Tag Archives: Jack Black

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Vault Vamp

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Borderlands

by Hope Madden

I want very much to love that Cate Blanchett keeps making Eli Roth movies. Maybe I could find that love if Roth would put her in something he knows how to make—a horror film—instead of trapping her inside a genre he can’t seem to figure out himself.

Borderlands is Roth’s big screen adaptation of a popular video game, a Mad Max style fantasy that follows low life bounty hunter Lilith (Blanchett) to a vile planet of opportunists and thieves on a quest to retrieve the kidnapped daughter of a mogul (Edgar Ramírez).

But daughter Tina (Ariana Greenblatt, Barbie) doesn’t want to be rescued and soon, begrudgingly, Lilith becomes part of Tina’s ragtag band of misfit heroes (along with Kevin Hart, Jamie Lee Curtis, Florian Munteanu and the voice of Jack Black).

That’s a good cast, top to bottom. Black and Blanchett co-led Roth’s 2018 misfire The House with a Clock in its Walls. It wasn’t a big miss. It was a fine if unremarkable adaptation of the John Bellairs novel for kids. But Blanchett and Black were fun.

This go-round, Black’s limited to pointless annoyance as he voices robot sidekick Claptrap. Blanchett is glorious, naturally, cutting an imposing video game figure with sly wit and grace. Greenblatt’s a bit of fun, Hart’s underused. But the cast is not the problem.

Roth feels out of sorts. The action is not compelling, the comic timing is way off, there’s little chemistry among his merry band, the stakes feel low, surprises are few, meaningful transitions from one set up to the next don’t exist, the FX are not great.

There are two main action set pieces (that’s not nearly enough, by the way) that could have amounted to something interesting: one with a car and a giant piss field monster and the second with an underground tunnel full of lunatics. Roth can’t generate either the exhilaration or the comedy the first calls for. The second comes closer—it’s a horror set up, truth be told, and that should be an easier fit for the filmmaker—and it’s a natural video game fit. It’s the closest he comes to excitement, but it’s belabored, its end an utter disappointment.

Like the film.

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Fourth Helping of Dumplings

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Kung Fu Panda 4

by Hope Madden

Animated sequels often work out. Every time you think “Do we really need another Toy Story?” you get one more cartoon masterpiece. Each How to Train Your Dragon movie is a stunner. And Puss in Boots: The Last Wish was not only better than any previous Puss in Boots film, it was better than any Shrek film.

So why not a fourth Kung Fu Panda? Literally no one expected the 2008 original to be a charming, lovely, thoroughly entertaining Oscar nominee. A couple more episodes in and maybe directors Mike Mitchell and Stephanie Stine have the power to entirely reimagine this franchise, find a universal truth and existential meaning that allows this installment to transcend its late-stage sequel position, a la Toy Story 3. Or Toy Story 4.

No, but it’s cute.

Po (Jack Black, lovable even if it’s only his voice) has been named the spiritual leader of the Valley of Peace, which means he must find his successor as Dragon Warrior. But he doesn’t want to. He finally found something he’s good at—kicking butt—and he’s kind of famous for it. And maybe he just fears change.

But all this successor stuff will have to wait. The Chameleon (Viola F. Davis) has a nefarious plan that needs thwarting and Po’s off to handle the situation with the help of this little thieving fox (Awkwafina, who may be voicing every animated film to come out, but she’s great at it).

Master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman) is disappointed. Naturally.

Hoffman is one of only a handful of returning voice talent—Angelina Jolie, Seth Rogan, Jackie Chan, Lucy Liu and David Cross are noticeably absent. But Ian McShane returns, and that’s a voice we can all listen to all day long, villainous or not. Plus, there’s more room for new characters.

Davis is characteristically wonderful as the evildoer, but it’s really the budding relationship between frenemies Po and Zhen (Awkwafina) that compels interest. Not every actor can carry off animation, but both Black and Awkwafina shine.

The animation is good looking enough. It’s not gorgeous, but it’s nice. The action is fun, the characters are funny enough, and the lessons are solid. And there are these three bloodthirsty little bunnies, and I am a fan.

