Frankenstein

 

Discovered by Danish sailors, a seriously injured Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) tells their captain (Lars Mikkelson) the tale of the creature (Jacob Elordi) who is relentlessly pursuing him. Victor, an aristocratic surgeon, created the creature, but his pride at his achievement turns to frustration and rejection. But the creature, whom Victor regards as a monstrous mistake, has a tale of his own to tell.

Finding the beauty in the horrifying and grotesque has been one of writer-director Guillermo del Toro’s unifying themes, and so it seemed almost inevitable that he would get around to adapting Mary Shelley’s classic novel one of these days. Del Toro’s version definitely bears his imprint while still remaining faithful to the spirit though not the letter of the source material.

Unsurprisingly, Frankenstein is a visually striking film. The costume design is impeccable, and the sets – from Victor’s towering Gothic laboratory to the frigid stillness of the Arctic – lend weight to the proceedings. This version of the creature also looks the most like what the text suggests he should: a stitched-together human.

While del Toro showed fidelity in that regard and honored the text’s Gothic/Romantic roots in other ways, he did make quite a few character changes. The William of the film (Felix Kammerer) is a combination of Victor’s younger brother and his friend Henry, and a new benefactor character has been added. He’s played by Christoph Waltz, which should keep complaints about the invention to a minimum. More controversially, Elizabeth (Mia Goth) has a far more adversarial relationship with Victor, whose selfishness is turned up just as the creature’s murderousness in the course of revenge is downplayed. This serves to render the creature more sympathetic and supports del Toro’s humanistic vision though it’s handled a bit ham-handedly and robs the film of some of its tragic potency.

Regardless, the cast is in good form here. Isaac captures not only Victor’s egomaniacal obsessiveness but also his later regret. Though Elizabeth feels shoehorned into being the film’s conscience, Goth still gives her a bit of an edge. Elordi, however, outshines everyone here on sheer range, convincingly playing the creature as innocently naïve, vengeful, pitiful, and terrifyingly vicious, at different points.

Remakes of oft-adapted classics fight an uphill battle to avoid feeling either superfluous or blasphemous. Del Toro capably dodged both those bullets, and while the end result can feel narratively constrained, on a stylistic level, it’s alive!

George's Pizza

 

Located at 2505 North Main Street in High Point, George’s Pizza serves pizza, pasta, and sandwiches. It is open from noon to 8:15 daily. There is a full bar, and online ordering is available.

George’s Pizza is a tough place to rate. Despite the name, it’s a lot closer to a bar that does food than a real pizzeria. By the standards of the former, it’s better than you’d expect. By the standards of the latter, it’s nothing special.

We ordered a medium George’s Combo pizza (pepperoni, sausage, beef, green peppers, and mushrooms) and an order of fried mushrooms. Food was read on-time, and it looked good. The pizza was generously topped, and the mushrooms were a nice golden brown.

Those mushrooms were addictively good. Dip them in ranch, and you’ll have a hard time stopping yourself from eating more than you should. The pizza was more of a mixed bag. The toppings were tasty as was the sauce: robust with just a hint of sweetness. However, the crust was mediocre, and $20-plus seemed steep for a medium pie.

I can imagine that George’s might be a fun place to watch a game, and it’s certainly convenient, but it’s far from the best pizza option in town.

Short Street Bakehouse & Cafe

 

Located at 108 Short Street in Kernersville, Short Street Bakehouse & Café offers baked goods, premade foods, and coffee drinks. Winter hours are 9-6 weekdays (except for closures on Wednesday), 9-5 Saturdays, and 12-6 Sundays.

No offense to the skilled sourdough slingers, but finding brick-and-mortar bakeries this side of Spring Garden that offer varied fresh-baked breads has been an adventure. For that reason alone, I’m glad that Short Street has entered the game. Across two visits, I’ve spied everything from sourdough to harvest bread to marbled rye to challah. However, there is far more on offer here than just bread. Short Street has quite a few cookies, cakes, scones, and croissants as well. It occupies a small – or short, if you prefer – space, but it packs a lot of (constantly changing) inventory.

Everything I’ve tried so far has been a hit. The marbled rye was thickly sliced and made for a sturdy sandwich bread. An apple spice cookie packed in plenty of apple flavor while a red velvet cookie didn’t skimp on the chocolate chunks.

I can’t attest to their grab-and-go options, but for sweet treats, Short Street is hard to beat.

