You have a lot of new choices at the movies this week, several of them very good and some just big. Like these:
Terminator Dark Fate: 3 stars
Pain and Glory: 4
Jojo Rabbit: 3 ½
Tel Aviv is Burning: 3 ½
The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open: 4
Harriet: 3
The King: 2 ½
Motherless Brooklyn: not reviewed
TERMINATOR: DARK FATE: It looked promising. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton and James Cameron all back together to re-ignite a key sci-fi series. The second of them is my favorite action movie of all time and this is a direct sequel to it, thereby dispensing with the three that followed. But not all is well. The story is by Cameron and he’s producing (i.e. overseeing) but he’s turned directing duties over to Tim Miller, famous for Deadpool . So what we have now is an odd hybrid. There are scenes that pretty-well repeat parts of Terminator 2 (check out the not-as-good highway truck chase) and a story line that feels much the same (but lacks the drive). It strives to be contemporary by featuring more women, warning about the rise of technology and even decrying the treatment of refugees at the US-Mexico border but only maximizes the first of those.
Once again a Terminator (Gabriel Luna) is sent from the future to kill a young woman (Natalia Reyes) and another one, a woman this time, arrives to protect her. She says she’s human but “augmented” and is played by Mackenzie Davis, who grew up and lived here in Vancouver until about 10 years ago. She joins up with Linda Hamilton, who as Sarah Connor, has been through this before. The three are directed to Arnold, the Terminator who has spent 20 years learning to be human and (I kid you not) runs a business installing drapery. That’s about when my affection for this film left me. It’s a funny bit but off-track. Arnold can still wield a big gun; everybody does. Luna is repeatedly blasted only to revive at will and the action sequences become tiresome after a while. More interesting is the time travel quandary about a future that never happened but affects the present anyway. Like the flickers of political content though, it only gets a brief mention. (Scotiabank, Dunbar, Marine Gateway and suburban theatres.) 3 out of 5
PAIN AND GLORY: Antonio Banderas won the best actor award at Cannes this year for this subtle and very moving performance of a man looking back over his life. He’s constantly in pain (from a back ailment) and laid low in spirit by regret. He’s also suffering a filmmaker’s form of writer’s block and that stalls the only work that has meaning for him. The Spanish writer-director Pedro Almodovar partially based the character on himself. Banderas makes him live with hints of melancholy, whimsy, grumpiness, triumph and egotism.
Can he revive his career? First he has to take stock of where he has been, from a poor boyhood (with Penelope Cruz as his mother), first sexual feelings as a lad (for a housepainter), as a celebrated auteur soon to be honored with a revival of his breakthrough film and two reunions. One is by chance with the man who was his long-time lover, the other deliberate and difficult with the actor who starred in the film about to be screened again but with whom he had a nasty falling out and no contact since. Add to that already dizzing list of plot points: a minor dalliance with heroin, a paralyzing fear that his reputation as a maverick is over and a complaint passed along by his aging mother that people in his village are tired of him using their lives as content for his films. This one has a collection of incidents, not a straight-through story line, but they meld and turn into a portrait that resonates. (5th Avenue) 4 out of 5
JOJO RABBIT: It was the people’s choice at the Toronto Film Festival but you might still have doubts about seeing it. Hitler as the imaginary friend of a young German boy, offering him ideology, advice and occasionally cigarettes near the end of World War II seems dicey at best. It is but not for reasons you might suspect. It is funny, not laugh out loud but quietly, clever and a little bit glib. Nazis are an easy target and these jokes are familiar. They assail racism, mock the perpetrators like the Fuehrer and most pointedly show the perils of following idols and their ideas. But the film comes off as too safe; it could be stronger.
Jojo is 10-year-old Johannes who aspires to be a good Nazi but gets “rabbit” added to his nickname after a failure at a youth camp. His dad and sister are away and his mom (Scarlett Johansson) is often busy so he takes guidance from Hitler who appears only to him and is played by Taika Waititi. The New Zealander also directed and scripted, based loosely on a novel, and again displays a quirky sense of humor as with the most recent Thor movie and the vampire comedy What We Do in the Shadows. He’s half Maori, half Jewish, which helps back up the centre of the movie. Jojo finds mom has given sanctuary to a Jewish girl (Thomasin McKenzie) and decides to get information from her about her race and write a book. Pretty well-every anti-Semitic rumor comes up for us to poke fun at. There’s a darker turn later that doesn’t feel well-earned but also fine performances by Johansson, Sam Rockwell, Rebel Wilson and new-kid Roman Griffin Davis as Jojo. (International Village, Park Theatre) 3 ½ out of 5
TEL AVIV ON FIRE: It’s not easy making a comedy about Palestinian-Israeli relations either. This one does pretty well, possibly because it draws from both sides of the line and perfectly depicts the difficulties in going back and forth across it. The title is the name of a fictional soap opera produced in Ramallah but watched everywhere. In it, a Palestinian woman is working for an Israeli general and also spying on him. (She’s played by Lubna Azabel who we saw in a new film at VIFF just recently and in the great Quebec film, Incendies, eight years ago). Kais Nashif plays a dialogue coach who understand how Israelis talk because he lives over there, although he’s Palestinian.