Kung Fu Panda 4 breaks no new ground, transcends no limitations, but it entertains throughout and delivers a pleasant bit of family-friendly fun. Plus reimagined Ozzy and Britney are a delight.

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Holding Out for a Hero

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The Super Mario Bros. Movie

by Hope Madden

Allegedly, Anya Taylor-Joy, who’d never played a Mario game of any kind, played incessantly to prepare for her role as Princess Peach in The Super Mario Bros. Movie. I have also never played, but I am far less committed.

Directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic (both of Teen Titans fame) hit their tone in an absurd, adorable opening sequence that introduces the evil of Bowser (Jack Black, perfect). Then we skip to Brooklyn to meet a pair of lovable plumbing losers, Luigi (Charlie Day) and Mario (Chris Pratt).

Soon the indefatigable Mario and his hapless brother are sucked into another realm where the filmmakers show their fondness for these games. To keep from inadvertently spoiling any surprises, I’ll limit my description because I have no idea what is and is not an Easter egg here.

But video games equal quests and quests are excellent underpinnings for films as long as you strike the right tone. The recent Dungeons & Dragons movie knew that, which is why it was the first success in three attempts to turn that game into a good movie.

Writer Matthew Fogel (Minions: The Rise of Gru) balances light hearted humor with video game architecture that benefits from Illumination’s trademark vibrant color. Bowser gets an excellent music video moment custom made for Black, and Seth Rogan gives Donkey Kong a bratty quality I never realized he needed.

Plus, did you know there were these skeleton turtle zombies? AND little masked dystopian devil soldier guys who are simultaneously goth and cute as can be? But this side of the coin gets little attention, the filmmakers instead making a solidly family friendly flick with no grim undercurrents.

It’s simple enough for kids to enjoy it, it throws a little macabre humor at you via Lumalee (Juliet Jelenic), and it looks good. Not glorious, but definitely good. The game-like levels definitely go on for too long and you feel each of those scant 92 minutes, but it’s a pretty good time.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie feels to me like a fitting celebration of a series of beloved video games. But what do I know? As a movie, it’s perfectly entertaining.

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Extra Life

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Jumanji: The Next Level

by George Wolf

Recent box office totals have sent a pretty clear message: if you want a butts-in-seats reboot, you gotta come with a strong new hook.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle got it right two years ago, and now most of that gang is back for The Next Level, which is smart enough to add a few new wrinkles (plus some trusty old ones) for freshness.

We catch up with our four young heroes a year removed from high school and trying hard to keep in touch. Over Christmas break from college, Spencer (Alex Wolff), Martha (Morgan Turner), Bethany (Madison Iseman) and Fridge (Ser’Darius Blain) make plans for a meetup, but Spencer doesn’t show.

Hearing those familiar drums, the other three quickly figure out he’s been sucked back into Jumanji, and decide to go after him. I mean, they beat it once, right?

New game, new rules, brand new hook.

Bethany is left behind, but two new players aren’t: Spencer’s grandpa Eddie (Danny DeVito) and Eddie’s ex-best friend Milo (Danny Glover). Know what else? Everyone gets a new avatar.

Well, not Martha, she’s still badass Ruby Roundhouse (Karen Gillan). But this time, it’s Eddie who gets the smoldering heroic intensity of Dr. Bravestone (Dwayne Johnson), while Fridge is portly Professor Shelly Oberon (Jack Black), Milo is diminutive zoologist Moose Finbar (Kevin Hart) and Spencer is newly-added cat burglar Ming Fleetfoot (Awkwafina).

The next level mission: free Jumanji from the evil clutches of Jurgen the Brutal (GOT‘s Rory McCann), or die trying. Game on!

Watching the four adult stars channel teenagers in the first film was a blast, but the avatar switches here are the smart plays, and the body swaps don’t stop once the game begins. Some of the gags do settle for low hanging fruit (i.e. old people are easily confused) but plenty others are clever and inspired.

