Babylon: A "New to Streaming" Movie Review

 When I first signed up to be a cinema major, the very first movie my professor showed was the excrutiatingly baffling and boring art-house "documentary," Koyaanisqatsi. I asked my professor why in the world he'd start us out with such a difficult movie to sit through, and he replied that this was an intentional choice, to weed out the students who weren't actually serious about majoring in cinema, and who just thought watching movies for college credit might be easy and fun.

    I was repeatedly reminded of this conversation during the first hour or so of the epic-length film Babylon. Yes, there are many good aspects of the movie, both in general, and even in that first hour. But director/ writer Damien Chazelle fills that first hour with so much unpleasantness, at such a pace, in such a bombardment of the senses, for such a relentlessly long time, that he seems determined to weed out the people who thought that this just looked like a fun movie, and who aren't really serious about watching it.

    I guess I was really serious about watching it, because despite the multiple times during that hour I sincerely considered turning the movie off, I kept on going, and ended up grateful that I had. But that first hour: It's not bad. It's just challenging.

    After a brief prologue introducing one of the three main characters -- Mexican-American movie studio errand boy Manuel "Manny" Torres -- the movie devotes more than half an hour to an extended party scene set in the desert mansion of fictional movie executive Don Wallach (Jeff Garlin).

    Hollywood loves to depict wild parties, but I kid you not, you have never, ever seen a movie party anywhere nearly as wild as the one depicted here. Is it a costume party? A dance party? A sexual orgy? Are there drugs? Do fights break out? Is there an excess of alcohol, food, and nudity? Is an elephant brought into the room for no reason other than for the host to brag about adding an extra element of randomness? The answers to all of these questions are a resounding "yes, oh, god, YES!"

    Despite all of this bombarding our senses, Chazelle somehow manages to use this scene to introduce our four main characters: There's the already mentioned Manny, by far the lowest rung on this ladder, who, significantly, shows a flash of creative problem-solving when he's tasked with removing an OD'd actress's body from the house without drawing attention.

    There's Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), a celebrity so on top of his game that when he enters the room, every single person tries to demand his attention.

    There's Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), a literal party-crasher who shows up uninvited, crashes her car into a statue in the driveway, and declares herself a star despite the fact that no one has heard of her. She befriends Manny, and later in the scene, finds a way to become the center of attention despite the many extreme distractions in the room.

    And there's Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), the highly talented, highly likable, level-headed jazz and swing musician who deftly instructs his band-mates how to remain calm and professional after they've been informed that a confused elephant is about to be running in their general direction.

    After an amusing but grueling half hour of all of this, Manny is assigned to take a still drunken Conrad home the next morning. Conrad and Manny become friends despite being on opposite ends of the Hollywood hierarchy, before Conrad, in the middle of a drunken monologue, falls out of his balcony and into his swimming pool and finally admits that maybe he should call it a day.

    And only then does the opening title show on the screen, and, already exhausted as viewers, we realize that everything we've watched so far is only the beginning.

    Is Chazelle finished exhausting and testing us? Not even close. The following extended sequence takes place on the studio backlot, where the four main characters are all working on different movies at the same time, in the same place. It's as chaotic as it sounds.

    The year is 1926, and silent film is at its height. The three main characters (Sidney is sort of a main character with his own storyline, but he is forgotten for large chunks of the film) are narrowed to Conrad, Manny, and Nellie. Conrad is initially at the height of his power and stardom, but struggles to maintain his relevance when Hollywood transitions to sound. Manny, by contrast, comes up with innovative ways to take advantage of this transition, and climbs the ladder from errand boy to script consultant to director/ producer/ executive status. For him, it's a gradual climb, but Nellie becomes the literal definition of an overnight success: She's spotted at the wild party at Wallach's mansion, assigned a relatively minor role in a film the next day, and her character gradually becomes more and more the focus of the film as the director becomes fascinated with Nellie's mastery of the technical side of performance. ("Can you cry just a little?" "Sure. You want one tear or two?")

