reviews

After last night’s AMC Danbury showing of Masters of the Universe (technically an earlybird thing as the film doesn’t open in AMC theatres until this afternoon), I drove right back to Wilton and filed my review. And now it’s up. Fast turnaround!

My poor math skills ensured that I would get Nicholas Galitzine‘s age wrong — he’s 32, not 22. I informed my editors of the error this morning; presumably they’ll be fixing it soon.

I also failed to include a pretty good kicker paragraph, although I sent it along 90 minutes ago. Here it is:

Possible omen:  There’s a big Castle Grayskull scene in the second act — a dramatic surge moment — in which Galitzine’s Adam finally abandons the uncertainty and becomes He-Man, wielding the Power Sword and affirming his destiny.  The AMC Danbury crowd came alive at this very moment…energy wave!…and at that moment I noticed, three rows in front of me, an actual Power Sword being raised in celebration.  Some guy cos-playing with a plastic, full-sized replica, probably bought 40 years ago in Toys ‘R’ Us, and pumping it in the air.  Go, He-Man!  Hilarious!

As I’ve been told I can share the New York Sun article and given the standard compression edits that always happen prior to publication, I thought I’d post the original HE version. Compare and evaluate.

“Honey, I Shrunk the Skeletor,” finished last night around 11:30 pm:

My thirtysomething sons, Jett and Dylan, were never into the Masters of the Universe Mattel universe…not yet born during the heyday.  And they never saw Gary Goddard’s Cannon-produced, nearly 40 year-old Masters of the Universe (’87)…still unborn, probably wouldn’t have cared if they had been.  And so I wasn’t parent-punished into buying the action figures or watching the kiddie cartoon serial.

But I was a Cannon Studios employee when Goddard’s film was being shot at Culver Studios in the early fall of ’86, and I damn well visited the massive Castle Grayskull set, you bet…a lavish undertaking which ate up two full sound stages.  My eyes and heart were sorta kinda dazzled as I strolled around with the unit publicist, muttering wisecracks and  wondering why the place felt so quiet.

Because it was empty, that’s why.  So no casual run-ins with a bare-chested, sword-bearing, heavily-costumed Dolph Lundgren (He-Man) or a dark-cloaked, masked-up Frank Langella (Skeletor).  And yet the film hadn’t wrapped so where was everyone?  

I knew that the financially squeezed Cannon had been forced to lose several script pages and things were being re-strategized.  Perhaps some of the battle sequences were being shot in and around SoCal instead of on the fantasy planet of Eternia.  

I couldn’t put my finger on it, but the sound-stage vibe felt a bit off.  Hesitant, uncertain…who knew?

I dragged myself to a screening when MOTU opened on 8.7.87, and I knew right away I couldn’t be fully honest with any of my fellow Cannon-ites. Because it obviously blew chunks.  It was critically savaged, became a box-office bomb.  ($22 million to produce, $17.3 million earned).  The tone was half-jape, half-solemn.  Lundgren struggled with his dialogue but Langella seemed to enjoy the scenery-chewing.   Courteney Cox, James Tolkan and Meg Foster costarring…whatevs.

Now there’s a brand-new Masters of the Universe from Amazon and director Travis Knight (Bumblebee)…thinner, slighter and much more expensive. Between $170M and $200M. 

So why remake an ‘80s stinker, and particularly one that feels out of synch with the here-and-now?  We’re living in an era of hit indie strange-os (Obsession, Weapons, Backrooms). IP sequels aren’t what they used to be in the teens, and nobody cares about MOTU merch…long gone.  Mattel obviously connected with Barbie, sure, but that was a misandrist, pinker-than-pink, auteur-driven one-off.

So why watch this thing, I asked myself?    Why submit to punishment?  Because a movie journo has to occasionally man up and take the pain.  And that was my attitude as I slipped into a special early-bird screening at the AMC Danbury.

Guess what?  Knight’s newbie is a feck-it movie, a mild breeze…good-natured, light-hearted and completely divorced from any notion of dramatic engagement.  Every line and every scene delivers a jack-off vibe.  It’s got that good old “nothing matters, it’s all a goof so forget the story and let’s just have fun” attitude…a Guardian of the Galaxy thing, only a wee bit lighter, a touch more throwaway.

