Are any of us more than the worst thing we’ve ever done? The dark romantic comedy The Drama boldly posits “maybe not!” The film opens on a more mild transgression: seeing Emma (Zendaya) reading in a café, Charlie (Robert Pattinson) snaps a photo of the book she’s buried in so he can look it up and pretend he’s a fan before introducing himself. On the ensuing first date, he admits he hasn’t read the novel and manufactured the meet-cute so that he could seem interesting to her. Fortunately, it’s not a large enough deception to derail things and 2 years later, Emma and Charlie are engaged. The week of the wedding, Charlie runs the speech that he’s prepared for the reception past his best man Mike (Mamoudou Athie); “I love how you always turn my drama into comedy,” Charlie says of his bride-to-be.

A last-minute food tasting between Emma, Charlie, Mike, and Mike’s wife and Emma’s maid of honor Rachel (Alana Haim) turns into a multi-bottle wine sampling to help take the edge off all the planning. Emma and Charlie relay a moral quandary that’s come up with their DJ, prompting Rachel to tipsily bring up an infraction from Mike’s past that she ribs him about periodically. He offers to spill the details if everyone agrees to share the worst thing each of them has done and the day-drinking session immediately gets more personally revealing. Mike and Rachel offer up dirty deeds about which they deservedly feel a measure of shame but Charlie can barely muster up an anecdote about how he cyberbullied a classmate who possibly moved away as a result. Emma brings them home with a secret so dark, it makes Charlie reconsider his entire relationship with her.

The Drama isn’t as much about what Emma did specifically — an act the film’s marketing cleverly conceals — but more about how fragile the bonds between significant others can be when they matter most. Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli, whose previous film Dream Scenario found Nicolas Cage popping up in people’s nightmares, carries over a sense of dream logic and unreality to this intimate tale. After Emma’s confession, Borgli and his editor Joshua Raymond Lee intersperse scenes of the couple completing pre-wedding tasks with mordant reveries that reveal anxieties about where they stand with one another. While some are exaggerated enough to read as purely fantastical, others are more plausible and we’re forced to decide whether what we’re seeing actually happened or not.

The humor in The Drama doesn’t come from minimizing Emma’s past actions but in seeing ourselves in the way that Charlie summarily unravels after learning about them. Every little detail — be it the messaging on an old coffee mug or the way that their photographer lays out the order in which family members will line up for photos — reveals hilarious fissures in Charlie’s psyche. Borgli doesn’t treat the characters or the audience with moral absolutes about how they should feel but he delights in depicting how one’s code can shift out of desperation. This is a comedy of discomfort, to the degree that some viewers may be repulsed by its subject material and possibly find it distasteful. As someone whose paranoia and uncertainty can dictate pointless rumination for embarrassing lengths of time, I felt seen by Charlie and found comfort in watching him scramble to resolve his dilemma.

Borgli personifies this struggle with a below-the-knee shot of Charlie pacing back and forth while trying out fancy shoes and socks, following up with a close-up of Emma unable to take him seriously due to the dainty sound of his feet shuffling. It’s a brief interaction that sums up the movie nicely; some fights and problems in a relationship should rightly be taken seriously but others can get so blown out of proportion that all it takes is a small discrepancy or distraction to render them comedic. It should be easy to tell the difference between the two, but as anyone who hasn’t been on the same page as their partner can tell you, it’s not. Sharing your life completely with someone else is both the most intimidating and the most rewarding act one can participate in. The Drama honors both the reverent and the ridiculous parts of the process.

Score – 4/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is You, Me & Tuscany, a romcom starring Halle Bailey and Regé-Jean Page, in which a free-spirited young cook makes a brash decision to become a squatter in an abandoned Tuscan villa and strikes up a romance with the homeowner’s cousin.
Also coming to theaters is Hunting Matthew Nichols, a found footage horror movie starring Markian Tarasiuk and Miranda MacDougall, involving a documentary filmmaker who sets out to solve her brother’s missing person’s case twenty-three years after his disappearance.
Streaming on Apple TV is Outcome, a dark comedy starring Keanu Reeves and Jonah Hill, which follows a Hollywood star as he is forced to confront his problems and atone for his past after being threatened by a bizarre video footage from his past.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

