On the Big Screen: THE TRAITOR (Il traditore, 2019)

At age eighty, and after more than fifty years of filmmaking Marco Bellocchio is arguably the elder statesman of Italian cinema. In the 21st century he's become an intermittent chronicler of Italy's 20th century. His latest film is a companion piece with his 2009 Mussolini film Vincere and his 2003 Aldo Moro-Red Brigades picture Good Morning Night. The "traitor" of this one is Tommaso Buscetta (Pierfrancesco Pavino), Italy's answer to Joe Valachi: the first man who spilled the beans on organized crime in his country in a major way. This happened in the 1980s, after Buscetta, a career criminal and ex-con, decided to leave the business and move to Brazil, where he had done "business" before. Relatives who remain in Italy, including two sons, are killed in a Mafia war, while the Brazilian government accuses him of drug trafficking. The Brazilian government of the day didn't play around; they try to force a confession by threatening to throw Tommaso's wife (Maria Fernanda Candido) from a helicopter into the ocean. Whether he had anything to confess or not, Buscetta ends up back in Italy, where he decides that he has actual stuff to confess to crusading prosecutor and eventual martyr Giovanni Falcone (Fausto Russo Alesi). He becomes the star witness at the so-called Maxi Trial, which becomes the film's central spectacle. For non-Italians, the unusual trial procedures stand out, particularly allowing defendants to cross-examine witnesses. This makes possible dramatic confrontations between Buscetta and his former colleagues, who naturally call him a liar when they aren't heckling him as a cuckold from their cages in the rear of the vast courtroom. Buscetta holds his own in these encounters -- though he fares less well later when he lobs accusations at politicians who clearly can afford better lawyers than mafiosi can -- but he hardly can enjoy his victories when the bosses are convicted. He knows all too well that the Mafia's reach and memory are long. Exiled in an American witness-protection program, he retreats from New Hampshire to Colorado after a restaurant singer in a Santa costume serenades him in Sicilian dialect as if he were the coward Robert Ford. To the day of his peaceful demise he has to remain on guard, because he knows the Mafia like he knows himself....

Accustomed as U.S. audiences have become to expansive, seemingly comprehensive Scorsese-style chronicles of crime, Il Traditore can't help seeming incomplete no matter how well made and performed it mostly is. We're likely to become conscious of gaps or omissions as Buscetta clarifies his motives for informing. He tells Falcone and the judges at the Maxi Trial that he still considers himself a "man of honor" but that his peers, particular Salvatore Riina (Nicola Cali) were the true traitors to the traditional values of La Cosa Nostra by going all in on the heroin trade, regardless of its cost to their own families. Something can't help but seem missing when Buscetta repeatedly reiterates how Riina has ruined La Cosa Nostra, yet Riina has a relatively minimal presence in the film and we see very little of the "golden age" Buscetta idealizes -- which we definitely would see in a Scorsese epic -- before Riina took over. Rather than show this idealized past, Bellocchio challenges us to take Bruscetta's word for it or question his actual motivation. The director presents the past in non-linear fashion rather than giving us a conventional rise-and-fall narrative. The film's flashbacks aren't self-consciously narrated by Bruscetta, but arrive more like unfiltered memories, though one important reminiscence midway through the picture is interrupted and only taken up again at the very end.  An exception to the general rule is a flashback to the murder of Buscetta's sons, based on the testimony of a new informer who took part in the killing. This scene, and Buscetta's reaction to the testimony, suggest guilt over abandoning his children to almost certain death as the his ultimate motive, since his indifference to whether they joined him in Brazil belies his claim that his real family ultimately mattered more to him than the Mafia family. In the end, I think, Bellocchio is too careful to offer a perfect "Rosebud" explanation for Buscetta's "treason." He keeps a certain distance from his subject that is arguably European if only by comparison to Hollywood's insistence on definitive answers. Overall, I rather like Favino's performance for its comparative understatement. He makes Buscetta seem like a real person rather than an archetype. I don't know if Favino and Bellocchio have given us the "real" Buscetta -- alternate presentations seem possible -- but they did make me want to know more about the man, and that should count as some kind of success.

THE KING (2019)

He may not play the title character, but the true auteur of David Michôd's history play may well be its co-producer, co-writer and co-star, Joel Edgerton. The King is an innately audacious project: a do-over of the story of King Henry V of England, the subject not only of Shakespeare's play but of two highly acclaimed films made from the play: Laurence Olivier's of 1944 and Kenneth Branagh's of 1989. Edgerton, however, has assigned himself perhaps the most audacious task of all: a dramatic makeover of one of Shakespeare's most beloved characters, Sir John Falstaff. That puts Michôd and The King on a collision course with Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight on top of its other challenges. Edgerton himself may have written the film's most audacious line, in which his Falstaff compares the fate Michôd and Edgerton have planned for him with a more ignominious finish which is pretty much what Shakespeare gave the character, and declares the King version the better ending. Except that Edgerton to a great extend underplays the role, his conception of Falstaff is what you might imagine Marlon Brando doing with the character, albeit without that actor's dubious British accent. That is, Edgerton and Michôd make Falstaff the conscience if not the outright hero of their story. The fat knight's aversion to combat is here more a matter of principle than it is in the original, in keeping with the new film's overall antiwar stance. But then Falstaff is shown to be the author of the winning strategy of the Battle of Agincourt, staking his own life on it by leading a virtually-suicidal feint intended to goad the French enemy into an even-more suicidal cavalry charge against English longbowmen on muddy terrain. For what it's worth, this Falstaff is neglected for a time but never publicly shunned by his old pal Prince Hal (Timothee Chalamet), who later resents the fat knight's refusal to commit war crimes but respects his counsel too much to hold it long against him. To each his own Falstaff, of course; Welles, selectively following the letter of Shakespeare, still made the character largely a mirror of himself. If Michôd and Edgerton's Falstaff seems sometimes like a mirror-universe version of Shakespeare's, the core idea of their conception seems to be the traditional fool who can tell a king the truth -- something the writers feel that Henry V desperately needed to hear.

The King's Henry shares Falstaff's aversion to mass slaughter, but is dangerously sensitive to personal slights that threaten his standing as a new, young heir to a usurping father. That makes Henry even more dangerously susceptible to manipulation by war-seeking advisers, particularly the Poloniesque William Gascoigne (Sean Harris), who manufactures conspiracies against Henry to be blamed on France and expendable colleagues. It doesn't help matters that the French Dauphin (Robert Pattinson in a critic-proof performance as a complete idiot) wants to get into some kind of pissing contest with the new king, or at least wants to fart in his general direction. Falstaff and later the French princess Catherine (Lily-Rose Depp) act as Henry's conscience against the tide of war, constantly questioning the need for war and reinforcing his own instinctual skepticism, born of resentment of the belligerent ways of his father (Ben Mendelsohn). Henry's the type who prefers to settle things by single combat when possible, as he does with the archetypal Hotspur rather than see his own brother waste an army and his own life in a pointless battle. A nice touch in this film is the way it shows Henry becoming Hotspur, i.e. the son his father really wanted despite Hotspur's treason. Another touch is the way that character arc ends with a parody of the early Hotspur fight, as the Dauphin challenges Henry to single combat after the big battle -- Michôd acquits himself fairly well in the shadow of past auteurs, by the way, and Chalamet works hard in long, violent takes --  but can't put one armored foot in front of the other without sprawling into the mud. The film ends with Catherine replacing Falstaff as Henry's good conscience and his evil counselors done away with all too neatly. But while it's all too obvious when actors are mouthpieces for the writers' opinions rather than real characters, and the film is absolutely not to be taken seriously as history, The King is a nicely made piece of work and mostly quite entertaining, especially if you're a sucker for historical epics like I am. It's just too bad that as a self-conscious alternative to the Shakespearean "Henriad," it's doomed to comparison with greater films instead of facing judgment on its own terms. 

