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.

ONE THAT GOT AWAY

Opening this weekend...

The Little Mermaid--It may be hard for younger people to understand what a big deal the original Little Mermaid was back in 1989. Disney is now so monolithic that it may be difficult to grasp the degree to which the firm, while still tops in the theme-park world, had become something of a lazy backwater in movie terms in the '80s. Animated features like The Black Cauldron and The Great Mouse Detective and Oliver & Company were profitable enough, but they weren't pop-culture landmarks that characterized childhood for a couple of generations.

With The Little Mermaid, one could immediately sense a sea change (sorry). Later animated Disney flicks like Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King became more beloved, perhaps, but that adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen tale set the trend, and the template. When title character Ariel looked toward the surface, opened her mouth and warbled, in the voice of Jodi Benson, that she wanted to be where the people were, she redefined what the word "princess" meant in our culture, and reshaped children's entertainment.

The key, of course, was the musical form. Earlier Disney flicks had songs, some of them classics, but The Little Mermaid was a true musical comedy. The tunes, by composer Alan Menken and lyricist Howard Ashman, were charmingly playful, but they also channeled adolescent longing into their fantasy situations. Ashman, who died in 1991 before the release of Beauty and the Beast, didn't know what he started.

The songs are the best thing about the new Little Mermaid too. I hadn't heard Ashman and Menken's tunes in decades, but they shake the movie to life at once, and a couple of new numbers by Menken and Lin-Manuel Miranda, including a rap for Awkwafina as the seabird, are strong as well. Halle Bailey sings "Part of Your World" with an expressive warmth that deepens the lyrics, and she brings a lovely, openhearted wonder to the role that's hard to resist.

The calypso number "Under the Sea," performed here by Daveed Diggs, is a crowd-pleaser again, and Jonah Hauer-King, in the comparatively thankless role of the Prince, rousingly handles his solo tune "Wild Uncharted Waters" (by Menken and Miranda). Melissa McCarthy brings sly humor--but not too much camp--to Ursula the Sea Witch in "Poor Unfortunate Souls."

The film could have used more music, and less filler. This Little Mermaid's director is Rob Marshall of Chicago and Dreamgirls, and he shapes the numbers excitingly--with the help of the Alvin Ailey Foundation, in the case of "Under the Sea"--but he can't do much with the in-between stuff. And there's a lot of in-between stuff; the new movie runs well over two hours, while the '89 original clocked in at well under an hour and a half.

Most of the non-musical sequences are poky, even interminable. This is especially true of the dry-land scenes, shot on a beautiful Sardinian coastline and set in a Caribbean-tinged storybook alternate past that feels much more like an overpriced, ersatz resort. The underwater scenes, with their immersive fanciful glitz, play better, but even they dawdle.

I've avoided most of the "live-action" (though heavily CGI-enhanced) remakes of Disney animated films in recent years. I did see Jon Favreau's 2016 Jungle Book, which was okay, mostly because it didn't stick too slavishly to the '67 film. But the idea of re-doing Beauty and the Beast or The Lion King in slick but unconvincing live action seemed, beyond the obvious profit potential, gratuitous. Fine as the performers are, this Little Mermaid seems that way too.

I WANT A NEW BUG

Opening in theaters this weekend:

Renfield--The wild-eyed, insect-gobbling toady to the Vampire Prince became a horror icon in his own right more than ninety years ago, when the great Dwight Frye unleashed his unforgettable giggle in Universal's original Dracula. It's a little surprising that he hasn't been given his own movie vehicle sooner.

But while Nicholas Hoult, who plays the title role in this horror spoof from Universal, briefly gets to do a respectable imitation of Frye's deranged laugh (hrrrr, hrrrr, hrrrrrrr....), he otherwise plays R. M. Renfield without mania, as a modest, mild-mannered, good-hearted fellow. He's also an action hero; munching bugs gives him superhuman strength and martial arts skills and recuperative powers.

