On the passing of Andre Braugher

When people talk about meeting celebrities I only have one experience to share. I was staying at a suburban Cleveland hotel. It was a Doubletree, which is relevant to the story. This was 2011 so it was after Men of a Certain Age had been canceled, but before Brooklyn 99 even started casting. I never watched Men of a Certain Age, and I bet nobody reading this did either. It was a sitcom starring the impressive lineup of Ray Romano, Scott Bakula, and Andre Braugher. I had driven out to meet up with my ex-girlfriend from law school, Emily, before she moved to Alaska. We went to checkin and there was a man speaking with the clerk. People who were certainly his wife and children were off to the side doing whatever family members do when someone else is checking in. I couldn’t see his face, but I could hear his voice. I recognized him, I thought. But I doubted it, because this was suburban Cleveland and he was asking about hours at the zoo, or something really normal. He turned around and walked off with his family. I didn’t stare or watch where he went, but I went forward to the clerk and asked, “Oh my g-d, was that Andre Braugher?” Amusingly the clerk blinked and replied in a confused voice, “Yeah.” I turned to Emily and triumphantly said something like, “I knew it was him.”

Now both Emily and the clerk wanted to know who Andre Braugher was. Before Brooklyn 99 I think a decent amount of people knew him, and liked him, from various things. For me it was Homicide: Life on the Street. That was my favorite police show. Despite being on NBC for 7 seasons, it seemed like almost nobody watched the show. It was 70% of The Wire. Literally, it was David Simon’s show about homicide police (don’t call them cops) in Baltimore. I think in season 5 they even do a story arc for a proto-Avon Barksdale. It was…fine. But back in season 1, it was the best police show ever made. And Braugher’s Detective Frank Pembleton was my favorite. He was the standout in an all-star cast. So I told Emily and the clerk, “He was Detective Frank Pembleton on Homicide.” And I got blank stares. I added, “he was also in the most recent Fantastic Four movie.” At least that was something famous at the time, which is relevant to the story.

Later that evening I wanted another warm chocolate chip cookie, because this is a Doubletree and their checkin counter has a drawer that during certain times of the day has cookies. I found the above photo on Google Maps and it shows the lobby, counter, and the little room straight back. When I came to ask for a cookie Andre Braugher is sitting and talking with his wife while his kids played. So I look at him and leave him the heck alone because he is with his family at a hotel in suburban Cleveland. I then ask the clerk, a different one, for a cookie. With my cookie in its little bag, I turn to head back left, which will take me past that little room again. His wife and children have gone, but he has a newspaper. I won’t bother him. But then he gets up and he is walking right next to me, so I turn to him and speak.

Me: “Hi, I didn’t want to interrupt your family time or anything, but I just wanted to say, that I’m a really big fan.”
Him, starting to smile: “Oh, thanks.”
Me: “I loved Homicide. Pembleton was my favorite.”
Him: Nodding and doing a half-smile.
Me: “And I also wanted to say that you were the best part of Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.”
Him: “Thanks.” But his body language said, “Is this guy fucking with me?”
Me, speaking quicker now: “Okay, thanks have a great time.”

Mercifully our rooms were down different corridors and that was that. I told Emily how it had gone. I think she asked why I had brought up the Fantastic Four. She definitely did not say Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, as I had. The reason I did it was because I remembered my dad talking about meeting Wallace Shawn on an Amtrak train and telling him how much he loved The Princess Bride.* I figured people always say they loved someone in their most famous work. So, having claimed to be a “big fan,” I couldn’t just say his most famous work. I hadn’t seen his recently canceled Men of a Certain Age. But I had downloaded, and watched, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. I gave it Three Stars. I truly had chosen to watch it because he was in it. I hadn’t even seen the first Fantastic Four movie. When he got into an argument with Reed Richards I thought he made some good points and briefly rooted against the Fantastic Four.

