Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie

Michael J. Fox has always had a surplus of nervous energy. If you picture him in his iconic roles, like Alex P. Keaton or Marty McFly, you don’t recall him at ease. He’s generally bustling, pacing, his body trying to keep pace with his brain. It now seems, some 32 years after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, that Fox’s tremors and lurching movements were forecast right from childhood, where, in re-enacted flashback, he’s often shown as running around, dashing off to the candy store by himself, refusing to be contained. The documentary Still shows, among other things, that Fox’s gradually worsening symptoms are a kind of nightmarish funhouse-mirror parody of how he comported himself in health. 

And now Fox has to learn how to move more mindfully and cautiously. He trips and falls, and often breaks bones. The disease has slowed him down by force, while it has strengthened and sped up his spasms. Medications help, but do not completely quell his involuntary motion. There is no cure, and Fox does not expect to see one in his lifetime. Parkinson’s patients — according to Fox’s own foundation, which has raised almost $2 billion for research — generally live ten to twenty years after diagnosis. Fox was diagnosed at age 29, while most patients get their dx past age 60; he will be 62 next month. So he is at least doubly an anomaly in this realm. Who knows, he may yet live to see a cure. 

As long as Fox can be assured there will be one, though, one suspects he’d be all right with not benefiting from it himself. He is, after all, notoriously optimistic. And that extends to his early days as an actor, when he spent years in obscurity waiting for something. Something turned out to be Family Ties, which made him famous as a pint-sized, restless comedian, the breakout star of a sitcom that was supposed to be about the parents. From there he took off in the Back to the Future franchise and thereafter, for the most part, circled the runway. He was seldom the problem in his films (he was terrific in Casualties of War); the material just wasn’t there for him. He returned to TV (Spin City) and, a couple years into it, decided to go public explaining the symptoms he had more and more trouble hiding.

Still combines the re-enactments, sharply chosen clips from Fox’s filmography, and Fox himself sitting and addressing the camera, or going about his family routines and physical therapies. Fox has retired from acting, but at heart he’s still an entertainer. In a candid moment, Fox is greeted by a passerby, turns to engage her, and falls. He waves away her concern, and redeems the mishap with a warm joke. I think the instinct for the laugh, for the audience love, runs so deep in Fox that it may be a large factor in keeping him together. He’s got to go out and be with people; he can’t just curl fetally into bed and die. 

Besides, Fox has a devoted family who don’t want to lose him any time soon: four kids and his wife and rock Tracy Pollan, who is another large factor in keeping him together. Pollan has been with Fox through the assholery of celebrity, the diagnosis, alcoholism, everything else; he’s aware he hit the lottery with her, and he is lost for words when asked her impact on his life — mere English seems inadequate for the task. “Clarity” is what he comes up with finally. It says a lot for one word. Still brings us closer to Fox as he contends with how his body has forced his mind to adapt. It doesn’t turn him into inspiration porn. It keeps a respectful distance from what must be a certain degree of daily indignity for him. It leaves him where we want him to be: walking towards sunset on a beach, surrounded by family. It’s a cozy profile that invites empathy more than sympathy.

Evil Dead Rise

Here’s the thing about the Evil Dead franchise. It needs Bruce Campbell’s Ash Williams the way the Alien franchise needs Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley. Without those characters and those actors, you may have in-name-only franchise sequels with gnashing xenomorphs and unruly deadites, but you don’t have the heart and soul. In the first three Evil Dead films and three seasons of Ash Vs. Evil Dead, Campbell and director Sam Raimi gradually leaned into knockabout comedy, until the stories were informed as much by the Three Stooges as by The Exorcist. 

Campbell comes on for a quick aural bow in Evil Dead Rise, and his out-of-patience voice on an ancient record snapping “It’s called The Book of the Dead for a reason” conveys more of the old Evil Dead spirit than anything else in the film. Here, we’re in a condemned old apartment building in Los Angeles. We meet our hero Beth (Lily Sullivan), a guitar tech, her sister Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland), a tattoo artist, and Ellie’s three kids. Ellie’s husband is out of the picture, while Beth has recently discovered she’s pregnant. Writer-director Lee Cronin kicks back and lets the women marinate in their sorrows for a while, just as though any of this is going to matter much once the evil dead barge in.

Which they do, possessing Ellie and then others. There’s a fair amount of nastiness involving the de-souled Ellie taunting Beth about her being a “groupie slut” and carrying an extra soul for Ellie to eat. I’d just as soon not get into the implications of that second bit.* And it’s weird to complain that a horror movie gets us to care about people, but this was a family I didn’t particularly relish watching as they suffered, bled, grieved, bled some more, and literally almost drowned in blood. We never “cared” about Ash — we liked the guy, but to enjoy him getting bashed around we had to keep some detachment from him. Ash didn’t really have feelings. He was a slapstick figure at the center of a horror-fantasy series.

