The Motion Picture Academy continues to try and muzzle the impact of the Golden Globes by unleashing a raft of “short lists” — radically narrowing the list of films that will be eligible for Academy awards a month before actual Oscar nominations are announced.
Some of the suspense is taken away, but some intrigue is revealed in how the field has been narrowed this far already.
For instance — the documentary short list. Five of these films will be nominated for an Oscar.
“Charm City”
“Communion”
“Crime + Punishment”
“Dark Money”
“The Distant Barking of Dogs”
“Free Solo”
“Hale County This Morning, This Evening”
“Minding the Gap”
“Of Fathers and Sons”
“On Her Shoulders”
“RBG”
“Shirkers”
“The Silence of Others”
“Three Identical Strangers”
“Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”
I’ve seen most of them, and there are so many popular and/or sentimental favorites, that the Academy could ALMOST make this category one people pay attention to this year.
No, Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 11/9” isn’t here.
But “RBG,” the Ruth Bader Ginsburg doc is. As is the delightful and dark “Three Identical Strangers.” The climbing community will get all worked up that “Free Solo” is on the short list, but not “The Dawn Wall.
I’d call “Won’t You Be My Neighbor” the favorite out of this lot, and a LOT of people saw it and will getting around to seeing it.
The Best Foreign Language Film short list has three potential winners — four, if you count the push that “Capernaum” is getting from the likes of NPR. Five films from this list will be Oscar nominated.
Colombia, “Birds of Passage”
Denmark, “The Guilty”
Germany, “Never Look Away”
Japan, “Shoplifters”
Kazakhstan, “Ayka”
Lebanon, “Capernaum”
Mexico, “Roma”
Poland, “Cold War”
South Korea, “Burning”
“Roma” should be the favorite, and really, this is the best place to honor Alfonso Cuaron’s personal memoir of growing up in Mexico in the turmoil of 1970. I’m not one of the “Roma” worshippers — a good film getting praised to the high heavens when A) it rambles and meanders and spreads its few dramatic or comic moments out over a long period of time, B) those moments aren’t of the heart-stopping variety and C) it has the flattest, dullest black and white cinematography imaginable.
But I liked the film and say, honor Cuaron and honor Mexico with this award, if you must. So long as nobody calls this Netflix production “best picture.”
There’s buzz for “Cold War,” too, and Korea’s “Burning.”
Best Original Song’s shortlist is where “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” could land a nomination.
Even if you figure the best songs from “Mary Poppins Returns” have the best shot at winning.
“When A Cowboy Trades His Spurs For Wings” from “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs”
“Treasure” from “Beautiful Boy”
“All The Stars” from “Black Panther”
“Revelation” from “Boy Erased”
“Girl In The Movies” from “Dumplin’”
“We Won’t Move” from “The Hate U Give”
“The Place Where Lost Things Go” from “Mary Poppins Returns”
“Trip A Little Light Fantastic” from “Mary Poppins Returns”
“Keep Reachin’” from “Quincy”
“I’ll Fight” from “RBG”
“A Place Called Slaughter Race” from “Ralph Breaks the Internet”
“OYAHYTT” from “Sorry to Bother You”
“Shallow” from “A Star Is Born”
“Suspirium” from “Suspiria”
“The Big Unknown” from “Widows”
Best Music? Anybody’s guess.
“Annihilation”
“Avengers: Infinity War”
“The Ballad of Buster Scruggs”
“Black Panther”
“BlacKkKlansman”
“Crazy Rich Asians”
“The Death of Stalin”
“Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald”
“First Man”
“If Beale Street Could Talk”
“Isle of Dogs”
“Mary Poppins Returns”
“A Quiet Place”
“Ready Player One”
“Vice”
If you want to SHORTEN the Academy Awards telecast, the best place to start would be moving honoring the short film winners off-stage and not on the broadcast. But nobody asked me.
Best Animated Short short list? Pixar’s “Bao,” attached to their last feature film release, has to be the favorite.
“Age of Sail”
“Animal Behaviour”
“Bao”
“Bilby”
“Bird Karma”
“Late Afternoon”
“Lost & Found”
“One Small Step”
“Pépé le Morse”
“Weekends”
Best Makeup? You could guess these if you went to the movies much this year. “Black Panther” might be the favorite here, unless “Vice” has some impact on the evening.
