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.
Amazon prime time for Mr. Bloom
Yes, the X-Men get into “Game of Thrones” casting (Who isn’t?) with this franchise wrap-up, or pause or whatever Disney decides to do with it now that it owns Fox.
“Dark Phoenix” opens Thursday night, and I think the embargo on reviews is Wed. noon or some such.
But we will see what we see when we see it.
The director of the best of the Lance Armstrong documentaries is behind “Maiden,” which is about an all-female crew taking on one of the world’s great oceanic sailboat races, the Whitbread Around the World race back in 1989.
The film will roll out into theaters in the weeks that follow, and this preview will include a Q & A with the skipper of that boat, Captain Tracy Edwards.
Here’s a kids-save-the-world action — um, comedy? — from McG that plays like sci-fi that just got its training wheels off.
“Rim of the World” puts a quartet of summer “adventure” camp wiseacres between us and alien invasion-driven extinction. Sure, the safe money’s on the kids.
Because they’re all stereotypes, and there’s a smart if cowardly white boy, a brazen black kid, a tough tween on the run from “juvie,” and the obligatory smart, brave and inscrutable girl who just got in from China.
Those darned crab-legged alien re-animators don’t stand a chance.
This could be the laziest screenplay you’ll watch or hear this year, so mark down this title and the date you saw it, not to mention the name under “script by” at the bottom of this review.
The nerdy coward Alex (Jake Gore) has lost himself online since losing his father in an accident.
“There is a whole world out there beyond these screens,” Mom (Annabeth Gish) counsels.
That’s why he’s going to camp in the mountains of Southern California.
Dariush (Benjamin Flores Jr.) is all blinged to the max, a rich kid whose Mercedes dealership daddy shipped him off to campn Rim of the World.
Zhenzhen (Miya Cech) is like a Red Chinese cartoon, a red beret-wearing mute whom we KNOW will open her mouth at just the right moment to save the day — repeatedly.
Gabriel (Alessio Scalzotto) is the boy-band-ready kid they stumble into who claims he just escaped from juvie when World War Aliens began.
It begins with the International Space Station getting chewed up (common in such movies) and bursts into an “Independence Day” blast of explosions and dogfights between the Air Force’s finest and the interstellar travelers’ own inexplicably just-as-primitive fighter jets.
There’s this key that a scientist entrusts to the survivors to get to Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The kids aren’t all as nerdy as Alex, mixing up EMP and EDM, and more amusingly “TRL” with JPL.
The film’s opening act has the kids leaving for camp, and checking into it — one lame joke follows another as “Ginger Nugget” (Alex) gets his first teasing by the profane and under-or-OVER-committed camp counselors.
“Our musical this year is ‘Fiddler on the Roof!”
The tone is set early on, with the odd off-color double entendre (Netflix’s kids’ movies have that “edge” — all of them), the obligatory over-use of “bitch”and Dariush playing that worn out stereotype, the over-sexed black man — in 13 year-old form.
“I got game…Girl, is this our layover? Because we’re making a connection.”
Other camp counselors of color ask, “Why we talkin’ like black men from the ’80s?” As do we all.
Dariush is a bottomless pit of cornball one-liners.
“Maybe North Korea’s invaded! Zhenzhen! Call it off!”
No, don’t leave him in the woods overnight.
“I don’t do so well with bears. I’m not fixing to get DiCaprio’d up in here!
The direction by the once promising McG is lackluster and perfunctory. The characters and dialogue lurch between clumsy homages to “Goonies” and “E.T.” — stuffed with self-aware references to the screenplay’s origins.
“Guys, we should turn back…I’m tellin’ you, this is how people die in movies!”
Their odyssey takes them from the mountains to Pasadena, past over-matched soldiers and opportunistic ex-cons, by bike and any handy car that has the keys left in it, which has to be a vintage ride because no car with computers in its electronics (save for the Humvees, because again, this script is clumsy) will work after the EMP blasts that crippled Earth.
Only the girl from the East has the answer to every dilemma.
“What do we in life echoes in eternity!”
“Did she just quote ‘Gladiator?'”
Some of which, to be frank, your average twelve year-old may dig. If they’ve seen “Gladiator,” that is.
Adults? We should know better.
