PO THINGS

Opening this weekend:

Kung Fu Panda 4--The titular mammal, Po, has been promoted from "Dragon Warrior" to the more exalted status of Spiritual Leader, and is expected to find and train a replacement for his former position. But he'd rather not; he'd like to just keep having butt-kicking adventures on his own.

This entry, set again in a fairy-tale Chinese past inhabited by talking animals, has Po capturing Zhen, a light-footed cutpurse fox. The "Furious Five" of the earlier films is away on assignment, so the imprisoned Zhen talks Po into letting her serve as a guide on a quest to the distant lair of a villainous shape-shifting lizard, The Chameleon. See where this is headed?

This Dreamworks series has been at the less exhausting, more rewarding end of the CGI animated family flick spectrum starting with the original, back in 2008, and continuing with the first two sequels. It's hard to say if it will be sustainable from now on, but this fourth film, at least, keeps the streak going. The story deals in the usual kid-movie platitudes, but the lighting-fast yet precise slapstick sequences are exciting, and rise at times to laugh-out-loud funny even for adults.  

The voice cast in this film, as in the earlier films, is unusually strong too. Jack Black is exuberant as ever as Po, and is joined again by Dustin Hoffman as the red panda master Shifu, Bryan Cranston as Po's biological father and the great James Hong as Po's adoptive father (a goose, you'll recall). Ian McShane returns from the first film as a sinister snow leopard. New cast members include Ke Huy Quan as a pangolin bandit, and the mighty and menacing Viola Davis as The Chameleon. But the showcase new role is Awkwafina as Zhen; she fits the series like a glove.

In another pretty good touch: Tenacious D rousingly covers "Hit Me Baby One More Time" over the credits.

Opening today at Harkins Shea 14:

Pitch People--Back in the late '60s I was fascinated by the Veg-o-Matic, the infamous manual vegetable chopper sold on TV by Ronco; it's one of my earliest consumerist memories. After numerous appeals to my poor Mom, she wearily ordered one, and we quickly learned that it did not significantly improve the efficiency of her kitchen. Decades later my kid, around the age of eight, insisted on ordering a Snackeez, a drinking cup with a compartment for snacks at the top likewise peddled on TV. The speed with which she lost interest in it was ineffably heart-tugging to me; I could hear "The Circle of Life" playing in my head.

This documentary, directed by Stanley Jacobs, is about the people who have sold products of all kinds, with kitchen gadgets a special favorite, by "pitching" them; demonstrating them with a performer's panache. The art goes back thousands of years, no doubt--it's described here as "the second oldest profession"--but this movie's focus is on the American and British practitioners who took it from boardwalks, notably Atlantic City, to state fairs to shopping malls to TV commercials and later, after Reagan-era deregulation, to "infomercials." 

It's a brisk, amusing, revealing chronicle. Strikingly, many of the veterans we meet here are related to each other, members of the Morris family, with connections to the Popeil family behind Ronco (the credits pointedly declare that "RON POPEIL WOULD NOT GRANT AN INTERVIEW FOR THIS FILM"). They gleefully dissect the strategies for separating audience members from their money, but they don't seem contemptuous of them, and we're told that they truly believe in their products. In any case, they show a certain guileless pride in their performing skills. It's as if the entertainment value of their pitches should offset any disappointment in what they're selling.

Along with Arnold and Lester Morris, talking heads here include Ed McMahon, an Atlantic City pitch veteran before his TV stardom, and Wally Nash, a Brit whose effortless old-school pitch of the "hand-hammered wok from the People's Republic of China" I watched countless times on late-night TV in DC. Re-watching it on YouTube I was amazed at how much I could still say along with him; I wanted to buy one every freakin' time I saw it. 

Inevitably the extended footage of performances makes up the strongest passages of Pitch People. It's also hilarious when we see behind-the-scenes footage of an infomercial rehearsal in which the presenters break several demo models of a slicer before realizing that they're using it wrong.

Alas, a number of the pitchers featured here have left us, as this movie was made in 1999. It saw play at festivals back then but was not picked up by a distributor, and actually had to be restored before it could get a proper release, a quarter of a century after it was completed. There's a delicious and stinging irony in the fact that this movie about selling failed, until now, to sell. Maybe it needed a better pitch.

ARGYLLE SUCKS

Okay, it doesn't totally suck; I just really wanted to use that headline.

Opening in theaters this weekend:

Argylle--For about the first half or so of this action comedy, our heroine Elly is pulled through chases and shootouts, squealing in girlish fright. Played by Bryce Dallas Howard, Elly is an author of popular spy thrillers featuring the flawlessly suave secret agent man Argylle, represented in her mind's eye by Henry Cavill.

One day on an Amtrak train she's accosted by Aidan (Sam Rockwell), a scruffy obnoxious guy who tells her that she's in grave danger, as her books are proving prophetic in real-world counterintelligence. Within seconds Aidan is defending her, and her put-upon Scottish Fold cat Alfie, from countless assassins in extended, cartoony hand-to-hand and gun combat, all the while dispensing reassurance and encouragement, and she's swept off into a globetrotting adventure.

You may recall that this was the central gag in the lame 2010 comedy Night and Day, with Cameron Diaz as the civilian and Tom Cruise as the hypercompetent and comically supportive secret agent man. Rockwell's woebegone manner is funnier and more agreeable than that of Cruise, but even so too much of this film feels derivative of previous spy parodies, both recent and vintage, from 2022's Bullet Train to the Mission: Impossible and Bourne flicks, and beyond. As in many of those films, the preposterously over-choreographed action scenes carry no real emotional weight, and I found the first part of the movie pretty tedious.

It started to grow on me after a while, though. The stars help; I've long been inclined to approve of Howard, with her lush pin-up beauty and her sweetness, and as Elly delves deeper into the case and gains more confidence, Howard is able to overcome the condescending hysterical woman stereotype she's forced to play along with early on. And she and the self-assured sad sack Rockwell play off each other nicely and without phony bickering.

The supporting cast is also top-notch; director Matthew Vaughn and screenwriter Jason Fuchs would have to work hard to prevent Bryan Cranston, as the fed-up evil kingpin, or Samuel L. Jackson as another spy boss, or the great Catherine O'Hara, pestering Elly to spend a weekend with Mom, from giving the audience any amusement. Along with Cavill's Argylle, the movie offers such overtly glamorous types as Jon Cena and Dua Lipa and Sofia Boutella and Ariana DeBose and Richard E. Grant, and they add another layer of drollery.

But just about the time I was loosening up and starting to think that Argylle was pretty good after all, it overplays its hand in the way of so many contemporary action blockbusters, shoveling one exhaustingly explosive finale after another at us. At two hours and twenty minutes it's at least thirty minutes too long. After a while you might start wondering if the movie has ended, and you're already a half-hour into Argylle 2.

CRATER LOVE HATH NO MAN

Opening in theaters today:

Asteroid City--In Golden Age of Television black and white, a stentorian TV host (Bryan Cranston) tells us that we're about to see a documentary about the writing and staging of a new play. The drama in question is titled Asteroid City, and it's set in a tiny desert community near the impact crater from an ancient meteorite. It's the Cold War mid-'50s in this, Wes Anderson's latest; mushroom clouds blossom in the distance from the occasional nuclear bomb test.

Soon we shift to color, and to a stylized milieu that looks like Midcentury travel-poster art of the southwest. A large roster of characters assembles in Asteroid City, many of them for the convention of the Junior Stargazers, an organization of youthful science prodigies and inventors.

At the center of this ensemble, insofar as it has a center, is a bereaved young photographer (Jason Schwartzman) who hasn't yet broken the news to his kids that their mother has passed on; he's one cabin over from a movie star (Scarlett Johansson) with whom he bonds, as do his son and her daughter. Along with these familial tensions, the gathering sees military intrigues, scientific experiments, quarantine and even alien close encounters.

I really wish I liked this movie better than I did. Anderson is a one-of-a-kind comedic artist, and his 1998 Rushmore is one of my favorite films of the last thirty years. His debut feature Bottle Rocket is a gem as well. Most of his subsequent films have been brilliant but uneven; the best of them, like The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel, have been flawed near-masterpieces, dazzlingly imagined and acted but marred by heavy-handed touches of sour violence and labored narrative conceits.

All of this is regrettably at work in Asteroid City. It has a beautiful look, the title setting is beguiling, there are patches of funny dialogue (by Anderson and Roman Coppola) and strong visual gags. The cast is without peer for current Hollywood prestige, glamour and chops. The star power is almost too abundant to name; check the poster above for the listing. It's the sort of bunch that only Woody Allen used to be able to command. But all of this, alas, falls short of overcoming Anderson's misguided habits.