Two hours and twenty three minutes is a long enough time to ponder just how perfect Jason Momoa’s casting as Aquaman is. Of course, his few minutes in “Justice League” and the two and a half minute trailers for “Aquaman” made that clear in a less Bollywood-length span.
But it’s also time enough to contemplate how Warner Brothers, custodians of the DC Universe and famed within the industry as the class act of Hollywood, where talent flocks to be coddled, indulged and showcased in posh Golden Age of Hollywood productions, can’t seem to manage that Marvel Studios touch.
You’d think that if Christopher Nolan isn’t available, they’d poach Jon Favreau or Kenneth Branagh to direct. They’d hire teams of script analysts to judge screenwriting talent fit to cook up a decent version of the “origin story,” one at least as good as “Wonder Woman,” which wasn’t terribly original, but worked and was directed by Patty Jenkins with a light touch.
Maybe it’s just the source material, I was thinking, well into the second hour of this senseless undersea quest/brawl/stunt and effects spectacle. Too many DC stories are of “chosen ones,” with only the least interesting Marvel origin (“Thor”) having that un-American “to the manner born” entitled-to-lead ethos.
Which is why I suggested hiring “Thor” director and Shakespearean Branagh. Brits get that whole royalty thing. But never mind. The deft director of “Saw” and “Insidious” will have to do. Only he doesn’t.
“Aquaman” introduces the myth, of the Queen of Atlantis (Nicole Kidman), on the lam and washing ashore in Maine where she falls for a lighthouse keeper (Temuera Morrison) and makes little future King Arthur (Curry), a “half-breed” boy who can swim like a fish and talk to the fish and fend off bullies with the help of his pals with fins.
Yeah, you saw the trailer. You know the aquarium scene’s punchline.
Years later, that queen’s other son (Patrick Wilson) is hellbent on becoming “Ocean Master,” making the various other undersea realms (“Realm of the Fishermen,” “Realm of the Trenches,” etc.) subservient to Atlantis.
Then, he can teach those polluting, killing land-dwellers (us) a lesson for the ages.
Only his flaming redheaded intended (Amber Heard) isn’t having it, and sets off to fetch man mountain Arthur (Momoa) from his life of fighting pirates, saving Russian submariners (Make Atlantis Great Again?), flipping his long locks and swilling beer to take his “rightful place” on the throne.
Arthur has his hero’s quest — several, actually — which takes him and Mera (Heard) from the Sahara to assorted undersea kingdoms, extant and extinct, a tidal wave to survive, gladiatorial combat to endure, a second villain (pirate Black Manta, dully played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) to fend off and the counsel of the wise “vizier” Vulko (Willem Dafoe) to consider.
He never has to deal with Mera’s compromised undersea king dad (Dolph Lundgren in red hair and beard, quite cool).
Momoa’s magnificent build, flowing hair and swagger are put to good use throughout. Those who only know him from “Conan” (he was young and not as interesting) and his TV work on “Game of Thrones” and “Red Road” have missed him growing into this funny, brooding self-mocking Hawaiian hunk. Indie films like “Road to Paloma,” “Sugar Mountain” and “Wolves” have readied him for this sort of stardom.
His promotional appearances for the film have included performing a Maori/Polynesian “haka” chant with his boys.
But aside from the odd, well-timed bit of swearing and the occasional one-liner, he’s given too little to play with here.
“Ask the sea for mercy,” he spits at the murderous pirates.
“Heads up, We’ve got BOGEYS on our six!” he shouts at Atlantean undersea pilot Mera in one chase.
“What does that even MEAN?”
Director James Wan and the many-handed script just keep piling up new settings, clever effects such as the watery hologram King Orm (Wilson) used to communicates with the hapless (and misplaced for most of the movie) Black Manta.
The tidal wave suggests Warners is ready to do the Hollywood remake of the Norwegian films “The Wave” and “The Quake” (now in theaters and much better than this).
Is it the ongoing presence of “Superman” mis-director Zack Snyder on these productions that gives each this incurable case of elephantiasis? Because “Aquaman” has that usual DC bloat about it, too much attempted, a movie not trimmed (in the script stage) into its best, most coherent story, sharpest jokes and most important confrontations.
The funniest sequence is the battle royale the king and Arthur fight in front of all of Atlantis, where Arthur’s disqualifications for the throne are listed — “land-dweller, likes beer.”