MPAA Rating: TV-14, violence, kids in peril, deaths, profanity, sexual come-ons
Cast:Jack Gore, Miya Cech, Benjamin Flores Jr., Alessio Scalzotto , Annabeth Gish
Credits: Directed by McG, script by Zack Stenz. A Netflix Original.
Running time: 1:38
With the theatrical studios generally unable to find their way through budget bloat and “star-vehicle” burdens to deliver light, frothy romantic comedies, Netflix has found itself a niche that it can have almost all to itself.
“The Set Up” announced the streaming service’s arrival in the genre with a bang. “Always be My Maybe” underscores it, cute modern romances for the “Why go out, we have Netflix?” set.
“Maybe” makes passable use of its comic-romantic leads, comic turned comic-actress Ali Wong and comic actor Randall Park, in a San Francisco tale set against the affluence of high-end dining in the City Too Expensive for Real People to Live In Anymore.
And if you’re thinking, as I was, “This isn’t quite good enough to find an audience in actual theaters,” be patient. The big laughs finally show up in a burst near the midway point, shortly before Keanu Reeves arrives for his killer cameo, and linger for a few minutes after he departs the scene.
Sasha and Marcus have been friends since childhood when they grew up next door to each other. She’s Chinese-American, growing up as a latchkey kid with workaholic parents she rarely sees. Marcus is the darling of his doting Korean-American parents’ eye, and they always have an extra spot at the table for little Sasha.
“Are you sure you’re not Korean?”
His mom (Susan Park) taught her to cook. And when she died, Marcus wasn’t the only one who felt he’d lost his mother.
The high school best friends had one night of something like pity sex (“Hey, where’d you get that condom?” “Uh, seventh grade…”), split up and went their separate ways.
“Always be My Maybe” is about them re-finding each other; Sasha as a buzzed-about LA chef opening a new restaurant in her old hometown, Marcus as the same old goof, still playing in his bar band, Hello Peril, still working with his dad installing and fixing HVAC systems in San Fran.
The three screenwriters, including Wong and Park, know how to set up “obstacles” to this renewed relationship. She’s engaged to her hunky older manager (Daniel Kae Kim), constantly on her phone, working like mad. He’s “stuck,” still doing dainty, cute hip hop and dating a daffy activist/poet (Vivian Bang).
She’s impressed by his HVAC coveralls.
“So you’re like…the air conditioner guy?”
“Nooooo. I just like the convenience of a onesie.”
“You look like a homeless astronaut!”
He’s underwhelmed by her “trans-denominational fusion” cuisine.
“Always be My Maybe” floats along, quite low to the ground, poking fun at San Fran’s all-encompassing LGBTQIA gender blurring, lame Spanx jokes, ridiculing “that racist lady” cook, Paula Deen and laughably pretentious cuisine, all set against the same sheen of gauche affluence of say, a “Crazy Rich Asians” or most of Tyler Perry’s non-Madea comedies.
There’s a little Netflix mockery, the odd goof on their race vs. The Dominant Culture.
“White people eat that s— up!”
Wait for the big phone tantrum, and lean forward in your seat. Because that’s the signal that Keanu Reeves, playing a cockier, more Summer’s Eve version of how we think of “Cool Keanu,” is arriving. Listen to him order at the higher-than-high-end restaurant they all wind up in.
“Do you have any courses that play with the concept of….time?”
That sequence makes the movie. The picture, which lurches from cute to “cutesy” a bit too often for my taste, fizzes out after Keanu has left the building, but finds a little sentimental kick for the finale.
Its most interesting moments are little peeks inside the West Coast Asian American culture it’s set in — Marcus and his dad (James Saito) enjoying a father-son exfoliating massage, Sasha getting over her food snobbery at a little “traditional” Cantonese eatery.
Park is plainly better at the whole “best joke on the set” improv thing than Wong.
About Jenny — “She sleeps bottomless, like a sexy Asian Winnie the Pooh!”
The story gives away its direction and intentions far too early and obviously. But these onetime “Fresh off the Boat” co-stars make a cute, cuddly couple that we root for, even if every joke doesn’t land, even if they let that devilish Keanu steal their movie from them.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sexual content, drug use/references, and language
Cast: Ali Wong, Randall Park, Susan Park, Michelle Buteau and Keanu Reeves
Credits: Directed by Nahnatchka Khan , script by Michael Golamco, Randall Park, Ali Wong A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:42
Yeah, the droll playwright/character actor Tracy Letts gets the deadpan laughs here.
