Movie Nation

The romantic leads are engaging and can sing, one of them a lot better than the other.

The production is eye-popping, visually, more India than Arabia — Guy Ritchie frenetic at times, and mildly amusing.

And Will Smith gets to strut his stuff in Hammer pants. Again.

So call “Aladdin” a win and call it a night, right? Disney’s latest remake of a classic cartoon is closer to its remake of “The Jungle Book” than “Dumbo,” which is a good thing.

It’s more sensitive in its casting, with any politically incorrect edges rubbed off or at least erased from its tunes.

But it’s villain is a bust, a Jafar who won’t scare anybody.

And with Smith forced to replicate, top or at least hold his own against Robin Williams’ antic animated turn as the Genie, we’re hurled into manic, loud and over-stuffed production numbers sung by a singer whose go-to move is to rap in tune and in time, not “American Idol” his way to Broadway.

Smith’s “Friend Like Me” is kind of lost in the editing, choreography and digitally-augmented and cluttered set decor.

Mena Massoud makes for a parkour-friendly thief of Baghdad, or “Agraba” as it’s called here. He’s boyishly winning if not perhaps as charismatic and cocksure as you remember other versions of Aladdin to be.

But Brit singer/actress Naomi Scott’s Jasmine is the real deal, a good singer and a spitfire in the role. When her Jasmine is denied the right of succession to her father the sultan (Navid Negahban), her fuming “I was born to more than marry some useless prince” tells us she’s going to be a lot more pro-active in this tale than age-old Arabic patriarchy would have her be.

Scott shines in a new number written for this musical, “Speechless,” a bit of female empowerment that should play wonderfully to the dress-like-our-favorite-princess demo.

The story is cleverly reframed as a tale told by a sailor/trader (Smith) to his little kids as they sail the Arabian Sea. Aladdin and his (digital) monkey Abu are introduced, stealing their way through a stunningl- realized fantasy port city of “Arabian Nights” vintage.

He meets the princess, in disguise so she can see how her people really live (struggling, unlike those in the palace). Aladdin’s way of coping with that charms her.

“When you don’t have anything, you still have to act like you own everything!”

But he is seized by the cruel courtier Jafar (Marwan Kenzari of “Murder on the Orient Express” and “What Happened to Monday?”), sent into the Cave of Wonders to fetch a lamp, and that’s how he meets the Bigmouth in Blue (Smith) with his “wishes three.”

Smith’s best song is his rendition of “Prince Ali,” the song in which the Genie croons the virtues of the thief he’s transformed into a prince suitable to be a suitor for Jasmine. It’s performed in more of Smith’s “Fresh Prince” rap style than as a Broadway-ready ditty (in the Alan Menken/Howard Ashman/Tim Rice composition) and he puts it over with panache.

The best effect is the playful pet flying carpet that becomes Aladdin’s edge in his duel with Jafar.

Will any of it make you forget the 1992 cartoon? No. Is this the best application of Guy Ritchie’s special gifts as a filmmaker? Not in the least.

But the jokes still land, albeit not as many as Robin Williams & Co. managed 27 years ago. “A Whole New World” still has a romantic tug to it.

Which is why “Aladdin” still works, just not as well as the live action remake of “Beauty and the Beast,” because the acting in that film was better and it was based on a better original animated classic, with more heart to the story and better songs to illustrate it.

Keep your expectations in check and you won’t be disappointed.

MPAA Rating: PG for some action/peril

Cast: Mena Massoud, Naomi Scott, Will Smith, Marwan Kenzari, Nasim Pedrad and Navid Negahban

Credits: Directed by Guy Ritchie, script John August and Guy Ritchie, based on the Disney animated film. A Walt Disney release.

Running time: 2:08

I had higher hopes for the adaptation of “Good Omens” than this.

Neil Gaiman co-wrote it, and they had the good sense to cast the cherubic, grinning Michael Sheen as “good” angel Aziraphale and the vulpine David Tennant as the demon Crowley.

The production design by Michael Ralph and cinematography by Gavin Finney (lots of use of fisheye lenses, minimal light) has a “Blade Runner” meets “Dark Shadows” feel — gloomy and foggy Britainnia, with the quasi-villain Crowley tooling about in a vintage Rolls “updated” with a Blaupunkt cassette player (’70s settings.

