virek213 Reviews

Marcus Welby, M.D.: The Daredevil Gesture (1970) Season 1, Episode 24

Steven Spielberg;s Second Professional Assignment--A Sign Of Things To Come

[9/10 · 19 March 2024]

By the standards set by recent similar TV series as "Grey's Anatomy" and "Bones", "Marcus Welby M. D.", which ran originally on ABC from 1969 to 1976, must seem painfully antiquated. But it came from a time when television was really starting to come into its own, being forced to move out of the formalism it had been locked in for so long. A lot of this had to do with the presence of the legendary Robert Young, who had already been the star of one TV series ("Father Knows Best") and had a number of great movie roles, notably as a cop in the landmark 1947 film-noir classic CROSSFIRE. It also succeeded for as long as it did because it focused on a lot of topics that were rarely ever discussed, either in the popular culture or out in the real world.

The episode "The Daredevil Gesture", the twenty-first episode of the series' first season (1969-70), which aired on March 17, 1970, features Frank Webb as a young high school student who wants to enjoy the activities of normal school kids his age, and is encouraged (if not outright forced) by his mother (Marsha Hunt) to do. The problem? Webb is afflicted with hemophilia; and his desires to have a normal school life conflict with the need to keep his classmates from getting what he has. It becomes a situation that Webb has to navigate with the help of Young, as well as his assistant doctor Steven Kiley (James Brolin) and his nurse Consuelo Lopez (Elena Verdugo).

What is very notable about this particular story, given that it could otherwise have been just another routine TV episode, is the fact that it really zeroes in on the human and social elements in a way that television had only started doing around that time. Some of the credit should go to the episode's writer Jerome Ross; but the main center of attention is the highly attentive director of one Steven Spielberg, here doing only his second professional assignment overall (following the "Eyes" segment of the TV pilot film NIGHT GALLERY in late 1969), and first full-length television episode. Even at the age of 23, Spielberg already knew a fair amount about the humanity contained in the situation, especially given the way he effectively directs Webb, who had been a student with Spielberg at Arcadia High School in Phoenix, Arizona several years earlier. Young, Brolin, and Verdugo give really good performances under Spielberg's innovative direction of what could otherwise have been a painfully formulaic 45-minute TV episode. For those who only ever thought of lost arks, dinosaurs, and the like when they thought of Spielberg, this is a very good, not to mention very early, example of the kind of director he'd be with a lot of other films to come in succeeding decades, including SCHINDLER'S LIST, SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, THE POST, WEST SIDE STORY, and THE FABELMANS.

Thus, "The Daredevil Gesture" gets a well-earned rating of '9' from me.

I.S.S. (2023)

A Crisis In Space

[8/10 · 28 January 2024]

What is known as the International Space Station was put up in space following the end of the Cold War to signify that space explorers and scientists from multiple countries will have a place to work together to make important scientific breakthroughs and monitor Earth from some three hundred miles above the ground. But what if, by some ghastly accident or deliberate intent, a war between the two superpowers on the ground actually did occur, and those on the station were forced to do something they never thought would be necessary? This is the premise of the 2024 sci-fi drama I. S. S.

Ariana DeBose, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 2021 for the role of Anita in director Steven Spielberg's re-imagining of WEST SIDE STORY, Chris Messina and John Gallagher Jr. Portray a three-person American team of astronauts who have taken over for their predecessors aboard the International Space Station. After a slightly shaky start, they become very familiar with their Russian counterparts (Masha Mashkova; Costa Ronin; Pilou Asbaek) and enjoy some friendly bantering. But then everything takes a turn towards the sinister, when DeBose, looking out a window of I. S. S. And down at Earth, sees flashes on the ground that don't look like lightning, but something far worse. As it turns out, though it is never explained what caused it, both superpowers are in a state of war, and that war appears to be spiraling towards the nuclear. And while it is bad enough that both crews effectively find themselves marooned in a confined place, with the only way to get home being a Soyuz emergency rescue craft, and the very real possibility that there won't be a world to return to, the dangers get magnified when both crews are informed separately by their individual governments that their job is to no longer be scientists, but to capture and take possession of I. S. S. By any means necessary.

In many ways, I. S. S. Is a combination of films like GRAVITY and MAROONED, with elements that are germane to the psychological thriller and Cold War genres. Director Gabriela Cowperthwaite, whose credits include 2013's BLACKFISH and 2017's MEGAN LEAVEY, does a very good job of showing that, as big as the International Space Station is from the vacuum of space, the actual living and working quarters of the station are quite cramped and claustrophobic. The scenario laid out by Nick Shafir in his screenplay does have its plausibility holes (given that it's unlikely either the U. S. or Russia would have the time of day to even care what is happening some three hundred miles above them in low Earth orbit if they are on the verge of irradiating one another), and some of the dialogue between the two crews, jumping back between English and Russian, is a bit confusing at times (unlike what was seen with the U. S./Russian cooperation scenario in 1984's "2010"). Even so, however, the visuals of I. S. S. And the depiction of an Earth about to tip over into nuclear war are done rather well, especially given that, with a $20 million budget, Cowperthwaite only had a quarter of the budget that director Alfonso Cuaron had for GRAVITY.

There isn't too much question that DeBose is the most prominent member of the cast, given what she had managed to achieve with Spielberg two years before. She also has roughly the same unenviable task that Sandra Bullock had in GRAVITY, carrying much of the film's weight on her shoulders, even with five other actors involved; and while she is able to convey the fear of being stuck in confined quarters while the world below is in the process of being atomized, she is equally able to remain stoic throughout the ordeal. Some of the scenes of violence that happen are a bit more than what people might want, but they aren't quite grisly; and the film's final moments, full as they are of ambiguity and uncertainty, have the feel inherent in Hitchcock's THE BIRDS and Spielberg's 1971 suspense classic DUEL.

Thus, while I do have issues with the story's plausibility factor, I am nevertheless willing to give this an '8' rating.

Macbeth (1971)

Extremely Faithful (And Extremely Violent) Adaptation Of The Bard's Darkest Play

[8/10 · 1 January 2024]

William Shakespeare is the ultimate playwright in human history, so it is not surprising that so many of his plays find their way onto stages, whether they are playhouses, high-school stages, or cinematic soundstages. When it comes to the latter, just ask Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, and Franco Zeffirelli, who made a lot of their reputations on the works of "Willie".

But some of them are not nearly as easy to pull off as one might think, especially since The Bard had a tendency to delve into dark subject matter. This is the case with "Macbeth", perhaps the spookiest and most disturbing of any of his plays. Welles made a very film-noir adaptation of it in 1948; and the great Japanese director Akira Kursoawa did his own take of it (in 1957's THRONE OF BLOOD); and Joel Coen made THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH in 2021.

And then we come to what may he the most controversial of all cinematic Shakespeare adaptations, the version of "Macbeth" made in England in 1970-71 by director Roman Polanski.

Jon Finch stars as the tragic and murderous 11th century titular character who seizes the throne by murdering the king with the help of his wife (Francesca Amis) and the help of a trio of witches. What ensues is without question an ultra-disturbing, but exceptionally faithful, adaptation of this cautionary tale of madness, tyrannical behavior, and supernatural occurrences of various stripes, all supported by a cast of veteran English actors who, perhaps to this day (with the possible exceptions of Finch and Amis), remain unknown to most American audiences, but who are supremely right in their roles.

Much has been made over the half-century-plus since MACBETH came out of the motivations behind its making. This was, for one thing, the first true effort into cinema by Hugh Hefner and his Playboy organization, so one could not help but expect a fair amount of nudity (though the play itself has an equal amount of that to begin with). But no one could possibly miss that this was the first film Polanski had directed in the wake of his wife Sharon Tate having been slaughtered, along with six others, in August 1969 by the Manson "family" in Los Angeles, and that it seemed to show up in how enormously violent his MACBETH was for 1971, even as it got released simultaneously with films like A CLOCKWORK ORANGE and STRAW DOGS, two films which were notorious for their own disturbing uses of violence.

Even by 21st century standards, where so much CGI can simulate the most gruesome stuff, the Polanski MACBETH is still an extremely (though not excessively) violent film, regardless of how much stock one puts in any connections between the inherent bloodiness of the original and how the director felt about what Manson's cult had done. And make no mistake, this is a hugely 'politically incorrect" film not only in terms of its violence, but also its nudity. But it is still a film worth seeing, worthy of an '8' rating.

Romeo and Juliet (1968)

A Love Story Like No Other In Human (Or Cinematic) History

[10/10 · 1 January 2024]

After the great adaptations of The Bard by the Legends Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles, Italian director Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 cinematic interpretation of ROMEO AND JULIET must be considered the best one of any of Shakespeare's plays. The reason is fairly obvious to anyone who even has the faintest idea of the play itself, let alone read it or performed in any stage performance. It is quite simply the most beautiful and heart-rending love story of all time, one that remains timeless after four centuries and perhaps hundreds of thousands of interpretations, stage and screen alike (and this doesn't even include the two equally brilliant and heartbreaking cinematic versions of the great Broadway play WEST SIDE STORY, which is essentially this play slightly revised and set in the New York City of 1957).

The timeless tale involves a lot of dangerous shenanigans between two warring families, the Capulets and the Montagues, in the Italian city of Verona; because the cause of the enmity is never fully explained in the play itself, it is explicitly meant to be meaningless, hence enhancing what is to follow. Romeo Montague (played expertly by Leonard Whiting, who was a neophyte at the time) crashes what is supposed to be a masked ball staged by the rival Capulets...and then it happens: he somehow falls in love with Juliet (Olivia Hussey). As much as they may be opposite sides of a feud that has no explanation, they are nevertheless attracted in a way that is so poignant because it is imperiled from the second it starts.

Zeffirelli had already scored a huge commercial, critical, and artistic success with another Shakespeare adaptation, 1967's THE TAMING OF THE SHREW; and somehow he topped himself with this masterpiece. Both Whiting and Hussey were acting "rookies" by any standards when this film was made; but given the fact that so many versions of this play had the titular characters played by actors who were much older than those characters, these two teen/young adult actors do convey, with the utmost conviction, the romance and the love for one another that should have transcended and ended the pointless, petty, and violent bickering of the two warring families.

Surrounding Hussey and Whiting are some exceptionally great actors, including Michael York as the impetuous, ready-for-a-fight Tybalt; Milo O'Shea as Friar Laurence; Pat Heywood as Juliet's nurse; John McEnery as Mercutio; Bruce Robinson as Benvolio; and Robert Stephens as the Prince, who delivers the final verdict of the two warring families after the two young lovers seal their fate. And it is Lord Olivier himself who narrates this poignant story, with the final line, "For never was a story of more woe, than this of Juliet and her Romeo".

ROMEO AND JULIET, besides being a massive critical, commercial, and artistic hit, one of the biggest of 1968, not surprisingly, and justifiably, won Academy Awards for its gorgeous cinematography and costume designs. It is a film that, like its source material, will always be timely and timeless.

A '10' rating is absolutely in order for this heartrending masterpiece.

Superdome (1978 TV Movie)

Under The (Super) Dome

[6/10 · 20 December 2023]

A lot of the television films made in the 1970's with sizeable all-star casts, with a handful of exceptions, are fairly cheesy by today's standards (and almost certainly were in their own time as well). The 1978 entry SUPERDOME is a case in point.

With a fairly robust line-up of all-stars, both actors and athletes-as-actors, SUPERDOME involves the intrigues behind the lead-up to the Super Bowl, being played at the Superdome in New Orleans (as it indeed was around the time this film aired on January 9, 1978 [Super Bowl XII). The intrigues involve a player (Ken Howard) who is less occupied with his bum knee and his worries about how he will hold up in the Big Game than he is with his wife (Susan Howard); a quarterback (Tom Selleck) who is being courted by a management firm; and a few other minor things. But when a couple of employees of one of the teams turn up dead in somewhat violent ways, that team's manager (David Janssen, one of the most underrated actors in history) has to find out who the assailant is before the Big Game starts. As he remarks to someone: "We've got seventy five thousand people in The Dome, and a psycho on the loose". It turns out that the assailant's bosses don't want Janssen's team to win, and it's up to him to find out who it is.

As cheesy as SUPERDOME looks, and as so obvious as it is a made-for-TV clone of two previous big-screen films, TWO-MINUTE WARNING and BLACK SUNDAY, which mix the violence of football with actual violence, it is, if no better than most TV fare of its kind, at least not any worse. In large part, it is because, even if he felt the part he played was kind of beneath the abilities of someone who has portrayed Dr. Richard Kimble in "The Fugitive" ion TV in the 1960's, Janssen does exude a goodly amount of credibility and professionalism in that part. The cast includes a lot of luminaries, including Edie Adams, Ed Nelson, Van Johnson, Donna Mills, and Jane Wyatt, and cameo roles by NFL legends Bubba Smith and Dick Butkus, plus the fact that it was filmed entirely on location in New Orleans and even inside the Superdome itself.

Jerry Jameson, who directed SUPERDOME, is no stranger to this all-star "multi-jeopardy" format, having helmed similar made-for-TV films like 1974's HURRICANE, TERROR ON THE 40TH FLOOR, and HEAT WAVE, among others, as well as the very good 1975 TV film THE DEADLY TOWER (about Charles Whitman's infamous 1966 sniper spree in Texas), and the 1977 big-screen disaster film AIRPORT '77, does a competent job here. He doesn't get too terribly bogged down in the melodramatics, though one can understandably be disappointed by the idea that the film itself ends right as the Super Bowl itself is about to start.

I'll be willing to give this a '6' rating for effort, being aware that it had the potential to be as scary as the films it attempts to be a clone of.

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (2023)

Feed The "Hunger"

[8/10 · 20 November 2023]

Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games series of books, set in an extremely Dystopian place called Panem in which participants from various districts in varying states of poverty are forced to fight to the death, are likely second only to J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series in terms of popularity among teens and young adults. The first three books, "The Hunger Games", "Catching Fire", and "Mockingjay", were published in consecutive years, 2008. 2009, and 2010, and were subsequently made into massive box office hit movies, the first in 2012; "Catching Fire" in 2013"; and "Mockingjay" made into two films, Part 1 in 2014, and Part 2 in 2015. Each of those films starred Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen, a girl from District 12 (located in the Appalachian region). In 2020, Collins released a prequel, "The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes", that was set some six and a half decades before the events of the first three novels. And in 2023, that book too got made into a massive opus of a movie.

Although Lawrence's character of Katniss Everdeen is absent here, THE BALLAD OF SONGBIRDS AND SNAKES does get into the meat and bones of how one character, Coriolanus Snow (played in the three films before this one by Donald Sutherland) came to be what he became in the main trilogy. As played by Tom Blyth, Snow is assigned to be a mentor to a District 12 contestant named Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler), an itinerant mountain girl and folk music singer, to help her win the tenth edition of the Hunger Games. This sets him up to be closely monitored by the Games' prime mastermind, Dr. Volumnia Gaul (played with rather vicious relish by Viola Davis), and the games' creator Dean Casca Hightbottom (Peter Dinklage). Zegler manages to win the Hunger Games, but many complications between her and Blyth ensue afterwards, as do his relationships with, among others, rival Sejanus Plith (Josh Andres Rivera).

As directed by Francis Lawrence, who helmed CATCHING FIRE and both MOCKINGJAY films, THE BALLAD OF SONGBIRDS AND SNAKES, aside from being Dystopian in ways that I think would have been hard for even Aldous Huxley or George Orwell to imagine, is quite hair-raising in terms of its action sequences, occasionally imperiling the credibility of its PG-13 rating. It is also quite a long movie at almost two hours and forty minutes, though that length is offset by the action sequences, and the breaks into Appalachian folk music that Zegler's character indulges in, and which earns her the support of the Hunger Games viewing audience. Zegler, whose role as Maria in director Steven Spielberg's beautiful 2021 reworking of WEST SIDE STORY is one for the ages, does a very good turn as Lucy Gray Baird, with her folk-singing voice being very much reminiscent of Mother Maybelle Carter, Joan Baez, and Linda Ronstadt; and although this role isn't quite on the level of what she did for Spielberg, it is nowhere near the hot mess that her detractors (of which there seem to be far too many), and she really gets into the role in the District 12 "bar" sequences.

THE BALLAD OF SONGBIRDS AND SNAKES, even with its weird complications, twists, and turns, earns a rating of 8 from me.

Barbie (I) (2023)

From Mattel She Came...And Now She Has Conquered

[9/10 · 19 September 2023]

Where to begin?

If anyone had told you at the start of 2023 that the highest-grossing film of the year was going to be a film based on a female doll that first appeared in 1959, you'd probably have them trucked off to the funny farm. And yet that is what has happened with BARBIE. Somehow, perhaps through osmosis, Gerta Gerwig, one of Hollywood's great female directors of this age, known for films like 2017's LADY BIRD and 2019's LITTLE WOMEN (a great adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's literary masterpiece), has made the world's most famous doll become a huge deal, through a mix of goofiness, gaudiness, a certain amount of camp, satire, and pointed jabs at society.

Mrs. Gerwig has also managed to do so with a few references to films of the distant and not so distant past. Take the very opening scene, in which little girls of a previous "era" used to play with baby dolls, giving them the idea that the only ideal for a woman to be when she grew up was to be merely a mother. But then Barbie comes along, and inspires them to destroy the past to create a better future. Gerwig does this in clear but witty homage to the "Dawn Of Man" sequence that opens up director Stanley Kubrick's 1968 sci-fi masterpiece 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, with Barbie standing in for the monolith, and the awestruck little girls standing in for the man-apes. Gerwig even went to the trouble to use both the portentous opening of Richard Strauss' "Also Sprach Zarathustra" and the Kyrie from Gyorgy Ligeti's "Requiem" from Kubrick's film (getting the hearty approval of Kubrick's family in the process).

After that, BARBIE goes into the adventures, and misadventures, of the world's most famous doll, in the personage of Margot Robbie (as the so-called "stereotypical" Barbie), and Ryan Gosling (LA LA LAND; FIRST MAN) as the original Ken. Robbie's existence with the other Barbies throughout time in Barbieland (which looks like a crazy amalgam of Hollywood, Venice, LAX, and Palm Springs rolled into one), finds her making her way into the Real World of today, and finding out, much to her shock, that being the ideal of perfection not only isn't all that it's cracked up to be, but that male patriarchy is the essence of everything in that world. In the meantime, Gosling's Ken, through reading about male patriarchy in high school books, leads a revolt with the "other" Kens to turn Barbieworld into "Ken's World", a symbol of male testosterone excess. The end result is crazy chaos, involving not only Mattel's CEO (Will Farrell), but also a mother (America Ferrera) and her daughter (Sascha Greenblatt), and Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman), the actual woman responsible for having created the original Barbie.

With all these crazy things happening in the span of just under two hours, it is not surprising that some of the acting is rather overripe, and the jokes and sight gags don't always work. But given all this, and the fact that it sometimes seems on the verge of falling totally apart, the film stays on track due to Mrs. Gerwig's imaginative direction, and, most especially, Robbie's performance as Barbie, where she evolves from a stereotypical figure to a genuinely human one If some of the shots Mrs. Gerwig and her co-screenwriter Noah Bumbach take on the clichés of the status of men and women in the real world can sometimes border on blatant point-making, many of the others are so spot-on that one cannot help laughing at them once we get them.

Gerwig's film references, besides the aforementioned "2001" homage, include two more Kubrick classics (DOCTOR STRANGELOVE; THE SHINING), plus THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG, THE WIZARD OF OZ, GREASE, and SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER, to name just a few. In the end, however, BARBIE is a totally original and insane piece of both old and new Hollywood at its best. For this, Gerwig, Robbie, and Gosling, along with the droll narration of Dame Helen Mirren, deserve tons of credit, as they managed to make what could easily have been an unmitigated disaster into a memorable and wholly unexpected smash spectacle.

BARBIE gets a '9' rating from me.

Oppenheimer (I) (2023)

"I Am Become Death, The Destroyer Of Worlds"

[10/10 · 28 July 2023]

He was deemed "The Father of the Atomic Bomb"-a man whose core studies on the nature of the universe and the atom itself led to the development of the ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction; and in his life, he was accused of being a Communist, particularly after his invention (or two of them) atomized Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was J. Robert Oppenheimer (or "Oppie" to his "fans" in the world), But while his story is fairly well known to anyone who has studied the history of America from World War II through to the Cold War, it took British director Christopher Nolan to truly bring his epic story to the big screen, which he has done so with OPPENHEIMER.

Adapted to the screen by Nolan from the book "American Prometheus" by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, OPPENHEIMER stars Cilia Murphy as the legendary and (frequently) legendarily controversial scientist whose studies in quantum physics unlock the great secret of the creation of the universe, but which, in the 1930's, were put to use for a much more disturbing purpose. In order to keep this disturbing purpose totally under wraps, Oppenheimer devised the entire building of a small town in New Mexico called Los Alamos. But both his advocacy for unions inside the professions of professors, teachers, and scientists and his loose associations with people who may have (suspected) ties to the Communist Party make him the subject of scrutiny by the U. S. government, particularly the FBI (very much under the control of J. Edgar Hoover). He nevertheless gets support in the development of The Bomb from legendary General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), Albert Einstein (Tom Conti), and fellow nuclear physicist Edward Teller (Benny Sadie) and the great Danish scientist Niels Bohr (Sir Kenneth Branagh). Overall, this makes OPPENHEIMER very much a political drama and an historical drama all in one, with Murphy's performance giving us insight into the psychology and psyche of this great and, in many ways, troubled American genius, and also a look at how America, from the 1940's onward, seemed hell bent on containing the evils of Communism with a nuclear weapons program that, if ever used for real, would wipe out every living thing on Earth.

Nolan, known for such great films as 2009's INCEPTION, 2014's INTERSTELLAR, and 2017's DUNKIRK, may have made an incredibly long film out of his subject, with a running time of three hours, but he certainly makes the most of it, particularly in the intense and frightening countdown to the device's test detonation in the New Mexico desert in July 1945. Emily Blunt is quite good as Oppenheimer's wife Kitty; and the supporting turns from Damon, Conti, and Branagh are top-notch all the way. And finally, Murphy's portrayal of Oppenheimer is a portrayal clearly worthy of being awarded, particularly a very likely nomination for Best Actor at the Oscars.

Clearly, this is a masterpiece, and worthy of a '10' rating.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

Indy's Final Jaunt: Not Perfect, But Nowhere Near A Disaster

[8/10 · 23 July 2023]

The character of the intrepid archaeologist Indiana Jones, as personified by Harrison Ford onscreen, and conceived by George Lucas, is clearly an ultimate Hollywood icon. Whether it was going after lost arks, the Holy Grail, or ancient alien crystal skulls, Indy and his trusty bullwhip were always on the case. And with INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY, Ford and Indy can finally hang it up, both having cemented their places in cinematic lore. But they do so with an extreme bang.

Pre-occupied as he was with both WEST SIDE STORY and THE FABELMANS, director Steven Spielberg, who helmed the first four, only stays on as co-executive producer with Lucas for THE DIAL OF DESTINY; and in his place in the director's chair is James Mangold, whose filmography includes such decidedly "non-cliffhanger: films as 1999's GIRL, INTERREPUTED; 2005's WALK THE LINE; and 2019's FORD VS. FERRARI. Beginning with a battle between Ford and the Nazis onboard a train in the Swiss Alps near the end of World War II involving an extremely valuable ancient dial from two millennia ago that could change history and even the existence of the human race, the film then moves forward to 1969, where, in the weeks following the Apollo 11 moon landing, that mysterious dial (or part of it anyway) enters Indy's life again, despite him being retired from "active" archaeology, via his long-lost goddaughter Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge). What ensues, of course, is not only transcontinental mayhem of the kind that one expects from the Indiana Jones series (given that it's always been essentially a high-tech version of the old 1930's and 1940's short adventure serials that Lucas and Spielberg watched as kids), but also, given that the artifact can alter time and history, and not in a good way if it's in the wrong hands, trans-temporal mayhem, as Ford and Bridge leap from one place to another.

Given that Ford has crossed his own real life eight-decade threshold, we might as well consider DIAL OF DESTINY the final Indiana Jones film we are likely to get; and however weird, bizarre, or credibility-stretching the series has been, even under Spielberg's direction, it has been a great thrill ride. Much of the credit for this should go to Ford, who has always been a hugely credible and at the same time recognizable human action hero as such. In terms of THE DIAL OF DESTINY itself, it is not a mark against Mangold to say that he is not Steven Spielberg (because let's face it, who else is?). As director and co-writer, he is still able to get a lot of mileage out of this entry. John Rhys Davies returns as Indy's long-time friend Sallah, and also gives us Antonio Banderas as Ford's Spanish deep-sea diving friend Renaldo. There is also a nefarious CIA agent working for Ford'a Nazi foe, played by Shaunette Renee Wilson, who is almost a dead-ringer for the legendary and real-life radical African-American activist Angela Davis (a richly ironic twist if ever there was one). We also can't forget Karen Allen returning at the end; nor should we forget that John Williams provides yet another astonishingly great music score, as his seemingly endless ability to do with film after film.

As crazy as this fifth and final Indiana Jones film entry is, I am more than willing to dial up an '8' rating for THE DIAL OF DESTINY.

The Drowning Pool (1975)

Newman As Lew Harper In New Orleans

[8/10 · 27 April 2023]

Back in 1966, Paul Newman enjoyed one of his biggest critical and commercial successes by getting into the private-eye genre in HARPER, as Lew Harper (Lew Archer, actually, in the Ross McDonald novel "The Moving Target" upon which that film was based). With his caginess and oftentimes-sardonic wit, Newman's Harper solved a complex Southern California kidnapping case revolving around a missing millionaire that virtually nobody liked. And then in 1975, he ventured down to New Orleans on another case, and a trip to THE DROWNING POOL.

In this one, Newman's Harper is called down to The Big Easy by an old flame of his, Iris Devereaux (Joanne Woodward, alias Newman's missus) to investigate the ex-chauffeur ((Andy Robinson) who has, according to her, been sending her threatening notes of the blackmail variety. Naturally, the more he digs into the Devereaux family, the more complex this case gets. The family is involved in a fierce war with an unctuous oil baron, one J. Hugh Kilbourne (Murray Hamilton) over land the family owns but that Hamilton wants because of a big petroleum reserve underfoot. Then there's the issue of Woodward's Lolita-ish kid Schuyler (Melanie Griffith, in an early role); the local police chief (Tony Franciosa) who has taken a strong interest in the welfare of the family; Franciosa's ambitious and duplicitous lieutenant (Richard Jaeckel); and the seedier side of life as represented by Hamilton's wife (Gail Strickland), who claims that her husband may, how shall we say, not be altogether upstairs. All of this leads Newman into some fairly dark corners, and into the Drowning Pool of the film's title, a hydrotherapy room at a sanitarium where Hamilton once went for The Treatment, but which Hamilton had purchased. Hamilton and his crony (Paul Koslo) subject both Newman and Strickland to The Treatment to force Newman to reveal the whereabouts of an account book with seedy financial disclosures involving Hamilton. All of this is wrapped into a very complex screenplay co-written by Walter Hill (48 HRS.).

As is with quite a lot of what Newman did throughout his career, THE DROWING POOL sees the great actor as being top-notch. His director here is Stuart Rosenberg, who worked with him on his Oscar-nominated role in the title character of COOL HAND LUKE in 1967, as well as 1970's WUSA and 1972's POCKET MONEY. And while Rosenberg may not necessarily be a standout director, or Lew Harper another Sam Spade or Phillip Marlowe, he is quite a character as Newman essays him. The supporting cast, particularly Hamilton in a role infinitely more uncouth than the greedy venal mayor he was in JAWS, and Franciosa's no-nonsense cop ("Mister, you don't belch without my knowin' about it"), is also quite good, as is Michael Small's New Orleans-centric music score (interpolating the Charles Fox/Norman Gimbel song "Killing Me Softly"). Finally, it's a great thing to see the husband-and-wife team of Newman and Woodward onscreen; their characters try to rekindle a romance six years in the past, though Newman doesn't know how it'll end badly for both of them.

This is a very good revisiting of Newman to the P. I. genre, a return that he'd make only one more time in his career (under a different character) in the 1998 Robert Benton-directed film TWILIGHT. THE DROWNING POOL gets a rating of '8' from me.