At the checkpoint he has to cross every day, the commander (Yaniv Biton) says he knows nothing about military dialogue and offers suggestions and then even story ideas. All he has to do is steer the script to please his wife, a regular viewer. Instead of the spy killing the general, she should marry him. That doesn’t fly with the producer (his uncle, by the way) or the show’s backers but he’s under pressure to deliver. The film finds an ingenious way out of that impasse, enough droll laughs to please us and a few political observations like this question: “Is there nothing between bomb and surrender?” Writer-director Sameh Zoabi, himself a Palestinian born in Isreal, shows what is there. (VanCity) 3 ½ out of 5
THE BODY REMEMBERS WHEN THE WORLD BROKE OPEN: The title, taken from a poem, is obscure. The story is not. Far from it. This is one of the most realistic depictions of one side of life in Vancouver I’ve ever seen. It’s highly involving, downbeat at times but satisfying because it is observant and compassionate. It’s based on a real incident in the life of Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, who along with Kathleen Hepburn wrote and directed the film. Both are Vancouver residents and celebrated filmmakers. She saw a barefoot and pregnant aboriginal woman standing cold on the street one day and tried to help her. It didn’t take, but in the film it does, up to a point.
She, herself playing middle-class Áila, takes the woman named Rosie (played sad-eyed and almost speechless by an authentic discovery, Violet Nelson) to her apartment to warm her up and comfort her. They talk and they bond and she almost gets her into a safe house for victims of domestic violence. Rosie is almost uncommunicative except for a brief period when some spirit and attitude punctures through. It’s a rare depiction of that type of woman and her difficult life and the film is poignant and truthful. It won best Canadian film in both Toronto and Vancouver and also, at our festival, best emerging filmmaker for Tailfeathers. (VanCity Theatre) 4 out of 5
HARRIET: Surprisingly this is the first movie about the legendary anti-slavery activist Harriet Tubman who might one day be pictured on the U.S. $20 bill. (That move is currently stalled in the White House). She has been portrayed on television, in stage plays, novels and songs so a full-length feature seems only fitting. This one tells her courageous story alright but more as a history lesson not as drama that gets us close to the real person. It plays like a pageant put on for an anniversary or to instruct about one hero’s story. The information is good but the presentation is overly reverential like an old-style biopic.
Cynthia Erivo, the English actor, plays her with great conviction. She was a slave in Maryland who was supposed to be freed, had to escape on her own, was taken in by an abolitionist group in Pennsylvania and made several trips back south to free others. That was dangerous work partly because of the new Fugitive Slave Act and the vicious slave trackers searching for runaways. Joe Alwyn plays one with cruel fervor while up north Janelle Monáe and Leslie Odom Jr. were kind and encouraging in the anti-slavery movement. They made Tubman a key “conductor” on the Underground Railroad. We get the facts about that one part of her diverse life, but not much personal connection. There’s not even much tension in this film by Kasi Lemmons, who’s worked mostly in TV since her celebrated film Eve’s Bayou (1997). (International Village and suburban theatres) 3 out of 5
THE KING: Power, the getting of it and its use, is the theme of this drama based on English history. Shakespeare covered the same territory in his Henry plays and here, without the artful language and less insight into human nature, we revisit the story of Henry V and his pal Falstaff early in the 15th Century. Timothée Chalamet plays him as a carousing wastrel before he’s reluctantly made king and a strong exponent of his own ideas when he is. He’s too small and thin, though, to convey much personal power and doesn’t feel right for the role.
He objects to his father’s wars in Wales and Scotland and once on the throne refuses to pursue his dream of conquering France. But he brings in Falstaff as an advisor. Joel Edgerton, who co-wrote the script with the director David Michôd, plays him and advocates war. A gift from the Dauphin of France was seen as an insult, the Dauphin himself (played with scene-stealing narcissism by Robert Pattinson) is smugly self-impressed and there’s word of an assassination plot. Henry switches just like that into a warmaker. The battle at Agincourt is staged in large scale and then rough fury in the mud. Like in the plays that came before, the attitude to war isn’t sure, although a late comment “Peace is forged in victory” may have it. Between the battles, the film is rather plodding. (VanCity) 2 ½ out of 5
Also now in theatres …
MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN: Scheduling conflicts kept me from seeing Edward Norton’s attempt at directing himself in this Chinatown clone (alledged). He’s a private eye in New York in the 1950s, afflicted with Tourette’s Syndrome and a protégé of a top man in the profession (Bruce Willis) who, when he’s killed, leaves him incriminating evidence about a shady property developer (Alec Baldwin) running for public office. Like anybody we know?