“Ford v Ferrari” is about the ’60s and the efforts of Ford to muscle its way into the winner’s circle at LeMans.
It. Looks. Epic. And. Sounds. Epic.
As any trailer that uses racecar motors and “Gimme Shelter” is going to sound epic.
Damn.
November, we see James Mangold’s take on the Age of Speed.
“Punk” wasn’t music solely confined to The West. It happened behind the Iron Curtain as well. As did its offspring, New Wave.
Granted, it wasn’t always the loud, passionate and sometimes musically-inept thrashing punk of The Ramones and The Sex Pistols, or the fashion statement New Wave pop of Duran Duran and The Cars.
“Leto” is a wistful, black and white musical fantasia, a memoir of the “24 Hour Party People” school set in the grim coast-to-coast gulag that was the Soviet Union. There’s a romantic softness to its grit and a somber, observational tone to many scenes.
But every now and then, magical realism takes over and Russians on buses or trains or in phone booths launch into Lou Reed, T-Rex or “the Heads that Talk” and things get downright giddy.
Musicians and the kids who wanted to be punks got off on T-Rex, Lou Reed, “All the Young Dudes” and “The Velvets (Underground).” You don’t have to know the bands — Kino, Zoopark et al, to follow what was happening in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, in very slow tape delay years after these movements and bands broke out in London, New York and points West.
It’s the early ’80s, the end of Breznev era, and musicians in the U.S.S.R. still have to have their songs approved in order to get the chance to play in the state operated “rock club,” where plainclothes state security officers act as ushers.
Don’t get out of your seat, don’t stand up and dance. Don’t hold up homemade posters for your idols and for the love of Mother Russia, don’t hold up a lighter and yell “FREE BIRD!”
This is an environment that Mayk Vassilievitch Naumenko (Roman Bilyk) thrives in. He wears Raybans in the Italian fashion — around the clock — and smokes in the Russian style — constantly. “Mike” and his band Zoopark own this scene.
He’s devoted to The Velvet Underground and “Berlin” era Lou Reed — music, like T-Rex, another favorite — that was seriously passe in the U.S. and Britain by then.
The fact that he’s considering covering Sweet songs — “Lies in Your Eyes” — tells you he’s out of step, which is just fine with The State.
Along come Viktor Tsoy (Tee Yoo) and Liosha (Filipp Avdeev), fans who play acoustic guitar and write biting, bitter songs about life in the Land of the Not Free, love and drinking. This is the cutting edge that Mike never found, and he’s enough of a music buff to hear it.
He doesn’t need the resident “Skeptic” in their orbit (Aleksandr Kuznetsov, funny) reminding him that Reed, Dylan, Bowie and other heroes of Western rock did cultural commentary and protest songs, and that he should be, too.
So he takes the lads under his wing. It’s just that his wife, the ravishing Natacha (Irina Starshenbaum) is quite taken with the long-haired, brooding face of artistic integity — to the point of being smitten.
Co-writer/director Kirill Serebrennikov (“The Student”) takes us into the clubs, the recording studio, the “official” meetings to get your music approved, the smoky house parties and beach bonfires of these real-life figures from the Russian music of the era.
He gives us a little hedonism, escape, sex, drugs and rock’n roll. Just enough. He uses hand-drawn animation to add “fantasy” dream elements to the story, simulated old home movies in black and white and color, and recreated Western music videos (and album covers) to create a chiaroscuro impression of a place, a time and the feeling of being young in that world.
And he and his fellow screenwriters, working from a memoir Mike’s wife Natacha wrote, find moments to bring a little musical magical realism to the enterprise. No, the scenes aren’t as gloriously over-produced as the big moments in “Rocketman.” But they’re delightful jolts, turning up just often to upend the movie’s drift toward Russian mopiness.
Kids, led by the boy Punk, prattle on (in Russian with English subtitles) about The Sex Pistols as inspiration, “the enemy’s songs,” the older folks overhearing them on the train gripe. “You are singing the pop songs of our ideological enemy!”
A beating starts, the secret police show up with their “Get your papers out”
And the Skeptic (VERY “24 Hour Party People”) tells Punk the only answer to this is a song by “the band ‘Heads that Talk.'”
The kid romps, bloody-nosed, through the train, belting out “Psycho Killer” as passengers of all ages take swings at him and sing along.