And that was it. Would I remember it as strongly if I hadn’t induced an actor I really liked and appreciated to look at me as if to say, “Is this guy fucking with me?” I doubt it. I hoped that he would continue to get work, but didn’t expect Brooklyn 99 and Captain Holt to happen. His casting, in light of how he’d played Det. Pembleton, felt even more special. He brought so much emotion to that role and Holt was the opposite. He played a stubborn, fallible genius. On Homicide, Pembleton was the master of “the Box.” “The Box” being the room where detectives interrogated suspects. The highest rated episode of Brooklyn 99 is called “The Box” and it’s Holt and Peralta (Andy Samberg) trying to get a confession out of a suspect. Brooklyn 99 got him the attention and appreciation that I felt he’d been unfairly denied for so long. Now I wonder about those kids I saw 13 years ago at the Doubletree. I feel bad for them and his wife, whom I did not recognize or would have had my mind blown because she played Mary Pembleton (the wife) on Homicide too. So that was my story and a chance to process feeling sad about his passing.

*NB – My dad met Wallace Shawn a second time and was by then equipped with a different film, a much less popular one, Vanya on 42nd Street, to say he had enjoyed Shawn in. For the record, Vanya on 42nd Street is a better film than Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.

Batman

****

Well… he made mistakes. Then he had his LIGHTS OUT! Now you wanna get nuts? Come on! Let’s get nuts!

Did I just review The Flash with co-star Michael Keaton (semi-)reprising his role as Batman/Bruce Wayne featuring the line, “You wanna get nuts? Let’s get nuts.”? Yes, yes I did. It was the the surprisingly decent Flash that made me wonder what I’d rated this Batman. THE Batman (not The Batman). Shockingly it turns out that I never rated it. I listened to Kevin Smith’s podcast about Batman for a long time, which included at least one watch-along. I remember watching Batman Forever on DVD during law school and being really disappointed, since I loved that movie when it came out (I was 13). This movie was too adult in my mind to have cared, at 7. Batman Returns, on the other hand I distinctly remember because of Catwoman and her unique look. Not from the movie, but from the Taco Bell cups and other cross-promotional merchandising associated with that movie. The question then was – would this film hold up?

Batman flies a plane with machine guns. Does that sound like it holds up? The director, Tim Burton, barely seems to have understood Batman, nor cared to really understand him. Does that sound ideal? Sam Hamm wrote the screenplay, not Burton, but the film is so atmospheric that it almost feels like the script was secondary. Danny Elfman’s all-time great Batman theme puts in a ton of work throughout the film. I want to talk about the casting, since that made a huge difference too. Gotham was not cast for this movie, but it is certainly one of the main characters. For me, despite major flaws as a movie and specifically as a Batman story, it is still worthy of 4 stars.

I have the least to say about the sets and art design simply because I lack the background to express why it strikes me as so atmospheric and great. If anything Gotham is better now than it was 34 years ago, because its basis, grimy 1980s New York City is gone. This version of Chicago is no more. The extra gothic and extra dark version of those places seems all the more striking now that those cities are closer to Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight movies. It’s the detailed miniature work and mat paintings that do it for me. It is not that I dislike computer graphics, but this was the dark pinnacle of skills honed by filmmakers for almost 100 years.

As I said, to me the story is weak and the writing relies on excellent acting. Robert Wuhl, who was charming as Arli$$ on HBO, read the lines as written and presumably in the way Tim Burton wanted, and is terrible. He is supposed to be cheesy and light, with a little dash of ‘hey, this part is serious’ but it feels like it’s all (weak) text and no subtext. Jack Palance as Grissom suffers too, because he played it like a Jack Palance role. Even Kim Basinger’s Vicki Vale, who manages to embody the impressive woman of the time (independent journalist), is limited by what she is stuck saying. The people who really elevate the film are it’s male stars: Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson. Keaton’s Bruce Wayne feels like a real character and his lines are delivered in a way that fits a man who is trying to play a certain role who lets his guard down a little. Keaton’s Batman is not perfect, but everything he did well was noted by those who followed him, and where there was room for improvement, others went for it. I can’t unwatch those performances, but Keaton’s Batman was very good. Nicholson’s Joker is not my favorite version, but it’s certainly Jack Nicholson’s Joker. The way his Jack Napier can sit in a chair and not command the focus, while that same character as the Joker demands it, really impresses me.

