DAY OF WRECKONING

Opening virtually this weekend:

Homewrecker--Michelle (Alex Essoe), a lovely young interior designer, is trying to get some work done on her laptop in a trendy coffee bar. All of a sudden she's accosted by Linda (Precious Chong), an aggressively over-friendly, strangely trapped-in-the-'80s woman from her yoga class. Linda invites herself to sit down, then bullies and cajoles Michelle into coming to her home on the pretext of offering her a design job. Once she gets her in the house, she won't let her leave.

The early part of this blackly comedic Canadian-made shocker, directed by Zach Gayne from a script he co-wrote with Essoe and Chong, is so socially excruciating that when the movie finally tips over into gruesome violence, it's almost a relief. Chong's persona is somewhat reminiscent of Leslie Mann's not-so-passively-aggressive shtick, and her energy drives the movie, but Essoe is subtly funny as well; Michelle's death-defying politeness and decency constitute Homewrecker's best joke.

The film is slight to the point that extended tussling and even a lip-synch sequence feel like padding to get it (just barely) to feature length. Even so, it improves steadily as it goes along; there are inventive episodes throughout, as when Michelle and Linda play an old-school '80s-style "video board game" called Party Hunks! It may be the best game between enemies since Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi played chess in The Black Cat.

My Spy--Dave Bautista of Guardians of the Galaxy plays a CIA badass who is assigned, for reasons I don't feel like explaining, to surveillance of a beautiful single mom and her cute nine-year-old daughter in Chicago. The daughter gets wise to the operation, and in return for silence about the blown cover, the badass agrees to be her special friend, to treat her to ice cream, take her skating and teach her to be a spy.

This comedy, aimed at families though surprisingly violent and crude at times, has the feel of something that Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson might have taken a pass on. There isn't an original moment; indeed, a great many of the gags derive from acknowledging that they're borrowed from earlier movies. But the kid (Chloe Coleman) is poised and agreeable; vets like Ken Jeong and the excellent Kristen Schaal add some texture; and Bautista, if not as polished as The Rock, nonetheless has an almost childlike quality that's touchingly sweet.

THE FALL CLASSIC

Happy Halloween everybody! My favorite holiday.

Check out The Wife's costume...

Pumpkin Pi, get it?

Here's my costume...

No clever pun with this one; I'm just calling it "Sharky McSharkboy."

Also, Happy Dia de los Muertos. Here's a pic, by The Kid, of the little Day of the Dead dude now riding on my dashboard...

...a kind gift from my pal Joe Moore.

Here's a couple of catch-up reviews:

It's been a few years--since 2015's heavy-handed but enjoyable Black Sea, unless I'm forgetting something--since we've gotten a big-budget submarine adventure picture. But Hunter Killer, now in theaters, gives us an amusing tour of some of the genre's favorite elements--nerve-wracking cat-and-mouse between underwater vessels, threading the ship through narrow canyons, stony-faced rival Captains who respect each other, an Executive Officer questioning orders, decisions effecting the fate of the world made in the cold depths of the sea. Coolest detail: The standing officers leaning back in unison as the ship dives.

The term "hunter killer" refers to a class of submarine used to attack other subs; the one we follow here is the U.S.S. Arkansas, commanded by non-Academy, up-from-the-working-class Captain Gerard Butler. He's asked to navigate his way through a heavily mined inlet to pick up a Navy SEAL team that has rescued the deposed Russian President (who seems decidedly NOT based on the current real-life holder of that office) from the rogue Defense Minister who wants to start a war with the U.S. Along the way the Arkansas picks up the Captain (Michael Nyqvist) of a sunken Russian sub, who must decide whether or not to help the Yanks navigate their way in.

All of these thrills are excitingly if conventionally handled. But where director Donovan Marsh and screenwriters Arnie Schmidt and Jamie Moss really show their ingenuity is how they avoid the dramatic as well as the literal claustrophobia of the submarine genre. We aren't stuck in the tin can underwater with Butler and his crew for the whole running time; there's a dry-land side to the movie as well.

We follow the Russians, and the exploits of the SEAL team, led by Toby Stephens, that's infiltrating the Russian headquarters. And back at the Pentagon, we get to see the squabbles between the bristling head of the Joint Chiefs (Gary Oldman), a sober-minded Admiral (Common) and a shrewd NSA analyst (Linda Cardellini). We even get a glimpse of the blond, female U.S. President (Caroline Goodall), wistfully reminding us that this film went into production when a different set of political and social assumptions were in place.

Butler is good company once again, and the late Swedish actor Nyqvist, to whom the film is co-dedicated (along with producer John Thompson), brings an effective tinge of the tragic to his Russian counterpart. Those hoping for a good rip-snorting Gary Oldman scenery-chew may be disappointed; he gets less of an opportunity for flamboyant ranting here than in some of his other roles.

