OLD MEN WILL BE BOYS

Opening this weekend:

Bad Boys: Ride or Die--Walking out of the theater after this fourth film in the Miami cop franchise, I was reminded by a friend that the original was released in 1995. Strange as it may seem, Bad Boys is almost thirty years old.

My first reaction was envy at how well the stars, Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, appear to have aged. These can no longer properly be called bad boys; as a title, something more like Grumpy Old Men seems more in order at this point. Yet neither actor looks ridiculous going through their action paces.

But it also strikes me that, to have lasted anywhere near this long, these movies must have meant something to audiences. Using the most routine, generic, by-the-numbers car chase and explosion formula, these four flicks, spaced out over decades, have kept people coming back to theaters.

The reason, of course, is the bickering. Directed by the Belgian filmmaking team of Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, Ride or Die opens with Mike Lowrey (Smith) and Marcus Burnett (Lawrence) kvetching at each other on their way Mike's wedding. There's a vague attempt to flip the script (by Chris Bremner and Will Beall) by giving Marcus a health scare which turns him into the daredevil of the duo and Mike into the worrywart. But the result is basically the same, with our heroes squabbling like an old married couple as they attempt to redeem the reputation of their late boss Captain Howard (Joe Pantoliano).

The Captain (who appears, via some visions and prerecorded cautionary messages) has been posthumously framed by drug dealers, led by a quite hissable Eric Dane. Jacob Scipio returns from the third film--over which Ride or Die felt to me like an improvement--as Mike's hunky convict son Armando.

In what appears to be a sheepish, pre-emptive wink at the audience, Smith gets slapped at one point in Ride or Die. Still, even with that almost fourth-wall gag, it wasn't until near the end, when an enormous albino alligator threatens Marcus, that it occurred to me what the Bad Boys flicks have come to resemble in tone: the Bob Hope-Bing Crosby Road pictures. But that series of seven goofy, easygoing movies started in 1940 and ended in 1962. So for longevity, Bad Boys already has it beat.

NET PROPHET

Opening this weekend:

King Richard--This biopic concerns the early rise of two of the greatest athletes of our time, Venus and Serena Williams. I found myself feeling a pang of sympathy for the casting director; how the hell is anyone supposed to find young actresses who plausibly suggest those two demigoddesses, and who presumably had to have at least some aptitude for tennis as well?

Saniyya Sidney and Demi Singleton got the parts, and play them well, with unaffected sweetness and physical confidence that brings the tennis scenes to life. But we catch a glimpse of the genuine articles in some video footage near the end, and realize that there's no replacement for them.

This doesn't matter much, however; the real focus of the film, as the title indicates, is Richard Williams, their father and, in their earlier years, their largely self-taught coach and manager. A security guard from Louisiana living in L.A., the elder Williams, played by Will Smith, is shown here to have essentially created his two world-beating prodigies from scratch.

The movie begins with him explaining to baffled white tennis coaches and sponsors he's trying to recruit that he wrote a plan to develop his girls into champs before they were born. Then he talked his wife Brandi (Aunjanue Ellis) into having two more children for this purpose (they both had children from previous relationships), and coached them rigorously, on dangerous, gang-infested neighborhood tennis courts in Compton.

You can hardly blame the guys listening to Williams for dismissing him as a crackpot, or even his disapproving neighbor for wondering if he's working them too hard. The point of the movie, however, is that almost everything Williams predicted came spectacularly true. It also shows him teaching them humility and good sportsmanship, almost tyrannically.

I think you'd have to have a piece of your soul missing not to find this story, briskly directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green from a script by Zach Baylin, at least a little bit moving and inspiring. The role fits Smith like a glove, both in his tireless positivity and his exhausting eccentricity, and we feel it when he gets angry at the racist condescension of the white tennis bigshots. And it's also hard not to love the character's preaching to his girls against unsportsmanlike braggadocio, and his disgust with abusively competitive tennis parents.

But there's no way around it, there's something crazy, almost science-fictional, about this story as well, as if the champs were cloned and programmed for their destiny. This sunny movie shows us happy, well-rounded, singing, squabbling little girls; if either Venus or Serena ever thought they might want to do something else with their lives we don't see it. Probably the world is full of sports parents with grandiose visions like this; what makes King Richard seem far stranger than fiction is that in this case the vision wasn't delusional.

Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time--This portrait arrives more than thirty years after it was begun. Over the decades of its gestation, the director, Robert B. Weide, became a talking head and a first-person presence in the film, explaining what Vonnegut means to him, how the project began, and (sort of) explaining the delay in completing it.

