It’s like an end-of-summer fire sale this week. So many movies! All available to watch from the couch in unwashed yoga pants and Alf tee shirts. I mean, that’s how we imagine you watching these, but really, wear whatever you want. The important thing is to let us help you decide where to spend your valuable time.
Click the movie titles for the full review.
Hey, friends of puppetry! What did we think about the Melissa McCarthy puppetmania that is The Happytime Murders? How about Charlie Hunnam’s Pappilon remake? And did you hear the dish on all those Hollywood celebrities? If not, you clearly haven’t seen Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood, but we did and we’ll tell you what we thought about those three flicks plus all that’s fit to watch in new home entertainment.
Check out the Screening Room podcast HERE.
by Hope Madden
Do you like Melissa McCarthy? Foul language?
How do you feel about puppet ejaculate?
You should probably be comfortable with at least two of the three if you’re considering seeing The Happytime Murders.
In a Who Framed Roger Rabbitt? vein, The Happytime Murders serves up a noir that exists in a town where flesh-and-blood humans co-exist with fantasy – in this case, puppets. Not Kermit, though. Not Big Bird, either.
No, like most noirs, the film lives on the seedier side of town, so we meet puppets with problems—sex addicts, porno freaks, folks with a mean jones for a sugar fix. The type of cat who’d perform a Continental Hot Sock for just fifty cents.
Continental Hot Sock—how great is that name?
Disgraced cop turned private investigator Phil Philips (Bill Barretta, longtime Muppet voice of Pepe the King Prawn, Rowlf the Dog, The Swedish Chef and others) re-teams with his old partner, Det. Edwards (McCarthy), to solve a string of puppet murders.
The case smells like rotten cotton.
McCarthy interacts as believably with puppets as she ever did with Sandra Bullock, and Todd Berger’s script takes excellent advantage of her whip-smart profanity maneuvering.
Not every joke lands. In fact, too many fall entirely flat and far too much time is spent cursing simply to curse. But there are also some spit-take laughs. McCarthy delivers several, and the always glorious Maya Rudolph is responsible for many others.
There is an underlying commentary in Happytime Murders that can be read as a take on systemic racism, or as a note on the underappreciation of puppetry as an art form. Or both? Systemic racism as a metaphor for marginalized puppeteers feels a little tone deaf, but the filmmakers aren’t trying to make the audience comfortable and Happytime Murders is not one for nuance.
The film is raunchy. It amounts to 90 minutes of profane, DNA-spewing nastiness with very little story to redeem it. I’m pretty sure that’s the point.
Director and puppeteer royalty Brian Henson, son of Jim and filmmaker behind The Muppet Christmas Carol and Muppet Treasure Island, spares no one as he spits in the eye of the family film that’s been his family legacy.
Actually, that may not be spit.
by Brandon Thomas
Hollywood has always been about vanity, secrets and fiction. It’s an industry filled with people who make a living pretending to be someone else. Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood tells a tale of men and women who led fictional personal lives too.
After his service in World War II, Midwest transplant Scotty Bowers lands a job at a busy gas station on Hollywood Blvd. It’s here where Scotty meets his first secretly gay Hollywood celebrity: Walter Pidgeon (Forbidden Planet). This meeting—and subsequent sexual encounter—opens Bowers’s eyes to a large community of closeted gay actors and actresses. He wants to give them a place to meet one another…and to make a buck in the process. Through his likability and ability to find sexy, young men and women, Bowers cements his place among the Hollywood elite.
During his tenure as “Pimp to the Stars,” Bowers finds himself setting up rendezvous for more than just famous actors and directors, as business tycoons also knew of his reputation. Bowers also attracts the attention of British royalty. Through it all, Scotty Bowers claims to only want one thing: to make people happy.
Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood could’ve easily turned into one big tell-all (and there are some revelations that I didn’t know), but director Matt Tyrnauer wisely keeps the focus squarely on Bowers himself. Scotty Bowers isn’t the flamboyant center of attention you’d expect. Instead, we’re shown a 95-year-old hoarder who spends most of his free time cruising the streets looking for junk he can load into one of his many homes.
The film wisely doesn’t rely on talking heads to fill in the gaps of the story. There’s the occasional interview with a Hollywood player like Peter Bart (former editor of Variety) or one of Scotty’s “boys,” but the bulk of the movie is composed of Scotty’s interactions with these people. Tyrnauer strives to show how Bowers continues to make connections with people, even though gay culture in Hollywood has become mainstream.
Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood is a celebration of sexual freedom. The feel-good nature of the film is a byproduct of who Bowers is as a person. He claims he only wanted to make people happy—and he meant it.
