The Nutcracker and the Four Realms: Far from balletic

The Nutcracker and the Four Realms (2018) • View trailer 
Three stars. Rated PG, for no particular reason
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.2.18

This isn’t your grandfather’s Nutcracker.

Actually, I’m not sure what to call it.

Having just learned that she's princess of the magical Four Realms, Clara (Mackenzie
Foy, left) is gowned in suitable fashion by Sugar Plum (Keira Knightley), while one of
the palace soldiers guards them attentively.

This Frankenstein’s Monster is a cynical, coldly calculated commodity that lards the gentle Marius Petipa/Lev Ivanov/Tchaikovsky ballet with bits and bobs from Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz and The Chronicles of Narnia, wraps the content-heavy mess with a ribbon of mild steampunk, and — for good measure — adds Harry Potter’s owl as a bow.

Only Disney could concoct such a clumsy, lumbering mess of a movie, in what appears to be a deliberate effort to enhance the corporate brand via ancillary merchandising.

Along with the opportunity to further entice little girls with a new “Disney princess.”

Mind you, The Nutcracker and the Four Realms certainly looks spectacular. The traditional Disney logo — Sleeping Beauty’s castle — appears on the screen; then the camera swoops past its spires and takes us on a breathtaking, owl’s-view ride above and through Victorian-era London, all in a single magnificent tracking shot, until we reach the Stahlbaum residence, home of Clara (Mackenzie Foy), Louise (Ellie Bamber), young Fritz (Tom Sweet) and their father (Matthew Macfadyen).

It’s a dizzying, captivating tour-de-force opening by cinematographer Linus Sandgren, production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas, and visual effects maestros Max Wood and Marc Weigert.

Things get even more dazzling when the Stahlbaum family joins the cream of London society at the annual Christmas Eve ball, held in the even more opulent palatial estate of Drosselmeyer (Morgan Freeman). He’s an eccentric, well-traveled entrepreneur and inventor, who also happens to be Clara’s godfather. She shares his talent for tinkering and fabrication: a gift revealed earlier, in the Stahlbaum attic, where she dazzles Fritz with a complicated, Rube Goldberg-esque mousetrap that (briefly) captures an actual mouse.

But Clara is troubled and saddened: This is the first Christmas without her mother, Marie, who — in the rather harsh Disney tradition — is dead before this story takes place. Consumed by her own grief, Clara fails to register her father’s similarly forlorn bearing (a mood that Macfadyen conveys with a persuasive subtlety the rest of this film lacks).

Ah, but Marie has bequeathed a special gift to Clara this Christmas Eve: an ornate, locked metal egg accompanied by a note that reads “Everything you need is inside.” But the egg requires a golden key that Clara does not possess; she hopes that her godfather will know how to open it. Instead, Drosselmeyer speaks in benevolent riddles and sends her along a ribboned trail to find his gift to her.

At which point, after following the ribbon through his garden hedge labyrinth, and the similar maze of upstairs hallways in his oddly, ever-expanding upstairs wings, she emerges from the hollowed trunk of a massive felled tree in a snow-covered landscape.

Whereupon I turned to Constant Companion and muttered, “C.S. Lewis, here we come.”

Beautiful Boy: Descent into drug hell

Beautiful Boy (2018) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated R, for profanity and graphic drug use
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.26.18

This film is highlighted by quiet, extraordinarily powerful little moments.

Director Felix Van Groeningen often is wise enough to simply hold his camera on stars Timothée Chalamet and Steve Carell, and they never disappoint. Chalamet, in particular, is a fascinating study, his character’s intelligent glow gradually dimming as this morose story proceeds.

Having already watched his son Nic (Timothée Chalamet, left) relapse repeatedly,
despite numerous stints in detox and rehab, David Sheff (Steve Carell) wonders
if things will be any different this time.

Unfortunately, the film as a whole disappoints.

Stories that trace the downward spiral of drug addiction are of a type, and it’s hard to bring any freshness to a narrative with beats that are both inevitable and familiar: the initial descent and personality shift; the attempt at recovery and subsequent relapse; the attempt at recovery and subsequent relapse. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Van Groeningen and co-scripter Luke Davies deserve credit for trying to adjust the recipe, and it’s somewhat novel to view so much of this saga from the viewpoint of those who represent collateral damage: which is to say, the helpless family members. On the other hand, the constant flashbacks become irritating, even confusing. While it makes sense for David Sheff (Carell) to remember the cheerful, jovial kid his son Nic once was, at times it’s difficult to know whether a given scene — with Nicolas (Chalamet) as a young adult — is in the “present,” or the not-quite-present.

The story definitely gets additional dramatic heft from its real-world origins. Sheff is a widely celebrated journalist and author whose résumé includes work for Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Fortune and National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. Van Groeningen and Davies’ script is adapted from Sheff’s best-selling 2008 memoir of the same title: a painfully raw account of dealing with Nic’s addiction to methamphetamine.