I didn’t care about the story or anybody or anything, and that was fine.  Because it didn’t irritate me or tick me off.  This film doesn’t fly — it glides.  I was sitting in a convertible with the top down and a cold beer in my hand, and I don’t even drink.  (Sober since March of 2012.)

And guess what?  32 year-old Nicholas Galitzine, as Adam Glenn and He-Man  — the former an easygoing, blonde-haired, earth-residing dude who wears black jeans, a pink Brooks Brothers shirt and whitesides but doesn’t want to get sucked into a mediocre life as an HR guy, and the latter character the former Prince of Eternia who lives to wield the mythical Power Sword…Galitzine is a slam-dunk star in this thing, at least during the first half to two-thirds.  (I succumbed to slight boredom during the last third.) 

Galitzine is certainly ten times the actor that Dolf Lundgren** was in the ’87 version.  Having bulked himself up for this role, Galitzine is relaxed and unassuming and always conveying an intelligent vibe.  I liked him immediately because he’s always settling things down, always letting you know this this big, carefree Amazon film is into chilling, bruh, even during the violent battle scenes…shoulder-shrugging, mellow-vibing….no worries because it’s all meaningless bullshit.

Deep down this movie is total helium…a stone that doesn’t skim across a pond as much as levitate above it.  Compared to it Guardians of the Galaxy feels like Arthur Miller’s A View From The Bridge, and The Empire Strikes Back plays like Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

I don’t know if Masters of the Universe is going to tank or succeed, but if I, a grumpy hater of empty-brain-pan CG-driven popcorn cinema, can make peace with it then maybe others can too.  And I’m speaking as someone who hated Chris Pine’s Dungeons and Dragons.

Possible omen:  There’s a big Castle Grayskull scene in the second act — a dramatic surge moment — in which Galitzine’s Adam finally abandons the uncertainty and becomes He-Man, wielding the Power Sword and affirming his destiny.  The AMC Danbury crowd came alive at this very moment…energy wave!…and at that moment I noticed, three rows in front of me, an actual Power Sword being raised in celebration.  Some guy cos-playing with a plastic, full-sized replica, probably bought 40 years ago in Toys ‘R’ Us, and pumping it in the air.  Go, He-Man!  Hilarious!

All hail Jared Leto as Skeletor, a skull-faced, buff-bod, baddy-waddy who delivers (you guessed it!) a put-on, jizz-whiz performance.  Ditto Camila Mendes as Teela, a foxy, no-nonsense warrior (a butchier Princess Leia); Idris Elba as Duncan / Man-at-Arms, a recovering alcoholic superhero who mans up when the going gets tough; Allison Brie as Evil-Lyn, a brittle-ironic suck-up worshipper of Skeletor; Kristen Wiig as the voice of Robot; and, last but not least, Morena Baccarin as “the Sorceress”.  (Except Baccarin is a much better actress than this pan-flash character allows her to be — I loved her in Phillip Noyce’s Fast Charlie.)   

** Lundgren cameos during the first half-hour or so, and does a good job of it.

Three hours before Wednesday night’s The Man I Love screening, I caught a grade-A Bruce Dern tribute doc — Dernsie: The Amazing Life of Bruce Dern — at the Salle Bunuel.

Dernsie is no one’s idea of a mindblowing film but is certainly a highly enjoyable stroll through a good man’s life. Plus the 89-year-old Bruce, whose legs are gone (two guys were holding him up as he walked to the small stage), took a bow and shared a few thoughts before the film began, and that was cool.

I’ve enjoyably chatted with Dern on two occasions (a 2004 press schmooze dinner at the Sundance Film Festival, a 2013 Cannes press junket for Nebraska). He’s a legendary raconteur, of course, and something told me during our Cannes chat that we could’ve continued for hours and hours.

I snapped Bruce when he took the Salle Bunuel stage, and I thought I saw a glint of recognition. Bruce has a kind, proud face.

Directed by Mike Mendez and lasting 111 minutes, Dernsie is one of those generally lively, colorful, “dutifully admiring portrait of a legendary fellow” films…beginning with an obligatory kiss-ass montage, moving into the historical-biographical section (90 or 95 minutes) and finishing up with another kiss-ass montage.

