Dark Highways

Category: Movies

  • Nosferatu

    Nosferatu

    A co-worker once visited Rome and described The Eternal City as a place that astonished him. 

    Everywhere he turned there was a statute, or architecture, or art that was among the greatest mankind had ever achieved. 

    “You would turn around, see something else amazing and go ‘holy shirtballs.’”

    He might have said something a little more crude. Robert Eggers Nosferatu is not afraid of being crude, or bloody, or sexual. 

    But never mind all that because every single shot, every camera movement and practically every moment had me saying ‘holy shirtballs.’ 

    Eggers has directed three other films and each of them are painterly and perfect.

    As I watched Nosferatu I kept thinking of Steven Spielberg because each scene had that touch of a master craftsman. There’s a moment in War Horse (of all things) where you see a farmhouse and a barn and everything is in just the right place and it seems wonderful and impossible. Everything in the frame is just so right. 

    Eggers summons not only the past but a precise vision of what a gothic horror movie should look like. Images that seem torn from a Mike Mignola comic book or a Universal horror film. A nightmare come to life. 

    If it has a failing it is probably that Nosferatu is not particularly scary. Rembrandt paintings aren’t scary either.

    Nosferatu is a presentation of Dracula and mostly follows the familiar beats of Bram Stoker’s most famous work. One other thought I had is that this will pair nicely with Director Francis Ford Coppola’s version of Dracula. Both movies are visually stunning and seem to understand, at their core, the sex and violence of the vampire myth. 

    Bill Skarsgard somehow transforms into the monster. And Lily-Rose Depp becomes the troubled, insane woman who can’t defeat her own longings or her tragic past. 

    I miss the show The Great but Nicholas Hoult makes it clear he’s a movie star and can do things no one else could pull off.

    Also, the real victim in this movie is Aaron Taylor Johnson’s Fredrick. He’s just trying to be a good friend and he ends up with two insane houseguests who won’t leave and then must face a deeper tragedy. 

    Lastly, I grinned everytime Willem Dafoe said, “Nosferatu.”

  • Juror 2

    Juror 2

    In his final years Clint Eastwood directs movies the way Ernest Hemingway wrote novels — straight, true and unadorned. 

    There is nothing in Juror #2 that anyone might mistake for a director showing off. Maybe J.K.Simmons’ hat. 

    Nor is there anything in the writing that gilds the lily. The ‘just the facts’ and ‘just what we need per scene’ could be mistaken for boring. And, given what a fan I am of more showy writing I can tell you that this style does test my patience. 

    But there are very few movies I watched this year that set a deep pit in my gut and did not let go. And great writing is sometimes a lot more or a lot less than great dialogue. 

    If you have seen the trailer you know Nicholous Hoult’s Justin Kemp is called for jury duty for a murder and discovers that he accidentally killed a woman in a car accident. Now, with an innocent man’s life on the line he faces a moral crisis about whether to come forward, stop the trial and confess. 

    The movie does a nice job of giving you a bit of everything from an update on 12 Angry Men to a normal courtroom drama and some realistic investigative work. 

    As a reporter I spent years hanging out with homicide detectives and covering trials and a lot of the time I can’t sit through these kinds of stories. 

    If you know how it actually works you find that nearly every murder mystery movie, detective show or lawyer novel is not just unrealistic, it’s pure fantasy. What happens in Mordor is more true to life than what happens in the fictional jury box. 

    But this one — despite a few left turns — rings true. 

    What the movie is concerned with, mostly, is an ethical test. It sets the challenge to Hoult’s Kemp and then watches what he does. 

    The story does everything it can to present Kemp as a sympathetic and decent man who, if he had known what he had done when it happened would almost assuredly  have reacted the right way. But the movie makes it clear that Kemp is now faced with an almost certain condemnation and a prison sentence because of past mistakes. So he looks for a way to save himself and — if he can — save the innocent man on trial. 

    Eastwood and writer Jonathan Abrams fill the flick with little moments that show where Kemp’s priorities lie as he comes to a final test. At one point he ducks in the jury box so a witness won’t recognize him. At another he stymies a juror who is getting too close to the truth. 

    Rescue the innocent man? Sure, Kemp says to himself, as he convinces half the jury that they should acquit. But only if he can keep his own head out of the noose. 

    Despite these incidents the movie reserves judgement until its final shot. 

    I don’t want to give it away. 

    But we find that just like Kemp another character in this story was facing a critical moral test. 

    In the end, only one of them comes out upright and righteous. 

  • Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

    As a comic book fan since childhood, it is hard to express just how much I love the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Although it is occasionally shaky the MCU has done what many of us thought impossible, take a comic book universe and bring it to live-action life.