The film itself even gets in on the switcheroo spirit, with fewer solid laughs but a markedly better adventure. Welcome to the Jungle’s riffs on The Breakfast Club make way for director Jake Kasdan’s set piece homages to Mission Impossible, Indiana Jones, Kingsman and even Peter Jackson’s King Kong in a thrilling escape from angry mandrills.

Writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers do not return, which I’m guessing is a major reason the life lesson feels don’t land as smoothly this time. But Kasdan and his team hit the big shots. They give us a reason to be interested in a return to Jumanji, and plenty of fun once we get there.

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Terror of the Blank Page

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Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween

by George Wolf

“Who would write this?”

Any Goosebumps fan knows the answer to that is Bexley native/OSU grad R.L. Stine, but in Goosebumps 2 it’s what Stine didn’t write that unleashes some not-too-scary family fun.

Good buddies Sonny (Jeremy Ray Taylor from IT) and Sam (Caleel Harris) stumble upon a mysterious book while cleaning out a creepy old house. They turn their backs and a ventriloquist’s dummy makes sure he’s found as well.

“Slappy” (voiced by Jack Black) was born from the book they found, the unfinished manuscript of Stine’s first novel, and he has some magical powers which are all fun and games until they’re not.

See, the dummy wants a real family, and he won’t stop until he brings Halloween to life and makes Sonny’s mom (Wendi McLendon-Covey) his own, which doesn’t sit well with Sonny or his sister Sarah (Madison Iseman).

It will take the whole gang, with a little help from Stine himself (Jack Black) to put Slappy and all he conjures back in the book where they belong.

Director Ari Sandel, who helmed the smarter-than-average teen comedy The Duff, and writer Rob Leiber (Alexander and the…Very Bad Day) take over the Goosebumps film franchise and hit a satisfyingly specific ‘tween target that will give adults some smiles as well.

The humor is silly but not stupid, the frights won’t bring nightmares, the town bully isn’t really that mean, and the town does Halloween like no place you’ve ever seen, led by Holiday enthusiast Mr. Chu (Ken Jeong). It makes for an inviting setting, and once all those costumes and decorations come to life, there is plenty of lower-budget visual pop.

Goosebumps 2 has style, a winning cast, and winking nods to horror classics such as IT and Frankenstein. Plus, it makes books and science seem cool, and gets it all done in under 90 minutes.

That adds up to one “fun-size” Halloween treat that doesn’t disappoint.





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Clock Management

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The House with a Clock In Its Walls

by Hope Madden

Eli Roth made a family film. That’s weird. Although there is certainly something juvenile about the filmmaker’s work in general.

Yes, the Hostel director (and Cabin Fever, The Green Inferno and any number of other hard-R flicks) indulges a sillier side with his big screen adaptation of John Bellairs’s 1973 novel, The House with a Clock in Its Walls.

Set in a mid-Fifties slice of Americana (New Zebedee, Michigan), the film lazily crosses Spielberg with Tim Burton by way of Nickelodeon.

Orphaned Lewis (Owen Vacarro) finds himself in the charge of weird Uncle Jonathan (Jack Black), who is a warlock. The two items most likely to be found in Uncle Jonathan’s big, weird house are his next door neighbor/best friend/fellow witch Mrs. Zimmerman (the always formidable Cate Blanchett), and clocks. Loads of clocks.

Why so many? Jonathan likes the ruckus they create—keeps his mind off that one ticking sound he can’t quite locate…that ominous harbinger of something terrible.

The house also boasts a number of bewitched items, none of which are given much point or presence as Lewis struggles with the loss of his parents, unpopularity at school, and the sudden realization that he might have just triggered the end of days.

Roth and screenwriter Eric Kripke streamline Bellairs’s charming prose. Some updates are sensible, although neutering the novel’s image of powerful women is not one of the more courageous or welcome choices the filmmakers made.

They entirely miss the novel’s tone, amplified with intermittent illustrations by the great Edward Gorey: subdued, wondrous yet melancholy. These are not adjectives used in conjunction with the work of Eli Roth.

What he substitutes instead is colorful, artificial, sloppy fun.

