Sometimes, you have to wonder if anybody in Netflix acquisitions even bothers to look over a lot of the junk they buy.
Sometimes, you realize that content providers know this and slide quick-and-junky projects in under the door that way. Just slap “Christmas” in the title, and you’re in.
Sometimes, you wonder why four screenwriters would want their names attached to anything as lame as “The App That Stole Christmas.”
A crew of bit players, newcomers and obscure rappers showed up for work on this 63 minute toss-off, a movie with no laughs, no wit and nothing to recommend it.
It’s about Felix (Jackie Long), whose company created a “time thieving app that keeps people apart.” That’s not how he advertises “Bomazon.” But with its animation (amateurish, like the acting) and “buy this/order that” instant gratification, everybody’s hooked on it.
Not that Felix or his hair salon-owner wife (Diane Howard) are enjoying it. They’re glued to their phones, ignoring their son and shrugging off his dad (Miguel A. Núñez Jr.) who lives with them, and who remembers when Felix “played outside” as a boy, and when he “made things with his hands” — durable, wooden toys father and son would whip up in Dad’s workshop.
Felix has a Come to Jesus moment, via rapper JayQ. “Life as you know it” is about to change, the stranger says. Sure enough, Felix has an accident, and he wakes up from his coma in a giant rustic cabin, some busy folks in red and green costumes and the sounds of “Rudolph the Runny-Nosed Reindeer” on the soundtrack.
Say what now?
Our workaholic has to pitch in making toys for a Megyn Kelly-triggering Santa (J. Anthony Brown) and “learn” the error of his ways before he can wake up back home.
The acting’s bad, the dialogue a clutter of cliches, banal affirmations, half-hearted jokes and vocalized pauses — those words all of us use while we’re trying to think of what to say. “You know what I’m saying?” Filler like that should never show up in a script, and this script is almost ALL filler.
Looking for an inclusive Christmas movie after seeing “Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey?” This isn’t it.
MPA Rating: TV-G
Cast: Jackie Long, Ray J, JayQ, Diane Howard, J. Anthony Brown, Miguel A. Núñez Jr., Anthony McKinley and Julia May Wong
Credits: Directed by Monica Floyd, script by Peter John, Monica Floyd, Miriam Bavly and Jenifer Rapaport. A Netflix release.
He’s pretty, she’s prettier, a gorgeous under-filmed Pacific isle location, a true story about a tradition of service members doing humanitarian work — “Operation Christmas Drop” has all the ingredients of a lightweight Christmas romance of the “fun for the whole family” school.
But its perfunctory script does little more than move characters from point A to point B. The writing has all the charm of an Air Force procurement budget and sets up no romantic sparks, so the leads are left on their own. And the location — Guam, and its surrounding atolls — is rendered so Air Force Base generic that I honestly wondered if they shot two days of second unit there, and filmed the rest in Pensacola.
Kat Graham of “Vampire Diaries” and “All Eyez on Me” stars as Erica, a Congressional aide working for a no-nonsense Congresswoman (Virginia Madsen) who needs to find “efficiencies” and savings in the military budget. In other words, she’s looking for a base to close.
A newspaper article picturing an Air Force pilot in a Santa hat playing a ukulele suggests “Guam.” Erica finds herself giving up her holidays and flying out to inspect the base, which seems to be spending taxpayer money and using military planes and crew on a charity.
She’ll also have to check out “Major Eye Candy in the Santa Cap.”
That would be her tour guide, the pilot who put his base in the Congressional bullseye. He’s not a major, but a Captain. Andrew (Alexander Ludwig of TV’s “Vikings”) will try to distract the Congressional hatchet-lady, Code Named “Blixen,” and explain how this 70 year tradition of making low-altitude supply drops of Christmas cheer isn’t done on the taxpayers’ dime.
Their first exchanges, delivered with a smirk or a smile, are totally geared to generating friction. She is a “bean-counter,” a “condescending pencil pusher.” He’s just a pretty boy “with a big heart and a nice smile.”
The dialogue is a bland blather of “putting it in my report” and “Does that line work on all the girls?”
The “local color” consists of beaches, snorkeling, shots of Andrew’s Jeep cruising the coastal road and the barely-glimpsed natives they’re helping.
