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Ralph Breaks the Internet

by Christie Robb

Movies with an abundance of pop-culture references run the risk of dating themselves well before they’re released. Ralph (John C. Reilly) and Vanellope (Sarah Silverman) from 2012’s Wreck-It-Ralph stride directly into that potential minefield.

The film opens as playable racer Princess Vanellope von Schweetz has an existential crisis wondering if there is more to life than looping the same levels of her game, Sugar Rush, every day and drinking root beers with Ralph at Tappers every night. When her hero inadvertently breaks her game, the duo head off into the internet in search of the part they need to fix Sugar Rush and secure Vanellope’s monotonous future at the Litwack Family Fun Center & Arcade.

And, it’s…fine, I guess.

Flocks of blue Twitter birds soar over Google’s skyscraper and Amazon’s distribution center. Folks with signs pop up, baiting others to click on their content. There’s a search bar that’s kind of an actual bar, and there’s a whole Snapchat area off in the distance. But the film has none of the bonkers creativity of Sausage Fest’s imagined grocery store and more or less comes off as designed by an intercompany team of Silicon Valley marketing executives.

A fundamental misunderstanding about how eBay works results in Ralph and Vanellope needing to come up with $27,001 for the part they need. Now it’s a question of how they get rich quick on the Internet.

This leads to Vanellope’s discovery of Slaughter Race, a gritty, open world driving game a la Grand Theft Auto that becomes her happy place. And Ralph becomes needy, clingy, and self-destructive, refusing to let his best friend move on as he hustles for cash by making viral videos on a site called BuzzTube. This part drags as it trots out references to past time wasters like Chewbacca Mom, hot pepper challenges, and screaming goats.

Honestly, easily the best part of the movie is when Vanellope wanders over to the Disney website and hobnobs with the princesses while evading some Stormtroopers. It’s 10 minutes of Disney patting itself on the back for its ownership of a ludicrous amount of intellectual property. But it’s fun, creative, and silly in a way the rest of Ralph Breaks the Internet is not.

There’s a much better movie here that I hope is in the works.

What we get with Ralph is a pretty movie with some great voice acting that’s got enough detail in the background to make you smile. But it’s the kind of amusement you’ll probably forget about soon enough, like planking, Keyboard Cat, or Doge memes.

 

 

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Cheap Tricks

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Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindewald

by Hope Madden

People really miss Harry Potter.

Maybe they miss the romantic notion of outsiders among outsiders, or the oh-so-earnest world of good versus evil. J.K. Rowling enchanted a generation with a densely populated world of magic and mayhem and an awful lot of people long to go back. So many, in fact, that they will mostly settle for the sloppy bastard Fantastic Beast series.

It is still Rowling’s words, after all—the author pens the screenplays, inviting us back into that wizarding world, albeit about a generation or two earlier.

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindewald picks up six months after its blandly likeable predecessor, 2016’s Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Odd duck Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) is banned from international travel by the Ministry of Magic. Grindewald (Johnny Depp) is in prison. Credence Barebone (Ezra Miller)—who conveniently survived what was clearly his death in the previous effort—wants to know who he is and where he belongs.

The second installment opens well, offering more vitality, thrill and sinister mayhem than you’ll find in its predecessor’s full 133 minutes.

Redmayne is as adorable as last time. Depp brings something seductively sinister to the role. And Rowling’s clear distaste for leaders who bang the drum for racial supremacy and fear mongering is both understandable and nicely executed.

David Yates returns to direct his sixth Potter-verse flick. He finds opportunities for the visual flourish that was the only true strength of the first Fantastic Beasts film, but manages far stronger narrative momentum this time around.

All of which really only leads to the frustration of realizing at the 134-minute mark that this film doesn’t end. In fact, the last scene is basically the beginning of the movie. The 130- minutes previous basically amounts to exposition that sets up the next film.

Which is funny, since the previous entire film amounts to little more than a preface to an actual narrative.

Characters are quirky, wardrobe is glorious, Ezra Miller broods well—all of which is a lot of what we’ve already seen. What Grindewald doesn’t offer is anything new, or any reason to care.

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Write What You Know

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Instant Family

by George Wolf

The comedy output of writer/director Sean Anders has ranged from decent (Hot Tub Time Machine, We’re the Millers) to disaster (That’s My Boy, Daddy’s Home 2). His latest works as well as it does thanks to leaning more on heart than humor.

That’s most likely because Anders is telling much of his own story here, and a warm authenticity buoys even the film’s most ridiculous moments.

Mark Wahlberg and Rose Byrne are Pete and Ellie Wagner, a California couple who run a home renovation business and remain undecided about having children. A flippant remark from Pete leads Ellie to investigate foster parenting, which then leads to three young siblings moving in.

There is, to put it mildly, an adjustment period.

