NEIL AND PREY

A Merry Christmas to all! Check out my reviews, online at Phoenix Magazine, of Song Sung Blue...

...and Anaconda...

...now in the multiplexes.

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.

A BLACK AND WHITE SITUATION

Opening this weekend:

  

Kung Fu Panda 3—A couple of weeks ago I was complaining that Norm of the North, like many animated kid flicks, was ruined by obligatory formula elements—the misfit hero, the contrived villain, the overcomplicated plot. But this third Kung Fu Panda flick demonstrates that all of this can work when it’s done right.

As before, it’s set in a medieval China inhabited by anthropomorphic animals. This time title character Po (voiced by Jack Black) is stalked by some sort of monstrous bull from the spirit world who wants to capture his “Chi.” Meanwhile Po is also reunited with his biological father—his adoptive father is a goose, you’ll recall—and travels with him to a Shangri-La-like all-panda domain. Ultimately he must train his newfound family to defend their home.

This pop-Taoist plot is unnecessarily elaborate, but the ingenuity and speed and panache of the gags buoy the movie. So does the acting—the regulars are back, along with fine additions Bryan Cranston as the Dad panda, and J.K. Simmons, dripping menace as the villain.

By the way, if you like “Kung Fu Fighting,” you’ll get a major dose of it here. Could Carl Douglas have imagined, back in 1974, that he’d written an enduring anthem? 

Playing this week at FilmBar Phoenix: 

 

Lazer Team—Decades ago, an alien race called the Antareans secretly contacted Earth with the bad news that other aliens, called the Worg, were on their way to destroy us. Fortunately, it would take many years for them to arrive, during which time we could train a “Champion of Earth” to take the Worg on in single combat, wearing a special suit the Antareans would send us. Not so fortunately, the arriving suit crashes in rural Texas, and its weapons—inspired by the mythological weapons of Perseus—are instead commandeered by four small-town nitwits, who become the misspelled superhero team of the title.

Laborious as this set-up may sound, once this sci-fi comedy gets going it’s really pretty funny. Heavily financed by Indiegogo, this first feature from online video production company Rooster Teeth was directed by Matt Hullum from a script he wrote with star Burnie Burns and others. It starts off a little frenetic and overdirected, but once Hullm gets his characters in place with their superpowers—the sad-sack local sheriff has a force shield, the has-been football star has running shoes, the dense current jock has an arm cannon, and the town simpleton has a helmet that increases his intelligence (giving him an English accent)—the movie’s off and running.

The cast handles the snarky, facetious dialogue well, and the slapstick action is freewheeling and inventive. The movie seems intended as a sly homage to ‘80s-style youth sci-fi like The Last Starfighter or D.A.R.Y.L. or Solarbabies. Lazer Team captures some of the exuberance that gave those mostly dopey films their charm, but it has a contemporary dopey charm that’s all its own.

BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED GEOPOLITICAL WATERS

Opening this weekend:

Bridge of Spies—This Cold War drama opens with one of those mesmerizing sequences that the mature Steven Spielberg does so effortlessly, as Soviet spy “Rudolf Abel” (Mark Rylance) is stalked by the Feds through the streets and subways of Brooklyn. After Abel, a British-born Russian who seems to have squeezed his espionage work in around his passion for painting, is captured in 1957, his defense is turned over to a staid Brooklyn insurance lawyer, James B. Donovan (Tom Hanks) who had worked on the prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials.

From there on, Bridge of Spies, scripted by Matt Charman and Joel and Ethan Coen, becomes a reflection on the meaning of patriotic duty. Donovan regards it as a point of national pride to provide Abel with a genuine best defense, while everyone from the judge (Dakin Matthews) to his wife (Amy Ryan) to the CIA creep shadowing him (Scott Shepherd) regards his role as a formality in a kangaroo court, and roll their eyes with disgust at his idealism. The public is even less sympathetic, glowering at him over their newspapers on the subway.

But a few years later, when U2 pilot Francis Gary Powers (Austin Sowell) is shot down and captured by the Soviets, Donovan’s spirited advocacy in keeping his client out of the electric chair seems prescient. He’s asked by Allen Dulles (Peter McRobbie) to travel to Berlin, where the wall is just then going up, to unofficially negotiate the swap of Abel for Powers at Glienicke Bridge between Berlin and Potsdam in February of 1962.

Hanks is terrific in the sort of Capra-esque hero part for which he’s the modern go-to American star—Spencer Tracy or James Stewart or Henry Fonda would have excelled in it too. But Hanks makes it his own, giving Donovan a certain wry perplexity at how those around him don’t seem to get it; don’t grasp that excluding foreigners or alleged enemies from full due process and civil protection is a betrayal of American values. These issues never seem to go away, alas—Donovan’s frustration will be familiar to anyone who ever felt like their head was going to explode in arguments over, say, waterboarding or Abu Ghraib.

Reliably fine as Hanks and several other members of the veteran cast are, the best performance in Bridge of Spies is by Rylance, as the mysterious, ethnically pied, imperturbable Rudolf Abel. Initially dismayed at his assignment, Donovan is almost immediately disarmed by his client’s dignity, resolve and ironic humor, while Abel seems moved by Donovan’s honor and good faith. Rylance and Hanks get all of this across without heavy-handed telegraphing; in each of their scenes together the two men are closer and closer friends.

I’m not historian enough to say to what degree this story has been streamlined and made symmetrical for dramatic purposes. Plenty, I’d guess. Nor can I say how much the movie’s version of Donovan, or any other character, reflects the reality. But as drama, it’s insistently absorbing. The final minutes—Donovan’s return to Brooklyn, just as his family is seeing a TV news report about him—are perhaps a bit too pat and burnished and reverent. It’s the only moment when Spielberg drops his impressive reserve here, and it’s brief. Otherwise, this low-key, sedately-paced movie builds quietly, earning its emotional payoffs with both a verbal and cinematic eloquence.

  

Goosebumps—Just in time for Halloween comes this comedy fantasy riff on the popular series of young-adult horror novels of the '90s. The work of the insanely prolific R. L. Stine, the formulaic Goosebumps yarns featured young protagonists going up against zombies, ghosts, werewolves, blobs, abominable snowmen, giant insects, murderous garden gnomes and just about every other imaginable horror motif (almost all of them, of course, pillaged from the movies).

Stine is an onscreen character in the film, played by Jack Black as a curmudgeon living in small-town Delaware. It turns out that Stine’s imagination is so potent that his monsters will “literally leap off the page” of the original manuscripts if their locked covers are opened. Our young hero (Dylan Minnette), a new kid in town who is drawn to Stine’s daughter (Odeya Rush), inadvertently liberates all of the Goosebumps monsters. Under the leadership of the evil ventriloquist dummy Slappy, they go on the hunt for their author, who they resent for their imprisonment in the books.

The storyline is silly, to be sure, but the script, by Darren Lemke (from a story concocted by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski), is a little wittier than you might expect, and Rob Letterman’s direction is exuberant. Black’s short-fused, fussy, vain, self-dramatizing Stine is a study in broad and happy hamming; he seems to be channeling Gale Gordon.

It's also great to hear the scherzos of Danny Elfman, in his classic style, on the soundtrack. Goosebumps is a trifle, certainly, but it’s a well-crafted, funny and colorful trifle. It would perhaps be a good family option for the season—grown-ups can get a kick out of it, and on any but the littlest viewers, it’s unlikely to raise any serious goosebumps.