Don’t chase that gecko out of your bungalow, Miss. It’s good luck. And CGI.
There’s nothing here to hate, but even less to love. The titular holiday tradition — the flights — is impressive and lump-in-the-throat righteous. But that seems to have given everybody in the production the excuse to phone it in.
Erica meets Andrew not on the tarmac, setting up her officious efficiency and the obstacles to saving the base and romance. No. They meet on the beach. I guess that necessary transitional scene got slashed. This sort of obvious boner happens more than once. Rare is the movie that does a worse job at hiding its budgeted shortcuts.
The Hallmark Channel, Netflix, Hulu and everybody else will carpet bomb us with Christmas movies this holiday season. There’s little sense wasting 100 minutes on stale fruitcake like this.
MPA Rating: TV-G
Cast: Kat Graham, Alexander Ludwig, Virginia Madsen, Trezzo Mahoro and Bethany Brown
Credits: Directed by Martin Wood, script by Gregg Rossen, Brian Sawyer. A Netflix release.
“Just What We Wanted” is a compact and quietly compelling German drama about a couple teetering towards a break-up because of their desperate desire to have a child.
Ulrike Kofler’s film, based on a Peter Stamm short story, wrestles with what people do when they start to grapple with a changing concept of the detailed plans they’ve built their entire lives around, and how a marriage where this is the core of their shared experience together is frayed when that connective tissue breaks.
All that is set up and laid out in the opening scene, coping with the bad news that their latest attempt at a pricey fertility clinic has failed. The doctor supervising their treatment quietly suggests “rethinking” things as they juggle which credit card can withstand the payment for this latest throw of the dice.
But the whole point of Alice (Lavinia Wilson) coping with endless expenses and contractor issues is that they’re building a house, one big enough for their planned family.
Niklas (Elyas M’Barek) can apologize, make the most tentative suggestions about other options, but that’s to no avail. The disappointment is still too fresh. Maybe a vacation to an Italian isle will do the trick.
That’s where they’re roomed right next door to a noisy, fractious family of their fellow Germans. Boundaries break down as their little girl (Anna Unterberger) gets underfoot, especially with Alice, the loud, gregarious father Romed (Lukas Spisser) chats them up and Christl (Iva Höpperger) the often-topless mom (Germans, amIright?) shoves her amateur astrology at them as a couple and her semi-careless parenting at Alice in particular.
What might have been an intimate healing/decision-making vacation turns into a broadening schism as Alice struggles with her pain, her husband “noticing” the half-naked blonde next door and the pesky but adorable child that reminds her of what she can’t have.
As the brittle union starts to crack, we wonder if the temporary “neighbors” and their “good life” will be the force that finally tears Alice and Niklas apart.
Wilson underplays Alice’s increasing uncertainty, and she and M’Barek are convincing as a loving, supportive couple and as one where that support erodes as it endures its most severe stress test.
Editor-turned-first-time director Kofler keeps the tension on simmer and gradually draws us into the most intimate rifts marriages can face. German reserve — Alice doesn’t tell Niklas she watched him watching the outdoor love-making of the boors next door — cracks a little on the tennis court, breaks in heated exchanges with contractors and erupts when wife and husband blurt out exactly what they think — never a good idea.
Kofler can’t avoid the melodramatic minefield that the third act serves up, but she deftly humanizes the calamities that play a decisive role in how this fraught, understated Scenes from a Marriage turns out.
MPA Rating: TV-MA, nudity, adult themes
Cast: Lavinia Wilson, Elyas M’Barek, Anna Unterberger, Lukas Spisser and Iva Höpperger
Credits: Directed by Ulrike Kofler, script by Ulrike Kofler, Sandra Bohle and Marie Kreutzer, based on a short story by Peter Stamm. A Netflix release.
County music icon and national treasure Dolly Parton’s having a moment, thanks to being a paragon of tolerance and exemplar of COVID vaccine philanthropy.
So there’s no being churlish about her new holiday Netflix musical, “Christmas on the Square.” None.
The choreography — Debbie Allen directed the film and oversaw that — sparkles in a few big production numbers.