    During the film's examination of these three careers, the movie finally slows down to a more tolerable pace, and we are rewarded. Conrad/ Pitt are established stars, while Manny / Diego Calva are not, but both Calva and Pitt deliver amazingly nuanced performances. When Chazelle manages to slow down long enough to just show us their faces as they're talking or even just thinking, Calva and Pitt are able to be funny and poignant in equal doses.

    Robbie's role is just as large but not quite as impressive. It's not the fault of either the acting nor the writing so much as the casting. The character is just too similar to some of Robbie's previous roles to really impress us, like watching Harley Quinn without the sadism. Don't get me wrong, Robbie is good in the role. But her character is so broad that she doesn't get to exercise the same nuance as Calva or Pitt.

    I don't know, man. That first hour is so determined to bombard our senses and depict almost nothing but pure chaos for so long, it's amazing that it gradually morphs into a movie that can make us get to know and feel for the characters. But it does.

    SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT! DO NOT READ THIS LAST PARAGRAPH IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW THE END OF THE MOVIE: The movie, rather confusingly, ends with a montage celebrating the history of cinema. The end of the movie takes place decades after the rest of the story, when Manny, now a family man with his Hollywood days long behind him, walks into a movie theater to watch Singing in the Rain. The movie he's watching transforms into a montage of different movies throughtout the decades, in a celebration of the history of cinema. This is confusing as hell. Is this supposed to be a vision Manny is having of the future? Sure, the bulk of the montage consists of silent film clips, but Manny, sitting in a 1950s theater, also sees scenes from Tron, Jurassic Park, and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Why? The artistic choice is baffling.

In Memory of David Warner

 A few days ago, actor David Warner passed away, on July 24th, 2022. He always seemed to be the kind of actor born to play Shakespeare; after he passed, I learned that his first claim to fame was in various leading roles with the Royal Shakespeare Company, but this trivia tidbit was so expected, I actually would have been shocked to read otherwise; he was the kind of distinguished, intelligent actor who seemed born to play Shakespeare.

I'm not interested in that, however. The Royal Shakespeare Company has, by now, employed hundreds of capable, talented actors. In that context alone, Warner's work would have been respectable, but hardly noteworthy.

What makes Warner notable, in my opinion, is his work in what they sometimes call "genre entertainment" -- mostly horror and science fiction. Warner's work in these areas brought dignity to genres that can often seem silly to mainstream audiences. Perhaps I feel this way because my first exposure to Warner's work was his role as a time-traveling Jack the Ripper in Time After Time. Like I said, it's silly work, and it would be foolish to claim otherwise, but Warner never made it seem like he was slumming.

His Shakespearean work notwithstanding, I'd argue that most of Warner's best work was in horror and sci-fi. His Jack the Ripper in Time After Time was chilling despite the mixture of wacky premise and 1970s disco aesthetics that almost but not quite derail the film. His Bob Cratchit in A Christmas Carol did the seemingly impossible, by making an overly familiar character with overly familiar lines seem fresh and relatable. And his turn as doctor and vampire hunter Professor Abraham van Helsing in (sadly, only two episodes of) Penny Dreadful was so believable that you almost wanted to check the history books to make sure that van Helsing was indeed a fictional character and not an historical figure. (Spoiler: He was fictional. It was just Warner's interpretation of the iconic character that made him so believable.)

Arguably, two of Warner's best performances were as aliens in Star Trek. As Klingon Chancellor Gorkon in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Warner was an only thinly disguised stand-in for Gorbachev, in a tale that intentionally mirrored the then current demise of the Cold War and the Soviet Union. Intriguingly, Gorkon's compatriot, General Chang, excellenty played by Christopher Plummer, was explicitly depicted as obsessed with the works of Shakespeare, but it was Gorkon whose role and demise were more Shakespearen in theme. Until this point, the Klingons had been depicted as purely villainous and war-like, which made Warner's performance of Gorkon as a calm, eloquent man of virtue all the more shocking for long time Star Trek viewers. Gorkon's assassination early in the film comes partially as a result of the character's one tragic flaw: He was so enamored of the hopes and potential promise of the future that he was blind to the fact that so many others would be terrified of that same future, to the point of violence. Gorkon's dying words about the future to Captain Kirk -- "don't let it end this way" -- are heart-breakingly delivered; even with Gorkon's dying breath, he cares more about his beloved future and his hoped for peace between enemies, than he does his own life.