The script also draws from Nic’s version of events, in his book Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines.

Difficult as it is, to watch this film at times, Van Groeningen and Davies chose not to include some of the books’ even bleaker events. Which probably is just as well.

Although Chalamet has the “showier” role, Carell’s David is the story’s focus. His is the more challenging acting job, since David most frequently reacts in response to Nic’s behavior. Carell’s face is a constant study in pain: haunted gaze and slumped posture, burdened by weary desperation. Rarely has the phrase “carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders” seemed more apt.

It’s natural to expect that if this saga includes a life-changing epiphany, it’ll belong to Nic; after all, the options are sharply etched. Either he kicks the habit, or he dies. But the crucial moment of dawning realization — a genuinely heartbreaking scene — actually belongs to David: when he finally, reluctantly, despondently realizes that he can’t fix this.

We’re reminded of the “three Cs” during an Al-Anon meeting that takes place toward the end of the film: You didn’t cause it; you can’t control it; you can’t cure it. Impossibly difficult to accept, for a parent accustomed to being a child’s full-time protector.

Hunter Killer: Old-school Cold War thrills

Hunter Killer (2018) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated R, for violence and profanity
By Derrick Bang

Boy, this one takes me back.

Director Donovan Marsh’s handsomely mounted adaptation of 2012’s Firing Point is a suspenseful, well-paced thriller. The George Wallace/Don Keith novel is, itself, a throwback to Alistair MacLean classics such as The Guns of Navarone and Ice Station Zebra, both of which also became crackling adventure films.

U.S. submarine commander Joe Glass (Gerard Butler, right) and his counterpart,
Russian commander Andropov (Michael Nyqvist) contemplate how best to handle
an international crisis that is escalating rapidly out of control.

The comparison to Ice Station Zebra is particularly apt, because Hunter Killer unfolds like a 1960s Cold War thriller, complete with U.S./Russian anxiety, posturing politicians, ground-level grunts given an impossible mission, and a maverick submarine commander willing to defy D.C. in order to avoid World War III.

Ah, the good ol’ days.

This new film also unfolds like a mystery, if only initially. The story begins deep beneath Arctic Circle ice, as a U.S. “hunter-killer” submarine clandestinely shadows a Russian sub: one side keeping tabs on the other. Suddenly the Russian vessel explodes, to the astonishment of the Americans; before they can consider whether to mount a rescue, they’re also crippled and sent to the ocean floor.

By whom, we wonder.

Back at the Pentagon, anxiety mounts when the American sub fails to make its scheduled report. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Charles Donnegan (Gary Oldman), a veteran hawk always willing to believe the worst of the Russians, wants to mobilize nearby battleships and destroyers. Rear Admiral John Fisk (Common), a next-gen negotiator loathe to jump to conclusions, seeks alternative solutions.

U.S. President Dover (Caroline Goodall, standing in for Hilary Clinton), considering all options, authorizes investigative reconnaissance by the USS Arkansas: a second hunter-killer sub, to be commanded by Joe Glass (Gerard Butler). He’s an unusual choice: a blue-collar “guy’s guy” who gained his knowledge of submarines the practical way, by working his way up through various departments, in marked contrast to Annapolis graduates with no hands-on experience.

In other words, Glass is savvier — and sneakier — than all those Pentagon desk jockeys.

Meanwhile… 

Long-range satellites have revealed unusual activity at the Polyarny Russian naval base, at the outermost western side of Kola Bay. Senior National Security Agency analyst Jayne Norquist (Linda Cardellini), sent to the Pentagon with need-to-know details, advises that Russian President Zakarin (Alexander Diachenko) has just arrived at Polyarny for unknown reasons.

Private Life: Painfully raw, deeply revealing

Private Life (2018) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated R, for strong sexual content, nudity and profanity
By Derrick Bang

Obsession takes many forms.

Richard and Rachel Biegler (Paul Giamatti and Kathryn Hahn) want a child. The artsy Manhattan-based couple delayed starting a family because Rachel — an author — always had a fresh publishing deadline. Now, having slid into middle age, the “process” has become more complicated.

Richard (Paul Giamatti) and Rachel (Kathryn Hahn, center), obsessed with their desire to
"become pregnant," are delighted by the distraction offered by their niece, Sadie
(Kayli Carter), when she asks to crash in their apartment for awhile.

Or perhaps things always would have been complicated. Rachel’s eggs apparently aren’t top-quality, and Richard has only one testicle: a detail quickly tossed into any discussion of the topic — even with friends — much to his ongoing embarrassment. (And the first indication of the degree of “sharing” we’re in for.)

