CORE VALUES

Opening in the multiplexes this weekend:

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire--2021's Godzilla vs. Kong began with Bobby Vinton's "Over the Mountain, Across the Sea" on the soundtrack, as Kong showered in a waterfall to start his day. This new saga starts with Jim Reeves singing "Welcome to My World" as the super simian lopes through his new home at the center of the earth. Things aren't so bucolic for the big ape; he's plagued with dental pain, harassed by hideous creatures and, assuming he's the last of his kind, he's lonely.

Meanwhile, up on the Earth's surface, Godzilla is keeping busy. He vanquishes a spidery Lovecraftian nightmare in the streets of Rome and then, rather adorably, he curls up to get some shuteye in the Colosseum like it's a cat-bed.

In other words, this is the second American kaiju flick in a row that declines to take itself too seriously. Is it as good as last year's startlingly sober Japanese national rumination Godzilla Minus One? Not remotely. Is it even as good as Godzilla vs. Kong? Probably not. But it's still plenty of fun.

Kong plumbs an unexplored region of the Hollow Earth where he meets an endearing mini-Kong and others of his own kind. They're enslaved by Skar King, a vicious ape dictator, and his brutal goons. Kong understandably feels the need to act.

Along for the ride are a few humans, including Rebecca Hall, returning as the Kong-ologist from the previous film, Kaylee Hottle as her beautiful, pained-looking adopted daughter, the last known Skull Islander, Brian Tyree Henry as the conspiracy-minded podcaster and Dan Stevens as a cocksure kaiju veterinarian. But the focus is less on humans here than even in the earlier films in the series.

As preposterous as Godzilla x Kong is, it's also genuinely and freewheelingly imaginative. Director Adam Wingard and his gaggle of co-screenwriters give us scenes of Kong sauntering among the Pyramids, or Mothra over Rio, or Kong taking a belly-flop dive from the summit of Gibraltar, that seem to owe more to cheerful whimsy than to logical plotting.

Still, without too much straining, one could even tease out an allegorical political subtext here. It's not hard to guess who the mangy, patchy, orange-furred King Skar might symbolize, but the source of his tyrannical power has a parallel, too. Skar maintains his rule because he holds in bondage a huge, spiky, frosty-pale monster with freezy breath. This behemoth started to remind me of a certain currently subjugated Grand Old Party.

There was also something I liked about this movie's ending: It has one. It doesn't have twenty. When the dramatic arc has been satisfied, Godzilla x Kong doesn't keep piling on extra codas, as if panicky it hasn't given us enough. It wraps things up in under two hours and gets out while the getting is good. Let it serve as an example to future big franchise movies.

GHOSTS AND DEMONS AND EVEN WILDER YET

Opening this weekend:

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire--This fifth feature in the franchise begins with a nice macabre episode set in 1904, like something from a creepier version of Disney's Haunted Mansion. This is followed by an extended chase through the streets of Manhattan, as the current Ghostbusters pursue, in the "Ectomobile," an eel-like flying dragon spirit up from the sewers.

It's a reasonably diverting start, and the movie goes on to deploy, in addition to Paul Rudd and Carrie Coon and the kids from 2021's Ghostbusters: Afterlife, most of the available stars from the 1984 original. Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, Williams Atherton and Bill Murray show up--no Sigourney Weaver or Rick Moranis, alas--and not just in cameos but with fairly substantive screen time. I was disappointed that the all-woman crew from the much-maligned and underrated 2016 version wasn't invited to this party, but apparently fans are still traumatized.

Anyway, the old vets here are good company--Murray with his peerless sardonic line readings, Akyroyd with his gee-whiz delivery of expository gibberish. A couple of new adds, like Patton Oswalt as an authority on the occult and Kumail Nanjiani as a clod who sells Aykroyd the spherical ancient artifact that serves as the McGuffin, also get into the proper, uhm, spirit of things.

On the whole the movie, directed by Gil Kenan from a script by Kenan and Jason Reitman, is an enjoyable lavish no-brainer. The closest it gets to any emotional weight is an intriguing plot strand in which the teenage heroine (Mckenna Grace) bonds, seemingly romantically, with a teen ghost (Emily Alyn Lind) after she's forbidden to go 'busting until she turns 18; the actors manage a touching rapport even through the special effects prism.