Frontline: America After 9/11 (2021) Season 40, Episode 1

From 9/11 To 1/6

[10/10 · 1 January 2023]

When four U. S. airliners were skyjacked over the northeastern United States and sent into the Twin Towers in New York City, the Pentagon in Washington, and a deserted field in Pennsylvania, and nearly three thousand innocent people lost their lives in the span of 102 minutes, on September 11, 2001, it seemed like, even in the midst of such unmitigated horror, death, and destruction, that the world in general was embracing America in a whole new fashion, and that Americans had found a true purpose in the 21st century.

That, sadly, did not turn out to be the case. In fact, it wasn't even close. Instead, a lot of the things that we as a nation thought we had buried, including ethnic and racial animosity, and political and generational warfare amongst ourselves, came gushing through the surface and infecting virtually everything about us. We actually came within a hair's breadth of losing our democracy on January 6th, 2021.

The PBS "Frontline" documentary AMERICA AFTER 9/11, which aired on September 7, 2021, four days before the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and just shortly after our withdrawal from Afghanistan, gives us a gripping, and oftentimes stomach-turning, look back at the things that erupted out of the ashes of 9/11, including the first egregious act, an invasion of Iraq whose pretext was a cooked-up lie conceived by then-President George W. Bush and vice-president Dick Cheney that Iraq and its loathsome leader Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in its possession and was in league with Osama Bin-Laden and Al-Qaeda, the rogue terrorist leader and group that had actually carried out 9/11. The fact that the corporate news media bought and sold this lie hook, line, and sinker, plus a great deal of prevarications, over the succeeding decade and a half made it, if not inevitable then certainly possible, for a would-be dictator to become president of the United States-which is sadly what happened, in the personage of one Donald Trump. All the while, the cause of the mistrust, the ill-conceived Iraq and Afghanistan misadventures that consumed not only Bush, but also Barack Obama, and which led to Trump, still haunted America.

The documentary, which is both alternately fascinating and outraging in equal measures, culminates with the horror of the storming of the U. S. Capitol on January 6th in an attempt to install Trump as virtually dictator-for-life after he had legitimately lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden. And all the while, we as a nation not only had to deal with foreign interventions, but the explosions of racial violence stemming from the May 25, 2020 of George Floyd, and the single worst pandemic the world had seen since 1918.

What AMERICA AFTER 9/11 tells us is that the worse enemy we have to face in the 21st century is no longer some vague threat from overseas; it is within our own borders, and fueled by twenty years of mistrust in our core institutions, a mistrust far worse than anything we even saw during the Vietnam era. We need to seriously come to grips with such a reality and fix things, or the United States may not survive as the beacon of democracy for much longer.

Desert One (2019)

The Real-Life Tragedy Of Operation Eagle Claw

[10/10 · 1 January 2023]

One of the great tragedies in the history of U. S. military operations outside of an actual war itself was the attempt in April 1980 by the U. S. Special Forces unit known as the Delta Force to effect a rescue of the personnel being held at our besieged embassy in Teheran, Iran. The operation, known as Eagle Claw, owing to a lack of foresight at the highest levels, was both well-intentioned and, sadly, misconceived; and owing to two of the eight helicopters involved in that operation malfunctioning, plus a blinding sandstorm in the Iranian desert, resulted in the deaths of eight U. S. servicemen on April 24, 1980, and prolonged the Iranian hostage crisis until January 20, 1981.

DESERT ONE, a 2019 documentary directed by Barbara Kopple, the legendary documentary filmmaker responsible for, among many classic docs, 1976's HARLAN COUNTY U. S. A., and 2006's DIXIE CHICKS: SHUT UP AND SING, takes a look at the lead-up to this event, including America's turbulent relationship with Iran, one which went rocky in 1953 when Iran's then-leader, and democratically elected prime minister, Mohammed Mosadegh was overthrown and killed in a violent CIA-sponsored coup. This resulted in the ascension of Reza Pahlavi, the "Shah", to power in Iran, where he was for all intents and purposes a "toady" for the United States. But in 1979, the Shah was overthrown by the Ayatollah Khomeni; and on November 4th of that year, radical students inspired by Khomeni seized the American embassy, holding fifty-two American diplomats hostage. This prompted then-President Jimmy Carter to instigate Operation Eagle Claw. The intent was to hatch a raid seemingly similar to Israel's 1976 Entebbe rescue mission. Its failure, and the deaths of the eight servicemen, dealt a blow to American prestige and morale, prolonged the hostage crisis, doomed Carter's re-election chances in 1980, and led to Ronald Reagan's ascension to the presidency.

In DESERT ONE, we get interviews with both Carter and his vice-president Walter Mondale, as well as interviews with former CIA director Robert Gates; legendary ABC newsman Ted Koppel (whose "Nightline" followed the Tehran hostage crisis from start to finish, and would become a fixture on ABC's late night programming for decades to come); and many of the embassy hostages and surviving members of Operation Eagle Claw (Michael Metrinko; James Q. Roberts; Ed Seiffert), as well as recorded telephone conversations between President Carter and Charles Beckwith, the legendary special forces commander responsible for the creation of Delta Force, of what was happening with the mission as it was unfolding and, unfortunately, fatally unraveling. Much of what emerges from DESERT ONE is the realization that dealing with what we call Middle East radicalism (especially when, in the case of Iran, it's something that our own government foments) and, eventually, terrorism is not nearly as cut-and-dried as we may have wanted to think it was.

But what also emerges is the fact that a group of good men at least had the guts to try and rescue our personnel from the hellhole they found themselves put in by the takeover of the embassy; and they deserve all the credit, the praise, and the commendations from We The People that they can get.

The Fabelmans (2022)

Spielberg Looks Inward

[10/10 · 6 December 2022]

Practically everything that Steven Spielberg has directed, from his 1971 made-for-TV psychological thriller DUEL to his 2021 re-imagining of WEST SIDE STORY, has had a personal resonance for him in some way or another. But his new film THE FABELMANS is quite a different animal altogether. This one is Personal in the most naked definition of that term, as he turns his camera more or less on his own peripatetic upbringing, starting with his first movie-going experience as a five year-old in Camden, New Jersey in 1952, going through his formative years as the family moves first to Arizona and then to Northern California, and finishing up with his first up-close encounter with Hollywood directing royalty in 1965. It is a story that is arguably quite cinema-centric, but one that alludes to things that too many kids went through during the conformist years of the 1950's and early 1960's, and things that too many kids of Jewish ancestry like Spielberg had to put up with.

As portrayed by Mateo Zayan in his very early years, Sammy Fabelman becomes excited (though also fairly terrified) with his first encounter with the art of movies via the 1952 Cecil B. DeMille opus THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH, which his parents Mitzi (Michelle Williams) and Burt (Paul Dano) take him to see at a cinema house in Camden, New Jersey. In those years, he borrows a motion picture camera to stage a mini version of that film's famous train wreck with his own train set. Then as the family moves out to Arizona, due to his father's expertise in the burgeoning technological explosion of the times, Sammy, henceforth played by Gabrielle LaBelle, gets downright serious. But through his little cinematic films of his family's Arizona adventures, he uncovers a very troubling secret that his mom has been keeping from the kids, one that involves close family friend Bennie Loewey (Seth Rogen). And once the family makes one more final move, this time to what would become known as Silicon Valley, not only do Williams and Dano start to split up, leaving LaBelle and his sisters to pick up the pieces, as a high school student in a largely WASP-ish community LaBelle encounters for the first time virulent anti-Semitism being aimed straight at him. Movie-making is his only real respite; and even then, he's not exactly sure whether he really wants to do it anymore--until that aforementioned first brush with a Hollywood directing legend of, how shall we say, some renown.

Co-written by Spielberg and his frequent collaborator Tony Kushner, THE FABELMANS is a moving film that's more than just about movies and the power to inspire one kid to take up this art form. It is about how he has to deal as a kid and then as a teenager morphing into an adult much sooner than he had ever expected with things that he had no way of controlling (let alone directing). It's one thing to go through those stages in what we used to call a "nuclear family" that is silently imploding, which far too many kids from the 1950's to this very day have had to do; but it is quite another matter when you're a kid trying to fit in a society that not only has no use for Jews but has this unfortunate tendency want to denigrate and destroy them. There are also quite a few amusing moments, as in the scenes in high school where LaBelle befriends a girl who tries to convert him from Judaism to Christianity (needless to say, that doesn't take), and his filming of his high school's hi-jinks on "Ditch Day" on the beach at Santa Cruz. LaBelle so accurately captures the triumphs and trauma of Spielberg's upbringing; and Williams, Dano, and Rogen are also incredibly good. Judd Hirsch has a ten-minute cameo role as Uncle Boris, who gives LaBelle some pointers about how art and love can tear a person in two, as it almost does to LaBelle.

So often in the past, Spielberg has been accused of being overtly sentimental and manipulative in some of his films, while being much too serious in others. But these charges are not very credible when it comes to those films; and they don't ring true when it comes to THE FABELMANS either. This is not only a personal film for Spielberg, it is eminently relatable to anyone who has had to go through the trauma of a family break-up and then to be bullied in school for the most petty and stupid reasons possible. Spielberg is a director of extraordinary ability, but he also believes in common people with common concerns and common dreams. In the end, THE FABELMANS hits very close to home when one thinks about it hard enough, and that's the kind of Hollywood art that Spielberg has engaged in for a half century-plus, to our everlasting benefit.

Yellow Rose (I) (2019)

Pursuing A Dream, Despite A Broken System

[9/10 · 15 October 2022]

What happens when you love the country you just migrated to...but it doesn't love you back? And suppose you are an aspiring musician in a style of music that historically has defined the values of that very country? That is the conundrum faced by a teenage girl of Filipina ancestry in YELLOW ROSE.

Eva Noblezada stars as the titular character, Rose Garcia being her actual name, living in a small Texas town not far from Austin, the state capital and capital of the kind of honky-tonk country-and-western music she aspires to sing and play, using her father's beat-up guitar as her method of expression. But what she doesn't know (and has never known) is that her mother (Princess Puzalan) got both of them into this country illegally; and when her mother is taken from her by officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, her life goes into absolute turmoil, especially when it's obvious that Puzalan is going to be deported back to Manila, if not also Noblezada.herself.

Fortunately for her, even though her aunt (Lea Salonga) is only marginally sympathetic (and maybe not necessarily even that, in Noblezada's eyes), Noblezada has been writing her own original songs for quite a while, looking for a way to make demo records to show off her abilities, and at least three people help her out: Jolene (Libby Vilari), the owner of the dance hall known as the Broken Spoke; Elliot (Liam Booth); and real-life Texas music legend Dale Watson. With this help behind her, and despite the odds stacked against her by an intolerable immigration situation, Noblezada finds the strength to persevere.

YELLOW ROSE, as directed by long-time documentary filmmaker Diane Paragas, here making her feature film debut (she also co-wrote the screenplay), does tread into the very hot political waters that are the American immigration system, but for the most part it focuses in on Noblezada's pursuit of her version of the American Dream, which is ironically rooted with the same forces trying to throw those of her kind out of this country. Noblezada's acting performance here is one that is equal amounts vulnerability, fierceness, determination, and resilience; and her singing is very authentic sounding as well. Watson's presence here also gives the film the right amount of Texas honky-tonk authenticity.

YELLOW ROSE is definitely a film worth seeing, whether one is a country music fan or just as casual filmgoer, and it gets a '9' from me.

Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)

Still Hypersonic--But Still A Really Good Superhero Flick

[9/10 · 7 October 2022]

The saga of Diana Prince, a.k.a. Wonder Woman, the leading female character in the DC Comics universe, was bought to the screen for the first time in 2017 under the striking direction of Patty Jenkins, and with Gal Gadot giving everything she had in the titular role of the Amazon warrior princess with a heart and a conscience. That particular film was set in the mechanized horrors of World War I. And in the mysterious way that is only plausible in a comic book, her saga moves sixty-seven years into the future in the follow-up, 2020's WONDER WOMAN 1984.

A longer film (by ten minutes) than its predecessor, WONDER WOMAN 1984 now finds Gadot's Diana Prince working at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D. C. in 1984, five years before (at least in terms of actual history) the end of the Cold War, as an archaeologist (not necessarily a female version of Indiana Jones, though) who soon becomes intrigued by a special gemstone with immense but (ultimately) very destructive powers. A very insecure colleague of hers, Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig), and a power-hungry businessman (sound familiar?) named Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal) come into contact with this gem; and very soon, Gadot has a situation on her hands that even her immense powers may not be enough to solve in a good way. Incredibly enough, even though he was lost in the first film, her former love Steve Trevor (Chris Pine), somehow comes back into her life; and therein lies the possibility to stop World War III. But both Minerva and Pascal have become so megalomaniacal that it takes all Gadot has, and then some, to get things back into order.

Jenkins not only returned to the director's chair for WONDER WOMAN 2020 (it made more than enough sense to have her for the original in the first place), but she also co-wrote the screenplay as well; and to add to the back story of a younger Diana (Lilly Aspell), she has both Connie Nielsen and Robin Wright returns in their roles of, respectively, Hippolyta and Antiope. Like many a hyper-budget comic book movie, especially those made during this century, some of the performances here are larger-than-life (this was true, though in a more deadpan way, of Gene Hackman's Lex Luthor in the 1978 classic SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE), and that case can be made for both Wiig's and Pascal's arguably over-the-top performances, which most of these films obvious have to have, as it is what fans of the genre have come to expect. But ultimately, it is Gadot's humanistic performance that drives this film, as it did its predecessor. While she may be a, for lack of a better term, a kick-ass super hero, it's only when she needs to be; otherwise, she eschews violence for love and truth. Meanwhile, the tag in the closing credits introduces a new character...played by someone with a very familiar name and face (you can't miss it).

As with the original, I am giving this a 9-star rating.

Wonder Woman (2017)

The Amazon Princess Finally Makes It To The Big Screen

[9/10 · 29 September 2022]

I have to confess, I am not a fan of big-screen comic book/superhero films, especially of the last twenty-plus years. In fact, the only one of these I sat through in my life was the original SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE, arguably the best film of its kind ever made-and this was back in 1978. But while I probably can't change my mind about the genre after seeing it, the 2017 film WONDER WOMAN has more than enough to distinguish it from the others of either the DC Comics lineup (which it is a part of) or Marvel.

The character of Diana, the Amazon warrior princess who became Wonder Woman, originated in comic books the late 1930's, but the most famous iteration of this character was on television during the late 1970's, when the role was portrayed (and legendarily so) by Lynda Carter. Fortunately, in the midst of Hollywood's (and the film going public's) obsession with comics, the character finally made a stand-alone big-screen bow in 2017-and with no less than a woman in the director's chair, Patty Jenkins, here making her first film as a director since 2003's MONSTER.

Israeli actress Gal Gadot steps into the role of the Amazon warrior princess, whose background of growing up among fellow goddesses on the mythical island of Themyscira is brilliantly depicted by Jenkins and her crew on location in Italy, and is mentored by the best of them (portrayed by Connie Nielsen and Robin Wright). But everything changes for her when an American pilot (Chris Pine) working as a spy for the British crashes his plane close to the island. Pine tells of a war to end all wars happening in the world outside of Themyscira, which is shielded by an invisible force field; and Gadot, having realized her abilities, makes every effort to try and stop it all. She and Pine take a boat into the worst of the fighting on the Western Front in France near the end of this war, World War I, and try to stop a ruthless German general (Danny Huston) from manufacturing a lethal gas sure to make an already atrocious body count in this first example of genuine mechanized warfare even higher than it is. The adventures that Gadot and Pine go on force Gadot to not only understand her own powers, but the weaknesses of the human race in general, and men in particular, and the penchant they have for killing each other through hatred. In her relationship with Pine, she realizes that love is the one thing that can save the world.

Unlike so many other superhero comic book movies, Wonder Woman, besides having immense powers of her own, is also able to show empathy and understanding, only using her powers when nothing else will do. And even though her Israeli accent is very obvious in her line renderings, Gadot makes a completely credible Wonder Woman all the same-likely, she was the only actress capable of creating a Wonder Woman for this era (even though this film is set more than a century in the past) and still paving a certain amount of homage to Carter, whom Jenkins gives very special thanks to in the final credits. The visual effects and the costumes are all first-rate, of course; but the reason they, and the film in general, work as well as they do is because of Jenkins' fine direction and Gadot's portrayal. This is not just a slam-bang, hypersonic Hollywood spectacle. This is a spectacle with a heart and a conscience; and that's why it gets a '9' rating from me.

Blue Bayou (2021)

A Tragic Immigrant Story Set In New Orleans

[9/10 · 4 September 2022]

One group of people who have never had it easy in the United States are the immigrants who come here to seek a better life, whether they are of Latino or Asian descent, only to be met with racism, xenophobia, prejudice, and racism-all unfortunate facts of life. Assimilation of "The Other" has always produced uneasy acceptance even in the best of times; and in recent tines, that ugly side of America was practically put on steroids. But America's immigration laws were broken and made antiquated long ago, and they have not been updated for decades. This is where writer/director Justin Chon's 2021 drama BLUE BAYOU comes in.

Chon, who co-produced the movie and, prior to this, was known also as an actor (in 2008's TWILIGHT and 2010's TWILIGHT SAGA: ECLIPSE), stars as Antonio LeBlanc, a Korean immigrant with a Spanish first name and a French-Canadian surname living in a small town on the outskirts of New Orleans, working as a local tattoo artist and a noted rider of motorcycles. He has what seems on the surface a very "charmed" life, with a wife (Alicia Virkander), a young daughter (Sydney Kowalske) whom he inherited from Virkander's previous husband, and another one on the way. But a run-in with members of New Orleans' finest at a local market results in him getting arrested; and, before he knows it, because of a previous run-in with the law and having been brought in under different immigration laws in 1988, now faces deportation from the United States. He is put into detention by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, before being released; but in the meantime, deportation still hangs over his head, as does the forced abandonment of Virkander and Kowalske to Virkander's ex (Mark O'Brien), one of the cops he had the run-in with in the market. Chon and Virkander consult with a local New Orleans immigration lawyer (Vondie Curtis-Hall) who advises him to get folks in his immediate circle who can vouch for his being worthy. But in his desperation, he not only has to confront the ghosts of his past, but the realities of having had a criminal record; so having good familial references may not be enough to have him.

In the meantime, he and Virkander try very hard to associate with other Asian members of the New Orleans community, many of them refugees not only from Korea but also from Vietnam, two nations basically torn apart by American between 1950 and 1975. This includes a gathering in which Virkander is invited onto a stage to perform a rendition of the classic 1963 Roy Orbison song "Blue Bayou", a song made into an even bigger hit in 1977 by Linda Ronstadt. But the strain between Chon and Virkander is extremely palpable because of Chon's failure to be honest with Virkander about his past and his unfortunate criminal present.