In this way it's a bit like many of Vonnegut's own books, especially his swansong novel Timequake, with his authorial intrusions that foreshadowed and influenced the "meta" techniques of contemporary lit. Weide, a veteran documentarian as well as a producer and director of Curb Your Enthusiasm, had idolized Vonnegut since high school, and wrote to him proposing the project in the '80s. The men hit it off, and as shooting continued they swiftly became close friends, maybe even best friends.

Thus, along with remarkable access to archival material--vivid home movies from the author's childhood and youth, marked-up manuscripts, rejection slips, drawings etc (and, be forewarned, some hard-to-watch wartime footage)--the interviews Weide captured of Vonnegut, teasing, ruminating, laughing inappropriately at grim stories, seem unusually candid and intimate. Vonnegut's children and stepchildren also appear, as well as friends and colleagues ranging from John Irving to Morley Safer, and generous chunks of his prose are heard, read by Sam Waterston when no recording of Vonnegut is extant.

Vonnegut has been much on my mind of late, as I had the opportunity to visit the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library in Indianapolis this past August; some of the artifacts I saw on display there are shown in the film. Although I've been a voracious Vonnegut reader since about the time that Weide started, I learned much from Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time. It's a chronicle of a remarkable life; it's also a chronicle of an enviable friendship.

BIRD WATCHING

Merry Christmas everybody!

Now in theaters:

“Why can’t Hollywood make something original?”

This is one of the more common complaints about the movies; you hear it most often when a remake, or “reboot,” of a classic film or a familiar TV show is announced. The short answer is, of course, why should Hollywood start now? But another answer is that every once in a while, for better or worse, Hollywood does make something original. And the new animated comedy Spies in Disguise is an example.

At least I think it is. I’ve never heard of another spy adventure in which the super-cool hero gets transformed into a pigeon.

Suave, wisecracking super-spy Lance Sterling (voiced by Will Smith, essentially reprising his Men in Black role) is the bigshot star operative of a secret intelligence agency headquartered under the reflecting pool in D.C. He’s a pure, unflappable, unstoppable winner, who insists he only flies solo, until he runs afoul of a glowering super-villain (Ben Mendelsohn) with a robot hand, who tricks him out of a high-tech weapon and uses a projection of Lance’s own face over his to frame him for the theft of the item. Soon Lance is on the run, with an Internal Affairs team led by a relentless agent (Rashida Jones) in pursuit.

He ends up with only one ally: A boyish young gadget inventor named Walter Dockett (Tom Holland). Walter is a bit like “Q” in the Bond films, except that he’s just a kid, and he’s committed to developing gadgets that are non-lethal, like grenades that explode into clouds of glitter which form into images of sweet little kittens, thus distracting the bad guys with the undeniable force of cuteness.

It need hardly be said, Walter's gizmos are met with skepticism and disdain by the macho Lance. Nonetheless, he and Walter, who has been fired the same day that Lance got in trouble, end up as action-movie buddies and travel the word in search of the bad guy, after Lance is inadvertently changed, by one of Walter’s inventions…into a pigeon.

That’s right, for much of the film Lance is unhappily trapped in the form of a stereoscopically-eyed bluish pigeon. Walter tries to sell Lance on the excellence of a pigeon as a secret agent’s cover—they’re everywhere, after all, in cities all over the world, and nobody pays any attention to them—but Lance, of course, is having none of it. Wild action scenes ensue.

Spies in Disguise is based on a 2009 short film by Lucas Martell with the much better title Pigeon: Impossible. It’s even sillier than ‘60s-era spy spoofs like The Last of the Secret Agents and Matchless. But it works; there were belly laughs from both children and grown-ups all around me in the theater throughout the screening I saw. And I may have contributed a couple of them.

It’s also a visually snappy film, with brilliant, intricately worked out slapstick gags and chases, and characters—like the pigeons—that are funny just to look at. The voice cast works well, with Karen Gillan and DJ Khaled adding amusing bits as the Internal Affairs agent’s entourage. And there’s an unusually strong, funky soundtrack.

About all that limits Spies in Disguise are the same obligatory elements that limit the vast majority of animated kid movies: the misunderstood, orphaned misfit who must overcome adversity; the tough guy who must learn to be part of a team. Despite the movie’s welcome and imaginative eccentricity, this standard template can still be detected at its foundation. So, come to think of it: Why can’t Hollywood make something original?