Black—more or less revisiting his role from 2015’s Goosebumps—charms exactly as he always does. Watching the incandescent Blanchett slyly deliver lines and easily steal scenes from Black—and anybody else who happens to be present—is a joy.

Vacarro isn’t given much opportunity. His is a story about grief and loneliness. Or maybe it’s about embracing your inner weirdo. Roth can’t seem to decide, and he’s far too sidetracked by the demonic jack-o-lanterns, topiary Griffin and inexplicable roomful of carnival freakshow dummies to pay attention to the story.

There is utterly forgettable fun here, mainly thanks to Black and Blanchett, but the intended audience is a little tough to gauge. Things are likely a bit too slow-moving and eventually too wicked for the very young, while teens and adults may be bored by the lack of logic or what passes for humor. Still, if you have a 10-year-old who wants a seasonal scare that’s not too scary, here you go.





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Hot Wheels

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Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot

by Hope Madden

In case you are missing it, Joaquin Phoenix is having one hell of a year. The inarguable talent is fresh off the relentlessly wonderful You Were Never Really Here (watch it right now!). Later this year we’ll get the chance to see him in Mary Magdalene as well as Jacques Audiard’s Western, The Sisters Brothers—both films boasting extraordinary casts.

Sandwiched in between his turns as gun-for-hire (YWNRH) and Jesus (MM), the clearly versatile actor portrays cartoonist John Callahan in Gus Van Sant’s biopic Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot.

Portland-based Callahan used creating cartoons as an outlet for his frustration, creativity and humor following a car accident that left him paralyzed. His simple visual style (both arms and hands were badly compromised by the paralysis) and his dark, taboo-driven humor found favor and protest in his hometown newspaper.

Phoenix charms and breaks hearts in equal measure as Callahan. What the actor conveys in breathtaking fashion is discovery. After Callahan’s accident and through his fleeting moments of clear-headedness, the character affords Phoenix many opportunities to recognize, accomplish or notice things for the first time. His interaction with an adorably saucy sex therapist, for instance, is pure joy.

His is not the only wonderful performance in the film. Jonah Hill effortlessly conveys a wearied tenderness that reminds you how truly talented an actor he is. Jack Black has a small but gloriously Jack Black role, and the AA group (Udo Kier, Beth Ditto, Mark Webber, Kim Gordon and Ronnie Adrian) offer rich and interesting characters regardless of their minimal screen time.

Rooney Mara, on the other hand, seems like she’s acting in an entirely different film. I fully expected her character to be a figment of Callahan’s imagination, pulled intact from another movie.

Van Sant bounces back from a creative lull (The Sea of Trees, anyone?), showing, among other things, his remarkable knack for period detail.

And while the 12-step structure feels both too stifling and too familiar for such an irreverent central figure, Van Sant bursts through that frame with a non-chronological series of vignettes and wild antics. As the film progresses, step by dutiful step, Van Sant fills gaps with quick jumps back and forth through drunken episodes and pivotal moments.

As interesting and entertaining as these flashes are, the chaotic lack of chronology fits so poorly with the rigid timeline of the film around it that the whole feels like an experiment gone wrong.

But so much of the film goes very, very right—thanks in large part to another award-worthy performance by Phoenix.





The Screening Room

The Screening Room: A Stocking Full of New Movies

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Helping you separate naughty from nice with this weekend’s movie options, The Screening Room looks at Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, Pitch Perfect 3, Downsizing, Darkest Hour, The Greatest Showman as well as your new options in home entertainment. Join us!

Listen to the full podcast HERE.





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The Safari Club

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Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle

by George Wolf

Do you hear a ruckus?

It’s coming from some easily identifiable high schoolers in detention, but this time they’re in an old storage room filled with everything from old magazines to a gaming system from the 1990s.

Turns out, that’s the same decade the soul-sucking Jumanji morphed from board to video cartridge, so the nerd, the jock, the queen bee and the outcast decide to power up this mystery game and kill some time.

