Movie Nation

Sci fi from the director of “The Lost City of Z,” due out Sept. 20.

It’s a pre Disney purchase Fox film, so the there’s that working against it. The Mouse makes dogs, too. Not like Fox has.

We are intrigued.

“The Secret Life of Pets 2” offers up more giddy giggles for the little kiddies, a dog-wise/cat-savvy comedy that aims squarely at the youngest common denominator — and scores.

Parents? Maybe you’ll laugh at the grumpy, seen-it-all shepherd voiced by Harrison Ford, a deadpan counterpoint to all the nonsense on the farm going on around him. Sight gags about toddlers, a fat sneering cat (Lake Bell) giving a Pomeranian (Jenny Slate) lessons on how to act feline, work. There’s a snicker or three or four at the inventive slapstick surrounding the masked crusader bunny, Snowball (Kevin Hart).

For a kids’ cartoon that you recognize right-off wasn’t intended for your demographic, I found this one a pleasant surprise

Three stories are threaded into this sequel. Max the Jack Russell (Patton Oswalt) has to adjust to his owner getting married and having a baby, which proceeds to torment him and Duke (Eric Stonestreet), until that bonding moment when baby’s first word is “Max.”

“This is MY kid…I’m never going to let anything bad happen to him!”

That is tested by life in the Big City, and fraidy cat Max has his moment of truth when they visit a relative’s farm.

Snowball, the bunny who lives in an upstairs apartment, is getting deeper and deeper into the delusion that he’s a super hero. The little girl who takes care of him sees to that, dressing him in mask and crime-fighting suit.

Snowball dreams 2D animated adventures starring himself, in ripped, muscular form.

When a Llasa Apso (Tiffany Hadddish) seeks his help rescuing a white Siberian tiger cub from a cruel Russian circus owner (Nick Kroll), Snowball is on the case, both fists — “Paw and ORDER” — at the ready.

And then there’s the Pom who crushes on Max. He gives Gidget ONE job when he’s off to the farm, guard his favorite toy. When it falls into the clutches of the cats of the cat hoarder downstairs, Gidget turns to Chloe for advice on how to “pass” for a cat.

The most adult gag in all this is a stoned-on-catnip gag set to Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit.” Not exactly edgy, the hoariest of cliches. And yeah, it’s still funny. The most serious material is the animal cruelty of circus training.

The big life lesson? “The first step in not being afraid is ACTING like you’re not afraid.”

Words to the wise from growling old grump Rooster, the farm dog voiced by Ford. His every line is a winner, every gesture drawn into him the sort of heroic, effortless cool that Ford built his career on.

I don’t want to oversell this as the laughs don’t come out of nowhere the way they did in the original film. But children will delight in a toddler who has assumed his family’s dogs are his true role models (eating on all fours, lifting a leg to, you know), and at many of the observations about life with pets — the dog with “I don’t want to go to the VET” eyes, cats affecting a too-cool/too smart to fetch, but delirious in their pursuit of red laser pointers.

Dana Carvey recycles an old “Saturday Night Live” grumpy old man’s voice as a Basset Hound, a cow mockingly impersonates dogs, and on and on.

No great lines, just lots of slapstick (with slapping), pratfalls and an over-the-top martial arts brawl.

Kid stuff, and pretty good at being exactly that.

MPAA Rating: PG for some action and rude humor

Cast: The voices of Patton Oswalt, Jenny Slate, Tiffany Haddish, Kevin Hart, Dana Carvey, Lake Bell and Harrison Ford.

Credits: Directed by Chris Renaud, Jonathan del Val, script by Brian Lynch.   A Universal (Illumination) release.

Running time: 1:26

Jean Grey is in the car with her parents. It’s 1975, a screen title tells us.

She’s telepathically bickering over what plays on the car radio. Glen Campbell, or this other song.

Because Jean, even at that tender age, can see or HEAR the future. She was into Warren Zevon three years before he recorded “Werewolves of London.”

(Roger Moore’s review of “Dark Phoenix” is here.)

Scorsese is Bob Dylan’s definitive screen biographer. Remember his 2005 “No Direction Home” PBS “American Masters” on the man/the legend?