Dern played exactly one semi-lead in his life — the ornery, white-haired codger in Alexander Payne‘s Nebraska (2013). Except it wasn’t a semi-lead, not really — Dern’s codger was a strong character part, and he knew it. But the 2013 Cannes Film Festival jury gave him a Best Actor award, and that set Dern’s mind in stone. If Dern had chosen to campaign stateside for Best Supporting Actor, he would have easily won.

HE’s favorite Dernsie (i.e., seemingly improvised): During a sidewalk scene in The Laughing Policeman, an angry dude of color is staring hard and long at Dern’s racist detective. Dern reply: “What are you gonna do, eyeball me to death?”

Kicker Dern quote on abandoning his early theatre career in favor of Hollywood feature-film gigs: “The reason I never went back to the theater is because what we’re doing here” — capturing special dramatic moments on film or digital bits — “is forever.”

I arrived a bit earlier than necessary and the Salle Bunuel ushers, it seemed, made the earlybirds wait on their feet much longer than necessary….a good 45 or 50 minutes. They derive a certain kind of pleasure from dragging it out as long as possible. They glance at you from the sides of their eyes, silently asking “are you enjoying this endless standing?…heh-heh-heh.”

Dernsie costars many narrators and interpreters — daughter Laura Dern (who’s now acting in Mike White‘s currently-lensing fourth season of The White Lotus, which will use the Cannes Film Festival as a backdrop), directors Quentin Tarantino and Alexander Payne, fellow actor Walton Goggins, etc.

Almost every significant chapter in Dern’s career is covered by Mendez’s film, and it’s all flavored with Dern talk-throughs and interpretations, of course. A whole lot of fun.

Mendez misses one important footnote — Dern’s darkly comedic performance as Lt. Billy Byron Bix in Sydney Pollack‘s Castle Keep (’69). Bix is the leader of a small group of conscientious objectors, and during a conversation with Peter Falk, a soldier who puts on a white apron and becomes a baker for a short time, they all hum a kind of religious hymn. Dern, I realized, was clearly aware of the absurd, dryly comic nature of Castle Keep, and for me his performance was the first conveyance that he was a wise hipster type.

Four years later Dern finally broke out of playing generically intense, crazy-eyed villains. It happened when old pal Jack Nicholson got him a costarring role in Bob Rafelson‘s The King of Marvin Gardens (’73).

HE’s roster of films containing the best Dern performances: The Trip, Castle Keep, Will Penny, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Drive He Said, The Cowboys (drilled John Wayne!), Silent Running, The Laughing Policeman, The Great Gatsby, Family Plot, Black Sunday, Coming Home, That Championship Season, Nebraska.

[Warning: This reaction to Scott Cooper‘s Deliver Me From Nowhere is crude and indelicate, but it’s honest.]

I fucking hated hanging with Jeremy Allen White‘s Bruce Springsteen in Deliver Me From Nowhere, which I caught earlier this evening.

Okay, I didn’t “hate” him exactly, but I certainly couldn’t accept White as Springsteen. I kept seeing and hearing the Bear guy, and he wouldn’t stop with the glum morose vibes…he kept “acting” at everyone with those big soulful eyes and that big beak nose. It’s not Bruce…I can’t buy into this.

Why was I touched and fascinated by Casey Affleck‘s miserable grief monkey in Manchester By the Sea, and yet annoyed and bitter about spending time with White?

When the mostly negative critical verdicts came down and the opening-weekend earnings were decidedly weak, I felt sorry for White and Cooper and Springsteen himself. My heart went out.

But now that I’ve seen it, you know what? This movie got exactly the response that it deserved. Because it’s slow as molasses and a fucking gloomhead downer.

Plus Masanobu Takayanagi‘s cinematography is way, WAY too dark. Overwhelming blackitude and enveloping shadows. The whole movie happens inside a black velvet fuck-me closet. It’s covered in Nestle’s chocolate syrup.

Plus I hated the overweight Stephen Graham, who plays Bruce’s boozing asshole dad. Ditto the funereal black-and-white 1950s flashback sequences. I even hated the low-rent band at the Stone Pony, and that long-haired lead singer in particular…fuck you!

Even the deep copper color of the wall-to-wall carpets in Springsteen’s Colts Neck rental bothered me.