Happy New Year: 1917 (2019)

So what happened? Nothing, really -- if anyone was wondering. There was just a period where I didn't watch much worth writing about, or else I found myself having nothing I thought worth writing about the things I saw. The turn of the year usually encourages increased productivity, however, and by then I had seen some things I wanted to write about. It then became a matter of resuming the old habit. Finally getting back to a movie theater after a few months provided the occasion, and from here I'll backtrack a little to cover some stuff I saw less recently. Where better to start, though, then more than a century in the past?...

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Now that history has taken World War I beyond living memory, it finally starts to feel like just another war. For a time, it seemed like it actually might be the war to end all war, because it seemed to be the one that discredited war as a concept. It stood for futility and tragic stupidity, an indictment of leaders military and political alike. But the most recent Great War movies -- at least in English -- have been far less bitter about the conflict than the classic familiar takes on the subject. Peter Jackson's documentary They Shall Not Grow Old and Sam Mendes' new film are inspired by ancestral memories on the grunt level, where the war was perceived, so it seems, as just another job of work. There is little in either film of the indignation characteristic of Great War movies going back at least to All Quiet on the Western Front and at least as far forward as Gallipoli. In fact, 1917 is to some extent Gallipoli with a happy ending. If that exaggerates things slightly, it's still fair to say that neither the Mendes nor the Jackson film is explicitly an antiwar film, as nearly all World War I movies were implicitly for a long time. Saying this isn't an indictment, only an observation of a change in tone that comes with a change in perspective.

It may exaggerate things even more to call 1917 World War I as a video game. It certainly will look that way to some people, but the effort by Mendes and cinematographer Roger Deakins to make their film look like a handful of long takes -- however obvious the cutting points actually are -- really seems rooted in an engagement with past war films. All Quiet remains arguably the most indelible of Great War films because of Lewis Milestone's epic horizontal tracking shots of advancing troops mowed down by machine gun fire, while Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory is well remembered for its lengthy tracking shots in the trenches and on the battlefield. 1917 may not be so much an attempt to top these films but a resort to a common cinematic language that somehow seems suited to the subject. Film buffs associate that war in particular with long takes and tracking shots, so if Mendes was going to make a film about that war, this was the way to make it feel especially like a World War I movie -- at least superficially.

Watching 1917, I had the obscure thought that Mendes and Deakins would have been ideal adapters of the work of Leonard H. Nason, an unsung author whose 1920s pulp stories of American soldiers blundering their way across the western front capture something of the chaos of war with considerable black or at least hard-boiled comedy. Instead, of course, Mendes and co-writer Krysty Winston-Cairns took inspiration from tales told by Mendes' grandfather. Whether grandpa told the future director a tale with a Private Ryan-style "mission is a man" hook, however, I don't know. The idea is that two soldiers (Dean-Charles Chapman and George McKay) must traverse dangerous terrain on foot in order to prevent a sure-to-fail attack that will jeopardize the life of the brother of one of the protagonists. Their journey inevitably is full of incidents, and as I hinted earlier, their mission ultimately is a success by the narrowest of margins. Your archetypal World War I movie probably would have ended differently, but 1917 plays out, to mix historical metaphors, like an Apocalypse Now that finds the colonel at the end of the long trail a surprisingly reasonable man. Crossing historic boundaries to make that comparison feels justified because 1917 is as much a tour de force for Deakins as the Coppola film was for Vittorio Storaro. The beloved cinematographer not only gives you your standard Great War mudscape, but also a wide range of settings permitting a more vivid and sometimes lurid palette of colors than we might expect from the archetypically monochrome imagery of that conflict. Whatever you think about the story -- which comes with a twist or two and may actually depend on our expectations for Great War films to maintain suspense -- 1917 is a treat to look at, as long as your definition of "treat" includes lots of moldering corpses. The horrors of war are plainly there to see, but at this point in movie history Mendes feels little need to editorialize over them. That certainly doesn't make this a pro-war film, but longtime movie fans will feel a difference from earlier Great War pictures, whatever they make of it. 1917 feels more like an exercise in style for its own sake, both because of its stunt quality and because the characters aren't really that interesting, than its famous precursors, but I think it'll be safe to say that it won't make anyone wish they could have their own World War I adventure, except perhaps in the comfort of their game room.

On the Big Screen: THE LIGHTHOUSE (2019)

The sophomore jinx has hit Robert Eggers, whose feature-film debut was the rightly-acclaimed The Witch from 2015. His new film is another piece of period Americana, this time taking place in 19th century New England. Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) and his new assistant Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson) arrive on an island for a four-week stint as keepers of its lighthouse. Wake is a vulgar, flatulent, superstitious drunk who drives Winslow relentlessly and tries to goad the apparent teetotaler into imbibing with him at dinnertime. On top of that, he forbids Winslow from entering the light of the lighthouse itself. Ephraim has issues of his own. A scrimshaw mermaid inspires him to masturbate frequently, while one particular seagull seems to make a point of getting in his way all the time. He's warned not to harm the bird -- Wake believes that seagulls harbor the souls of drowned sailors -- but the enraged Winslow finally takes the gull in hand and dashes him to pieces on a rock. As if by coincidence, a severe storm indefinitely delays the arrival of their replacements. If Wake had been somewhat mad before, Winslow quickly catches up with him....

The Lighthouse has no real subject other than madness, and madness as an end unto itself isn't firm ground to plant a film on. While in The Witch Eggers arguably was saying something about Puritanism, patriarchy, family, etc., in his new film the director (co-writing with his brother) seems more interested in evoking mood or genre. It may be wrong to ask what the point is, but viewers can hardly help doing so. The real problem may be that, at 110 minutes, the film is too long for its own good. The length tempts the Eggers brothers into too many self-indulgent twists as their characters struggle for dominance and deteriorate further into insanity. At one moment Wake is challenging Winslow's (and our) sense of reality by contradicting a version of recent events that we saw play out on screen as if it were objective truth. Not long afterward, Winslow has beaten Wake into such canine submission that he will walk, on a leash, into an open grave. But then Wake recalls himself and charges back inside for a perhaps-climactic attack. By this point both men have become so repellent that no rooting interest in either man is likely. No rooting interest is strictly necessary, to be fair, but by this point most viewers have probably lost hope at getting to the bottom of the whole situation. There seems to be no point to the exercise, or to the excellent black-and-white cinematography and production design, other than to have Dafoe and Pattinson act crazy. Dafoe is an old hand at this, but more eyes will be on Pattinson, whom we find at a pivotal point in his career. He is our next cinematic Batman, and by coincidence will have a high-profile role in Christopher Nolan's next film. By two years from now the ghost of Edward Cullen may be exorcised for good and Pattinson's real movie-star career will have begun. Will he be a respected actor by then? Some may argue that his work for David Cronenberg already should have earned him respect, but for most people the jury is still out or the memory of Twilight is still too strong. Can we see the future Pattinson here? He has deglamorized himself with an old-school moustache, several layers of grime and a slightly erratic character voice, while what might ungenerously have been called cow eyes a few years back are now capable of a penetrating gaze. Beyond that, it's hard to judge his interpretation of a character of whom his own author seems to lack a clear conception. We learn that Ephraim Winslow isn't what he initially introduced himself as, and the pressures of his situation further assail his sense of self, but neither Pattinson nor the Eggers brothers ultimately can give him the kind of empathetic reality that even characters in psychological horror films require. The problem isn't that we don't care what happens to him, but that we lose interest in the all too-protracted process.