HEAD GAMES

Merry Christmas! Quickies on several Christmas Day openings: 

Concussion—Peter Landesman directed this straightforward drama starring Will Smith, who plays Dr. Bennet Omalu. This Nigerian pathologist came to the U.S. starry-eyed about the American Dream, and then learned what happens when you get between Americans and football.

While doing autopsies for the Allegheny County Coroner’s office in Pittsburgh, including one for down-and-out Steelers center Mike Webster, Omalu came to the conclusion that it might not be healthy for men to spend their careers bashing their heads into each other—he referred to the results of this as Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. The NFL found his theory shocking and controversial.

After a while, it struck me that the film’s somber, brooding tone was less about the horror that befalls CTE victims and their families, and more about American angst over anything that challenges, complicates or interferes with the love of football. The best line, delivered by Albert Brooks, refers to the place the NFL has taken in America: “They own a day of the week,” he says. “The same one The Church used to own.”

Carol—The latest from Todd Haynes is this impeccable adaptation of the 1952 Patricia Highsmith novel The Price of Salt. As in Blue Jasmine, Cate Blanchett is a rich lady in trouble. Carol is an affluent, elegant New Jersey housewife and mother, in the process of divorcing her husband. She’s out shopping when she meets Therese (Rooney Mara), an aspiring Manhattan photographer, working in a department store. The two are immediately riveted by each other, and as they get acquainted, eventually taking a road trip together, their relationship grows from yearning infatuation to a genuine bond. It need hardly be said that all does not go smoothly for them.

This is sort of a companion piece to Haynes’ Far From Heaven, his lush, Douglas Sirk-ish ‘50s soap opera in which Dennis Quaid struggled against his sexuality as if he’d been diagnosed with low blood sugar or anemia. But because the lead characters in Carol aren’t trying to overcome their identities, it’s probably a more enjoyable movie. It’s also probably better made—the period detail is rich but not fussy, and the acting bristles, both erotically and emotionally.

Blanchett is daringly mannered, both in her look and her delivery—at first she seems lacquered and campy, almost a little gothic. But as the movie progresses her grand style starts to blend perfectly with Mara’s touchingly unaffected, natural directness. Very simply, the two of them seem lucky to have found each other.

Daddy’s Home—Will Farrell is the square, trying-too-hard stepdad, and Mark Wahlberg is the cool absentee Dad with the motorcycle and the treehouse-building skills. They stupidly one-up each other for the love of Linda Cardellini and her rather unlikable kids, and the result is self-consciously “transgressive” slapstick of the kids-in-wheelchairs-getting-knocked-over style in vogue since The Hangover.

It’s fairly terrible, though I suppose it gets a smidge better in the homestretch when Farrell and Wahlberg aren’t competing anymore. My only other comment is: I can no longer see Mark Wahlberg without being reminded of Andy Samberg’s Saturday Night Live impression of him.

FALLON MAN

“Thank you…”

For me, the funniest thing about Jimmy Fallon is his inflection of those two words, in his recurring “Thank You Note” segment on Late Night. If you watched the show Friday nights, you’ve seen the shtick—to the accompaniment of a poignant piano theme, Fallon takes a few minutes before the first guest segment to catch up on his thank you notes, speaking them out loud as he writes them on cards (which he doesn’t take the time to seal). They’re often addressed not to individual people but to inanimate objects and concepts, as in:

“Thank you, cotton candy, for making my grandmother’s hair look delicious.”

“Thank you, microbreweries, for making my alcoholism seem like a neat hobby.”

Clever as many of these are—two volumes of them have been published—I think it’s less the quips than Fallon’s presentation that makes them funny: his soft, lost-in-thought murmur, and the sense of spiritual cleansing provided by the music.

Born in Brooklyn but raised in upstate New York, Fallon was a Saturday Night Live nut from early childhood. He broke onto that show in his mid-20s in 1998, with his gift for impressions, especially of musicians. By 2000 he was the co-anchor, with Tina Fey, of SNL’s “Weekend Update” segment.

He acted in a few movies, notably Almost Famous, Woody Allen’s Anything Else and the dreadful action comedy Taxi, without making much of an impression, before being tapped to take over for Conan O’Brien on Late Night when O’Brien, in turn, left to take over Jay Leno’s Tonight Show for what turned out to be a painfully short tenure—NBC returned the antsy Leno to the host’s chair, and O'Brien was exiled to TBS, where he remains.

Fallon, however, settled in nicely in the Late Night slot, with his thank-you notes and his good-natured musical parodies. Now, after Leno’s teary-eyed farewell earlier this month, and some time off for the first week of the Olympics, Fallon yesterday became the 6th host of The Tonight Show (or maybe the 7th, if you count Leno twice).

