I Spy

Last weekend, we watched a trio of spy movies, so I thought I’d combine in a single post

Eagle Eye (2008) seems to be the perfect form of a genre of movies I am interested in - the surveillance paranoia movie. Ideally, it should feature one or two people fighting shadowy opponents who have access to panopticon surveillance (preferably involving a satellite). I thought that was what Source Code. I was getting closer with Enemy of the State. But this is what I was thinking of.

Shia Lebeouf is an ordinary guy with a brother in the military who just died. After the funeral, he gets a phone call, telling him not to go to his apartment. When he ignores this, he finds a ton of terrorist weapons there, and the FBI grabs him. Meanwhile, single mother Michelle Monaghan (also in Source Code!) is sending her son on a field trip to Washington DC. She gets a phone call telling her to get in a car at a certain address. When she disobeys, she sees her son on a tv and gets a threat.

When Lebeouf gets broken out of the FBI office by a construction crane, he is told to go to a car at a certain address, and there it is with Monaghan driving. There is a crazy car chase, with assists from the traffic light system and some more cranes. Neither knows what is going on.

But of course we figure it out. It’s no spoiler to say that the voice on the phone is a computer system that has become intelligent, and has an agenda. Meanwhile, FBI agent Billy Bob Thornton and Air Force investigator Rosario Dawson are on the trail of Lebeouf and Monaghan, and maybe the big computer. And is Defense Secretary Michael Chiklis one of the good guys or the bad guys?

I enjoyed the heck out of this movie, while recognizing its absurdity. Great car chases and clever escapes, with all kinds of sub-quests. Which never make sense: the super-intelligent computer seems to excel at creating rickety Rube Goldberg machines that barely work, while having the resources to just up and kill anybody she wants.

Red Sparrow (2018) is a bit more modern - an Atomic Blonde look at the origin story of a Black Widow-like character. It takes place in Moscow. In a park, CIA agent Joel Edgerton is meeting his double agent. When the cops show up, he fires a gun to draw attention and let his agent get away. This gets him in hot water.

Meanwhile, ballerina Jennifer Lawrence breaks her leg while performing, and gets sidelined. She tries to coach (if ballerinas have coaches), but she brutally beats the principal dancer and her replacement when she finds them sexing. And I mean brutally - blood everywhere. It kind of comes out of nowhere.

Anyway, JLaw’s creepy uncle Matthias Schoenaerts recruits her for spy school - actually, “Sparrow” school. Sparrows are sexy secret agents who use seduction to get their info. The school is pretty creepy, run by Charlotte Rampling. When she beats up a fellow student who tries to rape her, she beats him bloody. Rampling demands that she let him have sex with her, since that’s the point of the training. So, she demands that he do it then and there, then stares him impotent. It’s a gruesome scene, but Lawrence’s best. It’s easy to believe that she could wilt a man.

In fact, she’s the best thing here. She has a very Anna Karina look, with her huge eyes and bangs - my favorite New Wave actress. Joel Edgerton, on the other hand, didn’t impress us much. Several people refer to him as “that handsome American,” but I don’t see it. He has beady little eyes and is lumpy around the face. Not a bad actor, but nothing special I could see.

Same with the rest of the movie. There isn’t a lot of action, the suspense is a little light, but there is a good ending. There’s a sort of sequel setup, but I don’t see it happening.

Finally, The Spy Who Dumped Me (2018). It stars Mila Kunis as a boring single woman, who has just been dumped by her boyfriend. By text. On her birthday. Her best friend is Kate McKinnon, a bit of a drama queen who convinces her to burn all of the stuff her ex left at her apartment. But her ex, Justin Theroux, is actually a spy, who is busy being shot at. He just has time to beg Kunis not to burn his stuff.

Meanwhile, the girls get picked up, then kidnapped by another set of spies, lead by sexy Sam Heughan. Heughan tells them that Theroux is CIA and they need to get in touch. When Theroux does show up, he tells Kunis that if he is killed, she has to take his McGuffin to a cafe in Vienna. There is a shoot out, and he is killed. So the girls are going to Vienna.

There are no big surprises in this movie. It’s the old ordinary folks mixed up with spies story. The fun is in the execution. Kunis is a solid character, but McKinnon is a hoot. She reminds me a bit of Sandra Bernhardt - that kind of crazy kooky beauty. Her character spends all her time on the phone with her mother, talking about their sex lives. She dated Ed Snowden (that seems like a throwaway line, but it comes in handy). When they are at the circus, looking for an agent, she joins the act and gets up on the trapeze, based on having attended a circus arts class at camp.

