Quick Takes

The Weed King of London

After a lackluster stint helming mainstream commercial fare (‘Sherlock Holmes,’ ‘King Arthur,’ ‘Aladdin’), Brit director/producer/screenwriter (and Madonna’s ex) Guy Ritchie returns to his gangster comedy roots in ‘The Gentlemen.’  And why not?  It is what he does best after all.  ‘The Gentlemen’ is clever, snappy and packed with the black humor we’ve come to miss from such earlier works as ‘Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,’ ‘Snatch’ and 'RocknRolla.'  You can just tell that its ensemble cast of schemers and one-uppers including Matthew McConaughey, Charlie Hunnam, Jeremy Strong, Colin Farrell, Hugh Grant and Henry Golding was having so much bullet-ridden fun.

Grade: A- 

The Turning of the Shrew

I’m a sucker for horror movies, especially “gothic” horror set in dark and foreboding creaky old mansions.  Floria Sigismondi’s (‘The Runaways’) latest feature film ‘The Turning,’ based on Henry James’ 1898 short story ‘The Turn of the Screw,’ just proves how big of one I am.  Boring, plodding and lacking in anything even remotely scary, ‘The Turning’ is further plagued by a head-scratching “WTH was that???!!!” final scene.  Because by that point, I was way beyond caring if nanny/tutor Kate’s (Mackenzie Davis) gone all “cuckoo for cocoa puffs” like her institutionalized mom or not.  Really.

Grade: F 

Not a Civil War Movie

It’s just as well that Jeff Shaara’s last novel concluding his father’s ‘The Killer Angels’ civil war trilogy isn’t going to be adapted on the big screen after the disappointment that was ‘Gods and Generals,’ because ‘The Last Full Measure’ is now the story of USAF PJ (pararescue jumper) William Pitsenbarger, who was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor (the nation’s highest distinction for valor and sacrifice) 32 years later after a prolonged fight to have his heroic actions in ‘Nam recognized by Uncle Sam for saving – at the cost of his own life – many GI’s of the legendary “Big Red One” 1st ID who found themselves pinned down at a hot LZ in 1966.  It is a respectful story well told, even if it lacked the compelling you-are-there visceral quality of 2016’s WWII war drama ‘Hacksaw Ridge.’

Grade: B  

  

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Love Hina

It’s hard to believe that, being an anime fan since my childhood watching ‘Robotech’ and ‘Battle of the Planets,’ I have never reviewed an anime film until now.  I just don’t get to see a lot of anime on the big screen, the last two being Mamoru Oshii’s visually stylish but frustrating ‘Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence’ (2004) and Hayao Miyazaki’s strange but excellent ‘Spirited Away’ (2002) over 15 years ago, and before that Miyazaki’s ‘Princess Mononucleosis,’ I mean 'Mononoke' (1997) and Katsuhiro Otomo’s mindblowing cyberpunk classic ‘Akira’ back in 1988.  Now I can add a fifth anime movie I’ve seen at a theater in over 30 years, Makoto Shinkai’s romantic fantasy ‘Weathering with You.’

 

WWY is the story of 15-year old high schooler Hodaka, who jumped on a ship and ran away from his boring small town for a better life in bustling Tokyo, where he tries to get a job but lives as a vagrant when not sheltered by struggling magazine publisher Suga, whom he met on the ship.  One day, fate (in this case an act of kindless at a McDonald’s) made his acquaintance with another minimum wage-earning teenager named Hina, whom he’s (though at first he wouldn’t admit) smitten with and seems to possess magical powers in controlling the weather and bring a ray of localized sunshine to Tokyo’s perpetual state of gloomy unrelenting rain (brought about by climate change perhaps).  Their growing friendship and personal struggles form the basis of this movie.

 

Unlike the other four anime movies I’ve seen in theaters (though admittedly I’ve seen countless movies and anime TV series on DVD’s and digital streaming), I didn’t plan to watch WWY and chanced upon it by accident.  To be honest I only saw it because it happened to be showing at my local theater and I’m entitled to three movies a week via my movie membership, but I am glad I did because WWY is a wonderful story of hope, heartbreak and joy tinged with yearning and melancholy.  To the uninitiated this film can be a tad bizarre and overly melodramatic, but to anime fans it's fairly par for the course.

 

Grade: A

One Last Ride Together

I love buddy cop movies, having watched this often humorous subgenre of the crime thriller since its heyday of the 1980’s (big surprise) in such films as ‘Lethal Weapon,’ ’48 Hours,’ ‘Tango & Cash’ and ‘Stakeout.’  Although it lost some steam in the ‘90’s, ‘Bad Boys’ (1995) starring Will Smith and Martin Lawrence as two brothas with an attitude put a fresh spin on the genre with its hip take on ‘Miami Vice,’ doing well enough to earn two sequels – thus qualifying as a “franchise” – with the latest occurring some 25 years after the original.