Yes, Anders’s parallel of renovating homes and families is plenty obvious, but it goes down easier with his commitment to sincerity about an important topic. The film doesn’t shy away from pointing out the difficult aspects to foster parenting, utilizing an odd-couple pair of case workers (Octavia Spencer and Tig Notaro, playing nicely off each other) as an effectively organic vessel for reminding us that “things that matter are hard.”

The laugh quotient rarely rises above a good chuckle, and you can expect some obligatory music montages and family comedy trappings, but some well-drawn characters and a likable cast keep that sizable heart beating.

Byrne continues to show the timing of a comedy MVP, Wahlberg seems more comfortable with the genre than usual, and Margo Martindale breezes in with memorable support as Grandma Sandy, but Anders, speaking from experience, makes sure to remember it’s about the kids.

He doesn’t use children just to be cute (although they are), but as real characters at the core of this arc. This is especially true of oldest sibling Lizzy, thanks to the standout performance from Isabela Moner (Sicario 2), a true young talent.

Always more fuzzy than consistently funny, Instant Family offers plenty of good feels backed up with some lived-in comfortability.

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Moral Inventory

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Boy Erased

by George Wolf

I don’t know if Lucas Hedges and Timothee Chalamet are up on tennis history, but lately they’ve had a nice little Borg/McEnroe thing going. Close in both age and film credits, the last few years have seen them serve and volley with increasingly impressive performances.

Just weeks after Chalamet’s astounding turn in Beautiful Boy, Hedges joins him as a likely Oscar nominee with an intensely intimate performance in Boy Erased, a touching and vital account of one young man’s trip through “conversion therapy.”

Based on Garrard Conley’s 2016 memoir, it’s a film that also solidifies Joel Edgerton’s skills as both an actor and filmmaker, one able to balance a complicated, troubling subject with grace and understanding.

Hedges channels Conley as Jared Eamons, an Arkansas high school senior struggling with his sexual identity. Already in the Bible Belt, Jared feels even more pressure to conform from his father’s (a terrific Russel Crowe) status as a pastor and soon-to-be ordained minister in the local Baptist church. Once Jared is forced to admit his feelings for men, church elders recommend a conversion therapy program led by Mr. Sykes (Edgerton).

Amid flashbacks to Jared’s path toward confessing his feelings, Hedges makes all the confusion feel heart-breakingly real. Jared, facing a strictly conservative community and the chance his parents may disown him, enters The Refuge Program with a sincere commitment to become the person everyone else wants him to be. There is a quiet war stirring in Jared as he takes his “moral inventory”, and Hedges is able to make him a sympathetic soul screaming for release via a restrained, beautifully insightful turn.

Edgerton, who also wrote the screenplay, shows us Jared’s eyes being opened through gradual episodes that resist any urge to demonize. Small choices, such as the way he frames a prayer circle at the dinner table or one wonderful scene between Jared and his family doctor (the always welcome Cherry Jones) show Edgerton’s respect for the fragility of reminding us that beyond the rhetoric of hot button issues are real lives being lived.

Jared’s father and mother (Nicole Kidman, also award-worthy) are not portrayed as villains, but rather as parents making choices based on the information they had at the time. The ways that both the information and the parents change acknowledges the religion/science debate without soapboxes, keeping the film’s viewpoint wisely intimate.

It is precisely this intimacy that fuels the film’s resonance, as one family’s story becomes a vessel for greater understanding. That’s no small achievement, and Boy Erased is no small triumph.

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Screening Room: Whos, Whys, Webs, and…What’s In the Basement?

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Join us in the screening room as we rate The Grinch, Girl in the Spider’s Web, Overlord, Can You Ever Forgive Me? and everything new in home entertainment.

Listen to the full podcast HERE.

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Call of Duty

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Overlord

by Hope Madden

Perhaps you don’t know this, but Nazi zombies have a horror genre unto themselves: Shock Waves, Zombie Lake, Dead Snow, Dead Snow 2, Blood Creek. Well, there’s a new Nazi Zombie Sheriff in town, and he is effing glorious.

Overlord drops us into enemy territory on D-Day. One rag tag group of American soldiers needs to disable the radio tower the Nazis have set up on top of a rural French church, disabling Nazi communications and allowing our guys to land safely.

What’s on the church tower is not so much the problem. It’s what’s in the basement.

Director Julius Avery stays true to the war film vibe. Though clearly Overlord lacks the scope of something like Saving Private Ryan, visceral scenes of war set the stage for a film about the monstrosity lurking inside man.

He’s aided immeasurably by two writers with a knack for tales of endurance. Billy Ray’s career is littered with tense political thrillers, and his co-scribe Mark L. Smith wrote The Revenant, for Lord’s sake. He knows how to put a man through some shit.

The fellas find cover in the home of a sympathetic French woman (Mathilde Olivier) and plot their next move. Too bad it’s in that church basement.

