The Portable Door, on MGM+

Paul Carpenter and Sophie Pettingel are too old for Hogwarts. At this point, they are mostly kind of adults. Fortunately, the J.W. Wells & Co offers a sort of magical management training program. The tweedy firm administers fateful coincidences and serendipity, for a fee, but it takes Carpenter a few beats to figure that out. He was only hired thanks to providential happenstance and dumb luck. Nevertheless, he must navigate the company’s magical intrigues in Jeffrey Walker’s The Portable Door, based on Tom Holt’s YA novel, which premieres Saturday on MGM+.

Carpenter needs a job, any job, so when an odd chain of events leads him away from a barista interview to the mysterious Wells Company, he goes ahead and applies for the open position they have posted. The new CEO, Humphrey Wells seems to give Carpenter’s explanation more credence than the rest of the board interviewing him, but sure enough, he lands the paid internship.

Initially, he gets the cold shoulder from his officemate, Pettingel. She is on the management training fast track, because she is an actual seer. Carpenter isn’t sure what his place in the fantastical company could be, but Wells (who just succeeded his missing father) is convinced he has divination powers that can find the Portable Door, a magical portal device that theoretically takes users anywhere they want to go. However, in practice, the door can be a bit unpredictable.

Co-produced by the Jim Henson Company, Portable Door is an upbeat fantasy with a lot of visually distinctive world-building. The creature creations are as charming as you would expect from the Henson team (including goblins and baby dragons), but the target audience definitely skews young. The energy is high throughout the film, but not so much the intensity level.

The Consultant, on Prime

Much to their surprise, the employees of this mobile gaming company will have to return to the office, whether they like it or not. Regus Patoff, the corporate consultant now calling the shots is not exactly old school, but he certainly does not care what people think of him. He might even pull their accounts back into the black, but it could cost more than their corporate culture in creator Tony Basgallop’s eight episode The Consultant, adapted from Bentley Little’s novel, which premieres today on Prime.

Elaine Hayman assumed her boss’s unexpected death would also mean the demise of CompWare, but then Patoff shows up a few days later with a contract signed by the late Sang Woo, giving him complete operating authority. At his first company meeting, everyone logging-in remotely is given one hour to come into the office or they are fired. Patoff also threatens to pink-slip any employee he deems foul-smelling. He never appears to leave the office, where he constantly demands Hayman meet him at unprofessionally early hours. Yet, he always seems fresh and immaculately dressed.

The clever thing about the early episodes is the ambiguity surrounding Patoff. His name is revealed to be an alias right from the start, but his strategies are not always utterly irredeemable. In fact, the Mephistophelean consultant is open to new game pitches from frustrated staffers like Craig Horne, Hayman’s former office hook-up whom she still keeps flirting with, despite his engagement to the decidedly Catholic and un-slackerly Patti. However, as Patoff pushes the company to launch Horne’s unlikely game concept, he forces everyone around him to make Faustian bargains, especially Hayman.

Frankly, The Consultant cannot really be called a “workplace” comedy or drama, because CompWare is not a proper workplace, at least not until Patoff shows up. Unfortunately, Patoff’s potential for creative destruction eventually dissolves into predictably sinister and not particularly logical villainy in the later episodes.

Frankly, it is like Basgallop’s adaptation just implodes. For a while, Hayman and Horne sleuth out bizarre hints to Patoff’s backstory, but none of that intriguingly weird material pays off at the end. Even more troublingly, there are times when the character of Patti seems to be targeted for manipulation out of a desire to see a Roman Catholic corrupted, which constitutes religious bigotry (for instance, she has fantasy-delusions involving the confessional booth).

It is a shame that such a strong start eventually runs off course and crashes. The episodes, around thirty-five minutes each, are initially highly bingeable and promise mystery and intrigue at an unusually weird level. Christoph is perfectly cast as Patoff, delivering each verbal barb with gleefully sly understatement. He might be a monster to work for (literally), but it sure looks like he enjoys his job.

Tulip Fever: Will it Still Bloom After Being Buried So Long?