On the flip side of this moral scale, Warner harnessed some of those same characteristics -- calmness, dignity, and intellect -- and used them to create one of the most effective and horrifying villains in Star Trek history. As Cardassian Gul Madred in the story "Chain of Command," Warner's character mercilessly submits our beloved captain, Jean-Luc Picard, to emotional, mental, and physical torture -- for so long that it took two episodes for poor Picard to be rescued. Madred sees no emotional or moral contradiction between speaking lovingly with his daughter one moment and wracking Picard's body with painful electric shocks the next. His goal is to break Picard so completely that it's not enough for Madred that Picard simply admit to his accused crimes. He wants Picard to "admit" that there are five lights in the room, when there are obviously four. Madred wants nothing less than Picard's very sense of reality to bend at Madred's relentless will. You want to hate Madred with a passion while you watch these scenes, but you can't help but marvel at Warner's ability to bring a touch of humanity even to this monstrous villain.

If Warner had done nothing else but these aforementioned roles -- and I've mentioned only a few out of many -- he'd be forever remembered both by me and by the general public as a fine and admirable actor. But personally, my favorite David Warner performance -- it's hard to choose one, but for the sake of this blog, I will -- is as the narrator for the audiobook of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. Warner gives each character their own subtlely different inflection and voice to make them all distinct from another, and even though the main character is a shy young woman, you never once feel that Warner's casting is inappropriate. Warner perfectly portrays the mixture of hope, insecurity, and vulnerability in the role of Eleanor Vance. Furthermore, he makes the third person narrator a character in and of himself, reflecting the unique voice in which Jackson wrote her best work. Too often, narration is read simply to get across a plot point, but with Warner's performance here, he makes you feel like an eloquent, empathetic, professorial grampa is in the room, telling you a scary story by the fire. You can catch this brilliant performance on YouTube here:

David Warner reads The Haunting of Hill House

So rest in peace, David Warner. Your performances and talent will be missed by generations of audiences.

Red Sky at Morning: How Four Lines Can Serve as a Microcosm for an Entire Movie

 "Red sky at night,

sailor's delight.

Red sky at morning,

sailors take warning." -- ancient poem, original author unknown

"Green sky at morning,

neighbor take warning.

Green sky at night,

neighbor, take flight!" -- above poem, misquoted by Ricky Butler

The 'Burbs is a vastly under-rated 1989 horror comedy starring Tom Hanks as Raymond "Ray" Peterson, a man who, along with the rest of his neighborhood, begins to obsess over a growing suspicion that the new neighbors are a family of serial killers. The film does an excellent job of the difficult task of gradually increasing suspense and tension while at the same time poking hilarious, often slapsticky, fun at the ridiculous lengths Ray Peterson and his friends will go to find out whether their suspicions are correct.

    There is one quiet moment that seems entirely unimportant in the grand scheme of the movie. However, upon closer inspection, this rare moment of calm speaks volumes about character, plot and theme.

    There's a running gag in the movie about how the Klopeks, the creepy new family on the street, routinely run experiments in their basement. Nobody knows the nature or purpose of the experiments, but whatever the Klopeks are doing, those experiments create howling winds and require enough electricity to cause the lights in the entire neighborhood to dim. This results in the sky above the Klopek house to glow a beautiful but eery shade of green.

"Green sky at morning,

neighbor take warning!"

Ricky Butler recites. But it's night-time.

"Green sky at night?" Ray prompts, pointing at the night sky. He seems honestly curious about whether or not there's a similar saying addressing their current situation. There's the briefest pause, just long enough to let the audience know that Ricky's going to improvise his answer.

    "Neighbor take flight!" Ricky says with a grin.