His decades of servitude have made him reflective as well; he's come to entertain the possibility that he might just be in a toxic relationship with his boss. He's started attending a support group for people in a similar boat, both to explore his own emotional needs and to scout for victims--the abusers that people at the meetings describe--to serve as food to his convalescing sanguinary master.

The film is set in modern-day New Orleans, where Renfield has brought the charred remains of Dracula after the duo's last tangle with fearless vampire killers. The Count isn't looking well, but he's still able to bully and shame his poor lackey into submission, and he's a little more menacingly intact every time we see him. Then when Renfield comes to the attention of both a local crime family and of a New Orleans cop (Awkwafina) with an angry grudge against the gangsters, he must decide whose priorities he will focus on, Drac's or his own.

Directed by Chris McKay from a script by Ryan Ridley and a story by Robert Kirkman, Renfield is very silly and often heavy-handed. It's extremely gory, but like this February's Cocaine Bear, the gore is played strictly for laughs and lacks any true shock; it's too insubstantial to pack much punch even as a gross-out. The satirical points about modern self-help culture and pop psychology are trenchant enough, but they've pretty much exhausted themselves before the film is half over.

That said, Renfield is colorful, fast-moving and full of comedic invention, and Hoult is charming and easy to root for. Awkwafina pushes pretty hard, as she has in almost all her movies except The Farewell, but she also gets across an honest fury and grief, and when she lets herself connect with Hoult she lightens up agreeably. Shohreh Agdashloo has a gleefully sinister glint in her eyes as the queen of the crime family, Ben Schwartz is properly loath-able as her imbecilic son, and the support group offers some fine character players.

The movie would carry a lot less weight, however, without its other Nick. Growling through a mouth full of pointy teeth, seething with grievance at his reduced circumstances and unable to maintain the air of grand menace he's trying for, Nicholas Cage offers probably the goofiest parody version of Drac since George Hamilton in Love at First Bite back in 1979. Unlike Hamilton's, however, Cage's Count isn't meant to be lovable. Cage sinks his fangs into the role, and taps a rich vein of malignant narcissism.

VERNE NOTICE

The weekend of July 20 marks the 50^th anniversary of the moon landing. I decided to celebrate by writing, directing and acting in a one-hour radio play, Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon (drawing on both Verne's 1865 FTETTM and its 1870 sequel Round the Moon). It's scheduled to air at 7 p.m. (Phoenix time) Saturday, July 20, and again at 2 p.m. Wednesday, July 24, on Sun Sounds of Arizona; you can listen in at sunsounds.org.

Check out my Phoenix Magazine online article about the production.

Here I am in great-director mode during the recording:

 And here's a better angle on me:

 

This was a passion project for me. I was seven years old that week in 1969 when the Eagle, the lunar module of Apollo 11, touched down in the Sea of Tranquility, and I remember it, and the weeks and months leading up to it, with a vividness matched by only a few of my other early childhood memories.

I remember the gathering of relatives at our rural house, and one of my cousins saying, quite gratuitously, “There’s his foot comin’ down,” as we watched Neil Armstrong, in fuzzy black-and-white, take his legendary one small step. Looking back, it seems like a corny, Norman Rockwell scene, but I also remember going outside shortly thereafter, into the cool, clear Pennsylvania night, and looking up at the moon, as if I’d see the guys waving down at me from above.

One of my sisters, however, has these memories beat; she remembers watching the landing at the Newport Folk Festival, on a TV placed on the stage where both the audience and the performers could keep an eye on it!

The feverish excitement that arose during the early years of the Apollo program turned countless people into space geeks, and I was certainly one of the most insufferable of them, wearying teachers, family members and even friends my own age with space chatter to the exclusion of almost everything else (now I'm doing it again, at the age of  57!). As it happened, the mother of one of my brothers-in-law worked for a NASA contractor in D.C., so she had a connection; shortly after the safe return of the astronauts she somehow arranged for me to be sent an Apollo 11 press kit, complete with glossy prints of the iconic photos taken by Armstrong on that first lunar excursion. I still have them.

Several years ago I had my moon pics appraised when Antiques Roadshow came to the Valley, and was told that they’re fairly common, having been sent to thousands of schoolteachers at the time, and only worth about $20 as a collector’s item. You can well imagine, however, that in second grade I felt like I had been entrusted with high-level government documents, and they made me the undisputed King of Show-and-Tell.

Anyway, Happy Moon Landing Day tomorrow everybody, and may the spirit of America one day soon be devoted again to doing things "In Peace, For All Mankind."

Oh, by the way, check out my review, on Phoenix Magazine online, of Lulu Wang's The Farewell, starring Awkwafina...

...one of the better movies I've seen so far this year.

PET PROJECT

Check out my reviews, on Phoenix Magazine online, of Crazy Rich Asians and Down a Dark Hall.

Also opening this weekend:

Alpha—This new adventure isn’t just a Boy and his Dog story, it’s the Boy and his Dog story. The original Boy and his Dog story. It’s the seed from which grew Lassie, and Snoopy, and Scooby-Doo.

Well, OK, really it’s a Boy and his Wolf story. It’s set thousands of years ago, on hilly grasslands, among people who chip stones into spearheads, stampede buffalo off of cliffs, and revere their ancestors. Mammoths, wooly rhinos and saber-toothed felines are part of the local fauna.

Separated from his tribe and injured during a bison hunt disaster, an adolescent, Keda (Kodi Smit-McPhee), befriends a wolf. As they travel together, we see the beginnings of all that will follow: The first fetched stick, the first whistle, the first invaded bed, the first guilt-inducing stare while you’re trying to eat.

Directed by Albert Hughes (half of the Hughes Brothers team that made Menace II Society back in the ‘90s), from a screenplay by Daniele Sebastian Weidenhaupt, Alpha tries for some paleontological and anthropological authenticity. The people speak a (subtitled) language, presumably invented for the movie, though a phrase that sounded like “cara mi” (for “my friend”) kept reminding me of “cara mia,” a favorite Italian endearment of Gomez Addams for his beloved Morticia.

Alpha’s original title was The Solutrean, referring to the tool-makers of Western Europe in the Paleolithic. The change seems wise, not only because Alpha is less obscure but because the Boy/Wolf bonding tale is the true core of the picture.

Inevitably, this story is harsher than the average contemporary kid’s movie—animals die, blood is shed. But it’s only a little harsher. Our hero Keda is given a sensitive nature that seems distinctly modern; his mother says that he “leads with the heart.” He’s reluctant to kill, even in a hunt, and it’s this that leads him to take pity on the wounded wolf, even though the creature was part of the pack that had just tried to kill him. Thus Alpha is, perhaps, not only an origin story for the beginnings of domesticated animals, but for the beginning of thinking outside the box.

In any case, despite a plot full of questionable lucky breaks and softened edges, the movie works. Briefly, I thought it might have a Dog of Flanders-type ending, but Hughes and Weidenhaupt manage a final twist that I admit I didn’t see coming.

The delicate-featured Smit-McPhee, who played Viggo Mortensen’s generous-hearted little son in 2009’s The Road, has just the right callow yet otherworldly look and manner for his role. He’s only upstaged by the wolf, an uncommonly beautiful beast who is credited under the name “Chuck.” The cutaways to the canine’s interested but skeptical facial expressions seem to connect with the audience every time, and it’s touching when the homesick Alpha joins in the howling of a distant pack.

Those of us to whom pets in general, and dogs in particular, are one of the great joys in life may find our imaginations especially stirred by Alpha. The human innovation depicted here, however simplified and romanticized, was one of the chief reasons our species thrived, and certainly a big part of what makes our lives worthwhile.