Professor Marston and the Wonder Women: A few notes shy of wonderful

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (2017) • View trailer 
Three stars. Rated R, for strong sexual content, profanity, brief nudity and fleeting graphic images
By Derrick Bang

Although persuasively acted, sensitively directed and reasonably faithful to established fact, writer/director Angela Robinson’s take on comic book heroine Wonder Woman most frequently feels like a giddy endorsement of unconventional sexual lifestyles.

Flush with the "forbidden" delights of their blossoming three-way relationship, Elizabeth
Marston (Rebecca Hall, left), her husband William (Luke Evans) and their "plus one"
Olive Byrne (Bella Heathcote) unwisely fail to consider how their behavior will affect
fellow Tufts University faculty and students.

Goodness knows, the actual saga tops the Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction List, as recently revealed via comprehensive feature stories from National Public Radio, Smithsonian Magazine and The New Yorker, along with — most particularly — Harvard historian Jill Lepore’s fascinating 2015 book, The Secret History of Wonder Woman. Robinson had no shortage of research material, from which to draw.

But while the world’s best-known female superhero has been made the selling point of this unusual big-screen biography — the character’s status having accelerated exponentially, thanks to summer’s smash-hit film — Wonder Woman is mostly incidental to the story being told here. Robinson had other things on her mind.

The saga begins in 1925, as Harvard-trained psychologist William Moulton Marston (Luke Evans) begins teaching a large assemblage of young women at Tufts University. His wife Elizabeth (Rebecca Hall) is a ubiquitous presence, forever perched in the classroom window seat. An equally accredited psychologist and lawyer, she sharply observes — and records, via jotted notes — how the students respond, individually and as a group, during her husband’s lectures.

William and Elizabeth are a prickly but passionately devoted team, in and out of the classroom. He’s smooth, intelligent and seductively persuasive: a silver-tongued orator who’d have made a terrific snake-oil salesman. She’s bluntly combative, judgmental, sharp-tongued and even more ferociously smart. They constantly challenge each other, even as they love and collaborate in numerous endeavors ... not the least of which is the development of a functional lie-detector device.

In class, William’s gaze is drawn to the radiantly gorgeous Olive Byrne (Bella Heathcote), a senior who becomes his research assistant ... which is to say, she becomes their research assistant. William ostensibly insists that Olive is the perfect subject with whom to explore the active/passive aspects of a “DISC theory” — dominance, inducement, submission and compliance — that he believes governs all human behavior.

In reality, he just wants to bed Olive. Which Elizabeth realizes full well, and about which she’s ambivalent. At initial blush, William’s desire seems a non-starter; the quietly shy Olive, a seemingly conservative sorority girl, is engaged to a Nice Young Man.

Rules Don't Apply: Chaos reigns

Rules Don't Apply (2016) • View trailer 
One star. Rated PG-13, for sexual candor and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang

Oh, my.

This may not be Warren Beatty’s worst film — Ishtar and Town & Country still arm-wrestle for that distinction — but it runs a close third.

Marla Mabrey (Lily Collins), hoping to become a Hollywood star, finds herself spending
lots of time with driver Frank Forbes (Alden Ehrenreich), who seems a poor substitute
for potential mentor Howard Huges. Initially, anyway...

Much has been made about the “sudden” appearance of this new Beatty project: the first time he has appeared on screen since 2001 (in the aforementioned Town & Country), and the first film he has written, directed, produced and starred in, since 1998’s Bulworth (also far from a classic).

Warren, you shoulda stayed retired.

Alas, too many artists cannot resist the itch to create, long after common sense should have removed them from the stage.

In fairness, even at its worst — and there’s plenty of “worst” to go around — Beatty’s new film reveals traces of the idiosyncratic sparkle that bloomed to perfection in classics such as Shampoo and Heaven Can Wait. And, at 79 years young, Beatty himself remains a master of the roguish twinkle and droll double-takes that made him such a memorable screen presence, back in the day.

But Rules Don’t Apply remains a mess.

It’s the worst sort of self-indulgent vanity project: a bloated, bewildering, pointless excuse to shovel several dozen high-profile guest stars into meaningless, ill-defined and under-developed parts. The so-called story is a muddle — Beatty sharing scripting credit with Bo Goldman — and the limply executed result commits the entertainment world’s most unpardonable sin: It’s boring.

Turgid, mind-numbingly dull, I’d-rather-endure-root-canal-surgery tedious.

It’s also superfluous. While Beatty is the right age to deliver his interpretation of Howard Hughes’ tragic final years, there’s no reason to do so. This film’s script offers no information, no character analysis, that wasn’t covered far better by Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio, in 2004’s The Aviator.