While Eggers fails as a writer this time, he retains a strong directorial eye. Some of the best scenes are relatively simple but well-shot bits of Winslow struggling through his daily chores. If The Lighthouse feels ungrounded in other respects, it does feel grounded in a particular time and place. Strange as it may be to say, while panning this film I left it with the feeling that Eggers, with his firm sense of period and a visceral sensibility, might be the person to bring Cormac McCarthy's horrific western epic Blood Meridian to the screen. In other words, Lighthouse isn't the sort of disaster that exposes its auteur as some sort of fraud or one-trick pony. Instead, it's a failure that leaves much of Eggers' potential as a filmmaker intact, while leaving us hoping he'll find more critical collaborators next time.

On the Big Screen: JOKER (2019)

This year's winner of the Golden Lion of Venice, directed by the maker of the Hangover films, probably impressed festival judges more as an homage to Martin Scorsese than as anything else. Its acknowledgment of King of Comedy is most obvious, down to the role-reversal stunt casting of Rupert Pupkin himself, Robert De Niro, as the late night talk show host on whose show the current film's title character (Joaquin Phoenix) longs to appear. But Todd Phillips' Joker is as much Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle as he is Rupert Pupkin, ironically beginning his career of murder as a sort of vigilante and lurking at the fringes of a political movement. The film is even set in a Scorsesean epoch, sometime in the 1970s or 1980s. It's less about the DC Universe, though the protagonist's fate is linked to that of Bruce Wayne's family, than it is about society in decline, as seen in the Seventies or today. Its ultimate concern, however, is with the perception of society and people in general as unbearably cruel and whether that perception is a rational or at least comprehensible response to verifiable injustice or an irrational reaction of hopeless, useless people. Failure to distinguish between these perceptions, and the fact that proto-Joker Arthur Fleck is presented as a pathetic victim for the first half of the film, leads some to worry that moviegoers will take the new Joker as a role model to emulate, even though he proves to be a profoundly sick and fundamentally vicious individual who disavows politics and any idea of justice. People may well empathize with Fleck early on, but the star and filmmakers strive to alienate audiences from the protagonist and appear to succeed. Their success, however, depends on an assumption that audiences are rational, and between the belief that society is made up mostly of bullies and the belief that life is just a big joke, maybe that assumption can't be taken for granted.

So here is a new Joker, little more than a decade after Heath Ledger's instantly-legendary portrayal, thirty years removed from Jack Nicholson's once-definitive performance, and not much further removed from Alan Moore's Joker-origin graphic novel The Killing Joke. I don't notice any complaints about yet another Joker reboot, perhaps because Jared Leto's interpretation in Suicide Squad is viewed as a failure. The idea, encouraged by Ledger's telling multiple tales in The Dark Knight, that there never can be a definitive origin story, may help build audience tolerance for each new attempt. There's more creative license to mold a Joker for any given historic moment than there is for comparatively canonical comics characters, and Warner Bros' retreat from their commitment to a universal continuity uniting all DC films since the catastrophe of Justice League created an opportunity for Phillips and his collaborators to do their own thing even as Matt Reeves works on the latest reboot of Batman and his rogues' gallery. All that being said, Joker isn't especially original in its approach. It echoes some of the pathos of The Killing Joke, without committing to Moore's "one bad day" account of the origin, while Phoenix's interpretation of the character is very reminiscent of his titanic performance in Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master, stripped of that character's redemptive cynicism. What the creators do well is to invite empathy for the downtrodden, bullied Fleck until showing the audience that Fleck himself is incapable of empathy. The crucial moment that makes him a criminal comes when Fleck becomes aware of his mother's belief that billionaire Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen) is Arthur's father. Fleck visits Wayne Manor, only to learn that his mother (Frances Conroy) was insane, delusional and not his birth mother. After a visit to Arkham State Hospital confirms Alfred the butler's story, Arthur kills his mom and becomes a full-time murderer. I can't imagine anyone cheering for Joker after this point, though I guess you never can tell about some people.

Joker boasts impressive cinematography by Lawrence Sher, an appropriately ominous score by Hildur Guðnadóttir and plenty of Scorsesean shots by the admiring director. It grows increasingly horrific as it plumbs deeper into the protagonist's unmedicated madness, but bogs down in the homestretch with an overlong confrontation on DeNiro's show, followed by the common problem of multiple endings. The film could have ended neatly with Phoenix dancing ecstatically amid scenes of fire and riot, but presses on to a final chat between an imprisoned Joker and a psychologist. This bit may exist only because Phillips wanted a gag with Joker leaving bloody footprints in a hallway, but the final image of security chasing Joker through the halls was too reminiscent of old cartoons for its own good. Maybe that was the desired effect, but it's a weak finish for a film that otherwise hits most of the notes it aims for. Heath Ledger probably will remain the definitive Joker for our time, but Joaquin Phoenix demonstrates that the Clown Prince of Crime is the sort of folkloric character that many actors can share.

On the Big Screen: ONCE UPON A TIME ... IN HOLLYWOOD (2019)

The ninth film by Quentin Tarantino has become slightly controversial for a bit of historic revisionism. It appears to assert that Bruce Lee was not the greatest fighting machine ever to live, but rather more of a pretentious braggart than most who knew him recall him being. In the film, stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) fights Lee (Mike Moh) to at least a standstill after throwing the martial-arts master into the side of a car, having caught him in mid-flying kick. This brawl, provoked by Lee claiming that he could beat "Cassius Clay" in a fight, gets Booth blacklisted as a stuntman, forcing him to work full-time as a chauffeur, handyman and overall stooge for Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), the actor for whom Cliff doubled on the western series Bounty Law. But before we get too deep into the main story of the picture, let's linger on the Bruce Lee scene. It's interesting that, while Booth is a co-protagonist of the movie, Tarantino doesn't make him the obvious good guy of the scene by having him, unlike Lee, call Muhammad Ali by what was then his proper name. The writer-director shows impressive discipline here, since by showing Hollywood 1969 from the point of view of two white male has-beens, he adopts a reactionary perspective that's not necessarily his own. There's no objective corrective to Booth's implicit disdain for Lee's kung fu prowess, for instance, nor for Dalton's disdain for spaghetti westerns or both character's contempt for hippies. Tellingly, Hollywood is the first Tarantino film in almost forever with no participation whatsoever by Samuel L. Jackson, whose footnote-narrator function in Inglourious Basterds is taken over by Kurt Russell, who also has an onscreen role as the stunt coordinator who blacklists Booth. It actually surprises me that people don't think of Hollywood as a Trumpian film, though I have no idea whether Tarantino sympathizes to any extent for the current President or his agenda. This is a film which, like Basterds, rewrites history on the assumption that history is already changed by the existence of the auteur's creations, though the extent to which history is rewritten is left unclear at the end.