We forget what a big voice comic actress Jenifer Lewis has, and that she can sing. We don’t remember Treat Williams sang in the film of “Hair.” And while we’re always being reminded that Christine Baranski can sing (“Mamma Mia!”), it bears repeating that she could make a script consisting of a “Do No Remove This Tag” mattress label funny.
And if Saint Dolly — I am NOT using that sarcastically — wants to cast herself as a singing bag lady/angel, we GO with it. Got it?
The vast majority of musicals are packed with pleasant-enough/instantly-forgettable songs. “Square” falls into that category. And the “book” here is a play that I dare say never progressed beyond small town community theater/holiday “church” productions.
It’s a “Wonderful Life,” with songs, a heartless, rich FEMALE villain and an angel already has HER wings. That’s it.
Baranski plays the “wicked witch of the middle” (not Oz’s “East” or “West”) in tiny Fullerville, a postcard/soundstage-perfect village that she’s decided would be better off bulldozed to make way for her planned Cheetah Mall. Mass evictions ensue.
“Who’d do that during the holidays?”
“Rich people…with TAX breaks!”
As the town rallies to “resist” her high-handedness, led by Preacher Christian (Josh Segarra) and the wife (Mary Lane Haskell) he’s hoping to start a family with, old friends (Lewis) and old flames (Williams) aren’t enough to sway /Regina/Cruella’s lust for redevelopment. Even a possible cancer diagnosis won’t sway her.
Dolly’s the angel who tries to help her “change,” by gentle nagging, haunting and singing.
“Everybody needs an angel…” “Oh my God, I DO have a brain tumor!”
“Looking at life in the rear view mirror reveals your destiny…” “I hope if I have another hallucination, it won’t be wearing rhinestones!”
Parton’s hand in the script, beyond the music, might be the story’s Christian message of charity and the directness and squeaky clean nature of the songs — a church “resist” rally where everybody poor-mouths Regina with “rhymes with ‘witch'” lyrics.
“Christmas on the Square” isn’t much, but what’s here is a pleasant enough time-killer, which is more than you can say about the vast majority of holiday-themed Hallmark/Hulu/Netflix et al fare this season. Holiday “classic” it may not be, but Dolly always has been and deserves our thanks and attention accordingly.
MPA Rating: TV-PG
Cast: Dolly Parton, Christine Baranski, Josh Segarra, Mary Lane Haskell, Treat Williams, Jenifer Lewis,
Credits: Directed by Debbie Allen, script by Dolly Parton and Maria S. Schlatter, based on Schlatter’s stage play. A Warner Media/Netflix release.
What insipid, digitally-augmented elvish drivel is this?
Rhetorical question, like asking “Who let the Dogs Out?” Because unimaginative kids’ comedy would be complete without A) a belch or two, B) fart jokes and C) a “zany” montage set to that kid-friendly sing-along.
We’re talking “The Christmas Chronicles Part Two,” the one where Kurt Russell as Santa is joined by Goldie Hawn as Mrs. Claus, a partner so faithful that it’s about time they renamed the workshop town “Mrs. Claus’s Village.”
“That’s uh, not been finalized yet.”
This “kids save Christmas” tale brings back young “true believer” Kate (Darby Camp) , accompanied by the son (Jahzir Bruno) of the guy (Tyrese Gibson) is her mom’s new fella. Jack (Bruno) tags along when not-as-little-as-last-time Kate flees Cancun, because that’s where the united families are spending a most un-Christmas like Christmas.
Kate plays right into the hands of Elf-Gone-Bad Belsnickel (Julian Dennison), a gadget and gas-the-elves villain who wants to get back at Santa for banishing him from the village and his tribe. He’ll steal the Christmas Star with his drones, gas canisters and “gravity glove” and make the old bearded guy bend to his will.
The Veil of Borealis that conceals the “real” North Pole and powers the 300,000 shops there, the whole operation is in jeopardy. There’s nothing for it but for Santa, the few healthy reindeer left and the kids to travel to Asia Minor (Turkey) where Saint Nicholas got his start, consult with the “wood elves” there (Malcolm McDowell is their chief) and bring back the Spirit of Christmas.
“This is worse than I thought. We just opened a tear in the fabric of time!”
Chris Columbus, the director responsible for the early, weaker “Harry Potter” pictures directed and co-wrote this. Never would’ve guessed. Ahem.