The best joke here is a throw-away, the TV commercial playing when Arthur’s dad rescues his wounded mom in Maine. It’s 1985, and the TV ad is for the late British funnyman Arthur Treacher’s fast food franchise, “Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips.” Is that where they got Arthur’s name?
“Aquaman” is already an international blockbuster, so perhaps they’ll do better by Momoa next time. A tip for Warners, though. If you’re making a movie about fish, think “poached” not deep fried. Steal yourself some Marvel talent if you want to give this guy a chance.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and for some language
Cast: Jason Momoa, Amber Heard, Patrick Wilson, Willem Dafoe, Nicole Kidman
Credits: Directed by James Wan, script by David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick and Will Beall. A Warner Bros. release.
Peter Jackson’s “They Shall Not Grow Old,” his much-ballyhooed colorized documentary of World War I from the British Tommy’s trench–eye-view of the fighting, almost lives up to its hype.
It is immersive, letting us hear and feel the concussion of artillery, if not the whistling hail of bullets and the desperation and fury of hand to hand combat.
This is very old and for any History Channel or PBS or even CBS viewer — which broadcast hours of this stuff on TV in the ’60s — somewhat familiar footage, British Imperial War Museum black and white, 18 frames-per-second newsreel and government documentary footage of what “The Great War” was really like — 100 years ago.
Jackson edits this material into a bottom-of-the-ranks look at this “War to End All Wars,” screening it over archival oral history interviews with legions of unnamed survivors — recordings probably from the late 1950s or so, from the sounds of the men.
It paints a fairly thorough view of the British experience of the war from the view of the men who fought it. The myopia of the trenchworks, the narrow focus of “staying alive” and “having a job and getting on with it,” the very essence of keeping calm and “carrying on,” means that we see no maps, hear no historians declaiming the strategies, the ebb and flow of the war, or even the arrival of the Americans — which turned the tide in 1918.
These fellows had no experience of that, and when the Armistice was announced, they admit there was “no cheering” or celebrating, no feeling of “We’ve won.” Just exhaustion, followed by relief followed by bitter disappointment upon returning home.
One soldier recalls being accosted by women in 1914, harassed with “Why aren’t YOU in uniform?” One slipped a white feather, denoting cowardice, onto his person. There was no British “Lysistrata,” women taking the lead in preventing slaughter. Patriotism among those with no risk of being exposed to combat was universal.
What Jackson wanted to do was turn New Zealand’s digital effects wizards loose on a process that Ted Turner made infamous 30 years ago, ruining “Casablanca” and other black and white classics for his TV networks. Jackson’s team was working with much rougher footage, jerky motion due to the 18 (and not 24) frames per second exposure of hand cranked film cameras, washed out images due to the conditions of filming, faces often indistinct if the man being photographed turned his head while being filmed.
Much of that is corrected, and the colorized sequences — establishing shots of marching to the trenches, crawling into them, or rest and recreation scenes when the men were off the line — with dubbed background noise (a preacher giving a funeral sermon, officers giving pep talks, enlisted men bantering) can be impressive.
But quite often the colorized faces seem to drift clear of the footage they’re being superimposed upon. Sprints across No Man’s Land are disembodied, surreal with movement that isn’t remotely human. Explosions look like early TV efforts to videotape fire, fireworks and bomb blasts — diffuse, with an effect smothering what the camera actually captured.
Most impressive are the first tanks and the squat, thunderous howitzers of the day. We’ve never seen these British-invented tanks in their olive drab combat colors, and the jolt of the cannon — one moment has the mere noise blowing tiles off the roof of a nearby French barn — are impressively goosed by adding sound with impact.
It takes its title from the “Ode of Remembrance” portion of the famous “Remembrance Day” poem by Laurence Binyon, “For the Fallen.”
“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, We will remember them.”
So the larger aim here wasn’t so much the “in living (nope) colour” gimmick. This was a generation wiped out on the miscalculations and whims of unrepresentative governments. Jackson wants to pay tribute to those who served and those millions who fell, and cannot help but sentimentalize them, just a little.
A short film of American participation in the war, narrated by Gary Sinise and supporting a US World War I memorial, accompanies this Fathom Events presentation of Jackson’s Warner Brothers production.