Why Tarantino stops where and when he does no doubt means something, but let's stick with Bruce Lee a bit more. In his pretentious speech to the Green Hornet stuntmen, Lee complains that martial-arts exhibitions are mere stylized fakery compared to the genuine mortal combat in the boxing ring. While Tarantino's Lee is wrong to say that boxers like Ali and Sonny Liston literally are trying to kill each other, his distinction between fakery and reality sounds like a thematic statement for the film as a whole. This seems most apparent in the central section of the film, which intercuts between Dalton's struggles on the set of the Lancer show, where he plays a villain, and Booth's visit to the Spahn Movie Ranch, where old-timer George Spahn (Bruce Dern) is held a virtual prisoner by the Manson Family. A hungover Dalton suffers some existential lunchtime agony after blowing his lines a couple of times, but nails his last scene of the day. Oddly, while Tarantino has shown us clips of Bounty Law and other Dalton TV appearances in a realistic pastiche of Sixties techniques, he films the Lancer shoot with no regard for realism, framing the action to fill the widescreen and magnify the moment to suit its presumed significance for Dalton's career. Meanwhile, Booth rides into a scene of real menace, a lone hero against a potential mob (albeit without its leader; Manson himself only appears once in the picture). The sense of danger is real and strong, and yet it's fair to say that this scene above all establishes Hollywood as Tarantino's third consecutive western, even if it also serves as a bookend companion to Basterds bracketing the two more obvious westerns, Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight. In any event, Booth seems to embody a reality principle -- he's a real-life killer as both a war hero and the reputed murderer of his wife -- while Dalton represents a fantasy TV world. By establishing Dalton as the next-door neighbor of Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), Tarantino seems to be setting up the ultimate intrusion of lethal reality into the TV star's fantasy world by giving Dalton a front-row seat to Tate's murder. It should be clear by now, however, that Tarantino plays by his own rules, but we still need to find the point of his doing so this time.

So, to spoil the ending a month after the film's release, Dalton's mere existence as a drunken TV cowboy diverts the Manson killers from their original mission. After he berates them for stalling their noisy car outside his house, the Mansonites decide that Dalton is a more fitting target since he and his generation of TV stars taught the hippie generation to kill. Their attack on chez Dalton ends in happy disaster thanks to the presence of an acid-addled Booth and his pitbull buddy, though Dalton himself gets to carry out the coup de grace with a flamethrower left over from one of his movie projects. His reward is to be admitted into the presence of Sharon Tate and her un-doomed friends, while the wounded Booth is taken to a hospital. During the first half of the film, Tate has been a rising star while Dalton has struggled to arrest his decline. While they are next-door neighbors, Dalton actually sees Tate and Roman Polanski for the first time on the February 1969 day that takes up the film's first act. It's like having a version of A Star is Born where the falling and rising stars actually don't know each other. Unlike the hippies who so bother Dalton and Booth, Tate is a benign embodiment of the youth movement that's driving the likes of Dalton out of the spotlight. Tarantino finally finds an artistic use for his foot fetish by having Tate kick off her shoes while watching her performance in The Wrecking Crew on the big screen, linking her with the barefoot girls who both tempt and repel the middle-aged protagonists. I'm not much younger than Tarantino so I can testify to the scandalous symbolic power of bare feet in this period, even if it isn't something the protagonists themselves comment on. In her idealized form here, Tate represents a reconciliation of youth with old Hollywood. By changing history to rescue Tate, Dalton reconciles old Hollywood with now-grateful youth on a fantasy level, after gratifying a darker fantasy by helping exterminate less-grateful youth. Tarantino presumably depends on us knowing that all of this was not to be, and assumes that he can indulge in this fakery precisely because it's only a movie. It's the sort of fantasy men like Dalton and Booth might have more than it is Quentin Tarantino's own fantasy, and while Kurt Russell occasionally speaks up to correct Dalton's misstatements, this final fantasy is allowed to stand, presumably out of sympathy for the Daltons of real life who continued to decline -- unless they lived long enough to be embraced by Tarantino himself. The director has given us not an unreliable narrator but an unreliable narrative or an unreliable experience of how things might have been had some people had their way, or if the world worked the way they presumed it would.

Whether the exercise was worth the effort, posterity will judge. That being said, Hollywood boasts what may be Leonardo DiCaprio's greatest performance to date, a total immersion into a character to a point, once Dalton adopts a new hairstyle, where the star almost ceases to be recognizable. Playing a more conventional hero type, Pitt isn't as impressive but is still convincing as a man's man of the time. Overall, the film's a dense audio-visual collage combining a wide range of soundbites with detailed recreations of the 1969 cityscape with inevitable echoes of Zabriskie Point, while the violent climax owes something, at least, to the conclusion of Last House on the Left, another attempted exorcism of violent youth. While it's a long film, in some ways it feels less Tarantinian than previous films, with fewer digressive conversations, though Rick Dalton's attempt to describe the novel Ride a Wild Bronco (is it real???) to a precocious child actor is a poignant moment. A day after watching it, I'm not sure how I'd rank Hollywood in the Tarantino canon, or among films in general. Whether it's a point in its favor or not, this one, more than the others, feels like one that needs to be seen more than once to be fully understood or appreciated -- yet I could understand people not wanting to give it that extra time. It's definitely a more ambiguous film than its apparent popularity indicates, and I expect that discussions of it will get more interesting as the momentary controversies subside.