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Bad Boys for Life’ is the long-awaited “Bad Boys 3” that’s been in developmental hell since ‘Bad Boys II’ 17 years ago.  Although BB2 grossed $273 million worldwide, BB3 was held off due to the high salaries of A-List superstar Will Smith and director Michael Bay (the reported budget of BB2 was $130 million).  BB4Life was finally greenlighted after Bay was dropped from the project, which reduced its budget to well below that of its predecessor at $90 million.  BB4Life sees detectives Mike Lowrey (Smith) and Marcus Burnett (Lawrence), backed up by a team of cocky millennials led by Lowrey's ex-flame Rita straight out of CBS's crime-fighting procedural lineup, go up against cartel hitman Armando (Jacob Scipio), who's spurred on by his prison-escapee mother played by telenovelas veteran Kate del Castillo to kill everyone involved in her late husband's downfall.  But there's a twist.

 

Although I found BB4Life to be enjoyable enough as a mindless popcorn movie, it is also packed with enough genre tropes and “family bond” relationship subplots throughout its 124-minute running time that make it an ultimately forgettable exercise.  The action sequences are so relentless and the “tender” family moments are so contrived that I almost mistook it for a ‘Fast & Furious’ movie.  Its only saving grace is the slow-building twist about who Armando is near the end of the movie.

Grade: B

 

 

Saving Leftenant Blake

World War I (aka “The Great War”) could never hope to match its successor in terms of the number of Hollywood movies made on it, perhaps due to the widespread perception that it was a static war fought in the trenches characterized by machinegun suppression and artillery duels.  Indeed, it is telling that the greatest and most definitive WWI movie is still considered to be ‘All Quiet on the Western Front,’ the 90-year old anti-war film and Oscar winner about the futility of war based on Erich Maria Remarque’s classic novel.

 

Director Sam Mendes (‘American Beauty,’ James Bond’s ‘Skyfall’ and ‘Spectre’) attempts to redress this imbalance in his latest release, ‘1917,’ inspired by old war stories recounted by his grandfather who fought in The Great War.  If you’ve seen the trailer, you are no doubt aware (mild spoiler ahead) that’s it’s the tale of two lowly British PBI (poor bloody infantrymen) played by Dean-Charles Chapman and George MacKay on a perilous mission across “No Man’s Land” to warn a friendly unit off a planned attack the next morning, which will fail spectacularly with massive casualties from a German trap if carried out.  Why would the hapless lance corporals risk their lives, you ask?  Well, as you’re no doubt also aware from the trailer, the general (Colin Firth) ordering the suicide mission is clever enough to put a personal stake in it (as if saving 1,500 soldiers alone wasn’t enough) by choosing the brother of an officer in the battalion (2nd Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment) to be saved to undertake it.

 

Like ‘Saving Private Ryan,’ ‘1917’ is more about the journey than the destination.  In fact, to make sure we don’t take our eyes off LCpls Blake’s and Schofield’s arduous journey, Mendes shot the movie à la ‘Birdman’ (Alejandro Iñárritu’s 2014 Oscar winning anti-superhero movie starring Michael Keaton) to give it the appearance of being filmed in one long uninterrupted take.  It is a highly effective filmmaking technique, and one not as disorienting as the method used in ‘Dunkirk,’ in which Christopher Nolan told his story through three separate perspectives with three different timeframes.  While not quite as indelible as SPR, ‘1917’ is still a subtle and poignant war movie powerfully told from the grunts’ POV and a fine addition to the understocked WWI film catalogue.

 

Grade: A

 

Underwater, No One Can Hear You Scream

Growing up as a teen in the 1980’s with little parental supervision, I was fortunate enough to live on a staple of horror and sci-fi movies that largely shaped my somewhat geeky cinematic preference even today.  Among my favorite movies of that fondly remembered era are classics which combined sci-fi and horror, films like James Cameron’s ‘The Terminator,’ John McTiernan’s ‘Predator’ and, perhaps most notably of all, Ridley Scott’s seminal masterpiece ‘Alien.’  ‘Alien,’ with its “scary chitinous monster preying on soft fleshy humans in the dark and claustrophobic confines of a spaceship” premise, spawned a slew of analogues set underneath the sea including ‘Leviathan,’ ‘DeepStar Six’ and ‘The Rift.’  Needless to say, I enjoyed all of them.

 

‘Underwater,’ director William Eubank’s (‘The Signal’) homage and 21st century update of these beloved movies from my youth, dispenses with the requisite pre-disaster “character development” and thrusts us right into the chaotic mayhem, as young tomboyish engineer Norah Price (Kristen Stewart or KStew) scrambles to survive deep (six to seven miles) beneath the ocean as the state-of-the-art drilling facility she works at collapses around her from an earthquake, which turned out to be something else altogether.  The movie follows her and a handful of other would-be survivors as they trek across the deep ocean floor and try to reach escape pods at a nearby station some distance away, while being menaced by unspeakable horrors from the deep.