The boom and bust of the Dutch Tulip market was so dramatic, it became one of the primary case studies in Charles Mackay's classic (and now more relevant than ever) Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Despite what CBS might think, agitated masses often display foolish and reckless behavior, such as paying ten times the average skilled artisan’s wages for a single tulip bulb. Just when the market starts to look dicey, a pair of lovers hope to flip an exceedingly rare bulb to finance their happily ever after in Justin Chadwick’s notoriously delayed Tulip Fever (trailer here), which supposedly finally opens today nationwide.

The Dutch love their tulips. This was particularly true during the Dutch Golden Age. Like anything valuable, a commodities market for tulips sprung up, in which titles to bulb were traded by investors who never touched a spade in their lives. Old school merchant Cornelis Sandvoort is wise enough to steer clear of such wild speculation. Instead, his losing investment is his wife Sophia, whom he more or less purchased from her convent, but has yet to produce an heir.

In a cruel twist of fate, the Sandvoort’s housekeeper Maria has fertility to spare. She learns she is carrying her fishmonger lover’s baby soon after his is shanghaied by a press gang. Ordinarily, her master would turn out an unmarried pregnant servant without a second thought, but she has leverage over her mistress. She threatens to expose Sophia’s affair with sleepy-eyed garret-dwelling portrait painter Jan Van Loos if she is kicked to the curb. Thus, begins a desperate scheme to conceal her pregnancy and ultimately facilitate the lovers’ new life together, which will be financed by an exceedingly rare bulb Van Loos manages to claim.

Tulip Fever has been postponed so many times, it has evolved from an industry joke into an urban legend. Seriously, how hard is it to market a film penned by screenwriter Tom Stoppard, starring Oscar winners Alicia Vikander, Christoph Waltz, and Dame Judi Dench? Although some have come to doubt it, the film does indeed exist. It is okay—respectable but nothing spectacular. Frankly, Suite Française, which the Weinstein Company shunted off to Lifetime, is a far superior film, but this is the wrong film to look for logic in its release strategy.

Regardless, the Fever’s problems are glaringly obvious, starting first and foremost with the gross miscasting of Dane DeHaan as Van Loos. DeHaan is simply not a romantic lead—not by the wildest stretch of the imagination. He is the guy you cast as the nebbish introvert with a facial tic. Not for one instant can we believe him as Vikander’s lover.

Aside from looking awkward in her scenes with DeHaan, Vikander is fine as Sandvoort. Arguably, Waltz tries a little too hard as her fastidious husband, but he has some surprisingly poignant moments in the third act. However, it is excruciatingly painful to watch Zach Galifianakis’s shtick as Van Loos’s drunkenly buffoonish sidekick. Dude, go back to the ferns. However, Tom Hollander darn near rescues the film singlehandedly with his slyly roguish portrayal of the morally flexible Dr. Sorgh.

Fever has obviously been recut so many times, it is no longer fair to judge Stoppard screenplay. The business of the tulip market is fascinating, but the film never displays his erudite wit. Again, the self-defeating cast does not help in this respect either. What could and should have been delightfully tart and indulgent turned out to be fatally middlebrow. Recommended for viewers who have magic glasses that will make DeHaan and Galifianakis disappear from the frame, Tulip Fever hopefully opens today (9/1) in New York, at the Angelika Film Center downtown and the Paris Theatre uptown.

Tim Burton’s Big Eyes

Depending on who you ask, Margaret Keane’s big-eyed children paintings are either a precursor to George Rodrigue’s gallery-accepted Blue Dog paintings or a spiritual forerunner of Thomas Kinkade’s kitsch. Either way, the key point for her new bio-film treatment is that they really were her paintings and not the work of her credit stealing husband. It is a strange story, but it is told in a disappointingly conventional manner in Tim Burton’s Big Eyes (trailer here), which opens this Christmas in New York.

