CO-PICK OF THE WEEK: NEW

WORLD WAR Z (Three Stars)
U. S.: Marc Forster, 2013 (Paramount)

World War Z is a damned  fast movie—and it‘s probably got the biggest collection of ravenous zombies ever appearing together anywhere, anyhow. Assembled with panache by producer-star Brad Pitt, by director Marc Forster, and by  writers Matthew Michael Carnahan, Drew Goddard and Damon Lindelof,  this wildly expensive and sometimes insanely exciting horror thriller is about a worldwide epidemic of the living dead, and the one man on Earth who can apparently, maybe (we hope) stop it: ex-U.N. troubleshooter Gerry Lane, played by Pitt. It’s something to see, if not something to think (much) about, or to see again.

This movie moves like one of the dozens, no, hundreds, no, millions of rampaging ghouls who have suddenly declared war on humanity (or, as they like to call us, Lunch). Both the zombies and the movie come at us with the unstoppable push and fury of undead gangbangers or accountants. These zombies move  in a series of crazy skittering, lurching leaps that seem to cover miles of ground and plot in minutes, no seconds, no microseconds—taking over airplanes, hospitals, cities, countries, banging their heads on our car windows, threatening our adorable families, or Gerry’s adorable family (sweet mom Karen played by Mireille Enos, and sweet-pea daughters Sterling Jenns and Abigail Hargrove)—and killing or infecting or eating people with undead gusto and hideous relish and zip.

Zip! We’re in Philadelphia, having an adorable family breakfast. Then zip! suddenly (almost everything in this movie is sudden) we’re in a City of Unbrotherly Hunger besieged by walking corpses running amok! Zap! We’re bound by helicopter off a roof to a ship in the mid-Atlantic, where Gerry is separated from his family and given the hefty assignment of figuring out what’s going on, and figuring out how to stop it. Zip! We’re in South Korea, dodging corpses. Zippo! We’re in Israel for the big showpiece scene, watching a huge heap of inhuman life (or death) crawling over each other to form a massive, rising wall; Then Zappa! We’re on a plane filled with maddened monsters and shrieking humans and Gerry and an Israeili soldier survivor of the last big scene: Zegen (Daniela Kertesz).  And zappa-zippy-zombie! We’re in Wales, in a zombified medical center, just in time  for the film’s terror-fix-finale.

World War Z  is based on a novel by Max Brooks, the son of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft, and reportedly Max arranged the book as an oral history of the zombie attack—sounds more original than most of the movie. That’s a movie I’d like to see one day, and it also sounds like a film that Marc Forster (the one who made Monster’s Ball and The Kite Runner) might like to make.

Not that I didn’t enjoy at least some of this one. It’s mostly well-written, well cast, well-directed, and genuinely scary at times—though not especially inspiring or ingenious. But the producer was there when they needed him. A lot of the film’s quality, or at least its sometimes entertaining excess, is probably due to producer-star Brad Pitt, for whom this disaster epic was obviously a labor of zombie-love, as much as of zombie-commerce. Pitt is one actor whose good looks you tend not to hold against him. He’s a guy who, like Paul Newman and Robert Redford (two fathers of some of his performances) kids himself enough to remove what might be a taint of narcissism. Pitt doesn’t usually take the Tom Cruise stud-hero route; he’s done a lot of interesting projects. And though he’s wearing a strange hairdo for this type of role, he makes for a likable hero, if not a plausibly written one.

Why is Gerry Lane undertaking this vast mission mostly by himself? (The movie is a classic star vehicle but maybe it would  have been better to have two heroes: one official, and one, the Pitt part, more of  a freelancer.) Why is Gerry able to survive one horrendous action scene after another? Why do riots and screamfests break out wherever he goes—besides the fact that he’s a movie star, something producer Pitt exploits continuously? Why don’t  the Israeli defenders notice that writhing heap of zombies scaling their wall, or react to it until it’s too late?

Most of all, why did they spend so much money on this? I saw a big chunk of the original 1968 Night of the Living Dead on TV a short while  before catching World War Z—and I was amazed again at how much George Romero accomplished with such scant-seeming resources. World War Z, by contrast, is almost top-heavy with spectacle and action, almost gorged with blood and guts. Occasionally that pays off, as in the Tower of Zombies scene in Jerusalem. But like most big movies, especially big horror movies, it could use more character, more dialogue, more ideas, more personality. And maybe one or two or three hundred, no, three thousand, less zombies.

Extras: None.

CO-PICK OF THE WEEK: NEW 

THE BLING RING (Three Stars)
U.S.: Sofia Coppola, 2013 (Lionsgate)

OmiGod!

That’s the  most frequently exclaimed exclamation in Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring—I’ll bet I heard it in the movie at least a hundred times—and the phrase fits this picture and its people like a Gucci glove or like Louboutin shoes or like a critical cliche. It‘s used constantly by the title characters, an amateur bunch of L. A.-area teenaged thieves who pull heists at celebrity homes, and it can have a slightly toxic effect. Say it a few times, and you can almost feel the brain cells seeping out of your head. OmiGod! OmiGod! OmiGod!

What the catchphrase means—”I don‘t believe it!” or “ This is amazing!“ or maybe just “Hosanna!“—may affect you less than the mock-religious quality of its incessant repetition by the  Blingers. They were a gang of four wannabe-fashionista girls, and one computer geek boy from the San Fernando Valley. Based on real life kids who were the subjects of  a Vanity Fair article about their crimes, they became famous for going on joy-raids into the homes of the celebrity rich of Los Angeles-and-thereabouts, and stealing their bling: that is, their jewelry, shoes, objets d’art and fancy clothes and occasionally wads of dough the owners just leave lying around the place.

These were no petty robberies, and they aren‘t in the movie either. The kids—whose targets included Lindsay Lohan, Megan Fox, Orlando Bloom, Rachel Bilson, and most famously, Paris Hilton—netted nearly three million dollars worth of loot, though they got considerably less than that from the fences. And the raids were ridiculously easy. The fictionalized gang—including ringleader Rebecca (Katie Chang), Nicki (Emma Watson), and the only guy, Marc (Israel Broussard)—simply checked up on their favorite celebs on the Internet, found when they were going out of town on some celebrity gig and then went on their “shopping“ expeditions in the empty and unprotected homes.

These are a brazen but pretty inexperienced bunch. They never broke into the houses, but always got in through open doors or windows or with keys left under the mats. And they got their booty from people who had so much stuff that some of them, like Paris Hilton, didn’t even know, at first, that anything was missing. They were caught because they were incredibly stupid. They totally ignored the surveillance cameras some of their victims had on, and they sent out Facebook pictures of  themselves waving the loot. OmiGod!

Director-writer Coppola shows the Bling Ring for what they were: selfish and dopey, and she shows them with clarity and candor that mark all her films. Coppola makes American indie films that look like European films—The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette and Somewhere—and this is a European-style movie as well. But it’s also one of her most American films, in theme, subject and performances. These greedy, reckless, lazy, good-looking, mostly arrogant kids, obsessed with celebrity, obsessed with looks and loot, are the faces of the American wannabe idle rich, and Paris’s swanky domicile, which didn’t seem to contain a single book, is a kind of equivalent of Gatsby’s glittering mansion, except that it’s empty, in more ways than one.