One Battle After Another

 

Lovers Ghetto Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) are members of the French 75, a revolutionary terrorist group. After they raid an immigrant detention facility, the facility’s commanding officer, Col. Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn) becomes obsessed with Perfidia. He eventually catches up to her and offers her protection in exchange for her selling out her comrades. Years later, Pat is living as “Bob Ferguson” and raising the couple’s daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) as a single father when Lockjaw reemerges and threatens to cause trouble once again.

Dense and weird, nothing about Thomas Pynchon’s writing screams “filmable,” yet his brand of paranoid Americana seems to have found a champion in writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson. After previously adapting Inherent Vice, in One Battle After Another, Anderson gave Vineland a go. It’s a much looser adaptation, and despite its many idiosyncrasies, it amounts to something resonant.

Like Ari Aster’s Eddington, One Battle After Another uses violent set pieces to underscore political satire. Johnny Greenwood’s relentless (some might say overbearing) score makes for constant tension, and the film boasts more shoot-outs, car chases, and rooftop-hopping parkour escapes than you can shake a stick at. At the same time, it is unabashedly goofy, which grants it some much-needed levity. A stoned-to-the-gills Pat goes full Karen over the phone on an underground contact who hassles him for a pass phrase while the country club cabal to which Lockjaw tries to ingratiate himself interrogates him with all the faux-geniality of The Bobs from Office Space.

Unlike Eddington, the characters here feel specific and fully formed, which gives the capable cast far more to work with. DiCaprio has carved out an unlikely niche in recent years playing overwhelmed has-beens, and Pat is an amusingly volatile blend of parental good intentions and drug-addled incompetence. Penn gives one of his best performances in years as Lockjaw, a ruthless authoritarian thug who would be terrifying if he weren’t so pathetic and weird: note the atrocious haircut and rigid gait. Infiniti makes a strong screen debut, playing Willa as both defiant and conflicted. Benecio del Toro is memorable too as her karate sensei who runs a “Latino Harriet Tubman situation.” Credit

A politically charged 162-minute film released when Americans have every reason to feel completely burned out by our country’s ongoing deterioration, One Battle After Another could have been a tone-deaf disaster and perhaps would have been had not Anderson remembered that being relevant needn’t come at the cost of being energetic and engaging

Burke Street Pizza

 

Located at 3352 Robinhood Road in the Sherwood Plaza shopping center in Winston-Salem (with the original location still operating at 140 Burke Street), Burke StreetPizza offers New York-style pizza daily. It is open from 11-9 Sunday-Thursday and 11-10 Friday and Saturday. Lunch specials and online ordering are available.

Burke Street Pizza is a classic neighborhood pizza joint, nothing more and nothing less. The interior is dark and dated, which, while not terribly appealing, adds to its bona fides. In addition to pizza, the menu includes fried apps, wings, salads, and hot and cold sandwiches. The availability of grandma pies – a Long Island delicacy – was a pleasant surprise.

I ordered an Italian sandwich and a veggie slice to go. Both were prepared quickly, and while I wouldn’t call service here friendly, it is efficient. The food proved to be fairly satisfying albeit with room for improvement. The sandwich came stuffed with meats (Genoa salami/pepperoni/ham) and veggies though the oil and vinegar was barely discernible. The pizza slice was appreciably huge. Burke Street uses good-quality cheese and a nice sauce as well although the crust isn’t as remarkable. As with other places, for specialty slices, they toss on toppings and re-heat, which means that said toppings don’t get as cooked as long as they ideally should be. Presumably, a whole pie would offer a better texture.

Ultimately, Burke Street pizza proved more serviceable than sensational. You could do a lot worse if a pizza craving hits, but don’t expect to be blown away.

Eddington

 

It’s 2020, and not much is going right for Eddington, New Mexico sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix). He vehemently objects to the mask mandate implemented by the town’s mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). Black Lives Matter protests, which include Ted’s son Eric, threaten his authority. At home, his disturbed wife Louise (Emma Stone) is distant, and her conspiracy theorist mother Dawn (Deidre O’Connell), has invited cult leader Vernon (Austin Butler) to dinner. These frustrations prompt Joe to challenge Ted and run for mayor, but far from solving his and the town’s problems, his campaign only makes a volatile situation worse.

Best known for horror fare, writer-director Ari Aster took a stab at cross-genre filmmaking with this Western-satire-thriller mashup. It’s ambitious, and it boasts a strong cast, but in spite of that, it never really delivers the impact that it could have.