There’s an interlude where Mrs. Claus tells the story of Saint Nicholas and folds him into the toy maker/joy-bringer that Santa became that is the better movie hidden in all that high-tech treacle.
Here’s the highlight — Santa and a ticket agent played by Darlene Love serenading Logan Airport’s irate, snowbound passengers in the not-terribly-distant-past with a sax-heavy “Spirit of Christmas.” Yeah, that’s really Kurt singing and it’s fun. And yes, even that goes on too long.
Aside from that, this is more a contraption than a movie — all Santa logistics (the hallmark of many a crappy kiddie Christmas movie), effects and digital sets, elves and other creatures.
“Christmas isn’t about where you are, but who you’re with.”
Even during a pandemic, that message matters. Spending Christmas with this sequel makes you realize why almost every Netflix holiday film is padded to reach that magic two hour mark. It’s Netflix as babysitter, nothing more.
MPA Rating: PG
Cast: Kurt Russell, Goldie Hawn, Darby Camp, Julian Dennison, Jahzir Bruno, Kimberly Williams-Paisley, Darlene Love, the voice of Malcolm McDowell, and Tyrese Gibson
Credits: Directed by Chris Columbus, script by Chris Columbus and Matt Liberman. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:52
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“Ammonite” is an explicit and seriously sexy sex scene wrapped in a dull period piece that illuminates neither the characters nor the titular fossils that bring them together.
It’s a fine acting showcase for Oscar winner Kate Winslet and future Oscar winner Saoirse Ronan. But writer-director Francis Lee’s speculation on the sexuality of a famous 19th century British fossil collector and spinster trumps all other considerations. That results in a film of over-familiar soap operatic tropes and abrupt, illogical turns that play like a screenwriter’s lapses.
You can still find nautilus (Ammonite) fossils that Mary Anning was the first to find, study and identify in the British Museum. She was a solitary proto-paleontologist, prowling the beaches and cliffs of Lyme Regis in the first half of the 19th century, collecting and selling fossils to support herself and her widowed mother in the Age of Victorian splendor and discovery, and Dickensian poverty.
Winslet plays Anning late enough in life that the die has been cast. She eschews company, indulges her mother (Gemma Jones) and ventures out each day to find rocks that hide the remains of ancient creatures.
We don’t need a close-up of her fingernails to see the dirt crammed under them. We see the simple meals, the chores and routines of two women just scraping by, their only customers gentlemen “scientists” in an era when amateur enthusiasm could park you in that elite class of thinkers.
She’s already in the British Museum, which is why a budding paleontologist named Murchison (James McArdle of “Mary Queen of Scots,” which starred Ronan) comes to her wanting to “learn all I can” from this “impressive deity of Lyme.” He’ll pay her to take him fossil hunting.
His morose, quiet and overshadowed wife Charlotte (Ronan) is with him. Withdrawn after losing a baby, unhappily dismissed by a husband who has her on a tasteless diet and boring trip, he may say “I want my bright, funny, clever wife back.” But we wonder.
And as she’s such a drag on his travels, might he pay the reluctant Annings to “care for an invalid” and keep her while he traipses through the continent? Grumpy Mary agrees.
Charlotte has no clue about domestic chores, and hasn’t the strength for them, at first. They rub each other the wrong way until the day the “invalid” gets her hands dirty and starts to contribute. And we all know what’s coming when frail Charlotte forgets the class differences, turns considerate over Mary having to watch over her from a chair each night and says “We should share the bed.”
Lee, who directed the gritty rural gay romance “God’s Own Country,” incorporates plenty of period detail into this grey landscape with its grey seas, grey cliffs and grey skies. Charlotte’s been encouraged (by her husband) to “bathe in the sea.” That entails a “bathing machine” (an open-floored wagon eased into the surf, preserving a lady’s modesty) and of course leads to that 19th century malady above maladies — “a fever.”
The blossoming of a love affair isn’t all naive and innocent. We get the idea that this isn’t Mary’s first outing (Fiona Shaw is a local woman of property and “experience”), and that curdles into jealousy.
The sex scene is “Blue is the Warmest Color” explicit, so explicit that it’s the centerpiece of the film and considering how little we learn of the women’s lives and the state of the science, basically its entire reason for existing.