When Ridley Scott accepted the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture – Musical Or Comedy ten years ago for his adaptation of the Andy Weir novel The Martian, he almost immediately blurted out, “Comedy?” with a quizzical hand turned upward. If directing duo Phil Lord and Christopher Miller should happen to win for Project Hail Mary, their take on another Andy Weir novel about an astronaut stranded in space, it’s unlikely they’ll be as bemused by the categorization. The protagonists of both tales certainly use smart aleck humor to deflect from their dire situations, but the newest of the two space epics has both a mirthful touch and sense of wonder in its storytelling that make it a lighter lift. The film gets off to a slow start but once it hits ignition, it’s a joyous sci-fi spectacle that counts as a high point for the cinematic year so far.

Project Hail Mary centers on Dr. Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), a middle school science teacher whose PhD in molecular biology makes him uniquely qualified for a top-secret space mission. He’s visited by government higher-up Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller), who needs help understanding the “astrophage” material that is slowly eating away at our sun. Initially, Grace’s work is intended to be here on Earth but when the team discovers a line near Venus filled with the nefarious particles, the decision is made to put Grace on board with Hail Mary crew members Yáo (Ken Leung) and Olesya (Milana Vayntrub). Sadly, he’s the only one to wake up on the spacecraft when it finally arrives at the destination and Grace has to do his best impression of an astronaut while attempting to save the galaxy from a solar extinction.

It sounds like as much — if not even more so — of a bummer than The Martian on its face but the secret to the levity behind Project Hail Mary is that Grace gets by with a little help from his extraterrestrial friends. The appearance and nature of the alien life is best for audiences to discover on their own, but once that element is introduced into the story, the movie moves in the direction of a cosmos-set buddy comedy. Drew Goddard’s script balances the scientific jibber-jabber with humor that stems from Grace trying to bridge the communication gap with his new interstellar cohort. Ryan Gosling is effortlessly engaging even on his own but his game is elevated by the exceptional work of James Ortiz, who voices the creature Grace encounters in his journey. Chief among their hilarious exchanges is one invoking a fist bump to celebrate a win, which I assume comes from Andy Weir’s original text but registers as an instant classic regardless.

While co-director Chris Miller stated earlier this month that Project Hail Mary doesn’t have any green screen shots, the movie obviously utilizes visual effects heavily to depict its outer space settings. But the production design of the Hail Mary ship itself is immaculate, a fully-realized interior down to every last control panel light blinking peril at the stand-in space traveller. Everything outside the windows of the spacecraft is breathtaking to behold as well, whether it’s luminous planets suspended in the vast darkness or stars whizzing past at impossible speeds. Blockbuster filmmaking doesn’t get much more exhilarating than the scene above the moon of Tau Ceti, with Grace dangling precariously by a wire to collect material for an experiment. As the title of the film suggests, this mission is humanity’s last shot to save itself from catastrophe and watching our hero lay it all out on the line is why we return to the movies.

Besides The Martian as an obvious point of reference, Project Hail Mary readily recalls exemplars of the science fiction genre like Arrival, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and 2001: A Space Odyssey, among others. It may not live quite up to the standard set by those classics but it’s certainly an improvement on Spaceman, the Netflix clunker from a couple years ago with a similar premise. Lord and Miller, perhaps best known for producing the animated Spider-Verse franchise, continue to excel at synthesizing their influences into pop confections that don’t jettison their braininess along the way. At 156 minutes, the editing isn’t as judicious as it could’ve been and the storyline has a few different spots that would’ve properly sufficed as a fitting endpoint. But this film’s canvas and candor is so optimistic and open-hearted that it’s easy for me to overlook even its most apparent flaws.