Chon, who was actually born in America to Korean parents, wrote the screenplay after having heard of similar horror stories of Korean émigrés who got caught up in the often-confused and definitively broken American immigration system. And although he may not have gotten everything exactly right about the particulars of those immigration laws, he did get at least a couple of unfortunate things correct, such as the prejudice people like him who were born overseas, taken into America, and then adapted, tend to face, particularly in the South, even in a highly cosmopolitan polyglot of a city like New Orleans. He also gives us vivid depictions of how Korean and Vietnamese émigrés display their cultures living out in the swampy bayous that occupy much of the Louisiana landscape. Virkander, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 2015 for her role in THE DANISH GIRL, and had appeared in the weird 2014 psychosexual sci-fi film EX MACHINA, is also riveting as his sympathetic life; and Kowalske also impresses in her debut as Chon's and Virkander's daughter, who is horrified at the reality of her adapted father being expelled from America because of a whole series of unfortunate circumstances.

Despite the often graphic language, much of it racially charged (though appropriately so), and the violence (though not gratuitous in any way), BLUE BAYOU, thanks to Chon's efforts on both sides of the camera and Virkander's performance (especially when she sings the classic song the film is named after), is an often moving and touching story about the immigrant experience in late 20th/early 21st century America. It is also, sadly enough, an all-too-American story as well, one that far too many of us who were actually born here still don't acknowledge exists in our post-9/11 world.

Elvis (2022)

ELVIS: An Epic Film About An Epic Individual In American Music

[10/10 · 27 June 2022]

Perhaps no other figure defined popular music during the 20th century like Elvis Presley did. From being born a boy growing up in abject poverty in Jim Crow-era Mississippi and listening to plenty of "race" music, to adapting this music to his rural White roots and totally reshaping the American musical landscape of the 1950's, to his extremely sudden death in August 1977, Elvis was an incredible force of nature. But behind the scenes, virtually his every move from 1955 onward was controlled by one Colonel Tom Parker; and many would argue it was Parker's overworking his one and only client that contributed to his addiction to prescription drugs that led to his premature demise at the age of 42. Coming in to tell the story of The King, a story that still lingers on even though two full generations have passed since his death, is Australian director Baz Luhrmann, whose credits included a 1996 rendering of ROMEO AND JULIET, 1992's MOULIN ROUGE, and 2008's AUSTRALIA, with a film whose title needs no explanation: ELVIS.

Filled with cascading montages and split-screen footage that perfectly match The King's rise, Luhrmann's bio-pic stars Austin Butler as the young white Mississippi kid whose love of African-American music and his honest use of it make him a sensation in the South in 1954 and '55. Into this breach steps the mysterious "Colonel" Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), a carnival barker who, at that time, was managing country music legend Hank Snow, but who sees this not-yet-20 year-old truck driver as his meal ticket. Very soon, both Butler and Hanks are joined at the hip as artist and manager, and Butler becomes the biggest music sensation in the South, and eventually the nation, while of course attracting a lot of negative press from white segregationist Southerners and even big-city media for his "lewd" onstage gyrations. Butler absolutely doesn't get what the big deal is about his moves, but Hanks forces him to do a number of rather demeaning things, like going on The Steve Allen Show to sing his big 1956 hit "Hound Dog" to a real-life basset hound dog(!). His two-year stint in the Army, which is interrupted by the tragic death of his mother Gladys (Helen Thomson), results in his coming home to become a cinematic matinee idol-but where virtually all of the films are formulaic, as are the songs. Only in marrying his Army-era girlfriend Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge) and becoming a father with the birth of Lisa Marie does Butler know how far he has fallen

By the time the film reaches 1968, Butler's career is all but in the toilet; but with the help of noted TV producer Steve Binder (Dacre Montgomery), and virtually none from Hanks (who wants it to be strictly a Christmas program), he comes up with the revelatory NBC-TV special that leads to big things beginning in 1969 and his stint in Las Vegas. But the treadmill of one concert after another, plus twice-a-year six-week engagements in Sin City, engineered by Hanks' penchant for gambling his client's money to hell, begin to wear on him, wreck his marriage to DeJonge, and accelerate an addiction to prescription drugs that had begun slowly as far back as 1956. The end of this saga for Butler, of course, comes on August 16, 1977; but Hanks doesn't exactly escape so quietly into the night.

More than a few Elvis-sanctioned documentaries, plus John Carpenter's 1979 made-for-TV film ELVIS (starring Kurt Russell as The King), have been made about him; but there is just something about seeing every possible way of filming put to incredibly energetic (if hypersonic) use by Luhrmann. Butler more than accurately captures Elvis' persona, his vulnerability, his insecurity, and his rage at knowing not only how Hanks is spending his money, but also Hanks' dark past (including his questionable citizenship, which was found to be non-existent several years after Elvis died). DeJonge (as Priscilla) and Thomson (as Gladys) do incredibly good turns in their roles. And Hanks, normally as much a paragon of the Everyman as Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda had been in their day, has an equally tough job of portraying The Colonel as anything other than a villain. In truth, "Colonel" Tom Parker was quite the shyster, who worked his client practically to death all because of his addiction to gambling. But in the eyes of Elvis' fans, that one fact alone indeed made Parker into a villain.

However one views Luhrmann's take on The King or The Colonel, ELVIS is a reminder of just how big a deal Elvis Presley was in helping reshape American popular music and popular culture in an era of conformity, and how, even after The Beatles, Michael Jackson, and many others, he still manages to have an impact even into the 21st century. That alone makes ELVIS a big and important film in the year 2022.

Jurassic World Dominion (2022)

The End Of The "Jurassic" Era (??)

[8/10 · 13 June 2022]

It began in 1990 as a speculative science fiction novel by Michael Crichton about genetically engineered dinosaurs on an isolated island off the coast of Central America. And then in 1993, director Steven Spielberg turned it into a genuinely great and scary sci-fi/suspense thriller. Thus was born JURASSIC PARK. Two sequels-1997's THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK (directed by Spielberg), and 2001's JURASSIC PARK 3 (directed by Joe Johnston)-came about, followed by a fourteen-year break. Then in 2015, with Spielberg serving as executive producer but not directing, there came JURASSIC WORLD, directed by Colin Treverrow, followed in 2018 by JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM (directed by J. A. Bayona) in 2018. And in 2022, we have come to what is likely the conclusion of this mega-successful dinosaur franchise, in the form of JURASSIC WORLD: DOMINION, with Trevorrow back in the director's chair.

At the end of JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM, a combination of an exploding volcano on Isla Nublar and the usual corporate avarice had allowed the dinosaurs and all manner of genetically engineered prehistoric creatures to break free. As JURASSIC WORLD: DOMINION stars, therefore, humans and dinosaurs (and their offspring, needless to say) are co-existing together, with extremely chaotic results, including a plague of what are basically dino-locusts wiping out the world's grain supply. Dern and Neill return as the intrepid pair of paleontologists Ellie Sattler and Alan Grant to find out that those locusts are being fueled via a genetically-modified seed invented by the Biosyn corporation, run by one Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott), who seems very much a Steve Jobs type, but with megalomaniacal ambitions that could spell humanity's downfall. Pratt (as Owen Grady) and Howard (as Claire Dearing) are back to join in the race to stop Scott dead in his tracks; and they have a secret weapon of sorts in their adapted daughter (Sermon), who, in an interesting twist of a back story, is the granddaughter of John Hammond, the man responsible for this unleashing of genetic dinosaurs in the first place, and who also has a few dino genes inside her DNA as well. All of them converge at Biosyn's isolated mountain facility in northern Italy where, along with famous chaos theorist Ian Malcolm (Goldblum), whom Scott has basically bribed up to this point, confront Scott and his off-the-wall ambitions; and what ensues is, of course, hair-raising dinosaur terror on an industrial, if not indeed downright apocalyptic scale.

With a length of close to two and a half hours, JURASSIC WORLD: DOMINION is obviously the longest of the entire six-film franchise, and, without too much doubt, in many places the most off-the-wall entry as well, mostly due to Scott's kidnapping plot involving Sermon, which contains chases on motorbikes, vans, and planes that wouldn't be out of place in any James Bond film, but arguably are here. As with the previous three films of the Jurassic Park/Jurassic World franchise, Spielberg functions as an executive producer only (having gotten himself in two major directorial undertakings of his own, WEST SIDE STORY and THE FABELMANS), so it is up to Trevorrow to come up with something huge. And this is indeed what happens in JURASSIC WORLD: DOMINION. The dinosaurs, particularly the locusts, are more ferocious than they have ever been before, ensuring that the franchise end (if indeed it does end here) on an almost end-of-the-world scale. But to Trevorrow's credit, probably with Spielberg's encouragement, he had the good sense to bring Dern, Neill, and Goldblum back from the original 1993 classic, and combine them with Pratt and Howard, who are (thankfully) no longer a bickering couple as they were in the first two JURASSIC WORLD films, but responsible dinosaur behavioral experts also looking out for Sermon's welfare amidst all the violent, screaming dinosaur terror.

Trevorrow is obviously not the subtlest of directors to begin with (sometimes, even Spielberg isn't either {witness "1941"]), but when it comes to JURASSIC WORLD: DOMINION, he delivers the goods without turning towards the way-over-the-top implausibilities of a Michael Bay (the infernal "Transformers" series) or Roland Emmerich (his admittedly good 2009 end-of-the-world opus "2012"); and the six principal actors of the franchise keep much of everything else on an even keel.

If this is indeed the end of this dinosaur franchise, it is one hell of a way to go out on. And this is why I'm giving JURASSIC WORLD: DOMINION an '8' rating.