Steady, competent performances: (a) the always on-target Jeremy Strong (as Bruce’s manager Jon Landau), (b) Odessa Young as Faye Romano, a waitress and single mom whom Springsteen fiddles around with on an absentee-fuckbuddy basis (I felt instant empathy and sorrow for this poor woman), (c) the long-haired, needlessly obese Paul Walter Hauser as a recording engineer bro.

But White is really fucking dull. I don’t like his company, and he mumbles. He’s just moping and moping and moping some more. Mope-a-dope. Me to White: “Fuck you, you fucking downhead! You’re bohhrrring!”

Friendo: Is venting like this good for your health?

HE: The movie is the problem, not me. Graham is too fucking fat. “Sit on my lap”?? Fuck these guys. But double especially fuck Takayanagi and Cooper for going with their noirish, melted black licorice color-and-lighting scheme.

My Venice Film Festival viewing of David Kittredge‘s excellent Boorman and the Devil was greeted with blissful vibes and subdued awe. Critics and industry folks are like that — their emotions always in check.

But when it played last Wednesday night at the Brooklyn’s Nitehawk Cinema under the aegis of the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, the crowd was frequently laughing at the litany of blunders and terrible misfortunes endured by director John Boorman as he attempted to shoot the artistically ambitious Exorcist II: The Heretic during the summer and fall of ’76, followed months later by the buckshot scorn of critics and paying audiences when it opened on 6.17.77.

For Kittredge’s doc dispenses gallows humor in spades, and everyone over the age of ten knows what it’s like when things start going really badly…laughter is the only sane response when fate and the gods have allied against you…when a bad luck streak not only won’t stop but gets worse and worse.

The ghost of Stanley Kubrick is choking, hissing and sputtering over the apparent teal-tinting in portions of Criterion’s 4K Eyes Wide Shut disc, which pops on 11.25.25.

I’ve seen Eyes Wide Shut at least eight or nine times (twice theatrically, once or twice on DVD, the rest via WHE’s unrated 2008 Bluray), and the blue-and-amber nocturnal accent scheme has always been the same.

Nocturnal accent colors adorning the wooden window-sill-and-frames of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman‘s bedroom, the window sill-and-frame lighting outside of Sydney Pollack‘s pool room salon, the bluish-amber tints in the Harford kitchen…we’re talking lots of blue and amber. Unmistakably.

Remember the iron-bar gates of that Long Island estate where the orgy was held? They were painted vivid, bordering-on-radiant blue, and with a fresh coast of paint at that.

But the proverbial teal monster has reared its revoltingly ugly and disgusting head in Criterion’s forthcoming 4K version of this 1999 film.

A DVD Beaver rendering of a still from that daylit scene (Cruise staring at the gates) shows a distinct teal flavoring — the gates were luminous plain blue in an older version, but now they’re unmistakably a dark somber teal-green.

Even the frequently obsequious and kowtowing Gary W. Tooze, owner and proprietor of DVD Beaver, admits in his review that the Criterion 4K “does have some teal-leaning.”

“Not happening…way too laid back…zero narrative urgency,” I was muttering from the get-go. Basically the sixth episode of White Lotus Thai SERIOUSLY disappoints. Puttering around, way too slow. Things inch along but it’s all “woozy guilty lying aftermath to the big party night” stuff. Glacial pace…waiting, waiting.

I was told the story strands were going to begin to tighten up, but they’re just lying there in repose. Flaccid, lazy.

Two more episodes to go, and if episode 7 is as weak as 6 was tonight, everyone will say the whole thing was a bust.

SPOILERS FOLLOW: Before episode 6 began, series creator Mike White had only three hours to go. It’s obviously time to up the drama and intensify things (David Chase knew how to gradually turn the screws and tighten the strands in The Sopranos, not to mention deliver occasional dramatic crescendos) and he’s basically pissing away the time. In episode 6 White essentially says one thing: “I’ll deal with all this stuff later.”

When is Jason Isaacs going to finally DO something? Or at least BLURT SOMETHING OUT? His character is a terminally boring fraidy cat, enveloped in silent anguish, hopelessly inarticulate, buried in self-loathing. I’ve been watching this shallow-ass guy lie to his family as he shudders and trembles inside for five episodes now.