    It's never stated clearly, but there's an implication that Ray doesn't know that Ricky has misquoted the poem. This speaks volumes toward the characters of both Ray and, as an example of one of his typical neighbors, Ricky. Why does Ray prompt Ricky for the next line of the poem? Because it's Ray, more than anyone else, who wants information. As much as he scolds his neighbors for their various outlandish assumptions about the Klopeks, and as sincere as those scoldings are, Ray himself proves time and again that he's willing to go further than anyone else to get more information. He's also the one character most interested in relevant information. Every time the neighbors talk about the Klopeks, they routinely churn the rumor mill with discussions of half-remembered horror films, entirely unrelated tales of gruesome true crime, and wildly unfounded assumptions, and it's up to Ray to repeatedly say, "yes, that's all creepy, but what do we know about the Klopeks!" How do we sift through all of this completely irrelevant information to get to the truth? When Ricky points at the night sky and recites what he falsely remembers as an old saying about "green sky at morning," it's entirely consistent for Ray to be dissatisfied and prompt "yes, but what about a green sky at night? That's our current situation."

    And what of Ricky's response? Without even realizing it -- or, at least, initially without even realizing it -- Ricky is doing what everyone in the neighborhood has been doing throughout the movie, unknowingly filling each other with misinformation. But, significantly, when Ray prompts for more info, you can tell that Ricky is more than happy to fill in the blank with something he's completely made up on the spot.

    And yes, there is significance in the nature of Ricky's misquotes of the poem. The poem cites two possibilities, one for danger and tempest, the other for calm and safety. Ricky's version offers only ominous possibilities: take warning or take flight. Even the possibility of a more reassuring alternative is not mentioned as an option. And that's very much how Ricky and the other neighbors see the eccentric Klopeks. What are they up to, exactly, in that creepy old house of theirs? Several possibilities are floated and discussed, but none of them are reassuring. Ray's wife Carol tries to convince everyone that just because the Klopeks might be odd and keep to themselves doesn't mean they're evil or dangerous -- but no one is interested in this viewpoint, and despite the fact that up to this point, Ray has seemed to be the most reasonable person among the group, when Carol gets too insistent that the Klopeks might be more normal than anyone realizes, he leads the scheme in getting Carol out of town so he and everyone else can go back to trying to figure out what the Klopeks are really up to. Neighbor take flight or neighbor take warning, but neighbor just go on with your life and allow for the possibility that the new guys might be ordinary people? Not an option.

In Memory of Richard Donner

Other tributes to the recently deceased Richard Donner have, in varying ways, already made the observation that Donner's lack of distinctive visual flair resulted in a sort of anonymity in his work. You know a Martin Scorsese picture when you watch it. Just like you know a Steven Spielberg picture, or a Tim Burton picture. Donner's work, however, never seemed to have personal directorial touches that defined his style, or at least nothing readily noticeable. As a result, Donner himself has oddly been largely overlooked and underrated despite the fact that his films have reached iconic status -- and no, that's not a hyperbolic use of the word "iconic" -- on an almost regular basis. You can't hear the name "Damien," for example, without immediately thinking of the demon child from The Omen. You can't discuss, or even make, any Superman film without at least acknowledging the legacy of Christopher Reeve in the role. And any time anyone complains about being "too old for this shit!," you can't avoid picturing Danny Glover as Detective Roger Murtaugh.

It would be a mistake, of course, to lay all of the credit for this at Richard Donner's feet; certainly his writers deserve their share of acknowledgment as well. But what Donner provided was a consistency of quality that made a startling number of his movies the best -- or the most beloved, or the most influential, however you want to phrase it -- in their genre. The Omen. Superman. The Goonies. Lethal Weapon. If Donner had made any one of these films, he would have gone down in cinema history as an accomplished filmmaker. The fact that he made all of them is astonishing.

Even before Donner's astounding movie career, he had a tendency to make "the best of" whatever television producers threw at him. He didn't just direct episodes of The Fugitive for example; he made the episode where Doctor Kimble actually caught the One-Armed Man! Donner didn't just direct episodes of The Twilight Zone; he directed the episode in which William Shatner desperately tried to warn everyone "there's something on the wing of this plane!"

Even Donner's less appreciated work, frankly, deserves a second look. Take his most notorious film by far, for example, The Toy, starring Richard Pryor as a man who "sells himself" to the millionaire played by Jackie Gleason. Every single discussion of the movie bashes it for its insensitive and mostly unintentional echoes of slavery, and for playing that echo for laughs. Look, I agree with this assessment in a way. It would be royally screwed up to not at least address the parallels. But I submit that, under Donner's direction, Pryor did some great comedic work here. The Wonder Wheel scene alone is hilarious. Does acknowledging this make me a racist? No, it makes me appreciate the brilliant comedy performance of Richard Pryor.