The only epic tours worth remembering were “disasters,” ruinously expensive, epic in intent, unforgettable to those who saw them. Prince’s “Purple Rain” tour might not qualify, but Joe Cocker’s “Mad Dogs & Englishmen” certainly did.

Dylan’s ’75 “Rolling Thunder” concert, medicine show and happening, was the Holy Grail of such tours. Cannot wait to see this. I had a concert-crazed friend in college who saw it and went on and on about “that fiddle player.”

June 12, we’ll see what he was on about.

So much offscreen baggage hangs over “Dark Phoenix” that it’s hard to address the movie on its own what’s-on-the-screen terms.

It’s a winding up of the “X Men: First Class” saga, the prequels that brought James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Alexandra Shipp and now Sophie Turner in as younger versions of Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Halle Berry and Famke Janssen‘s characters.

The story has to back-engineer itself into what we’ve already learned (for those of us who remember the “original” films) about each of them, especially super-mutant Jean Grey (Janssen then, Turner now). And for all that back-engineering, it has to stand on its own as a movie.

And Disney has bought Fox, retrieving more loose threads of the Marvel empire, and may want to retire this audience-weary franchise — or at least shelve it for a while.

So writer-director Simon Kinberg, who has “Sherlock Holmes” and “Fantastic Four” and earlier “X Men” scripts under his belt, had a lot to deal with, right up to day of release.

He’s delivered a movie of fraught emotions and slack-storytelling, epic effects and a narrative that struggles to not cover the same ground we’ve been over many times before, and fails.

The tone is right, the cast is game and it delivers the meat and potatoes that fans come to these pictures for. It just doesn’t give us much that we haven’t experienced in “Captain Marvel” or “Avengers Endgame.”

It’s also almost entirely humorless, the anti-“Deadpool/Spider-Man” or even “Shazam!”

It fails at the impossible task of making us care.

But man, those effects. A space shuttle disintegrates, mutants float skyward, aliens shape-shift and beams shoot out of eyes and fingertips, sure.

But there’s this liquid visual memory effect as Professor Xavier (McAvoy) probes the disturbed mind of problem “daughter” Jean Grey (Turner) that is breathtaking in its beauty, and the stop-time (“bullet time”) effects here on Next Level stunning.

Death in this universe is gripping and has meaning. It’s no “Avengers” afterthought.

So maybe, given the conditions, Kinberg made all he could of this somber biography of Jean Grey, the “Dark Phoenix” of the film’s title.

He takes us from the childhood car accident she caused that killed her parents to her maturing at Professor’s X’s cool school, her first love (Tye Sheridan is Cyclops), her friendship with the likes of Storm (Alexandra Shipp) and Quicksilver (Evan Peters), her heroism in that shuttle disaster.

But that’s the day she changed. Something happened in space, something that amplified her powers. There are aliens interested in that, and Jessica Chastain is their leader.

And Jean is starting to ask Xavier pointed questions, mistrust that Raven (Jennifer Lawrence) and Hank McCoy (Nicholas Hoult) share.

Maybe the exiled Magneto (Fassbender) can help!

The X Men movies have all had a more theatrical feel, unnatural, portentous line-readings. It’s hard to be otherwise when you’re muttering about what a “primitive species” we humans are, with articulate mutants declaring they should take on “change the world so that we can live in it” as a mission statement.

This is Stan Lee’s ultimate “find peace and pride in being different” comic book series, so its more naturally touchy-feely than the others.

“Game of Thrones” veteran Turner doesn’t give us much to cling to in her performance, but she does get across the angst of somebody who may not carry the knowledge of her guilt, yet knows it’s there and that she must reckon with it.

McAvoy’s turn as Xavier this time has a little less Young Patrick Stewart in it, and the outsize concern he shows for what he’s “done to Jean” does set up Future Charles, if my memory of the original films is on the money.

It’s just that the whole affair feels winded, an argument — Will humans finally accept the mutants among us? — that’s exhausted everybody concerned, with many involved somehow knowing that those “Days of Future Past” are returning.

“Exhausted everybody concerned” could be said for the audience for this franchise, as well, or at least some of us.

(The funniest “mistake” in “Dark Phoenix?” It’s right here.)