Margaret Ulbrich packed up her daughter and walked out on her first husband at a time when such drama was scandalous. She relocated to San Francisco to pursue her dream of making it as an artist, but the only eye her work catches is that of Walter Keane. He too fancies himself an artist, but the real estate broker only has a talent for salesmanship. Convinced she needs taking care of, Ulbrich soon marries the brash Keane, believing their mutual interest in art will be a good thing.

One fateful night at Enrico Banducci’s hungry i club, Keane manages to sell one of his wife’s big eye paintings, but he kind of, sort of allows the purchaser to believe he is the artist. One thing leads to another and soon Walter Keane is a media sensation. Although she is troubled by the arrangement, Ms. Keane keeps churning out big eyes to feed her husband’s growing pop culture empire. However, despite his secret fraud, Walter Keane is bizarrely vexed by the proper art world’s snobbish appraisal of his (meaning her) work, leading to some odd confrontations with the profoundly unimpressed art critic John Canaday, who really ought to be considered the hero of this picture.

Of course, MDH Keane (as she starts to sign paintings) will eventually have enough of her husband’s manipulations and deceit. Running off to Hawaii, Keane re-starts her life after joining the Jehovah’s Witnesses. When she is finally ready, she will assert her claim to the Big Eyes body of work, precipitating a court battle for rights to the Keane brand.

There are many aspects of Big Eyes that will make people want to like it. After all, how often do films feature Cal Tjader jamming in Banducci’s club or portray Jehovah’s Witnesses in favorable, empowering light? Unfortunately, Burton’s uninspired made-for-cable vibe and Christoph Waltz’s overly manic performance always feel at odds with each other. The climatic courtroom scenes are particularly problematic, coming across excessively jokey, without ever delivering a good punch line.

At least Waltz is trying. As Margaret Keane, Amy Adams and her woe-is-me victim routine simply fade into the background. Their teenaged daughter also periodically wanders in and out of the film, but good luck remembering anything she says or does. Still, Burton and a fine supporting cast make the pre-hippy San Francisco scene come alive on-screen. Jon Polito flat out steals the film as the charismatic Banducci, while Terence Stamp’s Canaday is a tart-tongued joy. Danny Huston also adds some desperately needed acerbic flair as journalist Dick Nolan, who narrates the film as if it were a newspaper column.

Given Burton’s name in the credits, viewers will be waiting for Big Eyes to get good and crazy. Unfortunately, Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski’s screenplay is the cinematic equivalent of a Reader’s Digest condensed book. You can pick up the general outline, but the distinctive idiosyncrasies are largely glossed over. The results are disappointing, especially for Burton fans. Mostly just okay, Big Eyes will probably only satisfy Keane collectors when it opens nationwide tomorrow (12/25), including the Angelika Film Center in New York.

Zero Theorem: Terry Gilliam Goes Back to the Dystopian Well

Evidently, there is good money to be made from metaphysical nihilism. How so, you might ask? Well, obviously you are not an evil businessman or you would see it plain as day. For the rest of us mere mortals, it remains a gaping narrative hole in Terry Gilliam’s The Zero Theorem (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Qohen Leth is a programming drone who is slaving away, crunching the Zero Theorem, the grand unified theory of life’s meaninglessness, at the behest of his boss, “Management,” the charismatic chairman of Mancom. Evidently, the corporate predator stands to make a lot of money if he can prove the primacy of nothingness. However, Leth lives in the hope that he will soon receive a phone call that will finally give him the inner peace he yearns. (Careful of your shoes, because the irony is laid so thick here, even other characters pick up on it.)

Although practically a shut-in, Leth manages to befriend Bainsley, a professional party-girl and web-stripper and Management’s troubled cyber-repairman son Bob, (most likely through some calculating outside intervention). Nevertheless, Bob’s rebellious streak is genuine, but tragically so are his congenital health issues.

The good thing about Zero T is it looks like a Terry Gilliam film. Leth’s lair is a masterwork of cyber doodads, human detritus, and near future urban decay. Likewise, the Mancom set pieces are suitably large and eccentric. Unfortunately, Pat Rushin’s screenplay was apparently a belated afterthought, recycling wholesale tropes from Gilliam’s vastly superior Brazil. In fact, Zero T even lifts the ending (or rather one of the endings), minimally adapting it the fit the modestly altered circumstances.

Granted, Christoph Waltz truly goes for broke as Leth, over and beyond shaving his eyebrows. He also develops some intriguingly ambiguous chemistry with Mélanie Thierry’s Bainsley. Yet all his heavy-lifting is undermined by an over-abundance of clichés and cringingly broad characters, while internal logic remains dashed scarce.

By far, the greatest embarrassment is the ridiculously looking Matt Damon, trying to come across like a scary adult. He might be going for a J.R. “Bob” Dodds from the Church of the SubGenius kind of thing, but he just cannot carry himself convincingly. Still, in all fairness, it must be admitted Tilda Swinton gives a considerably subtler performance as Dr. Shrink-Rom the corporate psycho-babbler than her mean-spirited Thatcher caricature in Snowpiercer.

This is one of those films you want to be so much better than it really is, especially considering Gilliam doesn’t exactly churn films out like Woody Allen. Frankly, the far less heralded The Scribbler is a much better mind-trip. A real disappointment, The Zero Theorem opens this Friday (9/19) in New York at the IFC Center.

Django Unchained: Sorry, No Jazz Guitar Here

The real question is where’s the Gatling gun?  The nineteenth century machine gun certainly found its way into Sukiyaki Western Django, Takeshi Miike’s homage to Corbucci’s spaghetti western.  Considering the shtickiness of his supporting performance in Miike’s film, Quentin Tarantino has good reason to distinguish his Django pastiche from its predecessor.  This he surely does, re-conceiving the gritty western as a blaxploitation revenge beatdown.  Frontier justice gets a whole new look in Django Unchained (trailer here), which opens Christmas Day nationwide.

Dr. King Schultz is no ordinary dentist.  The German expat has taken up the more lucrative work of bounty hunting.  He also finds slavery appalling, so he has no qualms about liberating a slave to help him track down the Brittle Brothers, three of his former overseers who are now wanted by the law.  That slave is Django and when he teams up with Schultz, the Brittles do not stand a chance.

As everyone knows from Unchain’s media campaign, Django embraces bounty hunting because he gets paid for killing white people.  However, he and Schultz make good partners, even becoming friends.  After a profitable winter of killing outlaws, Schultz agrees to help the freeman liberate his wife, Broomhilda, who was taught German by her homesick former owner.  Unfortunately, she was recently purchased by Calvin Candie, the master of the notorious Candyland plantation.  A bit of subterfuge will be required to buy Broomhilda’s freedom, but Shultz has a suitably dubious plan. 

They will masquerade as a prospective slave fight promoter and his free “Mandingo” advisor looking to buy one of Candie’s brawlers.  Of course, the white racists of Candyland have trouble dealing with Django on civil terms, but the promise of Schultz’s cash keeps them temporarily in check.  Unfortunately, Stephen (as in Fetchit?), the head house slave is instantly suspicious of Django and his partner.

The weird racial undercurrents detectable in Tarantino’s previous films build into a tidal wave in Unchained.  On the surface, it is a scathing indictment of the antebellum era Deep South.  There will be retribution of Biblical proportions, carried out in some of the best choreographed shoot-outs since John Woo’s Hard Boiled.  However, before justice is served, Tarantino will thoroughly objectify African Americans, both men and women, and unleash a blizzard of racial epithets.  Yet, he will largely get away with it because of the film’s ostensibly politically correct sense of moral outrage.

When watching Unchained, one gets a sense Schultz and Candie represent two sides of the auteur’s persona.  Schultz is the white trickster he wants to be, finding acceptance from African Americans through social conscience and hipster sensibilities.  Yet, if you peaked into the dark recesses of his subconscious, one might find fantasies of the master, slinking off to the slave quarters late at night.