Score – 4/5

More new movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, a comedy horror sequel starring Samara Weaving and Kathryn Newton, in which the sole survivor of a brutal “game” that resulted in the deaths of her husband and in-laws is forced to participate in a new deadlier game.
Also coming to theaters is The Pout-Pout Fish, an animated fantasy comedy starring Nick Offerman and Nina Oyama, which follows two aquatic misfits as they embark on an impossible journey to save their home.
Premiering on Netflix is Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, a crime drama starring Cillian Murphy and Rebecca Ferguson, continuing the story of an infamous gangster as he returns to a bombed Birmingham in 1940 and becomes involved in secret wartime missions.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Most pop culture geeks are familiar with the 20 Year Rule, a cyclical principle in which popular trends can enjoy rejuvenated relevance roughly 20 years after their initial emergence. It’s why mid-aughts nostalgia is everywhere now, from emo stalwarts helming major music festivals to sitcoms like Scrubs and Malcolm In The Middle getting rebooted. The latest Pixar film Hoppers is mired in a mid-2000s animal-crazy animated era, when box office beasts like Madagascar, Ice Age: The Meltdown and Open Season ran rampant. It’s a throwback to when all you needed was a bevy of fuzzy creatures to make families at the cineplex happy. But the standard is higher now, chiefly because of Pixar output like Ratatouille, WALL·E and Up from the later 2000s that raised the bar for all American animation.

The hero of Hoppers is Mabel Tanaka (voiced by Piper Curda), a peppy sophomore at Beaverton University whose love of nature stems from time spent as a kid with her grandmother by a tranquil glade nearby. Ever the activist, she frequently petitions against Mayor Jerry Generazzo (voiced by Jon Hamm) and his efforts to expand the town at the expense of the local forests and their inhabitants. Jerry’s latest plan involves demolishing the very glade Mabel loved as a child to make way for Beaverton Beltway but when Mabel goes to revisit it, she discovers a particular beaver is acting strangely. It turns out that it’s actually a beaver-appearing robot that Mabel’s biology professor Dr. Sam (voiced by Kathy Najimy) has zapped her consciousness into so she can study the habitat. Against Dr. Sam’s wishes, Mabel “hops” into the robotic animal to help the glade flourish with wildlife once again before it’s too late.

Marketing for Hoppers has leaned heavily into an interaction Mabel has with Dr. Sam when she first finds out about the body-swapping tech; “Guys, this is like Avatar!” Mabel gawks, while Dr. Sam protests, “This is nothing like Avatar!” Since Disney now owns 20th Century Fox, the exchange counts not only as a cross-promotional effort but a meta way to get ahead of the film’s flimsy and derivative premise. The storyline is most reminiscent of FernGully: The Last Rainforest (which Avatar incidentally cribbed from as well), Happy Feet and other environmentally-conscious animated efforts. Messages about corporate interests poisoning the natural world remain depressingly relevant, but there have already been so many kid’s films with those themes that you have to broach the subject with more nuance than what’s on display here.

A member of Pixar’s senior creative team since 2022, Daniel Chong has his first shot here at directing a full feature for the studio and developed the story with fellow Pixar mainstay Jesse Andrews. He recruits a talented comedic ensemble of Saturday Night Live alum like Bobby Moynihan, Melissa Villaseñor and Ego Nwodim to voice cute animals that reside in the woods. Meryl Streep and Dave Franco fill out the dramatic side as an insect mother and son duo that seek to use the “hopping” technology for revenge against constantly interloping humans. Their sinister plot gives way to a third act that’s surprisingly menacing for a Pixar movie but even the darker turns don’t fully make up for a story whose stakes are largely superficial up to that point.

Between a montage set to “Working For The Weekend” where fuzzy creatures rebuild a dam and lines like “flock around and find out!” from a goose character, Hoppers feels tossed-off and regressive for a studio that knows better. Even if you’re going to populate your movie with myriad woodland dwellers, you can still write them with a sophistication that makes them memorable in addition to being adorable. With the exception of Mabel, the human characters are similarly underwritten and mainly just relied on as props to keep the action moving. The nature animation, particularly of the beaver’s Superlodge community, is predictably awe-inspiring from an animation house that is second to none when it comes to crafting intricate digital worlds. But in terms of storytelling, Hoppers feels like a hop backward in time to an era when simply compiling “wacky” animated critters was enough to win the day.

Score – 2.5/5

More new movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is The Bride!, a gothic crime movie starring Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale, in which a companion is created for a reanimated creature and the pair spark up romance, police interest and radical social change.
Also playing in theaters is Dolly, a horror film starring Fabianne Therese and Seann William Scott, involving a young woman who fights for survival after being abducted by a deranged, monster-like figure who wants to raise her as their child.
Streaming on Netflix is War Machine, a sci-fi action movie starring Alan Ritchson and Dennis Quaid, which follows the final recruits of a grueling special ops boot camp who encounter a deadly force from beyond this world.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup