#kevrock

That it also summons the vampires who Coogler presents as both the embodiment of the Faustian powers that “the Devil’s music” is said to call up and the white culture both eager to take it’s power for itself and spread it through the land which gives the bloody climax a heft and weight that kicks the movie past bloodsucker cliché’s into the dark heart of a country that still deciding whether it’s cursed or not. It’s Coogler’s best film.

But when the creature catches up to the ship, (killing another fair chunk of the crew, he tells his own side of the tale to the Captain, the story of a son rejected by his father, rebuked by almost everyone he meets and unwillingly causing death to those who trust him.  In  “The Creature’s story,” Del Toro applies a thin veneer of whitewash to Mary Shelley’s tragedy of a tabula rasa corrupted by his creator into the dark heart of humanity by making the Creature an inherently noble innocent betrayed by a flawed and monstrous humanity, shifting the story from a dark tragedy to a (Grimm) fairy tale. Shelley pitied her monster, but like the ghosts in Crimson Peak and the Amphibian Man in The Shape of Water, Del Toro loves him.

It’s both obvious and surprising that the first film in James Gunn's rebooting of the DC cinematic universe is a Superman movie, written and directed by himself. Gunn is the auteur of the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise as well as the best Suicide Squad movie, and an absurdist pop culture provocateur who has never tainted his love of superheroes with even a hint of reverence. Superman of course is the DC flagship hero, an alien from planet Krypton who is raised in Kansas by Jonathan and Martha Kent (Pruitt Taylor Vince and Neva Howell whose Kansas accents sound suspiciously Alabama) and whose combination of  immeasurable power (super strength, speed, flight, and super-vision) and upright (read: square) values make him both a God on earth and a comic straight man worthy of Ralph Bellamy (David Corenswet perfectly melds the dual identities). You’d be forgiven for expecting a Gunn vs. Superman abrasive mishmash (and the film opening in the middle of the action made me fear the worst) but Gunn’s junky clutter of a movie isn’t a hipster sneer so much as an affectionate salute to a character who in more than eighty years has picked up a fair amount of silliness. So we have a Krypto the superdog (whose adorableness  almost covers for his untrainability), a Fortress of Solitude run by effete robots (voiced by Gunn mainstays Alan Tudyk, Michael Rooker and Pom Klementieff), A Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) who  Elon Musk’s lawyers must surely be investigating, a “Justice Gang” (Nathan Fillion, Isabel Merced, Edi Gathegi and later, Anthony Carrigan) who roll their eyes at Superman’s determination to save any man, woman and squirrel during a battle. The movie is stuffed but not overstuffed and Gunn keeps everything moving at breakneck speed. He also spends ten minutes on an interview between Supes and Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan in the best live action version of the reporter) debating whether the hero is “punk rock” (“You trust everyone and think every one you’ve ever met is like…beautiful.” “Maybe that’s the real punk rock”) that you’d think would be a mawkish embarrassment. Instead it’s touching and funny. Maybe the Boy Scout and the anarchist are made for each other after all.

That faith and their marriage will be tested. When Shalla Bal (Julia Garner) a cosmic surfboard riding scout for Galactus, (Ralph Ineson) a godlike cosmic giant who gets his energy from consuming planets, the team heads into space (refreshingly, the fact that Sue is visibly showing isn’t remarked on) finds him, are captured and then offered  a version of Sophie's choice – give up what they most love to save humanity-and if they refuse  face humanity’s judgement. That choice doesn’t just inspire the film’s most inspired action sequence as the four have to elude the Surfer through space even as Sue goes into induced labor. It also cuts to the core of the Richard’s union as his cerebral pragmatism clashes with her maternal passion. Both Pascal and Kirby keep melodrama at bay as they keep their intimacy and trust in emotionally devastating circumstances. The inevitable post-credits sequence promises a dimension-hopping tale that will bring the foursome to the “main” MCU. If the filmmakers can bring it off it’s likely to inject Marvel movies with an invaluable panacea – sanity.

