NET GAINS

Opening this weekend:

Champions--Just like Gene Hackman in Hoosiers, Woody Harrelson is a hotheaded basketball coach who loses jobs over violent outbursts on the court. Just like Keanu Reeves in Hardball, he has a coaching gig forced on him, in this case as community service in lieu of jail time. In short, Champions follows the standard sports movie playbook plot point for plot point. The variation, this time, is that Harrelson is assigned to a Special Olympics team made up of players with intellectual disabilities.

Thus the obvious worry, going in, is that these characters will be either ridiculed or patronized, or both. The director is Bobby Farrelly, half of the Farrelly Brothers, who in earlier films have indeed derived broad comedy from intellectually disabled characters; his brother Peter Farrelly, who we saw advising the filmmakers with Down syndrome in the documentary Sam and Mattie Make a Zombie Movie, insists that they "revere" such people but refuse to sentimentalize or condescend in their depictions of them.

How does this approach work out in Champions? Well, certainly the quirks and limitations of Harrelson's ballers are played for laughs, but I think no more insultingly than in, say, The Mighty Ducks or Dodgeball or, for that matter, Major League, or any other formula sports flick about the triumph of a ragtag bunch of misfit underdogs.

It helps, too, that the coach is generally the butt of the jokes. More importantly, the actors who play the team members are spirited, ebullient, confident performers with vivid personalities. They also bring out the best in Harrelson, who responds to them with what appears to be genuine warmth and delight.

Aside from the charming engagement between these actors and the star, the movie, set in Des Moines but mostly filmed in Canada, is pretty by-the-numbers, though it's pleasant and watchable (it's a knockoff, by the way, of a 2018 Spanish film called Campeones, a hit in that country). Ernie Hudson and Cheech Marin turn up in supporting roles but have little to do. Harrelson's love interest is Kaitlin Olson as a small-potatoes Shakespearean actor and the protective sister of one of the players, and the bantering dialogue Mark Rizzo provides for them isn't a disgrace. And I'm predisposed to like any movie in which the climax of The Winter's Tale is used to teach the pick-and-roll.

WHY YOU ALWAYS LION?

Hope everybody had a great Inauguration Day.

On Inauguration Eve, Donald Trump, Jr. posted this comparison between incoming President Joe Biden and Scar, the villain of Disney's The Lion King, on Instagram:

I'd like to set aside the obvious silliness--that Biden "cheated to win"--and ask Junior a different question: Who, in this "analogy," are the hyenas?

Back in 1994, when I reviewed The Lion King for Phoenix New Times, the 32-year-old pedantic ass I was spent interminable paragraphs trying to show off my supposed great Shakespearean acumen by tediously noting all the allusions to the Bard in this and other Disney animated flicks of the period. I didn't get to what should have been the point of the review until the last couple of graphs, and even there I let the movie off too lightly for it.

Specifically, I should have given more emphasis to how hard it is to escape the interpretation of The Lion King as an allegory (probably unintentional) in support of racial--or, at the very least, nationalistic and aristocratic--purity. Much was made at the time that this was the first truly original Disney film; that it wasn't based on some fairy tale or novel or other such source. Yet what they came up with was, as in the Star Wars flicks, one more tired-ass tale of a prince destined to rule as a birthright.

Even back then, though, what I found still more disturbing was the matter of the hyenas.

The usurper Scar invites the hyenas to integrate the lion pride, a sure sign of his wickedness. Two of them have overtly "ethnic" characterizations, voiced by Whoopi Goldberg and Cheech Marin. A third, performed by veteran voice actor Jim Cummings, appears to have some sort of disability. It's this diversity that wrecks the integrity of the pride under Scar. The filmmakers seemed to be uncomfortable with this implication themselves, since toward the end there's a heavy-handed shot of the hyenas goose-stepping. This touch now seems like a classic reflexive right-wing projection, a meme tactic, like putting a Hitler mustache on a picture of Obama.

I closed my review back in '94 with the observation that "...if The Lion King weren't so obviously good-hearted...it might have seemed like the jackboots had been placed on the wrong paws." I can remember people I knew back then rolling their eyes at this mild suggestion as being overthought and tiresomely "politically correct" of me. But the 58-year-old pedantic ass I've grown into now wonders if I didn't take this insanely popular movie too little to task.

So, again, I'd like to ask Don Jr., who would have been about 16 years old when The Lion King came out: Who, in your view, are the hyenas?

Also, does this mean you see yourself as Simba, destined to rule after throwing Biden off a cliff?

TIME OF HER LIFE

Opening today at Harkins Shea (on Amazon Prime October 16):

Time--Garrett Bradley directed this nonfiction portrait of Sibil Fox Richardson, aka "Fox Rich," a Shreveport, Louisiana woman who, desperate for money to keep their clothing store running, tried to rob a credit union branch in Grambling with her husband Rob in 1997. They were caught and went to prison, and while Fox was released after about three years, Rob was sentenced to sixty years, and was still imprisoned two decades later. His wife--and mother of his six children--rebuilt her family's life, but she also worked tirelessly to attempt to shorten this preposterous sentence.

The title has multiple potential meanings. On a social level, it's a reproach against the outrageous "time" for which poor and non-white convicts are disproportionately incarcerated. But it also has a powerful perceptual meaning. Bradley originally intended the film as a short, until she was given hours of Fox's home-video footage covering years of her life, her impressive kids at different stages of their growth, etc.

This material, intermixed with the more current footage Bradley shot, and unified with it in beautiful black and white and with a sprightly, persistent solo piano score, gives the film a powerful sense of refracted time, of access to free-flowing memory, of a whole life seen at once. The feeling, which may sometimes overtake people in middle age, of all the moments of life seeming to constrict into close proximity with each other, is unaccountably captured by this movie.

This trembling, exalted tone-poem quality is worthy of the story's intense central character; with her low, urgent, un-histrionic yet somehow conspiratorial manner of speaking, Fox pulls us into her sense of mission. When she tries to get answers from court officials over the phone, she remains flawlessly courteous, well knowing how counterproductive it would be to lose her patience. But we see the toll it takes on her. We see the quiet worry under the surface of her strong, patient mother. And we see, and feel, her radiant love for her family. This isn't like any documentary you've seen before.

Also at Harkins:

The War with Grandpa--Grandpa being Robert De Niro, as a widower who's become so short-fused and violent that he's a danger to himself and others. He has to move back in with his daughter (Uma Thurman) and her husband (Rob Riggle), thus displacing his snotty grandson (Oakes Fegley) out of his bedroom to the attic. The little crud declares "war" to get his room back, and wacky slapstick ensues.

As cheesy middlebrow family comedies go, this one, directed by Tim Hill from a 1984 children's novel by Robert Kimmel Smith, is by no means the worst you've ever seen,  though the tone is a little artificially lighthearted for the nastiness of some of the pranks. On the shelf since it was completed in 2017, it should wring a few giggles out of your kids or grandkids on a slow afternoon.

But the real interest for an adult moviegoer is, of course, De Niro. How did a guy whose last name has become almost a synonym for "great actor" decide he needed to do this? His costars here include Cheech Marin, Jane Seymour and Christopher Walken--dutifully doing his best "Christopher Walken," of course--and it's fun to see the four of them work together, even in this silly stuff.

But it should be noted that while De Niro maintains a certain dignity, the menace of his Scorsese years has faded, even for comic effect. He comes across like an avuncular pussycat, something like he did in 2015's The Intern. Come to think of it, he came across that way last year in Scorsese's The Irishman, too.