The Weekly Gravy #116

Violent Night (2022) – ***

Gimmick movies are always a gamble, and they rarely pay off as much as you hope, especially when there’s actually any significant amount of money behind them – movies like Abraham Lincoln: Vampire and Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, while not bad, are too polished, too tamed down for wider appeal, to really achieve the level of cheesy entertainment their titles promise. (I admit I’m worried that next year’s Cocaine Bear will fall into the same trap.) To a degree Violent Night, from Tommy Wirkola, director of the aforementioned Hansel & Gretel, falls short of the giddy nonsense it could’ve been. But on the whole, it manages to deliver enough gruesome fun, with enough cockeyed charm, to make a merry couple of hours.

Santa Claus (David Harbour) isn’t feeling the Christmas spirit. Kids these days are too materialistic, too focused on the gifts (which hold their attention too briefly), and too ignorant of the true meaning of Christmas. After several centuries of schlepping gifts around the globe, he’s thinking this might be his last year, and when we meet him, he’s a few pints deep at a pub in Bristol, and though he still appreciates the cookies set out for him, when possible, he prefers the harder stuff to milk.

His rounds bring him to the mansion of Gertrude Lightstone (Beverly D’Angelo), an immensely wealthy businesswoman whose family is by turns corrupted and alienated by her wealth and power. Her daughter Alva (Edi Patterson) desperately sucks up to her, as do her fading action-star husband (Cam Gigandet) and teenage TikTok-ing son (Alexander Elliot), while her son Jason (Alex Hassell) has grown weary of working for her, given the stress it’s placed on his marriage to Linda (Alexis Louder). Their young daughter, Trudy (Leah Brady) is the most innocent soul among them, and simply wants Santa to help her parents reconcile.

She’ll get her wish and more, as a gang of criminals led by Jimmy Martinez, code-named Scrooge (John Leguizamo) infiltrate the house, threatening the Lightstones as they prepare to break into the family vault, filled with millions of dollars of off-the-books money. The noise they make awakens Santa, who’s passed out in another room thanks to the combination of brandy and a massage chair. He’s soon drawn into the fray and must draw on his skills as a warrior (he was a Viking berserker before he was Santa) to save the day. Much violence and quite a few one-liners ensue.

And, yes, there’s an ample amount of Christmas magic, some of it used to rather gruesome ends, but there’s also some sweetness on display, especially in the bond which grows between Santa and Trudy, whose belief in him is unshakeable. He also waxes romantic about Mrs. Claus and their roughly 1,100th anniversary, and easily forgives the reindeer their various follies. He may commit mayhem with, among other things, a sledgehammer, a candy cane shiv, and an electric tree-topper, but deep down, he’s a softy – and his victims were on the naughty list anyway.

Harbour certainly throws himself into the film’s take on Santa, relishing the tipsy cynicism and well-practiced ass-kicking, but also playing the necessary warmth with absolute sincerity. He may have a hard time convincing Scrooge and his cohorts of his identity – and when Scrooge is convinced, his own hatred of Christmas only deepens his vicious resolve – but his performance helps to sell us, even when the film itself doesn’t always make the grade.

Much of it works well enough. Wirkola’s staging of the action scenes is rarely remarkable, but there are certainly enough moments of imaginative bloodshed, spiced with quips (“Bah humbug, motherfucker!”) and bolstered by very good makeup and sound effects, for the film to sporadically achieve that level of giddy delight such a film should strive for. It earns its title (without changing my general wariness of pun titles) and its R rating, and it earns our affection, especially in the rapport between Santa and Trudy, who proves herself quite capable of violence in a sequence directly referencing Home Alone.

What it doesn’t earn is its 112-minute running time. Pat Casey and Josh Miller’s script is hit and miss, with inefficient pacing, a generally baggy structure, and too many generic and sloppy exchanges; I can’t imagine a good rewrite couldn’t sharpen up the dialogue, tighten up the story, and get the job done in 90 minutes without losing a single major plot point. There are other issues, like Leguizamo’s character being almost too nasty, or Jason starting the film as a relatively complex character (helped by Hassell’s solid performance) but slipping into forgettable buffoonery once the mayhem kicks off.