Most ruinous is the frame story, about the play. It looks great, but it distances us from the main story while adding no perspective on it that I could see, is of minimal amusement in itself, and diffuses the later part of the picture into hazy anticlimax. But even within the Asteroid City story, Anderson strikes a curiously flat tone. Deadpan is a wonderful comic technique, unless everybody's deadpan, and then it just becomes monotonous.

A couple of the actors, like Liev Schreiber, Tilda Swinton, Hope Davis and Steve Carrell, manage to escape the Jack Webb Sound-Alike Contest and texture their performances a bit. And Tom Hanks, as Schwartzman's dour father-in-law, somehow finds a tone that's fully in keeping with the movie's style but also seems entirely naturalistic. Hanks seems to be indestructible.

A BLACK AND WHITE SITUATION

Opening this weekend:

  

Kung Fu Panda 3—A couple of weeks ago I was complaining that Norm of the North, like many animated kid flicks, was ruined by obligatory formula elements—the misfit hero, the contrived villain, the overcomplicated plot. But this third Kung Fu Panda flick demonstrates that all of this can work when it’s done right.

As before, it’s set in a medieval China inhabited by anthropomorphic animals. This time title character Po (voiced by Jack Black) is stalked by some sort of monstrous bull from the spirit world who wants to capture his “Chi.” Meanwhile Po is also reunited with his biological father—his adoptive father is a goose, you’ll recall—and travels with him to a Shangri-La-like all-panda domain. Ultimately he must train his newfound family to defend their home.

This pop-Taoist plot is unnecessarily elaborate, but the ingenuity and speed and panache of the gags buoy the movie. So does the acting—the regulars are back, along with fine additions Bryan Cranston as the Dad panda, and J.K. Simmons, dripping menace as the villain.

By the way, if you like “Kung Fu Fighting,” you’ll get a major dose of it here. Could Carl Douglas have imagined, back in 1974, that he’d written an enduring anthem? 

Playing this week at FilmBar Phoenix: 

 

Lazer Team—Decades ago, an alien race called the Antareans secretly contacted Earth with the bad news that other aliens, called the Worg, were on their way to destroy us. Fortunately, it would take many years for them to arrive, during which time we could train a “Champion of Earth” to take the Worg on in single combat, wearing a special suit the Antareans would send us. Not so fortunately, the arriving suit crashes in rural Texas, and its weapons—inspired by the mythological weapons of Perseus—are instead commandeered by four small-town nitwits, who become the misspelled superhero team of the title.

Laborious as this set-up may sound, once this sci-fi comedy gets going it’s really pretty funny. Heavily financed by Indiegogo, this first feature from online video production company Rooster Teeth was directed by Matt Hullum from a script he wrote with star Burnie Burns and others. It starts off a little frenetic and overdirected, but once Hullm gets his characters in place with their superpowers—the sad-sack local sheriff has a force shield, the has-been football star has running shoes, the dense current jock has an arm cannon, and the town simpleton has a helmet that increases his intelligence (giving him an English accent)—the movie’s off and running.

The cast handles the snarky, facetious dialogue well, and the slapstick action is freewheeling and inventive. The movie seems intended as a sly homage to ‘80s-style youth sci-fi like The Last Starfighter or D.A.R.Y.L. or Solarbabies. Lazer Team captures some of the exuberance that gave those mostly dopey films their charm, but it has a contemporary dopey charm that’s all its own.

MUTOS GRACIAS

Out on DVD this week is the uneven new Yank version of Godzilla...

...in which the title beast faces off against…

Monster-of-the-Week: …the “Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms,” or MUTOs. I confess that I found these big geometrical buglike menaces somewhat lacking in personality, but they did, at least, have a fine sense of ponderousness, so let’s make the “Winged MUTO…”

…this week’s honoree.

THE BIGS

Opening this weekend…

Godzilla—There’s a fine melodramatic flourish near the beginning of this second American-made movie about the great beast. It involves Juliette Binoche and Bryan Cranston, and allows them both, but especially Cranston, to let it rip with some old school emoting. It gets the picture off to a promising start.

This doesn’t last, I’m disappointed to say. Though certainly an improvement on the 1998 U.S. version, the new movie plods. Binoche and Cranston are two of the best things it, and one of the movie’s troubles is that there isn’t nearly enough of them onscreen. Nor is there enough of Ken Watanabe, of Sally Hawkins, of David Strathairn, or of Elizabeth Olsen. The focus is on the Navy man hero, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who is passably stalwart but not remotely as interesting as his costars.