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action including some gunplay, disturbing images, and brief strong language

Cast: James McAvoy, Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Fassbender and Nicholas Hoult

Credits: Written and directed by Simon Kinberg. A Fox/Marvel release.

Running time:

This one didn’t involve Daniel Craig, but did include an explosion, a crew member injured and damage to a Pinewood Studios soundstage.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/bond-25-accident-leaves-crew-member-injured-pinewood-stage-damaged-1215578

It’s like that girlfriend or boyfriend who is too cute, too bubbly, and tries WAY too hard too much of the time.

Adorable? Sure. A real net asset in your life, with more than a few fringe benefits. Maybe more fun than lovable, or vice versa.

Bur girrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrl? EXHAUSTING.

That’s “Someone Great,” a rom-com so up-to-the-minute “New York Romance Right Now” they could stuff it into a time capsule — or The Cloud.

Writer-director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson did TV’s “Sweet/Vicious” a few years back, and she and her players — Gina Rodriguez of “Jane the Virgin,” DeWanda Wise of Netflix’s “She’s Gotta Have It” and the reliably cute and funny Brittany Snow of the “Pitch Perfect” movies — hurl so much slang, so many topical references and use the drugs of the moment (weed and Molly), it’s as if they’ve stuffed a TV season’s worth of sassy/witty banter into a 90 minute movie.

Yes, there are glib laughs. And yes, there’s a very touching moment in the finale. But, yeah. Exhausting.

The three thirty-five year old actresses play three buddies from college who still hang, still party together in New York. Heck, Blair and Erin (Snow and Wise) still share an apartment.

But Jennifer (Rodriguez) is about to break all this up. She’s a writer who just landed a gig with Rolling Stone Magazine. As in San Francisco Rolling Stone.

And even though we have seen her ALL OVER her beau, Nate (LaKeith Stanfield of Sorry to Bother You” and TV’s “Atlanta”), giddily in love, that move has triggered a breakup. Together nine years, and that’s over.

Jenny is drinking and weeping, giggling and drinking, babbling and drinking. Now Jenny and Nate are just a “supercut” montage of flashback memories — meeting and flirting and sex and relationshipping — all set to Lorde’s “Supercut.”

It’s “The end of an era,” she tells her mates, talking about them and her affair with Nate. “I need one last epic day with my girls!”

They need to get into the big Neon City “pop up show,” which her new gig with Rolling Stone should make a snap.

They need to drink mimosas. But Erin, could you like, get some orange juice? And maybe some champagne?

They need to score some of the “Good Molly” for tonight.

Hell, they need to sing-along to Lizzo’s “Truth Hurts.”

“Yeah, I got boy problems, that’s the human in me
Bling bling, then I solve ’em, that’s the goddess in me!”

Yaaaas queen. That’s a direct quote, and yes, that’s kind of dated. Or will be in seven or eight minutes.

There is a LOT of music, more than a dozen colorfully-worded pop tunes, meant to amp up the energy and emotion of this or that scene. It’s a crutch, sure, but hey, Netflix is paying for the rights, so why not?

The dialogue is pause-and-replay snappy and worth quoting, a lot of it coming from Erin. Did I mention she’s African American and gay?

“You know the beginning of a disaster movie, right before the girl who looks like me dies, and like right when a girl who looks like you (blonde Blair) walks outside and be like, ‘Oh my God, look how crazy the SKY looks?’ This feels like that!”

Sassy? Oh yes. Rupaul-approved. And “bee tee dubs,” Rupaul makes an appearance as the dealer with “The good Molly,” named “Hype.”

The Screenwriting 101 plot has the trio plotting and planning to get into that one last epic show, and zig zagging across the city to do so — meeting this connection, that hook-up, doing what comes naturally on occasion.

Jenny is tripping, as the kids say — huge mood swings from giddy to “Oh no, Washington Square/Coke in a bodega fridge/that song reminds me of NATE!”

Nate as a leading man and a character? Way under-developed. What connected them? What really broke them up? Some questions are answered, eventually, and some remain a mystery as this is about the ladies, friend. The guys are just way stations.

As a “romantic comedy,” this venture is depressingly unromantic, a bit like a break-up in that regard. Not straight romantic, not gay romantic, just transactional and sexual, for the most part.