But the movie still looks and feels European. It‘s not all sharp edges, and bright light pouring down on hunks and hotties. It has that misty, dreamy, well-textured look Coppola always got from her  excellent longtime cinematographer Harris Savides (who also worked for David Fincher). Savides became ill during the shooting and later died, and he was replaced by his assistant, Christopher Blauvet, who does a beautiful, inobtrusive job. Perhaps not as beautiful as Savides’, who was responsible for the film’s single most widely-discussed and praised shot, the long stationary take of Audrina Partridge’s home, at nighttime, with the Bling Ring moving from room to glass-walled room, picking up swag.

The cast is led by Katie  Chang, who makes a marvelous flirty psychopath out of Rebecca, by Israel Broussard, who does a nice variation on the usual high-school movie outsider kid who improbably gets the girl (or girls), and by Emma Watson (Hermione of the Harry Potter movies) who is a little scary as the gang‘s most self-deluded outlaw Nicki. (Nicki thinks the life-lessons from this experience will serve her well when she becomes a philanthropist or world leader.)

The others in the gang, all fine, imclude Tarmissa Farmiga as Sam, and Claire Allen as Chloe—and they all, singly or together, help paint this eerie portrait of the young, the selfish, and the vacuous—the image-crazy, bling-crazy products of a youth-intoxicated culture. The best acting in the movie though, is by the actress playing one of the film’s handful of parents: Leslie Mann as Nicki’s blissfully silly mom Laurie. Laurie is as thoughtless as her daughter is acquisitive. And Mann’s big acting moment comes when she leads some of the girls in witlessly clichéd new age self-helpish prayers—when you’d think a simple chorus of “OmiGods!” would have been more appropriate.

I liked the film very much at first. The best of it seems a sharp-eyed, sometimes stunning look at the utter vacuousness and amorality of much of the more visible modern culture. But it seemed to float away afterwards, and I think it needs more acid in its system. The film presents its gang as a little juiceless and too banal. There’s little or no sex in their routines and not even much heat. The kids, except for the notable nasty and manipulative Rebecca, seem almost  empty, waiting for a camera and a paparazzo to bring them some life. They are hooked on acquisition, on their addled dreams of becoming rich and famous and beautiful, or “famous for being famous.” As if to demonstrate this view, Paris Hilton appears in the film as herself and lends her digs—one of the actual crime scenes—to Sofia for the shoot. Her house looks like a set—and like the other sets impersonating the homes of Lindsay Lohan and the others.

So what’s the message? Does it need one? Is it a simple matter of getting more surveillance equipment, and maybe some guns? Me, I thought the message might be was as simple as the Biblical saying “The love of money is the root of all evil.” Isn’t that right? Isn’t that how it all  really comes down? Like totally. OmiGod!

THE WINGED SERPENT (Q) (Three Stars)
U.S.: Larry Cohen, 1982 (Shout! Factory)

A sleazy little semi-classic from the more daffily glorious times when horror movies had less gore, smaller budgets and more personality, The Winged Serpent (or Q, as it was called when I caught it in New York City on its first release) is a delightfully cheesy monster movie from Larry Cohen in his heyday. Cohen’s Robin Wood-certified masterpiece God Told Me To (or Demon) came out five years earlier, in 1977, but many joyous time-wasters find this one more memorable:

It’s all about an Aztec deity of whom you may have heard: Quetzalcoatl, the flying, and gruesomely hungry Godbird, who hides out in an NYC skyscraper, and bites the heads off sun worshippers and other rooftop hangers-out, until his nest is discovered by piano player-thief Jimmy Quinn (Michael Moriarty), who tries to snitch on Q and parley his knowledge into the Big Apple’s big time. Jimmy, a fearsomely vanity-less performance by Moriarty, is the best reason to see the movie. Moriarty, an ace at small-time bullies, mavericks and losers has never been better —not even in Bang the Drum Slowly or his bit in The Last Detail. And Richard Roundtree and David Carradine, as two cops who have Quinn’s number (they think) are almost as good. So is Candy Clark as the sex interest, Joan. The “Q:” is not bad either, though it obviously can’t play piano like Moriarty.

The Winged Serpent (or Q) is the kind of horror movie that amuses you, but doesn’t play off too much to your more sadistic instincts—which is all to the good, as far as I‘m concerned. And Moriarty is all aces, as a classic crumb-bum, trying to exploit the hell out of a Jaws-like cinematic scourge.

THE ICEMAN (Three Stars)

U.S.: Ariel Vromen, 2013

You want to know what “The Iceman” is? I’ll tell you. It was the nickname of a real-life Jersey guy named Richard Kuklinski who killed people for a living—and he’s the subject, the main guy, of a new movie called The Iceman, where he‘s played by that great f—kin’ actor Michael Shannon. Keep in mind that this fictionalized. They make some stuff up. But he (Richie I mean) was really good at it—whacking over a 100 guys by his count, maybe 250 by others, filling his contracts in so many different ways (shooting, strangling, poison, busting heads, slitting throats, etc.) that he never seemed to leave a signature. A pro, you know what I mean?

Richie started killing people in the 1960s, when he worked in the porn industry, and eventually he got hired by this wise guy Roy Demeo (Ray Liotta) as a regular hit man for the Gambino family, and he was the best they had, the best you’ve ever seen, never mind that he wasn’t Italian. He was Polish. (Excuse me, he was Polish-American.) He was also a good family man. He took good care of his family—his wife Deborah (Wynona Ryder) and their two daughters Betsy and Anabel (Mega Sherrill and McKaley Miller)—and they didn’t have a clue all those years what Richie really did for a living (He told them he worked for Walt Disney, then that he was in something called currency valuation.)

The mob called him The Iceman because sometimes he’d kill a guy, then put him on ice and freeze him, and drop the body later, so the cops would be confused about the time of death. And also, of course, because the guy was like ice on the job, absolute ice. As cold as a Smith and Wesson, loaded, shoved against your neck, but don’t get me wrong: Richie had his nice side too. I mean, he took care of his family. He never killed a guy unless he was being paid or unless the guy had it coming. And he never killed women or children. Never.

That was his big mistake.

I won’t tell you what happened to Richie—you may know already because they made a TV documentary and wrote a book about him—and besides, you want a few surprises here, don‘t you? One thing that‘s no shock. Michael Shannon is terrific as Richie. I mean, the best. Even though the real Kuklinski was 300 pounds and Shannon is a better-looking guy, but it’s the movies, you know? This show has a lot of other even better-looking guys—I mean leading-man or one time leading-man types like Liotta as Roy, and David Schwimmer, that “Friends” guy, as this slimy little louse named Josh Rosenthal, and Chris Evans, Captain America himself, as this other hit man named Robert Pronge, whose cover is he drives a Mr. Freezy ice cream van, and Stephen Dorff as Joey, Richie’s brother in the slammer. And James Franco—he‘s only in one scene, but it’s a beauty. He plays this Marty Freeman, one of Richie’s hits, who prays to God to save him from Richie. I won’t tell you what happens. Hell, you already know.