No longer fresh but not yet “history,” the recent past has a way of seeming dated before it logically should. With its peak pandemic setting, Eddington falls prey to that. It captures the divisiveness of the time, but it does so in a way that feels superficial, as if it’s going through the motions of what an indictment of pandemic-era political posturing should be. This is in large part due to how underwritten the characters are: from the grandstanding publicity hound sheriff to the hypocritical liberal mayor to the clueless college-aged protestors, they hew fairly closely to type. While we wouldn’t expect satirical characters to be case studies in complexity, we would be forgiven for not wanting them to be so dull. Pascal, Stone, and Butler all feel wasted here.

Phoenix, at least, wrings a good performance out of Sheriff Joe, who alternates between being pitiable and contemptible before finally going off the deep end. The film shifts into conspiracy thriller territory in its final third, and while the tonal shift is a bit jarring, it does give us the hilarious sight of Phoenix panic-firing round after round from a machine gun while screaming into the desert. There are other laughs and thrills to be found here though not enough for the two-and-a-half hour runtime.

Eddington’s concept – a small-town election as a proxy for exploring political polarization across the country – is a winning proposition, and in Sheriff Joe’s breakdown, Aster continues to show his mastery of slow-burn psychological drama. Unfortunately, attempting to merge these themes with several others causes the film to collapse under its own weight.

 

Wake Up Dead Man

 

When boxer-turned-priest Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor) punches an obnoxious deacon, his punishment is reassignment to a rural parish under the iron grip of the reactionary, domineering Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin). Despite Wicks’ abrasiveness, he commands the loyalty of a small group of parishioners as well as Martha (Glenn Close), the church’s longtime secretary. When Jud attempts to lead the congregation down a gentler path, the two priests butt heads. And when Wicks is murdered during a Good Friday service not long thereafter, Jud becomes police chief Geraldine Scott’s (Mila Kunis) lead suspect. Enter famed detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), whom Geraldine brings in to investigate. Can he find the truth behind Wicks’ demise and clear Jud’s name.

The third film in writer-director Rian Johnson’s Knives Out series, Wake Up Dead Man is the most somber of the lot. The laughs are fewer (though the film does not eschew comedy completely), the body count higher, the themes weightier and more personal. As with the previous two entries, the film proudly embraces its Agatha Christie influences and gives Craig a chance to play off of a talented ensemble. However, there are also several departures from precedent here, some for the best, and some decidedly not.

For starters, this is far less of Blanc’s movie than the previous two. In fact, he doesn’t even show up until more than a half hour in. In and of itself, that isn’t a problem as it gives O’Connor a chance to shine. He imbues Jud with an earnest desire to help and inspire others through his faith, which meets its match in both Wicks’ self-serving demagoguery and Blanc’s skeptical, rationalist atheism. However, this shift in narrative focus also leaves Blanc a less active participant toward the end, a move meant to signal character growth but also one that takes some of the wind out of the film’s sails in light of his previous grand summations.

At 144 minutes, Wake Up Dead Man is also the longest entry in the series and feels it. That isn’t to say that it’s a slog – hardly – but rather it isn’t as narratively propulsive as the films that preceded it. A series of reveals – the Wicks family’s sordid history, a fateful meeting that preceded the murder, and more – provide useful context but slow the pace.

As with the previous films, the suspect pool is a motley gang of deplorables. There’s a powerful lawyer (Kerry Washington), her podcaster/failed politician adoptive son (Daryl McCormack), a bitter alcoholic doctor (Jeremy Renner), and an Orson Scott Card-like sci-fi author-turned-pundit (Andrew Scott). While Washington gives a spirited performance, the rest of them are fairly forgettable. And while Johnson previously showed a penchant for taking satirical shots across the political spectrum, the narrowing of his focus here to rightwing attention-mongers makes Scott and McCormack’s characters feel duplicative and Johnson’s critique feel tired. Fortunately, however, Craig, O’Connor, Brolin (a snarling cesspool of malevolent anger), and Close (devoted to the point of delusion) are strong enough to paper over the weak spots.

If nothing else, Johnson remains a sharp visual stylist. From the high ceilings to the church to the sinister dark of the woods that surround it, he leverages atmosphere to influence tone. As befits the genre, a clue can often be found lurking in the background or sometimes even in plain sight. The director’s cousin, Nathan, once again provides a well-matched score.

Wake Up Dead Man is a less enjoyable watch than the first Knives Out and, arguably, even the shallower-but-zippier Glass Onion, but its willingness to spurn repetition, coupled with its strong lead performances, make it worthwhile in its own right.