Pilou Asbaek offers another excellent performance, this time as the Nazi commander. He drips sinister and looks enough like a handsome Michael Shannon to terrify even when he’s not speaking.

All the performances are strong, and character arcs feel fresh even though you know—if you have ever seen a war movie—how they will progress. Because this is a war movie, but war is hell and hell is horror.

Avery creates the same kind of desperate tension you’d expect from a suicide mission, and when the tables turn and we’re suddenly inside some kind of filthy mad scientist horror, the film doesn’t lose a step.

Suddenly, through Avery’s eyes and the horrified reactions of our heroes, we see how easily not only war movies but Marvel comic book films can cross the line to blood chilling horror.

A satisfying Good V Evil film that benefits from layers, Overlord reminds us repeatedly that it is possible to retain your humanity, even in the face of inhuman evil.

Plus, Nazi zombies, which is never not awesome!

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Salander. Lisbeth Salander.

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The Girl in the Spider’s Web: A New Dragon Tattoo Story

by George Wolf

This far along, it’s no surprise some freshness has wilted from the Lisbeth Salander franchise. But now, as the fourth book in Steig Larsson’s “Millennium” series makes it to the multiplex, some of its identity seems to be slipping away as well.

Claire Foy hops on the speed bike as the latest Lisbeth, Stockholm’s most infamous hacker/vigilante/all around badass. Her latest impossible mission is to recover a top secret computer program known as Firefall.

Developed by a weirdly tall code wizard (Stephen Merchant), the program can breach all missile defense systems and put them under the control of a single user. Though the program can’t be copied, it can be moved, and when the Americans steal it, Lisbeth is contracted to steal it back.

The job comes with plenty of attempts on her life and open wounds from the past, and as Lisbeth is pursued across Sweden by a Washington NSA agent (Lakeith Stanfield), her old pal Blomkvist (Sverrir Gudnason) tries to help sort it all out.

Director/co-writer Fede Alvarez (Don’t Breathe, Evil Dead) trades the cold, sterile atmospherics that marked the previous films for a more standard thriller tone. Despite a few nifty sleights of hand, the film always seems to be working from another’s playbook.

It’s less grisly, less ambitious and more comfortable settling for overly convenient plot turns and painting the female action hero in more of a male fantasy world. Salander has been an anti-Bond since book one, making this shift particularly disappointing.

For her part, Foy is a serviceable Salander but more of a blank slate. While Noomi Repace brought more instant menace and Rooney Mara more mystery, Foy can’t define her turn much beyond hurtful stares and beatdowns.

Spider’s Web is always watchable, and engaging enough to keep you invested. But Lisbeth became memorable by being uniquely compelling, not merely satisfactory.

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Exile in Whyville

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The Grinch

by George Wolf

Before we get to the Whos, let’s consider the Whys.

Is it too much of a GOML (Get Off My Lawn) moment to ask why, beyond the obvious cash grab, The Grinch has to be redone? The original, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, is 25 minutes of perfection, an animated TV classic that was already the subject of a charmless live action update for the big screens of nearly 20 years ago.

Now we’re back to animation, and facing the same quandary.

How do you add an hour of narrative that is more than just filler, substantial enough to not dilute what made the original work so simply joyous, so universally touching?

In 2009, Spike Jonze showed it can be done, delivering a wondrous and emotional take on Where the Wild Things Are.

But in this latest re-imagining of The Grinch, what writer Michael LeSieur and Tommy Swerdlow giveth only ends up taking away.

We’re still told the heart of Mr. Grinch (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch) is two sizes too small, yet we’re given a new backstory for additional explanation as to why he hates Christmas so much.

His heart is two sizes too small, didn’t you hear? That’s the reason! Well, it should be, but then we see the Grinch do little acts of kindness for his dog Max and some other creatures, meaning the whole idea of Mr. Grinch being such an unpleasant misanthrope (and thus the impact of the story’s entire resolution) is compromised early.

The narration (courtesy of Pharrell Williams) includes some of the delightful Dr. Suess wordplay from 1966, plus some fresh attempts to imitate it that, as you might guess, stand out like a ten dollar Rolex. Mr. Grinch’s ultimate change of holiday heart doesn’t fare much better, as he and Cindy Lou Who (The Greatest Showman‘s Cameron Seely) spend ample time hammering home a message that, while still welcome, shouldn’t require that much force.

Directors Yarrow Cheney and Scott Mosier craft a few giddy sequences set among the snowy terrain of Whoville, and SNL’s Kenan Thompson squeezes as much humor as he can from his role as the Mean One’s erstwhile “best friend,” but for anyone hoping to recapture the magic of a holiday standard, The Grinch is nearly as empty as Cindy Lou’s living room on Christmas morn.