Donner followed The Toy with Ladyhawke -- an often overlooked gem, but one that at least earns the proper respect from those few who watch it -- and then hit audiences with the one-two punch of back to back hits of wildly different tone and subject matter: the thoroughly Spielbergian Goonies, and the "yes it's fun but probably darker than you remember" landmark buddy cop movie Lethal Weapon.

After the love thrown at Donner for Lethal Weapon and its first sequel, it seems his stock gradually decreased in the eyes of both audiences and critics, who never seemed willing to give him a fair shake. "Under-rated" seems to be a term that can be applied no nearly all of his subsequent films. Scrooged, for example, is often dismissed as a "dumb comedy," but is arguably the most imaginative of all of the countless interpretations of A Christmas Carol. 

Lethal Weapon 3 is the first in the Lethal Weapon series that seemed a conscious attempt to maintain a formula -- but the formula worked. Maverick was a fun little Western, and despite the fact that it was obviously a labor of love for the filmmakers in some ways, it never pretended to be anything more ambitious than a simple joy ride, which poked fun at both Western movie conventions and also audience preconceptions of movie heroes. (Note the scene in which Mel Gibson easily single-handedly beats up a whole gang of tough guys -- a typical action movie scene, for certain -- only for the audience to later learn that Gibson's character had bribed the tough guys to lose the fight, and when they really get mad at him, he actually, more realistically, doesn't stand a chance.)

Assassins is often dismissed as merely "forgettable," but I saw this in the theaters, and had a grand old time watching veteran action hero Sylvester Stallone and newbie action hero Antonio Banderas match wits over whether to kill or protect Julianne Moore's damsel in distress.

Conspiracy Theory was praised by some as a "return to form" for Donner, who delivered the goods with a skillfully directed, intelligently written action comedy that had an intriguing high-concept premise: Gibson's paranoid loner is suddenly targeted by assassins, and he has to figure out which of his many crazy conspiracy theories was the one that turned out to be too close to home for powerful, dangerous figures.

I strongly advocate the opinion that the only reason why Lethal Weapon 4 was so maligned by both audiences and critics was less because of quality and more because of franchise fatigue. I'm thoroughly convinced that if the same movie had been made with a different title and different character names, it would have been praised as a delightful callback to the old fashioned farces of yesteryear.

Timeline was another skillfully directed genre picture, with modern-day time travelers finding themselves in the middle of a medieval war. And Donner's last picture was 16 Blocks, which critics rightfully praised as an intelligent action thriller sporting some of Bruce Willis's best work. Willis is (as is commonly observed) an actor who knows how to coast through a film when he's in it for just the paycheck, but 16 Blocks is a reminder of how good he can be (and how rarely he rises to that occasion) and perhaps it's a fitting end to a career that Donner was the director able to bring out the best of Willis. After all, Donner had already done the same for Shatner, Reeve, Glover, and Gibson, not to mention Gene Hackman, Ned Beatty, and Joe Pesci, giving us some of the best work of all of these very different actors, in very different genres.

And Donner's influence continues to be felt today. Many people are now arguing that the current constant slew of quality superhero movies wouldn't have been possible without Donner. I question that claim, as comic books have always provided a ready-made source of imaginative intellectual property ripe for cinematic interpretation; superhero movies were around decades before Donner's Superman, and no doubt would have continued even if Reeve had not put on those tights. Still, the argument could be made in both directions, since it was Donner's movie that proved that superheroes could dominate the box office. Marvel Entertainment certainly remembered Donner's contributions to superhero films when they brought him on as a producer of Wolverine's first solo movie. And more recently, Zack Snyder's opportunity to appeal to the general public and get a more personal, re-edited version of Justice League out even after the movie had already been widely seen in its more familiar studio format, undoubtedly owes much to Donner's struggle to get his "director's cut" of Superman II out to audiences long after the struggle seemed like a lost cause.