That said, Violent Night does enough right to merit a viewing for anyone who finds the premise appealing – the audience I saw it with was pretty enthusiastic, and I can imagine it would make a solid trip to movies with a bunch of like-minded friends. I doubt it will become any kind of a classic – it’s just not memorable enough for that – but it should make a decent bit of money. Maybe even enough for a sequel that really lives up to its potential. Is that too much to wish for?

Score: 72

The Beast of Yucca Flats (1961) – Dreck

While slightly less ubiquitous than Plan 9 from Outer Space (also featuring Tor Johnson) and Manos: The Hands of Fate, The Beast of Yucca Flats firmly earns its place in the bad-movie pantheon; if it isn’t the worst movie I’ve ever seen, it’s only by virtue of the competition being even more appalling. It’s a numbing experience, feeling far longer than its 54 minutes and achieving profound incoherence despite its ostensibly straightforward story and limited scope. A friend joked that compared to this film’s writer-director, Coleman Francis, Ed Wood was Godard; I replied that this film evokes Godard’s fragmented narratives and vague, philosophical dialogue, but probably not on purpose.

Since Beast was shot without sound, what little dialogue there is had to be dubbed (badly), and for the most part we’re stuck with Francis’ narration, some of the most confounding and least helpful I’ve ever heard; “Boys from the city. Not yet caught by the whirlwind of progress. Feed soda pop to the thirsty pigs” is only the most baffling line in the script, but we also get gems like “Flag on the Moon. How did it get there?”, “Touch a button. Things happen. A scientist becomes a beast,” “A man runs. Someone shoots at him,” and “Vacation time. People travel east, west, north or south.”

The fragmented syntax and Francis’ grave delivery were presumably meant to give the film a bluntly factual documentary quality, but the words themselves are laughable and Francis’ delivery, in trying to make them sound profound, only makes them sound more ludicrous. The same year, Blast of Silence used second-person narration to brilliant effect. It couldn’t have cost much more than Beast‘s $34,000 budget. The difference is talent.

I’ve hardly mentioned the story, such as it is. Joseph Javorski (Johnson), a “noted scientist” from the Soviet Union, defects to America, pursued by “two of the Kremlin’s most ruthless agents.” He disembarks a plane in the desert, and they’re waiting for him; his handlers bundle him into a car, and there’s a chase before they stop near Yucca Flats – a nuclear testing site – and Javorski runs into the wilderness with an attaché case full of space-race documents. An A-bomb goes off, killing everyone but Javorski, who is scarred and driven mad by the radiation.

Javorski kills a passing motorist and abducts his wife, leaving her at the cave where he lives, more or less. Another passing motorist sees the dead man and alerts patrolman Joe Dobson (Larry Aten, who also did the makeup and was an associate producer, credited under various permutations of his name). Joe investigates and gets his partner, Jim Archer (Bing Stafford) to help track down the culprit. They find the cave and the wife, who dies from her injuries.

Meanwhile, the Radcliffe family is on vacation, and get a flat tire nearby. After their young sons (played by Francis’ own children) wander off into the desert, Hank (Douglas Mellor) goes looking for them – and gets caught in the path of Jim’s “shoot first, ask questions later” pursuit of Javorski. Jim, a former paratrooper, decides to hunt the culprit from the air, and on seeing Hank running through the desert, shoots at him repeatedly. Hank is seemingly hit, and at one point seemingly killed.

But he’s fine, and goes to get help, while the boys encounter Javorski, who chases them into the path of Joe and Jim (who’s parachuted down). After a struggle, Javorski is fatally wounded, the boys are reunited with their family, no mention is made of Jim’s nearly murdering an innocent man, and a wild rabbit nuzzles Javorski as he dies. Ban the Bomb.