But you know. why is Michael Shannon so Goddam good? The “Boardwalk Empire” Michael Shannon. I mean, the guy is first-rate, fabulous, good enough for an Oscar. Absolutely. You remember Revolutionary Road? Take Shelter? Bug? The tall crazy-looking guy with that weirdo don’t f-ck-with-me stare? No Oscar out of at least one of those? Give me a break. He should have had at least one, maybe two. And now one for this.

I tell you, it‘s amazing: He’s got this creepy look that scares the sh-t out of you. Never cracks a smile. When he talks, we believe him. I mean you believe this guy can slit the throat of some schmucko pool-player he just met, and then go home and be a good husband and father to Wynona and the girls. You believe he was this smart-ass spooky intellectual in Revolutionary Road too, and this obsessed crazy guy in Take Shelter. And the nut job in Bug. All I can say is: My hat is off to the bastard. A Chicago guy, I hear.

They just shouldn’t wait too long to give him his prize, you now? They shouldn‘t wait until he’s some old guy who has to drag his ass up on stage and mumble and got propped up by some big star introducer a—hole. They should give it to him while he can still stare down the camera, while he can still make some money off it.

Though I imagine he makes plenty of money anyway, Like Richie. He sure as hell makes enough movies.

The other actors and actresses, they’re pretty good too. I mean better than pretty good. Maybe not great, but just on the edge of great. The movie is just on the edge of great, too. I’m not sure what it’s missing, except maybe it’s like The Godfather. They need more scenes of Richie’s family life, with Deborah (Wynona), and the kids. Like Coppola had lots of scenes with the Corleone family. He started the whole movie with that big family wedding, and that was the best scene in the whole damned movie.

I don’t know, Maybe somebody thought that having too many scenes with Wynona at home would start to get boring. But you know what I think? Maybe that’s where the real tension of the movie lies. In this guy, this hit man, trying to keep up his front with his family and neighbors, and sometimes the mask almost slips, you know? Anyhow, it would have been some kind of contrast.

You know, the whole look of the movie reminded me a little of The Godfather. Dark and like shadowy and kind of grimy. Like real life, you know? The guy who shot it, the cameraman, Bobby Bukowski—another Polish guy, I guess. He’s good at shooting, like Richie. And you know what I hear? They shot this picture in Louisiana some place, not New Jersey. Just like that Brad Pitt movie where he was a hit man and so was the Sopranos guy Gandolfini. They shot that one in New Orleans, and, in the book, it was supposed to have been in Boston. Hey, what is this thing about Louisiana anyway? We’re a long ways away from Carlos Marcello—that old New Orleans outfit boss they think was partly behind the Kennedy hit.

Ah, fuggedaboutit. But there’s another thing that might interest you, especially since they only have this one Jew character in the picture I think, this Rosenthal, and he’s a louse. Iceman was directed and also some of it was written not by a guy like Scorsese or Coppola, some paisano like you’d think, but I swear, by this Jewish guy Ariel Vromen, who comes from Israel. Can you believe it? What’s the deal, they’re running out of Italians? They’ maybe gave Liotta and Gandolfino too much, and De Niro and that kid DiCaprio? Like hell they did. But anyway, you figure: the Israelis, in Tel Aviv, there’s a lot of blood in the streets there too. Maybe there’s whatever you call it, an affinity. An analogy. Whatever.

But I give this Ariel guy credit. You listen to the dialogue and you’d swear they’re all from New Jersey —or some place a lot like it. Not like they’re copping The Sopranos or something, but the mood of it. The swing of it, you know what I mean? I don’t know what else this director guy did—some movie named Danika, I never heard of it—but this one gets a lot of points, if for nothing else than it gives Michael Shannon that role of Richie Kuklinski, which is one hell of role.

I tell you, Shannon looks at you, or he looks at the camera, whatever, and the cold sweat just shoots right through you. I bet it spooks you almost as much as if you saw the real-life Iceman guy, the real Richie, ready to ice somebody. Or like Angelo, Gina Maria’s brother-in-law, remember him? The one who threw that numbers guy, Crazy Sonny Monicelli, down the stairs on Dominic‘s party on the Feast of San Genarro? He—I mean the real Richie—has to have been scary too, you know? How many people did I say he killed? 100? 250? Hey, that’s a lot of people. That‘s impressive.

NOW YOU SEE ME (Two and a Half Stars)

U. S.: Louis Leterrier, 2013 (Summit Entertainment)

Movies are a magical art form—as Orson Welles, who was both a moviemaker and a magician, might have been quick to tell us. They transport us to magical lands, with magical people, and sometimes they excel at using magic and magicians as subjects. The Illusionist and The Prestige are recent pretty wondrous examples. Now You See Me isn’t.

Instead, this new cinematic magic show—in which four professional magicians join together for a Las Vegas-style super-act that may also be a super-crime—is a movie so self-consciously clever, so intent on surprising the hell out of us, and so utterly, shamelessly, mind-numbingly preposterous that you may walk out of it feeling that your mental pockets have been picked. (In a way, they have.)

Yet, like that Vegas-y magic act it shows us, Now You See Me snookers you for a while. For a half hour or so, I actually thought I was going to be pretty well entertained. The movie looks flashy, seems sort of smart, and throws a lot of star power at us. It’s directed by another of French action man Luc Besson’s protégés and Euro-slicksters (Bessonites?)—Louis Leterrier, the son of film director François Leterrier, and the helmer of Besson’s Transporter movies, as well as of the Ed Norton Incredible Hulk and Clash of the Titans).

Leterrier‘s films at least look good. (So, they say, did his dad‘s.) And, Now You See Me stars Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Isla Fisher and Dave Franco (James’s’ kid brother) as the magicians—“The Four Horsemen” they’re called, despite the presence of Ms. Fisher—along with further costars Mark Ruffalo and Mélanie Laurent as an FBI and French Interpol agent on their trail (after one of their magic acts seems like an actual bank robbery), plus Michael Caine as a big smarmy financial guy and Morgan Freeman as a magic fraud expert out to expose the foursome. So it’s a movie that seems to have a lot going for it, including that Grade-A cast and a very flashy production—one of those ultra-high-tech shows where everything looks like a perfume ad and is edited like a car chase. And it even has some good writers, though they haven‘t done such a good job here.

The script—by Ed Solomon, Edward Ricourt and Boaz Yakin (who wrote that moving 1994 big city heroin drama Fresh—tries to be a piece of ingenious fakery, flimflamming us through the movie and the acts, with a string of surprises going off like murder mystery last-chapter fireworks at the end. But, by the time we reached that end, the actors were the main reason I was watching the show, and the explanations were more unbelievable (and more mystifying) than the mysteries themselves.

Now You See Me begins with the assembling of the magic men (and woman)—card-trickster and sleight-of-hand sharpie J. Daniel Atlas (Eisenberg), escape artist Henley Reeves (Fisher), mind-reader /hypnotist Merritt McKinney (Harrelson) and street thief Jack Wilder (Dave Franco). Quickly rising to the top of the magic charts, outstripping David Copperfield (this movie’s technical advisor) and Burt Wonderstone (this movie’s patron saint), they’re soon ready to stage their super-big, super-impossible (and super-illegal) super-trick. In a glitzy Vegas theatre deep in Hangover country, they pick a bewildered audience member, hypnotize him, make him believe he’s been teleported to the inside of his French bank’s vault (covered by remote cameras and relayed to the Vegas Hilton), somehow steal all the money (it seems) and then “teleport” the fortune back to the theatre, where they supposedly pour the loot down on the deliriously happy audience. Funny money?