All White does is (a) show us two fatalistic shooting fantasies (it was interesting that he imagined killing Parker Posey before shooting himself) and (b) asks the spiritual guru guy what it’s like to die, and is curiously moved by the Buddhist cliche about life being a fountain and we’re all drops of water, etc. Who hasn’t heard that one?

It’s actually a line from a joke I heard back in the ‘70s. A spiritual seeker endures a long and arduous journey in trying to find the hallowed and supreme guru and thereby divine the essential secret of life, and when he finally finds him is told “my son, life is a fountain.” The seeker is stunned, outraged. “That’s IT?”, he barks at the guru. “I’ve spent months trying to find you, enduring all kinds of pain, danger, exhaustion and hardship, and all you can tell me is that life is a fountain?” Supreme guru, taken aback: “You mean life ain’t a fountain?”

And Parker Posey has been married to Isaacs for…what, 25 or 30 years and she can’t intuit that he’s seriously melting down and going to hell inside over something very scary? She can’t confront him about stealing her pills? She can’t put two and two together and deduce that something has gone horribly wrong with his investment portfolio? All she can say to Isaacs over and over is “what’s going on?” How many times has she fucking asked him that? A financial shark or hotshot of some kind, Isaacs has presumably been up to some sketchy, slippery stuff and knows, being the cagey type, that the regulatory authorities might conceivably get wind of this or that financial crime, and he hasn’t figured ways of hiding assets and socking away cash in hidden foreign bank accounts on a just-in-case basis?

What’s he looking at…several months or a year or two in a country-club prison? And he can’t get started again after serving his term? He doesn’t have friends and allies who might rally round and help him out? All he can do is think about killing himself because his wife is a fragile, drug-addled zombie? Pathetic.

There’s no insight or articulation or imagination in Isaacs’ character. His frozen-in-fear, “I can’t move or even breathe” psychology is dramatically suffocating, and hanging out with this guy is driving me nuts. I’ve really and truly run out of patience.

I finally saw Walter Salles‘ I’m Still Here two days ago in Ojai. It’s obviously an absorbing, very well-crafted, fact-based poltical drama, and yes, Fernanda Torres carries the whole thing on her shoulders. Superb actress. Fully deserving of her Best Actress nomination.

But as good as it basically is and as much as Salles is a masterful filmmakr, I’m Still Here — a film about South American political terror — is not as gripping or unnerving as Costa-Gavras‘ Missing (’82) or Luis Puenzo‘s The Official Story (’85).

Within the realm of anti-left, military-dictatorship South American films about leftist victimization, it doesn’t stick to your ribs quite as much. It’s certainly less haunting.

This is because I’m Still Here‘s focus is much more on treading the emotional family waters…the anguished struggles of Eunice Paiva, the real-life mom (played by Torres), and her five kids as they attempt to cope with the sudden absence of their dad, Rubens Paiva. The film is much more committed to this side of things than on the creepy, ominous particulars of her husband’s absence (which we all know is due to his murder).

I had a problem with one aspect, however — an aspect that infuriated me more and more. What bothered me was how Torres’ Eunice constantly hides the horrifying indications about what may be going on from the kids, and in some cases flat-out lies to them. At the two-thirds mark one of her daughters, the one who’s been living in London, calls her out on this.

Eunice’s kids are very smart and exceptionally mature, and yet in the initial stages of her husband’s disappearance she treats them like emotionally retarded simpletons who can’t be trusted with the facts, and so I became angrier and angrier with her.

Always level with your kids, and never blow smoke up their asses…ever.

Interesting sidenote: Eunice Paiva was around 50 when her husband was taken by government agents, never to be seen again. The film shows many photos of how Eunice looked in 1970 and in the years that followed, and the fact is that she was much more attractive than Fernanda Torres, who has the honest, fascinating face of a formidable stage actress and an apparent inner life that you can’t help believing and investing in, but who is also, truth be told, a bit homely looking. I’m just being honest — what do you want me to do, lie?

After three-plus-years of delay and fiddling around, Bernard McMahon‘s Becoming Led Zeppelin, an obsequious 2021 doc about the early glory days of arguably the greatest metal-rock band of all time, is opening in IMAX today in roughly 200 theaters. Sony Pictures Classics is distributing.