Hey! The actual movies mainly suck now, so why not stay home? Well, sir, here are two fine reasons to do just that.
Ahoy! This we talk through the pros and cons (mostly cons) of The Meg, as well as (mostly pros) BlackKklansman and (entirely cons) The Slenderman. We also run through what’s worth it and what’s not in home entertainment.
Check out the full podcast HERE.
by Christie Robb
Visually stunning, but emotionally monotonous, Alpha seems like a planetarium show scaled up to feature length, given a sketch of a plot to justify shots of a human staring up at the firmament and trudging through various majestic terrains.
Set 20,000 years ago in Europe, a hesitant young man, Keda (Kodi Smit-McPhee), sets out on his first hunt with the goal of making his dad proud. But when one of the beasts fights back, Keda takes a header off a cliff and is left for dead.
What follows is his somewhat preposterous journey to get back to his settlement.
It’s a little bit Cast Away, a little bit 127 Hours, with wide, sweeping shots of Keda’s journey that are very reminiscent of iconic scenes from the Lord of the Rings movies.
And there are glorious vistas to enjoy, any number of which would make a fantastic desktop picture for your work computer. But to properly enjoy it, you kind of have to turn the thinking part of your brain off. (At least a little bit. You still have to be able to read the subtitles to parse the Neanderthal language being spoken.)
For example, the hunting ground presumably is close enough to Keda’s settlement to allow the hunters to bring back the spoils before they, you know…spoil. And yet, on the way home, Keda climbs a few mountains, treks through a dessert, passes a swamp, skirts a volcano, and grows a delightfully thin adolescent mustache. For quite a time, he is doing this on a recently dislocated ankle and while carrying a full grown wolf.
Cause, oh yeah, he’s got a wolf buddy who he basically domesticates on the way home.
Billed as the heart of the story, Keda’s relationship with Alpha the wolf supposedly “shines a light on the origins of man’s best friend.” Given this, I was expecting the relationship to have a certain amount of complexity and emotional give and take. But this falls flat. The domestication happens so easily that it seems inevitable. I’ve adopted dogs that were harder to train. And despite the harsh environment and the occasional menacing hyenas, at no point do Keda and Alpha seem in any ultimate danger.
All, in all, Alpha would probably be best viewed if you’re jonesing for an easy visual escape or if you want inspiration for upgrading your winter wardrobe. Cause those suspiciously healthy-looking folks eking out their existence during an Ice Age have some beautifully made clothes. Now, I’m off to search for a pair of leather pants online.
by Matt Weiner
Equal parts John le Carré and John Carpenter if both men were lobotomized and then let loose with typewriter and camera, Mile 22 spends most of its brief running time trying to figure out if it has something meaningful to say. All the while, it stacks a public body count up so high that it’s impossible to see how the clandestine force responsible is going to stay secret long enough to become a film franchise.
And while the movie has ambitions at creating new intellectual property around the paramilitary Overwatch program introduced in the film, it’s a bit of a head fake for this first outing. For all its spy vs. spy setup and technobabble, director Peter Berg uses espionage as window dressing for a simple action setup that’s all about brute force.
Mark Wahlberg heads up the CIA team as James Silva, a prickly leader whose instability is used as a stand-in for self-effacing humor. Silva’s team springs into action when a local source Li Noor (Iko Uwais) surrenders to a U.S. Embassy claiming to have information that can help stop a nuclear attack. Silva’s team of elite operatives are tasked with escorting Noor safely out of the country, which becomes a lethal mission when Noor’s own intelligence agency works to stop the extraction at any cost.
To call Silva’s team ragtag would do a disservice to stereotype—it actually would’ve been nice if anybody rose to some level of quirkiness, or any distinction apart from fungible cannon fodder. Ronda Rousey comes close to having a compelling hook, which is: look, it’s Ronda Rousey! But the main emotional labor falls to The Walking Dead star Lauren Kerr as Alice, whose defining character trait is that she has a daughter waiting for her back home.
Thankfully, the team—and the film—have a secret weapon in Uwais. The Indonesian martial artist and choreographer best known for The Raid series gets to show off his captivating fighting style that’s a ballet of bone dislocation. The downside is that he goes underused for so long that his breakout set pieces serve mainly as a reminder that you’d be better off watching The Raid.