 

While ‘Underwater’ is derivative and liberally borrowed tropes from its predecessors, it nonetheless manages to do the job remarkably well and is a highly effective thriller.  The tightly focused, sometimes shifting and close-up camerawork really captures the chaos and foreboding sense of unseen peril reminiscent of ‘Cloverfield’ and ‘The Descent.’  And with her closely cropped haircut, KStew resembles Ellen Ripley in ‘Alien 3’ in more than appearance alone, imparting Norah with a dogged determination, quiet leadership, think-on-her-feet resourcefulness and spunkiness that are obviously a nod to Sigourney Weaver’s famous heroine.  Like her co-star Robert Pattinson, she had really come a long way since her moody, lower lip-biting ‘Twilight’ days and is becoming quite an actress.

 

Grade: A-

 

Quick Takes

Note: Due to the large number of movies I get to watch as an AMC Stubs A-List member, I will be posting these encapsulated reviews more frequently, maybe one a month or so.  This month we have an eclectic mix: a musical, a horror flick and an animated feature.

Pigeon: Impossible

I don’t watch many family-friendly computer-animated movies, but ‘Spies in Disguise’ caught my interest because it’s different from most of the unimaginative kid fare nowadays and is a spy movie.  This feature, based on (according to Wikipedia) a 2009 animated short whose name I stole for the title of this entry, is about a tux-wearing superspy (voiced by Will Smith) who’s accidently transformed by a tech geek (Tom Holland) into a large eye-browed blue pigeon which, other than providing the obvious comedic effects, gave him the perfect disguise to vanquish Killian (Ben Mendelson), the cybenetically-armed nemesis in this silly-fun but ultimately disposable exercise.

Grade: B

Please don't bring back vengeful water spirits from Japan 

Though ‘The Ring’ may be what comes to mind when it comes to Japanese scary movies or “J-Horror,” ‘The Grudge’ is proving to have more staying power thanks to producer Sam Raimi’s latest installment of the critically maligned franchise now spanning four films dating back to 2004 (not counting the Japanese-made original ‘Ju-On: The Grudge’).  But what do the producers care about the critics as long as suckers like me keep going to see these low budget affairs?  While this latest “sidequel” boasts some talented actors in John Cho, Jacki Weaver and genre veteran Lin Shaye, it’s about as much fun as watching someone ravaged slowly by cancer.

Grade: C-

Meow Mix

The critically-panned movie adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s time-honored feline musical ‘Cats’ from acclaimed director Tom Hooper (‘Les Mis,’ ‘The King’s Speech’) is perhaps doomed from the very start due to an ill-advised creative decision to utilize the much derided “digital fur technology” blending the faces and anthropomorphic shapes of its ensemble cast of talented and accomplished human actors with digitally rendered cat fur.  While I didn’t find the film’s aesthetic approach particularly unsettling or repulsive, this so-called “uncanny valley” effect apparently was too much to stomach for most.  Regardless, the song and dance numbers have a certain cheesy/burlesque-y 'Cabaret' and 'Moulin Rouge!' charm so I'm going to recommend it.

Grade: B+

Failure to Explode

The downfall of former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes as a result of sexual harassment allegations is the subject of ‘Bombshell,’ the latest movie from comedy director Jay Roach (‘Austin Powers,’ ‘Meet the Parents,’ ‘Dinner for Schmucks’).  Despite the star power and veritable bombshells featured in the film including Charlize Theron, Margot Robbie and Nicole Kidman, ‘Bombshell’ failed to go off at the box office in our climate of anti-media cynicism and political divisiveness, notwithstanding its “feminist” message.

 

Long before Harvey Weinstein was laid (no pun intended) low for his misdeeds against women, Ailes (played by John Lithgow in this movie) found himself under fire from sexual harassment allegations by various Fox-y newswomen, chief among them Gretchen Carlson (Kidman) and Megyn Kelly (Theron).  ‘Bombshell’ tells the story of how a deeply suppressed “dirty little secret” finally emerged into the open and took on a momentum of its own, bringing down a remorseless predator who thought himself untouchable (metaphorically speaking, that is).

 

While ‘Bombshell’ is packed with cynical wit and behind-the-scenes fourth-wall breaking candor, its impact is somewhat diminished by the fact that Theron’s Kelly and Kidman’s Carlson failed to garner any sort of sympathy or empathy from the viewers.  The former is pragmatic to a fault, an office politics survivor who sat on the fence until the absolute last moment; the latter just came across as self-centered, petty and vindictive.  Indeed, the only character I found to be interesting or even remotely likeable is the fictional Kayla Popsicle, I mean Pospisil (Robbie), an “evangelical millennial” whose character is based on a composite of all the other women who spoke out against Ailes.  It’s no mean feat that ‘Bombshell’ manages to provide both CNN and MSNBC-following liberals and FOX‑watching Trump-supporters something to agree on and dislike.
 
Grade: C