By Susan Granger
Special to WestportNow
As years go by, more and more poignant survival stories that have been buried in Holocaust history are surfacing.
“The Zookeeper’s Wife” begins on a beautiful day in 1939 at Poland’s Warsaw Zoo, where Antonia Zabinska (Jessica Chastain) is helping her husband Jan (Belgian actor Johan Heldenberg) tend the animals. That afternoon, she resuscitates a newborn elephant calf who cannot breathe – with its distraught mother’s at her side.
But then German aircraft appear overhead, and bombs reign down, killing many of the terrified beasts, while others escape to roam the city’s streets.
Led by Berlin’s chief zoologist, sinister Lutz Heck (Daniel Bruhl), the Nazis commandeer the grounds, saving only “prize specimens” for selective breeding, savagely slaughtering the rest.
Meanwhile, within the city, the Jewish population is being herded into a ghetto, locked behind barbed wire to starve or, later, be loaded on boxcars and sent to concentration camps.
Appalled at the brutality, Antonia and Jan come up with defiant plan. Since the German soldiers love pork, they’ll turn the zoo into a pig farm, feeding the animals garbage from the ghetto.
While Antonia cares for their dwindling menagerie, Jan drives his truck into the ghetto, where he hides Jews in bins, covering them with refuse and smuggling them into his human sanctuary, where they hide until the Resistance forges papers and transports them to safety.
Since Lutz Heck often makes unexpected visits to the zoo, it’s up to Antonia to keep him distracted, as jealous Jan observes from a distance.
While Jessica Chastain (“Miss Sloane,” “Zero Dark Thirty”) radiates beatific compassion, Angela Workman’s perfunctory script is a flaccid, almost antiseptic adaption of Diane Ackerman’s haunting 2007 non-fiction book.
Sensitively helmed by New Zealand director Niki Caro (“Whale Rider”), the most memorable moments include Antonia’s empathy with a traumatized Jewish teenager (Shira Haas) who was raped by German soldiers – as the tension mounts.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The Zookeeper’s Wife” is nobly stoic 7, heralding one brave couple’s unobtrusive heroics.
“Saban’s Power Rangers” evokes nostalgia, as fans of its namesake sci-fi show recall the 1990s Fox Kids series, adapted by Haim Saban from “Super Sentai’ on Japanese TV.
Revolving around superheroes in color-coded costumes, this origin story begins with a prehistoric flashback revealing that the original Power Rangers were humanoid-looking extraterrestrials who, led by Zordon (Bryan Cranston), arrived on Earth millions of years ago to defend the planet from a power-hungry alien invader, Rita Repulsa (Elizabeth Banks).
When a meteor strike annihilates most of them, along with the dinosaurs, Zordon’s consciousness is loaded into their spacecraft’s computer system by his loyal android, Alpha 5 (Bill Hader).
More than 60 million years later in Angel Grove, a rural California town, nerdy Billy Cranston (RJ Cyler) discovers a mysterious energy source hidden in an underground cave in a nearby mountainside, joined by other angst-riddled high-school delinquents: disgraced quarterback Jason (Dacre Montgomery), loner Zack (Ludi Lin), ostracized cheerleader Kimberly (Naomi Scott) and sullen Trini (the singer Becky G).
They unearth mysteriously glowing medallions that enhance their speed, strength and agility. It’s all great fun until they realize their real purpose. That’s revealed when they find Zordon’s buried spaceship and encounter Alpha 5, who observes “Different colors! Different kids! Different-colored kids!”
In the meantime, evil Rita Repulsa returns, determined to steal the Zeo Crystal buried below a Krispy Kreme store. So the teenagers must – somewhat tediously – train to morph into a cohesive team to thwart her global ambitions.
Superficially scripted by John Gatins and chaotically directed by Dean Israelite, it contains lots of folklore from the original series, little Easter eggs (inside jokes), along with the “Go Go Power Rangers” theme.
On the Granger Gauge, “Saban’s Power Rangers” is a slick yet silly 6, scheming for franchise possibilities.
The raunchy, lame-brained reboot of “CHiPs” begins with the disclaimer: “The California Highway Patrol does not endorse this film. At all.”
You think?
Writer/director/actor Dax Shepard stars as Jon Baker, a battered, former motocross hotshot who tries to save his faltering marriage by joining the Highway Patrol.
When painkiller-popping Baker is partnered with Frank ‘Ponch’ Poncherello (Michael Pena), he has no idea that Ponch is actually an undercover FBI agent who has been dispatched from Miami.
Corrupt cops, led by Kurtz (Vincent D’Onofrio), are hijacking armored cars. Apprehending them involves the guys on wide-bodied Ducati bikes engaging in lots of high-velocity vehicular chases on the Los Angeles freeways. (Around 150 stunt performers are listed in the credits.)
As I recall, the TV version (1977-1983) of “CHiPs” was campy/cheesy, yet wholesome, featuring cool cats in mirrored sunglasses catching crooks in sunny Southern California. In this lewd, crude, R-rated incarnation, there’s a great deal of gay panic. Females are sex objects and subjected to disparaging remarks. Ponch cannot view an attractive woman in yoga pants without needing to masturbate.
For series devotees, Erik Estrada, the original Ponch, does a cameo, while Kristen Bell, Shepard’s real-life wife, plays his estranged, on-screen spouse. And President Donald Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, is an Executive Producer. Make of that what you will.
On the Granger Gauge, “CHiPs” is a tasteless, testosterone-fueled 3. How many ways can I say ‘un-funny’ and ‘stupid’?
(Editor’s Note: Westport resident Susan Granger grew up in Hollywood, studied journalism with Pierre Salinger at Mills College, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with highest honors in journalism. In addition to writing for newspapers and magazines, she has been on radio/television as an anchorwoman and movie/drama critic for many years. See her reviews at www.susangranger.com.)