“Embarrassment” is plentiful in writer/director Tamara Jenkins’ intimate Private Life, much of it radiating from us viewers, who can’t help feeling like voyeurs. This is one of the most ferociously personal, deeply poignant dramedies I’ve ever seen, and also one of the most painfully, hilariously insightful. We laugh a lot, but often self-defensively: hoping that Jenkins — and her terrific cast — won’t go that one more private step further.

But they always do.

We meet Richard and Rachel well into what already must have been dozens (scores?) of sessions with their specialist, Dr. Dordick (Denis O’Hare, a stitch as the sort of tone-deaf male doctor who tries for humor at all the wrong moments). The film opens as Richard jabs his wife in the buttocks with another hormone shot, the actors bravely bared just as much physically, as emotionally.

We get a sense, as details emerge, that this process is being driven primarily by Rachel, and that Richard is doing everything he can to help and support. Both are weary after months on numerous emotional roller coasters. The hormones make her crazy, alternately bitchy or despondent; he’s exhausted, trying to anticipate and keep up with her moods, without saying or doing something that prompts an unexpected eruption of fury.

Rarely has the phrase “walking on eggshells” been more apt.

Unfortunately — unhappily — it quickly becomes clear that they’ve moved beyond “reasonable” options, and strayed deeply into the realm of fixation. Artificial insemination failed. An attempt to adopt went cruelly awry, as revealed during an absolutely heartbreaking flashback.

Halloween: All trick, little treat

Halloween (2018) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated R, for strong violence, gore, profanity, brief drug use and fleeting nudity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.19.18

You can’t go home again … but boy, the Hollywood sausage-grinders do keep trying.

Hollywood has unleashed 10 sequels, remakes or re-boots of John Carpenter’s modest — but undeniably ground-breaking — 1978 chiller, and not oneof them has anywhere near the original’s intensity or suspense. Instead, they’ve all succumbed to the ever-increasing gore quotient much more reminiscent of the deliberately disgusting Friday the 13th series that kicked off two years later.

As Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) has just discovered, not even a heavily fortified home
can stop a homicidal maniac crafty enough to punch through a window.

This one’s no exception.

The butchery here adheres to the usual formula: exercises solely designed to challenge the imaginations of make-up and special effects crewmembers. Of particular delight is the carving knife thwocked into the back of a woman’s skull, the blade’s front emerging between her agonized eyes; and the head that gets stomped into hamburger beneath a heavy boot. Tasty.

Carpenter must be of two minds. On the one hand, he’s likely pleased that every one of these misbegotten offspring have made his first film look ever better with time. On the other hand, he’s gotta be dismayed by what that film has wrought, and how it keeps getting blamed — unfairly — for all the gruesome “doomed teenager” franchises that have erupted in its wake.

The saddest part is that director/co-scripter David Gordon Green hasn’t even tried to make this new film halfway decent. He and co-writers Danny McBride and Jeff Fradley merely introduce a sizable stable of one-dimensional doofus characters who exist solely to be slaughtered. I mean, really: With almost no exception, these are numbskulls who’d wander into night-time freeway traffic, in order to marvel at all the pretty headlights.

Factor in the first resort of lazy horror-franchise filmmakers — the idiot plot, which lurches forward only because each and every individual behaves like an idiot at all times — and there’s very little to recommend this early Thanksgiving turkey.

Green and his cohorts probably would argue that such behavior is expected of the characters in horror flicks, and that this adds a desired note of dark humor. In the first place, that’s nonsense; in the second, I’m not willing to credit them with that much insight. This is hack work, plain and simple.

This Halloween rebelliously insists that none of the other franchise entries existed, save Carpenter’s first film. (That’s somewhat essential, since Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode was killed toward the beginning of 2002’s Halloween: Resurrection, and yet here she is again.)

Forty years have passed — as actually is the case — during which the homicidal Michael Myers has been locked up in a reasonably comfortable mental facility, where he has been carefully studied by psychiatrist Dr. Sartain (Haluk Bilginer, standing in for Donald Pleasance’s Dr. Sam Loomis, in the first film). Michael hasn’t spoken a word the entire time.

First Man: A troubled landing

First Man (2018) • View trailer 
Three stars. Rated PG-13, and too harshly, for dramatic intensity and fleeting profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.12.18

Director Damien Chazelle and screenwriter Josh Singer jump into their film with an edge-of-the-seat sequence: the highest of solo pilot Neil Armstrong’s numerous test flights in the X-15 rocket airplane.

While Janet Armstrong (Claire Foy) putters in the kitchen, her husband Neil (Ryan Gosling)
and their elder son Rick (Gavin Warren) work on a jigsaw puzzle during a rare moment
of family bonding, unaware that a phone call is about to bring disturbing news.

It’s a savagely cut cacophony of images: the shuddering and jouncing aircraft; the roar of the rocket engines that blast Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) up to 207,500 feet; similarly jittery close-ups on his determined expression.