But more than that, Richard Donner movies aren't just acting class exercises or lessons in cinematic history; they're just plain fun viewing experiences for audiences. Even though Donner's death was more than a decade after his most recent film, his loss is still our loss, as movie-goers. Donner never gave up on his dream of one day making a Goonies 2, and while his death means that that movie may never come to fruition, in a way, that's Donner in a nut-shell; the best filmmakers, the best artists, have always been dreamers.

random movie review: The Man From the Boulevard de Capucines

 The storylines of countless Westerns have been set into motion by the arrival of a Mysterious Stranger, an out-of-towner who forever changes the town’s destiny. Sometimes the Stranger is a con man looking to make a quick buck. Sometimes he’s a reluctant hero, not looking for any trouble but forced by circumstance to rise to feats of bravery and selflessness. Sometimes he’s a ruthless outlaw who terrorizes the town until he inadvertently motivates a hero to emerge from the community.

Johnny First is arguably the most unique example of the Mysterious Stranger archetype. He comes to town looking not for heroism, villainy, or opportunity. All he wants to do is share something with the townspeople: a brand new, seemingly miraculous, wondrous new blending of art and technology, which he calls “cinema.”

This is one helluva rough and tumble town for an outsider to venture into. In one of the first scenes, a man’s accidentally ruined steak somehow directly leads to a massive bar brawl that trashes the entire saloon. Harry McCue, the proprietor, is delighted, because destructive brawls are so common that his primary source of income is overcharging his patrons for the damage they cause. Drunkenness, gunfire, prostitution, and violence are such constants in this town that the townspeople don’t even realize that anything’s wrong with the way they live.

Mr. First shows up, befriends the toughest fighter in town (a quick-tempered but otherwise good-hearted young man named Billy King), and shows the saloon patrons a couple of silent films. Until that moment, no one in town had even heard of “cinema.”

Something magical happens: The townspeople are so awe-struck by the wonder of cinema that the town becomes civilized almost immediately. Bar patrons who used to punch someone’s lights out for accidentally bumping into each other now instead apologize. “Please” and “thank you” are suddenly heard on a regular basis. Foul language is suddenly looked down on. The bartender finds himself serving less and less alcohol, as his customers now prefer milk or water.

And that’s just the set-up. The townspeople start to think of Mr. First as a hero, perhaps even a savior, which doesn’t sit well with the local priest, a villainous character who hates Mr. First and his “sinful” movie projector just because hatred and judgmentalism seem to be the priest’s default positions. Harry the saloonkeeper is also torn about the positive changes that Mr. First brought to the town: Harry loves the movies just as much as everyone else, but milk isn’t as profitable as beer and whiskey were, and besides, he can’t overcharge for bar repairs if no one wants to fight anymore.

This movie sure does play to the top of its audience’s intelligence, man. When Mr. First meets the local undertaker, the mortician asks Johnny what is his preferred school of philosophy. When a stereotypically racist cowboy calls a Comanche a “big ape,” the Indian Chief isn’t insulted because he points out that “if he was familiar with the writings of Mr. Charles Darwin, he’d know that he and I share the early apes as a common ancestor.” For a rough and tumble town in the Old West, this place sure has its share of intellectuals.

Is this a good movie? Hard to say. Its intelligence and uniqueness sure deserve kudos. But the pacing is awkward, the songs are awful, the slapstick comedy is somehow flat, and many of the verbal jokes get lost in translation. I have to say I admired the writing much more than I enjoyed the movie. I hate admitting that, because I really want to reward such a creative, smart film with a wholehearted recommendation. Instead, all I can do is shrug and say that I sincerely appreciate the effort.

In Memory of Christopher Plummer

 Arthur Christopher Orme Plummer passed away yesterday, at the ripe old age of 91. He left behind a stellar body of work, lending a touch of class to every role he played.

    Christopher Plummer always seemed to convey a genuine joy of performance, a joy that arguably was most manifest whenever he found himself talking about his love for the works and words of William Shakespeare. Note the glimmer in his eye and the wide grin when, in the documentary The Captains, he reminisces with William Shatner about the two of them performing Shakespeare as young unknowns in the Canadian theater. Plummer occasionally got to land a role that allowed him to infuse his love of Shakespeare into the character. What fun he has when this occurs! Whether he's putting his own spin on the Danish prince in Hamlet at Elsinore, breaking into impromptu Shakespearian monologue as Jonathan Lawrence in The Cosby Show, or gleefully taking Shakespeare quotes out of context as General Chang in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Plummer knows the Bard like the back of his hand, and makes the now ancient words sound not just like poetry but like music.

    Plummer's love of classical characters wasn't limited to Shakespeare, and for my money, his performance as Sherlock Holmes in Murder by Decree marks him as one of the very best Sherlocks -- high praise, when you consider that Holmes has been depicted on-screen more than any other fictional character. (Look it up! It's true! Count Dracula is a distant second.)

    My wife and I both first knew Plummer as slimy villains, a role in which he excelled. My first two Christopher Plummer films were the 80s movies Dragnet and Dreamscape. In the former, Plummer is Reverend Jonathan Whirley, whose public face as a caring man of God and a moral crusader contrasts sharply with his secret identity as the leader of a cult dedicated to the corruption of morality. In Dreamscape, Plummer plays Bob Blair, a political consultant who uses his personal friendship with the President to manipulate and eventually assassinate the Leader of the Free World. My wife, and many others, know Plummer best as William Fawcett Robinson, the cruel supporting character who tries to keep the two lovers apart in the romance Somewhere in Time.

    One notable aspect of Plummer's love for acting is that even when he appeared in projects that definitely didn't need a Christopher Plummer, he had a talent for making it never seem like he was slumming. He could have a supporting role in a Nicolas Cage action movie (as John Adams Gates in National Treasure), for example, and he never made it feel like he was sacrificing his dignity to do so.

    I suggest all of the above films and more to see Christopher Plummer at his finest. As far as his performances go, you could pick pretty much anything off of his extensive IMDb list and walk away satisfied. But if you really want to see Plummer cut loose, check out his amazing one-man show Barrymore, in which Plummer pours his passion and talent into playing another classy, respected actor, Mr. John Barrymore. It's another perfect example of Plummer finding truth in his own joy of performance, and communicating that truth and joy through the screen and directly into the viewer's own heart and soul. He won a Tony Award for this exact same performance on the stage, and watching the movie, it's easy to see why. It's pretty much just one man talking for nearly an hour and a half, and kudos to Plummer for making that talk so compelling you just can't look away the entire time. The role represents the absolute highest end example of bringing theater to the screen.

    His next project immediately after that? Providing the voice of the wizard Arngeir in the fantasy video game Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. And you know what? He's damn good in that too. Plummer poured his best into everything he did.

Halloween Suggestion: The Door

I love browsing through free movies available on Amazon Prime, but admittedly, there's a lot of junk on there, especially in the horror genre -- a lot of formulaic, low-budget, unimaginative schlock that isn't worth your time. Patrick McBrearty's The Door is definitely low budget, but "unimaginative schlock" it ain't. McBrearty uses his budgetary limitations and turns them into advantages, to create a quietly compelling, wholly original story.

    The movie opens in a cafe, where a superficial viewing might misinterpret the dialogue between Matt and Owen as equally superficial plot exposition. It's explicitly stated, for example, that Matt and Owen are best friends, that Owen is broke, and that he's worried by the fact that he doesn't have any money to buy his girlfriend a gift for her birthday party that night.

    But director/ writer McBrearty is sneaky at how he slips some character development in here. Matt's preoccupation with his cell phone in this scene isn't just another "kids and their phones these days!" scene, it illustrates how little Matt is interested in Owen's concerns. It's equally telling when the scene ends and Matt, acting magnanimous, says "I got this!" as he picks up the check. Well, yeah, Matt's the only one who ate anything, but that doesn't stop him from thinking he's awesome for picking up the check.

    Matt is not a good friend.

    Desperate for money, Owen seems to stumble on to good fortune when he breaks up a mugging, and the grateful would-be victim offers Owen a job as a reward.

    "I'm a very rich man!" the businessman explains matter-of-factly as he gives Owen a bundle of cash as an advance, and if the dialogue seems so on-the-nose that it strikes as lazy screenwriting, that's okay -- the businessman's odd behavior is actually an intentional clue that something's not quite right.

    Owen's new job is certainly an odd one, reminiscent of many of the "creepy-pastas" so popular online in the past several years. As IMDb explains Owen's job, "$500 a night. 5 nights a week. All Owen has to do is wear a security uniform, sit in a chair in an otherwise abandoned warehouse, and make sure that an ominous door is never opened."

    Nobody will tell Owen what's on the other side of the door, and when he asks "but what happens if the door does open?", the answer is always the same: "It won't." Owen's no fool, and recognizes a non-answer when he hears, one, and also quickly figures out that anybody willing to pay $500 a night to make sure a door doesn't open, isn't as confident as they claim to be when they keep assuring him that it will never happen. But $500 is $500.

    After Owen is repeatedly told that his entire job is to make sure that the door must not be opened under any circumstances, and repeatedly assured that he's got nothing to worry about because the door never does open, he is, of course, immediately presented with a variety of circumstances that require him to open the door. A mysterious delivery shows up in the dead of night, with Owen's co-workers insisting that they need to drop off the contents of the box behind the door. Owen gets permission from somebody on the phone, and the voice seems to be that of his employer, but is it? When the deliverymen/ security officers return from behind the mysterious door, they are bloodied and out of breath, and, of course, continue the new tradition of refusing to answer any of Owen's questions.

    The story is really set into motion when a group of Owen's friends show up, unannounced, uninvited, unwelcome, and in varying degrees of intoxication. Their first instinct of course, is to try to get behind the door despite the fact that they know damn well it might cost Owen his desperately needed job. His so-called "friends" dismiss his concerns, make empty promises about how he won't get in trouble, do everything they can to jeopardize his job, and act like he's the jerk when he asks them to leave. Forget about ghosts and goblins, this is a horror film about toxic relationships.

    And yet it's so much more. When the drunkest of the group, Mia, manages to accidentally lock herself behind the door, that's when the fun starts in earnest. In search of Mia behind the forbidden door, Owen and his friends explore an abandoned, dark, maze-like warehouse, and here's where McBrearty really starts to shine.

    "Is it haunted" someone asks at one point, and the warehouse very well may be, but if it is, it's no typical Hollywood haunting with jump scares or crazy visual effects. No, McBrearty is more interested in scaring you with mind games, and damned if he doesn't turn out to be a master. McBrearty and his audio team must have had a field day, filling the soundtrack with half-heard footsteps, shuffling, and whispers, and yet equally unexplained loud crashes.

    "Did you hear that?" people keep asking each other, and the answer is usually "no." If the friend next to you says he didn't hear quiet whispering, okay, that's creepy, but understandable. If there's a loud bang and he insists he didn't hear that either, that's damn near terrifying. What's going on here? Are Owen and his friends lying to each other for some inexplicable reason? Are they hallucinating these noises? What about the shadows? Are they hallucinatory or real, ominous, or simply a trick of the lighting?

    At the risk of a minor spoiler, one of my favorite aspects of McBrearty's constant mind games is the "crushed can scene." Olivia insists she saw Matt stomp on a soda can and crush it. Matt insists he didn't. Neither one of them has any apparent reason to lie about something so trivial. Is one of them lying anyway? If so, why? Did something that looked like Matt crush the can?

    McBrearty has fun with presenting these weird questions and holding back on the answers as long as possible, causing Owen and his friends to alternately doubt each other's trustworthiness and their own sanity. It's a twist on the old "fear of the unknown," because what McBrearty is reveling in here is something more insidiously ill-defined, fear of uncertainty. Fear of the unknown has its limitations, because at least you can try to force yourself to accept that you don't know something. You know what's behind the door is a mystery, you know there's no way to predict what's around a corner or in a dark room. But . . . . what if you're not even sure of what you don't know and what you do? "I saw him crush the can, so I know he's lying" -- but then why is he so adamant that he didn't? "I know there's someone in the next room, because I heard someone banging around in there" -- but then why didn't anybody else hear it? And so on.

    Yes, the budget could be measured in the hundreds of dollars rather than in the millions. But don't let that scare you away from this unique (and scary!) exercise in creativity.