That also brings me to the best villain, Ivanna Sakhno, gymnast and assassin. She has a deadly pixie look - reminded me of Rinko Kikuchi. She battles McKinnon on the trapezes and...

I won’t spoil it. This is a fun movie - even if it isn’t the most original idea, it is beautifully carried out. They do seem to be trying to use gross out humor for shock value. Like Melissa McCarthy saying “fuck”a lot, this isn’t really too impressive. The girls’ friendship is the key to it all.

Bloody Vikings

I first saw The Vikings (1958) on TV, at my cousins’ house when I was a kid, on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Ever since I have considered it the perfect rainy Sunday movie - but I’ve never seen it since, until now.

It starts with an attack on an English kingdom. There is pillaging, looting and raping, including Viking king Ernest Borgnine doing the Queen and killing the King. When things settle down, a sleazy cousin Frank Thring takes over the kingdom. The pregnant ex-Queen sends the bastard baby half-prince away for safety, but his ship is taken by Vikings, and he is brought up a slave. He will grow up to be Tony Curtis.

Meanwhile, Borgnine’s legitimate son, Kirk Douglas, is a rough and rowdy Viking, drinking, carousing, and going on raids. He crosses paths with Curtis when they are hunting. They get in a tiff and Curtis flies his hawk at Douglas, blinding him in one eye. Curtis is condemned to drowning (due to a curse against shedding his blood), but a witch-woman saves him, and an exiled English noble claims him as his slave. This noble soon realizes that this slave is the rightful heir to an English kingdom.

There will be more adventures in England, the Northland, and on the sea. There will be a magic Negro, Eric Connor, who teaches Curtis to use a compass to navigate. Janet Leigh shows up as the beautiful Englishwoman both Curtis and Douglas are in love with. And it all ends with a showdown between Curtis and Douglas, and a Viking funeral.

First of all, this is beautifully photographed in an unspoiled fjord and a historic castle or two. It has a great ancient-by-way-of-Hollywood feel. Douglas plays the villain very convincingly here, much more than I remembered. I have no idea why they thought Curtis, with his broad Brooklyn accent, belongs in historical movies (“Yonda lies da castle of my fadda”), but there it is.

All in all, a great rainy Sunday afternoon movie still.

It’s Incredible

Incredibles 2 (2018) was, of course, incredible. Maybe as incredible as the first, plus or minus the novelty. It is great visually, has a big cast of fine roles, filled with great voice actors, and some big ideas. That last part may be the problem for me.

It begins with Mr and Ms Incredible (Craig T. Nelson and Holly Hunter) fighting a mole man in a boring machine. This is illegal, since the Sokovia Accords or whatever they are called. Also, it goes poorly, even though Frozone (Samuel L. Jackson) appears to help out. The bad guy (John Ratzenberger) even gets away.

The Incredible family has been living in hotels and safe houses with the help of government man Jonathan Banks - pretty clearly modeled after Tommy Lee Jones from Men in Black, down to the memory ray. But now the hero protection service is being shut down, and they will need to face the hostile world alone.

Here we get a little monologue from Hunter about how they have to depend on themselves, how no one else is going to help them, etc. It’s weirdly Randian (and I guess so it the first Incredibles), and that odd right wing flavor is one of the things that kept taking me out of the movie.

Anyway, a billionaire (Bob Odenkirk) and his genius sister (Katherine Keener) have a proposition for them. He will work to get the Fuck Heroes Anyway Act (or whatever) repealed, by putting them in a sort of crimefighting reality show. Since all recent supervillains are basically Elon Musk, we were suspicious right away.

But before we get to that, we get Mr. Incredible babysitting Jack-Jack. I don’t think the old “men can’t handle cooking or babies” gag is very fresh, but Jack-Jack is about my favorite part of this franchise. Like Franklin Richards (the Incredible family is mostly based on the Fantastic Four), he is ridiculously overpowered - he’s invulnerable, shots laser beams from his eyes, can duplicate himself, fly, teleport, change appearance, and turn into a giant demon. Mr I tries to keep this from Ms I and finally takes JJ to Edna Mode for help (another fave) and she takes care of him.

Meanwhile, Ms I is getting famous, bonding with Keener and meeting another X-Men-like crew of supers. The best is low-self-esteem goth-girl Voyd, played by Sophia Bush. With Odenkirk’s help, they get the Ambassador (Isabella Rossellini) to help them legalize superheroism. They are needed to fight Screenslaver, a supervillain who can take over the mind of anyone who looks at electronic screens. This is clumsy topicalism, but reminded me of Ghost in the Shell, which clued me in that there might be a villain behind the villain.