Wise’s endless parade of zingers — about how “Weed is like ketchup, it never goes bad,” ridiculing “hetero-normative lives” and how the easily-swayed tastes of “middle class whites” are like “reparations” to trend-setters of color like her, and how that outfit looks like “Liz Lemon ‘f—–d the Salvation Army” — are winners, and there are so many of them.

Archeologists digging into this time capsule two years from now will learn about “stress diarrhea” and “byeeeee” and the generation that grew up on Harry Potter’s references.

“Technically, I identify as  a Slitherin with a Ravenclaw moon.”

“Yo, that is such a Slitherin thing for you to say!”

There’s this lovely little grace note, good advice from the last place you’d expect it

“You’ve been blessed with a broken heart…Live in this as long as you can.”

But there’s just…so MUCH that comes before it, and the players (especially Rodriguez) are trying EVER so hard to play younger it’s like their memories of being that age — or research — told them everybody was on Speed or Coke and not Molly.

It’s wearing. All that gushing over a relationship remembered for its physicality, and seen through rose-colored glasses, and we don’t have time to take a breath to consider it.

Nate is poorly represented in screen time, solely seen in flashbacks. Having only Jenny’s point of view is empowering, but hamstrings the proceedings.

The character arcs are as tidy and neat as the rest of the movie is breathlessly blurted and rushed, even not all that much happens. The big scenes aren’t big scenes at all, just vignettes — ideas for a sketch. Believable? Kind of. But thinly worked out.

I didn’t dislike “Someone Great” so much as feel like I needed to sleep it off, afterwards. For somebody who harps on “pacing” in comedies as much as I do, you’d think this would be a slam dunk.

I laughed at lines, not characters or scenes or situations. No wonder the soundtrack is crammed with tunes. There’s a lot of dead time and dead feeling to cover up.

Speed in comedy isn’t an end unto itself. “Urgency” is more important, and there’s not a hint of that here, no sense — in the least — that these three pals, so devoted (Hah!) to each other on that “one last night” — won’t have moved on before the moving van is out of sight, out of mind.

MPAA Rating: R for drug content, drinking, sexual material and language throughout

Cast: Gina Rodriguez, LaKeith Stanfield, Brittany Snow, DeWanda Wise.

Credits: Written and directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson.  A Netflix Original.

Running time: 1:32

“The Highwaymen” is a sturdy, slow and stately Western about the hunt for Bonnie & Clyde and the two retired, out-of-date Texas Rangers who birddogged them through the Dust Bowl.

It’s a picture that comes down squarely on the law’s side, de-mythologizing the outlaws, the cult of celebrity and America’s tendency to fall for the wrong sorts of “heroes.” Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow’s twelve “official” victims were all but ignored by the public at the time and forgotten by history.

As such, “Highwaymen” is a “cop, judge and jury” Old West Western, admiring the ruthless methods of the past, lightly mocking the “soft”  female governor of Texas in 1934 for not approving of them.

And it’s trigger happy, all but fetishizing the firearms that the Barrow Gang and those who pursued them hefted — BARs and Colts and Thompson submachine guns, which gives it an out-of-step-with-our-times feel.

But it strips away the cute, almost ignoring the perpetrators themselves– seen at their most cold-blooded. “Highwaymen” is just about the pursuit of them, the hunters and the people who helped the killers — fans — and their kin, who both understood that “wrong turn in the trail” that changed them, and the need for them to be, as the lawmen said, “to be put down.”

The film doesn’t have the pacing of a theatrical release — it’s “streaming slow,” sluggish at times. Director John Lee Hancock (“The Blind Side,” “The Alamo”) doesn’t so much coast on his own reputation as those of his two formidable, grizzled and manly leading men — Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson, playing Frank Hamer and Maney Gault, Texas Rangers in an era when the Rangers had been disbanded, disapproved of by Governor Miriam “Ma” Ferguson (Kathy Bates), the first female governor of Texas.

“If they make’a fool’a me, there’s gonna be HELL to pay!”

She’d rather her new-fangled state police, working with the new-ish F.B.I., using the law and forensics, track down the robbers and killers who’d become folk heroes to Depression Era America.

But the menfolk knew better, which is why Marshal Lee Simmons (John Carroll Lynch) tracks down the married well and retired Frank (Costner), who in turn — eventually — seeks out his old partner, Maney.

