THE TRIP TO SPAIN (Directed by Michael Winterbottom, 108 minutes, UK 2017) BY CHRISTOPHER MALENEY FILM CRITIC There are lots of movies about journeys and adventures, from The Great Race to Eurotrip, but not many of them capture the banalities of a road-trip quite as well as The Trip series. Originally a series on the BBC, the trilogy — The Trip, The Trip to Italy and now The Trip To Spain — have all been made into feature length movies and released abroad. Each presents a similar story of two friendly rivals, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon playing heightened versions […]
Jerry Lewis, The Dark Prince Of Zany, Dead @ 91
NEW YORK MAGAZINE: He grew up in showbiz, much of it Catskills-based, traveling with his mom and dad through the Borscht Belt. His future could be discerned in some of his first, juvenile routines: pantomiming to grand opera and other emotional recordings, his rubber face exaggerating every vocal quaver, enacting a counter narrative that was completely disruptive — yet indebted to the high art of his predecessors. This is a recognizable mode of being for a Jewish comedian, who’ll find a quick route to an audience’s heart as a clown, but secretly wants to be part of the world […]
CINEMA: The Day The Clown Died
Illustration by DREW FRIEDMAN SPY MAGAZINE: To artists and intellectuals, the twentieth century has posed no questions more vexing than these: First, can art make sense of the Holocaust? And second, why do the French love Jerry Lewis? The first question can’t really be answered, at least not in the space allotted here. As for the second, it’s my own opinion that the French have confused sloppy, uneven filmmaking with Godardian anti-formalism. Regardless, raising these two issues on the same page is not just a pointless exercise in non-sequitur. Because Jerry Lewis, like Elli Wiesel and Primo Levi before him […]
CINEMA: Trigger Warning
THE HITMAN’S BODYGUARD (dir. by Patrick Hughes, 118 minutes, USA, 2017) BY CHRISTOPHER MALENEY FILM CRITIC Following in the tradition of buddy-cop action comedies like 48 Hours or 16 Blocks, The Hitman’s Bodyguard is the story of a material witness who must be transported to the courthouse overcoming multiple obstacles and people trying to kill him before he gets there. Where this movie differs from those archetypal comedies is in its international scale, because, instead of a drug dealer or corrupt cop, the authority figure on trial is Gary Oldman’s Vladislav Dukhovich (a substitute for real life President of Belarus […]
CINEMA: Smarter Than The Average Bear
BRIGSBY BEAR (Directed by Dave McCary, 100 minutes, 2017, USA) BY CHRISTOPHER MALENEY If Philip K. Dick was alive today, he may well have ended up writing something a little like Brigsby Bear. The movie bears many of his hallmarks: a seeming post-collapse family unit; an obsession with obscure television; the utter distortion of seeming-reality; and the ultimate question of how society copes with aberrant individuals. However, this is not a Philip K. Dick movie, and the creative team never intended it to be. What we have instead is equal parts fish-out-of-water comedy and bildungsroman drama with a bizarre setup […]
CINEMA: Towering Infernal
THE DARK TOWER (directed by Nikolaj Arcel, 95 minutes, 2017, USA) BY CHRISTOPHER MALENEY FILM CRITIC When your plot is essentially invincible cowboy knights waging eternal war on Nyarlathotep in order to save the universe, you rely heavily on conventions to forge a narrative. But the point is to build strong characters with emotional depth to drive the conventions home and create meaningful drama. The Dark Tower smothers its most interesting ideas with cliches, and gives no reason for the audience to care about the characters’ struggles. Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey are both fine, but not special. It doesn’t […]
CINEMA: Uneasy Rider
JOHN POWERS, FRESH AIR CRITIC-AT-LARGE: A lot of comedians are funny. But only a handful have the genius to shape the comic terrain. One of them is Albert Brooks, who, in a cosmic bad joke, is probably best known to today’s audiences as the voice of Marlin in “Finding Nemo.” But back in the early ’70s, in a famous Esquire article and a series of legendary “Tonight Show” performances, Brooks set about gleefully exploding the schticks and traditions of standup comedy. Making comedy about comedy, he blazed the trail for such later masters of showbiz meta as Steve Martin, […]
Sam Shepard, The Last Of The Punk Rock Cowboys
VILLAGE VOICE: He was — even more as time went on — the living, breathing image of a cowboy: tall, preposterously thin, ruggedly handsome, and maximally taciturn unless words were absolutely necessary. The few brief times I encountered him in this century, I would always think for an instant that I was encountering an ambulatory myth — The American Cowboy — and not my longtime acquaintance, Sam Shepard, the playwright, that quirky constructor of hypnotically fascinating plays, who had really wanted to be a rock drummer and had somehow settled for being a world-class movie star instead, while continuing […]
CINEMA: Lost In Space
VALERIAN (Directed by Luc Besson, 137 min., USA, 2017) BY CHRISTOPHER MALENEY Going into Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, I really hoped it was going to be excellent. Though I have never read Valérian et Laureline, the French graphic novel that provides the material for the film, I was impressed by director Luc Besson’s credits (Leon: The Professional, The 5th Element, Taken, Lucy, etc.). I love science fiction movies and detective movies, so the trailers seemed to promise a film that very rarely gets made. I mean, space police, alien worlds, political intrigue, what’s not to love? […]
CINEMA: Bedtime For Gonzo
EDITOR’S NOTE: Hunter Thompson would have turned 80 today. NEW YORK TIMES: HUNTER S. THOMPSON, who has been lionized in two feature films, served as the model for a running character in “Doonesbury” and is the subject of enough doctoral dissertations to build a bonfire, now has a documentary devoted to him, “Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson,” by Alex Gibney. Thompson, who always seemed to keep one drug-crazed eye on posterity behind his ever-present shades, would surely be pleased but not surprised. But how to freshly document the life of a man who was his […]
CINEMA: On The War Path
WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (2017, directed by Matt Reeves, 140 min, U.S.) LOST IN PARIS (2016, directed by Dominique Abel & Fiona Gordon, 83 min, France/Belgium) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC I remember how perplexed Charlton Heston’s Taylor was back in 1968 when he made the realization that the planet he and his men landed on was ruled by apes. As the third of the rebooted sequels touches down in blockbuster season I find myself similarly flummoxed by glowing reception of War For the Planet of the Apes, a terribly turgid, self-serious, gloomfest. Have the critics all […]
CINEMA: Blackmail Is My Life
NEW YORK TIMES: Roger J. Stone Jr., the subject and star of “Get Me Roger Stone,” struts through this documentary with peacock feathers fully fanned. He’s first heard from a perch in some luxury digs, dressed in a tailored chalk-stripe suit with an olive martini at the ready. “My name is Roger Stone,” he says, “and I’m an agent provocateur.” The scene suggests James Bond cosplay, although it’s worth mentioning that the definition of an agent provocateur isn’t a supercool British fantasy spy but someone who persuades others to do wrong. So, who is Mr. Stone persuading? It’s an inevitable […]
SECOND OPINION: ‘Baby Driver’ Ain’t All That
WASHINGTON POST: Nominally, “Baby Driver” takes place in Atlanta, but it really exists in the imaginative world of Edgar Wright, the British filmmaker whose previous films — “Shaun of the Dead,” “Hot Fuzz,” “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” — brim with equal parts sophomoric humor, boyish kicks and grating self-satisfaction. This often clever but ultimately appalling piece of genre inversion has originality on its side: It’s a Tarantino-esque heist film re-conceived as a jukebox musical. But that novelty soon wears off as it becomes clear that it’s less written than reverse-engineered to live up to its title. It’s about […]