And then utter silence, as the engines switch off (intentionally) ,and Armstrong gets a panoramic view of the blue globe below, against the dark-night contrast at the edge of space.

Totally, amazingly breathtaking.

But that’s just the preamble. Armstrong’s return to Earth goes awry when the X-15 begins to “bounce” off the upper atmosphere, sending him even higher into the mesosphere above. Utter chaos, as he tries to compensate while mentally plotting a new landing spot, having zoomed past the planned touchdown at Edwards Air Force Base.

Like, wow.

First Man is laden with sequences even superior to this one, given a degree of verisimilitude — by visual effects supervisor Paul Lambert — wholly on par with the we-are-there reality viewers experienced while watching 2013’s Gravity. It becomes clear that Armstrong had more lives than a cat, and also possessed seat-of-the-pants math and physics calculating skills that made him just this side of a walking computer. (A good thing, too, given the limitations of 1960s mainframes.)

If only this film’s quieter moments were handled as well.

Singer’s script is adapted from James R. Hansen’s 2005 best-seller, First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong, the pilot/astronaut’s only official biography. The film’s intimate “family” element takes place in between stunning piloting events that could be considered myth, were the details not so well known: the aforementioned 1962 X-15 flight, the 1966 Gemini 8 crisis, the 1968 mishap with one of the Earthbound Lunar Lander Research Vehicles, and — the reason for this film’s existence — the 1969 Apollo 11 mission.

Considerable time is spent with Armstrong’s home life, particularly early on, as he and his wife Janet (Claire Foy) agonize over the final months of their 2-year-old daughter, Karen, who died while being treated for a malignant tumor at the base of her brain stem. This is a lot to take in, so quickly, and explanations are minimal. 

The presentation of this chapter establishes the style Chazelle and cinematographer Linus Sandgren use throughout the film: lots of tight close-ups and jiggle-cam tracking shots, like one would expect from home movies. This suggests documentary-style authenticity — which Chazelle likely intended — but it also assumes considerable pre-existing knowledge of the part of the viewer, and repeatedly leaves questions unanswered.

I got a sense, heightened as the film continued, that this 141-minute drama has been distilled from a longer director’s edit. Details are left unexplained; scenes cut abruptly to unrelated events.

Bad Times at the El Royale: Well titled

Bad Times at the El Royale (2018) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated R, for strong violence, profanity, drug content and dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang

It begins with such promise.

During the first hour, I couldn’t wait to see this film a second time.

Traveling salesman Laramie Seymour Sullivan (Jon Hamm, left) and touring soul singer
Darlene Sweet (Cynthia Erivo) are just as surprised as desk manager Miles Miller
(Lewis Pullman), when their check-in procedure is interrupted by a brazen newcomer.

Shortly thereafter, my enthusiasm began to wane. Ninety minutes in, it was obvious that one viewing would be sufficient.

By the time this interminable slog had concluded, I wanted my 141 minutes back.

Yes, it’s that long. No, the length isn’t justified. Not by any means.

I suspect writer/director Drew Goddard intended Bad Times at the El Royale to be a similarly snarky and dark-dark-darkblend of this past spring’s Hotel Artemis and Quentin Tarantino’s Hateful Eight. The preview certainly suggested as much, and Goddard’s pedigree is solid; he was the guiding hand behind 2012’s ferociously clever The Cabin in the Woods, and he cut his teeth writing and directing episodes of cult TV faves such as Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Alias and Lost.

What could possible go wrong?

Well … a lack of self-discipline, for starters. An inability to recognize when “mischievous” veers into “tasteless.” And a failure to perceive that although his script has a great set-up and premise, the execution leaves much to be desired. By the bonkers third act, at which point the film has gone completely off the rails, one gets a sense that Goddard was hastily scribbling fresh pages as he went along.

Such a disappointment.

That said, there’s no denying the skill with which Goddard toys with us, during the ingeniously twisty first hour.

It’s January 1969: a time of momentous upheaval, as the last vestiges of the debonair, Rat Pack jazz era are buried beneath the rock ’n’ roll-fueled counter-culture revolution. Richard Nixon has just been inaugurated as the 37th president of the United States, and a new decade beckons.

But on the border between California and Nevada, the once-glorious El Royale still seems time-locked in the 1950s. The resort is cheekily built to straddle both states, with a fat red line dividing the two wings of rooms, and running right down the middle of the spacious lobby. The establishment offers warmth and sunshine to the west, and hope, opportunity — and gambling — to the east. Once upon a time, this Tahoe hot spot catered to the country’s most famous celebrities and politicians; now it’s just this shy of being a ghost.

(The El Royale is inspired by the actual Cal Neva Resort and Casino, which similarly straddled both states.)