I could not help but be moved by the seemingly senseless tragedy, the scale of the horror, which the survivors would only describe as “tension” on those rare occasions when the folks back home wanted to know what the soldiers went through.
Adding color to the carnage of bleeding men, trench foot treatments, smashed corpses and dying horses just underscores the awfulness of it all. Seeing it in 3D will heighten the immersive nature of it all.
But every so often — more often than you’d like — the hyped colorizing looks like rotoscoping — animator Ralph Bakshi’s way of filming “The Lord of the Rings” in the ’70s, Richard Linklater’s “Waking Life” a more recent example. That gives “They Shall Not Grow Old” an impressionistic touch, as Jackson mixes still drawings, recruiting posters and the noble black and white footage to frame the story he tells in largely washed-out colors.
That distracts and lets the effects rob what they’re depicting of some of the power that these images still hold for those who don’t need them colorized to remember the nightmare an entire “lost” generation — killed, wounded or brutalized in other ways — endured. The whole is rather less impressive than the hype (there’s a “making of” short film after each showing) would have us believe.
MPAA Rating: R for disturbing war images
Credits: Directed by Peter Jackson. A Warner Brothers release.
Peter Jackson needs some good news, considering the debacle that the “Mortal Engines” adaptation he produced and co-scripted stands as the biggest bomb of the year — many a year.
So let’s go see his righteous WWI doc (showing Dec. 17 and 27 at select cinemas in the US) and hope we’re not bummed by the colorization of the footage or the added sound of “They Shall Not Grow Old.” My Grandfather fought in the Great War, but as it fades into distant memory, a turning point in human history and the starting point for arguments against war, the military-industrial complex, oligarchs and monarchs is worth remembering.
“Aquaman” opened overseas and has a few foreign and US premiere reviews up already. Indifferent reviews. But we will see for ourselves, shall we? It opens Friday.
A favorite moment from “Between Worlds,” the latest Nicolas Cage Z-movie released to an audience of one, is in a “love scene.”
We’ll call it that, because a more accurate description has to get into a lot of grey areas. His character, a trucker named Joe, is sexing up the overripe daughter (Penelope Mitchell) of his new “choke-me” girlfriend (Franka Potente). The daughter is, we’re pretty sure and Joe is dead-certain, Joe’s trashy late wife whose spirit has popped up in that daughter. And popped up means horned up as well.
Anyway, they’re going at it, and she requests a little dirty talk. And then she gets specific.
“Read to me from ‘Memories,’ Joe.” So he does. He picks up what looks like a publisher’s proof of “Memories,” a self-published porno by…Nicolas Cage. And he reads from its explicit pages.
Nic Cage has already shared his butt crack with us in the film’s opening images. He is playing a trucker, after all. And if there’s one thing the man is, it’s self-aware. He’s an Academy Award winner making another movie probably not worthy of his talents. Might as well have a little fun at his own expense, something to tickle his fans.
“Between Worlds” is a down and dirty supernatural thriller with the faintest veneer of substance covering the sordid.
We meet Joe at a truck stop where he interrupts, he thinks, a serial killer offing a woman in the bathroom.
“We don’t HURT women down South!” Next time, try wrasslin’ a MAN gator!”
Vintage one-liners that add to the cult of Cage. But might this woman, Julie (Franka Potente of “Run Lola Run” and a couple of “Bourne” movies) like being choked? Not exactly.
“You MARAN!” Julie shouts, because she’s German and it doesn’t roll off the tongue in Baden-Baden the way it might in Biloxi.
This “strangling business is inSANE!” Joe bellows. But “I haven’t even GOTTEN to the crazy part,” she promises.
It seems that when she was a kid, she drowned (seen in the opening credits imagery). And something about that experience connected her to “the other side.” When she’s choked, she gets to cross over “Between Worlds.” She’s a trucker herself, and the dude who was choking her? He was doing her a favor.
Her daughter was in a motorcycle wreck and may be dying in a hospital in Mobile. Mom needed to be choked-out “to save her.” She would drift into the afterlife and bring Billie (Mitchell) back.
She explains this to Joe as he’s giving her a lift and telling her his life story. He drinks from a bottomless flask, stomps the clutch, brakes and gas pedals with his cowboy boots and shows her a family photo.
“Wife and daughter. You like? OOOPS! Dead!”
