A LEGO UP

Opening this weekend:

 

Whenever the subject of Legos comes up, as it does more and more frequently in popular movie reviewing, I feel the need to mention that I never had Legos as a kid, or particularly wanted them. Nor have I played with them as an adult. Even so, I've enjoyed all of the Lego movies I've seen.

2017's The Lego Batman Movie was my favorite, an on-the-money spoof of torturous, "dark" superhero flicks. But 2014's original The Lego Movie was a charming, funny, unpretentious meditation on conformity versus individualism.

Now we get the sequel to that film, The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part, directed by Mike Mitchell from a script by Phil Lord, Christopher Miller and Matthew Fogel, and set, appropriately, five years after the events of The Lego Movie. The locale, once again, is the vast Lego metropolis of Bricksburg. The name has since been changed to "Apocalypseburg," however, after an invasion of cutesy but lethal aliens has reduced the town to dystopian wreckage. Even so, our hero Emmet (Chris Pratt) remains as upbeat and cheerful as ever.

When aliens abduct Lucy (Elizabeth Banks), Lego Batman (Will Arnett), and several of Emmet's other friends, taking them to the distant "Systar System," Emmet follows, intent on rescuing them. Along the way, he meets Rex (also Pratt), a tough guy space mercenary—with a crew of dinosaurs!—who helps him summon reserves of gritty resolve.

This is only the beginning of the plot's twists and turns. Like its predecessor, Lego Movie 2 is a dense and complex piece of storytelling. It's almost—though maybe not quite—as seamlessly thought through as the original, yet it flies along with effortless speed and precision.

As before, much of the comedy derives from the limited range of motion available to Lego figures, and there were gags that went over my head. I don't know why, for instance, sequences of numbers appear onscreen when the characters are building some new contraption, but I'm guessing this involves the technical side of Lego-building. There are also endless, and amusing, references to pop culture classics starting with Planet of the Apes and 2001 and carrying on through Jurassic Park and the Lord of the Rings movies up to the most topical industry gossip, and even a quick nod to RBG.

The voice cast also helps, from Pratt's openhearted sweetness as Emmet and his jaunty Kurt Russell-like swagger as Rex, to the tough but soulful heroine of Banks to Arnett's growl as Batman. Most hilarious here is Tiffany Haddish as Queen Watevra Wa-Nabi of the Systar System; her blossoming romance with Batman made me feel protective of both characters.

Check out my "Friday Flicks" column online at Phoenix Magazine, with reviews of What Men Want and The Isle, plus a preview of the Greater Phoenix Jewish Film Festival. Also, check out my review of the Broadway version of Disney's Aladdin, playing through February 17 at Gammage Auditorium.

RIP to brilliant, funny Albert Finney, passed on at 82.

DC & DEE, SEE?

Happy Friday everybody! Check out my reviews, on Phoenix Magazine online, of Teen Titans GO! (To the Movies)...

...and Detective Dee: The Four Heavenly Kings...

UP WITH PAPAL

Opening this week:

Pope Francis: A Man of his Word--German filmmaker Wim Wenders, of Wings of Desire and The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, directed this documentary about the current pontiff. It's more a present-tense portrait than a biography. We don't get much about his background, or about the unusual circumstances of his election; unless I missed it there was no mention of his predecessor Benedict XVI, who retired in 2013. Instead, Wenders shows us Francis traveling the world and interacting with people, and we get substantive talking-head interviews with him, in which he explains his interests.

As a non-Catholic, but the veteran of a Catholic liberal education, I've been a fan of this guy since his election. I had a bumper sticker on my old truck with his picture, reading THIS POPE GIVES ME HOPE. The first from the Americas and from the Southern Hemisphere, he's the Pope many of us never thought we'd see: the vociferous environmentalist and anti-consumerist, the tolerant ecumenical, and above all the staunch champion of the poor. Incredibly (or maybe not), he's the first Pope ever to take the name Francis, in honor of Francis of Assisi. He seems almost too good to be true--a part of me keeps waiting, I confess, for the other Shoe of the Fisherman to drop.

But that doesn't happen in this movie, at any rate. When we see him embracing destitute or sick or displaced people all over the world, or lecturing a bunch of stony-faced Cardinals, or addressing a joint house of Congress in the U.S., or just chatting with the camera in his wry, smiling, self-deprecating, yet direct manner, he's extremely hard not to like.

A sadness hangs over the film, however, because at the moment, the fear-mongering leaders of the global superpowers seem to have little interest in this Pope's values, and we citizens of the developed world don't seem to be much in the mood for his notion that we can all be "a little poorer" for the benefit of our neighbors, and of the planet. The melancholy narration by Wenders seems to reflect the doubt that this cheerful, seemingly good man's vision for the world can take hold, and I understand how he feels. This Pope does indeed give me hope, but not enough of his fellow world leaders do.

