Denzel Washington as Othello, on Broadway

The prospect of a European nation waging war against Turkey on the island of Cypress ought to be unthinkable in the near future. Yet, given Erdogan’s increasing authoritarian oppression and his open hostility towards his supposed NATO allies, it is not so outlandish anymore. Consequently, the mildly dystopian setting for Broadway’s latest Shakespearean production sort of makes sense—not that anyone cares. The real story is the casting. As even people outside New York have heard, Denzel Washington plays the tragic Moor and Jake Gyllenhaal plays Iago in Othello, directed by Kenny Leon, which is now playing on Broadway.

Washington assumes the role so famously associated with Orson Welles, Sir Laurence Olivier, Placido Domingo, and William Marshall—and for most readers that is all they need to know to have confidence in this production. Frankly, they are not wrong. Leon and company emphasize Othello’s military status, which plays to the strengths of Washington, who can still don fatigues with complete conviction and a ram-rod straight bearing.

You really ought to know the basic plot of Othello, but if you are a Gen-Z’er who was failed by your woke schooling, Othello was an outsider who rose to become one of Renaissance Venice’s top generals. However, he passed over Iago for promotion, in favor of the more refined but less experienced Michael Cassio. Despite his ostensive loyalty, Iago also bears nativist sentiments of some sort towards the Moor. As a result, resentful Iago resolves to ruin Othello, exploiting his insecurities regarding his much younger wife, Desdemona, while both are summoned to Cypress to fight the Ottoman Turks.

If you have seen Washington in The Tragedy of Macbeth, there is question he can swagger through the first act and then rage and wail through the second. He is perfectly cast and he never disappoints. However, the surprisingly good news is Gyllenhaal’s comparable performance as Iago. Think of him as the Gyllenhaal of Nightcrawler, but at a higher, more devious, and sarcastically calculating level.

So yes, the two reasons everyone is interested in this production are as good as you expect, or even substantially more so. Take that George Clooney and your extended movie monologue. In fact, the chemistry (from Othello’s perspective) or tension (as Iago sees it) shared by the two co-leads is totally electric.

Leon’s director well serves the two thesps and their fans. He stages most of the action front and center, so it is easy to follow from any seat in the house. The imposing yet minimalist set designs harkens back to classical architecture through its massive concrete-looking columns, while also evoking the dehumanizing brutalism of its Orwellian setting.

Michael Bay’s Ambulance

This would be a good day in Los Angeles to do your banking online, for the usual reasons of traffic and street crime. Nevertheless, a rookie cop happens to want to ask out a pretty teller. Instead of a rom-com, he walks into a heist movie. After he is shot by a reluctant bank-robber, Officer Zach’s ride to the hospital is hijacked by two desperate armed robbers (very well armed) in Michael Bay’s Ambulance, which opens nationwide tomorrow.

Afghanistan veteran Will Sharp’s wife needs an experimental cancer treatment, so naturally insurance will not cover it. Swallowing his pride, he visits his estranged adopted brother Danny for a loan. Instead, he offers his brother a gig on a bank heist due to go down in minutes. Danny took over their father’s criminal business, but at least he is not the violent psycho killer the old man was. Unfortunately, this job is going to get unusually messy.

It turns out Captain Monroe was waiting outside the bank with his flying squad, or whatever he calls them. With the other three losers incapacitated, the Sharp brothers commandeer the ambulance dispatched for Officer Zach to sneak out of the trap. It not a clean getaway though. Like it or not, they have EMT Cam Thompson and the critically wounded Zach as hostages. While they evade Monroe’s dragnet, they desperately need Thompson to keep the officer alive, to prevent them ever facing murder charges.

Ambulance is a perfect example of why Michael Bay is probably the only genuine auteur, with an immediately recognizable visual style, currently working within the Hollywood system. Even if you knew nothing about Ambulance, you could probably guess it is a Michael Bay film within the first five minutes. In this case, that’s actually a compliment.

There are still plenty of crazy explosions and car crashes in Ambulance, but it is a much more grounded film than Bay’s Transformer spectacles. There is legit character development and drama here. Jake Gyllenhaal is impressively off-the-wall, pushing the envelop of deranged, as Brother Danny. Yahya Abdul-Mateen has the less flashy role, but he is suitably intense as the driven and guilt-wracked Brother Will. Eiza Gonzalez holds her own against both of them as Thompson, who has a surprisingly potent character development arc of her own.

However, the real star that will come out of Ambulance is Bay’s mastiff Nitro, who plays Monroe’s loyal dog, whom he somehow fits in the back of his Fiat. The big guy just has massive screen presence. For the record, his co-star, Garret Dillahunt is terrific too as the sly, sarcastic police captain.