What tips the scales though is the music and specifically Danny Elfman’s Batman theme. It was used for my favorite animated series of all-time, Batman: The Animated Series, and presented essentially unchanged. Functionally, it took a comic book character and made him James Bond. No matter what had happened, when I heard that theme hit…it meant Batman was there. Bad dialogue? Dumb story? Inconsistencies with the comics? Out the window. In the same way that it does not matter if it’s Sean Connery, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton or Daniel Craig…when that theme hits – it’s Batman and that’s the best thing a Batman movie can really do because as a kid I loved Batman. Part of me still loves Batman and that means that an extremely positive emotion can be touched by art, or it can feel betrayed and lead to hatred.

After enjoying this movie and finding so much to analyze, I wanted to watch the others! I put on Batman Returns but couldn’t get past the first five minutes because it was awful and clearly not Batman. It was everything people disliked about Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory condensed into five minutes. Batman and Robin, on the other hand, was kind of Batman, but it was also aggressively and condescendingly dumb. It wanted to be modern Batman merged with 1966’s Adam West Batman and it failed at both. Those awful sequels helped me appreciate this movie so much more.

The Flash

***½
Barry, those scars we have make us who we are. We’re not meant to go back and fix them. And there’s nothing broken with you that needs to be fixed. Take it from an old guy who’s made plenty of mistakes.

There are three things I wanted to talk about: the tone of the film, Ezra Miller’s performance within it, and the film overall. This is a comic book movie from DC and Warner Bros. The Flash has super speed and is a member of the Justice League, a team that includes the more famous Batman, Superman and Wonderwoman.

I went into this movie with very low expectations. This was a combination of general attitudes about the film, supposedly poor CGI clips, and the controversy surrounding Ezra Miller. I did not expect the film to be funny. In particular when it started, there was criticism of a baby being in a microwave, and when that microwave dinged in the first scene, I thought that was a harbinger of terrible comedy to come. However, it was less offensive than I expected. There was logic for behind the microwave baby – in the microwave it had protection from an oxygen tube that the Flash had to light on fire. So that was fine, the ding just wasn’t amusing. Still I would say that the movie was generally funny. I had six or seven big laughs, which is pretty good for a superhero movie. That comedy was important, because this is probably one of the darker DCEU movies. It’s a movie that looks for Deadpool and lands in Korean revenge territory (think Oldboy). 

Initially, I was of the opinion that DC should have replaced Ezra Miller. Having seen the film I know realize how this would have been prohibitively expensive. Miller is not just in almost every scene; two of him are in most scenes. Even with justifiable dislike for the individual I thought he did a great job (twice). It might help that one version of him is as annoying as your average Sandra Bullock character.

In summary, the film has an unlikable main actor, a depressing story, plot holes and its saving grace, Michael Keaton, was actually not transcendent. Somehow it managed to be enjoyable. And, I do not say this lately, actually has a surprise at the end, which I won’t share because it would spoil something. I did not expect this to be a movie that would be good enough to need spoiler alerts. Kudos to Director Andy Muschietti.

Glass Onion

A Knives Out Mystery! I loved Knives Out. It was both exactly the kind of movie I enjoy along with being a twist on a genre I really enjoy. It was extremely clever. Glass Onion was a take on a take. The reactions I’ve seen showed that it really hit some people right between the legs. The whiniest of the worst complained about this movie, which is why I knew I’d love it.

“It’s a dangerous thing to mistake speaking without thought for speaking the truth. Don’t you think?“

I really liked the use (and misuse) of language throughout the film. The performances mostly landed for me – it would be quicker to list the weaker ones, like Kate Hudson and Leslie Odom, Jr., than to laud how great everyone else was. This blended two types of movies that I enjoy, detective (mystery) and meta. So it was really up my alley. If the film works for you, you will wind up rooting for something almost no-one would want to have happen. That is no mean feat.

****

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

***

The Ten Rings are stronger than anything in your universe.

