Whew! That is a lot of movies. We will talk you through all of them: Shazam!, Pet Sematary, The Best of Enemies, The Public, The Wind, The Aftermath and Diane—plus all that’s fit to watch in new home entertainment.
Listen to the full podcast HERE.
Tag Archives: George Wolf
Word Up or Nerd Up
Shazam!
by George Wolf
To paraphrase a classic segment from the old Letterman show: Can a guy in a supersuit get into a strip club?
Easily, which is pretty exciting for the teenage boy inside the super man inside the suit. And it’s just one example of the irreverent vibe Shazam! rides to bring home one of the most fun origin stories in recent memory.
The teenage boy is Billy Batson (Asher Angel), who’s just been placed in the latest of a string of foster homes. Just as he’s getting to know his foster family, including the superhero-crazed Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer from IT, impressive again), Billy is chosen to replace the aging Wizard Shazam (Djimon Hounsou) as protector of the Realms, bringing a youthful energy that will ensure the Seven Deadly Sin-Monsters cannot assume Earthly forms.
The super-villainous Dr. Thaddeus Silva (Mark Strong, gloriously slimy) does not approve, and vows to defeat the new Shazam (Zachary Levi) and assume all his powers.
So it’s on!
But first, Billy and Freddy have to find out just what superpowers are brought on by saying that magic word, which sets up a series of amusing tests and is the springboard for getting to know this grown up superboy while he mulls over possible super names.
“Thundercrack?” “No! That sounds like a butt thing.”
If you’re thinking Big (and the film acknowledges that you are with a cute homage), you’re right on. Writer Henry Gayden (Earth to Echo) fills the script with action, humor, heart and spunk, while director David F. Sandberg (Lights Out) keeps things lively and engaging with plenty of impressive visual pop.
The entire cast is wonderfully diverse and consistently winning, and a few corny moments aside, makes the feels on friendship, family and responsibility land nearly as flush as the winking riffs on superhero tropes.
There really isn’t much Shazam! doesn’t deliver (okay, maybe it delivers a slightly bloated running time that includes two post-credits stingers), and as fast as you can say the magic word, DC has the best film in its universe since Bale was the Bat.
Necessary Evils
The Best of Enemies
by George Wolf
At the risk of opening recent wounds, it’s hard not to view The Best of Enemies through the lens of last year’s Oscar race debate. It’s a based-on-true-events historical drama draped in racial healing and also, the KKK.
So, is this more BlackKkKlansman, then? Or Green Book?
While it’s nowhere near the rarified air of the former, it does a better job than the latter of veering from the white pandering playbook.
For his debut feature, writer/director Robin Bissell adapts the tale of an unlikely friendship between a black community leader and the president of the local Klan chapter. Ann Atwater (Taraji P. Henson) and C.P. Ellis (Sam Rockwell) were on vastly opposing sides over school segregation in 1971 North Carolina when an arbitration exercise called a charrette forced them to hear each other out.
So you know where it’s going, but too often the trick is getting to that moment of average white awakening without making it the black character’s reward for being exceptional, or the white audience’s reward for being in the theater. Yes, Ellis has the biggest character arc, but Atwater changes, too, and thankfully isn’t here just to help him grow.
So Bissell is wise to put Atwater and Ellis on nearly equal footing, and fortunate to have leads this good. Henson mines powerful emotions as the defiant “Roughhouse Annie,” while Rockwell refuses to make Ellis a caricature villain. Together they find a combative chemistry that is raw and often effectively human.
Bissell is clearly a student of the Scorsese School of Pop Song Insertion, and an early sequence set to Roy Orbison’s “Blue Bayou” is indeed striking. But while the film’s overall structure is workmanlike, a few clunky, pause-for-dramatic-effect moments seem to exist more from indecision than confidence.
The Best of Enemies tells a good story and does plenty right while doing it, but is held back by missed opportunities.