Hey, that’s some act. And if you did it for a live audience, without the benefit of movie editing and CGI, it would no doubt blow everyone away. As part of a movie—with the benefit of editing and camera trickery—it’s not quite as impressive. Furthermore since our heroes have now committed a robbery in front of thousands of witnesses (some admittedly well-paid), you wonder why they still get bookings. (Maybe I missed it.) You wonder why the FBI (as represented by Mark Ruffalo) and Interpol (as represented by Melanie Laurent), or even just the local police, can’t do a better job with them. (There’s an explanation for that, but not a very satisfying one.) You wonder who pays Morgan Freeman to debunk magic acts. (Could he also get paid for debunking horror movies and fairytales?) You wonder if Wonderstone will show up and teleport them all to Wonderland and West Hollywood.

I should tell you that the movie later also offers what’s supposed to be a perfectly logical explanation for the “bank robbery trick“ and the other tricks and everything strange and seemingly magical that happens (something that might actually, supposedly happen in the real world), and if you can swallow them, you may be entertained by the rest of the Now You See Me. You might be amused by the alleged romance, or rom-com slight-of-hand, between the chic Laurent and Ruffalo at his sloppiest. But in the end, it’s all tricks and little magic.

Now You See Me is lucky it has its cast, especially Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman, to anchor it in some kind of amusing humanity and acting expertise. But it doesn’t have enough of Caine, and Freeman, unfortunately, is saddled with some of the script’s more absurd plot twists. Of all the show’s many absurdities, the most absurd is the main trick itself—an elaborate triple-reverse wannabe-shockeroo that goes too far.

Of course, I don’t want to let any rabbits out of the hat. Or keep any Bessonites out of Bessonia. And I’m aware that “it’s only a movie.” But a movie, like a magic trick (and Now You See Me tries to be both) ought to find its own vein of internal logic and stick to it. Not only is the main trick here a piece of sleight-of hand or sleight-of-story that couldn’t happen in the real world. By rights, it shouldn‘t have happened in this movie either, not even to Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman.

DVD PICK OF THE WEEK: NEW
THE GREAT GATSBY (Four  Stars) U.S.-Australia: Baz Luhrmann, 2013 (Warner Bros,)

 “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… And one fine morning —

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (“The Great Gatsby”)

I. Razzle Bazzle Dazzle Frazzle

Baz Luhrmann’s often dazzling, sometimes excessive, frequently fascinating film of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age masterpiece, The Great Gatsby—a movie that has been trashed by a number of critics—is not only no disaster. It’s one of the best movies of 2013. Predictably crammed with cinematic excess, and done in Luhrmann‘s (Moulin Rouge, Strictly Ballroom) high style, it’s a stunningly imaginative, sometimes madly enjoyable show. At it‘s best, it makes a classic of literature come alive again on the screen in startling, voluptuously entertaining new and old ways.

To be honest, some of it (not a lot) is over the top, self-indulgent and no doubt annoying to literary purists (and some impurists)—but not so much that it cancels out, or even seriously diminishes the many pleasures that this Gatsby and its superb source, marvelous cast and first-rate technical people have to offer. I saw the movie twice and reread Fitzgerald‘s novel again—and, between them both, I’ve rarely had a better time in or out of the movies all year. Mulling over how much pleasure The Great Gatsby in both forms gave me, makes me sad that people were steered away from it.

Luhrmann’s new movie is not the Gatsby I envisioned as I read (and re-read) the novel. But I didn‘t expect it to be, and you shouldn‘t either. This film may not capture all the aesthetic brilliance and sexy allure of the book. (How could it?). But it gives us plenty to enjoy, and I enjoyed most of it: including the Luhrmann-Craig Pearce script, which keeps intact a lot of Fitzgerald’s lyrical narration and fizzy icy-liquor dialogue. This Gatsby is often as much Luhrmann’s—and his wife, production-costume designer Catherine Martin’s—as it is Fitzgerald’s. But it has a lot of the book in it, and the resulting mixture is snazzy, beguiling, Smart, exciting and marvelous to look at. And, of course, courtesy of Fitzgerald, it has a great story, which, contrary to what you may have heard, has not been botched and debauched out of all recognition.

To the contrary. Though Luhrmann’s stamp is all over the movie, it’s still a quite faithful version of the book (more so than the three previous Hollywood versions): a literary adaptation that preserves much of the original text, but is also encased in a dreamy, show-bizzy musical romp and an ultra-romantic Roaring Twenties movie-movie style that keeps going off in wild stylistic riffs.

There’s something admittedly kitschy and pop-operatic and even pop-grand-operatic about Luhrmann’s style here, even when the music isn’t playing (which isn’t often). It’s as if Verdi, while composing one of his Shakespearean operas (Falstaff or Otello), had also been able to include a lot of Shakespeare’s original spoken text and dialogue as well, and threw in “O Sole Mio“ for good measure.  In this Gatsby though, the arias are usually Fitzgerald’s prose poems, spoken (very effectively, with a kind of morose reverie and regret) by Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway. So we get the novel’s jewel-like words and phrases writhe across the screen in dancing subtitles, a tribute to Fitzgerald’s gorgeously alive prose.

In any case, I don’t think Luhrmann’s audacity with this material should be held against him—as if he’d committed some crime against art by not making the super-faithful, painstaking BBC miniseries version or respectful theatrical film that we wouldn’t expect from him anyway, and that somebody else can make later on. This is something different, a romantic musical Gatsby, a Gatsby for the new millennium. That’s part, of course, of what the movie’s detractors objected to. Perhaps because of all the hype, they’ve decided that Luhrmann is an ego-tripping revisionist show-off and that the book has been buried under the spectacular rubble.

But Fitzgerald’s classic novel is still the great animating force, inspiration and artistic structure behind the film and all its flights of fancy.  Luhrmann so obviously loves and admires the book and wants to give it his best, that his Gatsby becomes not only a  beautiful movie and the best Gatsby film adaptation of the several made so far (1926’s with gruff, glum Warner Baxter, 1949’s with suave Alan Ladd, and 1974’s with golden boy Robert Redford), but a sometimes truly fabulous entertainment, exploding past the book’s original, beautifully filled boundaries,  shooting off like a black sky full of fireworks over a blazing dance floor packed with intoxicated revelers.

II. The Jazz Age

If ever a novel seemed perfectly matched to the movies, it’s  Fitzgerald’s  “The Great Gatsby.“ The plot seems born for MGM or Paramount in their glory silent years. Even as you read it, the lustrous, glamorous  images burn into your memory. and the characters whirl and  dance in your mind while they flirt and kibitz and drink gobs of expensive liquor—gyrating and Charlestoning their frantic way through parties and assignations on the lawns and beaches and vast mansions of the fictional Long Island domains of East Egg and West Egg.