Firstly, the name of this movie is far too short. The name of a movie should tell you the main character, the power/weapon, if there is a story/legend associated with it, if there is a love interest or if they are just friends, the comic book universe in which this is set (especially if it’s in the middle of the “snap” from Thanos), and every guest character, with what movie we would know them from. A better title would be – Marvel’s Shang-Chi, with his friend Katy, Trevor Slattery from Iron Man 3, Abomination from The Hulk and Wong from Doctor Strange and the Post-Snap Story about the Legend of the Ten Rings. It probably would have made more money with my title.

Secondly, I thought that had I reviewed this movie months ago. Here is a peak behind the curtain. Once I review a movie I know that I have memorialized my thoughts, and even if I only include a portion of those thoughts, going back to my review triggers the memory, therefore I keep far less information about movies, including my own opinions, in my head. Except for Thomas the Tank Engine movies. I have those mostly memorized now. Stay tuned for my eight review series on the Thomas movies…I am just joking. I hope I am just joking. This means that I do not remember as much about this movie as I usually do for my reviews.

As for the movie itself, I thought that it was fine. The cast was great. The story was so-so. The scale of the action is stuck in the feedback loop of ever escalating stakes. Simu Liu plays Shang-Chi, whose best friend is Katy, played by Awkwafina. He has been hiding from his father, the holder of the Ten Rings power and the leader of the organization of the same name. That father is played by Tony Leung. He is the Mandarin? Ben Kingsley played Trevor Slattery playing the Mandarin in Iron Man 3, which was a really good movie and he was really good in it. He was good in this too. He is Ben Kingsley, an actor on par with Tony Leung and Michelle Yeoh. Michelle Yeoh is also in this movie and we get to see her fight Tony. Is it as great as her fight scenes in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? No, obviously not. That movie came out 20 years earlier and this had a fight scene that seemed to reference Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Many aspects of this film were done competently, like the special effects, the music, and the costumes. This was an origin story for Shang-Chi, master of kung fu, and those are hard movies to make well. This one made the discovery aspect of the story go along with Katy’s and even Shang-Chi’s path, so it felt less arbitrary. On the other hand, I felt that the stakes got too high to be credible and the story hadn’t earned my disbelief sufficiently to just go along for the ride. Some stuff in the story was just a bit too convenient, which movies get away with when I’m more sucked into the story.

The Count of Monte Cristo

***½

Why not just kill them? I’ll do it! I’ll run up to Paris – bam, bam, bam, bam. I’m back before week’s end. We spend the treasure. How is this a bad plan?

Luis Guzman’s Jacopo asks that question and the answer to it is what propels the movie. In the morality of the film, death is not enough. Jim Caviezel’s Edmond Dantes wants sweet, sweet vengeance. I will not negatively compare the film to the book; it’s just not a fair comparison at all. Two hours to deliver one of the greatest, most detailed stories ever told? A fool’s errand, but a profitable one that has been tried time and time again.

Focusing on the positive, there are two distinct ways that I found the film more enjoyable. Firstly, it has Luis Guzman. More than that, the charming Guzman survives the film, which felt like a rarity for an actor with many memorable deaths. Secondly, the locations for filming. I meant to choose a beautiful shot of Isla Monte Cristo or the carriage racing before the tall walls of the port, but then I used a Luis Guzman quotation and forgot. Richard Harris’ Abbe Faria was a classic wizened Harris performance. Guy Pierce’s duplicitous Fernand was as loathsomely enjoyable as he was unambiguously detestable.

There is ample room for criticism here, but I think that expectations are everything with this movie. Focus on what the film has, and not on what’s missing, if you want to enjoy it. If you want to focus on the weaknesses, there’s the fact that nobody even tries to use a French accent. Guy Pierce is Australian! He’s using an English accent while playing a Frenchman! It is a well paced 2:11 movie, and I think that if you like it for what’s good, or enjoy it for what’s bad, that it’s enjoyable either way. Personally, I enjoyed it more watching it this time, compared to having watched it in theaters 20 years ago, with the book fresh in my mind.