I suppose you could, in theory, give Beast credit for attempting to convey a cautionary message with its references to people “caught in the wheels of progress” and the increasingly ironic use of the phrase “the betterment of mankind.” Certainly, the central premise isn’t subtle: having a noted scientist reduced to a murderous beast by the supreme scientific symbol of the era is a blunt a rebuke of the arms race as you could ask for. But it doesn’t matter, because the film is so totally inept that

I suppose Beast is trying to convey a cautionary message; there are, after all, repeated ironic references to “(scientific) progress” and “the betterment of mankind.” And the central premise, in which a brilliant scientist is destroyed as a man by the supreme scientific symbol of the era, is certainly not subtle. But it’s all so ineptly done that it doesn’t matter; it’s hard to retain the message when the film itself is making your brains leak out of your ears.

If the opening scene, in which a topless woman (very daring for 1961) is attacked by a man whose face we never see -presumably Javorski, but when and how? – while a maddening ticking is heard on the soundtrack, doesn’t convince you of the film’s sleazy ineptitude, then any remaining faith in the film should evaporate when Javorski’s handlers and the Kremlin agents get into a firefight while Javorski runs into the desert.

The set-up of the scene is faulty; it’s not clear why they stop at all, let alone near a nuclear testing site, and it’s not clear where Javorski is headed when he goes off. But the way it plays out is worse. The action is amateurishly staged and sluggishly paced – at one point, we see Javorski’s handler reloading his gun rather deliberately, an action which could’ve generated suspense in a good film, but here simply looks like an editorial error.

Moreover, Javorski moves into the desert so slowly – Johnson was a wrestler, and while he was formidable in hand-to-hand combat, he wasn’t built for speed – and removes his coat and tie so randomly – it’s supposed to be the middle of the night! the desert is really brisk at night! – that you’re utterly baffled if you’re paying attention at all. And if you’re not, well, I can’t blame you. It only gets worse from there.

Score: 0

Strange World (2022) – ***½

Maybe the low expectations helped. I hadn’t been terribly impressed by the trailers or the generic title, the reviews were broadly positive but not enthusiastic, and the box-office returns have been catastrophic; adjusted for inflation, infamous flops like The Black Cauldron and Treasure Planet made more than twice as much. It wasn’t going to take a lot for Strange World to exceed my expectations, and while I can’t claim it’s a classic – or as good as it could’ve been – I found it to be a perfectly enjoyable family adventure, pleasing to look at and thoroughly likable.

The land of Avalonia is surrounded by towering mountains, and all attempts to cross them and find what lies on the other side have failed. Enter explorer Jaeger Clade (Dennis Quaid), a legend in his own time, who’s determined to cross the mountains and find Avalonia’s destiny – or at least his own. He’s brought up his son Searcher (Jake Gyllenhaal) to follow in his footsteps, but Searcher lacks his father’s taste for adventure – he’d rather be a farmer.

During a treacherous journey through the mountains, Searcher discovers pando, a species of electro-genetic fruit, and believes this is Avalonia’s real destiny. The rest of their team agrees, but Jaeger stubbornly insists on continuing the journey alone. 25 years pass, and Avalonia has advanced considerably, using pando to power everything, including their ubiquitous airships. Searcher is a leading pando farmer, and married to Meridian (Gabrielle Union); he’s raising their son Ethan (Jaboukie Young-White) to follow in his own footsteps.

One day, President Callisto Mal (Lucy Liu), a member of that fateful expedition, tells Searcher about a blight which is killing the pando, and asks him to join an expedition which will find the source of the blight; we learn that the pando is a single vast organism with a shared root traveling to a distant “heart.” Despite his misgivings about exploration, Searcher agrees…and despite his forbidding it, Ethan stows away, and Meridian is pulled into the expedition while searching for him.

The expedition has discovered a deep chasm which leads to the heart of the pando, and during their descent strange creatures attack them, causing their ship to plunge through a membrane and into a new world populated by a variety of bizarre creatures. Many adventures follow, in which Searcher is reunited with Jaeger – reopening old emotional wounds – Ethan comes to terms with his own goals in life (that is, not taking over the family farm), and a discovery is made which challenges everything we and the characters thought we knew about Avalonia and the pando.