In case it isn't clear from my description, Hunter Killer is a very old-school piece of work, in the "guy movie" tradition. If you're the sort who could never resist a Saturday afternoon rerun of The Enemy Below or Ice Station Zebra, this might be the movie for you, and maybe your dad or your grandfather or your uncle might want to come along. Much of the action seems cartoonishly implausible, and it's exactly on that basis that you're likely to enjoy it.

A note on this movie's Russians: In another old-school convention, they speak Russian when it's necessary for the American characters to overhear them, and accented English the rest of the time, so we don't have to read subtitles. But at a key moment, a Russian character expresses his feelings to some of his fellow countrymen by showing them his middle fingers. Does that gesture have the same meaning for Russians that it does for us?

Halloween is here, both the holiday and yet another movie named after it that's too scary for younger children and wimpy adults. But there's also a milder movie alternative for such audiences who still want to get into the spirit: Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween. The subtitle begs the question, though--shouldn't any self-respecting Halloween be haunted?

It's a sequel to Goosebumps, the 2015 comedy-fantasy riff on Scholastic Publishing's massively successful young-adult horror paperback series of the 1990s. The heroes of these tongue-in-cheek tales, cranked out by the dozens by author R. L. Stine, were kids, pitted against ghosts and werewolves and aliens and giant bugs and mummies and pretty much any other standard horror or sci-fi menace you could name, most of them derived from the movies.

The 2015 film turned a bunch of these creatures loose on a small town in Delaware; it also brought Stine onscreen as a character, played by Jack Black as a vain but lovable curmudgeon with an imagination so powerful that his creations can literally leap off the page. It was a trifling film, but well-made and enjoyable, with a little more wit than might have been expected.

Goosebumps 2, directed by Ari Sandel and set in a small town in New York, has a Halloween theme. Two scavenging boys inadvertently unleash the power of an unfinished early Stine tale, Haunted Halloween, and the town's elaborate decorations and treats come to life, from a bucket of Gummi bears to an enormous black-and-purple dragon made of balloons. These creepy creatures are led, once again, by Slappy, the sinister ventriloquist's dummy come to life.

Some of the resulting sequences are visually striking, though again, none are allowed to tip over into serious terror, and the film should be fun for all but the littlest viewers. The young cast, led by Jeremy Ray Taylor and Caleel Harris as the boys and Madison Iseman as Taylor's college-bound older sister, are capable. But most of the laughs are provided by the adults, especially the always-amusing Wendy McLendon-Covey as the indomitable mom, Chris Parnell as the drug store guy turned into Slappy's toadying sidekick, and Ken Jeong as the wacky neighbor who really, really likes Halloween.

One of the best features of the first film was the lively music by the great Danny Elfman. The macabre scherzos here are by the British composer Dominic Lewis, and he channels Elfman so well it's scary.

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.

TOP OF THE WORLD, NAH...

Opening this weekend:

Norm of the North—The title character is not your average polar bear. He’s able to talk to humans, for one thing, and he’s squeamish about hunting and eating seals—though the movie never makes clear what he has been eating up to this point.

When a greedy New York developer plans to build luxury homes in the Arctic, Norm and three lemming pals travel to the Big Apple to find a way to put a stop to it. He becomes a media star shilling for the developer’s project, just waiting for his popularity to peak so that he can use it to turn public opinion against the ridiculous scheme.

This animated kidflick has its heart in the right place, and it’s hard to completely dislike a movie that mocks eco-tourism and gratuitous development of environments that should remain pristine. But Norm of the North falls flat. It has a flicker of wit here and there, but overall, it just isn’t funny.

Much of the problem, as with so many of films of this sort, is that the story is overcomplicated, weighed down with obligatory formula elements, as if the makers were terrified to do without them. Why, for instance, did we need the clumsily introduced human heroine, who wants to send her gifted daughter to a private school but needs the developer’s endorsement? Did we need Norm’s grandfather bear, held captive in a cage in the basement of the developer’s office so that Norm can have somebody to rescue? And then there are those wacky lemmings, who are in absolutely no way imitative of the Minions.

Why, above all, must Norm be a misfit, struggling to be understood? Just for variety, why couldn’t the hero of one of these movies be brassy and confident, and unflappably foil his furious adversaries with silly slapstick and surreal gags? I seem to remember a carrot-wielding rabbit of this sort who had a pretty successful career as a cartoon hero.

Rob Schneider provides Norm’s voice, and there’s nothing very wrong with his work. The cast also includes such talent as Bill Nighy as a Freudian seagull, Ken Jeong as the villain, Colm Meany as the grandfather and even Salome Jens as a nasty councilwoman. This movie does not, I’m glad to say, represent the finest hour for any of them.