As both factions in a divided community state their cases, the arguments are shockingly current, but Bissell can’t find the tone that clearly connects this past to our present. Just when he’s close (like the rundown of different challenges the black parents faced), some Mayberry-esque comedy re-sets the mood, leaving a worthy but not quite memorable history lesson on the value of reaching across the battle lines.
The Grapes of Something Something
The Public
by George Wolf
Emilio Estevez just does not do nuance.
The Public marks his fifth feature as writer/director, and it sports the conviction of his best work while also suffering from his familliar lack of restraint.
Estevez also stars as Stuart Goodson, a dedicated, stoic manager at the Cincinnati Public Library. While Stuart and his staff deal daily with an array of homeless citizens using the library, he finds himself a “good son” under fire when complaints about body odor lead to one vagrant’s eviction – and a lawsuit.
And then things get complicated.
Beyond the free computer use, the library also offers respite from the bitter winter cold, and when a deadly deep freeze grips Ohio, Stuart sits at the center of an armed standoff between the city and homeless folks needing shelter.
And it’s not just the homeless question The Public is addressing. From addiction and recovery to tabloid journalism, political cowardice and civic (ii.e. “the public”) responsibility, Estevez has plenty of heart available for numerous sleeves, getting admirable support from a solid ensemble cast including Alec Baldwin, Christian Slater, Jeffrey Wright, Taylor Schilling, Michael Kenneth Williams, Gabrielle Union and the ever-ageless Jena Malone.
Characters and subplots converge through dialog that’s too often desperate for authenticity, and a film that decries “intellectual vanity” seems overly proud of its own moments of clumsy enlightenment.
Case in point: a callous TV reporter (Union) is pumped at the social media traction she’s getting for her live reports from the library conflict. While her cameraman points out the plight of people at the heart of the story, she stays glued to her phone.
Point made, but Estevez can’t leave it there.
“Huh? What?” she answers, then a cut to the cameraman rolling his eyes. Second that.
Similarly, the stunt Estevez engineers for the big resolve gets a bystander explanation that is not only unnecessary, but factually dubious at best.
It’s just a culmination of the slow slide from good intentions to self-satisfied finger-wagging. The film has a respect for books and libraries that is indeed admirable, but by the time Goodson starts reading from Steinbeck on live TV, it becomes painfully evident what The Public wants to be when it grows up.
I Don’t Want to Go Out—Week of April 1
Couple of flicks worth your time coming home this week. One you probably saw, one you probably didn’t. Here is the skinny.
Click the film title for the full review.
Vice
Rust Creek
(DVD)
Screening Room: Dumbo, Hotel Mumbai, Beach Bum, Hummingbird Project, Woman at War
Join us as we divvy up the good and the bad this week in theaters: Dumbo, Hotel Mumbai, The Beach Bum, The Hummingbird Project and Woman at War. We also run through what’s new in home entertainment.
Listen to the full podcast HERE.
Wastin’ Away Again
The Beach Bum
by George Wolf
Though it shares much more of the mind-altered DNA found in the works of Cheech, Chong or S. Thompson, The Beach Bum left me quoting directly from John Hughes.
“You know when you’re telling these little stories? Have a point! It makes it so much more interesting for the listener!”
Writer/director Harmony Korine spent years as the cult auteur behind such WTF classics as Gummo and Trash Humpers, only to go semi-mainstream in 2012 with Spring Breakers, a surprisingly coherent pop culture rumination buoyed by a memorable turn from James Franco.
The Beach Bum‘s star power burns bright courtesy of Matthew McConaughey, which has to be the main reason the film got this size budget, promotion and release. But after watching him party with Snoop Dogg and Jimmy Buffett while wearing women’s clothing for 90 minutes, even the effortlessly likable McConaughey’s welcome wears thin.
He’s Moondog, a legendary gonzo poet who hangs in Key West while his uber-wealthy wife Minnie (Isla Fisher) tends their mansion in Miami. Reality comes calling when the Mrs. cuts off the gravy train, kicking him out and insisting that he dry out and finally write his novel if he wants to regain access to the family funds.