On top of which, the whole Howard Hughes riff apparently is intended as mere framing device for a stuttering courtship between two young lovers caught in the eccentric industrialist’s disintegrating orbit. It’s a clumsy narrative device, and it fails utterly. Those who grimly slog through this film’s interminable 126 minutes still won’t care a whit about any of these characters.

I’m surprised that Goldman returned to this particular well, having won an Academy Award for writing 1980’s far more successful Hughes project, Melvin and Howard. Now, that was a clever, precocious, charming and thoroughly entertaining lark.

All of which are qualities sorely lacking in Beatty’s newest — and undoubtedly final — misfire.

The 9th Life of Louis Drax: Deserves a quick death

The 9th Life of Louis Drax (2016) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated R, for dramatic intensity and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang

Those who’ve ever wondered about the degree to which a single guiding hand can influence a project, need look no further.

By all indications, young Louis (Aiden Longworth) and his father Peter (Aaron Paul) deeply
love each other. But appearances can be deceiving, and this particular family dynamic
includes quite a few uncomfortable secrets.

This is a textbook example of how a bad director can ruin a film.

Mind you, there’s plenty of blame to go around. Several of the primary actors deliver entirely wrong readings of their characters; the story’s overall tone is completely wrong; and there’s no consistent point of reference for viewers to grasp.

But while multiple individuals can be faulted, it all comes down to the guy in charge, in this case Alexandre Aja. He failed to draw better performances from his cast; he couldn’t maintain a consistent atmosphere; and — most crucially — he clearly didn’t understand the material, and didn’t have the faintest idea how to present it properly.

Because — and this is the sad part — there’s clearly a decent story buried in the wreckage of this film. Actor-turned-scripter Max Minghella took a respectable shot at best-selling British author Liz Jensen’s 2004 thriller, The Ninth Life of Louis Drax, and the results could have been much, much better. But Aja’s crude sensibilities lie in the realm of gory horror such as Piranha 3D and the remake of The Hills Have Eyes; he lacks the sensitivity required for a tale that requires such delicate handling.

In fairness, the premise is challenging. The story is told (mostly) from the point of view of a 9-year-old boy in a hospital coma ward, and Aja spends much of the film immersing us in the ongoing care of coma patients; that’s a tough, depressing sell. It may have been mostly unusual and intriguing in Jensen’s book; confronted with cinematic visuals, it’s heartbreaking ... and difficult to surmount, as the narrative progresses.

But Aja makes his first significant blunder even sooner, during a prologue in which young Louis (Aidan Longworth) matter-of-factly shares his back-story, growing up as an accident-prone kid who — to his parents’ horror — endured all manner of freak calamities during his tender years. This weird flashback montage is off-putting and fairy tale-esque, with cartoonish touches that suggest we’re in for some sort of fantasy: a notion reinforced by the introduction of a grotesque, deep-voiced sea creature who seems to be the boy’s spirit guide.

But this isn’t a fairy tale, or a parable, as eventually becomes clear; it’s a mystery. Sort of. Maybe. Or perhaps it’s a suspense thriller. Aja obviously can’t decide.

2012: End of days

2012 (2009) • View trailer for 2012
3.5 stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for dramatic intensity, considerable carnage and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.13.09
Buy DVD: 2012 • Buy Blu-Ray: 2012 (Two-Disc Special Edition) [Blu-ray]

Goodness, it's déja vu all over again!

Its modern CGI effects aside, director/co-scripter Roland Emmerich's 2012 is a throwback to the cornball disaster flicks of the early 1970s — think Earthquake and The Towering Inferno, along with a nod to The Poseidon Adventure — and their rigid formulas: stalwart good guys, women and children in peril, grim fates for the sexually adventurous, and B-list actors introduced solely so they can perish after exchanging noble sentiments with each other. ("I've had a good run, son; don't you worry about me.")

This could be the computer-screen from a particularly difficult air-flight-
simulator game, but no: It's actually a rip-snortin' action sequence that finds
five of our central characters -- in the plane -- trying to dodge and climb above
the crumbling Los Angeles high-rises that rather peskily keep threatening to
hit them, during an early sequence in this film.

Bowing to our 21st century demand for bigger and noisier, of course, Emmerich and co-writer Harald Kloser couldn't be satisfied with demolishing a single building or even all of Los Angeles; no, they've got to take out Earth itself.

One wonders what could possibly come next. The destruction of all eight-and-a-half planets in our solar system, along with their various complements of moons?