All this is done in Brad Bird’s classic animation style, with a script that is both embedded in and commenting on modern superhero movies. That’s all great. But there’s so much random stuff, like Ms I’s Republicanism, Mr I’s old-fashioned dumb male role shtick, the billionaire villains (no spoiler), and the now-standard anti-hero legislation that just sort of rubbed me the wrong way. Too many “huh?” or “oh come on” moments.

On the other hand, Violet’s (Sarah Vowell) teen romance sub-plot, while not very original, seemed sweet and fun to me. Your mileage may vary.

In Dreams

We picked A Midsummer Night's Dream (2014) because it is both Shakespeare and Julie Taymor - our third time for this pairing, after Titus and Tempest. This time, it is basically a filmed stage play, which makes sense, because that’s what she’s known for.

The staging starts with a little person (Kathryn Hunter) getting into bed. Then the rude mechanicals attach lines to the sheets and hoist her up into the rafters. Then the play begins. Taymor has made many edits to the script, which you don’t notice too much, because the sound recording isn’t that good - my only issue with the way the play is staged. There seemed to be multiple cameras onstage, so we get a lot of handheld movement and closeups, without ever catching a glimpse of the cameras (the way you do in concert films, for ex). It actually was a little much in the scene where Egeus is demanding that Hermia marry Demetrius. I think this calmed down a little as the show went on, or I just got used to it.

The stage effects are the best part - billowing cloth for fog, for instance, or a projected ever-blooming flower. Black-clad kabuki-style stage hands hold pole for the forest, and use them to block or lead the poor lost lovers. And since it’s Taymor, there are puppet/costumes, deer and hounds for the hunt in the fourth act.

We didn’t recognize anyone from the cast, except David Haresden as Oberon. He is the Martian Manhunter on Supergril. Mandi Masden was great as Helena. Since she is a black woman, the quips about her being “not fair” were a little close to the bone. Most outstanding is Kathryn Hunter as Puck. She had the general feel of Joel Grey in Cabaret, but also she was a bit of a contortionist. Another sort of special human special effect.

It all ends, of course, with the craftsmen’s dramatic league performing Pyramis and Thisbe, quite humorously. But their Thisbe, Peter Flute, is played by Zachary Infante as an Italian (?) immigrant. He seems to get deeply into the role, bringing real pathos to the clownish part. A lovely way to end the play.

Strip Mall of Death

I love old movies, by which I mean black and white, pre-1960s talkies. I don’t mean “classics” - I love those too, but a movie doesn’t have to be especially good to scratch my itch. Take Seven Doors to Death (1944).

It starts promisingly - a shot rings out! A woman runs out of an apartment. She jumps on the running board of a nearby car, jams a gun in the drivers neck and tells him to drive. She directs him down a dead end alley, and runs off when he crashes! The driver, Chick Chandler, goes back to the apartment and finds a corpse. But when the police arrive, there’s a different corpse.

The new corpse is June Clyde’s lawyer. When she shows up at the police station the next day, Chandler recognizes her as the lady who made him drive his car into a wall. He has already figured out that the “gun” she had in his back was a flashlight (I had guessed lipstick, but I guess the light indicates that she was snooping).

So they start investigating. It seems that Clyde’s aunt was a rich eccentric with an Egyptian chest full of jewels that is currently missing. The suspects are all connected to seven shops arranged around a fountain. They include a shady jeweler and a creepy furrier with a line in taxidermy. It gets pretty confusing - there’s another corpse that is partially mummified, and a safe cracker who left fingerprints on the job, but was already dead. These little macabre touches give the movie an Old Dark House feel.

There’s also some comedy and romance, and it all gets wrapped up in 64 minutes flat. Not exactly memorable, but a pleasant waste of an hour.

Ghost Story

Since we watched the live-action ScarJo version, I felt that we should watch the anime Ghost in the Shell (1996). Sadly, I think we kind of liked the live version.

They both start more or less the same way, with the Major, a cyborg police officer, stripping to her plastic skin and diving off a skyscraper roof. Naked, she can use the camouflage function of her skin. And falling off the building, she can crash through the window of the conference room, where a VIP is being arrested. It turns out he was being controlled through his cybernetic brain extensions by an entity known as the Puppetmaster.