Dracula Untold

**

My father was a great man, a hero, so they say. But sometimes the world doesn’t need another hero, sometimes what it needs is a monster.

Dominic Cooper as the Turkish Sultan.

Perhaps you preferred that line better the first time, when you heard it from Commissioner Gordon at the end of The Dark Knight. This story tasks Luke Evans with playing a sympathetic Vlad the Impaler/Dracula. “By putting one village to the stake, I spared ten more.” And he was sent into slavery as a royal prisoner and turned into a Janissary. I was unfamiliar with the Turkish Janissary Corps—child slave soldiers who grew into paid soldiers. I questioned the authenticity of this Corps since the film seems so inauthentic because it’s just so British. It’s so British that the guy playing the Sultan of the Turkish Empire was played by Dominic Cooper (Howard Stark from the MCU, even though that character is American). Unlike most of the cast, Cooper at least attempted an accent, which might have been offensive if it were more accurate. Most of the cast just sounded British.

I know Luke Evans best for his blockbuster work. Bard in the Hobbit movies. Twin brothers in the Fast and the Furious movies because they killed his character and then wanted him back. Gaston in the remake of Beauty and the Beast. Oh, you don’t think that the Beauty and the Beast remake was a blockbuster? It made 1.3 BILLION dollars worldwide. It was the #2 movie of 2017 behind Star Wars VIII. Sarah Gordon, Mirena in this, was no Emma Watson, but I don’t think Watson could have saved this role. Mirena wore a lot of white, because the movie wasn’t subtle.

I wanted to list the character roles played by both male and female actors I enjoy, but Mirena might have been the sole female speaking role in the film. Charles Dance played the Master Vampire and I know him best from always being a cold jerk, like as Raymond Stockbridge in Gosford Park. He was also in Game of Thrones. Everyone I’m about to list probably was, but I never watched that show, so I won’t pretend that’s what I know them from. Paul Kaye was the monk, Lucien, who protects Dracula’s son. He was excellent as Vinculus in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Lord Wellington from Strange and Norrell was also in this, Ronan Vibert! Lastly, there was William Houston, who played another noble, Cazan, whom I enjoyed as Constable Clark in the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes movies.

If you are still with me, I will share my personal experience with Vlad the Impaler/Dracula. One of the required courses for a master’s degree from at the University of Chicago in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures was a course titled, “Old Church Slavonic.” I have three memories of taking that class with just two other students and the instructor.

1. Mark 6:25 from the Christian Bible. We were sight-reading, and I got that line to read. Being far more familiar with the Torah, than the Christian part, I confusedly read out something like, “And she came in directly with haste before the king, and asked, saying, I want that thou give me by a plate…the head of John Baptist??” I distinctly remember saying “plate” and the other three people looking at me like I was crazy for not knowing where the paragraph was headed.

2. An Old Church Slavonic to English dictionary does exist, but I certainly did not have access to it. I knew Russian and had a 5 page printout with OCS translations and basic grammatical rules. Unsurprisingly, much of what we read was from the Bible, although the class focused more on Late Common Slavic than OCS. My grandparents gave me a pocket-sized, Russian Gideon’s Bible. For some reason, it was basically a word for word translation from the King James Bible, from 1611. That version is inaccurate for modern english purposes, but it gave me a three step process to look up words that I otherwise would have had no clue about. Thank you Grandma and Grandpa Senser.

3. My favorite reading was Skazanie o Drakule voievode (The Tale about Voivode Dracula). Until that point, I had never heard the connection between Vlad the Impaler and the name Dracula before. Some of the descriptions were more colorful than just asking for a head on a plate. Any possible inferences to Vlad being a vampire were either non-existent or lost in the translation. I honestly believe that those stories were part of the lore considered for this movie, considering the slightly more positive viewpoint that the Slavs took regarding Vlad. I will end this review with a reminder that in Russian it’s not Ivan the Terrible, but Ivan (the) Awesome.

Morbius

**½

I’m starting to get hungry. You don’t want to see me when I’m hungry.