While he looks a bit like Christopher Guest, Christoph Waltz thoroughly dominates the film as Schultz.  Conveying a charismatic sense of danger, he is the only character who consistently surprises viewers, while serving as the film’s figure of tolerance.  Waltz also has the perfect flair for Tarantino’s dialogue, which is razor sharp as ever.  In fact, the period setting is something of a blessing, forcing him to avoid ironic pop culture references.

Jamie Foxx is appropriately flinty when going toe-to-toe with his racist antagonists, but lacks Waltz’s dynamic screen presence.  Cruel but disturbingly subservient, Samuel L. Jackson’s Stephen is one of the most distinctive villains of the year.  Yet, on some level, it is oddly problematic that Unchained invites the most scorn for an African American character.  Conversely, Leonardo DiCaprio and his pasted on mustache are simply ridiculous as Candie.  Completely lacking gravitas or menace, he looks like he should have a surf board under his arm rather than a whip.

Tarantino delivers some spectacular mayhem and some wickedly clever lines.  Still, there is a leering tone to the film that feels wrong when the bullets are not flying.  Regardless, there is enough attitude and inventive bloodshed to satisfy the filmmaker’s fans, as well as a cool cameo from the original Django, Franco Nero, but the running time of one hundred sixty-some minutes is just excessive. By comparison, Corbucci's Django kills just about as many people in nearly half the time. Recommended strictly for connoisseurs of more violent exploitation films and spaghetti westerns, Django Unchained opens wide this Christmas.

It is No Dream: The Theodor Herzl Documentary

Theodor Herzl once advocated mass Jewish conversion to Christianity, but would become a unifying leader for the Jewish Diaspora.  Profoundly concerned about the rise of anti-Semitism, his fears would be dreadfully justified in the years soon following his death.  Yet, they provided the early impetus for the Zionist movement that ultimately led to the founding of the State of Israel.  His life and mission are documented in Richard Trank’s It is No Dream: The Life of Theodor Herzl (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Herzl believed if a wave anti-Semitic could sweep across France, the cultural capitol of Europe in the 1890’s—and it was—it could happen anywhere.  Never particularly religious, covering the Dreyfus Affair as a journalist forced Herzl to take stock of his own Jewish heritage and seriously address the increasing volume of European anti-Semitism.  His early ideas proved impractical on further reflection, but the notion of a sovereign Jewish state (not original to Herzl) remained a viable option.

For the remaining years of his life, Herzl became the preeminent leader of the movement forge a Jewish homeland, making his case to some of Europe’s most influential power brokers, including the Kaiser.  For Herzl, the only question was where.  Eventually, the colonial territory entrusted to England by a League of Nations mandate, known at the time as “Palestine,” became the obvious choice, given the Jewish people’s deep roots to the region.  However, Herzl was appalled by the backwardness and poverty of the British Mandate during his first visit.  Still, this did not disqualify the small tract of land from consideration.  Arguably, it made even more sense on several levels.

Produced by Moriah Films, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s film production subsidiary, Dream is a welcome and necessary antidote to malicious attempts to make “Zionism” a dirty word in the media.  Trank and co-writer-co-producer Rabbi Marvin Hier clearly illustrate the alarming nature of anti-Semitism during Herzl’s lifetime, largely leaving unspoken (but ever-present in viewer’s minds) the enormity of the Holocaust, which would tragically vindicate all his fears.

Narrated by Academy Award winner Sir Ben Kingsley, with fellow Oscar winner Christoph Waltz giving voice to Herzl’s letters and writings, Dream has a fair amount of star power for a serious historical documentary.  With an elegant score composed and conducted by the Emmy winning Lee Holdridge (whose credits including Moonlighting), Dream is a pretty prestigious package, but the real attraction is Herzl’s short but epic life-story, which will probably come as a revelation to many viewers outside the Jewish faith.  Though perhaps not the target market, it is those viewers of good will not especially schooled in Jewish history who would get the most out of the film.

Consistently fascinating and never dry, Dream tells a compelling story that remains only too timely for the world today.  Well paced and informative, It is No Dream is recommended for general audiences, regardless of religion or political affiliation, when it opens this Friday (8/10) in New York at the Quad Cinema.