SPIDER-MAN: FAR FROM HOME (2019) in SPOILERVISION

Most of the way, Jon Watts' sequel to Spider-Man: Homecoming feels like an appropriately comic epilogue to the last two Avengers movies. It feels true to the spirit of Marvel Comics to treat with levity what so shortly before had seemed the ultimate disaster or tragedy. So here we get a lot of riffs on the the comical complications of the event now known as "the blip," the five-year absence of half the people of Earth, followed by their very abrupt return. It seems like almost everyone in Peter Parker's science school suffered this fate, so all the characters we met in the last film look no more than two years older now. Far From Home leans even more toward teen comedy than Homecoming did, using a class trip to Europe as its framework like a special episode of an old sitcom. Writers spend so much time developing the teen plot -- in short, Peter (Tom Holland) wants to declare his love for MJ (Zendaya) but best bud Ned (Jacob Batalon) wants them to be bachelor buddies in Europe until he almost accidentally falls for Betty Brant (Angourie Rice), while suddenly-grown Brad (Remy Hill) has his own eyes set on MJ and Flash Thompson (Tony Revolori) remains a conceited jerk. On top of that you have two comical chaperones, and on the side there's a budding romance between longtime Stark henchman Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) and Peter's frisky Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) There's so much of this early on, once we get past a prologue establishing the film's superhero credentials, that the standard supervillain plot feels secondary for quite a while. It doesn't help the supervillain plot that comics book already know what to expect from the beginning. The film, however, introduces Quentin Beck (Jake Gyllenhaal), who acquires the nickname "Mysterio" from European TV, as a hero from an alternate universe who stands as Earth's only hope, in the apparently extended absence of most of the Avengers, against a quartet of rampaging elemental creatures appearing in different parts of the world. The only familiar hero Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) can lay hands on is Spidey, who finds this new crisis an unwelcome complication of his European plans but feels obliged to carry on Tony Stark's legacy. The comic book fans know Mysterio is a villain and are bound to grow impatient for the other shoe to drop as Beck befriends Peter and becomes a kind of new mentor for the young hero. The teen stuff is actually better written and definitely funnier, even if it makes Far From Home feel more like an Archie movie than a Marvel one.

The shoe finally drops once Peter is convinced that Beck is a worthier successor to Stark than he could be. He gives Beck the precious, all-powerful EDITH glasses bequeathed him by Stark, which is what Mysterio was after all along. Comics fans know the character as an illusionist and will have expected the elemental monsters to be fake. They are, in fact, a collective project, as Quentin Beck is but the leader of a clique of disgruntled former Stark Industries employees who have combined their talents to create illusions with teeth, holograms with drone air support adding up to genuine destructive power. The idea seems to be to make Mysterio Earth's greatest hero in a way that will allow all the clique to reap benefits in some corrupt way. To succeed, they need to kill the ever-suspicious Fury, but Beck is willing to let Peter live his life until Peter (and MJ) discover the truth about the elemental attacks. Now both of them, and Ned and Betty, are in mortal peril as well. While the idea of a gang of working stiffs, albeit in a higher pay grade, echoes the Vulture's gang in Homecoming, Far From Home raises the stakes from the previous film's admirably modest level as Mysterio orchestrates a mass-destruction attack on London, hoping to reinforce his heroic reputation by thwarting it after killing off anyone who may know too much. This adds up to an overlong, arguably incoherent climactic battle that has Spidey fighting drones, illusions and finally Beck himself while Happy Hogan and the primary school kids fight off drones in the Tower of London.

Gyllenhaal simply lacks the combo of charisma and gravitas Michael Keaton gave the vulture, and while the climactic fight is much busier than the climax of Homecoming it's not really an improvement. That Mysterio proves to be a one-and-done villain may also prove that neither the writers nor the actor were never very invested in the character, though he does get in a parting shot that will have ramifications for any further sequel. The weak villain condemns Far From Home to be an inferior film to Homecoming, unless you judge superhero films exclusively by the scale of action, but the ensemble of young actors remain likable enough to make their probable return still a welcome one. Holland is still a fine, easily-flustered Spidey and the other kids complement him well. Jackson is a more irascible Fury than we've seen in a while --  there's an explanation for this in the post-credits scene -- while Favreau, who goes back to the beginning of the MCU, makes a more plausible quasi-father figure for Peter. Overall, Far From Home isn't great, but thanks to most of the cast, it's hard to really dislike it.

DARK PHOENIX (2019) in SPOILERVISION

One problem with the modern superhero film cycle is that most superhero comics stories are deemed too small for the big screen. Only existential crises, ideally for both our heroes and the world, are thought to justify movies' big budgets. Films like Spider-Man: Homecoming, in which the hero thwarts a gang of thieves, are the exception. More typical was Zack Snyder's decision to get on with "The Death of Superman" in only his second film using the venerable character. So it is with the slightly less venerable Jean Grey, a charter member of the Uncanny X-Men dating back to 1963. To judge from the movies, the only reason to put the erstwhile Marvel Girl on film is to retell Chris Claremont's long story arc in which Jean survives a space disaster and becomes a being of godlike power. You wouldn't know from the movies, however, that Claremont took more than thirty issues of the X-Men comic to get Jean to the point where, having undergone mental and emotional manipulation while increasingly craving to manifest her power, she becomes Dark Phoenix and threatens the entire civilized universe. Filmmakers -- or to be specific, writer Simon Kinberg -- prefer to cut to the chase and get Jean from Phoenix to Dark Phoenix as soon as possible. Interestingly, though, Kinberg, making his second try with the material and now directing as well, tries to steer clear of the familiar "power corrupts" trope that has made the Dark Phoenix Saga a template for so many more comics over the last forty years. That's not to say that he steers clear of cliche entirely, however.

To review, we're in the new reality created by Days of Future Past, the second film with the current core cast of James McAvoy (as Charles Xavier), Michael Fassbender (as Magneto), Jennifer Lawrence (as Raven aka Mystique) and Nicholas Hoult (as Hank "Beast" McCoy). The new continuity has reached the year 1992, eight years prior to the events and release date of the original X-Men movie, but the four principal actors appear to have aged little over the decades. In the early scenes we get the best illustration yet of how reality has altered in mutants' favor. In a world where there are, to our knowledge, no non-mutant heroes (depending on how you classify Deadpool), the X-Men are the only game in town when a U.S. space shuttle gets in trouble in orbit. The President of the United States can call for help on the X-Phone, and Charles Xavier will answer. And when the X-Men return, their mission accomplished, they're acclaimed as world heroes. Xavier in particular is lionized and decorated by the government, and yet somehow the universe itself recognizes that there's something wrong with this picture. When Jean (Sophie Turner), almost sacrificing her life to save the shuttle crew, becomes possessed by primal cosmic energies she can hardly control, it's as if the cosmos has risen in rebellion against the historic anomaly and to punish Charles for some fundamental hubris.

The nature of Xavier's hubris will be familiar to any regular viewer of superhero TV shows. I really should have known what was coming when the film opened with a flashback to Jean as a little girl arguing with her parents over the car radio and unconsciously manifesting telekinesis moments before a fatal wreck. We cut to Charles taking Jean in at his mansion, but the rest of the film will fill in crucial gaps. In the present, Jean will discover that her father survived the accident. From him, she'll learn that Dad basically gave her up to Charles Xavier, wanting nothing more to do with her after his wife's death. The film seems unclear on which is the worse sin: the father's abandonment of his daughter or the surrogate father's lie. The fatal combination of the two puts poor Jean into a lethal rage that at long last liberates Jennifer Lawrence from a series that long ago had stopped offering her anything but money.

What would you do if you suddenly had immense but uncontrollable power and you killed somebody? Of course, you'd go look up Magneto, since it was long ago decided that you can't have an X-Men film without their on-again, off-again nemesis. Good ol' Eric has gathered a bunch of mutants in some shantytown, where he warily welcomes the wandering, bloodstained Jean. The girl won't answer when asked whose blood that is, but Magneto will find out soon enough. Both he and Hank McCoy had old, strong feelings for Raven, so when Beast spills the beans, after Jean has skedaddled, they decide to take revenge, while the rest of the X-Men resolve to stop them.