Let me start off by noting that this film made some interesting choices. For instance, due to a lack of alternate protagonist, they made Morbius a perfect guy, but without a cool accent. Jared Leto showed some good physical acting, such as when his powers started to fade how his physical weaknesses started to return. I will note that Jared Leto sounds like a creep in real life, so that detracted from my enjoyment of the film.

There were interesting casting choices. Jared Harris (Dr. Emil Nicholas) got to play a nice guy. He was Moriarty from Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. Corey Johnson (Rude Mercenary) was great in United 93, and really used his first 45 seconds of screen time to let the audience know that it was morally okay for him to get killed. Tyrese Gibson (Agent Simon Stroud) is in this and he seems to be intentionally the opposite his character in the Fast and Furious series.

Another interesting decision was to overload the film with references. It was as if an unsubtle Kevin Smith directed this. It was directed by Daniel Espinosa, known to me for the underwhelming Safe House. While I probably only caught 25% of the references, here’s some of what jumped out. The Matrix for avoiding the bullets and then the way they got into a subway platform fight scene. Alien, or the sequels was big for the fight on the boat. The name of that boat? The Murnau! Do people remember FW Murnau? Most famous for directing Nosferatu. Nosferatu and Dracula famously have a boat arrive with no (almost) survivors and the corpses having been drained of blood. Bats flying around him like Batman Begins. That actually happens in multiple forms – lots of Batman Begins. Speaking of DC, the fighting reminded me of Man of Steel for the end fight scene.

What to say about that end fight scene. In Man of Steel it was Superman vs General Zod with the fate of the Earth at stake and the power/scale worked very well. This was two vampires in a sewer… The ending was ridiculous. I cannot remember who said it, maybe Steven Spielberg, but if you have the viewer for 90 minutes, you can do whatever you want for the last 30. Well this movie didn’t have me for the first 90 minutes…so the bonkers ending lacked realism and gravitas. I had hoped that the movie would either be surprisingly good, or so bad that it was good, and this unsatisfyingly landed in the middle.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

***½

Our lives are defined by opportunities; even the ones we miss.

This is a very sad movie. Generally stories that begin at birth and end at death are sad, because if we invest in a character, then seeing them pass on should make us feel something. This movie has a mix between earned and unearned sadness. Watching a new father seek to kill, and when thwarted to abandon, his unnaturally aged child is not an earned emotional response from the audience. Rather it is an automatic one for most viewers to empathize with the defenseless baby and to loathe the scumbag. By the time Brad Pitt’s character’s body starts to revert to a childlike state, our attachment is earned and in particular Cate Blanchett’s performance really sells the tragedy of it.

This film boasts a great supporting cast. I was excited to see Jason Flemyng, someone whom I’ve enjoyed since From Hell. Mahershala Ali went on to win an Oscar for Moonlight. Taraji P. Henson was great in Hustle & Flow. Elias Koteas was the clockmaker in this movie, and I’ve liked him since I was a kid and he played Casey Jones from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. One of my biggest complaints was that the clock he made never stopped working.

One thing I want to touch on is the name “Daisy.” It seems meaningful that F. Scott Fitzgerald named the love interest “Daisy”, considering Daisy was the love interest in The Great Gatsby, which he also wrote. For a comparison of those books, I recommend an American literary scholar. I don’t have a degree in that, although it is admittedly closer to what my actual degree is in. Cate Blanchett is just a phenomenal Daisy, because she is consistently great. This is a solid film, but not great by the standards of other David Fincher films.

The Night House

***

It was a personal matter.

This is a difficult movie for me to review, because it’s unclear whether or not I fully understood what happened. But the acting from Rebecca Hall, who has to act by herself for much of the film, is very good. The story is creepy and initially avoids things like jump scares. That makes the jump scares that come later more effective.

The look of the film was really good. It seemed very cold and nordic, which is interesting for upstate New York. There were a couple of times when the use of a green screen set me up for action that didn’t happen. This was either clever directing or a gaff. Similarly, the director either wants a deeply personal morality, or forgot to examine the morality in this story. That reminds me a little bit of John Wick.

A question I will leave you with is, can you trust what you see? Can you trust what she sees? And is there a difference?