GREEN NEW DEAL

Opening in theaters today:

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem--This new animated feature version of the adolescent DNA-altered martial-arts-practicing chelonians is about mayhem that arises due to mutants. In case the title doesn't make it clear.

The quartet, all named for some reason after Italian Old Masters, dwell in the sewers of New York under the strict protective care of their teacher and adoptive parent, the mutant rat Splinter (voiced by Jackie Chan), but long to go to high school, maybe have girlfriends. On one of their sorties into the city, they meet high schooler April O'Niel (Ayo Edebiri), who's an aspiring journalist. They also run afoul of an evil scientist (Maya Rudolph) as well as a gang of other mutant animals led by the monstrous Superfly (Ice Cube).

It's a striking movie to look at. The visuals have a garish, roughed-out, graffiti-esque look, and the animation has a stylized hint of stop-motion in the Rankin-Bass manner. Among the writers are Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen; Rogen also provides the voice of the mutant warthog Bebop. The trailer and poster say the movie is "FROM PERMANENT TEENAGER SETH ROGEN."

The jabbery, overlapping dialogue is ticklingly funny, and I appreciated the characterization of the young April, who in the earlier movies has seemingly served as eye candy for the dads in the audience, as a smart and brave but unconfident kid with a typical body shape. As with earlier entries in the series, the film is packed with product placement, to the point that it becomes part of the comedy.

The Turtles made their debut in 1983, too late to be part of my childhood; my nephews were fans. I remember finding the '90s-era live-action TMNT movies annoying, but I found the live-action features of 2014 and 2016 surprisingly fun, even without a nostalgic attachment. Mutant Mayhem, however, may be the best-looking and funniest of them all.

As is so often the case in movies for kids, the ultimate goal that our heroes are seeking is, of course, acceptance, popularity, or simply "to be normal." This persistent theme can be tiresome, but undoubtedly it does reflect a common wish among this film's target audience. Permanent Teenager Rogen and his collaborators know their business.

VAST TIMES AND ROSS NOTES, HIGH

Opening virtually this weekend:

The Vast of Night--In a small New Mexico town one night in the mid-'50s, a teenage switchboard operator and the cocky young radio DJ with whom she's infatuated hear the same weird, unearthly sound coming through both of their boards. When they're contacted by a couple of listeners who claim to remember the sound, and narrate their backstory with it, things get weirder still.

This sci-fi flick, directed by Andrew Patterson from a script by James Montague and Craig W. Sanger, begins with the conceit that we're seeing an episode of Paradox Theatre, an earnest anthology series in the Twilight Zone manner. The filmmakers wisely don't try to maintain this throughout, but now and then they shift back to a grainy TV image for a few minutes, as if to remind us of the tradition they're working in.

The script is so talky, really, that it could probably be an effective radio play, yet the film is visually wondrous as well, with flashy editing and dazzling long tracking shots (accomplished by drones, I guess) that evoke an otherworldly flavor. Best of all is the acting; Sierra McCormick is extremely adorable as the sweet, bespectacled young heroine, loping through the streets of the town at the slightest, always decent, impulse. Jake Horowitz seems for all the world like he's doing his best junior-league Matthew McConaughey as the DJ, and it works well. Bruce Davis, in a voice-over performance, and the excellent Gail Cronauer cast a cumulative chill as the witnesses.

The film isn't quite a home-run; the resolution is somehow both a little too vague and a little too literal. But The Vast of Night is so rich and inventive that I feel ungrateful pointing this out. It's as if Robert Altman and Stephen Spielberg collaborated on a Twilight Zone, and it almost worked.

The High Note--Tracee Ellis Ross plays a superstar pop singer. She'd like to work on new material; her handlers, led by Ice Cube, want her play to it safe with a Vegas residency. Dakota Johnson plays her put-upon personal assistant, who of course is an aspiring music producer. Kelvin Harrison, Jr. is the inexplicably obscure young musical prodigy the assistant falls for, and would also like to produce.

Although I don't know if audiences will (or should) share my reasons, I liked this movie, one of the higher-profile releases so far to get exiled to streaming by the pandemic, precisely because it was an undemanding big-budget indulgence; a pop-music story without a lot of drug use or other torturous, tiresome self-destructive behavior on parade. Although Johnson is attractive and agreeable enough as the reckless heroine, the star performance is the charming, funny Tracee Ellis Ross; defiantly batty, mercurial and high-maintenance, but not a villain. Mostly thanks to Ross, The High Note stays on-key.

DODGE BRAWL

Opening this week:

 

Fist Fight—Charlie Day is Andy Campbell, a milquetoast English teacher at an underfunded, underachieving, metal-detector-enclosed high school. Ice Cube is Strickland, a tough history teacher. It’s the last day of school, the odious, arrogant students are playing outrageous pranks, and the teachers are re-interviewing for their jobs in the face of layoffs. Things are tense.