May 4: Our Place in History (2016)

A 28-Minute Look At May 4, 1970

[10/10 · 18 May 2022]

Though a short film, at just twenty-eight minutes, MAY 4: OUR PLACE IN HISTORY is nevertheless an important document of a dark day in American history in general, and for the Baby Boom generation in particular.

It is about a specific moment of turmoil that erupted on a once seemingly innocuous college campus called Kent State University in the northeast Ohio town of Kent, thirty-five miles south of Cleveland, in the mid-spring of 1970. The Vietnam War had been an open wound on America for several years by that time; and although then-President Richard Nixon had campaigned in 1968 on a promise to end that war with honor, he then promptly reversed course on April 30, 1970 and sent tens of thousands of U. S. troops across the border into the tiny neighboring nation of Cambodia to supposedly destroy secretive Vietcong bases that were supplying the Communist insurgency in South Vietnam. This sent the nation in general, and educational institutions, including high schools, colleges, and universities, in particular, into a spasm of protest. It didn't take long for Kent State to become the center of turmoil.

On the night of May 2nd, angry students protesting the Cambodian incursion put the campus's ROTC building to the torch; and soon, that rage seeped off the campus and into the town of Kent itself, enraging the locals and spurring Ohio's neo-con governor Jim Rhodes to send in the Ohio National Guard in response. Then came May 4th, a Monday, in which there was a large-scale protest planned. That's when things got violent and ugly.

At 12:24 PM that day, for reasons that have never been fully disclosed to this day, National Guard troops opened fire on a group of protestors who had confronted them in an admittedly very raucous and arguably somewhat violent fashion. In the span of thirteen seconds, nine students had been shot, one of them, Dean Kahler, so badly that he was crippled from the waist down and bound to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Four others, William Schroeder, Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, and Sandra Scheuer, lay dead. The massacre led to other outbreaks of angry student walkouts and demonstrations on other college campuses, and even high schools, from one end of the United States to another, and it also further polarized the nation in a way that, in almost every single respect, it has never gotten over. Only ten days later, two young African-Americans were gunned down at a dormitory on the campus of Jackson State University in Mississippi, thus pouring more gasoline onto a raging political and social firestorm.

Featuring interviews from several of the surviving participants of the 5/4/70 horror, including Laura Davis and Jerry M. Lewis, plus observations being made by legendary filmmaker Oliver Stone, and musician activist David Crosby, who witnessed Neil Young write the protest song "Ohio" in response to that day, MAY $: OUR PLACE IN HISTORY, a project of Kent State University itself as a way of acknowledging the school's responsibility for what happened, is one of many truly documentaries about this dark day in American history, a day that must always be remembered, and never forgotten under any circumstances.

Mission: Impossible (1996)

This review will self-destruct in five seconds...

[8/10 · 17 March 2022]

Hollywood has always liked to recycle old television shows, at least ever since "Star Trek", which only lasted three years (from 1966 to 1969) during its original network run on NBC, was turned into an incredible cinematic franchise starting in 1979. Thus, it probably isn't too terribly surprising that "Mission: Impossible", which was a huge ratings smash during its original seven-season run on CBS from 1966 to 1973, found its way onto the big screen. In fact, by 2023, it will have gone to seven cinematic spin-offs. But given that the outlandish stunts, special effects, and plotting have come to dominate the series, it is instructive to revisit its original 1996 cinematic incarnation, which is not only closer in spirit to the original TV series, but also more classically suspenseful than the sequels to come.

Tom Cruise is Ethan Hunt, a member of the CIA's super-secretive Impossible Mission Force, who is given the assignment of recovering a disc containing what is known as a NOC (Non-Official Cover) list of CIA agents across Europe from a traitor in Prague who intends to give it to an as-yet-unknown organized crime fighter named Max. But during the operation, supervised by Cruise's boss Jim Phelps (Jon Voight), things go painfully haywire, and each member of his IMF team are killed (or at least, it seems so). As it turns out, the NOC list is actually safe at home at CIA headquarters in Langley, and the CIA boss (Henry Czeny, as unctuous here as he was in 1994's CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER) informs Cruise that the whole operation is a mole hunt, and that Cruise himself may be the mole. The result is a series of twists that take Cruise and a newly assemble team of rogue agents, including Ving Rhames, from Langley to London, and finally onto the high-speed train going from London to Paris (the famous "Chunnel" underneath the English Channel) where Max (Vanessa Redgrave) intends to acquire the NOC list.

As with a lot of what went on in the original series created by Bruce Geller, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE has its moments of twists and turns that don't always seem to make a whole lot of sense, though the twist as to just who is the actual "traitor" is inside the IMF organization, as devised by screenwriters David Koepp and Robert Towne, is fairly ingenious. It also helps that this film is bolstered by the fine direction of Brian DePalma, who uses his skills as a classic director of Hitchcock-inspired suspense, as exemplified in CARRIE and DRESSED TO KILL, to build intensity into a plot that can at times approach confusion. This is very much in evidence in the sequence in which Cruise has to hang by a harness inside the IMF vault to get the NOC list off the IMF mainframe, a sequence shot with almost dead silence.

The movie's soundtrack score by Danny Elfman, though often quite raucous and loud, wisely interpolates the famous theme music originally composed and conducted by veteran Hollywood film composer Lalo Schifrin. The end result, with all of its labyrinthine twists and turns, is still memorable after more than a quarter of a century, worthy of the '8' rating I am giving it.

Twister (I) (1996)

Into The Whirlwinds In Oklahoma

[8/10 · 10 March 2022]

What happens when you have a couple who are on the verge of divorce, but then are brought together because their own profession won't let them go? You get the 1996 science fiction/disaster film TWISTER.

Bill Paxton portrays a TV news weatherman who has to go out into the field to find his soon-to-be-divorced wife (Helen Hunt) to get her to sign divorce papers. He has to go out and do it like this because, as it turns out, it is the middle of spring in Oklahoma, and that means it is tornado season. Hunt and her team are out there to test a new revolutionary device that is intended to measure the dynamics of this most violent meteorological phenomena, one that is an unfortunate fixture in life in the Midwest during the spring. It is this obsession that Hunt has been nursing since she lost her father as a young girl during a violent tornado in June 1969, that Paxton can't necessarily tolerate in her. But even as he intends to wed his second wife Melissa (Jami Gertz), Paxton is drawn back into the field with Hunt and her rough-and-tumble team of storm chasers. Soon, they get much more than they bargained for, when a series of increasingly violent tornadoes start ravaging the Oklahoma landscape. But they have competition in this somewhat insane race to map the inside of a tornado from a renegade bunch, led by Cary Elwes, who, to put it mildly, not only don't play fair, but they don't play it safe either (though playing it safe with a violent 200 mile-per-hour force of nature is impossible to begin with anyway). And at the end, it comes down to chasing a monstrosity of a twister that ranks as a '5" on the Enhanced Fujita measuring scale, with winds approaching apocalyptic speeds of 300 miles per hour and above.

While there is an unusual amount of clunky dialogue, given that Michael Crichton, known for JURASSIC PARK, WESTWORLD, and THE ANDROMEDA STRIAN, co-wrote this with his wife Anne-Marie Martin, TWISTER nevertheless has a lot to recommend all the same. Much of the credit has to go to Jan DeBont, whose second film this is as a director; he had done the cinematography on, among other films, DIE HARD and THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER, and then got into the director's chair with the justifiably much lauded 1993 action/suspense blockbuster smash SPEED. Even though the back-and-forth bickering between Paxton and Hunt in the first half of the movie is definitively irritating, and Gertz's performance is rather wobbly, once TWISTER gets into high gear with the twisters becoming increasingly violent and destructive, the intensity of the suspense ratchets up; and the special effects, accurately depicting what people in the Midwest and the South experience all too often from March through June. The film is also helped out by some witty references to legendary filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, in that two of the characters in Hunt's team, played by Nicholas Sadler and Ben Weber, are named, respectively "Kubrick" and "Stanley", and one of the twisters hits a small-town drive-in that is showing Kubrick's 1980 horror classic THE SHINING.

Given that this was arguably the first significant disaster film Hollywood had done since the genre's supposed demise at the end of the 1970's, and despite its problems, TWISTER doesn't go as over-the-top in its super-destruction theatrics as Roland Emmerich arguably would in his hyper-apocalyptic opuses to come. For those reasons, I am willing to give TWISTER an '8' rating, because it is still as memorable and accurate in its depiction of this cataclysmic real-life phenomena of Mother Nature in 2022 as it was in 1996.

Moonwalk One (1972)

A First Look At The First Step

[8/10 · 24 February 2022]

The landing of Apollo 11 on the Moon on the evening of July 20, 1969 was one of the great moments in the history not just of the United States but also of the human race in general. The culmination of the "Space Race" that started with the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union in October 4, 1957, the lunar landing was by no means achieved without sacrifice, given that Roger Chaffee, Gus Grissom, and Ed White were asphyxiated in that terrible Apollo 1 flash fire on the Kennedy Space Center launch pad in 1967. Nor did it come cheap, with billions spent to make this eternal dream of Mankind come true. But it was precisely because of these real-life dangers that Apollo 11 was arguably the greatest human triumph of an otherwise tragically troubled 20th century. The first film to take on this monumental event was 1972's MOONWALK ONE.