Anything--Devastated and unsuccessfully suicidal after the death of his wife, fifty-something insurance man Early Landry (John Carroll Lynch) moves from small-town Mississippi to L.A. at the insistence of his rich, fretful younger sister Laurette (Maura Tierney). Much to her horror, he ends up taking a small apartment in a gritty area of Hollywood, where he develops a bond with Frida (Matt Bomer) the beautiful street hustler in the apartment next door.

Written and directed by Timothy McNeil, this is the newest and maybe the gentlest of the movies in which small-town men connect with transgender divas and find their lives enriched. McNeil's dialogue is sentimental but speakable and sweet, and his direction showcases the actors well.

The movie is no great shakes, but it's about time somebody gave a juicy star part to the excellent Lynch, who's been a reliable, lovable presence for years, whether that meant providing emotional support to Marge as Norm "Son of a" Gunderson in Fargo or nobly wading through lava in Volcano. He underplays Early with estimable discipline, and Bomer's wary, intelligent but emotionally hungry Frida stares at him, startled at his capacity for love.

Show Dogs--There's not much idiocy and insipidity I won't put up with if it affords me the chance to watch cute dogs. So believe me when I tell you that this talking-dog comedy is to be avoided at all costs. Even for mush-brained dog lovers, this one is atrocious. The CGI pasted on to the faces of the canine stars robs them of their personalities.

Directed by Raja Gosnell of the Smurfs movies, it's a cop-buddy parody in which FBI man Will Arnett and a NYC police Rottweiler voiced by Chris "Ludacris" Bridges travel together to Las Vegas to infiltrate an illegal-animal trade happening behind the scenes at a dog show at Caesar's Palace. It's sort of a cross between Beverly Hills Chihuahua and Miss Congeniality, but the comparison is an insult even to those movies.

Stanley Tucci plays a papillon called Philippe, who coaches the tough Rottie in the ways of the dog show, a la Michael Caine in Miss Congeniality. The voice cast also includes Gabriel Iglesias, Jordin Sparks, RuPaul, Alan Cumming and Shaquille O'Neal, while Natasha Lyonne turns up as Arnett's love interest. All of these people have had finer hours, and hopefully will again.

OK, I'll admit that there's a fantasy sequence that spoofs Dirty Dancing that made me laugh out loud, once. Part of me hesitates to give the movie even that much credit, but if you run out and see Show Dogs on that basis, I suppose I can't be blamed for your misfortune.

TO BE, OR NUT TO BE

Opening this weekend:

The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature—It may be that Our Commander in Chief raised the profile of this movie a bit when, with the presidential gravitas we’ve come to expect from him, he reportedly referred to his fired FBI Director as a “nut job.” Not much less than executive action could have kept this sequel to 2014’s animated feature The Nut Job, a particularly drab and unrewarding kidflick, from flying under the radar. 

The original, which was based, in turn, on a much better 2005 cartoon short from Canada called Surly Squirrel, was about squirrels and other fuzzy little creatures from a city park raiding the nut shop across the street in the manner of a noir heist movie. It was promising idea, wrecked by the inclusion of a bunch of obligatory kid-movie elements, like an underdog hero and a love interest, which negated the caper-picture atmosphere.

The sequel finds alpha squirrel Surly (voiced, again, by Will Arnett) and his pals living easy on the hoard in the basement of the now closed and abandoned nut shop. When this lifetime supply is destroyed, the gang is forced to return to the hard but character-building work of foraging in the park, as Surly’s love interest squirrel (Katherine Heigl) had been urging all along. But when a greedy Mayor (Bobby Moynihan) decides to turn the park into a shoddy but profitable amusement park, the creatures band together to mount a resistance. 

I’m not suggesting anyone should rush straight to the multiplexes to see Nut Job 2, but for whatever it may be worth, it’s funnier than the original. It has some visual richness—there are scenes which recall everything from Caddyshack to Bill Peet’s wonderful children’s book Farewell to Shady Glade—and some truly crazy old-school cartoon slapstick.

The most memorable character from the first film, a pug voiced by Maya Rudolph, is back again, this time with a love interest (Bobby Cannavale). But the best new element is Mr. Feng, a feral white mouse voiced by Jackie Chan who leads a crack army of martial-artist mice. Toward the end, this rodent collective commandeers a HAZMAT suit, and brings it to wobbly life, something like the mice masquerading as a ghost that torment Sylvester in the classic 1954 Warner Brothers cartoon Claws for Alarm.

