I’m joined again by my friend Bart as we untangle the myriad mysteries of Under the Silver Lake, the new detective story that’s available to rent now. Then we discuss some streaming options, including the new HBO documentary What’s My Name: Muhammad Ali and the YouTube videos from storm chaser Pecos Hank. Find us on Facebook, Twitter and Letterboxd.
Disney’s endless parade of live-action remakes based on beloved animated classics continues with Aladdin, a pointless and tedious exercise in cynical corporate filmmaking. While one could argue that there’s still value in trying to “refresh” films like Cinderella and Dumbo that were released 70 years ago, the artistic merit behind bringing back movies that aren’t even 30 years old yet seems dubious at best. Even though this retread isn’t quite as bad as the abysmal Beauty and the Beast variant from 2017, it offers virtually no improvements from its predecessor and wastes most of its opportunities to branch off into new directions.
This “re-imagining” follows many of the same plot details of the 1992 original, in which the amiable “street rat” Aladdin (Mena Massoud) and his pet monkey Abu scrounge for food in the city of Agrabah. After sneaking away from the palace, Princess Jasmine (Naomi Scott) crosses paths with Aladdin and the two have an instance connection, despite the disparity between their social standings. Through deception by the treacherous aristocrat Jafar (Marwan Kenzari), Aladdin becomes trapped in a mystical cave, where he meets a magical Genie (Will Smith) who grants him three wishes.
The easiest way to sum up Aladdin would be to say that it feels like watching a version of the original that has been stripped of most of its charm and personality. It’s simply an odd experience to watch a film that quotes specific story beats or lines from an existing work but does so in the most lifeless and stilted way imaginable. If anything, this nagging sense of déjà vu made me appreciate the stellar voice work and vibrant animation style of the original even more by comparison. Perhaps Disney is going for a grounded or serious approach for this live-action iteration but the muted tone does no favors to the magical elements of the story.
With the exception of Naomi Scott, who does a fine job of conjuring both the grace and panache that make Jasmine a memorable heroine, none of the actors are able to access the defining aspects of their respective characters. Both Kenzari as Jafar and Navid Negahban as The Sultan are one-note and spectacularly miscast in roles that require some over-the-top flourishes to make their characters work well. Massoud strains hard to keep the ship afloat in the titular role but there just isn’t enough in his performance past his flashy smile to mirror the affability of his animated counterpart.
But perhaps it’s time to address the Genie in the room. Since footage of Will Smith as the singing and dancing jinn emerged months ago, many have lambasted the off-putting computer-generated work that sloppily rendered Smith’s face atop a smoky blue monstrosity. I won’t add to the sea of well-founded criticism that’s already been heaped upon it but would instead call out a more galling aspect tied to this Genie, which is that it relies too much on comedic callbacks derived from Robin Williams’ performance to get its point across. It’s obvious the heads at Disney don’t adhere to the axiom “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and Aladdin is further proof that they aren’t likely to adopt it any time soon.
Score – 1.5/5
Coming to theaters this weekend:
Godzilla: King of Monsters, starring Millie Bobby Brown and Kyle Chandler, pits everybody’s favorite green lizard monster against other gargantuan foes like Mothra, Rodan, and King Ghidorah.
Rocketman, starring Taron Egerton and Jamie Bell, is another music biopic hot off the heels of recent Oscar winner Bohemian Rhapsody detailing the life and career of English rocker Elton John.
Ma, starring Octavia Spencer and Luke Evans, is the latest Blumhouse horror film that follows a group of teenagers after they accept an invitation to party at a lonely woman’s house but soon regret their decision.
Reprinted by permission of Whatzup
I’m joined again by my friend Taylor as we do an advance review of Booksmart, the hilarious new comedy by Olivia Wilde. Then we talk about the new Netflix series Dead To Me and I try desperately to talk about Game Of Thrones season 8 without spoiling it (and then definitely spoil it in detail). Find us on Facebook, Twitter and Letterboxd.
Actress Olivia Wilde makes her feature directorial debut with Booksmart, a joyfully vulgar and endlessly witty teen comedy that is destined to go down as an all-time classic. Taking cues from genre pillars like The Breakfast Club and Clueless, Wilde paints a hilarious portrait of high school life that feels specific to this generation while still remaining timeless on a thematic level. Even though we’ve been recently spoiled with an abundance of excellent coming-of-age movies like Lady Bird and Eighth Grade, we have yet another winner on our hands.