Andy witnesses Strickland violently lose it front of his class, and faced with the prospect of losing his job if he doesn’t, he “rats out” Strickland to the principal. On the familiar grounds that “snitches get stitches,” Strickland then challenges Andy to the title combat after school.

The rest of this broad, crude, foul-mouthed comedy, directed by Richie Keen from a script by Van Robichaux and Evan Susser, involves Andy frantically resorting to ever more dishonorable and humiliating tactics in an attempt to avoid this fight. In outline, the plot is very much like that of 1987’s Three O’Clock High, except featuring teachers instead of students. Ultimately, of course, in the grand tradition of movies, Andy and Strickland must face off—if they didn’t, the title would be a cheat.

It’s an indefensibly stupid, ill-conceived, mostly unfunny, often offensive movie. So of course, I feel compelled to defend it a little. A very, very little.

First of all, the actors are good. Day, a veteran nitwit from the Horrible Bosses movies and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, fearlessly plays shamelessness. He isn’t the customary cinematic comical coward, like Bob Hope or Woody Allen, making his avoidance of peril into a self-deprecating dignity—he’s palpably willing to abase himself, and the effect is painful, verging at times on poignancy.

Tracy Morgan brings his querulous, imploring tones to the part of the perennially losing football coach, and he’s pretty funny. Jillian Bell is even funnier as a guidance counselor who seems desperately in need of guidance herself. Only Christina Hendricks, as a possibly psychotic French teacher, seems wasted, although I suppose no footage which features Christina Hendricks walking down the hallway in a form-fitting black dress can be considered a total waste.

Ice Cube is always effortlessly commanding, even in a role like this, which aside from being one-note is saddled with a major idiocy at its core. The moviemakers try to sell us on the idea that Strickland’s rage is because he’s fed up with the disrespect of students and the indifference of his colleagues, and that he’s insisting on going through with his challenge to Andy on the grounds that a fight between two teachers will somehow showcase the problems faced by those in their profession.

This is ludicrous, certainly, but it may point to the reason why, as terrible as Fist Fight is, the movie can’t be called dull. It draws a certain degree of dramatic potency from the near-impossible situation in which public school teachers in poorer districts find themselves—constant frustration if they care about their jobs and their students, soulless defeat if they give up. The dumb fight-between-teachers plot, even though it was probably the inspiration for the picture, is also a weight around its neck. It’s possible to see how, with the same cast and setting, something could have been made that was at least equally funny but genuinely trenchant.

THE SPY'S THE LIMIT

Opening this weekend:

The Man From U.N.C.L.E.—The feature knockoff of I Spy back in 2002 would have been a lousy movie in any case, but it was the more galling if you had any affection for the original series. The same went for the 1999 version of Wild Wild West, and the 2008 version of Get Smart.

I was at an advantage when it came to the new movie version of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., directed by Guy Ritchie, and based on the hit espionage series which ran on NBC from 1964 to 1968. Unlike the aforementioned three shows, I hardly ever watched U.N.C.L.E. as a kid, and therefore had no particular nostalgic investment in it.

The show, you may recall, concerned an international agency (United Network Command for Law and Enforcement) in which spies from either side of the Cold War set aside their differences and cooperated to thwart the evil designs of T.H.R.U.S.H. (Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity). Two such agents were American Napoleon Solo (Robert Vaughn) and Soviet Illya Kuryakin (David McCallum), supervised by dry Brit Mr. Waverly (Leo G. Carroll).

I watched the old show a little in recent weeks in anticipation of the film. It’s on the slovenly and feeble side, but the acting, both of the regulars and the guest stars, was droll and good-natured, and so was some of the writing. If I had been a bigger fan, maybe I would be outraged by Ritchie’s film version. It’s a mixed bag, with style and panache in the directing and designs and acting thrown together with tiresome, even tasteless ideas. But for me, the style and panache won out.

It’s an origin story, about how Napoleon and Illya meet as enemies and are forced to work together to retrieve an atom bomb from some surviving Nazis, and for about the first half of the movie the two of them brawl and bicker. This is tedious, but not as tedious as the chase of all-terrain vehicles in the rain that climaxes the film. And the slightly campy tone taken toward a Nazi torturer feels a little queasy, too.

But Ritchie’s mastery of scrambling and de-scrambling strands of action through omniscient camera moves, split screens, chronology juggling and wild crosscutting give the film a lot of headlong momentum to get us past these missteps. So does a heavy dose of mid-‘60s period flavor from the cars and the fashions on the several beauties in the cast to the punchy, sexy soundtrack.

Probably the biggest upside, though, is the performance of Henry Cavill as Napoleon. Cavill seemed like a cipher to me as Superman, but here he has a grand time imitating the ironically stentorian cadences of Robert Vaughn, and he more or less carries the film.

Armie Hammer manages Illya’s accent well, but the anger issues with which the character is stuck here cheat him out of the chance to show his suave side. Hugh Grant comes into the story late as Waverly, and his line readings are a breath of fresh air, though it’s distressing to think that Grant is now old enough to play a Leo G. Carroll part.