Naturally they end up banging the bedposts and waking the neighbors when she gets home. Her daughter has been “saved.” But was it really Billie’s spirit Julie retrieved from the afterlife?
Writer-director Maria Pulera (“Falsely Accused” with Rosanna Arquette is her best known credit) plays up the Southern Gothic/trailer trashy elements of this tale, wallowing in the seamy sex and testy lust triangle the story sets up.
The soundtrack imitates the spacey mystery of “Twin Peaks,” which is what Pulera might have been going for here.
Billie is possessed by Joe’s even trashier late wife Mary (Lydia Hearst). And Mary’s favorite expression, the phrase she wore out when complaining to her long-haul trucker husband, was “Don’t you EVER leave me alone again!”
Whatever Billie thinks about hurting Mom by sleeping with Mom’s new man, Mary inside of Billie is an uninhibited freak. A banana hammock moment and a gonzo dream-sequence involving hosing off Billie’s motorcycle are classic Cage clips hidden inside “Between Worlds.”
In movies like this, Cage dresses down to the point where no self-respecting woman would want him — “I smell like three days on the road,” and he looks it, too.
That’s part of the joke. Another part is Julie’s slow speed in picking up on the fornicating going on under her roof, which she isn’t participating in.
Figuring things out is only half a solution, though. At some point, we know somebody’s going to have to choke somebody else.
One takes one’s pleasure in Cage’s performances in pictures like this one from his eye for a telling detail. Truck driving isn’t just about Dan Post python-skin cowboy boots, flasks, and those little bottle energy drinks that keep them awake.
It’s about that battered Turkey and the Wolf cap Joe wears on the road. It’s a famed New Orleans eatery, and Cage has called New Orleans home, off and on, for years.
And it’s about Cage relishing any chance he can to Deep South drawl his way through a part, with a “What’s a nice lil’German gal like you doin’ drivin’ a Big Rig in the ol’U-S of A?”
It’s only when the film has as little entertainment value or value value as “Between Worlds” that I’m reminded of the shadow that work like this casts over Cage.
He’s still got fanboy cachet, thanks to the occasional appearance in comic book movies like “Kick-Ass” or the new “Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse.”
But as he has told me a few times over the years in interviews, work isn’t about ego or fans or tax bills, challenging himself or building a nest egg. It’s a compulsion, a mania, a need to not be at home alone with his thoughts.
It’s why Bob Dylan tours constantly, and why Nic Cage shuffles from film to film, some of them barely worth releasing (this is better than some, worse than most). There’s a sadness in that, but a nobility, too. I try to keep that in mind every time I review one of these flea-bitten dogs.
MPAA Rating: R for strong sexual content, language throughout, drug use and some violence
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Franka Potente, Penelope Mitchell, Garret Clayton
Credits: Written and directed by Maria Pulera. A Saban Films release
It had been widely predicted to open over $40 million by Variety, Deadline.com, Box Office Mojo, et al., especially after a healthy (not record breaking) Thursday night.
But the early week projections were the right ones. I’d been hearing $35, and $35 it was. $35.4.
But here’s the thing. “Spider-Man” pre-“opened LAST weekend, and earned $1.9 million. That was added to this “weekend” taken. It opened Thursday night, as I said. So.
“Sing!” held the previous record — $35.2. Anybody remember that one? Fondly?
“The Mule” is Clint Eastwood’s latest — perhaps last — leading man/director effort. It barely cleared expectations — $17.2 million. Maybe it’ll have legs. It takes his audience a while to find his movies.
Conversely, NOBODY wanted anything to do with “Mortal Engines.” Maybe the window for Peter Jackson adapting the early 2000s novels of Phillip Reeve passed while Peter J. was trapped in Tolkienland.
The $100 million Young Adult sci-fi fantasy did a whopping $7.5 million on its opening weekend. Bombs away.
“Once Upon a Deadpool” was a cute “extra feature” for the DVD release that was not worth putting into theaters. Most every review worth reading said so. It did $2.6 million. No interest in this cute PG-13/”Princess Bride” idea. At all.
The House. The Abbey. Promises of all your favorite characters making the journey from Brit TV/PBS small screens to the big one.
“Next year.”
