered by on-air talking heads surgically unable to stop smiling.

The modern TV creation where actual “news” long ago perished from malnutrition.

Aline Brosh McKenna’s script doesn’t dwell overmuch on network TV’s complicity in the dumbing-down of America, but the implication is felt. The game has changed because the goals have changed: Where once the industry respected and rewarded journalists who dug up and reported stories of merit and substance, and the race reflected a healthy desire to scoop everybody else with the next Watergate or Valerie Plame scandal, now it’s just a sprint to the overnight and weekly ratings … and if that means cooking segments, stupid pet tricks and sending desk anchors out in funny costumes, well, devil take the hindmost.

Extraordinary Measures: Merely ordinary

Extraordinary Measures (2010) • View trailer for Extraordinary Measures
3.5 stars (out of five). Rating: PG, for mild profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.22.10
Buy DVD: Extraordinary Measures • Buy Blu-Ray: Extraordinary Measures [Blu-ray]


The quest for medical miracles, although obviously compelling to those intimately involved, can be a tough sell cinematically; the real-world process is frustrating and grindingly slow, the obsessed, lab-coated doctors and researchers generally far from the big-screen archetypes likely to bring us into the story.

The usual "solutions," as a result, involve the infusion of melodrama and the fabrication of fictitious characters; the resulting narrative — at this point merely "suggested by" actual events, as opposed to rigorously factual — can turn into an eye-rolling TV movie designed to manipulate more than educate.

Dr. Robert Stonehill (Harrison Ford, left) increasingly resents what he perceives
as partner John Crowley's (Brendan Fraser) bean-counting "corporatized"
decisions, believing that pure research is being sacrificed on the altar of
"acceptable loss." It's a frequent argument in today's biotech field, and one of
this film's most persuasive dramatic components.

Fortunately, Extraordinary Measures doesn't succumb to such shortcomings ... at least, not completely.

Robert Nelson Jacobs' screenplay — drawn from the book The Cure, by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Geeta Anand, who in turn based it on her own August 2003 Wall Street Journal article — does an impressive job of detailing the frankly insane financial and corporate constraints under which miracle drugs are developed these days. The saga is fascinating and frequently overwhelming, particularly with respect to the notion that any "regular citizen" could survive, let alone make progress, in such a process.

Our hearts are won as well by Brendan Fraser's persuasive and wholly sympathetic starring performance as John Crowley, who with his wife Aileen (Keri Russell) have been coping with having two children — out of three — who suffer from Pompe Disease, an extremely rare genetic disorder somewhat related to both muscular dystrophy and Lou Gehrig's Disease. It's fatal, with most children dying before their ninth birthday.

As the film opens, Megan (Meredith Droeger, a genuine charmer) is celebrating her eighth birthday. Patrick (Diego Velazquez), not quite two years younger, has the same disease; both children require wheelchairs, breathing devices and constant monitoring by trained nurses. First-born son John Jr. (Sam Hall) is completely healthy.

Crowley, having educated himself to every possible degree, is drawn repeatedly to the theoretical research of Dr. Robert Stonehill (Harrison Ford), whose efforts are largely ignored in the tiny lab he holds together at a Nebraska university. Ford plays Stonehill as a crusty eccentric with two ex-wives and a preference for working with loud music blaring: a guy who can't really be bothered with "people skills."