Downton Abbey: A New Era — A carefully calculated crowd-pleaser

Downton Abbey: A New Era (2022) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated PG, for no particular reason

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang

This certainly is the epitome of “comfort cinema.”

 

As this ensemble cast has expanded since the series 2010 debut, writer/creator Julian Fellowes has done an impressive job of granting every new character ample individuality, exposure and melodramatic plot points. We’ve lost only two major players, over time — Matthew and Sybil Crawley (Dan Stevens and Jessica Brown Findlay) — while adding several dozen more.

 

After sound engineer Stubbins (Alex McQueen, in headphones) orders total silence from
everybody else, Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) tries hard to match her spoken dialogue
to the silent images being projected on a screen.

Goodness, it takes several minutes, during this sequel’s title credits montage, just to run through the entire cast list.

Not that this is any sort of problem. Fellowes knows his audience, just as all the players have grown comfortable with their roles. Spending another two hours with these characters is like enjoying an evening with beloved friends and relatives.

 

This film’s subtitle — “A New Era” — is both apt and a bit misleading. On the one hand, it does signify both a pop-culture shift (about which, more in a moment) and a change in fortune for both the Crawley family and a few of their “downstairs” servants. Yet the rise of such working-class individuals, and the accelerating decline of the aristocracy — which played such a key role in the TV series’ final season — is largely ignored here, even though we’ve moved forward another year, to 1928.

 

Indeed, this film concludes on a note that suggests nothing has changed in this respect, as if the real-world’s socio-political clock had ceased to move forward. Granted, that prompts a cheerful, audience-pleasing tableau, if this is to be our final glimpse of these characters — assuming Fellowes isn’t persuaded to do yet another film — but it’s a bit of a cheat.

 

Not that fans will care a whit.

 

The story begins as Tom Branson (Allen Leech), the Earl of Grantham’s widowed son-in-law, marries Lucy Smith (Tuppence Middleton): a celebration that makes good on the previous film’s swooningly romantic finale. This is the “upstairs” answer to the earlier, humbler but equally romantic wedding of adorably impertinent assistant cook Daisy (Sophie McShera) and footman Andy (Michael Fox), now living in the tenancy home of her father-in-law, Mr. Mason (Paul Copley).

 

Two unexpected events land simultaneously. The British Lion Film Studio expresses interest in shooting its next silent costume drama, The Gambler, at Downton Abbey — a notion that horrifies the Earl, Robert Crawley (Hugh Bonneville), and retired butler Mr. Carson (Jim Carter) — and the Dowager Countess Violet Crawley (Maggie Smith) learns that she has been bequeathed a villa in the south of France, in the will of the recently deceased Marquis de Montmirail. 

 

The latter prompts all manner of raised eyebrows, but Violet refuses to provide any explanation; she tartly refers only to her “mysterious past” (a line delivered with Smith’s typically arch smugness).

Mank: A true dazzler

Mank (2020) • View trailer

Five stars. Rated R, for profanity and sexual candor

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.8.21

Director David Fincher’s Mank is a magnificent experience in all manner of ways, starting with Gary Oldman’s mesmerizing portrayal of celebrated journalist, author and screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz.

 

Screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) and actress Marion Davies
(Amanda Seyfried) meet over a shared cigarette; they'll soon bond over their
tempestuous fealty to William Randolph Hearst.

It’s also a bravura, often breathtaking display of cinematic art. Fincher, cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt and editor Kirk Baxter have meticulously replicated the style, atmosphere and very essence of the film — Citizen Kane — whose creation drives this narrative. The sharply sculpted screenplay — by Fincher’s late father, Jack — even mimics the non-linear storytelling style that was so innovative in Orson Welles’ classic.

 

The saga is rigorously period-authentic, and (mostly) historically accurate. Jack Fincher conflates a few key events — and meddles a bit with chronology — to heighten dramatic tension, but his characterization of key players is (often dismayingly) dead-on.

 

Perhaps Jack Fincher’s most audacious stroke is his revival of a controversy that film scholars have deemed long settled: the question of who actually wrote, and/or contributed the most, to the script of Citizen Kane. Fincher pere et fil clearly imply that Mankiewicz deserves the lion’s share of credit, whereas actual evidence weighs far more heavily in Welles’ favor. 

 

Ah, but even here, Fincher’s script is cheekily ambiguous … because their Mankiewicz clearly isn’t the most reliable narrator of — or participant in — his own life.

 

(In the movie world, stubborn skeptics are akin to those who insist that Shakespeare’s plays actually were written by Francis Bacon. For the record, though, Welles and Mankiewicz shared the screenplay Academy Award, the sole victory among Kane’s nine Oscar nominations.)