 

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Rock You They Will

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Bohemian Rhapsody

by George Wolf

After several false stars and a midstream director change, the long-awaited Queen/Freddie Mercury biopic lands as a celebration of one legendary band and one bravura performance.

Rami Malek is a certified powerhouse as Mercury, the former Farrokh Buisara, the uniquely gifted performer and iconic presence who became of rock’s most enduring frontmen.

Mercury’s extravagant persona lent itself to caricature, but Malek has none of it. His is a true characterization, eerily mirroring the singer’s appearance, elegance, movements and, with help from both original Queen music and Mercury soundalike Marc Martel, his incredible voice.

Malek’s performance stands out all the more from the void left by Queen’s surviving band members. As executive producers, they’ve whitewashed themselves into more reaction shots and less actual human beings.

It’s one of several ways the film plays it safe and settles for a crowd-pleasing greatest hits package. Directors Bryan Singer and an uncredited Dexter Fletcher work wonders with the performance pieces (the thrilling recreation of Live Aid is worth paying for IMAX), but soften the sharp edges of rock hedonism enough for a PG-13 rating. And rock and roll ain’t PG-13.

The biggest missed chance comes in the relationship between Mercury and his muse for the song “Love of My Life,” Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton). From their first scenes together, Malek and Boynton fuel the emotional core of the film, creating an absence felt whenever screenwriter Anthony McCarten (Darkest Hours) broadens the focus, which is often.

Factual liberties are taken, timelines are sometimes carelessly misrepresented (“We Will Rock You” was not written in the 80s), and there’s a totally needless gag from Mike Myers, but whenever Bohemian Rhapsody is most unsteady, Queen’s music is there for a bailout.

It’s still great. And so is Malek.

 

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Dance Macabre

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Suspiria

by George Wolf

Seventies horror has had a damn good month.

Just weeks after David Gordon Green gave 1978’s Halloween the sequel it deserved, director Luca Guadagnino re-imagines 1977’s giallo classic Suspiria as a gorgeous rumination on the horror of being haunted by echoes of your past.

Wait, wasn’t the original about witches?

It still is, more than ever. Guadagnino and screenwriter David Kajganich (True Story, A Bigger Splash, the upcoming Pet Sematary remake) remove the guesswork about the dance academy coven in favor of a narrative much more layered, meaningful and bloody.

The building blocks remain the same. It is 1977 in “a divided Berlin,” when American Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson, nicely moving the character from naivete to complexity) arrives for an audition with a world-renowned dance company run by Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton, mesmerizing). Susie impresses immediately, and is soon given the lead in the company’s next production.

This “cover version” (The Tilda’s phrase, and valid) of Argento’s original lifts the veil on the academy elders early, via the diaries of Patricia (Chloe Moretz), a dancer who has fled the troupe in fear. While whispers paint Patricia as a radical member of the anti-fascist Red Army Faction, she tells psychotherapist Dr. Josef Kiemperer (also The Tilda, under impressive makeup) wild tales of witches and their shocking plans.

Guadagnino continues to be a master film craftsman. Much as he draped Call Me by Your Name in waves of dreamy romance, here he establishes a consistent mood of nightmarish goth. Macabre visions dart in and out like a video that will kill you in 7 days while sudden, extreme zooms, precise sound design and a vivid score from Thom Yorke help cement the homage to another era.

But even when this new Suspiria is tipping its hat, Guadagnino leaves no doubt he is making his own confident statement. The color scheme is intentionally muted, and you’ll find no men in this dance troupe, serving immediate notice that superficialities are not the endgame here.

Guadagnino’s stated goal of “de-victimizing” women in this film shows early and often. They move in strong solidarity both onstage and off, dancing with a hypnotic power capable of deadly results. In fact, most of the male characters here are mere playthings under the spell of powerful women, which takes a deliciously ironic swipe at witch lore as it creates a compelling bookend to what’s going on away from the dance academy.

Dr. Kiemperer, still searching for his wife missing since the end of WWII, becomes a personal illustration of Germany’s struggle with its Nazi legacy. When paired with Patricia’s rumored involvement in the “German Autumn” uprising of ’77, we get two important pillars of an epilogue that, admittedly, some may find a head-scratching overreach.

But after the finale that precedes that epilogue, the bigger problem may be breath-catching. A glorious celebration of the grotesque, it explodes into a cathartic mix of Ken Russell’s The Devils and GOT‘s Red Wedding that more than affirms the film’s intense, obsessive build. Guadagnino has thrown so much at us, he knows we deserve a payoff and damn, he delivers one.

It cements a vision of Suspiria that’s as ambitious and it is uncompromising, one that explores different definitions of horror while ultimately delivering more outright shocks and shivers than Argento ever attempted. Who knew a silly witch story could support so much mind-fuckery?

His name is Luca.