JUST AN OLD-FASHIONED DUFF SONG

Opening this weekend:

The DUFF—Bianca, the heroine of the high school comedy The DUFF, is actually the title character. DUFF, you see, is an acronym for Designated Ugly Fat Friend. When Bianca has the term applied to her, she realizes that her best pals Casey and Jessica are two of the school hotties, while she’s a frump with a snarky sense of humor who loves horror movies (where were all the girls like this when I was in high school?). She finds herself wondering if her purpose in the trio is to make Casey and Jessica look even cuter by comparison.

She promptly freaks out, cuts off relations with her friends, and strikes a deal with the swaggering jock next door to help her gain confidence and style. The object of these tutorials is to get a date with her crush, a guitar-strumming pretty-boy to whom she is—literally—unable to say three words.

In other words, in terms of theme and plot, we’re on standard John Hughes teen comedy turf here. Indeed, The DUFF is so self-consciously of the Hughes School that it has a Breakfast Club reference in the first line of the narration, and it goes on to ring its own variations on the obligatory scenes of the genre: the Big Suburban Party, the Big Dance Climax, the Cafeteria Scene in which high school social stereotypes are broken down anthropologically.

The DUFF is more charming than all this makes it sound. The script, by Josh A. Cagan (from Kody Keplinger’s novel), isn’t without some heavy platitudes and some clumsily trendy references to social media, but the best of its dialogue is crudely, bluntly funny, and it has a generous streak—it’s immediately clear to the audience, for instance, that Bianca’s misjudged Casey and Jessica. Ari Sandel’s direction zips along swiftly, and while there are poorly-timed gags that don’t come off, most of them land skillfully.

The true strength of the movie, however, is the acting. As usual in such films, there are some slumming character players as the grown-ups, like Allison Janney as Bianca’s distracted motivational-speaker Mom, Romany Malco as the wound-up Principal and Ken Jeong and Chris Wylde as daffy teachers. Robbie Amell is brashly likable as the Jock Next Door, and Bella Thorne is effective as the mean-girl villainess.

But the film is really a showcase for Mae Whitman as Bianca. Having seen the TV ads for this movie, I’ll admit I walked in with a chip—Whitman, who has the droll adorableness of a slightly less elfin Ellen Page, seemed to conform to the usual convention in a film with an “ugly duckling” heroine. And as with other movies of this sort, the makers of The DUFF didn’t seem to get that preaching to us about how everyone is beautiful in their own way while refusing, for box-office reasons, to cast an actress who really might be seen as unattractive or overweight is an offensive attempt to have it both ways.

But Whitman’s performance broke me down on this preconceived point. A former child actress, she’s a veteran of more than twenty years in show business—among many, many other roles, she’s the current voice of Disney’s Tinkerbell. Yet as Bianca she transcends her own showbiz slickness—for all her sitcom timing, she has an emotional directness to which you can feel the audience respond.

The Last Five Years—Jamie is a young writer who sells a novel and hits it big. His girlfriend Cathy is a struggling New York stage actress who doesn’t, or at least hasn’t, yet. They’re played by Jeremy Jordan and Anna Kendrick, respectively, in this movie version of Jason Robert Brown’s musical, which premiered in Chicago in 2001 and Off-Broadway in 2002, and has since been produced all over the world.

In the play, a two-hander, Cathy sings her side of the story backwards from the break-up, while we get Jamie’s side forward, from the happy early days. The two strands pass each other in the middle. This ingenious structure is weakened in the movie, adapted and directed by Richard LaGravenese. Kendrick and Jordan sing to each other, and a few other actors—little more than bit players—are shooed past the camera as well, and I, at least, lost track at times of where we were in the five-year ordeal.

But I didn’t mind that much, because Brown’s songs are pretty and witty, and prettily and wittily sung, in the clarion belter style of contemporary musicals. A good thing the score is so strong, too, because the story, stripped of the sometimes thrilling music, is just the autopsy of a typical neurotic on-again-off-again relationship, perfectly believable but not much less tiresome than listening to some friend recount five years’ worth of marital troubles in bitter detail.

Such troubles are greatly improved by good singing, though. When the movie was over, I found myself thinking that I’d rather buy the soundtrack and listen to it while driving instead of having to watch the resentments and envies and deceptions of these two.

Both of the actors are impressive, but Anna Kendrick’s rise as musical performer, starting with the improbable chart success of her “cup song” from Pitch Perfect through her roles in Into the Woods and this movie, continues to tickle. Her voice has strength alongside a plangent, comically plaintive beauty. Once it looked like Kendrick might go down in movie history as the best friend in the Twilight flicks. But maybe the Twilight flicks will go down in movie history as Kendrick’s apprenticeship before she became a singing star.