There’s a ludicrous nihilism underpinning the film that is almost refreshing for a Berg/Wahlberg pairing. But the script (written by Lea Carpenter) is so humorless it’s genuinely difficult to make out how much of this is Berg and company trying to make a statement about the War on Terror and how much is just the inevitable byproduct of a tight 90-minute cut that only comes alive during the brutal one-on-one fight scenes. John Malkovich’s arch turn as an anonymous and ultimately meaningless government agent, for example, is far more vital—and still relevant—under the direction of the Coen brothers in Burn After Reading than it is here, even though the two roles share an uncanny echo.
Mile 22 doesn’t offer up much replay value as anything more than a fun but forgettable live-action video game level. Although as far as meta-commentary on espionage thrillers goes, this strange blend of individualism and irrelevance might be all we have to look forward to for a while.
by Rachel Willis
When Nick Young (Henry Golding) asks Rachel Chu (Constance Wu) to be his date to a wedding in Singapore, she expects a nice, but simple trip to her boyfriend’s home. She’ll meet his family, and they’ll take an important step forward in their relationship. It’s what Rachel doesn’t know – that Nick is a member of a family known as “Singapore royalty” – that sets up the comedy and drama of Crazy Rich Asians.
Director Jon M. Chu’s adaptation of Kevin Kwan’s novel is an entertaining look at the culture clash that happens when Rachel attempts to fit in with Nick’s family.
“Crazy rich” is an accurate descriptor for Nick’s family and their class of friends. Born and raised in New York by a single, working mother, Rachel isn’t prepared for the ostentatious wealth that surrounds Nick’s family. Though proud of her life and career – economics professor at NYU – she realizes that she’s seen as an unremarkable outsider in this world of wealth and power, especially by Nick’s mother, Eleanor (Michelle Yeoh – outstanding as always). Efforts to sabotage their relationship begin before Rachel even leaves New York.
There are a lot of characters in the movie. Too many, really, and the important side characters suffer a lack of necessary development. A second narrative thread involving Nick’s cousin, Astrid (Gemma Chan), and her husband, Michael (Pierre Png), never hits the stride it deserves.
But there’s a lot to like about the movie. Nick and Rachel rank among the best – and most realistic – rom-com couples. As Rachel’s friend Peik Lin, Awkwafina provides the film’s funniest moments. She’s also the dose of reality Rachel needs when dealing with the crazy rich. And despite being 120 minutes, long for a romantic comedy, the film never drags.
Crazy Rich Asians is the kind of fluffy, fun, romantic summer fare that will leave almost everyone satisfied.
by Rachel Willis
The life of iconic fashion designer Alexander McQueen is the subject of director Ian Bonhôte’s documentary, McQueen. With writer and co-director Peter Ettedgui, Bonhôte creates a richly artistic dive into the controversial designer’s life and art.
Dividing his portrait into sections, Bonhôte uses home videos, archival footage, interviews with family and friends, and scenes from the catwalk to highlight McQueen’s unique—and oftentimes controversial—work.
As Bonhôte highlights with sensitivity and warmth throughout the film, fashion is an expression of McQueen’s experiences. It’s clear McQueen puts his feelings into his designs, and his collections become deeply personal. “I would go to the far reaches of my dark side and pull these horrors out of my soul and put them on the catwalk,” he says of his art.
The fondness with which people speak of McQueen in the documentary’s many interviews offers a picture of someone who made an impact beyond his creative output. His friends, many of whom were part of his design team, speak of the dedication and drive behind his designs. There is a love for McQueen that shines throughout the film.
However, the darkness in McQueen, at first kept to the catwalk, begins to come through in his personal life. As his success grows, the energy behind his work grows darker. Some of his long-time collaborators end their working relationship with him, something he takes personally. For McQueen, there was no such thing as a work-life balance.
It’s clear through the course of the film that the world of haute couture is a stressful one, and no one seemed to take on more than McQueen. In an interview, he mentions assembling 14 collections a year. It’s a staggering number given how much time, energy, and effort must go into each piece of clothing, not to mention the hair, makeup, and set design that made up McQueen’s unique and stunning exhibitions. What’s unclear is if McQueen’s inner turmoil drove him to work nonstop or if it was the work that fueled his inner chaos.
Bonhôte and Ettedgui produce a mesmerizing narrative. From McQueen’s early apprenticeships with tailors to his meteoric rise as one of the most sought-after designers, the filmmakers cultivate an interest in a subject that many may be unfamiliar with. They highlight the art in fashion design, utilizing footage from many of McQueen’s collections to show this artistry.
Coupling the fashion world and McQueen’s creativity with a captivating score, the documentary pulls the viewer in from the first moment and never lets go. It’s a fascinating, compassionate portrait of an imaginative genius.