Of course, the entire affair is not proven, which is no fatal failing to anyone but a historian. But what comes after the passion is abrupt, irrational and obviously the hamfisted efforts of a screenwriter trying to “explain” how this didn’t endure or become more public and provable, and failing miserably.
The rare pairing of talent this esteemed in a project tailor-made for them makes the blundering “Ammonite” a singular disappointment of the season, awards bait without a hook to dangle from.
MPA Rating: R for graphic sexuality, some graphic nudity and brief language
Cast: Kate Winslet, Saoirse Ronan, Gemma Jones, James McArdle and Fiona Shaw
Credits: Written and directed by Francis Lee. A Neon release.
“Soul” is Pixar’s intellectually ambitious companion piece to “Inside/Out,” a whimsical “Outside/In” take on what makes us human.
It’s comical, but not really a comedy, spiritual without being all that deep. But as it grapples with what drives a creative person, paints the “after life” and “before life” eternity in Picasso-with-a-light-pen strokes and questions what makes life worth living, it can be quite touching.
As to “answers” about The Meaning of Life and the concept of “soul,” let’s just say it’s a Zen koan where the punchline is “Whatever we say it is.” Parent and preacher, mystic and guru — all seekers are all legitimized as those with answers for those with questions.
Jamie Foxx is the voice of Joe Gardner, 40something and single, a New Yorker and middle school music teacher who’s just been offered the chance to switch to full time.
But he is another “Mr. Holland,” and this wasn’t the “opus” he imagined for his life. Mom (Phylicia Rashad) may be relieved he’s moved beyond that “dead end gigging” that’s been his life.
But a former student (voiced by Quest Love of The Roots, “The Tonight Show’s” house band) hooks him up. The kid grew up to be a drummer for a star sax player (Angela Bassett, regal in form, regal in voice) and they need a piano player. It’s Joe’s shot at a Big Break.
If you’re old enough to have seen “Heaven Can Wait,” you know that’s the very day Joe dies, and that his first words on realizing his fate will be “I can’t die NOW!”
He finds himself in an officious afterlife where “The Great Beyond” is at the upper end of the escalator. But he wants off, and he stumbles across loopholes in the bureaucracy. He’s mistaken for a Nobel laureate in the mentor program for “new souls” and assigned the incorrigible future human #22.
She sounds like Tina Fey because that’s a “voice that annoys people.” And she is hellbent on not living a life, and even if she’s never actually lived one and thus has no serious experience to draw on. Famous souls, from Mother Teresa to Copernicus, the Greeks to Gandhi, have taken a shot at mentoring/convincing her to come to Earth. No dice. Joe realizes this will be “soul crushing” work.
“You can’t crush a soul here. That’s what life on Earth is for!”
But Joe’s determined efforts take them to the sea of lost souls, and a pirate ship captained by a whimsically spiritual seeker/guide to getting Joe back to his life to fulfill what he figures is his destiny. Moonwind (Graham Norton, a hoot) may be a captain here. On Earth, he’s a sign spinner on 14th and 7th, an aged hippy guru.
That’s one of the best conceits of “Soul.” Musicians, artists and creative people who get “in the zone” are experiencing the divine, as are mystics of every stripe. They are living corporeal lives on Earth, occasionally venturing into the very afterlife Joe’s been sentenced to. They’re teachers and go betweens — literally.
Will Joe will learn what he’s really seeking, what his real destiny might be? Will #22 find her bliss, what makes life worth risking on Earth?
I found the whole afterlife business here more derivative and somewhat less comforting than perhaps the film’s creators (writer-director Pete Docter of “Monsters, Inc.,” “Up,” “Wall-E” and “Inside/Out” is the guiding force) intended. This is supposed to be a child’s guide to spirituality, right?
The afterlife/before-life animation is original, but amorphous and aside from the Picasso homages, mostly a drab palette in shades of blue. A Who’s Who of pointlessly-famous voices rush by as various officials, all named “Jerry” or “Gerel” (Alice Braga, Wes Studi, June Squibb,Richard Ayoade).
Rachel House is “Terry,” the accountant who chases Joe’s missing soul hither and yon, determined to balance the supernatural books and thus is the half-hearted villain of the piece.