Stuff like this bumps Nut Job 2 up a few notches over its predecessor. If you find yourself at a matinee of it with your kid, you may get a few more chuckles than you expected.

Still in theaters:

Atomic Blonde--There's some enjoyment, certainly, in watching the stunning 41-year-old Charlize Theron beat the snot out of skeevy-looking guys. And you can get your fill of this pleasure from this espionage thriller, set in Berlin in 1989, against the backdrop of The Wall coming down. There are lots of fight scenes, intricately choreographed, superbly shot, and performed with a percussive, grunting-and-groaning violence by Theron and the heavies assaulting her, and these sequences go on for a long, long time. 

They often feel like fights in a stage play, with the actors "selling" their highly telegraphed moves with loud vocalizations. The combatants slow down as the fights progress and they get increasingly tired and injured. They're left bloody and dirty and scarred, and our heroine is forced to take ice baths to revive herself afterwards.

This is not to say, of course, that the action in this film is really much more plausible than that in any Bond or Jackie Chan movie. It's just stylized in a different way, and after a while the brutality of it becomes funny--you wonder what makes these people so doggedly determined to kill each other, what could possibly inspire such loyalty and commitment in the face of such savage punishment. 

But it is fun to watch. Many of the film's brawls and stalkings are ingeniously edited to '80s techno-pop hits, Bowie and Falco and Nena and the like, and as with the '70s stuff in the Guardians of the Galaxy flicks, it's a terrific, nostalgic playlist.

Theron plays Lorraine, sent by MI6 to investigate the murder of a British spy just as the East German government is unraveling, and to recover the McGuffin he was chasing, some sort of list that could restart the Cold War. This allows Theron to be spectacularly showcased, both in terms of her physical abandon and her nicotine and Stoli-charged ‘80s glamour. But there’s nothing especially distinctive about Lorraine as a character, and while I didn’t particularly notice any deficiencies in her British accent, the person with whom I saw the film did. 

The star, the fights and the music have to hold us through a story that's both complicated and somehow uninvolving. Lorraine's bosses tell her to trust no one, including Their Man in Berlin (James McAvoy). Other shady sorts include Sofia Boutella as a neophyte French operative, John Goodman as a CIA man, Til Schweiger as a contact in a watch shop, Eddie Marsan as the Soviet asset they're trying to smuggle into West Berlin, and Toby Jones and James Faulkner as the British Intelligence honchos.

That cast is a game and capable bunch, clearly, but the script, adapted from a graphic novel, doesn't release their full potential. And the director, stunt unit specialist David Leitch, doesn't find a way to unwind the plot twists coherently. The movie feels overlong to no notable benefit; stretches of it are entertaining, but it's ultimately unsatisfying.

BRICK BAT

Opening this weekend:

The Lego Batman Movie—Even though I never had Legos as a kid, nor played with them as an adult, I enjoyed 2014’s The Lego Movie and A Lego Brickumentary. I think I liked this cubist take on the Caped Crusader best of all, however.

Directed by Chris McKay from a script by, among other hands, Seth Grahame-Smith of Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, it’s a highly observant spoof of the sort of turgid, self-important superhero epics that have, for me, taken a lot of the fun out of the genre. Batman, growled here, as in The Lego Movie, by Will Arnett, is a vain loner, obsessed with his “nine-pack” abs, and opposed to letting anyone help him with, or share the glory of, his exploits. Partly this is ego, but he also can’t bear the idea of personal attachments of any kind—he watches Jerry Maguire and cackles loudly at the line “You complete me.”

He even wounds the feelings of Lego Joker (Zach Galifianakis) by refusing to admit that, as enemies, the two of them share something special. In response the Clown Prince of Lego Crime hatches a magnum opus scheme against Lego Gotham City, involving not only the DC stable of villains but…

Well, I shouldn’t give away too much more. Suffice to say that Lego Robin (Michael Cera), Lego Batgirl (Rosario Dawson), Lego Superman (Channing Tatum) and Lego Alfred (Ralph Fiennes) all get involved in the story, among many other classic characters. The gags are obsessively detailed and fly by at furious speed, yet somehow, maybe because of the geometrical nature of the figures, the action remains more lucid and coherent than it is in many of the movies being sent up here.

Better still, unlike many of the targets of its parody, it clocks in at well under two hours.

SHELL HATH NO FURY

Opening this weekend: 

 

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows—The title characters, four talking adolescent turtles oddly named after Old Masters of the Italian Renaissance, were parented, and mentored in martial arts, by a talking mutant rat. They live in the sewers of New York, and secretly defend the city from freaky wrongdoers, abetted only by fetching TV reporter April O’Neil and a few other allies.