Very Sherlock Holmes’ Moriarty, with cats-eye contact lenses.

The “Damien: Omen 2” story about mixed up spawn of Satan being raised by “the wrong” families is a non-starter, with all its internecine angel fighting and scheming. But a lot of the dialogue is as witty as you’d hope, demons cooing at how cute Baby AntiChrist/warlock is, right down to his “little toesy woesies!”

Contending with the inept Satanic nuns from “The Chatting Order of Saint Beryl,” bickering about who good and evil — “You’re an angel. I don’t think you CAN do the wrong thing.” — and who might have to spend eternity watching “The Sound of Music” over and over again.

Jon Hamm is the Archangel Gabriel, selling the “Miracles are what we do!” pitch with sinister undertones. The supporting cast, varying from episode to episode, has some heft to it.

The series hangs on the great chemistry between Tennant and Sheen, bickering over the relative merits of “The Divine Plan” vs. “the wiles of the Evil One.” They’re a lot of fun.

The cute conceit here is that neither is absolutely sold and wholly committed to their side in this eternal war.

The obnoxious, cloying crutch of the whole is that everything — what we’ve OBVIOUSLY seen, what we expect to see, what has happened before and whose agenda is being pursued is unnecessarily and insufferably over-narrated by The Almighty, voiced by Frances McDormand.

The Oscar winner is a great actress, and in a series overwhelmed by testosterone, she’s almost certainly a needed female face. Which is why not showing that face is such a bad idea, almost as bad as that lazy storyteller’s go-to shortcut, “voice over.”

It’s not as long as some limited series, even if its dollops of plot are doled out in that cable TV way (tiny drops of exposition, slowly advancing story, attempts at cliffhangers). So maybe it’s worth your time.

It wasn’t really worth mine.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA

Cast: David Tennant, Michael Sheen, Brian Cox, Jill Winternitz, Benedict Cumberbatch, Nick Offerman, Jon Hamm and the voice of Frances McDormand.

Credits: Directed by Douglas MacKinnon, script by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. An Amazon Prime release.

Running time: 6 episodes of one hour each

You come for the dogs, you stay for the tears?
That’s the way these “Dog’s Purpose/Dog’s Way Home/Dog’s Journey” movies are supposed to work.

You watch some perfectly youtubeable clips of puppies, a few utterly generic canine stunts, listen to some seriously lachrymose narration by Josh Gad, as “The Dog of a Thousand Names” and endure the deaths of assorted beloved pets, secure in the knowledge that “All Dogs Go to Heaven,” that Bailey the dog will be reincarnated and that Dennis Quaid will be the only one who knows Bailey’s secret.

What works in “A Dog’s Journey,” in which Bailey goes through several breeds/genders/lives on his mission of “purpose,” to look after the neglected grandchild of Ethan (Quaid) and Hannah (Marg Helgenberger, replacing the late Peggy Lipton).

“I would never stop looking until I found her!”

The tiny tyke CJ needs looking after because her widowed mom (Betty Gilpin of TV’s “Glow” and “Elementary”) is self-absorbed, determined to make it as a “singer” and always dragging home strays — men who will never replace her dead husband, Hannah and Ethan’s son.

Bailey, a Great Pyrnees/Bernese mix in the opening scenes, becomes Molly, an adorable Beaglier (Beagle, King Charles Spaniel mix), and later a Biewer Yorkshire Terrier lapdog named Max and an African Boerboel  named “Big Dog.

No, I didn’t recognize all the breeds, I looked them up. And no, I didn’t give you “spoilers” because I listed them out of order, so there.

As CJ grows up to pursue her dreams of a music career in the big city, she is played by Kathryn Prescott and must endure an abusive teen romance and a lot of lingering bitterness over the mother that kept her from her beloved grandparents.

But of course, we know that Bailey, in whatever guise, will make all these wrongs right. Even if it takes him/her a few lives to do it.

Kathryn Prescott and Henry Lau in "A Dog's Journey." (Universal Pictures)

I found the whole more than a tad insipid, but I love dogs almost beyond measure, so here’s what I loved seeing.

