Quick Reviews: Doctor Strange and Rogue One

Doctor Strange. A friend said “go see this in the theatre”. I should have taken his advice, but had been burned by one too many visually-middling Marvel efforts to quite get over the hump of making the effort to pay twelve bucks.  But finally, at home, and sitting there with a touch of some bug wriggling through my veins, I figured "what the hell, at least it has Mads Mikkelsen".  And I don't know if it was the bugs or the phantasmagorical visuals on screen, but the resulting viewing was a decently fun time.

Doctor Strange isn't narratively special; if anything, its story of an arrogant white guy going east for salvation and finding wisdom/magic powers is painfully cliche. Benedict Cumberbatch (No sp! First time, even!) is a Manhattan neurosurgeon whose Dr. House-like photographic memory and brilliant mind seems to have given him a comparably ridiculous superiority complex.

One night he multitasks just a little too much while driving a curvy road and ends up smashing both of his hands to bits. Finding that no conventional means will bring his fingers back to what they once were, he follows a loose rumour all the way to a temple full of mystics in Nepal. Their leader, the “Ancient One” (a bald, smirking Tilda Swinton), goes all Morpheus on the Doctor and before you know it he's bending the laws of reality.

So yeah, it's Harry Potter + The Matrix. And weirdly, it's mostly pretty good, and the way Doctor Strange visually realizes the effects of magic on reality is downright amazing. Sorcerers weave patterns of light and fire in the air. Gravity swings sideways, upside down, in circles. Buildings multiply and fold in amongst themselves. Wormholes fling us from dimension to dimension, from crystalline, shimmering beauty to bulbous, fuzzy disgust.

You probably won't care what happens – Strange is himself such a douche that it's pretty tough to care if he makes it past his rambunctious self-love to a space of “let's save the world!”. But as far as the Marvel side-projects go, Doctor Strange ranks alongside the first Iron Man and Ant-Man as one that people who aren't really into superheroes could check out.

Rogue One. So, it was 1:00 a.m., I'd just finished Doctor Strange and Rogue One was also just sitting there and the bugs hadn't won yet. I thought “well, let's just see how it looks”. Whoops. Before I knew it, it's 3:30 in the morning and my brain is just reeling in wonder.

For those that aren't already entrenched in the “Star Wars” phenomenon, Rogue One is a standalone film that takes place just before the action that starts the original 1977 Star Wars. It follows the story of a ragtag group of castoffs who find themselves at the heart of a plot to steal the technical plans for the very first Death Star.

Again, sort of like Doctor Strange, the plot isn't entirely inspired. Well, that's being kind of unfair, since Rogue One shares some of the baggage carried by the recent Star Wars: The Force Awakens, forced to continually remind you that you're in a “Star Wars” movie by way of little (and big, that said) references to the saga. And I think Rogue One did that better, if only because it didn't have to showcase a clearly bored Harrison Ford.

Where this film really shines is its energy and visuals. Director Gavin Hood, who also did the recent Godzilla, has a great touch for composing action within a frame. Unlike Force Awakens, which kind of suffers from its own director's obsession with keeping everything on the screen at a sort of flat, middle-distance, Rogue One perfectly establishes distance and movement.

A star destroyer pops out of hyperspace, completely filling the frame and dwarfing the half-dozen Rebellion ships with its size, and proceeds to shred them to pieces with a barrage of laser blasts. The camera tracks a squadron of X-Wing fighters, whipping to the side as they pass and then pulling behind them as if on a string as they swirl and dive down to attack a shield-generating space station. A blind mystic fights a dozen stormtroopers simultaneously, twisting and dancing, his staff flailing and smacking them on the head and foot, pure controlled chaos.

I'd also be lying if I said I didn't get a little emotional at a couple of points, but interestingly, they weren't the obvious ones (i.e. when the film was making its connections with the rest of the series). It was the smaller moments, the times in between “big moments” when the excellent cast has their banter and whatnot.

So yeah, Rogue One is great fun, a welcome addition to the saga, and I hope that more of these get made. If this new “Han Solo” movie is even close to as good, and it's Lord and Miller (“Clone High”, the Jump Street remakes, The Lego Movie) so it likely will, we're looking at an interesting new trend in the way in which Hollywood does the remake/sequel thing.