So far so meh, but at least it's easily better than the previous mutant movie, X-Men Apocalypse. Unfortunately, the new film promptly repeats the old film's fatal mistake by introducing an utterly boring big bad. To be accurate, this character first appears earlier in the picture, but it's not until she encounters an increasingly frightened and angry Jean that we realize how bad she's going to be. If you think Jennifer Lawrence had been phoning in her mutant performances recently, wait until you see how Jessica Chastain does it. She sends hers by snail-mail. Long story short, she's an evil alien who leads an expeditionary force of superpowered refugees from a world previously destroyed by the entity that now possesses Jean Grey. These aliens hope to harness the "Phoenix" power to build a new world -- ideally, as it develops, on the corpse of our world. If they can get the disgruntled Grey to help out, fine. If not, they have ways of taking her power for themselves. In a way, I suppose, Chastain aims for actorly authenticity. Tasked with playing an emotionless alien, she pretty much nails it. The problem is, you start to believe that the actress herself is an emotionless alien, and the suspicion is no tribute to her work. She and her apparently infinite supply of soldiers have no interesting characteristics whatsoever. Worse, her character botches the master plan by lapsing into blatant villain dialogue in Charles Xavier's hearing at the moment when she's convinced Jean to surrender her power. Feeling the need to tell Charles that she's going to kill all humans, so there, pretty much seals the aliens' fate, though we still have to sit through an initially exciting but ultimately interminable-seeming fight aboard a speeding train before the final scene between Jean and the alien queen....

Probably only long-form television could do justice to Claremont's original stories, though there, too, creative license would be inevitable. Jean Grey's power-drunkenness is a slow burn that only accelerates late in the game when she falls under the influence of the Hellfire Club -- who aren't available for the Dark Phoenix movie because they'd been used back in the Sixties-set X-Men: First Class. By no means do I argue that the Hellfire Club is essential to telling the story effectively, but a telling truer to the spirit of the original would allow time for storylines like theirs to play out. You really need the X-Men to be more regular presences in your entertainment life, instead of showing up every three years or so, for Jean's story to have anything like the impact the comics did. Doing the whole arc in two hours is hopeless, and the emotions and motivations Kinberg substitutes for the originals don't help matters. A collective failure of acting helps even less. Nobody here does their best work for the franchise with the arguable exception of Tye Sheridan's Cyclops, whose best moment is an unexpected but appreciated f-bomb threat to Magneto, proof of feelings for Jean that in comics had nearly forty years of publication time to develop by the time of the Dark Phoenix saga. As Jean, Sophie Turner seems more assured than in Apocalypse, but there's only so much she can do with the script's high-school psychoanalysis of her character, and there's nothing she can do with the void that Chastain becomes. In the film's favor, most of the characters are at least likable -- and I'll at least acknowledge that they want Magneto to be likable this time. While the main action scene goes on far too long, and the climactic confrontation includes way to many swirly lights, at times Kinberg and editor Lee Smith give the fight scenes a good punchy quality when speed is of the essence. Hans Zimmer's music is okay, I guess. That may not sound like much, but it's still better than Apocalypse, though early box-office reports indicate that that film turned people off a franchise that most now realize is moribund. Inevitably the X-Men will fall under the control of Marvel Studios following Disney's takeover of Twentieth Century-Fox. That probably means that somewhere down the line there will be more and better mutant films -- as long as Marvel can resist the very temptation their comics line planted in people's minds long ago.

AVENGERS: ENDGAME (2019) in SPOILERVISION

I laughed when the title of the sequel to Avengers: Infinity War was announced last year. "Endgame" is one of those cliche titles you see everywhere. Nearly every genre show has an "Endgame" episode. It seemed almost hilariously unimaginative of Marvel Studios to use it now. But while that made me laugh months ago, the surprising thing about the actual film is how consistently funny it is. I really shouldn't have been surprised, since humor has been crucial to the more-than-decade-long success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. There seemed to be no room for comedy after the previous film, which saw half the life of the universe, if not 50% of all Marvel superheroes, snuffed out with a snap of Thanos' fingers. Yet there is such a thing as gallows humor, and there's always a new normal with room for jokes. That's how some people (or whatever Rocket is) cope with situations, after all. The really surprising thing about this is that the comedy star of the picture turns out to be Mark Ruffalo as The Incredible Hulk. In what may be his last turn in the role, Ruffalo gets to perform the popular variation of the character in which Ol' Greenskin has Bruce Banner's brain. It's alarming how at ease Ruffalo makes the mighty monster, compared to the pouty, childish Hulk of Thor: Ragnaraok and the default rage mode. This Hulk always has time to pose for selfies with fans -- for there are still fans in this traumatized world -- and, compared to normal, seems almost imperturbable, even when dealing with theoretical science over even Banner's head. There's a wonderful scene in which this new Hulk time-travels to 2012 New York during the climactic battle of the original Avengers film. In order to be inconspicuous on his mission (see below), he's advised to behave in his old self's smashing manner. The well-meaning yet hopelessly halfhearted way in which he goes about lazily growling and lackadaisically wrecking a car is, as of now, my favorite scene in the picture.

The Russo brothers and their writing partners, Stephen McFeely and Christopher Markus, take an actually daring approach to the story, getting a much-anticipated catharsis out of the way about 30 minutes into the film when Thor (I shouldn't have to identify the actors by now) decapitates Thanos on the latter's retirement planet. The problem is, killing Thanos doesn't solve anything, since he'd already destroyed his Infinity Stones, making a reversal of his infamous snap impossible. From this empty bit of avenging, the film jumps forward five years to a world -- not to mention a universe, as new arrival Captain Marvel reminds us -- barely hanging on. Some of our heroes aren't even doing that. Thor has lapsed into drunken slackerdom, hanging out at New Asgard with some of his Ragnarok buddies while Valkyrie does most of the real work without anyone asking where she was when Thanos attacked the refugee ship in the last picture. Hawkeye, having lost his entire family, goes full vigilante on a global killing tour, less convinced than ever of some people's right to live. Only Tony Stark (along with the Hulk) seems better off, having given up and settled down to have a kid with Pepper Potts. Yet when Ant-Man gets randomly released from his post-credits predicament from last year, he intuits a solution from the fact that only a few hours passed by for him in the Quantum Realm while years went by outside. It takes a while to convince Stark, who worries that changing the recent past might wipe out his daughter, but once he's on board the film becomes Avengers: Timeheist -- an excuse for a valedictory tour of past MCU moments in search of Infinity Stones to preempt Thanos' seizure of them. While probably no one really wanted to revisit Thor: The Dark World, that mission gives Rene Russo an opportunity to make one of this film's many, many encore appearances by its supporting players. This middle act is more caper film than action picture, but comes to a dark climax as one team of heroes arrives at that planet where the Red Skull curates the Soul Gem, which as ever requires a love sacrifice. This results in a surprise exit from the franchise, but the sacrifice may be for naught. Thanks to a big gimme -- the idea that past evil Nebula can tap into the memories of her good future self, Thanos circa 2014 is tipped off to his future and endeavors to change some details. Thwarted then, he takes the battle to the present, only to be faced with an almost entirely replenished superhero army, plus the game-changing power of Captain Marvel. Ultimately, though, the only way to keep the Infinity Gauntlet away from Thanos is to use it against him, and as Hulk experienced using it to reverse the Snap, it would very likely prove fatal for a human to wield it.