All I can say is, it took ’em long enough.

I saw a version of McMahon’s film roughly 41 months ago in Telluride, and then it vanished. I really liked most of it but what was the big hassle? The now-playing version runs 121 minutes — the version I saw in Telluride ran 137 minutes or 2 hours and 17 minutes….the newbie is 16 minutes shorter.

“Led Zep Doc Hiding in Tall Grass,” posted on 11.1.21: What’s happened to Bernard McMahon’s Becoming Led Zeppelin?

In early September of ’21 the 137-minute doc screened at the Venice and Telluride film festivals, which almost always signals some kind of imminent fall release, or at least early the following year. But then it disappeared. Either nobody acquired it or it was withdrawn for further editing or something. All I know is that there’s no word about anything.

HE wild guess: There’s been a general sense of frustration with the critical response to the doc. Most reviewers found it overly obsequious and not even slightly inquisitive, and so (again, purely a guess) some re-editing and re-shaping is going on.

Led Zeppelin headliners Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, who had apparently turned down previous proposals for a definitive Led Zeppelin doc over the years, presumably because they didn’t want a warts-and-all portrait (i.e., infamous drug use and groupie debauchery on the road + the drug-related death of dummer John Bonham), are presumably hammering things out with McMahon as we speak. Or not. Who knows?

I saw and reviewed Becoming Led Zeppelin at Telluride ’21. Like most many reviewers I found it satisfactory if (and I say “if“) you’re willing to just go with it and put away your cranky hat. Providing, in other words, that you’re willing to ignore the doc’s kiss-ass attitude and general lack of curiosity about anything other than how the band came together and how the early songs were created, etc.

Forty-eight words: Becoming Led Zeppelin is highly enjoyable but a bit under-nourishing due to control-freak conditions imposed by Page and Plant. Overly sanitized, dishonest by way of omission, totally obsequious. But I still “liked” it — i.e., had a mildly good time except during the last 20 or 25 minutes.

Excerpt: “The first hour relates the individual paths of the three remaining Zeppers, and straight from the mouths — Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones (all currently in their 70s and in good spirits) as well as the late John Bonham, who is heard speaking to a journalist about this and that.

“The second hour is about the launch of Led Zeppelin — the early play dates, the creation of the first two albums, the acclaim, the power and the glory. It’s basically about good times, and there’s certainly nothing ‘wrong’ with that.

“The problem is that it doesn’t dig in. It’s not even slightly inquisitive. It’s way too obliging, almost feeing like an infomercial at times. It offers, in short, a really restricted portrait, and around the 110-minute mark (and with 27 minutes to go) I started to mind this.

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To my great surprise and delight, Christy Hall‘s Daddio, which I was remiss in not seeing during last year’s Telluride Film Festival, is a truly first-rate two-hander — a pure-dialogue, character-revealing, heart-to-heart talkfest that knows what it’s doing and ends sublimely.

Yes, it all happens inside a Yellow Cab on a long nocturnal trek from JFK airport to midtown Manhattan. It may not sound like much, I realize, because it’s just talk, but it holds you with ease and humanity and really effing pays off…sticks the landing with assurance.

I wasn’t exactly astonished by the quality of the lead performances from Sean Penn (driver) and Dakota Johnson (passenger), as they have the whole film to themselves and are both formidable, ace-level talents (Penn especially), but I was definitely taken aback by the quality of Hall’s dialogue and how she magically maintains a sense of story tension start to finish, even though there’s no “story” and it’s all about dodging, contemplating, confessing and looking within.

In my mind Daddio is right up there with Steven Knight‘s Locke (’13) — this century’s other great dialogue-driven, “guy driving on a nighttime highway while discussing fundamental issues” movie.

This may sound like excessive hyperbole, but I honestly feel that Daddio is in the same two-hander ballpark as Joseph L. Manchiewicz‘s Sleuth , Louise Malle‘s My Dinner with Andre, and Richard Linklater‘s Before Sunrise. I’m not saying it’s “better” than any of these three, but it delivers the same kind of step-by-step character cards.