But if Frozen Empire--which concerns a horned demon with freezing superpowers imprisoned inside the McGuffin--doesn't feel like a home run, it may be the result of too much wholesomeness. The teen romance and bickering family dynamic didn't quite feel like Ghostbusters to me, somehow. What made the '84 film seem new was its mix of extravagant, big-budget special effects spectacle with the snarky, irreverent slacker sketch-comedy of Murray and the other stars. Only when Frozen Empire taps into this sensibility does it truly thaw out.

The movie is dedicated to Ivan Reitman, director of the original, and this film, like several of the others, includes a nod to Cannibal Girls, Rietman's 1973 shocker starring the impossibly young and adorable Andrea Martin and Eugene Levy. I hope it makes fans seek out that amusing low-budget creepshow; there's a movie that doesn't suffer from too much wholesomeness. 

Late Night With the Devil--Here's another wry paranormal chiller set in New York, although it was conceived by the Australian brothers Cameron Cairnes and Colin Cairnes and filmed in Melbourne. The premise is that we're watching the 1976 Halloween episode of a syndicated talk show, a perennial also-ran in the ratings to Johnny Carson. Desperate for a sweeps win, the recently widowed host (David Dastmalchian) stacks the guest list with a hokey stage psychic (Fayssal Bazzi), an Amazing Randi-type skeptic (Ian Bliss), and a psychiatrist (Laura Gordon) and her patient, an angelically smiling teenage girl (Ingrid Torelli). This girl was rescued from a cult and just might be possessed.

From the set to the music to the "More to Come" break cards, the Cairnes Brothers truly capture the look and feel of anything-goes '70s talk shows to a degree that will be nostalgic to those of us who remember them. The movie also evokes sources of the period from The Exorcist to Network (Michael Ironside provides stentorian narration in the manner of Network's Lee Richardson), and the soundtrack includes the likes of Flo & Eddie's "Keep It Warm."

The "found footage" conceit is quickly strained; the supposed "behind the scenes" sequences are pretty cinematic and helpfully narrative. But after a while you accept it, largely because the acting, especially the haunted yet game showmanship of the excellent Dastmalchian, keeps us involved.

It's a little scary, but mostly Late Night With the Devil is, like Network, a tongue-in-cheek satire of TV business culture, with ripe lines like "Ladies and gentlemen, a live television first, as we attempt to communicate with...the Devil. But not before a word from our sponsors." I also loved the implication that no amount of supernatural power could overtake Carson in the ratings in those days. Apparently even the Devil couldn't do that.

At Harkins Shea...

Remembering Gene Wilder--This documentary, directed by Ron Frank, does indeed fondly remember the late comedy great. Frank makes Wilder himself the narrator, using audiobook excerpts from his noirishly-titled 2005 memoir Kiss Me Like a Stranger.

Born Jerry Silberman in Milwaukee, he grew up trying to make his mother laugh, and later drew inspiration from the mental patients he worked with while serving in the U.S. Army. He wanted, he says, something a bit "wilder" for his stage name when he started acting in New York. Cast in Brecht's Mother Courage and her Children at the Martin Beck Theatre in the early '60s, he met leading lady Anne Bancroft's future husband Mel Brooks, who later cast him in The Producers.

From there, we get a chronicle of some of the highlights of Wilder's movie career--not all of them; Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx and Start the Revolution Without Me, for instance, are passed over. But there's terrific material on Bonnie and Clyde, The Producers, Willy Wonka, Young Frankenstein, his relationship with Richard Pryor, his scenes with the sheep in Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (he says that Allen told him that he wanted to do a version of Sister Carrie with a sheep instead of Jennifer Jones), and more. My own favorite of Wilder's characters, Jim aka The Waco Kid in Blazing Saddles, is very well represented here.

Talking heads include Brooks, Carol Kane, Mike Medavoy, Alan Alda, Ben Mankiewicz, Rain Pryor, Harry Connick, Jr., Eric McCormack, and Willy Wonka's Charlie Bucket himself, Peter Ostrum, as well as Wilder's widow Karen Wilder, all speaking with unmistakable love. They tell good stories, but the real joy is simply the big dose of Wilder's utterly sui generis blend of innocent sweetness and strangled volatility. If the clips in this movie don't make you smile, you may need to see a doctor.

PULPY LOVE, PUPPY LOVE

Opening this weekend:

Love Lies Bleeding--It certainly does, along with a fair number of corpses, before this New Mexico noir has run its course. It's 1989--the Berlin Wall is coming down on TV in the background--and our heroine Lou (Kristen Stewart), a lonely employee at a low-rent desert gym, spends her days unclogging toilets and stonewalling FBI agents who would like to talk to her about her estranged arms-dealer dad.

Lou falls hard for Jackie (Katy O'Brian), a beautiful feral bodybuilder who's in training for a competition in Vegas. Jackie moves in with Lou, but as you might guess, all does not go smoothly. Jealousy, domestic violence, gang violence, PEDs and the rage to which they give rise all intrude on this sweet romance and lead to gruesome murder and desperate cover-ups.

Stewart and O'Brian are both believable, and their passion for each other is exhilarating, even as you see the collision course with disaster that they're on. Ed Harris is at his creepiest as Lou's Dad, but Dave Franco wins the award for most odious as J.J., Lou's brother-in-law who abuses her hapless sister Beth (Jena Malone). Anna Baryshnikov is wistful as Daisy, who has the bad luck to have a crush on Lou.

The director is Rose Glass, the Brit behind Saint Maud, working from a script she wrote with Weronika Tofilska. As with Saint Maud, Glass is adept at blending the horrific with the ecstatic and the erotic, and her style, abetted by Ben Fordesman's queasy fluorescent cinematography, shifts comfortably from bleak British nastiness to gritty, lurid '80s-style southwestern nastiness. While the story gets a bit chaotically close to running off the rails in the homestretch, Glass even manages a surreal, magical-realist flourish near the end that feels right.

Arthur the King--This isn't a new version of Malory or T. H. White or Camelot. The title character here is a scruffy third-world street mongrel of such dignified bearing that he's given the royal moniker by his new best friend. Said friend is Mike (Mark Wahlberg), an "adventure racer" who impulsively feeds the dog a meatball during a break in a grueling event in the Dominican Republic, after which the mutt shadows Mike's four-person team as they run, bike, free-climb, zip-line and kayak across hundreds of miles of jungle. He even steers them away from peril.

Directed by Simon Cellan Jones, this is based on the 2017 book Arthur: The Dog Who Crossed the Jungle to Find a Home, by Mikael Lindnord. The script, by Michael Brandt, is fictionalized; Lindnord is a Swede, not an American; he met Arthur in Ecuador, not the Dominican Republic, and Wahlberg's teammates in the movie (Simu Liu, Nathalie Emmanuel, Ali Suliman) are likewise made-up.

More strikingly, the real-life circumstances of Arthur's adoption may have been more ambiguous: an Ecuadoran man later claimed that Arthur, originally named Barbuncho, belonged to him, and that Lindnord had essentially dognapped him. Many hardcore dog lovers, of course, will be unlikely to feel much sympathy for the owner of a "pet" who's at liberty to join a dangerous cross-country race.

In any case, Arthur the King is an unembarrassed and pretty effective hybrid of the venerable band-of-misfits, last-chance-for-glory underdog sports movie with an old-school "I think he's trying to tell us something" dog picture. It's admirably attuned to the plight of strays; there's a hint of reproach, probably unintentional, in the contrast between Arthur's struggles to survive on the streets and Mike's self-imposed travails in his rather bougie, corporate-sponsored sport.

Ultimately, though, the movie is really no less corny than any Rin-Tin-Tin or Lassie flick. But it's well-paced, and if, like me, you're a sucker for dogs there's a good chance you'll enjoy it. Wahlberg is agreeable as the boyishly earnest Mike, but neither he nor any other member of the human cast is a match for Ukai, who plays Arthur, and steals the movie like it was a meatball.

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.