While it has understandably been vastly overshadowed by the brilliant 2019 film APOLLO 11, MOONWALK ONE nevertheless had an immediacy that few other documentaries had during that same time on the subject of space. As directed by Theo Karnecke, and narrated by actor Lawrence Luckinbill, this film utilizes much of the same NASA footage that Todd Douglas Miller would use, in vastly restored form, in his 2019 masterpiece. And while this is a clearly dated film, it is nevertheless still a thoroughgoing look at the event, going from the past events of discovery (Magellan; Columbus, etc.) to the actual construction of the components of the Apollo spacecraft, including the massive Saturn V launch vehicles At times, it may be tempting to think that MOONWALK ONE is a hagiographic ode to NASA and its manned space flight program, which has expended several hundred billion dollars of the American taxpayers' money during its existence. Whether that's true or not will obvious be argued from now until doomsday. But even if this were indeed the truth, history has shown that it was still money well worth having been spent, in singular contrast to putting trillions of dollars more into the voracious maw of the military-industrial complex for endless wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and getting absolutely nothing but dead and crippled soldiers and civilians, and endless political strife.

Not simply an ode to American nationalism or hubris (which would make it merely simplistic n the extreme), MOONWALK ONE, even if a relic by our standards, nevertheless is still a relic well worth studying, and worthy of an '8' rating.

Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)

A One-Armed Solider, And A Small Town With A Dirty Little Secret

[10/10 · 21 February 2022]

While the America of the ten to fifteen years following the end of World War II was one marked by the hysteria of Joe McCarthy's railing against Communism, one other form of hysteria that Americans would rather have not talked about was the racism directed at those of Japanese origin, simply because of what the Imperial Japanese Navy did on December 7, 1941 at Pearl Harbor. Indeed, exactly ten years after that war ended, a big time Hollywood film dealt rather concisely with that form of racism, and did so in a way that also roped in certain elements of that most American of genres, the Western. That film was BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK.

Filmed on location near Lone Pine, at the foot of California's eastern Sierra Nevada, and not too far from the Manznnar detention camp, BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK stars Spencer Tracy as a one-armed World War II veteran who has come to this very small town along a railroad line to find the Japanese soldier who saved his life during an important battle in the Pacific and give him the hero's medal he felt he deserved. But what he finds is that this town has a fairly ugly secret to hide about that soldier; and the townsfolk don't take too kindly to this "outsider" snooping around, even if he did fight and almost die for the country these people so openly, but also somewhat self-righteously, take pride in. The town is basically controlled by a strong-arm rancher named Reno Smith (the inimitable Robert Ryan), who is backed up by a pair of equally tough associates (Lee Marvin; Ernest Borgnine); and the three men, each of whom have their own twisted reasons, make life very interesting, not to mention very rough, for Tracy as he tries to find out the truth. But there are also townsfolk, including Walter Brennan and Anne Francis, who are sympathetic to Tracy's cause, and give him information that proves very valuable to him...and damaging to the three tough guys.

Very brilliantly directed by journeyman John Sturges, BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK is a genuinely taut and suspenseful modern-day Western, with certain inspiration taken from the 1952 classic HIGH NOON. If, as it has sometimes been remarked, Tracy seemed a bit up there in years to be playing a World War II veteran, he nevertheless conveys the maximum amount of gravitas required for his role, where he has to get to the unfortunate and dirty truth, and how an act of getting "patriotic drunk" led to a totally unjustifiable crime and a subsequent cover-up. Marvin and Borgnine (the latter of whom would actually win a Best Actor Oscar the same year for his far more sympathetic role in MARTY), both of whom were known for playing tough guys, both good and (in this case) evil, are exceptionally menacing. It is Ryan, however, who truly stands out because of the authoritarian look on his face that often made it easy to cast him as an incredibly evil bastard, sometimes (as in here, or in 1947's CROSSFIRE, where he played an anti-Semitic soldier) motivated by racism. In truth, Ryan was known as one of Hollywood's greatest humanitarians and one of its staunchest political progressives, especially during the 1950's, when being so could (and often did) get people blacklisted as Commies.

With a taut and suspenseful scrip by Millard Kaufman, and a brilliant score by Andre Previn, who after having achieved success in Hollywood went on to have an even more successful classical conducting career (particularly with the London Symphony Orchestra in the 1970's), BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK stands out as a powerful film, one of the first to examine the much darker side of American patriotism and even the values espoused in the Old West that still hung over rural America in its post-World War II period, and certainly worthy of its having been put in the National Film Registry in 2018. It is a must-see to this day, whether one is a fan of social-political films, film-noir, or Westerns.

West Side Story (2021)

Spielberg Re-Imagines WEST SIDE STORY...And Gets Away With A Masterpiece

[10/10 · 18 February 2022]

It takes a special kind of nerve, or unmitigated gall, to try and put a new spin on a much-beloved film classic of any kind, especially when it's the Broadway musical WEST SIDE STORY that, in its original 1961 cinematic incarnation, won a record-setting ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture But of course that's the kind of nerve, or more specifically that of a riverboat gambler, that the ultra-legendary Steven Spielberg had when he decided to rework, or more accurately re-imagine, both the musical and the film version in 2021. And in every sense of the word, while it was never his intention to top what was done on Broadway in 1957 or for the big screen in 1961, he has nevertheless made a WEST SIDE STORY with a particular vision and a particular poignancy that perhaps only he, out of all the directors alive today, could possibly muster.

With the screenplay adaptation by Tony Kushner taking it back to the original Arthur Laurents book (and with a fair amount of un-subtitled Spanish dialogue to boot), this WEST SIDE STORY maintains the "Romeo And Juliet"-inspired outline, and the setting in the New York City of 1957. Here, however, the famed and fierce rivalry between the Jets (all Anglos) and the Sharks (all Puerto Ricans) is set against the factual demolition of their part of Manhattan, namely Lincoln Square and San Juan Hill, to build the Lincoln Center. Tony (Ansel Elgort), a former member of the Jets, now works at the drugstore operated by a wise Puerto Rican woman named Valentina (Rita Moreno, who won her Academy Award for portraying Anita in the 1961 original), after having served a year in jail for nearly beating an Egyptian Kings gang member to death. When his old friend Riff (Mike Faist) shows up, feeling him out for a possible rumble with the Sharks, he is unsettled by his friend's newfound xenophobia towards Puerto Ricans. Elgort cannot have any overt contact with his old gang, lest he break his parole; but when Faist invites him to a dance at the nearby school gym where the Sharks are also going to be, he reluctantly goes along, all the time wary of what this might mean for him.

In the meantime, Bernardo (David Alvarez), the leader of the sharks and an up-and-coming boxer, is taking his girlfriend Anita (Ariana DeBose), his younger sister Maria (Rachel Zegler), and Chino (Josh Andres Rivera), the man Alvarez intends to be Zegler's suitor, to that same dance. The intention is to try and bring the two sides together in a dance-off without any violence, but it almost does come to that, until DuBose motions to the bandleader to break into the famously volcanic Mambo. But unbeknownst to everybody else, Elgort, who has been standing on the periphery of the dance floor, has suddenly caught the eye of Zegler, and vice-versa. The two of them sneak out behind the bleachers, and the poignant "Romeo And Juliet" tryst between the two begins. In the inexplicable way that love has been known to operate throughout eternity, Elgort and Zegler know and acknowledge how ethnically different they both are, and yet they find common cause. The sad tragedy, of course, is that neither the Sharks nor the Jets seem to "get' what Elgort and Zegler see in the other.

There are a number of reasons why Spielberg ventured into the musical genre for the first, and maybe only, time in his career by re-imagining WEST SIDE STORY. One is that he identified with the Latinx community (in this case New York's Puerto Rican community) out of experience of his having felt "Otherized" in his youth because he was a Jewish kid growing up in predominately WASP neighborhoods. Another one, and on a more purely emotional level, is that he wanted to explore how two people from two totally different backgrounds, neither of whom are quite sure how they're supposed to fit in, manage to fall in love. All of this, as was the case on the Broadway stage in 1957 and the big screen in 1961, is set to the great music of Leonard Bernstein, the brilliant lyricism of Stephen Sondheim, and Justin Peck's re-imagining of Jerome Robbins' original choreography.

A lot of attention has rightly been paid to the contributions of Faist, Alvarez, and DeBose (the latter stepping into Moreno's original role); but as this is also at its heart a romantic tragedy, the contributions of the two leads must also be taken into account. Elgort has come in for a lot of fairly vicious attacks for his portrayal of Tony, but I feel they are grossly unjust, because his Tony (unlike that of Richard Beymer in the 1961 film) has a past that he isn't exactly proud of, and he is trying to make a better future for himself with Moreno's support. Elgort conveys that situation of his in exceptionally honest fashion in the scene at the Cloisters with Zegler, where he tries to reassure her that he can somehow stop the impending rumble between the Jets and the Sharks from taking place. It also makes it easier for Zegler to understand that the chain of violence that leads to this story's catastrophic ending was not Elgort's doing, but the end result of the blind hatred that both the Jets and the Sharks had had towards one another long before she herself even came to New York from Puerto Rico.

And when it comes to Zegler--well, she has the Herculean task of going from having been a YouTube sensation to being in her first-ever movie here; stepping into a role made famous on Broadway by Carol Lawrence in 1957, and on the big screen by Natalie Wood in 1961; and doing so under the direction of Hollywood's greatest living filmmaker. In what has to rank among the biggest surprises in all of Hollywood history, she absolutely nails the role of Maria, both in her singing (which is absolutely gorgeous) and her acting, which is oftentimes painfully honest in a way that I can't recall ever seeing in any first-time performance. It is a performance for the ages, and not just for 2021-22.

Despite what the so-called "anti-Woke Culture" critics on the Far Right might want everybody to believe about this film, Spielberg's take on WEST SIDE STORY is yet one more masterpiece from this great filmmaker from start to finish. From making the musical and dance sequences explode with color to the poignant romantic drama between Elgort and Zegler, this is more than worthy of a '10' rating.