Really, if you’re not doing a prequel, then you simply MUST get this posh soap opera into or out of World War II. Two fascinating periods, with Great Houses (as they were in the WWI portions of the program) taken over for military purposes. Or under threat in the End of Empire/Taxes Go Up, great estates broken up days right after WWII
Took the girlfriend to a nearly sold-out small town Florida showing of “The Mule” Friday night.
Warner Brothers didn’t put a lot of promotional money behind Clint Eastwood’s 40th film as a director. It wasn’t previewed in most of America. Perhaps they think his audience has aged out of going, unless the film becomes a Red State phenomenon — “American Sniper,” for example.
But the old guy’s still a draw — older, all white audience I saw it with. And they were tickled with the film, about a 90 year old drug mule who made his living, for decades, growing day lilies.
The film is performing a bit better than expectations. Some had it opening at $11 million, but projections went as high as $17. Deadline.com is saying, based on Friday’s take, that it’ll manage $17.8 or more for its opening weekend.
That’s about half of what the animated “Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse” is taking in. Deadline is calling this a $35 million opening weekend hit. Projections had been pushing this one well over $40 million, and unless they count last weekend’s $1.9 million as part of its opening weekend (not sure they do that), this won’t come close to that.
$35 million is what the animated “Sing!” opened at a couple of Decembers back. So.
The BIG story has to be Peter Jackson’s farmed-out production of “Mortal Engines.” He produced and co-wrote the script for this steampunk sci-fi based on the Phillip Reeve YA novel. It cost a fortune, and you can see that money up on the screen.
But nobody is going. It was projected to bomb, but nobody thought it wouldn’t clear $10. It might not top $8 million. A $100 million budget disaster.
“Once Upon a Deadpool” isn’t making any real money, either — $3-4 million, tops. Won’t cover the cost of Ryan Reynolds and Fred Savage and that “Princess Bride” set, much less the re-edit.
“The Grinch” and “Ralph Breaks the Internet” are still performing — with “Grinch” hauling in another $12 million. Kids cartoons are still smart money in Hollywood.
“Creed II” will clear $5 million, “Bohemian Rhapsody” has closed the gap with “A Star is Born” domestically — over $180 million by midnight Sunday — and has owned the overseas box office this holiday season. Everybody loves Queen.
Clint Eastwood pulls one last bait and switch with his latest — perhaps last — picture, “The Mule.”
From the tenor of the trailers and TV commercials, we gather that he’s directed and stars in a drug trade thriller — tense, guilt-ridden, an old man’s late life understanding of remorse.
Actually this drama, inspired by a true story, is Eastwood’s most whimsical picture in years. It’s about a 90 year-old’s dalliance in the drug trade, driving (ever so carefully) cocaine from El Paso to Chicago, collecting big paydays, shrugging off threats and evidence that he’s dealing with deadly people in a business bathed in death.
We know it’s going to turn dark. Nick Schenk’s cutesy, logic-straining script (aided and abetted by Eastwood’s handling of it) has a hard time making that turn. But Clint twinkles, old-man-shuffles and jokes his way through it like a guy who never gave up his career of comedies with an orangutan. He makes it entertaining and lets the moral lessons about generational foibles, family and the power of guilt go down easily.
Earl Stone has made his Peoria, Illinois living in the soil — raising, competing and selling day lilies. As a 2007 prologue makes clear, he’s most at home with the flowers and his fellow day lily traders — conventions, contests, charming the ladies who buy his hothouse flowers.
“I love’em,” he confesses at one point. “They’re worth all the time and attention.”
So was his family. That 2007 prologue has a second theater of action. His daughter (Alison Eastwood) is getting married. And his bitter ex-wife (Oscar winner Dianne Wiest) is quick to remind her that “He missed your baptism” and every thing that came after it. Why would he change now?
Daughter Iris never forgave him, any more than ex-wife Mary did. But granddaughter Ginny (Taissa Farmiga) is wholly charmed and full of hope for the old man.
Because 17 years later, the “damned Internet” has killed his business, put his house in foreclosure and made him — seemingly — more attentive to family. Mary, Iris and Iris’s husband aren’t falling for this abandonment of “work comes first.” But Ginny, on her own wedding day, is more forgiving.
That wedding is where elderly, down-on-his-luck Earl meets a guy who knows a guy. And he’s impressed that Earl has an ancient Ford pickup and a perfect driving record. His “friends” might have some work for him.