Romance and sin and drama and glossy décor and beautiful people and huge, mind-boggling wealth and other cinematic mainstays are there, and so are some great, provocative literary themes and characters. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is about the glamour and evil of money—as many movies were, especially in the Jazz Age—and it’s also about the glory and anguish of romance —as many movies are still, although usually they have happy endings and

(EXCUSE ME: SPOILER ALERT: roll over to reveal)

Gatsby, famously, doesn’t.

END OF ALERT

The central characters are not just rich, but super-rich or famous: Gatsby himself (Leonardo DiCaprio, in a performance of poignant splendor), pretty fragile belle-of-the-ball Daisy Fay Buchanan (Carey Mulligan), her wealthy, brutish husband Tom (Joel Edgerton) and her semi-androgynous golf pro crony Jordan Baker (Elizabeth Debicki)—as well as the more modestly moneyed “poor boy“ Wall Street bond-seller Nick Carraway (Maguire) who acts as the tale‘s ironic, grieving, poetic observer and narrator. (Only in a story as plush and rich, yet openly critical, as The Great Gatsby could a bond-seller from a well-to-do family be regarded as a poor boy.) And there are the others, even poorer than Nick: Isla Fisher as Tom‘s crass juicy mistress Myrtle Wilson and Jason Clarke as Myrtle‘s hapless and haggard husband, gas station owner and car guy George.

Both book and movie are about affluent, selfish American hedonists like Tom and Daisy who “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated into their money,” “careless” spoilers who live in posh East Egg, Long Island, and who seduce (and maybe diminish or destroy) people like Gatsby, the one-time Western plains poor boy who’s risen to the New York City heights, and who foolishly wants to be like them, and to win at their games.

The story is narrated (in both novel and movie) by the character often described as Fitzgerald’s literary surrogate, Nick Carraway, who has moved into a cottage next door to the estate of society titan Gatsby—and who becomes Gatsby’s friend and confidante after Jay learns that Nick is the second cousin of the great love of Gatsby’s life: pretty Daisy of Louisville, Kentucky, whom Jay met and fell in love with before he went off to World War I. (Daisy, a character both real and deeply fallible, is at least partly modeled after Scott’s  own radiant, emotionally disturbed  wife Zelda—a novelist herself.)

In movie as in book, flashbacks (or revelations told to Nick) keep carrying us back into the past Gatsby wants so desperately to recapture, the nights of love and courtship in Louisville, Kentucky with Daisy—and the film revels in this fluidity of time.  Then, after we learn of that devastating meeting and parting of Gatsby and Daisy—one of those intense romantic conjunctions that we never forget and never get over—we also learn the rest: how the lovers lost touch during the war and Daisy married rich all-American footballer/tennis/polo player and racist libertine Tom Buchanan (whose wealth is inherited and whose infidelities are legion), and moved into a mansion in the old money East Egg area on Long Island, just across the lake from what has now become Gatsby’s estate (and Nick’s cottage) in the new money West Egg area—far away, but close enough so Gatsby can see and tantalize himself with the haunting view off his pier of a flashing green light on the Buchanan estate, and Nick can tantalize himself with watching Gatsby watching it. In the rest of the story—which has one of the great American plots, besides being written so beautifully it stuns you—Gatsby woos Daisy again, and they all face the consequences.

Luhrmann’s movie is, as we said, faithful to its source. And where it deviates —as in having Nick writing the novel as therapy in an asylum where he’s being treated by a psychiatrist named Perkins (played by Aussie movie legend Jack Thompson) for, among other things “morbid alcoholism’—it has fairly good reasons and sometimes interesting results. That includes, amazingly, the use of a score with contemporary hip-hop music by executive producer Jay Z:  an idea that disheartened me when I first heard about it, but which I accepted quickly on screen. (Perkins, by the way, was the last name of Fitzgerald’s—and Hemingway’s and Thomas Wolfe’s—legendary Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins.)

We get a lot of Fitzgerald’s writing in the movie (sometimes in those writhing little scripts on screen) and that‘s another of the film’s strengths. Nick’s narration and most of the dialogue come largely out of the book—as opposed to the many film adaptations of major, narrated novels (like Mark Twain’s or Charles Dickens’ or Henry James‘) that simply, and, I think, mistakenly, jettison the original author’s words and prose, even though the words and prose are a large part of what made us love those books and writers in the first place. Rob The Great Gatsby of Nick’s painful, poetic, intoxicated   reveries and you’ve lost much of what makes it great. That doesn’t happen here.

In DiCaprio, the movie also has, in its title role, one of the best Gatsbys (if not the best) imaginable: the star of Titanic and The Aviator and The Gangs of New York playing what now seems a nearly perfect part for him, and playing it perfectly. DiCaprio has a great look as Gatsby. He’s an Arrow Collar guy with wary eyes and a softly vulnerable smile, and his most frequent salutation, “Old Sport,” spoken in a deliberately artificial stage accent, is an almost touching pastiche of the British aristocracy and the American pseudo-aristocracy. The movie’s Jay Gatsby, a mystery man and an ultimate 1920s romantic, is a heartbreakingly sweet and reckless character and DiCaprio makes him a believably sweet and reckless soul—an eternal love-torn boyish climber who won’t let go of the past and is hell-bent on winning back Daisy.

A delusion? “You can’t bring back the past,“ Nick warns Gatsby, (No you can’t, but that‘s what movies routinely do.)  Gatsby, radiating that “hope” and ‘romantic readiness” that Nick will sadly celebrate, answers buoyantly “Of course, you can.” Of course…You can buy anything. Why not the past? Or the future. (No you can’t.) Or even the present. (No. You can’t do that either —unless you move in the right circles.)

As for the rest of the cast, Edgerton, as Tom, very knowingly and powerfully incarnates the sometime cruelty of great, unearned wealth. Debicki is a properly saucy Jordan, Fisher an amusingly and sadly trashy Myrtle, Jason Clarke a hapless George (a man of ash living near the story‘s famed valleys of ashes) and Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan has an anachronistic, dashing take on Gatsby‘s patron, Meyer Wolfsheim (supposedly the gambler who fixed the 1919 World Series).

The one casting problem for me was the Daisy of the usually admirable Carey Mulligan. The difficulty with this part—and Betty Field in 1949 and Mia Farrow in 1974 had similar problems with it —is that Daisy is someone loved unto death, beyond all reason, and even if we feel Gatsby is wrong to feel that way (and we probably do), we have to know why he does. We have to feel some part of what resonates so enduringly in his hopeful heart. Carey Mulligan is a sometimes-superb actress (as in An Education). But she’s more a brainy and sensitive gal than a heart-piercing or regal beauty (a Kidman, a Paltrow, a Wasikowska), and she (or maybe Luhrmann) have also chosen to have Mulligan play the part without enough of the high intensity, spark, and incandescence that would have made her more of a magnet. I should add that Mulligan gives a fine performance anyway. She‘s just not as perfect a match with the part as DiCaprio with his. Or as Maguire, whose Nick seems initially a well-contained, almost diffident witness and chronicler, the one rational guy around, but who also conveys a held-back yearning for Gatsby‘s approval that almost suggests Gatsby’s intense feeling for Daisy.