Without giving too much away, that last point is my biggest issue with Strange World. Because that discovery is so significant that a whole film could’ve been made just to explore the fallout from it, and Strange World buries it a good three-quarters of the way into its story. As a result, the film has to rush the consequences of this discovery, leading to some of its weakest scenes and leaving a whole host of potential adventures on the table – perhaps as material for sequels that will never be made. As far as I can recall, the marketing didn’t even hint at this development; if Disney was trying to keep it a surprise, it cost them dearly.

What wasn’t kept a surprise was the fact that Ethan is openly gay and drawn to his friend Diazo (Jonathan Melo), a fact freely acknowledged by friends and family alike. Even Jaeger, when he learns about it, makes no bones about it, instead offering characteristically absurd advice on how to break the ice. Their relationship is chastely depicted, but it’s nice to have an LGBTQ+ character in a Disney film whose sexuality isn’t confined to a single line or scene. This may have hurt the film with certain audiences – but I suspect the outwardly generic premise and underpowered promotion did more damage.

That’s a shame. While it doesn’t rise to the heights of Disney’s true classics, Strange World has likeable characters, solid voice acting (Gyllenhaal is perfectly cast as the gentle but inwardly resentful Searcher), and a worthy exploration of father-son dynamics. Henry Jackman’s score, while a bit too evocative of John Williams, is sweeping, exciting, and perfectly suits the material. But most of all, it’s a beautiful film to look at.

Part of the problem with burying the reveal so deep is that we can’t fully appreciate what the various creatures of the new world are – and some of them are harder to explain than others, seeming to exist more because the animators wanted to bring them to life than because the story needed them. But they’re fascinating, from the fluorescent pink flying creatures (like pterodactyls) to the strange living clouds to the piggish blobs which help our heroes cross a sea of acid to the fearsome Reapers, which devour anything in their path. And of course, there’s Splat, the glowing blue globule Ethan befriends, who becomes a key part of the expedition.

And the environment, with trees that seem to breathe, a lake of glowing yellow-green acid, and what lies on the other side of the mountains – to say nothing of Avalonia and its capital city, a well-detailed setting we get little time to explore – is a real achievement in animation. The use of pulp-magazine illustrations for the opening exposition underlines the film’s status as an homage to old-school adventure stories – and if anything, it should’ve embraced that homage a bit more.

Ultimately, Strange World doesn’t quite have the depth of character or the narrative strength to be all it could be. Perhaps it tries to go into realms too weighty, too existential, for a simple family adventure to do justice to. But it might also fire the imaginations of those children who actually get to see it – and maybe some of their parents as well – and lead, down the line, to works which actually fulfill the promise of that premise. That’s certainly not something to take for granted.

Score: 82

She Said (2022) – ***½

CW: sexual assault.

It took me a long time to actually see She Said. A combination of inconvenient showtimes, inconsistent availability (probably a result of the film’s disappointing box-office), and my own fatigue delayed my seeing it until this week – which I might’ve taken as a sign that the film wasn’t one I really wanted to see, but was seeking out because of its awards-season potential and the importance of the subject matter. As it is, I can only imagine a few categories where it has much chance of breaking through – one of them because of an absurd but pragmatic choice on the part of the studio – but it is a solid film which deals with an important subject. It’s just not the best film to touch on that subject, nor is it necessarily better than a good documentary would’ve been.

It covers the work done by New York Times reporters Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan) and Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan) to bring to light the sexual abuses of Harvey Weinstein. Stymied by the various measures Weinstein used to protect himself over the years – in particular the use of non-disclosure agreements which forced his victims to remain silent – Twohey and Kantor must work around the legal obstacles and the reservations of the victims, many of whom are reluctant to speak out for fear of harassment and retribution, but bit by bit, they get the necessary elements of the story and publish, despite Weinstein’s own attempts to discredit and intimidate them. They won a Pulitzer. He went to prison.

It may be pretentious to use the word “pointillist,” but that describes the structure of She Said fairly well, as we get quite a few brief scenes interweaving Twohey and Kantor at work, at home with their families, and making their way through the streets of New York with scenes of their editors and the victims, sometimes directly tied to the developing story, sometimes little slices of life, sometimes set in the present (well, 2017), sometimes set in the 1990s or 2000s, showing glimpses – but only glimpses – of the tragic past which was so long buried.