What to do?
Smoke some weed? Drink some beers? Bust out of rehab and wreak some havoc with Zac Efron? Sure, and maybe write a little bit on that old manual typewriter he drags around.
It’s all drenched in yacht rock (yes, that is “Key Largo” crooner Bertie Higgins), “Boats ‘N Hoes” bad boy style and improvisational freedom, and it makes for a shallow brew with a murky purpose.
Is Moondog’s crazy journey just an after-effect of Snoop Dogg’s special blend, Korine’s final ode to his wild past, or what?
What is clear is that after trying his hand at social commentary with Spring Breakers, Korine wants to have a good time. No doubt he and the cast (also including Johan Hill and Martin Lawrence) had a blast filming it, and good for them.
For the rest of us, though, The Beach Bum is a mildly funny one trick pony, a rambling barfly always cracking up at his own jokes.
Elephant Ears
Dumbo
by Hope Madden and George Wolf
There was something so terrifyingly perfect in the idea of Tim Burton reimagining Disney’s 1941 circus tearjerker Dumbo. If anyone could rediscover, perhaps even amplify the grotesque tragedy lurking at the heart of this outsider sideshow, it should be Burton.
He seems at home with the material.
Burton’s Edward Scissorhands is basically Dumbo: an innocent misfit, safe only with the one who birthed him, tragically loses that protector and must face a cold, ugly and abusive world that accepts him only because of what it can gain from the very oddities it mocks.
Dumbo is maybe the most emotionally battering film Walt Disney ever unleashed on unsuspecting families. But Burton seems thrown off course by a hero seeking release over acceptance, and instead of that macabre sense of wonder that infuses Burton’s best efforts, he seems content to bite the white-gloved hand that is feeding him.
Dumbo, the wing-eared baby elephant himself, does come to impressive CGI life – all grey wrinkles, long lashes and big, beautifully expressive eyes.
The film’s other squatty little character – Danny DeVito – is also a joy to watch. As circus owner Max Medici, DeVito charms every moment onscreen, and seeing him face to face again with Michael Keaton (as the shady, badly-wigged amusement park magnate V.A. Vandevere) is a nostalgic hoot.
The balance of the cast—Colin Farrell, Nico Parker, Finley Hobbins, Eva Green—fluctuates from passable to painful while staying consistently detached, and any true emotional connection just cannot take root, despite the inherent head start.
Because let’s be honest, many parents will be carrying an emotional connection into the theater with them, perfectly ready to surrender to the ugly cry moment they know is coming.
And it does…but it doesn’t, the scene strangely cut off at the knees to serve a bloated narrative that adds nothing but running time. True movie magic, heartbreaking or otherwise, is nowhere to be found.
The only interesting thing Burton and screenwriter Ehren Kruger (The Ring, several Transformers installments) do, via the Vandevere character and his theme park, is deride the film’s parent company. It’s nearly impossible to view “Dreamland” as anything but a Disneyland stand-in, and equally difficult to decipher the purpose.
Are they calling out rampant consumerism, unsavory Disney memories such as Song of the South or none of the above? Whatever the answer, it only adds to the confusion found in the center ring of this misguided update.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NiYVoqBt-8
I Don’t Want to Go Out – Week of March 25
Whole bunch of yes and one very big no coming home this week. Allow us to walk you through your options.
Click the film title for the full review.
If Beale Street Could Talk
Capernaum
(DVD)
Dragged Across Concrete
Stan & Ollie
Aquaman
(DVD)
Second Act
Screening Room: Us, Gloria Bell, Dragged Across Concrete
Not a lot of waste in this week’s Screening Room! Whether theatrical releases or home entertainment, every film is a recommendation: Us, Gloria Bell, Dragged Across Pavement and more.
Listen to the full podcast HERE.