III. The Green Light

Finally, The Great Gatsby has a great look: a spectacular visual realization of the Roaring Twenties in New York, and the time’s orgies and gestalt. (The movie’s most compelling image, like the book’s, is the giant painting of  bespectacled eyes, on the abandoned optometrist‘s billboard, near the Wilson gas station. The eyes of an absent God?) That fantastic style showcases CGI and 3D in highly creative ways—especially in the show’s great gaudy centerpiece, the first big Gatsby party that Nick attends, with both period 1920s songs and hip-hop blasting way, and people in snazzy ‘20s duds jumping up and down to the music (which ranges from Jay Z to Fats Waller to George Gershwin’s crashing, soaring “Rhapsody in Blue,“ accompanied by fireworks), all bobbing like apples and candies and colored lights in a moonlit tide.

Together Luhrmann and Martin (and the company) have created their own little world of artifice and nostalgia, set in a dreamy fabrication of 1922 Long Island and Manhattan (actually shot in Luhrmann’s and Martin’s native Australia), a romantic-fantasy domain that knocks your eyes out again and again. It’s a world that, especially in the party scenes, makes you feel happily drunk—a feeling that fits, since the story is taken from a novel (like Dashiell Hammett’s 1934 “The Thin Man”) about people who drink too much, written by a self-indulgent genius of a writer who drank too much—and though The Great Gatsby’s narrator Nick Carraway tells us he‘s only been drunk twice, we may find it hard to believe him, at least without taking a few snorts ourselves.

This is Luhrmann’s Gatsby (yet Fitzgerald’s also). But the novel’s original qualities shine though as well. It becomes not only a beautiful movie and the best Gatsby film adaptation of the several made so far, but for me, an instant classic.

So why has the film been so vehemently attacked, so nastily axed? Maybe because it’s an adaptation of a book now routinely selected by people with good literature credentials as the Great American Novel, or at least one of them (with “Huckleberry Finn,” “Moby Dick,” “The Portrait of a Lady” and a few others), and many serious movie critics like to prove that they’re not seduced by a film’s literary pedigree into giving a good review, and also maybe that they’ve read the book and are appalled at the cinematic havoc wreaked.

And maybe because Baz Luhrmann, now routinely savaged by some as the crazy Aussie madman of the movies, has the kind of go-for-broke technique that either mightily entertains you or just plain rubs you the wrong way —a flamboyant, dare-anything style like Orson Welles’ in Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, which was a film a lot of the original preview audience certainly thought was over the top, off the edge, and out to lunch. Now we think it’s magnificent. Maybe some day too, as with that F. Scott Fitzgerald novel that was rejected back in 1925, we’ll think the movie Gatsby is great.

George Bernard Shaw On Film (Three and a Half Stars) U.K.; Various Directors, 1941-1952 (Criterion/Eclipse)

Late in life, George Bernard Shaw entrusted the film rights for o all his plays to a relatively inexperienced  and threadbare thirty-something producer named Gabriel Pascal. Pascal, raised in Hungary, was an entrepreneur without money, and his only film credit up until then  had been, appropriately enough for a native-born Transylvanian, a movie called “The Living Dead.” But Shaw, then in his 70s, liked Pascal. The Nobel Prize-winning writer, the most famous playwright in the world at that time, and also a socialist who could get along with capitalists (if they made him money), had nevertheless resisted most other attempts to film his plays.

But Shaw made, and Pascal accepted, the major demand that the producer  not change or overly cut Shaw’s unusually verbose texts, but instead respect the playwright’s letter and law. In return, Shaw gave Pascal the rights to all his plays, and even worked on the screenplays (for which he took full credit), advised on the productions, and attended the shoots.

Pascal mostly did what Shaw wanted. (Once getting his producer‘s word, the crusty writer became more tractable as far as making changes designed to attract audiences and boost box office.) The first results were two instant classics made successively out of “Pygmalion,” in 1938, co-directed by Anthony Asquith and star Leslie Howard, and co-starring Wendy Hiller and Wilfred Lawson (a film available from Criterion but  not included in this set) and “Major Barbara,” a witty 1941 film with an extraordinary cast: Hiller again, supported by Rex Harrison, Robert Morley, Robert Newton, Sybil Thorndike, Emlyn Williams, Stanley Holloway and Deborah Kerr. Major Barbara was signed this time by Pascal, though most of the actual directing was done  by Harold French (who guided the actors) and the young editor David Lean, who, in his first stab at movie helming, handled both the camera direction and the montage.

Shaw and Pascal seemed now an unbeatable combination, producing and making great plays just as they should be made: leaving intact the  original ambitious themes and ideas and memorable characters and brilliant dialogue,  pulling in vast worldwide audiences for quality work, and with Pascal joining Alexander and the Korda brothers as yet another Hungarian master of prestige British cinema.

But, then came a legendary financial flop: the huge prodigal spectacle Pascal, as sole credited director, tried to wrest from Shaw‘s “Caesar and Cleopatra,” costarring Vivien Leigh as a saucy minx of a Cleopatra, and Claude Rains (Shaw’s personal choice) as a wise, bemused old warrior-king Caesar — along with Stewart Granger at his most dashing, Cecil Parker at his fubsiest, Basil Sydney at his staunchest, and Flora Robson and Francis L. Sullivan at their most sinister. The gorgeous location photography was by Freddie Young, who later returned to the desert to shoot Lawrence of Arabia” for Major Barbara’s co-director, David Lean.

That movie, shot in Egypt, was an Ishtar of its day, and it made Pascal something of a joke, and, despite Shaw’s continuing support, brought about the end of most of his lofty projects. The exceptions were  one more lower-budgeted film, the charming Androcles and the Lion, shot more cheaply at Howard Hughes’ RKO, with Alan Young (as Androcles), Jean Simmons, Victor Mature, Newton, Maurice Evans and Jim Backus — and Pascal‘s long time plans for a musical version of “Pygmalion,” which were realized two years after his death.

That, of course became “My Fair Lady” — a project reuniting two actors from the 1941 Major Barbara, Harrison and Holloway, and a play that achieved such phenomenal success that it might have won a living Pascal back everything, prestige and cash, that  he lost on “Caesar” (as long as he didn’t try to direct it).

These films today look as good as they did on their release, and in “Caesar’s” case, a little better.  I wish Pascal had produced a few more. Which shows that Shaw was right about producers sticking to their, and his, words.

Included: Major Barbara (U.K.; Gabriel Pascal/Harold French/David Lean, 1941)  Four Stars. Caesar and Cleopatra (U. K.; Pascal, 1945) Two and a Half Stars. ” (U.S.; Chester Erskine, 1952). Three Stars.

(Extras: Liner notes by Bruce Eder.)

G. I. JOE: RETALIATION (Two and a Half Stars)

U. S.: Jon M. Chu, 2013

G. I. Joe Retaliation may sound like another big, rotten box-office smash shooting down the pipes: another ridiculously over-violent action movie, in this case with characters based on Hasbro action figures or toys (and on Marvel Comics versions of them) with another machismo-drenched cast (topped by Dwayne Johnson, Bruce Willis and Channing Tatum) and another cliché-drenched script. And some of it as bad as your worst fears. But some of it surprises you.

Not at first though, You walk into the theater or turn on the player,  the lights (and your wits) dimming, and you think: Is that all there is? Is this what movies have come to? Are most of us now reduced to watching the 3D chronicles of the battles waged  by the toy hero G. I. Joe (Willis, in a supporting role), the massive hero Roadblock (Johnson, the star) and, for a while, the two-fisted hero Duke (Tatum, who was the star of the last 2009 G. I. Joe smash), with all three fighting the gang of the insidious Cobra Commander (Luke Bracey) and his maniacal minions? Where is Ming the Merciless?

The movie then reveals its secret weapon: a light touch. The plot is familiar, but it’s done with some humor. In the story, the G. I. Joe guys are hit with a massacre (of most of their number, apparently including Duke), a frame-up of the ones left, including Roadblock and the adorable Lady Jaye (Adrienne Palicki), and a plot to conquer and  destroy the world, engineered by their old nemesis Cobra (I think) and involving a phony double of The U. S. President (Jonathan Pryce, of Brazil), who bullies a gathering of world leaders and starts yet another countdown to destruction (one of those countdowns that usually gets all the way past five), while the real President (also played by Pryce) languishes in captivity nearby, probably wishing he were in Brazil.

That’s what it’s all about: a lot of bang-bang, but no kiss-kiss — or at least none I remember. Be that as it may,  G. I. Joe Retaliation is better than most of te recent big-bucks bang-a-thons. Maybe the film partly works because of the cast: Johnson, Pryce as The Presidents real and ersatz, Willis, Tatum, Bracey, Byun hung-Lee as the aptly named Storm Shadow, Walton Goggins as a warden, D. J. Coltrona as Joe‘s man Flint, Ray Park as the aptly-named Snake Eyes and James Carville as the aptly named campaign advisor James (“It’s the economy, Stupid”) Carville.

Or maybe it was because of the truly spectacular action, which includes one certifiably killer scene: an amazing battle raging and soaring all over Himalayan cliffs and slopes, with Storm Shadow in a body-bag being carried or whooshed downhill  by his daredevils — with bad guys swooping at them to try to stop the escape, and the snow-capped mountains treated like the site of  a parkour chase, bodies tumbling like the popcorn that the entire audience probably failed to eat while they watched dumbstruck, as this outrageously exciting scene —  a sequence that puts the “cliff” back in cliffhanger — run its course.

Or maybe it was because the people who made Retaliation, director Jon M. Chu (of  the ludicrous, if high-spirited musicals Step Up 2 and 3) , and writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (of  the undead comedy Zombieland), just don’t seem to be taking themselves or the movie all that seriously. They have fun with the clichés and formulas, which is more than you can say about most of these  gun-crazy shows.

So the movie wasn’t so bad after all. But don’t be fooled. Except for the mountain battle, it’s not that good either. Now, excuse me. Ming the Merciless and Storm Shadow are waiting in the hall with a high concept. It has something to do with the Himalayas.

GUYS AND DOLLS (Also Blu-ray) (Three Stars)
U.S.: Joseph Mankiewicz, 1955 (Warner Brothers)

If there was ever a part Frank Sinatra was born to play—and sing—it was Sky Masterson, the lady-killing, dice-rolling, high-living gambler who is the main man and big shooter of the classic New York-Broadway musical (and the Hollywood movie made from it) Guys and Dolls. Sinatra loved the show, loved the part, and liked to include Sky’s signature song, “Luck Be a Lady” in his acts. And. Frank was at the top of his career and game and box-office clout when the movie (produced by Samuel Goldwyn and directed and written by Joseph Mankiewicz) was released in 1955. There’s no question that, in 1955, Sinatra was the greatest, most famous, most admired pop singer/recording artist in the world. (His only peers and rivals then, like Bing Crosby and Ella Fitzgerald, were unsuitable casting for Sky.)

But when the movie was cast, Goldwyn decided instead to go for the guy who was then regarded as the greatest movie actor in the world, Marlon Brando. Sinatra was cast in the movie too, but in the, less charismatic role of Nathan Detroit—New York City gambling entrepreneur and proprietor of The Oldest Established Permanent Floating Crap Game in New York. Sinatra is swell as Detroit—it’s actually one of his best movie musical roles—and Brando is not half-bad as Sky. His acting is superlative; he‘s slick as a whistle and handsome as a Times Square gent in full streetwise blossom. But face it: As well as he could fake it (and he does act out the songs a bit like Rex Harrison in “My Fair Lady”), Brando could not sing like Sinatra. Sky was Frank’s part, and he proved it a few years later when his record company, Reprise, released an album of the songs from “Guys and Dolls,” with Frank singing some of Sky‘s, and other numbers recorded by Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr. and Crosby. (It was a gasser.)

Even with its dubious bit of star casting however, the movie of Guys and Dolls is a killer show. Set on Times Square, in Havana and in the high spots and delis of Broadway, adapted and directed by Mankiewicz and with a fantastic, witty, street-smart song score by Frank Loesser, it’s a hard-boiled romantic comedy based on Damon Runyon’s hard-boiled, vernacular-heavy Broadway stories of life among the guys who gamble and the dolls they gamble for. Here those high-rolling guys include Brando’s Masterson and Sinatra’s Nathan, with dolls Vivian Blaine (the only holdover from the stage version) as Miss Adelaide, Nathan‘s longtime fiancée, and Jean Simmons as Sergeant Sarah Brown, a fiercely faithful, beautiful and seemingly proper soul-gatherer for the local Salvation Army—and also the gal who eventually conquers the ace gambler‘s luckiest and most vulnerable spot, his heart.

Other denizens of this choice slice of Manhattan folklore include Sheldon Leonard as slickster Harry the Horse, B. S. Pully as granite-faced gangster Big Jule, and those two amiable horse experts, Johnny Silver as Benny Southstreet, and the perfectly cast Stubby Kaye as Nicely-Nicely Johnson. The pudgy dynamo Kaye probably, during the run of the stage “Guys and Dolls” stole the show every night twice—the first time as part of the ensemble in the unforgettable “Fugue for Tinhorns” (“I got the horse right here; his name is Paul Revere…”) and the second time with the unbeatable “Sit Down, (Sit Down, Sit Down,) You‘re Rockin’ the Boat.” “Guys and Dolls would probably still be a great musical if it included just those two songs and the big ballad “A Woman in Love,” and “Luck Be a Lady,” But the movie was so crammed with first-class tunes with great lyrics, that it could survive Goldwyn‘s perverse removal of one of the show‘s biggest hits, “A Bushel and a Peck”, and its replacement with the cute but so-so “Pet Me, Poppa.”

The man who wrote those songs—both the music and the lyrics—was another Frank: Frank Loesser, one of he best and most inventive and funniest and most purely lyrical pop songsmiths ever. (Loesser also wrote the words and music for the excellent scores of the stage shows “The Most Happy Fella” and the Pulitzer Prize-wining “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.”) Guys and Dolls was written for the stage by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows, and they (and Runyon) are responsible for its Runyonesque language and lingo, which are both oddly formal and engagingly raw —like the speech of finicky but uneducated gangsters trying to tip-toe into high society.

But Loesser is the main reason the stage show is a classic. It’ s hard to analyze his special qualities as a songsmith, but one of them is his almost perfect matching of the words and music, a quality he shares with Cole Porter. Loesser’s lyrics sound absolutely right, and his songs are so well wrought that they practically sing themselves—which is why Brando almost gets away with Sky Masterson. Loesser had spent most of his career writing not for Broadway but for Hollywood, where his most famous song was the ingenious seduction ballad and double-entendre Oscar-winner “Baby It’s Cold Outside.“ When he wrote the songs for Guys and Dolls, he was at his peak, his work has an effortless grace and wit—and he was just a few years away from another great score for the underrated 1952 Goldwyn/Danny Kaye movie musical, “Hans Christian Andersen.”

Joseph Mankiewicz, Goldwyn’s choice to direct Guys and Dolls, was no Stanley Donen or Vincente Minnelli, and probably not even a George Sidney. In fact Mankiewicz never directed another musical, before or afterwards—which at least gives him a very high average in that genre. It can be argued (but I wouldn’t) that “Mank“ didn’t really (totally) direct this musical either, since his strategy was to handle all the dialogue and acting scenes (of which there are quite a few) and hand over all the singing and dancing numbers to his genius choreographer Michael Kidd, whose romping, stomping signature was already all over the classic Western numbers of Donen’s Seven Brides for Seven Brothers—and who here proves just as synchronous with the rhythms of America’s biggest, classiest city and one of the best musicals ever set in it.

The movie Guys and Dolls, has long taken a second row in the movie musical pantheon to the great dancing musicals of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. But the show, both on stage and on film, has grown in stature over the years, until the play is now generally regarded as one of Broadway’s best—if not the best. The movie is revered to such an extent that even the numbers written for and added to the picture, like Sinatra’s “Adelaide’s Lament,” have been added to the play revivals as well. The movie is everything the slightly illegal side of Broadway was (or how we like to imagine it: fast, breezy, clever, high-stepping full of inside dope and rapid chatter and the promise of big rewards—and the zing and sting of romance in the city.

One question has to be asked. Should Sinatra have played Sky Masterson instead of Brando? The answer is probably yes. Brando tries hard– and he’s absolutely magnetic when he’s just doing dialogue. But singing? It’s like Pagliacci telling us he coulda been a contender. It’s not that he doesn’t hit the notes. He does, but the strings of your heart don’t sing as they would for Frank. In a way, it’s a shame they couldn’t have waited a few years and cast Frank and Dino, like the Reprise album. (One of Dean’s biggest record hits, by the way, was Loesser’s “Standing on the Corner” from “Most Happy Fella.”)

Better yet though may have been a piece of casting that was actually available at the time and would have given Hollywood’s Guys and Dolls a good shot at being remembered today as a great musical in the Singin’ in the Rain/Top Hat/An American in Paris class. The part of Sky Masterson was actually offered to Sinatra’s old On the Town partner, Gene Kelly—and though Kelly couldn’t sing as well as Frank either, and sometimes not even as well as Brando, he (and Kidd) could have given Guys and Dolls what it doesn’t have now: great dance numbers to go with those great songs. Imagine Kelly waltzing to “A Woman in Love” or careening all around the crap game to “Luck Be a Lady.“ As Marlon once said (in a taxi cab): “Wow!“

What happened? MGM wouldn’t loan Kelly out—even though Goldwyn was their middle name. Listen… Ah, why make a fuss when it’s already over? Anything can be improved, even Singin‘ in the Rain. (For one thing, they could put back those deleted scenes on the DVD.) But hey, Mr. MGM of the 1950s, let me inform you: It may be Sam Goldwyn’s fault that Frank did not sing “Luck Be a Lady.

But it’s your fault Gene did not dance it. Youse were not gentleman, I fear. Now, sit down; You’re rockin’ the boat.

Extras: Documentaries The Goldwyn Touch and From Stage to Screen; More musical performances; Trailer; Booklet.

OBLIVION (Three Stars)
U.S.: Joseph Kosinski, 2013 (Universal)

Oblivion, a stunningly visualized, dramatically erratic science fiction film epic about what happens after the Apocalypse, maybe, is really two movies: one good, one not so good. First, it’s the long-lost progeny of 2001: A Space Odyssey and “The Twilight Zone.” (Good.) Second, it’s a Tom Cruise killer-thriller space opera about a rebellion on our ravaged earth. (Not  good.)

 The 2001-inspired section, thanks to the film’s visual artists (which include director-writer Joseph Kosinski and cinematographer Claudio Miranda of Life of Pi), is often extraordinary—and get a load of the movie’s splendiferous vistas: those sand dunes out of Lawrence of Arabia, those cloud castles out of Up, those moody dreamy interiors out of Solaris. The way the movie looks is one of its main attractions. Another is the acting (Cruise, Morgan Freeman, Andrea Riseborough, Olga Kurylenko and Melissa Leo).

The second part of Oblivion, which is more big-bucks action movie-driven, is well cast and well acted, but both predictable and often befuddling. From the midpoint of Oblivion on, the movie often doesn’t make much sense. The premise is reminiscent of all those “Zone” episodes which took place in the (seeming) future, or (seeming) deep space, and where we‘re watching something rich and strange and often nightmarish, in a world that we can sense is going to change radically—and often does. On a post-nuclear war Earth, cosmic cleanup operator/sky-boy Jack Harper (Cruise) and his British co-worker/bedmate Victoria Olsen (Riseborough) are located in what looks like a super-Hollywood Hills sort of number called the Skytower. They, and everyyone else will be  evacuated to the Saturn moon of Titan, while Earth suffers the ruin and wreckage of 60 years of planetary warfare with alien invaders called the Scavengers. Earth is now a blasted wasteland, with its seas drained for energy, and with a number of famous landmarks (the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, the New York Public Library) poking Planet-of-the-Apes-like, out of the sandy devastation.

Jack and Victoria are spending their last time there, mopping up what’s left of Desert Earth, in anticipation of humanity’s impending exodus. Meanwhile, nasty Scavengers, or Scavs, roam around menacingly, even though humankind supposedly won a 60-year war, and  Jack/Tom cruises around in the Top Gun-nish cockpit of his glider  Bubbleship and treasures  a sumptuously weathered old hardcover book called “The Lays of Ancient Rome” by Thomas Macaulay. Also haunted by memories of a beautiful woman he saw on the observation deck of the Empire State Building (Olga Kurylenko), he is about to meet a flock of other characters played by Morgan Freeman (Beech, a rebel leader),  Kurylenko (Julia, the real beauty), Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Sykes, a hothead) — and to find out that neither he, the Earth, nor the Scavengers, nor Victoria, nor any of the others.  nor almost anything all is quite what it seems, even if we’ve seen a lot of it before in other movies.

There aren‘t many movies around as stunning to look at as the first part of Oblivion and it‘s worth a look. Kosinski displayed a strong visual imagination in the critically bashed TRON: Legacy., but this is his show—adapted from a story and graphic novel he wrote — and it’s clear he has more emotion invested in it. Maybe Cruise does too.  He doesn’t quite triumph over the forced ending—nobody can really, except Morgan Freeman, who, it seems, can survive anything. But the movie has its moments, and many new pictures don’t have even that much. Oblivion doesn’t quite turn real, or even convincingly unreal In the end, it’s just another Tom Cruise action spectacular. But at least it’s not oblivious to other possibilities.

Extras: None.