Of course, the rest of the movie will be a pursuit of this Puppetmaster. And, of course, this will be difficult, since anyone you catch will turn out to be only another puppet. You can’t trust anyone’s identity, maybe not even your own. The major herself is mostly electronic, and doesn’t even know who she was before she became the Major.

There is a lot less of the Major’s search for her identity in this movie than the ScarJo version. There is also more about the team, and less about the Major. Overall, I found the plot hard to follow (OK, maybe I was just sleepy), in the way I sometimes do with Asian movies - they do less handholding than I expect. But I will say this: This is a gorgeously visual movie. Some scenes just stop and look around the city of the future, long meditative takes of a rainy city street, not moving the plot at all. Those were my favorite parts.

Chan the Man

On a personal note, it is my birthday month, and I am celebrating by making Ms. Spenser watch a bunch of movies from the queue that she ordinarily would veto. First up,  Bleeding Steel (2017), a recent Jackie Chan movie, with all that entails.

Chan is a police officer in a near future Hong Kong. HIs daughter is in critical condition and he is racing to her side. But a call comes in that an important witness is being threatened, so he abandons his trip to see daughter.

The witness is a scientist, working on an artificial heart and some special blood, which he is testing on himself. The police arrive at the same time as a high-tech army, lead by a weird looking guy that seems to be invulnerable. Chan finally manages to blow him up - and then he gets the text that his daughter has died.

Thirteen years later, in Australia. Jackie is now working in a college food court, keeping watch over a young woman who —SPOILER— later turns out to be his daughter, resurrected with that high-tech stuff. Also watching her is a goofy blonde thief, Show Lo. Along with the bad guy Chan blew up and his army, there’s a sexy female assassin after Jackie’s daughter, and he reluctantly lets Show Lo help out.

Since this is late Chan, he does very few stunts or fights, and you can see stand-ins when he does. He still gets to demonstrate some impressive speed - there just isn’t a lot of it. There are a lot of car chases instead - Audis this time, instead of his usual Mitsubishis. I feel let down, like he sold out. Show Lo, a comedian/boyband singer, is obviously added for youth appeal, and he’s not bad. But he’s not Jackie.

The futuristic plot has a lot of odd twists - the title comes from a novel someone wrote that too closely resembles the actual mechanical heart/special blood thing, and there’s a laptop and so on. But we’ve seen worse and didn’t mind it. I don’t even mind not getting much in the way of fantastic fight scenes. But Jackie didn’t even seem to be doing any choreography. There was nothing intelligent or inventive about the fights or chases.

So the joke was on me. Ms. Spenser slept through this, and I had to watch all the way through.

Fountain Heads

We watched the The Fountain (2006) because one of the nephews said something like, “If I had wanted to watch something off the wall, I’d have watched The Fountain”. I’ll take that as a recommendation.

The Fountain interweaves three stories, or one story over three eras. One is set in the time of the Conquistadors, when Hugh Jackman is searching for the Tree of Life from the Garden of Eden (or the Fountain of Youth or something). He was given this quest by Isabella, Queen of Spain, Rachel Weisz. This might have been more interesting if it had been more than one or two scenes, filmed at night. There main story is set in modern times, where Jackman is a neurosurgeon whose wife Izzy (still Weisz) is dying of brain cancer, and he’s not handling it well.

The final story is set in a dreamlike future, where a bald Jackman is floating in space in a bubble that contains an old tree. This is my favorite - it is mystical and hallucinatory, and therefore fun. To tie these stories together, this space travelller might be the surgeon from modern day become immortal, or possibly the reincarnation of the other Jackmen. That would make the tree Weisz.

The fact that Weisz gets reduced to a tree in this phase is a bit of a giveaway. In the modern phase, she is mainly a manic pixie dying girl. She implores Jackman to walk with her in the year’s first snowfall, but he has to hang around in his man-cave lab and obsess about how to cure her. He even gets a little shouty about it. He’s kind of right though. Tests on a South American tree bark finally show that it can cure cancer, and just as he gets it to her - she up and dies.

But this is a Darren Aronofsky movie - you might not be watching it for the plot. It does have some beautiful visuals, done practically - stellar nebulae are created with photomicrographs of colored liquids, etc. The Cloud-Atlas-style intertwining of loosely related stories is interesting too. There were some interesting twists in the story - Weisz talking about how the Mayan hell of Xibalba was believed to be a certain star, which turned out to be the dying nebula that space-Jackman was visiting. And maybe the whole movie is the novel Weisz is writing, that Jackman has to finish when she dies. But the overall weakness of the story made this, for me, more interesting than great. Still glad we watched.

Oh Nurse!