We meet best friends and academic overachievers Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) and Molly (Beanie Feldstein) on their final day of high school as they prepare to graduate with top honors. Upon discovering that most of her rambunctious peers were also accepted to prestigious universities, Molly grows envious of their party-hard mentality and vows to make their last night of senior year one to remember. The pair set out on a conquest to find an ever-elusive house party (“We are A+ people going to an A+ party,” Molly asserts) while naturally running into increasingly absurd obstacles along the way.
Penned by an all-female quartet of writers, the masterful script for Booksmart is filled with humor that can be shockingly explicit one minute and then unexpectedly high-minded (indicative of the film’s title) the next. This means that copious amounts of four-letter words and jokes about the human anatomy are tempered with relatively obscure references to famed documentarian Ken Burns and Queen Noor of Jordan. In her first time out as a director, Wilde deftly juggles an impressive array of comedic styles with unfailingly hilarious results.
Atop a talented ensemble of both first-time actors and veteran comedy performers, Dever and Feldstein sport an undeniable chemistry full of charm and warmth that trickles down to the rest of the cast. A chief complaint I had with Superbad, another very funny high school romp to which Booksmart will inevitably be compared, is that the friendship between its two central characters seemed to be rooted more in malice than in mirth. Even at their snarkiest, Amy and Molly always find small but significant ways to empower one another and, in one notable instance, reprimand each other when they occasionally succumb to negative self-talk.
While SNL alums like Will Forte and Wilde’s fiancé Jason Sudeikis turn up in amusing adult roles, the cast of the film is mainly made up of fresh faces who make the most of their time on screen. Billie Lourd, the daughter of the late Carrie Fisher, is a scene-stealing highlight as a relentless party girl who continues to pop up mysteriously throughout the night. Molly Gordon is similarly terrific as a character who seems to fit the “mean girl” mold early on until a pivotal monologue reveals greater depths to her character. As a high school comedy that both invigorates the genre and reminds us why it’s such an enduring one in the first place, Booksmart succeeds with flying colors.
Score – 4.5/5
Also coming to theaters this weekend:
Aladdin, starring Mena Massoud and Will Smith, is another live-action Disney remake of a animated classic about an affable thief who hopes to win the heart of a princess with the help of a magical genie.
Brightburn, starring Elizabeth Banks and David Denman, inverts the traditional superhero origin story and depicts a child from another planet who comes to use his powers for evil instead of good.
Opening at Cinema Center is Hail Satan?, a documentary that traces the recent rise of The Satanic Temple, which is regarded as one of the most controversial religious movements in American history.
Reprinted by permission of Whatzup
Based on the hugely successful video game franchise, Pokémon Detective Pikachu stars Justice Smith as Tim, a young Pokémon trainer who learns that his father Harry has died in a suspicious car crash. Upon hearing the news, he travels to Harry’s apartment in Ryme City, a unique town where Pokémon and people live in peaceful co-existence. It is there that Tim encounters Pikachu (Ryan Reynolds), a Pokémon who is able to communicate freely with Tim while other humans can only hear him repeat his name ad nauseam. The two set out to uncover clues which point to a cover-up that suggests Harry could still be alive.
It’s no secret that video games tend to translate poorly to the big screen and while this film does have some admirable elements, it often feels too far removed from its original source material. An early scene suggests a simpler movie that could have been, where Tim and his friend (who disappears from the film afterwards) are trying to catch a Cubone with a Pokéball in the wild. Even as someone who hasn’t played Pokémon in 20 years, I was still able to track with the terms of this Poké-world but the actual premise of the film rarely resembles the gameplay of those early Gameboy entries or the anime series that coincides with them.
With visual allusions to Blade Runner and a storyline that mirrors Zootopia to an uncomfortable degree, Pokémon Detective Pikachu is conceptually busy even before we meet the cherubic titular character. When Reynolds enters the mix with his signature brand of smart aleck banter, then the film veers more in the direction of a buddy comedy along the lines of The Hitman’s Bodyguard. On top of all of these incongruous tones, director Rob Letterman drags us through a whodunit so convoluted that even the most ardent of Poké-fans will have a hard time making heads or tails of the unnecessarily complicated plot developments.
As one may expect, the movie is packed to the gills with bits of fan service embedded in nearly every frame and loads of Pokémon make blink-and-you’ll-miss-them cameos. If the sight of Machamp directing street traffic or Jigglypuff singing karaoke doesn’t sound enticing, it’s likely that you’re not in the film’s desired demographic. As someone who is relatively Poké-agnostic, the barrage of admittedly well-rendered CG creatures didn’t add or detract much from my overall experience, although I did grow attached to the adorably nebbish Psyduck character. His ability to create powerful psychic blasts unexpectedly when he gets overwhelmed is a subject of my favorite gag in the film.