Intially and quite naturally, Johnson’s unnamed protagonist (“Girlie”) holds her cards close to her chest, at least as far as Penn’s cabbie is concerned. But Hall shows us several text messages Girlie hae been getting from her highly hormonal boyfriend. To me he sounds like a real jerk — adolescent, eager-beaver (he actually sends her a dick pic), insensitive.

Penn’s “Clark” is an occasionally blunt (i.e., flirting with coarse) borough guy, and yet also sly, gentle and highly perceptive. Straight-up, decent, not an asshole. And a bit of an amateur shrink, or at least imbued with the observational powers of a seasoned Manhattan detective.

I’m not going to divulge what’s revealed or admitted to, but I can affirm that Daddio unfolds and hangs on in just the right way.

The conversation starts off casually and amusingly, but then a bad traffic accident happens, the traffic slows to a stop and we gradually understand that Johnson’s “Girlie” was up to while visiting her lesbo half-sister in the Oklahoma panhandle. The sister’s girlfriend sounds, by the way, like a Lily Gladstone type.

We get to absorb some melancholy situational truths about Clark and his two past wives and the (presumably modest) Queens house he lives in, etc. And yet the film primarily turns on Girlie’s relationship with the dick-pic sender, and this, trust me, takes on a greater weight as the film moves along.

On top of which Daddio is only 101 minutes long…congratulations for the discipline! And hats off to Hall, a very sharp, 40-year-old rookie.

7:45 pm: Okay, the initial light-hearted section (repartee, wedding, hospital, afterlife Joey Pants, healthy diet) was enjoyable, but Jesus, when and how did Martin Lawrence become Oliver Hardy? He’s funny in that bug-eyed, space-cadet way…

7:55 pm: And now it’s all cartel bad guys, ice-cold vibes, hard bullets, bad business, that silver haired sociopath, etc. Not cool, man.

8:05 pm: The Michael Bay cameo was okay, but the shoot-out in the nightclub and subsequent gunfire on the street…very disappointing. Seen this shit a zillion times. Highly-placed corrupted officials in Miami in league with cartel guys? I have to watch this?

8:13: Out-of-control spinning helicopter, etc. If it weren’t for Lawrence’s unhinged-cuckoo schtick (Will Smith is more or less the straight man) this movie would be worthless. People behind me are laughing at / with Lawrence…ooh–hoo–hoo! I’m not laughing ‘cause I’m not a whoo-hoo-hoo laughing-gas type but the guys behind me…turn it down, will ya?

8:24 pm: Smith & Lawrence trying to fool a pair of MAGA redneck yokels by trying to fake-sing a Reba McIntire song…good stuff. Possibly the best scene so far. The forced cunnilingus scene (“licky-licky”) isn’t bad either. Oh, no… more cartel guys with automatic weapons!! Van on fire, squealing tires!! Smith’s son Armando (Jacob Scipio) is cool, good-looking, etc. Cpt. Howard (Joey Pants) is innocent!

8:39 pm: This is slick, punchy, hack-level garbage. Good, high-impact, power-punch direction by Adil and Bilall, but it’s a wank…they’re trying to wank me off but I’m not the wanking type.

8:46 pm: The people sitting behind me won’t stop laughing. They’re easy lays…what can I say? Okay, Lawrence is pretty funny at times. And Scipio has great coal-black eyes, a great sense of implacable cool…he might be my favorite guy in this.

It took me a full month to see Wes Ball and Josh Friedman‘s Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (20th Century, 5.2), mainly because I’ve been off the Apes barge for many years now. I just don’t care any more. My investment is nil.

But I’m glad I finally sat down with it as Kingdom is obviously a first-rate, well-produced, technically excellent effort — as good as this sort of thing gets. As far as it went I respected the passion and exactitude that everyone apparently invested top to bottom, especially as it contains the most realistically rendered, subtly expressive CG simians I’ve ever seen.

Plus I found the performances uniformly excellent — Owen Teague, Freya Allan, Kevin Durand, Peter Macon, William H. Macy, etc.

Plus I loved, incidentally, the re-appearance of those ape hide scarecrows, which I haven’t seen since Franklin Schaffner’e 1968 original.

But at the end of the day I felt completely untouched and indifferent. Respectful but also relieved when it finally ended. Yes, I was annoyed by the 145-minute length, but all features are too long these days. It’s a plague.