Endgame is a fine film but lacks the relentless tension of Infinity War and barely makes it past the three-hour mark with more endings than The Return of the King, but its indulgent length feels earned. The battles aren't as ambitious or dramatic as in the previous picture, though yet again we have a strangely sexist moment when all the female heroes converge on one location for no special reason apart perhaps for the convenience of GIF makers. I suspect, however, that many people will like it more than its predecessor simply for the feels, both happy and sad. For the most part, the sequel exemplifies Marvel Studios' commitment to quality control in pursuit of a consistent defining tone. It quite self-consciously marks the end of an era, as half the original Avengers are exiting the franchise, but also takes time to point toward new directions: Thor teaming with the Guardians of the Galaxy, Sam Wilson as Captain America, etc. It is not the end some fatigued critics may have hoped for, but it does at least feel like the end of a chapter. The one-two punch of Infinity War and Endgame puts an exclamation point on what so far has been (with a handful of exceptions) an uncannily consistent run of epic entertainment.

SHAZAM! (2019) in SPOILERVISION

Pedantic genre fans probably have told you already about the convoluted publishing history of the protagonist of  David F. Sandberg's film and how another film's title should have been his. I'll limit myself to telling you that once upon a time, long long ago, the dude in the red costume with the lightning bolt was the most popular of all superheroes, but what to do with him in modern times has challenged DC Comics, his current publisher, for nearly half a century. There's been an effort to have it both ways with "the big red cheese," preserving him as an embodiment of a more innocent era of comics publishing and fandom, in part because co-creator C.C. Beck was a reactionary when it came to modernizing superheroes, but at the same time making him something of a laughingstock precisely for being the innocent among heroes. The occasional efforts to make him and his stories more complex generally haven't gone well. The default approach has been to treat him as a child in a super-adult body, sometimes emphasizing a seeming-inevitable naivete but more recently taking him in an arguably more sophomoric direction. Add to this Hollywood's preoccupation with the zero-to-hero paradigm and movie writers' own consensus on how a boy in a man's body would behave and Shazam! could have written itself with little significant input from credited screenwriter Henry Gayden.

Fortunately, the filmmakers gathered together a decent cast of child actors in support of a luckily likable Zachary Levi as the learning-on-the-fly (or learning-to-fly) hero who now takes the name of the old wizard (Djimon Honsou) who, as of old, empowers him. To be more exact, old Shazam empowers, as of old, Billy Batson (Asher Angel), the archetypal orphan who's just landed in a group home alongside his traditional playmates Freddy Freeman (Jack Dylan Grazer) and Mary Bromfield (Grace Fulton) and a bunch of other kids recently introduced in the comics. We're given to understand that the old wizard has to be less choosy than he'd like, since one of the kids he rejected 45 years ago has grown up to be Mark Strong calling himself Dr. Sivana. Maybe twice the size of the hero's comics arch-enemy, the movie Sivana has used tremendous corporate resources, and presumably some mad scientist know-how, to find his way back to the old wizard's stop on the subway and claim the powers offered him long ago (i.e. at the start of the picture) by the monsters known as the Seven Deadly Sins. The old wizard has wanted a champion pure of heart but will settle for the sullen, rebellious Batson before breathing his last.

Barely conscious of his purpose, the magically-roided up Batson goes about discovering his powers, trying out different names and performing acts of petty heroism as the film becomes something like a cross between Chronicle and The Tick. In recent comics the hero has been somewhat successfully reimagined as a bit of a smartass dork, but Levi's performance leans heavily sometimes in the direction of the typical Hollywood infantile man. That's okay, though, because the point of the picture is for him, unlike the typical Hollywood infantile man, to grow out of that mode. He does this by learning to love his new extended family while leaving behind the ideal of his real mother that made every other option seem inadequate to him. It's ironic, once you actually see Shazam!, to see some people call it Spielbergian, since it actually refrains from idealizing its mother figure in favor of a "love the ones you're with" message. It's a practical message, too, since its corollary is that there's strength in numbers. The film follows current comics most closely in its conceit that all of Billy's surrogate siblings are eligible to partake of the Shazam power and thus help him fight off Sivana and the Deadly Sins. The kids are hit-or-miss as characters and their hero-forms get even less time to introduce themselves, but their innocent joy in getting superpowers -- please never let any of them go to the dark side, producers! -- is infectious. Unfortunately, they also make the climax a bit too busy and lengthy, and the action scenes here were never going to break new ground. The best super-stunt comes much earlier, when Billy has to figure out how to deal with a bus falling off an overpass, and then has to figure out how to put it down safely when there's a dog in the way. The filmmakers have a nice habit of throwing in little details like that or the increasingly frantic Santa Claus who keeps getting caught in the middle of the super-battles. Sandberg shows an admirable eye for the absurd that helps lighten the tone throughout; you have to like a film that will move into a crowd celebration for a close-up of a dancing gingerbread man. Overall, Shazam! is the sort of film that you can tell means well even when it doesn't always work, and it's hard to hold its misses against it when it hits often enough to be unpretentious fun.

CAPTAIN MARVEL (2019) in SPOILERVISION

By Marvel Studios standards Captain Marvel is relatively non-linear, which may be why it feels a little rough early on. We're immediately immersed in the adventures of some sort of space special-forces unit of the Kree empire, an entity moviegoers first encountered in Guardians of the Galaxy. The Kree are battling their traditional enemies, the shape-shifting Skrulls. One of the Kree team, a woman named "Veers" (Bree Larson) is the special protege of her commanding officer (Jude Law). Something about his team may give viewers pause, however; one of them is somebody (Djimon Hounsou) we've seen as a bad guy in Guardians. This is a minor detail compared to Veers' flashbacks, which focus on a middle-aged female (Annette Bening) who is also the form Veers sees when she communes with the Kree "Supreme Intelligence," which in comics is represented by a giant green blob-face. For each Kree, the Supreme Intelligence takes the form of someone familiar, but Veers has no idea who the woman is. Over the course of the film, she comes to realize there's a lot she doesn't know about herself. In fact, if I recall right, this is the first time Marvel has gone the "everything you thought you knew is wrong" route so familiar in genre fiction in general these days. The comics audience, of course, anticipates this, because they know that Veers is really Carol Danvers, the much-revamped heroine once known as Ms. Marvel, who was most recently upgraded into "Earth's Mightiest Hero. Watching the first half of Captain Marvel is a matter of waiting for Carol to rediscover the truth about herself, and that may explain why the early action has a somewhat perfunctory feel. There's nothing spectacularly original about the alien environment Veers works in; Hala, the Kree homeworld, looks pretty much like every other Marvel megalopolis, and there's little truly alien in a sci-fi sense about the Kree or the Skrulls, apart from the latters' morphing abilities. For a while, and maybe all the way through for some viewers, this film (directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck from a story and script from theirs and many other hands) feels like it might be the most generic, by-the-numbers Marvel movie of all apart from the title character's (who never uses that title) relatively nonlinear character arc.

It doesn't help that, when Veers goes crashing onto planet C-53 (i.e., Earth), it's the year of our lord 1995. In other words, cue the oldies soundtrack! Maybe I let this familiar marketing ploy bother me too much, since making movies out of Marvel Comics themselves is mere moneygrubbing from one point of view, but one might ask whether this film had to be set in the past at all, unless it's to market an oldies soundtrack. To be fair, also, this is far from the most cynical or implausible deployment of oldies (that would be Spider-Man: Homecoming). Still, there's something pandering about it that always leaves a bad taste in a killjoy mouth, but this will be just about my last complaint about Captain Marvel.

Anyway, it's 1995 and Veers crash-lands in a strip-mall Blockbuster Video, and who should be called onto the case but a young -- well, a younger Nicholas Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), who was a much less serious person a quarter-century ago. He also, understandably, had much smoother skin, and the CGI wizards deserve some credit for the job they did on him, though their treatment of Clark (Agent Coulson) Gregg leaves a lot more to be desired. A nice detail about this film, which stands at the brink of the end-of-an-era Avengers: Endgame, is that it brings the Marvel Cinematic Universe just about to full circle by showing us that his encounter with Carol, the Kree and the Skrulls provoked Fury to launch what he initially calls the Protector Initiative before Danvers gives him one more inspiration. Nevertheless, it's an odd turn from Jackson, most memorable for Fury's misplaced affection for a precocious cat, though again you can argue that it's this experience that made him more serious about things. Anyway, with him as tag-along, Carol rediscovers her past by tracking down her best friend and fellow jet pilot (Lashana Lynch), whose daughter may turn up in a future, present-day film as yet another Captain Marvel. It's a long story and I'll save it for when I need it.

Meanwhile, as noted, Carol learns that a lot of what she thought she knew was wrong -- and one cute thing the film does to make some of this surprising is to exploit the recent typecasting of Ben Mendelsohn (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Ready Player One, Robin Hood ...). He plays a Skrull agent who's taken the form of a S.H.I.E.L.D. commander in order to get at Veers, who has subconscious knowledge of an important science project the Annette Bening mystery woman was working on. But everything you thought you knew about Ben Mendelsohn is wrong! In this particular variation on the Kree-Skrull conflict, the green, waffle-chinned shapeshifters are the good guys, while the Kree are exploiting Carol Danvers by suppressing her memories of Earth as well as her full potential as a superbeing -- which once unleashed could be limitless. Since last year, Marvel has teased that Captain Marvel is the hero who can tip Thanos' precious balance, and watching her pull off Superman-style stunts like blowing up starships by flying through them may make more people believers. The directing team aren't really the most visionary or even efficient storytellers, but they do succeed at making Carol's realization of her full power, intercut with her memories of a lifetime of rising from adversity, an exhilarating moment, an ultimate comic-book power fantasy brought to cinematic life. While overall Captain Marvel is at best a mid-level Marvel movie, if its main purpose is to get people even more interested in Endgame, it probably should count as an unqualified success.

On the Big Screen: ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL (2019)

Robert Rodriguez, once known for making exciting films on the cheap, had a ton of money thrown at him by James Cameron in order to realize a project that had been stewing in the latter's mind for about twenty years. Wikipedia reports that Cameron had been turned on to Yukito Kishiro's manga by Guillermo del Toro, but del Toro by now is too big a deal himself to be anyone else's hired gun. Rodriguez did an uncredited polish on a screenplay Cameron collaborated on, so the finished product is as much his interpretation of the story as anyone's. He deserves credit for how well it turned out, and I suspect that Alita will prove a no-lose proposition for him, since those who don't like it will most likely blame Cameron. I suspect a lot of people won't like it, and I'm not sure I can blame anyone who doesn't. It's not for everyone, even if it needs to be to break even; it lacks that jenesaisquois that makes Star Wars almost uniquely accessible to the mass audience for stuff of this kind. There's an audience guaranteed to enjoy this, but another more certainly guaranteed to resent its story's demands on their attention -- and a lot of them write film reviews.

While Alita is undeniably a work of great craftsmanship and visual dynamism, I don't know if it's possible at this point to do enough to differentiate the film's setting from other cyberpunk dystopias. If you're not into the concept at the primal generic level Alita could well look like just another of its kind to those for whom any one is enough. The film is also indisputably repetitive, presumably covering multiple episodes of the original Japanese strip. We get multiple go-rounds on the Motorball track -- the sport of the future is basically Rollerball on cyber-roids -- and multiple fights with an evil but relatively dull cyborg who's really no more than a tertiary villain in a hierarchy where the top is mostly unseen. We can question the pacing of the film, again arguably a consequence of biting off more of the original than it could chew. The cyborg heroine (Rosa Salazar) has a boyfriend (Keean Johnson) caught in an inescapable mortal predicament resolved by Alita decapitating him but diverting some of her own bloodstream into his brain so the head can be installed on a cyborg body. This looks like the setup for a happy ending of cyborg love, but just a few minutes later the boyfriend is off on a suicide mission and this time Alita can't save him. It makes you question the point of saving him the first time around. Meanwhile, while Cameron, Rodriguez and co-writer Laeta Kalogridis may have bitten off more than they could chew of the complete manga, the film isn't actually complete. While there's no cliffhanger, it does leave things open-ended with a promise of future battles between Alita and the nebulous big-bad (Edward Norton) if she finally acts on her centuries-old directive to destroy the villain's elitist floating city. I can imagine some people groaning at the promise of a sequel that I suspect will never happen, based on the sparse crowd I saw the movie with. But as far as I'm concerned the scene of Alita, now a champion-level Motorballer, raising her sword in apparent salute to the spectators but also in an implicit threat to the floating city, makes for an awesome ending.

Beyond that, despite her initially creepily cartoonish computerized face Salazar as Alita won me over with her fairy-tale Frankensteinian (or Pinocchian) good-little-death-machine personality, while Christoph Waltz, an on-and-off character actor, was quite charming as her surrogate father, a techno-nerd variation on his benign bounty hunter from Django Unchained. Jennifer Connelly was fine in a semi-villainous role and ultimately tragic role as Waltz's ex-wife, while Mahershala Ali often seemed to sleepwalk through a literally superficial secondary-villain role that required him often to play his own puppetmaster. All this aside, the real star of the film is Robert Rodriguez, one the great genre minds of our time, who somehow manages to foreground personality amid the massive production design while staging several amazing action scenes. If the overall film feels repetitive at times, Rodriguez knows when and how to escalate the action. You can see this in the difference between the scene where Alita is only an eager spectator for Motorball and the big tryout game where she's in the middle of the action, literally the target for all the other competitors. You can also see it in the way Alita makes relatively short work of her most frequent antagonist in their final encounter; by then, there's no need for them to have another long battle. Alita is a film that feels longer than it actually is -- just over two hours -- but it's a good kind of long, the kind that immerses you in a densely detailed and constantly strange cityscape and keeps your eye constantly engaged. It's a film that gets a lot done, and it left me, at least, sort of hoping that that sequel does get me. I'm just the sort of dope that likes this stuff.