JUDY AND JAMES; YETI AND INGRID

Happy Friday everybody!

Check out my "Friday Flicks" column online at Phoenix Magazine, this week reviewing Judy...

...and the caper comedy Raising Buchanan...

...about a scheme to steal the body of President James Buchanan and hold it for ransom. That tired old plot device again.

Also opening this week:

  
Abominable--Following last year's peculiar Smallfoot, here's another CGI animated feature about Yetis. This one is peculiar, too.

In this Chinese-American co-production, a teenage Chinese city girl finds a fuzzy, sweet-natured Yeti hiding on the roof of her apartment building; he's escaped from a cruel scientific facility. She feeds him steamed pork buns and plays her violin for him, and then, with the help of two friends from the building, tries to smuggle him back to his home in the mountains, with the forces of the nasty collector hot in pursuit. The movie is of a New-Agey-bent; in the course of the odyssey we learn that the creature is tune with the forces of nature, and when he hums the sound causes flowers to blossom and blueberries to grow enormous.

As is almost invariably the case with wide-release animated features of the last few decades, the obligatory elements in Abominable, the stock villains and the stock character motivations, are highly tedious. This template for has been so successful for so long that it's hard to see it going away anytime soon, but it sure makes these films wearisomely repetitive.

That said, the characterizations of the Yeti and the kids are winning, and the Chinese setting is different and colorful. And this is almost certainly the only film to contain the line "Don't body-shame my yak!"

Finally, if you happen to be here in the Phoenix area, you could check out The House That Dripped Blood at 10 p.m. this evening, September 27, at FilmBar. This 1971 British horror anthology, scripted by Robert Bloch and featuring Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Jon Pertwee and Denholm Elliot, has long been a fave of mine, largely on the basis of the scene near the end in which supremely sultry and statuesque vampiress Ingrid Pitt levitates and...her high-heeled shoes drop off her feet to the floor. I don't know why, but for some reason that detail remains one of the most deliriously sexy moments in movies for me.

MOTHER JONES

Opening this weekend:

Bridget Jones’s Baby—It’s been twelve years since the film version of Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, and fifteen years since Bridget Jones's Diary. It didn’t seem like audiences were clamoring for one more movie iteration of Helen Fielding’s hapless chick-lit heroine, but maybe they were. In any case, here she is.

As our story begins, Bridget (Renée Zellweger) is celebrating her 43^rd birthday alone in her flat, with a candle in a cupcake, she and her beloved Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) having long since split. Through some rather laborious contrivances, she has two one-night stands—one with a rich American online-dating mogul (Patrick Dempsey) and the other with Darcy himself—within a week of each other. So when she turns up pregnant, owing to the unreliability of her “Vegan condoms,” whichever of the nice fellows might be the baby daddy? And however will she break the news to the non-daddy, since both gents are enthusiastic at the prospect?

As this synopsis may suggest, there’s little to be said for the carpentry of the script, credited to Fielding, Dan Mazer and Emma Thompson, and the direction, by Sharon Maguire, is no more than efficient. As always, the focus is on hoisting Bridget into slapstick humiliations, which is a bit more problematic now that Zellweger is pushing fifty. She looks great, but rightly or wrongly, seeing her fall face-down in the mud has a different vibe now—less cute, more cringe-inducing—than it did when she was in her thirties.

That said, this trivial movie is full of pros, and I enjoyed them. Zellweger remains good company, and so is Firth, though it’s uncertain whether his dour, discomfited manner derives from the character’s feelings or the actor’s—it’s jarring, somehow, when he smiles. Dempsey’s role, a stereotypical platitudinous American, does him no favors, but he comfortably fulfills the requirements of a mature hunk.

The real fun is in the supporting cast. The regulars from the earlier films, like Jim Broadbent and Gemma Jones as Bridget’s parents, make mostly token appearances, but there are a few new adds that are funny. As Bridget’s ob-gyn, Emma Thompson nips her terse lines off smartly but with just the right tinge of underlying kindness, and Kate O’Flynn is amusing as Bridget’s noxious new boss. I’ll also confess that Sarah Solemani’s mischievous sidelong smirks, as Bridget’s wacky anchorwoman pal, left me with a slight crush.