This sounds crazy, but if you can look past the fact that the characters are turtles (and a rat), is it really any crazier, in terms of plausibility, than the X-Men or the Justice League? In any case, the quartet has been popular, in everything from comics to cartoons to live shows to movies, for about thirty years now, and in 2014 the movie series was “rebooted,” enjoyably enough.

In this sequel, directed by Dave Green, the villainous Shredder (Brian Tee), captured at the end of the previous movie, gets sprung from an armored vehicle by his motorcycle-borne minions. He’s then recruited by a repulsive alien warlord for a plot to, what else, take over the world.

The bad guys get a hold of some purplish gunk that transforms two of Shredder’s henchmen into monstrous rhino and warthog mutants, respectively. This same gunk also has the potential to turn the Turtles human, which might allow them to come out of the shadows and be accepted by the people of the Big Apple. Disagreement over whether this is a good idea sows dissension among the quartet.

In the midst of all the ensuing chases and fights, such pros as Laura Linney, as a police honcho, and Tyler Perry, as a nerdy scientist on Shredder’s team, struggle to hold their own against the CGI characters, and mostly succeed. Megan Fox is back as April, this time provided with Stephen Amell as love interest Casey Jones. Will Arnett is back, too, as April’s wacky sidekick Vern.

The finale involves a big time-space portal opening over Manhattan and the alien’s war machinery pouring out. We’ve seen this shtick at least twice before, in The Avengers and in Mr. Peabody & Sherman, and now it needs a nice long hiatus. But overall I enjoyed this silly summer movie. It couldn’t be less consequential, but it’s speedy, action packed and good natured.

It’s a hair more violent than I would have expected from a movie for kids in this day and age, but then I’m not sure to what extent younger kids really are the target audience here. The franchise began, after all, in the mid-‘80s. Many of the TMNT t-shirts I saw at the screening were worn by thirty- and forty-somethings.

CURRYING FAVOR

New this week:

The Hundred-Foot Journey—If Oprah likes your book, you’ve got it made. A few years ago she took a shine to Richard C. Morais’ tale of a rivalry between an established upscale restaurant in provincial France and the upstart Indian place a hundred feet across the road, showed it to Steven Spielberg, and now it’s a lavishly produced movie directed by Lasse Hallstrom, with a cast led by Helen Mirren and Om Puri.

After leaving Mumbai under tragic circumstances, and a brief stay under the flight path at Heathrow, the Kadam family settles in a small town in southern France, mainly because the brakes on their wreck of a vehicle fail there. Gruff, handsome Om Puri plays the widowed patriarch, who insists on opening “Maison Mumbai” in the ruin across the road from Le Saule Pleureur, a classical-French place with a Michelin star. It’s presided over by Mirren as the elegant, imperious Madame Mallory, who at first attempts to sabotage the new enterprise. But the star of the Kadam family is Papa’s son Hassan, a culinary prodigy so gifted that Madame Mallory wants him to cross the road and learn the Ways of the Heavy Sauce, in hopes that he can help her to a long-coveted second star.

Lushly photographed by Linus Sandgren and goosed along by another rousing score from A.R. Rahman, The Hundred-Foot Journey is, I suppose, the most calculated and shameless sort of unthreatening cross-cultural feel-good/foodie movie. But it gives good value as such; the setting is idyllic, the cast is splendid—not just Puri and Mirren but also Manish Dayal as the open-hearted Hassam and the charming Charlotte Le Bon as his besotted love interest—and there’s just enough conflict to keep the story going but not so much as to spoil the pleasant atmosphere. And, of course, the food looks wonderful: The movie left me with a serious taste for sea urchin.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles—Like the Transformers, the TMNT came along in the mid-‘80s, when I was already old enough to find them annoying, so I don’t have a nostalgic attachment to them. I was surprised, therefore, to find myself sort of enjoying this new film version.

Concocted by artists Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird as a send-up of by-the-numbers comic book clichés, the Turtles were soon turned into the very kind of marketing and merchandising juggernaut they originally sought to spoof. The four are sewer-dwelling New Yorkers, each named, for some reason, after a Renaissance Old Master: Raphael, Leonardo, Donatello and Michaelangelo, and parented by a sagacious old rat, Splinter, who trains them in martial arts, he says, as an alternative to the distractions of pop culture—the best, and nerviest, joke in the movie.

The lads are pitted here against a villain in hulking robotic samurai armor and his legions of henchpersons, who are trying to do something terrible to the Big Apple for some stupid reason that doesn’t matter. Their clashes provide headlong action, and their jabbering and antics, while they aren’t exactly on the Oscar Wilde level of wit, keep the energy level high.

