Tag Archives: Madd at the Movies

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Once and Future

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Mufasa: The Lion King

by Hope Madden

It was hard not to be a little worried about Mufasa: The Lion King. Or maybe it was hard not to be worried about Barry Jenkins. Too few of our genuinely brilliant independent film directors come away from Giant Studio Efforts unscathed. (Quick callback to last week’s JD Chandor debacle, Kraven the Hunter.)

Surely there are some auteurs who are able to leave their unique thumbprints on Disney films. No one comes to mind except Rian Johnson, and man, people really universally loved The Last Jedi, didn’t they?   

Well, Mufasa is far from the flaming disaster of Kraven, thank goodness. And it’s not nearly as polarizingly renegade as Jedi.

Safe. That’s what it is.

It’s also very pretty, if equally needless. The film delivers the origin story of Simba’s father Mufasa, providing—as origin stories so often do—a glimpse into the early development of other beloved and not-so-beloved characters. Young Mufasa (Braelyn Rankins) is separated from his parents and his pride by a great flood. Washed far from home, he’s saved by a bratty little cub called Taka (Theo Somolu). While Taka’s father, the king, will never accept this outsider, Taka’s mother (Thandiwe Newton) takes him in.

As Simba and Taka (voiced as older lions by Aaron Pierre and Kelvin Harrison Jr., respectively) flee a marauding pride led by the villainous Kiros (Mads Mikkelsen, gloriously and effortlessly villainous), they find out what kind of lions they really are.

And here for a while we get a bit of something refreshing. Mufasa’s worthiness to rule is grounded in skills learned from hunting with the females in the pride. And some of these transcend hunting skills: he listens, he’s humble, he’s honest.

The CG animation is mainly very impressive and there are camera movements and choices that feel like new ideas in an old tradition. But tradition wins out, not just in the look but in the storytelling. (Outsiders are bad. It takes a king to lead. Women support the men who make things happen. Lions don’t eat meat?)

The core story is often interrupted by a framing device of an elderly Rafiki (John Kani) telling the story of Mufasa. These breaks are meant to be funny, and sometimes they do generate a chuckle, but they feel more like well-timed bathroom breaks for when the film hits Disney+.

But it’s not bad. Your kids might like it. They won’t likely remember it, but they won’t hate it. It’s perfectly safe.

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Why Yes, That Chicken Looks Familiar

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Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

by Hope Madden

Just over 30 years ago, cheese-loving inventor Wallace and his long-suffering dog Gromit took in a lodger and invented a new kind of pants. Neither were what they seemed.

And just when you thought you’d seen the last of Feathers McGraw—well, several decades after you thought you’d seen the last of him—he resurfaces with a diabolical scheme involving zookeepers, turnips, and gnomes.

Oh, and vengeance. Vengeance most fowl.

Longtime Aardman Entertainment filmmaker Nick Park takes on a couple of partners this go-round in co-writer Mark Burton (Shaun the Sheep) and co-director Merlin Crossingham, who’s been part of the Aardman team for years, directing video games, television, as well as the documentary A Grand Night In: The Story of Aardman.

After 2023’s disappointing Aardman sequel Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, the stop-motion plasticine legends could use a reminder of how they nabbed all four of those Oscars. And so, W&G return with Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.

What have the lads been up to? Gromit’s been finding peace in his garden. Meanwhile, Wallace has invented a yard gnome that does gardening so Gromit doesn’t have to. Norbot (voiced Reece Shearsmith) is so efficient and hardworking that the whole of Wallaby Street wants his help! What could go wrong?

Loads! Especially once Feathers McGraw catches wind of the new invention, thanks to the crack reporting of one Onya Doorstep (Diane Morgan).

We lost Peter Sallis, longtime voice of Wallace, back in 2017, but Ben Whitehead takes on lead duties with appropriate aplomb.

Otherwise, expect the expected, which turns out to be the film’s strength as well as its weakness. The film mixes silly with clever in exactly the right proportion, as is the charm with the entire franchise. Wallace is so addicted to tech that he’s sure his old ceramic teapot is broken because he keeps pushing its knob and nothing happens. It doesn’t turn on. Nothing!

There are dozens of bright sight gags, loads of Rube Goldberg style tech, and plenty of endearingly dunderheaded characters. The animation itself, full of thumb prints and vivid color, is as brilliant as it has ever been.

There’s just not a lot of surprises. No one expected a giant were-rabbit in the lads’ last film, and it was right in the title of 2005’s magnificent Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Vengeance Most Fowl is a comforting, comfortable adventure, but it breaks no new ground and leaves less of an impression than you might hope.

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My Only Friend

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The End

by Hope Madden

In 2012, Joshua Oppenheimer co-directed (with Anonymous, to keep the second filmmaker from being murdered) my personal pick for greatest documentary ever made. He won the Oscar two years later for The Look of Silence, a sequel of sorts, but The Act of Killing is unlike anything else ever made and will stay with me until I die.

That’s not the only reason I was excited about The End, Oppenheimer’s narrative feature directing debut. There’s also Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon, two of the greatest living actors. It’s a musical, but I won’t hold that against it.

Don’t think Wicked. The End is not dazzling song and dance numbers boasting stellar vocals set to catchy tunes you’ll be humming after the credits roll. The somber choreography and overlapping vocals feels a bit more inspired by Sondheim, and the setting is anything but dazzling.

George MacKay plays Son. He was born in the underground bunker Mother (Swinton) and Father (Shannon) evacuated to with Butler (Tim McInnerny), Doctor (Lennie James) and Friend (Bronagh Gallagher) sometime before climate change irreversibly destroyed the planet. They arrange and rearrange the masterpieces of the artworld that crowd their walls, swim to keep healthy, and practice emergency drills. Meanwhile Son is helping Father write his autobiography, that of the brave philanthropic energy tycoon who is definitely not to blame for the fall of mankind.

And there is fragile, manufactured, numb peace among them underground. Until Girl (Moses Ingram), an outsider, a survivor of the disasters that have claimed nearly everyone on the planet, makes her way to their compound.

With the influence of the outsider, each member of the little community reflects on what they’ve ignored for years: the little inconsistencies, the fictionalizations, the lies they tell themselves and each other to get numb. To forgive themselves of what a person is willing to do to someone else to survive.

It’s a clever conceit artfully executed. Each performance is beautiful. James and Gallagher are especially powerful in smaller roles. Oppenheimer’s script, co-written with Rasmus Heisterberg, quietly unveils each self-serving, nearly innocent sin that becomes the inescapable rot that ruins a civilization.

Aside from one devastatingly absurd number showcasing Shannon, the music doesn’t add a lot. Swinton’s not much of a singer (well, at least we’ve found the one thing she isn’t good at), which makes the songs a little harder to bear.

In the end, The End is a bold, admirable film that’s sometimes too obvious, a bit too long, and a tad gimmicky to meet its aspirations.

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Hunt for Green December

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Kraven the Hunter

by Hope Madden

I keep waiting for Aaron Taylor-Johnson to become a giant household-name superstar. He’s a good-looking kid, always turns in solid work, makes interesting career choices. I’ve been a fan since 2010’s Kick-Ass, but it doesn’t seem to me that he’s really hit.

Maybe now’s his time. He does a solid job in a supporting turn in Nosferatu, hitting screens this Christmas. And based on the trailer, he seems to be leading the most anticipated horror sequel in decades, next summer’s 28 Years Later. Plus, he’s finally starring in his own franchise comic book superhero movie, J.C. Chandor’s Kraven the Hunter.

And holy shit, J.C. Chandor! Do you know how good a director he is?! Margin Call, All Is Lost, A Most Violent Year—these are brilliant films. Brilliant! And you know what happens with genius indie directors pair up with Marvel. Just look how well that went for Oscar winner Chloé Zhao and her endlessly maligned Eternals.