In an instant, Welcome to the Jungle puts them all in the heart of one, playing for their lives as the avatars they chose, which just happen to be the polar opposites of their “real” selves.

Whaaat?

Yes, convenient, but director Jake Kasdan and an extremely likable cast squeeze a fine amount of fun from a colorful adventure that follows its own advice for a healthy self-image.

Nerdy Spencer becomes the muscular hero (Dwayne Johnson), athletic “Fridge” is now the diminutive sidekick (Kevin Hart), and introvert Martha becomes a Lara Croft-y babe (Karen Gillan) while the self-absorbed beauty faces life as Jack Black.

Some solid laughs are landed from the foursome discovering their new gaming strengths (“smoldering intensity”), weaknesses (“cake”) and body parts (“don’t forget to aim!”), with the actors’ willingness to poke fun at their own images only adding to the good vibes.

There are some effective set pieces, but the overall heroics required to get back home are fairly standard, and Kasdan (Bad Teacher, Sex Tape, the under-appreciated Walk Hard) wisely doesn’t overreach. He’s not tasked with one-upping Indiana Jones, and keeps things focused more on the breezy fun to be had with his stars. These moments when the tone hits a frisky groove of self-awareness (no doubt aided by Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, two writers from the wonderful Spider-Man: Homecoming) are the film’s high points, making it easier to look past some shaky CGI or an overly cartoonish villain (Bobby Cannavale, in yet another over-the-top waste of his talent).

The teens have to learn something today, so Welcome to the Jungle can’t hold that tone throughout, but it displays enough of a commitment to character-based comedy for a ruckus worth exploring.





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Monsters Jump Off the Page

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Goosebumps

by Christie Robb

It’s been over 20 years since the publication of R.L. Stine’s classic Goosebumps #1: Night of the Living Dummy. And now, a generation who whiled away the nighttime hours gripping paperbacks with white knuckles can bring a new crop of kiddos to experience the thrills of Stine’s monsters, this time on the big screen.

In Goosebumps the movie, teenage hunk Zach (Dylan Minnette) moves with his mom to the ‘burbs. He is lucky in that his next-door neighbor is a quick-witted and gorgeous girl, Hannah (Odeya Rush), who immediately whisks him away to the neighborhood’s abandoned amusement park. However, he is unlucky in that her dad (Jack Black) is a curmudgeon who pops out from windows and in between the slats of fences to warn Zach to stay away or else something bad will happen.

Believing Hannah to be held captive by her overbearing dad, and after overhearing some screaming, Zach lures the dad away and breaks into the house accompanied by his timid, socially awkward friend Champ. In searching for Hannah, they discover a shelf full of Goosebumps manuscripts. And open one. Chaos ensues.

It appears Zach’s prickly neighbor is reclusive author R.L. Stine who, with the help of a magical typewriter, brings his imaginary monsters to life, but traps them inside the pages of his locked manuscripts.

The real trouble begins when Slappy (the antagonist from Night of the Living Dummy) escapes and steals the collection of manuscripts, releasing the full extent of Stine’s imagination upon the town—from the Werewolf of Fever Swamp, to a giant praying mantis, to freeze-ray wielding aliens, to murderous garden gnomes. It’s kind of Cabin in the Woods for tweens.

The movie is relentlessly paced as the crew dashes from one crisis to the next, concocting a zany plan to defeat all the monsters. The scares provided by the monsters and creepy crawlies are balanced by pratfalls, cheeky dialogue (See Zach’s aunt’s description of Stine’s smell: “… like mint and B.O. It works.”), and scene-stealing supporting characters.

Goosebumps is not without its flaws, however. It woefully underutilizes some cast members – Amy Ryan (Birdman) and Ken Marino (Wet Hot American Summer) in particular. Like the book franchise on which it is based, the movie is fairly predictable, at least for the older folks in the audience. There are some logical inconsistencies (for example, the lights are still running in the abandoned amusement park) and a definite lack of diversity in casting. But, nevertheless, it’s a seasonally-appropriate, Danny Elfman-scored thrill that will keep folks entertained without fostering nightmares.

Verdict-3-0-Stars