Less successful from a comedic standpoint is woefully miscast Reynolds as Pikachu, who quickly wears out his welcome with tiresome riffing and snarky injections that come at a non-stop pace. It’s not clear exactly how much of his dialogue is the product of the screenplay or vocal booth improv from Reynolds but the results suggest the latter over the former. The decision to cast him was obviously designed to cash in on the subversive persona cultivated from the successful Deadpool films but that R-rated brand of humor just doesn’t gel in this kid-friendly environment. Overdeveloped and under-realized, Pokémon Detective Pikachu serves as a reminder that sometimes simpler is better.
Score – 2/5
Coming to theaters this weekend:
John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, starring Keanu Reeves and Halle Berry, pits the unstoppable hitman against a legion of trained assassins after he is excommunicated from their guild.
A Dog’s Journey, starring Dennis Quaid and Josh Gad, is the family-friendly follow-up to A Dog’s Purpose is which a dog is reincarnated into different canine bodies to enrich the lives of those around him.
Opening at Cinema Center is Amazing Grace, a recently unearthed Sydney Pollack-directed concert film that captures Aretha Franklin’s 1972 performance from New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles.
Reprinted by permission of Whatzup
Opening at Cinema Center this weekend, the new Claire Denis film High Life stars Robert Pattinson as Monte, an astronaut who lives in an otherwise abandoned spaceship with his newborn daughter. Through flashbacks, we learn that Monte is actually one of several violent criminals serving life sentences on the ship undergoing a dangerous mission to extract energy from a distant black hole. As the story continues, we learn more about a creepy doctor named Dibs (Juliette Binoche) and a heinous experiment that she is secretly performing on the prisoners behind their backs.
In nearly every way, this film is designed to challenge, provoke and even disgust its audience. The aggressively non-linear storytelling that Denis uses to tell this troubling and distressing tale makes it difficult to even form a coherent storyline in one’s head. Piecing the story together during the film is difficult enough but even mentally re-arranging the scenes together after the fact can also prove to be strenuous. Even those who are comfortable with atypical chronology could still be turned off by its perverse and often shocking subject material; I would implore potential viewers to take the MPAA rating very seriously.
Having said all of that, High Life is an exceptionally well-crafted and almost overwhelmingly haunting blend of science-fiction and horror that lingers in the memory far after the end credits roll. Its deliberate pace and ruminative camera recalls the work of Tarkovsky, particularly Solaris, but some of the nightmarish imagery and visceral scares also reminded me of the 90s chiller Event Horizon. Even with those two relatively disparate films as touchstones, it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly how to characterize this beguiling film but that may well be one of its greatest strengths.
If there’s a central theme to be mined from this enigmatic, puzzle box of a movie, it’s that hope and love can still found amidst the bleakest and desperate of circumstances. Onboard a dingy spaceship with flickering lights and sputtering AC units, the crew on board must fill out a status report to a computer just to continue the 24-hour cycle of functional support systems as they hurtle into the unknown. Even at the brink of oblivion, Denis treats us to quiet scenes of Monte doing his best to lovingly raise his daughter with as much grace and warmth as he can muster.
Driving these fatherly scenes home is Robert Pattinson, probably still best known for his lead role as a hunky vampire in the five incredibly lucrative Twilight films that concluded with Breaking Dawn – Part 2 in 2012. Since then, he has pushed himself with demanding roles in films like The Rover and Good Time which showcase a level of talent that would have been difficult to forecast from those YA adaptations. He may further alienate his fans if he continues to challenge himself with these kinds of roles but if it means we get films like High Life as a result, it’s a worthwhile trade-off.
Score – 4/5
Also coming to theaters this weekend:
Pokémon Detective Pikachu, starring Ryan Reynolds and Justice Smith, adapts the popular video game phenomenon to a live-action/animated story about a talking creature who helps a young man search for his missing father.
The Hustle, starring Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson, is a gender-swapped remake of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels about two scam artists who plan to take revenge on the men who wronged them.
Poms, starring Diane Keaton and Jacki Weaver, follows a group of women from a retirement community looking to take one last shot at their dreams by forming a cheerleading squad.
Reprinted by permission of Whatzup