Reviews

I can't help comparing Sofia Coppola's PRISCILLA to last year's Baz Luhrmann epic, ELVIS. Whereas Luhrmann portrayed the King of Rock 'n' Roll as a larger-than-life, godlike figure, PRSCILLA serves him up as an emotionally insecure man-child with serious anger and control issues. I find Coppola's portrayal much more believable.

ELVIS skirted a major issue: that when he and Priscilla me, he was grown man of 24 while she was a naive, impressionable child of 14. He must have been charming as hell to convince her parents to let her keep time with him, let alone move across the ocean to Graceland while she was still in high school!

PRISCILLA explores that avenue in great--even harrowing--detail. Even though a decade separated them physically, his emotional maturity was no greater than hers. The stress of living with Elvis became so great, Priscilla took to popping pills along with him--and not one member of the man's sycophantic retinue thought to question it.

In the film, Elvis is a good 18 inches taller than Priscilla. He towers over her the entire time, and not just physically. The real-life Elvis was indeed taller than his wife, but not by that much! So I'm guessing Coppola intended the height difference symbolically. If so, it worked.

The acting is uniformly strong. Cailee Spaeny shows us a Priscilla who grows up from a doe-eyed kid into a confident, self-sufficient woman who finally works up the courage to end her suffocating marriage.

Meanwhile, Jacob Elordi looks even more like Elvis than Austin Butler did. He delves so deeply into the character, I often forgot that I was seeing an actor play a part. Elordi's performance is every bit as strong as Butler's was. I wonder if he, too, will receive an Oscar nomination?

Coincidentally, I read Priscilla's memoir, "Elvis and Me," just last year. Based on my recall, this film is a pretty faithful adaptation of the book. However, unlike the book, it ends abruptly when she leaves him. I initially found it jarring; but in retrospect, the film ended exactly when it should have. There was no need to show the Presleys' divorce and subsequent friendship, let alone the man's premature death at age 42.

If you're an Elvis worshipper, PRISCILLA's anything-but-reverent portrayal of the man could very well anger you. But if, like me, you're more of a reality-based Elvis fan, you might respect the film as much as I do.

In typical Hollywood fashion, THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE DEMETER inserts 21st-century race and gender politics into a story from 1897. But that's not what bugged me the most. Rather, it was the entire second half.

When you base a feature-length movie on a single chapter from a novel, you'll need to make a lot of things up. LAST VOYAGE, however, abuses the privilege. This film did not need to be two hours long. It might have worked better at 90 minutes. That way, it could have eliminated the turgid exposition, and it may well have cut back on the plot holes. For example:

• Dracula turns one crewman into a vampire, who catches on fire and burns to death in the sunlight. However, the wooden ship does not catch on fire as well.

• The Captain burns his hands on the flaming corpse of a second crew member, but is still able to grasp the ship's wheel and to pick up a quill to write in his log.

• The monster throws one crew member off a mast from very high up. The crewman crashes through the main deck and lands quite hard below. Yet, he is able to immediately stand up and resume fighting.

• They've learned where Dracula sleeps, and could easily have inferred how to destroy him. (Hello? Sunlight!) Yet, they launch their attack on the vampire not during the day, when he'd be weak, but at night, when he'd be strong.

• While the Demeter is supposedly of Russian origin, the ship's name appears on its sides in English. And the captain's log is also in that language. (In Bram Stoker's novel, the log had to be translated from Russian before it could be read by the Brits who found the shipwreck.) For good measure, all the crew members speak fluent English (and mostly with British accents). If there's anything about the Demeter to suggest a Russian vessel, I missed it.

IMDb does not allow for partial-point ratings, or I would have given it a 6.5/10. However, I'm feeling a bit generous, so I'll up my grade to a 7. I've seen far better Dracula movies, but I've also seen much worse.

An old guy wanders the desert, sees a little girl in a cape, then goes into a greenhouse where a bunch of little bald kids are being indoctrinated by this weird hippie cult leader.

Next, the little girl gets a loaded gun for her birthday and accidentally shoots her mom, who seems really chill about being paralyzed from the waist down. Then, Shelly Winters comes to babysit the mom, the little girl goes ice skating, a bird attacks and kills a police detective, and the weird old guy comes to "babysit" the little girl. Next, for God knows what reason, there's something about a basketball team, which the little girl's dad, who happens to be evil, is coaching.

The little girl tries to kill her mom with a bird, but mom's babysitter kills the bird instead. So the girl pushes the wheelchair-bound mom into a giant aquarium with no fish in it, but mom is still somehow alive. So the little girl tries to kill her again, while the evil dad watches.

Meanwhile, the old weird guy is watching some bizarre laser light show going on at the skating plaza, then the Bird Apocalypse happens, and the film is over.

Is that how it plays out, or did I get a contact high from my pot-smoking neighbors?

Ten minutes in, I muttered, "This is going to be a slog." And so it was.

It's not that I lack the attention span to appreciate a lengthy film. Three years ago, I sat enraptured through 3.5 hours of THE IRISHMAN. But that film justified its length. THE BATMAN does not. At three hours, it's just too damned long.

Robert Pattinson was a passable Batman, but his Bruce Wayne came across as a brooding, self-pitying Goth. And Wayne Manor looks like something out of a 19th-century vampire story. Both touches left me cold.

So what did I like about the film?

Paul Dano is a genuinely terrifying Riddler, even if the riddles themselves are pitifully easy to solve. When he asked, "What does a liar do after he dies," I responded, "He lies still," even before Batman got the answer.

I liked Zoe Kravitz as Selina Kyle A/K/A Catwoman. As in 2012's THE DARK KNIGHT RISES, she and Batman are not enemies but uneasy allies. Selina proves every bit as tough as Batman--so much so, he has to reel her in lest Ms. Kyle be charged with multiple felonies as she tries to find her missing girlfriend.

Recasting Penguin as a mob flunky was an effective move. I only wish the character had been used more. Colin Farrell deserved additional screentime.

Jeffrey Wright was severely one-dimensional as Lt. James Gordon, an incorruptible cop who works with Batman--to the chagrin of most of his fellow officers. This is not Mr. Wright's fault. The script simply gave him little to work with.

The same is true of Andy Serkis as Alfred Pennyworth, Bruce's Wayne guardian (and butler to his late parents). He's a valuable ally in helping Batman solve the Riddler's puzzles (and getting himself blown up in Bruce's place), but that's about it.

Finally, John Turturro is competent as mob boss Carmine Falcone, the unofficial mayor of Gotham City these past 20 years. I say "competent" because playing a mob boss could hardly have been a reach for Mr. Turturro.

I could provide a plot rehash, but I won't bother.

I'm not sorry I finally saw THE BATMAN (on an $8.00 DVD), but I'd rather have rewatched the first two Christian Bale films.

Did Robert Eggers intend THE NORTHMAN as a campy put-on? It plays out like a drunken parody of Shakespeare. Hell, the central character's name is an anagram of Hamlet! I wasn't really supposed to take this thing seriously, was I?

At any given time, THE NORTHMAN's characters do one of three things: spout cliches, scream at the top of their lungs, or hack each other up with swords. When the "actors" aren't engaged in enough scenery-chewing to keep 100 dentists employed for a year, they deliver Eggers' tin-ear dialogue with the woodenness of a Downy birch. Meanwhile, the full-frontal-assault visual effects often have no clear bearing on what passes for the plot.

Did Nicole Kidman really regard this Hudabrastic mélange as a worthy follow-up to the Oscar-nominated BEING THE RICARDOS? Methinks the lady doth need a new agent.

One last thing: incongruously, the Gates of Hell are located in Iceland.

If a comedian is not making someone angry, he isn't doing his job. In that regard, Dave Chappelle does his job masterfully.

"The Closer" has infuriated certain people because he made jokes about the transgendered. But Chappelle makes jokes about everyone.

He spent the final fifteen minutes of "The Closer" talking about Daphne Dorman, a transgendered woman Chappelle had befriended. When her community excoriated Chappelle for his alleged transphobia, Daphne defended him. Her reward was merciless bullying and ostracism. Six days after the trans community launched its Twitter war against Daphne, she took her own life.

Daphne's suicide motivated Chappelle to start a trust fund for her daughter. Does that sound like a transphobic bigot? Chappelle's monologue about Daphne Dorman likely did more to help the transgendered than a bilious Twitter campaign ever will.

I've had transgendered friends since I was 17 years old. (I'm now 55.) Nearly all of them would have laughed out loud at lines like, "I knew your father. He was an amazing woman."

Full equality includes sometimes being the butt of a joke. To think otherwise is to regard the group in question as too childlike to live in the real world. The "white saviors" of the 1960s and '70s treated Black people that way. Now the "cis saviors" of the 21st century do the same to the transgendered. It was misguided then and it's misguided now.

Instead of attacking comedians for simply doing their job, the trans community might engage in self-examination. It would be a fitting response to having driven one of their own to suicide.

"The Father" blew me away! Anthony Hopkins is getting all manner of accolades for his performance and deservedly so, but Olivia Colman is brilliant too.

The film plays out from the point of view of the man with Alzheimer's. Consequently, the storyline is hallucinatory, disjointed, confusing, filled with internal contradictions, and makes dizzying leaps in time. All that works to the movie's advantage as it shows us how that loathsome disease will turn a once-vital man into a desiccated husk of his former self.

Having witnessed the ravages of Alzheimer's as it destroyed two people I loved, I found a lot to relate to in "The Father." One example is the fantasy segment in which Ann imagines herself choking the life out of the old man. She has these thoughts not out of malice or resentment, but because she wishes to end her father's suffering, as well as her own.

One issue the film does not address is finances. The characters are well off enough that when Ann makes the heartbreaking decision to put her father in a nursing home, he gets a private room in a comfortable-looking facility with a nurse who gives him one-on-one attention.

Having once held a driving job for a pharmacy, I delivered to a lot of nursing homes. Many of them stank of urine and feces, crammed several patients into a room, and were severely understaffed so that one-on-one care was impossible. I would be interested in someday seeing a film about Alzheimer's in which the victim and his loved ones are working-class or poor.

Having seen only a handful of movies from the Year of Covid, I can't say for sure that "The Father" is the best film of 2020. It is, however, the best one I've seen. This is nothing to watch if you're looking for escapist entertainment; but if you want a film for the ages, you've found it.

...it amazes me that I can still recall so much of PARIS IS BURNING.

Though not gay myself, I befriended a number of GLBTQs during my 11-year stint as a member of the ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW cult. By the time PARIS IS BURNING came out (no pun intended), I had been going to midnight screenings of RHPS for seven years and had developed a deep compassion for the GLBTQ community. Given my conservative working-class upbringing, that was nothing short of a miracle.

Sorry, I don't mean to make this review about me. What prompted it was that earlier tonight, I caught a trailer for the 30th-anniversary restored print. It got me wondering whatever became of the people from PARIS IS BURNING, so I did a Google search. A depressing number of them are dead now--including Octavia Saint Laurent, who was born just two years before I was.

Admittedly, I'm typing these words with moist eyes after having learned of the deaths of so many of these people. In certain aspects, I could identify with them all. I truly believe the world is a poorer place without them.

At times, those folks made me laugh. At other times, their personal histories made me profoundly sad. At still other times, their words got me angry. (Some of them were so-o-o materialistic!) And my heart sank when the film ended with the news that Venus Xtravanganza had been murdered before the film was even complete. (She was a mere ten months older than me.)

I also wonder about the kids from PARIS IS BURNING. The ones who are still alive would be in their mid to late forties now. I only hope that life turned out OK for them.

May Venus and Octavia, along with Pepper LaBeija, Dorian Corey, Paris Dupree, Willi Ninja, Kim Pendavis, Angie and Danny Xtravaganza, and Eileen Ford all find the happiness and inner peace in death that so often eluded them in life.

Unfortunately, my local art house is only showing the restored print for one night--and I have other plans. Here's hoping there's a DVD release.

I wanted to like "1917," but it did very little for me. Among my issues with it:

• For the first hour, the camera work repeatedly gave me motion sickness. That has never before happened to me at a movie.

• The CGI is horrible.

• To call the characters one-dimensional is to be charitable. They're not even characters so much as game pieces.

• The suspense scenes did not fill me with suspense; the scenes depicting acts of humanity struck me as emotionally manipulative.

• If delivery of the message is so important, why send two inexperienced corporals on foot instead of dispatching a pilot to fly the message to the front?

• Who milked the cow? And how did her milk magically become drinkable between the udder and the bucket?

• Since Corporal Schofield spent so much time immersed in a river, how did the letter he was carrying stay dry enough to be legible to Colonel MacKenzie?

And don't be fooled by Benedict Cumberatch's being second billed. He appears on screen for all of three minutes.

"1917" is not a bad movie. But with all the hype and advance praise (not to mention its two Golden Globes), I was expecting much better than this poorly written (though beautifully photographed) cliche fest.

Sorry, Golden Globes, you got it wrong this year. Best Picture should have gone to THE IRISHMAN, and Best Director to Martin Scorsese. Here's hoping the Oscars won't repeat your mistakes.