The Turtles also have allies, especially in their Lois Lane equivalent: plucky TV reporter April O’Neill, played in the new film by Megan Fox. In what appears to be an attempt to market the film to girls, April is very much the lead role here, and this approach proved effective with regard to my own 12-year-old, who grumbled about the prospect of sitting through a movie for boys but got caught up in it all the same.

This TMNT is also a minefield of really bald-faced product placement. Pizza Hut and Orange Crush are the most heavy-handed, but there’s a surprising—and amusing—nod to Victoria’s Secret, in anticipation, presumably, of the fast-approaching days when the target audience loses its interest in turtles.

HART FOR HART'S SAKE

Opening this weekend:

Ride Along—The standup comedian Kevin Hart first came to my attention in a tiny role in Judd Apatow’s 2005 The 40-Year-Old Virgin. He had just three or four lines, but he had a comic intensity that popped off the screen, and I made a point of checking the end credits to catch his name—I was pretty sure I’d be seeing more from him.

Now he’s a movie star, top billed with Ice Cube in the action comedy Ride Along. The diminutive Hart’s comedy largely derives from Little Man’s Syndrome—he lives in a constantly aggrieved state of overcompensating machismo. Here he’s a video-game-addicted high school security guard and cop wannabe. When at last he makes it into the Atlanta Police Academy, he’s invited on a day-long ride along by tough-guy detective Ice Cube, the brother of his improbable girlfriend played by Tika Sumpter, a leggy creature who towers over Hart like a showhorse.

Ice Cube’s ulterior motive is to put his brother-in-law-to-be through hell and thus discourage him from joining the force—and, if possible, to break things up between him and his sister. So we get a series of wacky set pieces in which the overconfident Hart is sent barging into situations he’s not prepared for.

Almost all of these scenes are embarrassingly unfunny and overextended. There’s no real sense in which Ride Along, directed by Tim Story from a script by Greg Coolidge and others, can be called a good movie. But the leads are good—Ice Cube, always a strong, naturalistic actor, makes a solid straight man to Hart’s bristling indignation at not being recognized as a studly man of action.

In noting this, I hope nobody will suppose I’m suggesting that you should run out and see Ride Along. But feeble as the movie is, I didn’t mind it, not just because the stars are good company but also because it works through the old-school cop-movie playbook so modestly. When our heroes tangle with gangster heavy Laurence Fishburne—thus reuniting Ice Cube with “Furious Styles” from 1991’s Boyz in the Hood—and his henchman, the result is a little flurry of fistfights, shootouts and explosions, not a half-dozen Wagnerian climaxes in the earthshaking Bruckheimer tradition. It’s almost relaxing.

The Nut Job—This animated feature concerns a squirrel named Surly (voiced by Will Arnett), a renegade from the collective of food hoarders in a midcentury urban park, who organizes a heist from a nut shop. I like squirrels, and I share their passion for nuts—my inability to stop eating them (nuts, that is, not squirrels) is such that I could never, without hypocrisy, be judgmental toward a crack addict. So I’m probably the ideal audience member for this US/Canadian/South Korean co-production, and I must reluctantly report that it isn’t very good either.

If The Nut Job had stuck to being a noir/caper movie, but had replaced the humans with squirrels and the diamonds or art treasures or whatever with nuts, it might have been a riot. But the filmmakers weight it down with obligatory kidflick elements—the need for the misunderstood hero to prove himself, the romance, etc—that are inimical to the spirit of the heist picture. It’s visually pleasant, some of the characters come off well—especially an excitable pug voiced Maya Rudolph—and an animated version of the Korean pop star Psy performs the catchy “Gangnam Style” over the end credits, but overall this is, at best, a slow-afternoon desperation matinee pick when your kids have seen everything else at the multiplex.

The degree to which it’s a missed opportunity may become clear, however, if you watch the Canadian cartoon short on which it’s based, Surly Squirrel by Peter Lepeniotis. It’s hilarious, and it upholds the unsentimental cynicism of its genre.

RIP to Russell Johnson, best known as “The Professor” on Gilligan’s Island, though his long career included everything from Rancho Notorious to Roger Corman’s Attack of the Crab Monsters, passed on at 89. The Professor was one of my strongest childhood role models, along with Mr. Peabody. They made me want to grow up to be an insufferable pedantic know-it-all.

Speaking of Mr. Peabody, check out this Topless Robot list, in which various contributors to the site say what they’re most looking forward to in nerd culture in the coming year. My entry is number 9.