What to know going in? It’s rated R. Hmmm, provocative. Oscar winners Ariana DeBose and Russell Crow join Taylor-Johnson, along with beloved indie actors Christopher Abbott and Alessandro Nivola, plus Fred Hechinger, who is killing it in 2024 (Thelma, Gladiator II, Nickel Boys).

The result: After a fun, bloody prologue, Act 1 plods along with scene after scene of exposition. In Act 2, we get to see a lot more exposition, a bit more action, but at least the seriously fine ensemble is able to carve out some weird, fun characters.

Hechinger comes off best as the sweet-natured younger brother Dmitri to Kraven (Taylor-Johnson). Both sons of criminal kingpin Nikolai Kravinoff (Crowe), Dmitri craves his father’s respect while Kraven spurns all his dad stands for and hunts down baddies like him all over the world.

Crowe, brandishing a ludicrous Russian accent, is fun in that saucy Russell Crowe way. Likewise, Nivola and Abbott are delightfully, drolly evil and seem to be having an excellent time.

DeBose is wasted in a badly written role. Her scenes are almost exclusively with Taylor-Johnson, who’s asked to look good shirtless, move about well, and talk more than the character should just to make sure audiences don’t get lost.

The biggest problem are the CGI animals. Yikes. (It makes one worry for the brilliant indie director Barry Jenkins and his leap to CGI animals/giant studios with next week’s Mufasa: The Lion King.) How can they all look this bad?

But, Act 3 delivers so much blood! I’d almost forgotten about that R rating until Kraven snaps shut those bear traps on that bad guy’s head!

It’s not a great movie. I doubt it’s really franchise material, which is almost too bad because I’d love to see Hechinger again. It’s not really worth waiting for the Act 3 payoff, unless you just really like bloodspatter and viscera in your superhero movies.

Maybe 28 Years Later will be better.

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Winter of Discontent

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Oh, Canada

by Hope Madden

Paul Schrader has made a career of solitary, perhaps unforgivably damaged men seeking final redemption through self-sacrifice. The stakes and damage change from project to project, but the themes remain consistent. You can see what drew him to the Russell Banks novel Foregone, in which a lauded documentarian now dying of cancer sits for an interview determined to confess his fictionalized mythology to his wife.

Retitled Oh, Canada for the screen, the film sits with Leo Fife (Richard Gere), wheeled out in a sour mood to his living room, which has been transformed quickly into a film studio. His former students Malcolm (Michael Imperioli) and Diana (Victoria Hill) intend to film a final farewell with the famous American draft dodger turned Canadian documentary provocateur.

Leo just wants to tell his wife Emma (Uma Thurman) who he really is.

As Leo reminisces, Jacob Elordi takes on the younger self moving through marriage and back to high school, to youthful indiscretions and less youthful betrayals. Periodically, Gere will walk out of a scene as Elordi walks into it, Schrader reminding the viewer that memory is a tricky thing, sometimes as fanciful and artificial as fiction.

This artifice becomes the film’s undoing. There’s a staginess to the dialogue, a theatricality to the aging and de-aging, the way one actor will take on multiple personas. It fits with the theme of memory and truth but is at odds with what Schrader does best, and that’s brutal truth.

Gere delivers exactly that in the film’s most blistering and uncomfortable scenes, almost hateful in his regret, in his desperation to come clean—as clean as this rather dirty man can come. His contempt for himself extends to his students, some for being like him, some for having been weak for him. When the opportunity arises, Gere and Schrader are on a different level than the balance of the cast and the rest of the film. It seems Schrader exposes something of himself as this character, this filmmaker, commits his own deterioration and death to cinema.

The last Banks novel Schrader adapted, 1997’s Affliction, generated two Oscar nominations, including James Coburn’s win. And while both novels fit the Schrader canon, neither film seems like his creation, something sprung from the folds of his own brain.

Schrader’s greatest screenplays—Taxi Driver, First Reformed, The Card Counter—find hope in the hopeless resolution. Oh, Canada lacks the cohesion of story and the poignant irreversibility that Schrader’s best films boast.

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Most Natural Painkiller

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Queer

by Hope Madden

William S. Burroughs is a tough writer to set to film. Queer, an appendage to his first novel, Junky, published decades later as its own novella, is particularly thorny. Rather than submerging the writer’s themes and curiosities under layers of surreal flourish—as most of his novels did—both Junky and Queer mainly skim the surface in a Bukowski-esque autobiography by way of fiction. Mainly.

Protagonist William Lee—the Burroughs stand-in—is a recovering heroin addict in 1940s Mexico City, played with ferocious commitment by Daniel Craig. Without the buffer of the drug, Lee is a raw bundle of longing, isolation and desperation passing time among expats and looking for a different kind of fix.

Luca Guadagnino’s bittersweet period piece works best when it directs the confessional prose to create a character study. Craig meets that challenge, delivering a performance of unsheathed vulnerability and ache cut with salty wit and self-loathing.

Burroughs was the master of the unreliable narrator. Though Guadagnino doesn’t develop the same kind of reckless guide through his film, the script and performance make it clear that, though Lee is our protagonist, he’s not to be trusted. He’s a user, and though Craig’s performance is wonderfully human, he’s also every ounce the Ugly American.

That creates some fascinating scenes, but it does not make for much of a narrative arc.

Queer follows the relationship between Lee and the much younger WWII veteran Eugene Allerton, played with intriguing distance by Drew Starkey. Jason Schwartzman pops in and out for comic relief and the great Lesley Manville arrives in a third act that feels, while fascinating, also wildly out of place.

Because the relationship between Lee and Allerton is never really probed, and Allerton remains as distant and mysterious to us as he does to Lee, Queer feels unfinished. Guadagnino’s aesthetically lovely turns toward the surreal do little to either clarify the story or to deepen the mystery. They feel like ornamentation, which draws more attention to the artifice of the period detail, the stilted ensemble performances and the musical choices.

There is something in Queer that is beautiful, provocative, unsettling and unpleasant—all adjectives easily at home within the Burroughs atmosphere. It’s not a terrible way to spend an evening, but it’s not entirely satisfying, either.

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That Seventies Show

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The Man in the White Van

by Hope Madden

A teen prone to exaggeration is disbelieved when she tells of a white van following her around her small Florida town. Working from a script he wrote with Sharon Y. Cobb, director Warren Skeels recreates a time when doors were left unlocked, and rebels were listening to Credence instead of the Partridge Family for his true crime thriller The Man in the White Van.

It’s 1975, but as Annie (Madison Wolfe, The Conjuring 2) tries to protect herself, Skeels takes us back to 1974, 1973, 1972, 1971, 1970 with the menacing van and the other girls nobody believed.  

The story is ostensibly based on Billy Mansfield Jr.’s Seventies era crime binge, although no name is given to the driver stalking Florida streets. Skeels’s framing device—present-day Seventies storytelling punctuated with vignettes from across the murder spree—is reminiscent of Anna Kendrick’s Woman of the Hour. But where Kendrick used cutaways to serial killer Rodney Alcala’s previous victims to deepen our understanding of the psychopath and humanize his victims, Skeels uses it to tweak tension as we wait for what is to come for young Annie.

Skeels also develops anxiety with Seventies style hijinks—the frustration of a busy signal and rotary phone dialing when in a real hurry.  

Ali Larter and Sean Astin, who also serve as executive producers, help to generate a believable family dynamic as Annie’s loving but skeptical parents. Though the balance of performances are not bad, the writing is superficial enough that the ensemble can’t carve out much in the way of personality. Worse, scenes last a beat too long, the camera often lingering on each line long enough that the unnaturalness, the performance itself, becomes evident.

Interestingly, there’s something about this particular falseness and the sloppiness in the script that actually reflects Seventies horror, which is kind of fun—sort of the The Town that Dreaded Sundown era, before tropes dug in and determined every story beat.