Most of the canines are mixed breeds, not inbred purebreds.

There’s a moment one dog is fetched from a rescue group, and the lady running the adoptions (Cherissa Richards), gets the movie’s best line.

“Rescue’s like a river. It has to keep flowing, or it backs up.”

Don’t buy your pals-for-life from a pet shop. Adopt from a shelter.

And Dennis Quaid, who replaces Jeff Bridges as the Best Actor to Never Win an Oscar, throws himself into this part, selling this relationship like someone born with dogs, raised with dogs and never quite at home unless he’s with a dog. He may actually be a cat person, but I totally bought him and his “Boss Dog” moments. And if he is a cat person, that’s another argument for giving this guy an Oscar.

Not for these tear-jerkers. The further they get from “A Dog’s Purpose,” the weaker they get.

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic content, some peril and rude humor

Cast: Dennis Quaid, Kathryn Prescott, Betty Gilpin, Marg Helgenberger, Henry Lau, Johnny Galecki.

Credits: Directed by Gail Mancuso, script by Maya Forbes, Cathryn Michon, Wallace Wolodarsky and W. Bruce Cameron, based on his novel.  A Universal release.

Running time: 1:49

In Hollywood, there is nothing they hate more than “runaway production,” film and TV work that is done in states far from the mother guilds, unions and working folks who make that the industry’s home base. All these states offering giveaways to lure studio’s into filming in Georgia, Louisiana, New Mexico and Florida? A nuisance, especially to legislators seeking to keep all that payroll, infrastructure and tax money at home.

So go ahead, take your state in the last century with anti civil rights legislation. You just gave them an excuse to offer production companies a way back in the door at home.

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/444800-california-bill-would-give-tax-breaks-to-production-studios-that-leave

The closing credits of the death row drama “Trial by Fire” show then-Texas Governor Rick Perry defending his state’s enthusiastic application of the death penalty during a presidential debate, to the loud applause of the G.O.P. audience for that forum.

The presumption that “the state,” hated in conservative circles for generations, is somehow infallible in the most serious and terminal application of its power, in defiance of logic and what we know about human fallibility, corruption and general mean-spiritedness, is probably lost on those doing the clapping. “Cognitive dissonance” is but speaking in tongues in many corners of America.

From what we’ve picked up about Rick Perry, he couldn’t even spell it.

And no movie is going to suddenly awaken us to the knowledge that all these people, spending years in prison or even executed, convicted of crimes that later science or evidence proves was false, has put blood on all our hands.

But like the heroine of “Trial by Fire,” a Houston French teacher and playwright played by Laura Dern, it’s comforting to see somebody try.

Elizabeth Gilbert exchanged letters with Cameron Todd Willingham, which led her to pursue experts and witnesses who made his case unravel, basically disproving his conviction with journalists all but indicting the prosecutor, arson investigators and Rick Perry who railroaded a very unpleasant “town punk” onto death row.

The case became an Innocence Project showpiece and was the subject of a documentary a few years back, “Incendiary: The Willingham Case.”

Edward Zwick’s feature film (he did “Glory”) is something of a mixed bag, a long-winded sermon that wastes too much time on preliminaries in the interest of being thorough, when its drama, pathos and rage are all packed into the third act.

The British actor Jack O’Connell (“Unbroken,””71,” “Tulip Fever”) is made over into a seething, short-tempered redneck capable of mercurial mood swings and real violence. Todd Willingham was a wife-beating drunk with a thing for Satanic posters and widely regarded as bad news in Corsicana, Texas.

When his house burned up with his three small children inside it, it wasn’t a huge leap to assume this creep was responsible. As it turned out, the whole town, including law enforcement, never looked at the fire any other way — arson. His trial was for murder, and when he got “the ultimate penalty” that prosecutor John H. Jackson (Jason Douglas) demanded, capital punishment, the view of one and all was “He deserves it.”

But even the most casual viewer of legal eagle TV series will have a laugh or two at the “evidence,” the conclusions leapt to by good ol’boy fire investigators who drawl “ire talks to you. It does not lie,” and the court approved “Dr. Death” psychotherapist.