 

Fincher opens his film in early 1940, as Mankiewicz is deposited at an isolated ranch in Victorville, California, roughly 90 miles from the hedonistic Hollywood environment that exacerbates his worst tendencies. He’s left with secretary Rita Alexander (Lily Collins), longtime friend and writing associate John Houseman (Sam Troughton), and a nurse (Monika Gossmann) to care for a badly broken leg sustained in a recent driving accident.

 

Mankiewicz’s assignment from Welles: to come up with the initial draft of a screenplay depicting the imperious career of a combustible newspaper mogul who — wink, wink, nudge, nudge — isn’t really based on William Randolph Hearst. Except that of course it is.

Fisherman's Friends: Quite a catch!

Fisherman's Friends (2019) • View trailer

Four stars. Rated PG-13, and much too harshly, for fleeting profanity

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.16.20 

You can’t get much more charming than this one.

 

Hoping to impress his rugged hosts, Danny (Daniel Mays) nervously rises at the crack
of dawn, in order to join a gaggle of men during a typical morning at sea.

Director Chris Foggin’s gently amiable comedy, available via Amazon Prime and other streaming services, gets additional sizzle from its factual origins. Scripters Piers Ashworth, Meg Leonard and Nick Moorcroft based their story — while adding a sweet romantic subplot — on the “discovery” of the actual Fisherman’s Friends, a group of Cornish fishermen who, for the past quarter-century, have met on the Platt (harbor) in their native Port Isaac, raising money for charity by singing traditional sea shanties.

 

They signed a major record deal in 2010; their debut album went gold, as they became the first traditional folk act to land a Top 10 album in the UK.

 

You can’t ask for a better premise on which to hang a typically droll touch of British whimsy.

 

A quartet of cynical, fast-living, London-based music executives, led by patronizing boss Troy (Noel Clarke), descend on Port Isaac for a “stag weekend” prior to one of their own getting married. They couldn’t be more insufferably arrogant, prompting the locals to dismiss them as useless tossers (with several deliciously arch insults hurled in their direction).

 

The newcomers also prove helpless when it comes to simple ocean activities such as stand-up paddle boarding, further irritating the townsfolk by necessitating a rescue at sea.

 

Having quickly lost interest in these “boring” surroundings, Troy and his mates perk up when they happen upon the local fishermen’s weekly pier-side concert (“the rock ’n’ roll of 1752”). But the performance quality cannot be denied; Troy encourages colleague Danny (Daniel Mays) to chat the group up, in the hopes of signing them to a contract.

 

This proves useless, of course; the cheerfully unruly, mildly grumpy men, led by nominal spokesman Jim (James Purefoy), can’t begin to take this big-city clown seriously. Indeed, they laugh him out of the pub (which actually happened to London record executive Ian Brown, the real-life Friends’ manager, on whom Danny is loosely based).

 

Jupiter Ascending: Overcooked sci-fi slop

Jupiter Ascending (2015) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated PG-13, for violence, dramatic intensity and brief chaste nudity
By Derrick Bang

Back in the day — way back in the day — sci-fi pulp magazine covers were known for their wonderfully lurid images of scantily clad maidens being menaced by all manner of strange creatures, usually of a reptilian or insectoid nature.

With several nasty spaceships chasing them through the urban canyons of downtown
Chicago, Jupiter (Mila Kunis) and Caine (Channing Tatum) just barely manage to dodge
the laser blasts, thanks to his anti-gravity footwear, which allows him to "skate" on air.

Such covers generally accompanied thoroughly ludicrous space operas that were light on credible characterization or plausible plotting, and heavy on high-tech hardware and weaponry.

This laughably ridiculous flick belongs squarely in that sort of company.

In fairness, Jupiter Ascending isn’t as inane as the Wachowski siblings’ nadir, a spot forever and always to be occupied by 2008’s ill-advised big-screen adaptation of Speed Racer. (At least, one hopes they never plumb lower depths.)

At times, though, it seems a pretty close call. Despite some genuinely thoughtful “big ideas” that percolate throughout this clumsy original script, Jupiter Ascending will be remembered — if it’s remembered at all — for its howlingly dreadful dialogue and relentless, protracted, video game-style action scenes.

Rarely has an ordinary, flesh-and-blood human being endured such punishment, violated so many natural laws of physics, and emerged with nary a scratch. Heck, our heroine’s hair never even gets mussed. We can but roll our eyes, as she survives megascale carnage that should have pulped her fragile body many times over. Scores of times over. Hundreds of times over.

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Outer space fantasies can be a tough genre to mine successfully; it’s difficult to qualify what separates an engaging, rip-roaring homage — such as the original Star Wars trilogy — from the sort of overcooked mess being served here. I guess the distinction becomes obvious only when filmmakers egregiously succumb to the dark side of the Force, as Andy and Lana Wachowski have done so ostentatiously.

And the silly names don’t help much.