There are grace notes in the introductions — Costner’s Hamer getting young farmhands to throw bottles that he no longer has the speed or the eye to shoot in mid air.

“Pity’s sake. I’m a goddamned old man!”

Maney (Harrelson) is broke, living with his daughter’s family on a farm in foreclosure, and Frank seems reluctant to offer him the job. Frank runs down a list of other retired Rangers he’d be better off with, men “further down the roster.”

“That’s honest. Too honest.”

The script by John Fusco (“Hidalgo,” “The Founder,””Saving Mister Banks”) fights the urge to make this a buddy picture, from that final invitation, “Judas Priest, get in. No singin’.” to Maney’s constant trips to the toilet to jibes about each other’s shooting or driving.

He wrote each man a fine soliloquy, about violence, their own “one turn on the trail” that put them in the business of hunting down and killing “cold blooded killers who’re more adored than movie stars,” or as Maney calls them, “that jackass and his girlfriend.”

They violate jurisdictions and drive all over the region, chasing their quarry, second-guessing them, stumbling into them.

And they get an earful about what “heroes” the Barrow Gang are.

“They only takin’ from the banks. They ain’t takin’ from the poor folk, like me.”

The film may be a blend of truth and fiction, but that’s one thing it gets absolutely right.

The press of the day was both appalled by and enamored of these two, turning Bonnie into a beret-wearing fashion icon long before Faye Dunaway played her that was in the ’60s. They’d write letters to the editor, get self-mythologizing poems published in magazines.

“Used to be, had to have talent to get published,” Maney drawls.”Now, all you have to do is shoot people.”

All these two see is their violence — coldblooded, sadistic. They have to use their instincts to get ahead of them, staking out Bonnie’s family home in “The Devil’s Back Porch” part of West Dallas.

“Outlaws and mustangs…always come home.”

Hancock shows us the Hoovervilles that littered the impoverished Southern landscape, and takes a stab at giving the picture the proper Dust Bowl grit. Everybody still looks too clean, the vintage cars (generally) too well-cared for, the roads too modern, the paved sidewalks showing through even in the poorest neighborhoods of the day.

Costner’s hoarse growl is put to good use, as is Woody’s innate folksiness. The casting is “on-the-nose,” as we say, two very good actors with great rapport playing a bit too far within their comfort zone, but getting the job done.

William Sadler makes the most of one scene, playing Clyde’s half-sympathetic daddy. Bates doesn’t have enough to play, and Ma’s reputation is tarnished with cracks about “100 pardoned convicts a day” and the like. She’s having her history man-splained by a screenwriter who probably isn’t giving her what’s due.

The picture’s only serious drawback is its pacing, that “streaming slow” remark I made earlier. Starting the story with a prison break and taking us to the final hail of bullets suggests something more compact is about to unfold. Nope. Two hours and 12 minutes of driving around, bickering, running roughshod over “modern” law enforcers and violence makes this play a tad like cable’s “Hatfields & McCoys,” without developing any characters beyond the two leads.

But what leads they are, and if “The Highwaymen” of the tale come off more legend than truth, that’s a deal most Western fans — even Westerns with V8 Fords — are more than willing to make.

MPAA Rating: R for some strong violence and bloody images

Cast: Kevin Costner, Woody Harrelson Kathy Bates, Emily Brobst,  Edward Bossert

Credits: Directed by John Lee Hancock, script by John Fusco.  A Netflix Original release.

Running time: 2:12

These are Governor’s Awards for creating bodies of work.

The great Native American actor Wes Studi stands out for me. An iconic character actor and sometime leading man. Lynch and Wertmuller are distinct directing talents whose careers wound down in our corporate cinema age. Geena Davis seems a little out of place in this list, a Mensa member and a great talent. But she’s done great work so more honor to her.

https://www.oscars.org/news/academy-honor-geena-davis-david-lynch-wes-studi-and-lina-wertmuller-2019-governors-awards

Illumination fills these cartoons with funny people’s sometimes funny voices, some good sight gags, and then they hope for the best.

Fingers crossed for this one, because the kids need some laughs after “Aladdin.”

“The Secret Life of Pets 2” opens this weekend.