    It did this by respecting the artists and writers who built the thing and by building a fictional world that chooses to make its heroes and villains realistic, where possible, but is just as willing to throw out realism when necessary.

    So what we get is a best-of-both-worlds situation where the characters look and act right, there are consequences to their actions and the amazing visuals that look stunning on a comic page are brought to life.

    The MCU doesn’t blink at giving you a celestial, or Thanos, or Asgard. And after an early emphasis to explain away everything with science the MCU wisely pivoted to do, just what the comics do, and say that magic, gods, monsters, and a host of other things simply exist in the world and that no explanation is needed.

    It’s also a place, for me at least, full of joy and hope. Maybe the last decade or so has been great for you. I certainly wish you blessings. But for me, these have been trying times. And I got through them with my faith, my family, and, honestly, a Marvel movie a couple of times each year.

    These things are fun and I have fun every time I go to one.

    And if you were to ask me, what am I most looking forward to about the MCU I would tell you that it is an organic and changing thing. Because these are real actors who age and at times decide to move on Kevin Feige and the Marvel team face choices every few years.

    What it seems like they have chosen, and what makes it riveting, is that the heroes of this world, unlike the comics) will grow old and die and be replaced by new characters.

    Marvel sets Thanos up in Avengers and then wisely didn’t pay it off until Infinity War and Endgame 7 years later. Compare that with the fact that Batman has faced off with the Joker and the Riddler twice since the 1990s and will likely battle him again before Matt Reeves is done with the caped crusader.

    And unless the James Gunn administration changes things, Bruce Wayne will forever be about 30 and forever fighting the same three or four villains.

    Meanwhile, unless the MCU really backtracks, Tony Stark is dead, Steve Rogers’s story is probably done and I fully expect Peter Parker to be replaced by Miles Morales before the 2020s end. Here’s hoping Sony understands why that’s a great thing and plays along.

    And yet, the thing that makes me the most excited about the MCU, was what made Black Panther: Wakanda Forever a radically different experience than most Marvel movies. In the real world, the great Chadwick Boseman died from cancer. That left Ryan Coogler considering how to move a movie franchise forward without the title character. Coogler said he honestly considered not making a sequel and also leaving his career behind as well. Such was the pain he felt after losing his friend.

    What he ultimately decided was that Black Panther: Wakanda Forever would be made as a tribute to Boseman and that in the fictional world of the MCU Boseman’s character, T’Challa, will be dead as the movie opens.

    What we have then, as a viewer, is a Marvel movie that is also a wake for a beloved actor and a way for Marvel to continue moving the fictional world of Wakanda forward in its own group of movies and television shows.

    It’s heavy man. It’s a lot for any movie to carry much less a movie with superhero shenanigans that must be employed.

    T’Challa’s kid sister Shuri, played with heart and humor by Letitia Wright, essentially goes through the five stages of grief on screen. The movie introduces both Ironheart, (Dominique Thorne) a new genius with a supersuit in the Iron Man mold, and Namor, who is played by Tenoch Huerta as something more than a supervillain.

    This line, performed by the great Winston Duke as M’Baku, rang in my head all weekend: His people do not call him general or king. They call him K’uk’ulkan, the feather serpent god. Killing him will risk eternal war.

    If you want to know what kind of comic book person I am, after I cried for a while at the first Wakanda Forever trailer I spotted that Namor has wings on his ankles, just as he does in the comics. And I was both excited and nervous. Because how can a comic book concept as weird as wings on ankles look good on screen?

    If Sony or Fox had introduced Namor in the bad old days the very first thing to go would have been the ankle wings.

    But the MCU embraces comics and finds a way, most of the time, to make these things fly.

    The wings didn’t just work in Wakanda Forever they were both amazing and terrifying. They made him, in flight, seem like a rattlesnake ready to strike at any given moment. He was that serpent god.

    Angela Bassett as Queen Ramonda once again shows you who she is and how wonderful she can be in any role. Danai Gurira once again steals nearly every scene with just a look.

    Anyway, this film hit its targets and managed to do much more than your average movie. There were several subplots that could have been avoided. I like seeing Martin Freeman in anything but his Everett Ross had nothing to do except set up future things.

    Most of the time I leave a Marvel movie jazzed about what I’ve seen and excited about what is to come. This time, of course, was a much different experience.

    I left the theater feeling at least some of the grief that Coogler, Wright, and Boseman’s friends and co-workers feel. This is what the filmmakers intended. It’s a stirring tribute to Boseman and it resonates with real emotion.

    Those of us who grieve know that the pain endures.

    But joy comes in the morning.