But the jazz scenes, where Joe falls into an almost ecstatic trance, the explanations of jazz improv as “a conversation” in an elite language that people strive their whole creative lives to master, are some of the most glorious and transcendent in Pixar history.
Another late-night band leader, Jon Batiste of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” created the jazz here. I want the soundtrack.
And the jazz is how the viewer should approach “Soul.” Simplistic and derivative it may be, it’s still not something you’re meant to wholly understand. It’s a film that you feel.
MPA Rating: PG
Cast: The voices of Jamie Foxx, Tina Fey, Graham Norton, Angela Bassett, Quest Love, Rachel House, Phylicia Rashad, Alice Braga, Daveed Diggs, Wes Studi
Credits: Directed by Pete Docter, Kemp Powers, script by Pete Docter, Kemp Powers and Mike Jones. A Disney/Pixar release on Disney+.
On a sliding “quirky tales about teenage girls” scale, “Antarctica” is a lot more “Ghost World” than “Booksmart.” Not that it’s in either of those films’ league.
It’s another self-consciously odd, almost surreal “smirk” of a comedy about two misfits who aren’t just BFFs in Morgansfield High, they’re each others only friends. And how you take it depends on how easy a laugh you are.
Chloë Levine (“The Ranger”) plays Kat — clever, cute and too-cool for this school, a smart aleck who wastes too much of her time stifling laughs at the quite-elderly “health” teacher’s “hip” admonitions to “check your head and believe the hype” about the dangers of premarital sex and consumable hallucinogens .
Janet (Kimie Moruya, making her feature film debut) is busier ignoring the wingnut history teacher praising the “entrepreneurs” who benefited from Reagan’s 1980s CIA/cheap cocaine smuggling policy and invented crack.
Janet’s typing “fire and forget” missiles, college application forms online where her flippant answer to “describe the world 100 feet from where you are right now” is an unfiltered blurt about her father’s aging urinary tract, the proximity of her new vibrator and the self-described “sweaty fat chick” bothering to fill out this form.
Kat’s coping with the “healthy” kiddie snack diet Mom (Clea Lewis) foists on her so that her slovenly Slavic creep of a latest-husband (Laith Nakli) can gorge on what HE likes and lecture Kat and her younger siblings to “chew food. Otherwise, expand in intestines!”
Boys? Janet isn’t dealing with that, and Kat is forced to rebuff the advances of boorish mook B-boy Stevie (Steve Lipman) who has figured out why there are no Black serial killers, even though he doesn’t know any Black people.
“You know, we should be lesbians,” Janet shrugs.
“Can’t do the wardrobe.”
The inciting incident in “Antarctica” is Kat’s Halloween hook-up, leading to “slut shaming” at school, leading to Janet beating the hell out of the offender and getting put on this mood-altering/weight controlling medication, FemTrex. Kat? She just gets pregnant.
That leads to a schism as Kat is “sent away” (a sex addict, her mother figures) and drugged Janet wonders what is real and what she’s hallucinating — like the new neighbor teen (Bubba Weiler) who seems to know all about her, is into her, and walks the streets in a space suit.
Writer-director Keith Beardon’s (“Meet Monica Velour”) dialogue is glib and somewhat current. “What makes insane people always want to talk to me? Should I scowl more?” But it’s the situations that give “Antarctica” the feel of surreal.
An OB-GYN who puns “At your cervix” and makes duck puppet jokes with a speculum as he gets down to business, Kat in rehab with a bunch of adult sex addicts for having unprotected sex (he lied) one time, Janet’s new “boyfriend” who may not be real, and even if he is he’s wearing a SPACE SUIT — all kind of nuts.
The sitcom jokey high school entrance marquee — “A friend is a stranger you haven’t alienated yet.” — group therapy in rehab where everybody learns “It’s not HOW you have sex, but how sex has you” — almost every joke here is aimed at the smirk bone, not the funny one.
I didn’t laugh at anything until Kat’s mother takes her on a “four hour and 29 minute” drive and chat on their way to the mental health rehab hospital. Sitcom and screen comedy veteran Lewis — she’s been around since “Friends” and “Mad About You” — punches through all the “trying too hard” and delivers.
“Don’t you wish we’d had this conversation sooner?”
Movie Nation 