Sundance ’19: Velvet Buzzsaw

The oeuvre of late, undiscovered outsider artist Ventril Dease could be considered the Necronomicon of oil paintings. They have a rather odd effect on those who view them. It is even worse for those who try to profit from them. The exploitative sharks of the fine art world are in for some EC Comics-style karma in Dan Gilroy’s Velvet Buzzsaw, which premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.

Ventril Dease is dead and nobody really noticed, until it was time to clear out the hundreds of tormented paintings he left behind. Then they came to the attention of his neighbor, Josephine, an aspiring gallerist, who immediately recognizes the collection as a potential blockbuster. Around that time, she conveniently starts sleeping with pompous art critic Morf Vandewalt, who is even more struck by Dease’s twisted vision. Soon, the entire art world is desperate to get their hands on Dease’s work, especially Josephine’s former boss (and Vandewalt’s bestie), Rhodora Haze, who once played in a punk band called “Velvet Buzzsaw” during her wild youth, thereby explaining the cryptic title, as well as her fiercest rival, Ricky Blaine.

Of course, the various grasping players start dropping like flies, under decidedly sinister circumstances. Vandewalt, who negotiated himself gigs as Dease’s official biographer and author of the exhibit catalogue, starts having weird visions worthy of a twisted Dease painting. Although his paranoia is definitely galloping unfettered, the critic is not necessarily wrong when he warns the paintings are exerting a malevolent, uncanny influence on their beholders.

Arguably, Buzzsaw is a contemporary cousin to Roger Corman’s classic Bucket of Blood, chronicling the rise and fall of artist Walter Paisley, whose sculptures look so realistic, because he embeds dead people inside them. Surprisingly, Buzzsaw is nearly as campy. It also has a roughly comparable body count.

It is not exactly what we would have expected from the director and two leads of Nightcrawler, but it is still fun the watch the game, scenery-chewing cast preen about the Miami Beach Art Basel. This is a case of beautiful people absolutely skewering beautiful people of an even more rarified strata.

Of course, when it comes to acidic snark, nobody can top Toni Collette as Gretchen, a spectacularly ruthless museum agent. Jake Gyllenhaal’s Vandewalt is an utterly un-self-aware uber-twit who puts Bertie Wooster to shame. He is a self-important dolt, but he has his principles, which makes him strangely interesting. Rene Russo is flamboyantly charismatic as Haze, the cynical game-player. John Malkovich adds his usual sly élan as Piers, a superstar artist, but this time around, he can’t match Collette’s caustic energy.

Buzzsaw is a minor work of cinema, but it is undeniably fun. Let’s be honest, any film that leads us to invoke Corman’s Bucket of Blood cannot be all bad. Recommended as a goofy, slightly horror-ish distraction after a frustrating day at work, Velvet Buzzsaw screens again this Saturday (2/2) in Park City and Sunday (2/3) in Salt Lake, as part of this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Okja: Bong Joon-ho Hates Science

After Bong Joon-ho’s latest film, every little girl will want her own genetically modified pig—and why shouldn’t she? There is absolutely no scientific evidence of any danger stemming from GMO crops or livestock. Don’t tell that to Bong. He has no interest in what science has to say. His crusade against GMO’s is rooted in religious fervor. He believes they are wrong, therefore they must be. In an effort to promulgate the faith, he will introduce the world to an endearing little girl and her giant pig in the Netflix production, Okja (trailer here), which opens this Wednesday in New York.

When Lucy Mirando took over her father’s chemical and agricultural corporation, she took a page out of Google’s book, projecting an idealistic façade, while employing cutthroat tactics behind closed doors. The super-pig project is her piglet. Dozens of genetically enhance piggies like Okja were placed with traditional farmers around the world to track the impact of regional variables. Okja’s TLC-upbringing in the mountains of South Korea yielded the most impressive results. Now Mirando wants to showcase their poster-pig, so they have ripped him away from Mika, his beloved thirteen-year-old companion.

Of course, a plucky kid like Mija isn’t going to give up her pig without a fight. Her first attempt to rescue Okja causes such a media kerfuffle, Mirando tries to coopt her, on the wise counsel of corporate greybeard Frank Dawson. However, Mija knows when she is being used. That also applies to the animal rights activists who want to deliberately put Okja back in harm’s way for the good of their cause. Thanks to a bit of deliberate mistranslation, that is exactly what they do.

Wow, Bong Joon-ho hates science. Anyone wearing a lab coat in his films ranks somewhere between Richard Speck and John Wayne Gacy on the morality spectrum. He can also be a talented filmmaker when he isn’t hitting the audience over the head with his message. Mother and Memories of Murder are both terrific films. Unfortunately, Okja reflects the kneejerk anti-Americanism of The Host, but spiked with virulent anti-Capitalist rhetoric and marinated in a luddite contempt for technological development. The idyllic scenes of Mija and Okja look amazing and they do indeed pull our heartstrings. However, the manipulation throughout the film is so blatant and relentless, it just becomes a wearisome chore to endure.