Hotel Artemis (2018) is a very zeitgeisty movie. It is about a hospital for criminals, based in a hotel, like the Continental of John Wick, but has more of the character-driven indie feel of Bad Day at the El Royale.

It is set in future dystopian LA, where the whole city is wracked with water riots. Sterling K. Brown and brother Brian Tyree Henry are robbing a bank when it all goes sideways and they have to get to Hotel Artemis, which is a cover for a high-tech underground hospital. The Nurse (Jodie Foster) has been drinking all night, but her orderly, Dave Bautista, gets her to admit them. They are put in adjoining rooms Waikiki and Honolulu, which will become their pseudonyms. Charlie Day (Pacific Rim), a sleazy arms dealer, and Sofia Boutella, an assassin, are already in residence in Acapulco and Nice, recuperating. The hotel has a nice rundown Deco feel, with huge murals of the tourist locations the rooms are named after. Then, they are fitted with modern, but slightly junky, nanotech medical equipment, including 3-D organ printers.

But the power keeps going out, and Bautista has to go to the roof to fix it, because the Nurse won’t go outside. When someone comes to the door, hurt in the riot, it looks like she’ll have to go outside to bring her in, because it’s someone from her past - Jenny Slate (Venom), a cop. Of course, it is very much against the rules to let a cop into the Hotel Artemis. What’s worse, the hotel’s funder, the meanest mob boss around, the Wolf King of Los Angeles, is coming, and he’s Jeff Goldblum.

Jodie Foster’s nurse is a great character, drunk, broken, tottering along with tiny steps (I bet her feet hurt), but full of strength. Bautista, who goes by Everest (due to his size?), is another - very powerful,  but always deferring to Foster with “Yes, Nurse”. The hotel itself is a great character, although it’s only sketched out with 5-6 sets. I didn’t really buy Goldblum as a dangerous criminal - he’s too Goldblummy for that. But he always welcome.

As for the plot, which I haven’t spoiled at all, I was just glad it wasn’t about fathers. In fact, it was about mothers - something a lot of scriptwriters don’t seem to care about. I guess the Artemis in the title should be a clue that this is a movie about wisdom and craft and women. Now, it isn’t exactly a great movie. Like El Royale, some parts seem sort of random or diversions. I don’t think the Acapulco/Nice characters did anything but supply atmosphere. But they were fun. I’ll take it.

Suckers

I’m not sure how, but somehow we discovered that there are a ton of heavy-metal horror comedies. Many are now in our queue. Suck (2009) is the first one we saw.

It’s written and directed by Rob Stefaniuk, and he is one of the stars: the leader of the punk(ish) band, the Winners, which includes his beautiful ex-girlfriend Jessica Pare. Setting up for a gig, Stefaniuk gets waylaid by creepy bartender Alice Cooper, who lays some cryptic banter on him. He also meets with their manager, Dave Foley, who recommends that they fire him - because he’s too chicken to fire them. But they are still on for the big festival in New York, where there are a lot of execs who might discover them.

But Pare goes to a party with a weird guy named Queenie after the gig, and comes back the next day different. More glamorous, hypnotically attractive. People are digging the band now. At first, Stefaniuk thinks she has started using, but it finally comes out. She’s been turned into a vampire. This leads to a little trouble at the US/Canada border, since she looks pretty bad during the day, but fortunately, the customs agent is Alex Lifeson of Rush. He says he was in a band and understands. Rock on.

They hang out with Beef, the lead singer for the Secretaries of Steak - played by arch-vegan Moby. He’s a bit of a jerk, so they feed him to Pare. Later, they go to record with Iggy Pop, a reclusive producer, who immediately knows what’s going on - he’s seen stuff. That’s most of the cameos - there are a few more, but I didn’t recognize them.

Wait, one more - Eddie Van Helsing is on their trail, and he’s played by Malcom McDowell. They do some flashbacks to his younger days by cutting in shots from O Lucky Man! Soderbergh did this with Terence Stamp, so it isn’t quite an innovation, but it is fun.

There’s a lot of cheepnis in this movie - mostly manifested by cheesy models shots for transitions. Also, they used a lot of dive bars for the dive bars the bands played in. I’m not too sure about the music - it isn’t very punk or metal. Some of it has an edge, but a lot is pretty “indie” sounding. You know, sensitive singer-songwriter stuff. Stefaniuk does do his own singing and it looks like he wrote a lot of the songs. He might have done better with some help.

But not on the comedy. This was funny and satisfying. We’ve got a bunch more queued up.