Earl doesn’t let the first automatic weapon he sees waved around by the tattooed cartel thugs scare him off. That’s Eastwood’s most adorable wrinkle in this very old man. Nothing rattles him. Even threats, jabbing a pistol in his rib cage, don’t phase him. Or maybe it’s that the threats don’t register.
As the drug runs, delineated by intertitles — “First Run,” “Third Run,” etc. — add up, the Mexicans, particularly Emilio (Robert Lasardo, type cast but spot on) and Bald Rob (Noel Gugliemi) let themselves get tickled by the codger who dodges the cops for them. They indulge his eccentricities, school him on cell phones and “burner” phones. They call him “viejito” and “abuelito.”
Earl moseys down the back roads, stops to help a couple of Prius-driving “Negros” learn how to change a tire, buys a fancy Lincoln pickup and starts throwing money around — at his family, his broke VFW post. And then the Big Boss (Andy Garcia, “cute” too) gives him “a minder.” Tense, no-nonsense Julio (Ignacio Serricchio) is a signal that things are about to get darker, that Earl’s pleasant demeanor towards his “beaners” (unfiltered racism makes an appearance) is going to be tested.
This is the story we care about. The one we’re never given a reason to, the one that should add urgency to the “thriller” nature of “The Mule,” is law enforcement — the patient, ponderous Feds, led by Laurence Fishburne and his field agents (Bradley Cooper, Michael Peña) trying to stop up this coke pipeline.
Eastwood lets his film stop — repeatedly — to catch up on their efforts to find out who is running all this coke into Chicago. These interruptions are never more than mildly diverting, and considering the higher (murderous) stakes of the cartel, we never for a second consider law enforcement the scariest of Earl’s problems.
Not that he notices. He’s just singing along to “I’ve Been Every Where, Man” on the truck radio, stopping at the home of “the best pulled pork sandwich” in the country, his favorite small town motels where his favorite small town hookers are close by.
A running gag — the “mañana” Mexicans, culturally stereotyped as lazy and slow, are the ones in a hurry, the ones freaking out at Earl’s dawdling, his “family” delays. He’s constantly lecturing Julio to “slow down.”
Shoehorned in? A police stop of an innocent man who freaks out and does a three minute bit on how “This is the most dangerous five minutes of my life,” a brown man stopped by a trigger-happy generation of mostly white cops. Also jammed in? “I want to meet this ‘Tata,'” (their name for Earl), says the Big Boss (Garcia). Couple of old guys joshing and joking around a Mexican drug lord’s mansion.
“Who’d you have to kill to get a place like this?”
No drug lord would want to meet a mule. Kind of defeats the purpose of distancing yourself from drug trafficking by HIRING a mule.
But damned if old Clint doesn’t keep this amiable, amoral tale shuffling along, damned if he doesn’t show us the human cost — not so much of the drug trade, but of a life lived for “work” instead of family.
“The Mule” is not one of Eastwood’s greats, but it does hold your interest and keep you tickled, almost from first to last. That’s more than you can say for what could have been his “last” film, “The 15:17 to Paris.” And if this is his curtain call, a grinning, goofy drug smuggling grandpa isn’t a bad way to be remembered.
MPAA Rating: R for language throughout and brief sexuality/nudity
Cast: Clint Eastwood, Dianne Wiest, Bradley Cooper, Michael Pena, Laurence Fishburne, Ignacio Serracchio, Taissa Farmiga, Alison Eastwood, Andy Garcia, Clifton Collins Jr
Credits: Directed by Clint Eastwood, script by Nick Schenk. A Warner Brothers release.
The Motion Picture Academy continues to try and muzzle the impact of the Golden Globes by unleashing a raft of “short lists” — radically narrowing the list of films that will be eligible for Academy awards a month before actual Oscar nominations are announced.
“Roma” should be the favorite, and really, this is the best place to honor Alfonso Cuaron’s personal memoir of growing up in Mexico in the turmoil of 1970. I’m not one of the “Roma” worshippers — a good film getting praised to the high heavens when A) it rambles and meanders and spreads its few dramatic or comic moments out over a long period of time, B) those moments aren’t of the heart-stopping variety and C) it has the flattest, dullest black and white cinematography imaginable.
There’s a new Dec. animated movie opening record at the U.S. box office, 
Took the girlfriend to a nearly sold-out small town Florida showing of “The Mule” Friday night.
Movie Nation 