Still, the Okja team made her remarkably expressive. Young Ahn Seo-hyun is also appealingly plucky as a Mija and she is clearly a natural working with the big pig effects. It is also good fun to watch the crafty veteran Giancarlo Esposito do his thing as the sly Dawson. However, Tilda Swinton’s shamelessly ridiculous turn as the Mirando sisters makes Snidely Whiplash look like a model of subtlety in comparison, even though he is literally a cartoon villain. However, nothing can compare to the pain of watching Jake Gyllenhaal mug and cavort as fallen-from-grace TV nature programming host, Dr. Johnny Wilcox. Ouch, that will leave a mark on your soul.

There are ethical implications to this film as well. Imagine how counter-productive it might have been if a leading genre filmmaker like George Pal released a film demonizing immunizations a few years before the rollout of Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine. Granted, widespread famines are still largely deliberately caused by dictators to control or even decimate large population segments, but there is still a great deal of hunger and malnutrition in the world. GMO food could be a godsend to those suffering, but Bong is whipping up an irrational fervor against such scientific breakthroughs.

Make no mistake, this is a religiously motivated film. It is an article faith that just so happens to have a big, cute super-pig. Hopefully “corporate media” will eventually defang and rehabilitate Okja, turning her into the star of her own Saturday morning kids show. She is pretty much the only reason to see her eponymous film and you really don’t want to watch what Bong puts her through. Not recommended, Okja opens this Wednesday (6/28) at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Donnie Darko: The 15th Anniversary Restored Director’s Cut

It was a box office flop that inspired a non-canonical sequel. For obvious reasons, the late fall of 2001 was not a great time to release a film about a jet engine mysteriously falling out of the sky into the protagonist’s bedroom, but it would find its audience through midnight screenings and home video (including VHS). Now the apocalyptic high school angst is back in the 4K restored director’s cut and the original theatrical edit of Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko (trailer here), both of which open in select cities starting this Friday.

Much to his family’s consternation, Donnie Darko has gone off his meds. However, he will consider taking them again when strange things start happening around him. For one thing, he is sleepwalking again. During his latest bout of somnambulism, he encounters “Frank,” presumably a dude in a bunny suit or possibly a cosmic rabbit over six feet tall (not even counting the ears), who tells him the world will end inn twenty-six days.

When Darko finally returns home, he finds it cordoned off by the FAA. Evidently, his rendezvous with Frank saved him from the aforementioned jet engine. Much to the investigators’ bewilderment, there are no aircraft in the vicinity missing any hardware. However, Darko will figure out what it is and how it is significant thanks to Frank’s subsequent cryptic messages and The Philosophy of Time Travel, a theoretical treatise written by Roberta Sparrow, a.k.a. “Grandma Death,” an addled old lady in the neighborhood obsessed with her mailbox.

Apparently, there was also a Millennial generation of genre film fans who were obsessed with Donnie Darko. To paraphrase Pacino, they knew the film so well, he was “Don Darko” to them. It seems some prefer the twenty-minute-shorter theatrical version to the director’s cut, because it is more ambiguous and open to interpretation. However, those who start with Kelly’s cut will be struck by the passages from Sparrow’s book that give context to the strange events of Darko’s life. Essentially, they make the nun turned science teacher into a prophet in her own time and dimension.

Jake Gyllenhaal is weirdly compelling as Darko, a rather strange, not especially well-socialized teen, who could indeed be the younger alter-ego of Gyllenhaal’s Nightcrawler character, Louis Bloom. Arguably, Darko is the film that made the Gyllenhaals the Gyllenhaals, convincingly casting his sister Maggie as Darko’s sister Elizabeth.

Yet, it is a number of the supporting performances that really make indelible impressions. Mary McDonnell and Holmes Osborne have terrific bantering chemistry together, but they are ultimately quite touching as Darko’s parents. Executive producer Drew Barrymore is subversively sly and witty as Karen Pomery, the only decent teacher at Darko’s progressive prep school. Patrick Swayze willingly blows up his big screen image as sleazy self-help guru Jim Cunningham, while the Katharine Ross totally sells some intense hypnosis sessions, as Darko’s shrink, Dr. Thurman.

Without a doubt, Darko’s creepy look and spot-on 1980s soundtrack contributed immeasurably to its cult success. There is still something about it that gets under your skin (in a good way), perhaps now more than ever. Highly recommended in its director’s cut, Donnie Darko opens this Friday (3/31) in New York, at the Metrograph (theatrical cut) and in Los Angeles at the Cinefamily (both versions).