Skeptic is not quite our narrator, punctuating this moment with “This didn’t happen. Nor will it.” Later, it’s “Sadly, this did not happen. If only it had.”
All the while, the musicians are making music (very folkie/singer-songerwriter “New Romantics” stuff, mostly, little that’s punk or New Wave), experimenting in the studio — “Try ‘Mama, mama, mama’ here!” “How about a drunken chorus? You know, like The Doors did with ‘Alabama Song?'””
And Natacha openly flirts with Viktor, who remains desperate for Mike’s approval and help.
“Natacha, come, your husband’s still alive,” is all the husband can think of in response.
“Leto” — the title means “Summer” in Russian, and is the title of one of the popish songs played here — never quite reaches the full gallop that this era and this material demands, with the Afghan War draft hanging over every young man and All the Young Dudes more concerned with dissecting Bowie’s “Aladdin Sane.”
But the musical moments stick, and the dialogue is tasty and ever-so-Russian.
“It’s bad, sad for the songs if they’re stuck in your head. Release them!”
Yes, too little changed in Mother Russia with these cultural warriors battling commissars who growl, “Soviet youths don’t need these kind of messages.” But as the Skeptic might say, it’s nice to think it could have, that the “Children of the Revolution” could have reformed their repressive State, just with their tunes.
“Leto” makes us wish for a Russian “Summer of Love” that never was.
MPAA Rating: unrated, nudity, alcohol abuse, smoking
Cast: Teo Yoo, Irina Starshenbaum, Roman Bilyk and Aleksandr Kuznetsov
Credits: Directed by Kirill Serebrennikov, script by Mikhail Idov, Lili Idova , Ivan Kapitonov and Kirill Serebrennikov. A Gunpowder & Sky release.
Running time: 2:08
Who better to do that? Interesting break down of the film’s version as opposed to what really happened.
Lots of liberties taken, mistakes made. And typos in the article. It’s a pity none of us can afford a copy editor, these days.
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/rocketman-fact-check-elton-john-biopic-842902/
Not a runaway weekend at the box office, like say LAST weekend was, with “Aladdin” far exceeding depressed expectations and clearing over $100 million.
“Godzilla: King of the Monsters” didn’t hit the predicted $65, $55 or $53 million it was expected to pull in last week — indeed, as late as Saturday morning.
A tepid film in a worn out franchise? It’s not as if nobody cared, but not enough cared to make it a runaway hit. $49 million isn’t terrible, and with overseas money the $200 million monster mash won’t be a flop. But still…Let’s hope they retire the character and find better Hollywood parts for Ken Watanabe.
“Rocketman” appealed to an older audience of Elton John fans, and while there weren’t nearly as many of them as say, “Gnomeo & Juliet” et al fans (cartoons that used Elton’s tunes), a $25 million weekend is better than things looked Friday. This was expected to challenge “Bohemian Rhapsody’s” break-out opening in the $40s — and didn’t. Predictions ran into the $30s as late as Thursday. Didn’t happen.
It’s a sour, joyless film, built around everybody who ever did Elton wrong. “Makes him look like a jerk” one critic noted. I’d agree with that.
“Ma” wasn’t all that, but Octavia Spencer and BH Tilt opened a horror movie with no supernatural evil, ghosts or “Amityville/Insidious/Annabelle” universe tie-ins. $18 million on a cheap film is a win.
“Booksmart” fell off so steeply that any thoughts it would find a bigger audience, hold onto screens and become a hit “with legs” disappeared. It fell only 52%, but that’s a falloff that took it way down the top ten. It will join “Long Shot” in the over-hyped but under-viewed comedy of the summer sweepstakes, out of the top ten and losing most of its screens within two weeks.
The PG-13 “The Hustle,” a cute remake of “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” and “Bedtime Story” (1964) has earned more than the two R-rated comedies put together. R-rated has been the way to go in the Judd Apatow Ap-pack era, but not this summer. Not so far.
“Booksmart” is better, more ambitious than “The Hustle.” “Long Shot” isn’t.
If the adorable documentary “Biggest Little Farm” was on a few more (275 now) screens, it might crack the top ten. But that’s the sort of thinking that made “Booksmart” seem like a bomb. It was never going to have wide Middle-America appeal, nor is “Farm.”
Movie Nation 