Naturally, arson investigators saw Satanic pentangles in the fire pattern. Of course the shrink declared the guy was a psychopath, not based on ever meeting him, but on the posters he had on the wall of that house.

And no tearful defense by his wife (Emily Meade of “Money Monster” and TV’s “The Deuce”) or outbursts in court by the defendant could convince anybody otherwise. The defense attorney didn’t even try.

Zwick’s film takes a long interlude to get from the fire and trial to the interest of the one woman who thought he had a case and wasn’t going to let any sloppy public defender (Darren Pettie) scare her off.

“Where’d you get your law degree, missy?”

Imagine calling Laura Dern “missy.” Only in Texas.

Zwick and the screenplay spend more time than they should showing Willingham’s heinous prison experience, brutal fights and vicious beatings by the guards, the cruelest of whom (Chris Coy, compelling in giving this guy human dimensions) nicknames him “Baby Killer,” when the entire prison population adopts.

We see the stormy relationship between Todd and Stacy, given a hint of Hollywood “trailer trash heat” here, overdone in the extreme.

This middle acts interlude also allows too much time for sermonizing, which “Trial By Fire” gets down to. McKinley Belcher III is a riveting presence as the jailhouse lawyer/philosopher in the next cell, with “Ain’t no JUSTICE in the SYSTEM” and in Texas, “You ain’t got no CAPITAL, you get PUNISHED,” and don’t expect any mercy or legal exactitude from the Supreme Court.

“If it leans any more to the right, it’ll fall over…They got you in here, they got you GOOD.”

The film throws flashbacks with contradictory accounts of the fire (witnesses, experts, Willingham’s own) at us, and O’Connell nicely suggests mystery in the man himself. Did he do it? Is his guilt related to something less criminal? Is he just playing the playwright lady who is pretty much his only visitor?

Dern brings another version of steel (spined) magnolia empathy to Gilbert, charming when she needs to be, brittle when she forgets herself, not so tough she can’t be threatened by people who know there were Texas shortcuts taken in this case that would burn it to the ground.

I kept thinking of the contortions of Italian justice in the various screen investigations of the Amanda Knox case, where as with Willingham, how the defendant reacted to a death seemed to be all the proof the prosecutors needed. There’s a little Italian ineptitude and outright flim-flammery in an awful lot of American courtrooms, cases like this one remind us.

But that’s what happens when a movie dawdles along the way “Trial by Fire” does. Your mind wanders, fills in the dead spots where “filler” is what we’re seeing on the screen. A vigorous re-edit would have spared us that.

As it is, “Trial by Fire” finds its “Dead Man Walking” heart only after Dern shows up, and only hits its tension-building sweet spot as the “ticking clock” of impending execution winds down. It’s a sermon with too much preamble and a big finish, with some rough-edged nap time tucked in between.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, some violence, disturbing images, sexual material and brief nudity

Cast: Jack O’Connell, Laura Dern, Emily Meade, Jeff Perry, Chris Coy and Jade Pettyjohn

Credits: Directed by Edward Zwick, script by Geoffrey Fletcher. A Roadside Attractions release.

Running time: 2:07

Here we go, QT exiting directing with a bang?

I cannot tell what this is going to be like from the trailers. It could go either way.

Could be “Dumbo,” could be “Beauty and the Beast” in the real of love action Disney remakes. Or “Jungle Book,” which was more down the middle.

The set up is as old as Hemingway’s “To Have and Have.”

A tropical island fisherman, down on his luck, turns to a more desperate use for his boat.

“Cargo” is a human trafficking melodrama set in the Bahamas, with Haitian refugees taking on the title role.

Writer-director Kareem J. Mortimer gives us a taste of island flavor, a dose of the racism/classism that kicks into high gear whenever a lot of immigrants shows up.

But it’s a slow moving thriller, spiraling into a grimness that allows for no heroics, no nobility, just the desperate struggling with the more desperate in situations that turn from bleak to dire, all of it scored with dialogue that hits “hackneyed” far too often for its own good.

Kevin (British actor Warren Brown, best known for co-starring in “Luther”) is the fisherman, unable to pay his mate (Omar J. Dorsey), ineptly filleting under-sized snapper after the latest failed trip.