Quick Reviews: Cafe Society and Nocturnal Animals

Cafe Society. The first Woody Allen film I've seen since... Midnight in Paris? Kind of a shame, as this semi-trifle is a pretty enjoyable effort, if not a little too slight to be entirely interesting or totally memorable. Reprising their chemistry nurtured in the quite likeable Adventureland and American Ultra, Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart are still super darned cute together. It's the 30s, and Eisenberg's Billy moves from the Bronx to Hollywood to hopefully get a job from his powerful studio-mogul uncle Phil Stern (Steve Carell, nicely toned down). He immediately falls for Stewart's Vonnie, Phil's secretary. The two connect immediately, but she's got a “journalist” boyfriend that keeps them from hooking up entirely. Plot twist? The journalist isn't a journalist, it's Phil. Oh, boy.

I kind of figured the entire movie would be a screwball comedy of missed connections and delayed declarations of great loves, but Cafe Society eschews anything so simple. Allen not only edits to surprise, extending throwaway character bits beyond their narrative purpose and then popping a revelation out of the blue, but the film shifts halfway through from something cutesy to something approaching something short of depressingly realistic. Before you know it the entire affair has shifted back to New York and Blake Lively livens up the show as a stupendously hot shiksa (can I say that?  I haven't read Portnoy's Complaint recently enough to remember if it's a bad word or not) while “House of Cards”' martyr of choice Carey Stoll magnificently suspenders-it-up as a smart-talkin' gangster.

Worth seeing? Yeah, depending on your tolerance for Eisenberg and Stewart (I have an abundance of love for both). It's pretty and cute and the aforementioned shift in tone is interesting enough if not really all that novel for an Allen film. Does it look like you'll like it? You'll like it.

Nocturnal Animals. Middlebrow thrillers are pretty rare now, what with theatres now oscillating between eye candy for teams of semi-drunk office ladies on prowl and uh, hot guys in spandex flying around and tackling each other.

I haven't seen director Tom Ford's A Single Man, but now I kind of want to, just to see if it's as frustratingly nearly-there as Nocturnal Animals. A sort of a story within a story, the film has Amy Adams once again wandering around a glass house with beautiful vistas (see also: Arrival). Adams is Susan, an L.A. art dealer/curator/somethingrather who puts on high budget art shows of the kind that cultural Marxists (like myself) love but probably only make sense to other cultural Marxists or their groupies.

Susan not only hates her job, because she wishes deep down she was an actual artist, but she's in the death-throes of a horrifically casual marriage to a cheating cad (the way-too-wholesome-to-authentically-play-a-cheating-dick Armie Hammer). One morning she receives a manuscript of a novel written by her ex-husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), who she dumped long ago when his failing career as an author didn't match up with her somewhat “realistic” needs for a more standard lifestyle.

The novel, dealing with Tony (also played by Gyllenhaal, surprise), deals with both the horrific assault on Tony and his wife and daughter in the Texas hinterlands and the subsequent revenge scenario. Susan, of course, reads the novel as a metaphor for their failed marriage and is immediately struck by existential dread. But as she moves further along a hope seethes within her, a hope for a return to a more idealistic time in her life, before her beauty-queen Texas mom and her consumerist, all-American values drove her to a real career and away from Edward.

This is one of those movies where your final reaction is either “oh, that's nice, I can get out of bed tomorrow” or “Oh Jesus Fuck, turn on the oven” depending on the very last shot, and on that level Nocturnal Animals is pretty good, even excellent. It has a lot to say about how the power of art is derived from our own personal reactions to how it relates to our life experience; Edward is literally using art to expose Susan to her unconscious self and it's pretty genius in that way as a dark, nearly cynical polemic on why art is so vital to human existence.

But there's something missing, some kind of directorial flourish or idiosyncrasy that you might have seen from other thriller experts like Da Palma or Verhoeven or even recent genre-apers like Jeremy Saulnier. The first few minutes is totally dynamite, opening on an art-piece consisting of buck naked, quite overweight women dancing while wielding American flags and sparklers, then cutting to visions of a smoggy, lethargic LA landscape, but after that Nocturnal Animals is stylistically sort of bland.

Worth seeing? I don't know. I think it's more of a curiosity than a must-see, a relic of earlier cinematic times. I almost want to champion it just for its ambition within the genre, but we all know that that's a slim rationale for a recommendation.