More problematic still...there wasn’t enough of the title character here, for my taste. King Kong obviously excepted, no giant movie monster has as distinctive and oddly lovable a personality as Godzilla. The filmmakers give him quite a buildup here before his entrance, and unlike Roland Emmerich’s ‘98 Yankzilla, this one really does feel like an authentic incarnation of beast, with his blunt muzzle, his nettled expression and his squeaky-hinge roar.

The monster scenes are good—directed with an almost maddening sense of deliberation by Gareth Edwards, they have an uneasy ponderousness, a low-angle sense of peril, that many other films in this genre miss. But only at the end do we get a heavy dose of rampaging creature action, and by that time I was worn out by the banality of the plot and the dialogue. This Godzilla has many strong moments, but to assemble a fine cast around an iconic central presence and then not give any of them enough to do? That’s monstrous.

Million Dollar Arm—American sports agent J. B. Bernstein hits upon an idea to open India to baseball fandom: a reality TV show in which cricket “bowlers” compete to see who can throw fast enough, and accurately enough, that they might be a prospect as an MLB pitcher. Neither of the first year’s winners turns out to be a bowler; one specializes in the javelin. But both end up in Los Angeles, trying out for the Majors.

At least in its broad outlines, it’s a true story, though this sweet Disney movie doubtless makes it a little taller. Bernstein, played by Jon Hamm, is depicted as a desperate, scheming hustler who starts by exploiting the two homesick boys, both of whom come from poor provincial backgrounds, and gradually finds his soul by becoming a surrogate father to them. He’s also a ladies’ man who likes young models, and the boys see that his scrub-wearing, nurturing neighbor (the charming Lake Bell) is the better choice for him.

It isn’t as corny as it sounds. The screenwriter is Thomas McCarthy of The Station Agent and The Visitor, that master of unlikely ad hoc families, and he wrings most of the potential condescension out of the dialogue. Aided by a driving score by A. R. Rahman, the director, Craig Gillespie, keeps things crisp, as do the actors—Suraj Sharma and Madhur Mittal as the arms, Pitobash as an aspiring manager, and Bill Paxton as the earnest pitching coach Tom House. There’s also Alan Arkin as a curmudgeonly scout who keeps his eyes closed throughout the tryouts, because he can judge the speed of a pitch by the sound it makes in the catcher’s mitt.

And then there’s Hamm. He shows a scarily flawless surface in his Mad Men role, but as soon as he steps out of that character he becomes strangely disheveled and nerdy. This isn’t always a bad thing—he used this quality to excellent effect, for instance, in his supporting role in Ben Affleck’s The Town. It works for him in Million Dollar Arm, too—he comes across believably as a nice guy trying hard to be a heartless shark, and happily failing.

Skinless—Playing for one show only, at 11:55 tonight at FilmBar Phoenix, this splatter parody concerns Dr. Peter Peel (Brandon Salkil), a brilliant young oncology researcher working, like many brilliant young oncology researchers, out of his basement. He has a malignancy on his shoulder, so despite countless examples of this proving a poor idea, he skips straight to human trials on a possible skin cancer cure, with himself as the guinea pig. Regret ensues.

Originally known under the (better, if less commercial) title The Ballad of Skinless Pete, this no-budgeter is the work of a young Cleveland-based writer-director named Dustin Wayde Mills. He’s by no means lacking in talent—he writes speakable, lucid dialogue, he obtains serviceable performances from his actors, and he structures the story coherently. It’s outrageously gruesome and deliberately sick, very definitely not for the squeamish, but it’s played with a deadpan wit that keeps it, overall, from seeming mean-spirited.

I just wish that young horror film makers could find a way to tell a gripping tale without reflexively turning to the trope of the young woman tied up, pleading and whimpering for her life. Skinless escapes contemptibility because, like Cronenberg’s The Fly (to which it pays homage) it has a heart. But I can’t say that I enjoyed the unsavory final act.

Still, Mills could quite conceivably make a classic horror film. Unlike the many modern-era movie horrors that are motivated by hatred of women, Skinless Pete, you see, is motivated by unrequited love—like the Phantom of the Opera, like King Kong, like the Creature of the Black Lagoon. I’m not placing Pete in their league, certainly, but neither am I suggesting that Mills could never create a movie monster that was.