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.

WALKING TALL

A story with a hero named Jack is always promising. The Ripper aside, fictional Jacks tend to be plucky, resourceful working-class fellows who overcome adversity through courage and native wit, without benefit of being knights or princes. Indeed, in latter-day retellings they sometimes even get the Princess—and while killing a giant may be impressive, being accepted by the 1% is truly the stuff of fairy tale

The Cornish folktales known since at least the 18th Century as Jack the Giant Killer have been adapted for the movies at least once already, in a pleasant 1962 version manifestly made in imitation of the Ray Harryhausen classic The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. The lavish new version opening today, directed by Bryan Singer and called Jack the Giant Slayer, borrows elements from the earlier film but applies them to a retelling of Jack and the Beanstalk.

The new movie’s Jack is played by Nicholas Hoult of Warm Bodies, whose long, homely-handsome face lends itself to the idea of a farm-boy hero. The script, by Darren Lemke, Christopher McQuarrie and Dan Studney, cleverly makes Jack’s acquisition of the Magic Beans plausible without either violating the spirit of the story or making him a hopeless dupe. The plot is also embellished to add a sweet Princess (Eleanor Tomlinson), a fretful King (Ian McShane), a scheming rat of a courtier-villain (Stanley Tucci, sly as ever), and a valiant guardsman (Ewan McGregor), among other secondary characters, all effective.

But of course this movie must stand or fall by its giants, and it’s nice to report that they’re terrific—squalid and scabby and scary, but with a certain uncouth grandeur and with pungently distinctive characterizations, from the two-headed alpha male (the left head voiced by Bill Nighy, the gibbering right by John Kassir) down through various aggrieved subordinates and malcontents. They have pathos and a bitter dignity along with their menace; you want to see them defeated, but you don’t hate them.

When episodic high fantasy of this sort is done right—soberly but not somberly, with unpretentious high spirits, a generous heart and a well-structured story that sticks to the rules it sets up—it can offer one of the keenest pleasures of which the movies are capable. Jack the Giant Slayer comes closer to nailing this atmosphere than any I’ve seen in a while, much closer than the remake of Clash of the Titans from a couple of years back.

I don’t think I could ever feel as warmly toward CGI effects as I do toward stop-motion, but that’s personal nostalgia. And it should be said that Giant Slayer is likely to be a little too frightening for smaller kids. But that’s not a criticism either; it just means that they’ve taken their giants with proper seriousness. Jack the Giant Slayer is a strong entertainment. Only in its final minute or two does it strike a very slightly sour note, when it links the story’s legacy to an ongoing aristocratic fetish that is unworthy of a self-respecting Jack.