Familiarity aside, Emmerich orchestrates this mayhem with considerable panache, and 2012 never flags during its bloated 158 minutes. That's pretty impressive, when the explosive money sequences start after a brief introductory half-hour. You'd think it unwise for a film of this nature to lead off with the sinking of California — all together now: "It's San Andreas' fault!" — but Emmerich has plenty of equally bombastic cards left up his sleeve.

Indeed, once beyond the obligatory mayhem and mass destruction, this film evolves into a strong echo of 1951's When Worlds Collide, the solid adaptation of Edwin Balmer's sci-fi novel that wonders how the people of Earth would behave, after learning of the impending arrival of a massive celestial body that will strike and destroy our planet.

Both When Worlds Collide and 2012 subscribe to the hail-fellow-well-met view of humanity: that we will (for the most part) behave virtuously and pull together for the common good, in an effort to save as many people — and as much of our way of life — as possible.

This may be naively optimistic, but it's a helluva lot more entertaining and gratifying than the bleak, every-cannibal-for-himself attitude on display in the upcoming adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

2012 takes its premise from the pseudo-scientific twaddle currently making the rounds, about how the Mayans supposedly predicted a massive celestial event — an alignment of planets and our sun that takes place only once every hundreds of thousands of years — that will destroy life as we know it on Earth.

Translations being what they are, calmer heads tend to believe (if they address this nonsense at all) that the Mayans simply recognized that, as of 2012, it would be time to flip the page and start a new calendar. But hey, that would take all the fun away from the conspiracy wingnuts who stand on street corners and carry those cardboard signs proclaiming that "The end of the world is near" ... a phenomenon that this film acknowledges with a good laugh.

Frost/Nixon: Battle royale

Frost/Nixon (2008) • View trailer for Frost/Nixon
Five stars (out of five). Rating: R, and rather too harshly, for profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.15.09
Buy DVD: Frost/Nixon • Buy Blu-Ray: Frost/Nixon [Blu-ray]


"And the American people?"

David Frost's question, although hardly a surprise when it emerges during the climactic fourth interview, nonetheless seems to catch his subject off-guard.

Despite the increased agitation of his research team — from right, journalist Bob
Zelnick (Oliver Platt), author James Reston Jr. (Sam Rockwell) and veteran
producer John Birt (Matthew Macfadyen) — David Frost (Michael Sheen, far
left) refuses to believe he'll be outmatched, outgunned and outfoxed when former
U.S. President Richard Nixon faces him during the first of four upcoming
interviews. Frost quickly discovers, however, that he has much to learn about
shrewd, skilled subjects with agendas of their own.

And in that moment, as his features sag slightly, and his eyes betray a blend of surrender and wan hope — perhaps redemption really does come from baring one's soul? — actor Frank Langella ceases to exist. We are, instead, witnessing the crumbling of former U.S. President Richard M. Nixon.

The transformation, creeping up on us throughout director Ron Howard's Frost/ Nixon, is complete. And astonishing.

It's a fascinating performance, all the more so because Langella doesn't really look a thing like Nixon. But the actor clearly studied every facial tic and physical mannerism, from the slightly stooped walk to the jowly frown that forever seemed poised between censure and admiration. Langella radiates the sense of Nixon, every facet of the man's complex personality either on view or slyly suggested.

("I was determined not to do an impression," Langella explains, in the press notes. "I looked in him for the thing I look for in every character I play: What is his soul about?")

Langella has had plenty of practice, since both he and Michael Sheen — as Frost — starred when playwright/screenwriter Peter Morgan (The Queen, The Last King of Scotland) debuted this stage drama at London's Donmar Warehouse in August 2006. Following a subsequent transition to Broadway, Langella won a Tony Award for best actor in a drama.

It's easy to see why.

Aside from the eerie sense that we're witnessing some resurrection of Richard Nixon in Frank Langella's body, the actor also manages the near impossible: He actually engenders sympathy for a man it has become fashionable to despise. Despite the oily, unctuous manner; despite the naked, self-serving desire — glittering in Langella's eyes — to engage in what he imagines will be damage control, simply to revive a reputation in tatters; despite all the glib maneuvering that prompted the feared nickname of "Tricky Dick," this man emerges as a tragic figure.

Perhaps no less reviled, but pathetic nonetheless.

Langella's performance is one of the two amazing aspects of Howard's film. The other, thanks to the clever way Morgan orchestrates his script in three acts — prologue and establishing maneuvers; hideous battle of unequals; revelatory climax — we're on the edge of our seats in tense anticipation, despite knowing with certainty how these events eventually play out.