Where Kendrick attempted to push the conversation about serial murder and horror in a fresh direction, Skeels reaches back toward an older version of the story. It doesn’t make for as compelling a film, but The Man in the White Van has its charm.

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Bark at the Moon

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Nightbitch

by Hope Madden

There’s something wrong with Mother.

That’s the only name we have for Amy Adams’s character in Marielle Heller’s darkly surreal comedy Nightbitch, because it’s all we really need to know about her. Whatever she was before Baby (Arleigh and Emmet Snowden, adorable)—a successful artist, as it turns out—hardly matters now. Some time before the opening credits rolled, she gave that up to be a stay-at-home mother. And like most humans on the planet, she had no real idea what parenthood would mean.

Adams is wonderful at articulating with a gesture or a glance the loneliness and isolation, the weariness and guilt and self-loathing that can seep into days spent truly loving the tiny, filthy, needy little monster eating up every waking second of your life.

But in case you miss it, Heller’s script, penned with Rachel Yoder, allows her a number of alternative ways to beat you about the head and neck with it. These include voiceover narration as well as fantasy sequences where she screams at and slaps those who insult or underestimate her. Plus, of course, there’s the larger metaphor at work in which Mother embraces her inner bitch goddess and indeed turns into a feral dog at night.

Parenting is exhausting, especially if it’s not a truly shared responsibility. Society is set up to judge women whether they work or stay home, and no matter how their kids behave. Adams delivers a delightfully subversive take on motherhood and navigates tough material to carve out a sympathetic and funny character. But the metaphor itself—Heller’s touch with magical realism—weaken rather than strengthen the effort.

The real problems with Nightbitch, though, are all first world. These parents can afford to live in a big, spacious suburban neighborhood on one income. Mother’s artist friends can afford nannies, and her “Book Baby” mommies also all seem to flourish financially without a second income.

Which is to say that Mother’s choice to give up her career and stay home with her son, while fraught with self-sacrifice, feels more like privilege than burden since most parents have no such choice in front of them.

And if the problems are only for the wealthy, the solutions are equally out of reach for most audiences. Which makes it hard to root for Mother, no matter how truly (and characteristically) excellent Adams is.

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And Hustle

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Flow

by Hope Madden

Have you felt recently like the world as you know it has changed irreparably, everything around you is dangerous chaos, and those who were once family are no longer reliable so you have to kind of cobble together a new tribe or go it alone?

Cat knows your pain.

Gints Zilbalodis’s stunning animated film Flow follows the solitary feline through a lush world where it does what it can to remain aloof and alone—fleeing other creatures, particularly those rambunctious dogs, to find its quiet spot in the top floor of an empty home. The time period is unspecific but ancient, the attention to detail magnificent, and the animation breathtaking.

A flood is coming, and this little black cat will have to work in tandem with a handful of other strays—one capybara, a lemur, a secretarybird, and a dog—in an abandoned boat to survive the rising tide.

There’s no dialog and precious little anthropomorphism to be found. That may sound like it could keep an audience at arm’s length, but quite the opposite results. The surprisingly natural, primal behavior of the animals, particularly in peril, gives Flow an anguished kind of thrill that is gripping.

The animals have personalities in keeping with their species (the capybara can’t be bullied or bothered; the lemur collects and covets shiny things; the dog is big, dumb and friendly) and Zilbalodis gives over to magical realism sparingly.

The animals’ surroundings, even in moments of catastrophe, are rendered with such care and beauty they almost conjure Miyazaki. Almost. That Zilbalodis crafted such gorgeously animated scenes entirely with an open-source platform to keep budget in check is indie genius that would be only a gimmick were his storytelling instincts less stellar.

The dog doesn’t look great. I have no idea why that is, but it can pull you out of certain scenes.

Otherwise, there’s not much opportunity to slight this animated Latvian treasure sure to scoop up awards nominations this season. Catch it on the big screen while you can.