 Her best film moments were in a trio of Christopher Guest mockumentaries  -- As a dog show contestant with a multi-checkered past (when an old flame sing-songs “I’m not wearing underwear” she says “Bulge! Get outta town!”) in Best in Show (2000), playing a legendary folk musician with a VERY eccentric singing partner in A Mighty Wind (2003); and as an actress who has half-convinced herself she has Oscar buzz for playing a southern Jewish matriarch in an indie tearjerker called “Home for Purim” (“Is that my sweet Rachel’s voice I heard? Or am I just goin’ meshuga?”) she was a master parodist and still managed pathos – and a small role in After Hours, Martin Scorsese’s 1985 urban paranoia farce.  As a woman who takes in hapless yuppie Griffin Dunne, tricks him into forgetting a crucial phone number and stares him down while babbling non-sequiturs (“….and I have my own Mr. Softee truck…”) as if to say “Don’t come down here. This place is full of people like me. And you can’t handle it.” RIP.

Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin don’t break new ground in A Real Pain but they dig deep. As Benji (Culkin) and David (Eisenberg), two Jewish cousins as close as brothers, who take a Holocaust tour of Poland to honor their recently deceased  grandmother they play their characters (Eisenberg an awkward neurotic, Culkin a glib man-child) like putting on comfortable suits but the actors (and Eisenberg’s funny and nuanced screenplay) keep finding pockets of empathy in the characters. From the way that Benji’s social charisma, his ability to bring the tour group into his every drama, makes David (a happily married family man) feel stiff and ungainly, or how Benji’s laugh-out-loud wit and vivacity coexist with a deep-seated dissatisfaction with his life read below the surface. As we learn more about the cousins’ relationship and the pain and isolation that underscore Benji’s gregariousness (Culkin gives one of the year’s best performances), and as the group travels through the history of Poland’s darkest days the film doesn’t so much conflate the Holocaust with one man’s pain and disconnection as it show how all the empathy and compassion in the world can’t make sense of one man’s sadness. Recommended. 

Yelena doing the dirty work of Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss whose amoral self-regarding charm makes her a perfect Marvel villain) a corrupt CIA executive facing down a congressional hearing concerning an abortive and illegal attempt to create a superhuman operative for a mysterious “Sentry” project. In an effort to get rid of loose ends, she sends Yelena and several other henchmen – Antonia Dreykov (Olga Kurylenko) an assassin with photographic reflexes; Ava Starr (Hannah John-Kamen) who can turn intangible; John Walker (Wyatt Russell, channelling his father Kurt) a failed and disgraced former “Captain America”; and “Bob” (Lewis Pullman, channelling his father Bill even harder) – to a remote facility/deathtrap in hopes that they’ll kill each other after which the building will incinerate them. Instead, they escape, join up with Alexie Shostakov, (David Harbour boisterously stealing scenes) a former Soviet “super-soldier” and band together first for survival, then (after being contacted/arrested by Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes) to take down de Fontaine. When things go spectacularly wrong culminating in a monstrous being threatening to cast New York into a soul-killing “Void” the team has to step up as heroes, not with the obligatory and by now banal final slugfest (that happens earlier and is mercifully short) but by putting their meager supply of optimism and hope against the bleakness of their past. Since this is a Marvel movie that doesn’t so much end as proceed to the next chapter, they achieve a tenuous heroism that they may or not be able to sustain (and as a post credit scene suggests, may soon encounter a much less nihilistic kind). Superheroes who distrust the possibility of idealism and virtue? Sounds just about right for our time.

In A House of Dynamite Kathryn Bigelow imagines a nuclear crisis three times, each with an increasingly certain result – the detonation of an ICBM in an American city. The missile is detected with only twenty minutes until impact and Bigelow uses her considerable ability at creating suspense to squeeze the audience, as officials at all levels of response from a Major at Fort Greely, Alaska (Anthony Ramos) whose team launches two interceptor missiles at the ICBM, to NSA advisor (Tracy Letts), to the US President (Idris Elba) who needs to choose a response between apocalypse and surrender, try to get a handle on the crisis, and we see actors as good as Rebecca Ferguson, Jared Harris, Jason Clarke, and Greta Lee conveying the slowly rising panic of realizing the future of mankind depends on how they handle the next third of an hour – and as players in the drama, they’re not killing it. Bigelow means both to keep us in a horrifyingly uncertainty and leave us there with a resolution that eschews both last-minute deliverance and a spectacular Armageddon, if only to make us realize that’s where we are now and if we can reassure ourselves that we’re looking at a worst-case scenario, we are also seeing a best-case imagining of a team of competent and responsible people making tough decisions with the best information possible. The film was completed before January.