At their best, they add up to a pretty full picture of these people as people; as the son of a journalist, it’s nice to see a film about journalists that touches upon their own humanity to this degree. Twohey and Kantor are both married with children, Twohey actually becoming a mother early in the film, which takes time to show her struggle with post-partum depression. Kantor, for her part, has conversations with her young daughter which show her attempts to convey, in an age-appropriate manner, the weight of this story and of journalism in general. And there are scenes, like one where Kantor speaks to the husband of a victim who turns out not to know about his wife’s experiences, which show how difficult it actually is to broach these subjects with another human being.

But, as was the case with Spotlight, there are too many scenes of newsroom procedure which amount to little more than briefing the editors and getting generic, usually affirmative responses. As those editors, Patricia Clarkson and especially Andre Braugher are solid – Braugher’s Dean Baquet has past experience with Weinstein and little patience for his tactics, allowing for some very satisfying exchanges – but the scenes in the Times offices tend to be somewhat dry and undramatic.

Maria Schrader’s direction is good, especially when she reaches into the past or lets the sheer scale of New York dwarf her characters (Natasha Braier’s cinematography is crisply composed throughout). And Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s script (which might break through in a weak year for adapted scripts – it’s based on Twohey and Kantor’s book) has some potent exchanges, like the conversations between Kantor and Weinstein accountant Irwin Reiter (Zach Grenier), who touch on their shared experiences as Jews, and more specifically as descendants of Holocaust survivors, and who carefully dance around what legal prudence actually allows them to say. But for the most part, it’s hard to say the film really rises that far above a well-produced documentary.

A documentary wouldn’t have these actors, however, and the performances are quite good, if not among the very best of the year – although Mulligan, despite being an obvious co-lead, is being pushed as a supporting actress by the studio, and in what’s frankly a weak year for that category, she might well get a nomination. She does give the film’s strongest performance, again showing her way of balancing take-no-bullshit steadfastness and raw humanity – almost to the point of overshadowing Kazan, who is quite good in her own right, but plays Twohey as a bit naive and overwhelmed by the weight of the story – an odd choice, given that Twohey was an experienced journalist by this point in her career.

There are also good smaller turns by Grenier, Jennifer Ehle as a key witness who’s dealing with her own personal troubles, Samantha Morton as another accuser who found herself up against appalling legal sanctions, and Peter Friedman as a representative of Weinstein’s who’s very good at not saying the wrong thing and who parries with the probing Twohey, not giving any ground but, by his chariness, betraying his awareness of the horrible truth.

But the most outstanding part of the film is Nicholas Britell’s score, which brings shades of suspense and horror to a story that’s all too realistic. Whether it breaks through as well remains to be seen, but it’s another fine work from a first-rate film composer.

The film itself isn’t quite that good, and Kitty Green’s The Assistant remains the best film on the subject of Weinstein’s abuses, despite being a fictionalized treatment of the environment he (or his unnamed equivalent) created. Like that film, She Said keeps Weinstein largely off-screen, heard but never clearly seen, while prominently showing the women who suffered at his hands. The Assistant just gets a little closer to the heart of the matter.

Score: 81

Empire of Light (2022) – **½

CW: racism, mental illness.

It takes a very careful touch to make a film which is at once a sentimental ode to the magic of the movies, an elegy for the great movie palaces, a sobering reflection on the racial strife of Thatcher’s Britain, an affecting romance which transcends social barriers of race and age, and a poignant depiction of mental illness. Sam Mendes does not have that touch, at least not as a screenwriter, and the result is that Empire of Light, which should’ve been a major awards player this year, will be lucky to get noticed for much more than Roger Deakins’ cinematography – and that as much on the strength of his reputation as on the lensing itself.

In 1980-81 Margate (never named but the film was mostly shot there) Hilary Small (Olivia Colman) works as the duty manager at the Empire Cinema, which has seen better days but still books first-run films. She has an unenthusiastic sexual relationship with the married general manager, Donald Ellis (Colin Firth); she is also hinted to be recovering from a mental-health crisis. Ellis hires Stephen (Micheal Ward), a young man of Jamaican heritage, to be the new ticket-taker, and Hilary is attracted to him. In time, they begin a secret love affair, using the Empire’s derelict upper level as a love nest.

When co-worker Neil (Tom Brooke) picks up on it, Stephen suggests they break things off, devastating Hilary. She falls into a mental-health spiral, disrupting the Empire’s gala premiere of Chariots of Fire and revealing Ellis’ infidelity to his wife. Her condition deteriorates further, and she is institutionalized for a time. During this time, Stephen reconnects with an old flame, Ruby (Crystal Clarke). When he sees Hilary out in public, he invites her to return to the Empire, as Ellis has left and Neil is now the manager; she accepts.

During a party to celebrate her return, a demonstration by the National Front party outside leads to a group of skinheads breaking into the Empire and attacking the staff, Stephen most of all. He’s hospitalized, and when Hilary visits him, his mother Delia (Tanya Moodie) thanks her for being kind to him. After he’s discharged, he gets accepted to university in Bristol to study architecture (his great dream) and shares an emotional farewell with Hilary. She continues working at the Empire, happier than before.

It’s a fairly modest story, and Mendes struggles to develop the germs of his premise beyond the elaborate production, the valiant acting, and a lot of short scenes which advance the story in the most mechanical fashion. In She Said, the many short scenes helped to create a mosaic of the characters’ experiences; here, they simply feel like bad writing. Mendes wrote the script himself, the first time he’s ever done so; hopefully he’ll take the hint and not repeat the experiment.

Again, the film struggles to answer the question of what it’s really about, and none of the possible answers are really satisfying. If it’s an ode to great movie palaces like the Empire, it fails to go very deep or stir much emotion after the first few dozen shots of its admittedly grand interior. The long-closed upper level is a neat setting, but after the first act it’s just the place where Hilary and Stephen have sex. If it’s an ode to the power of the movies, it suffers by having little to say about the movies themselves; a couple of sentimental monologues by the projectionist, Norman (Toby Jones) don’t really suffice, and when Hilary makes a big show of finally sitting down and seeing a film, the fact that she sees Being There adds little except as a reminder that Being There is a much better film than this one.

As a romance, it’s pretty thin, relying on Colman and Ward to give some weight to a relationship which only vaguely affects the characters involved. It’s nice when people are nice to each other. But that’s not much to build a film on. As a portrait of mental illness, it again works mainly because Colman’s performance is so good; she portrays desperation, paranoia, self-loathing, and resentment as well as any working performer, but we learn all too little about who Hilary is or who she was before the events of the film.

And as a portrait of racial politics, it fails because so much of the film is seen through the eyes of the white characters; when a group of skinheads harass Stephen on the street, we only see it from a distance – from Hilary’s perspective. When they break into the theater and attack him, the focus is as much on Hilary’s distress as on his own. More effective is a scene where he butts heads with an obnoxious customer (Ron Cook), but that too is diminished by the bizarre sight of him aggressively finishing his fish and chips and draining his tea, and by Stephen storming out of the theater – a showy moment, but an unconvincing one.

It’s a classy enterprise in many respects. Deakins’ cinematography, while far from his most memorable work, has some lovely touches, especially the use of light. Mark Tildesley’s production design, augmenting the still-operating Dreamland Margate cinema, is expansively impressive. The score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is, if not one of their own best, an effectively low-key, piano-driven work that suits the generally subdued, reflective tone. And the acting is solid, at least when the actors have something to work with; Colman and Ward (who very ably communicates the charm and warmth which endears Stephen to Hilary) come off best, but Jones handles some iffy material quite well.

Perhaps what sums up Empire best is the scene where Norman reveals he’s estranged from his son, having “run away.” When asked why, he admits he can’t remember. Jones plays it for wistful poignancy, and in a better film it might have come off as such, but here it feels like Mendes just couldn’t think of a better answer.

Score: 64