He’s in the hole, with a nice house where his beautiful but sullen wife (Persia White) hides out, basically in shame, refusing to care for his demented mother. And the biggest expense is his tweenage son’s private school tuition. Because Kevin went to a private school and figures he owes the boy “at least as much a chance” as he had.

His chance, we’re teased, was probably in the past. He got them all stateside, and screwed up royally once there.

“Am I the worst thing that ever happened to you?”

“Yes. The worst…I married ‘less.'”

She has a grievance, a BIG one.

Now, he’s gambling away his little ready cash in a desperate attempt to get even.

Celianne (Gessica Geneus) has a boy of her own, a Haitian single-mom longing to save up enough to get them to Miami, where her mother has relocated. Waitressing is the only gig she can land, and she takes abuse from the Native Bahamian who owns the joint just to keep that job.

Kevin’s offered the chance to do a little work for “The Major” (Craig Pinder, sporting the most authentic accent in the movie). Human trafficking?

“Dat sounds sinister…I’m not in the slave trade. I provide a service. I prefer to call it ‘de transpor-TATION business.'”

All Kevin has to do is take small boatloads of Haitians from Nassau to “The Berrys” (small, less developed Bahamian islands) where faster boats will shuttle them to Florida.

Easy money, right? Sure.

Mortimer, who specializes in tales with this setting (2010’s “Children of God”) gives us just enough of that local color to give “Cargo” a sense of place.

But he’s basically telling the wrong end of the story, the least interesting and most cliched “white gambler in trouble and cheating on his wife” tale. And he takes forever to get down to it.

The English dialogue (the film is in English and Creole) practically groans with cliches – “Maybe I’ll get lucky.” “I’ve always been there for you, right? As long as your daddy has breath in him, I’ll work it out…I’ll protect you.”

This extends to Kevin’s dealings with the waitress whose life he takes an interest in and his extremely patriarchal treatment of her.

We see far too little of Celianne’s story, figure out only bits and pieces of her life and cannot fathom why she’d tumble for the handsome white fisherman with no apparent means of improving her and her little boy’s lots.

A Jamaican maid (Sky Nicole Grey, good) comes in further complicating matters, joining Kevin’s mother and other “passengers” — not necessarily satisfied with his or the screenplay’s service.

All the while, our “hero” is scrambling to pay the damned private school tuition so that his bi-racial kid can enjoy the white privilege he himself, “a white man in this country,” has had and squandered.

The Major has almost all of the best lines, and they feel improvised — as if the actor was helping out a writer-director who’s only seen movies and listened to the dialogue in them (a common problem with greener filmmakers).

“So, now you is the Jesus Christ of human smugglers! If you play with puppy, he lick you mouth!”

We’re treated to a few lovely shots beneath the gin-clear waters of the Bahamas and a LOT of scenes of Kevin haggling with his bank, with the private school’s bursar, ambling around in his late model Mercedes station wagon, “helping” this or that Bahamian or Haitian, just shocked when his “help” isn’t appreciated, or competent.

“You can tell someone is sincere by the look in their eye!”

Maybe you can. And you can tell a tin-eared screenwriter by her or his leaning on such lines to make his rambling, disjointed and too-often dull melodrama make sense.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, nudity

Cast: Warren Brown, Gessica Geneus, Omar J. Dorsey, Persia White, Jamie Donnelly, Sky Nicole Grey, Jimmy Jean Louis

Credits: Written and directed by Kareem J. Mortimer. An Uncork’d Release

Running time: 1:52

Yup, a near $60 million opening for the third film in the franchise, not the best movie of the three, and the green light is lit. The brand is the thing, and Keanu and John Wick are a bramd growing in value.

Here’s Variety on the announcement that confirms Keanu’s threat to keep making these as long as people keep buying tickets.

https://variety.com/2019/film/news/john-wick-4-summer-2021-lionsgate-1203221620/

Focus Features has this on deck for fall, Sept. 20 to be exact.

Everybody who is anybody in the series (pretty much) is here.

Will “Downton Abbey” get the PBS “Masterpiece” set out of the house and into theaters?