Quick Takes

I'm short on time this month and it's been quite awhile since I did one of these, so....

Terrifying Tales to Tell Without the Lights On

The latest film attached to Oscar winner and Guadalajara’s favorite son Guillermo del Toro (as screenwriter and producer) is the PG-13 rated – a rarity for GdT – ‘Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark,’ based on a children’s anthology book I’ve never even heard of before this movie came out.  A creepy, old-fashioned campfire story in the best rustic small-town tradition of Stephen King, ‘Scary Stories’ is really just one continuous story about the evil curse of a vengeful spirit in a haunted house plaguing a group of teenagers – again a staple of Stephen King – in a small Pennsylvania town during the late ‘60’s.  Scary?  Oh quite so, even for a jaded horror aficionado like yours truly.

Grade: B+ 

Not a Manfred Mann Movie

Some of you will probably lambaste me for this, but Manfred Mann rather than Bruce Springsteen comes to mind when I think of the song “Blinded by the Light.”  I suppose that’s because I was never a big fan of “The Boss” and his particular brand of blue-collar, working class New Jersey rock & roll even if he gave Courtney Cox her first big break.  So this painfully honest and heart-felt inspired-by-a-true-story coming-of-age dramedy from the director of 'Bend It Like Beckham' about how his music helped a Pakistani teenager in recession-era 1980's England deal with his family struggles and realize his creative potential didn’t quite hit the right notes for me.  Yeah boo, I know.

Grade: B- 

Supergood  

Good boys, good boys, what ya gonna do, what ya gonna do when you have to learn how to kiss a girl for the very first time at a party?  Well, you practice it with your dad’s pretty and well-endowed (but fully dressed) “CPR doll” of course.  From long-time partners-in-crime Evan Goldberg, Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill, ‘Good Boys’ makes three tweener 6th-graders “Superbad” in their many well-meaning, often ill-fated and - as much as I hate to admit – hilarious shenanigans.  ‘Good Boys’ is directed by a guy named (I kid you not) Gene Stupnitsky, so what did you expect?  A cerebral comedy perhaps?  Does the warning below "From the guys who brought you Superbad, Neighbors and Sausage Party" mean absolutely nothing to you?  Just sit back and get ready to laugh your asses off already.

 

Grade: B
 

Need More Testosterone in this Flick

It bespeaks the popularity of a movie franchise when its secondary characters warrant a spin-off of their own, and the latest example is ‘Hobbs & Shaw,’ or rather ‘Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw’ spawned from the (you guessed it) inexplicable box office success of the ‘Fast & Furious’ franchise which began rather humbly and inauspiciously back in 2001.  With each successive installment, F&F has only proven to be more and more over-the-top and preposterous in its impossible and laws of physics-defying automotive derring-do and shenanigans. Then again, we can hardly blame Hollywood for pandering to the moviegoing masses now, can we?

 

H&S brings together two of F&F’s key supporting characters, Dwayne Johnson’s muscular Diplomatic Security Service (State Department’s “Secret Service”) agent/good guy Luke Hobbs and Jason Statham’s brooding British badass/former villain Deckard Shaw, as they join forces to stop a sinister and all-powerful supra-national organization called HYDRA, I mean "Eteon" from causing worldwide apocalypse by releasing a deadly and very nasty virus that can destroy us from within, while also saving Shaw’s MI6 agent sister Hattie in the process (who injected herself with the virus before going on the run to keep it from the bad guys at Eteon, but don’t worry because it has a delayed time release which gives her plenty of time to get it out after the coast is clear).  The bad guy tasked to secure the virus is Brixton aka “Black Superman” (Idris Elba), an old colleague of Shaw’s whose head he placed a bullet in earlier but was brought back by Eteon as a genetically enhanced “Six Billion Dollar Man” of sorts to do their dirty deeds.

 

As you might have surmised based on previous installments, H&S’s plot isn’t much to speak of and could easily have been concocted by a bored and not-so-imaginative 10-year old during a lunch break.  It’s little more than an excuse to bring two of F&F’s most macho men together to "save the world,” banter with one another for two hours because they “can’t stand each other” and – of course – to give us more of the testosterone-fueled madness we’ve all come to expect and love from the franchise.  Or have we?

 

Grade: C