But here, and also in its grim predecessor from ten years ago, there’s no slapstick, no “Klaatu barada nikto,” no fun. These are realistic people with real pain over real problems. Turning deadites loose on them is like kicking a dying puppy in the face. Now, that kind of nihilistic cruelty to characters can work, and has worked many times, in good horror stories. And none of those horror stories were called Evil Dead. But now here we are. You can no longer be guaranteed a rowdy good time with this franchise. It has become rancid, humorless, toxic. Apart from the spasmodic, shambolic, cackling-witch behavior of the possessed, the tone of these latter Evil Dead films is so different they don’t even seem part of the same series. 

The two leads, both from Australian TV and film, work strenuously and honestly as sisters with all sorts of brittle feelings between them. They aren’t the problem here — the conception of the film is unappealing, and they do what they can within it, maintaining some dignity in circumstances that mitigate against dignity. The movie itself doesn’t work hard enough to deserve them (the kids are all great too). The gore level is off the chart, leading comics artist and horror buff Stephen Bissette to opine that this might be the bloodiest movie ever to pass with an R rating. It may well be. Maybe if it’s demonic blood it doesn’t count as real blood. That’s fine; to me, this doesn’t count as a real Evil Dead film either. 

*All right, I will here. The movie basically says the fetus has a soul, a classic pro-life stance. 

Sisu

Here, perhaps a month or two early, is the Nazi-bashing action flick we’ve been waiting for. Sisu may not be as nostalgically nourishing as the upcoming Indiana Jones coda might be, but it’s certainly gorier, with a properly sadistic sense of humor about the various grisly ways in which Nazis beef it. Named after the Finnish expression for grit in the face of overwhelming odds (among other things), Sisu is refreshingly simple. A Finnish gold prospector, Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tammila), discovers a rich deposit and stows the heavy nuggets in his backpack. Korpi gets waylaid by some retreating Nazi soldiers, who steal his gold. Korpi, though, has a reputation as a hardy and merciless fighter — he’s dubbed Koschei, or “the immortal.” Korpi wants his gold back and the Nazis dead.

Is Korpi actually immortal? He gets shot, hanged, bashed around, and generally ill-treated, but he keeps on ticking. He’s been compared to Rambo, but is possibly closer to a slasher icon like Jason. The movie remembers how much uncomplicated fun it is to root for an unstoppable bad-ass against Nazis, who are not humanized in the slightest here other than a motivational speech given by their leader (Aksel Hennie), who sees the writing on the wall. The Nazis will lose and they will be hanged, and Korpi’s gold might buy them a way out. But even this Nazi is a cold cod, calculating and brutal. He may be shrewder than the others, but writer-director Jalmari Helander doesn’t warm to him. He’s a Nazi and must die.

Which isn’t really a spoiler, not in a movie like this. We go to Sisu to see our guy wreck shop on a bunch of fascists, and he does. Korpi also has a dog, but you shouldn’t worry about him. In general, Helander wants us in a chipper mood as the hero sets about his mission. There’s a group of captive Finnish women in one of the Nazi tanks, and we gather they are there for the same reason Sean Penn kidnapped a Vietnamese girl in Casualties of War, but the movie doesn’t rub our faces in their suffering. Soon enough, these women recognize Korpi not as their savior but as their inspiration, and Helander gives them a heroic widescreen shot worthy of Tarantino. Fuck around with the Finnish, the movie says, and find out.

The action is absorbing and easily readable; the kills are, almost without exception, fierce and gory. The carnage isn’t unpleasant, because it’s mostly visited upon Nazis; it’s not long before we figure out that whatever damage Korpi takes isn’t going to slow him down much. And one Nazi comeuppance in particular is engineered to get a full-throated audience response, and likely has. Sisu is enjoyable but a bit thin. I liked it, but it is what it is and that’s all it is. Which is fine, but the same down-to-business aesthetic that gives us a cracking action flick in 90 minutes also doesn’t have much time to fill out its characters, even the heroic ones. There’s one among the Finnish women who seems braver than the others, but we learn nothing about her, and scarcely more about Korpi himself.

Maybe we should have been made to worry about the dog after all. Korpi seems at least to like the dog, and that makes him relatable. And maybe Helander is like me and wants to watch a fun movie without having a panic attack over whether a dog is going to snuff it. So if I were making this movie, I’d do the same, and as a dog aficionado watching the movie, I approve, but as a critic I gotta say taking the dog fully out of the equation leaves us with nothing to worry about as regards Korpi. He’s immortal, and apparently so is his dog. (Horse lovers, though, might want to give Sisu a wide berth.) He has no flaws, no weaknesses, nothing his enemy can use against him. You just wind him up and point him at the Nazis and watch him chew his way through them. Even Indy was afraid of snakes.