Anachronism watch: The phrases “low tech” and “skill set” are spoken in this movie. Likely, in the mid-‘60s?

Straight Outta Compton—As to the historical accuracy of this chronicle of N.W.A., I’m certainly not hip hop historian enough to have an opinion. I was a fan of several of the guys from the seminal late-‘80s “gangsta rap” ensemble, but mostly on the basis of their movie work. I liked the music a lot, but didn’t think it provided the healthiest set of life influences, and I must say that little in this movie suggests to me that I was wrong about that.

Besides, to a white kid from rural Pennsylvania, it would have somehow felt oddly presumptuous buying those albums, like something I couldn’t pull off. I would have felt like a poseur (if all the white boys had felt that way back then, those guys would have gotten much less wealthy).

What I can say is that the movie, directed by F. Gary Gray, is juicy entertainment, full of terrific acting and music and laughs and heart. It follows the familiar show-biz-legend movie template—an insanely meteoric rise from rough origins, exhilarating success, too much too soon, conflicts and feuds and tragedy and reconciliation. It plays out against the backdrop of L.A. in the turbulent '80s/‘90s, with its constant threat of violence and terror, both from gangs and from the goonish occupying force of the CRASH-era LAPD.

Ice Cube and Dr. Dre were among the producers of Straight Outta Compton, and Gray directed the former in Friday and the latter in Set It Off, so it may not be surprising that these two—played by O’Shea Jackson, Jr. (Ice Cube’s real-life son, or possibly clone) and Corey Hawkins, are presented as the best artists. But the emotional center of the film is a little-known actor named Jason Mitchell as Eric “Eazy-E” Wright, the weed-dealing hustler who launched Ruthless Records, and, even though he was strained and unmusical, managed to make his mark as a performer as well. Mitchell has a touchingly pensive quality as Eazy-E; it’s not hard to believe it when he bonds with Ruthless manager Jerry Heller (the target of Ice Cube’s notorious anti-Semitic swipe in “No Vaseline”), played here by Paul Giamatti. They’re both fretters.

Nobody in the movie comes across as perfect, nor does anybody—except, maybe, for the baleful Suge Knight (R. Marcus Taylor)—come across like a villain. Everybody seems, rather, like they’re in over their heads, blindsided by the intensity and breadth of the reaction to their music and the fame and fortune it brought. The title, after all, is Straight Outta Compton, not Gradually Outta Compton.

COP TO BOTTOM

The movie isn’t much fun, but Woody Harrelson is brilliant in Rampart. He plays Dave Brown, an unraveling Los Angeles cop in 1999, the height of the notorious Rampart Scandal. From the outside, Dave looks like a cocksure archetype of the LAPD at its formidable worst: Crooked, vicious, racist, arrogant, obsessively macho, reflexively self-justifying.

But Harrelson also lets us see how Dave sees himself—as a roguish, vigilante hero—& how his intensity & sexual confidence suck others, women especially, into sharing & enabling this delusion, at least temporarily. His smile is both boyish & predatory, & he speaks with a deliberate, jaunty verbosity, provided in part by James Ellroy, who wrote the script with director Oren Moverman. The movie is a bit like a west coast version of Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, with a more specific psychology & social context & minus the Catholic guilt & mysticism. For better & worse, it’s Bad Lieutenant done a la Robert Altman.

Dave Brown feels that his name is too prosaic for a person as remarkable as he thinks he is, but he has a more distinctive nickname: In the department he’s called “Date-Rape,” because he coyly declines to confirm or deny having killed a man known to be a serial date rapist. Early on, we see him bully a (female) rookie & beat up a suspect, then do a full-on Rodney King to a guy who collides with his car & then flees. Later, we’re clearly shown his capacity for murder, not to mention robbery.

He justifies all this brutality with claim that he never hurts any good people. He also uses the familiar line, beloved of racists everywhere, that because he hates everybody he somehow can’t be a racist; he cites his willingness to sleep with black women as further evidence of this.

Some of the most successful scenes in Rampart, however, are concerned not with Dave’s work but with his eyebrow-raising home life. He’s been married, consecutively, to sisters (Cynthia Nixon & Anne Heche), & has one daughter with each, & they all live together, though the exes want him gone so they can get on with their lives. Despite frequent absences for sex with other women, including Robin Wright as a self-loathing lawyer, Dave refuses to move out—his role as paterfamilias is essential to his heroic self-image.

The cast of Rampart is stellar—in addition to the aforementioned, it includes Sigourney Weaver, Ned Beatty, Steve Buscemi, Ice Cube, Ben Foster & Audra McDonald—& they give fine performances, but they have the feel of cameos in a vehicle for Harrelson.

For about half the film’s length, his magnetism keeps it morbidly riveting. But Ellroy & Moverman haven’t shaped the material for a climactic payoff. We’re just expected to stare at the last few loops of this guy’s downward spiral, & it grows very tedious. Even though I felt a certain repulsed pity for Dave, I also began to strenuously wish that someone would put him out of our misery, & his own.