It’s hard to say, but I think it could be a good fit. Although he had some fine bits—his “headlines” routine, especially—I was never able to warm up to Leno as the great Carson’s successor. Leno, with his prickly, nettled persona, was one of the best American stand-ups ever back in the ‘80s, but he grotesquely softened and dumbed-down his act for The Tonight Show—there was always something unctuous and wheedling and pitifully desperate not to offend about him. And ill-treated though he was, it must be admitted that somehow O’Brien’s aggressive brilliance didn’t quite fit the classic flavor of that show either.

Fallon, on the other hand, has always used a soft, fuzzy persona, an amiable vagueness. Talented though he is, you wouldn’t think to use the word “brilliant” in connection with him. I don’t mean to suggest that he isn’t intelligent, only that his appeal as a performer derives more from his likability than from his intelligence or wit. He’s unlikely to replace Carson—nobody’s likely to do that—but unlike Leno or O’Brien, he has no need to dumb down his humor to be easy for the mainstream audience to take. Put bluntly, he doesn’t need to sell out to succeed.

And he says he isn’t going to: “I’m not going to change anything,” he’s reportedly said. “It’s more eyeballs watching, but it’s the same show.”

Based on his first show, he seems to be keeping his word. After a brief prologue in which he acknowledged the past hosts and touchingly introduced his parents and explained what The Tonight Show meant to him as a kid, he went back behind the curtain and then re-emerged to do a more or less business-as-usual show. The guests were perhaps bigger-name than usual, and a gag early on allowed for a parade of really big-name cameos, but the loose style—a silly dance skit with Will Smith; a lovely acoustic number by U2—was the same that he’s been using for years, an hour later. Would that Leno had had the same confidence.

Check out this portrait of Your Humble Narrator...

...drawn by Vince Larue for his upcoming Southwest Noir project, to which I’m proud to be a contributor…

Check out Mr. Peabody and Sherman getting honored on Hollywood Boulevard, in anticipation of their March 7 movie…

All I can say is, it's about freaking time.

RIP to Mary Grace Canfield, TV’s perennial dowdy spinster, and guest star on “A Date for Gomer,” one of the sweetest episodes of The Andy Griffith Show, departed at 89…

CRASH BEHAVIOR

Most of the career of M. Night Shyamalan, director of After Earth, could be characterized as “After The Sixth Sense.” His work over the decade-plus since that 1999 ghost-story classic has largely been a string of interesting failures, except for 2010’s The Last Airbender, which wasn’t very interesting, and 2004’s The Village, which wasn’t a failure, though I’m apparently in the minority in that opinion.

Shyamalan is full of intriguing ideas, and he’s able to get terrific performances out of his actors. His troubles, at least in part, may have arisen because The Sixth Sense ended with a seamlessly-constructed surprise, and his subsequent films have almost all tried for a similar revelatory effect, with far less success. On the basis of one dazzling twist ending, he became known as the Twist Ending Guy, and he just wasn’t up to it.

His latest, After Earth, is no great shakes, but it has, at least, the virtue of being straightforward. Perhaps because he was principally a hired gun here—the script is by Gary Whitta and Shyamalan, from a story conceived by star and executive producer Will Smith—Shyamalan doesn’t bust a gut trying to blow our minds.

As with so many of his films, After Earth has a laborious-to-explain backstory. Here goes: Having trashed Earth by about the middle of this century, humans abandon it for a new planet called Nova Prime. An alien race resents the invasion, and releases hideous creatures called “Ursas,” who are eyeless but able to track humans through the pheromones we secrete when afraid, and who have the charming habit of impaling their victims on tree branches, like shrikes. The Ursas are foiled, about a thousand years from now, by a stalwart Supreme Commander named Cypher Raige (Will Smith) who learns to battle them without fear, a technique he calls “ghosting.”

All of this is prologue, and as contrived as it sounds (and is) it really just amounts to an overcomplicated set-up for a boy’s-book adventure. As soon as After Earth gets going as such, it’s watchable and reasonably exciting.

The story proper centers on Cypher’s teenage son Kitai (Jaden Smith), who has a distant relationship with his famous father, linked to a shared tragedy. When the spaceship on which they’re traveling crashes on the now-uninhabited Earth, and Cypher is too badly injured to walk, Kitai must make his way, with his father coaching him, to another piece of the wreck, miles away, to send a distress signal.

His father tells him that all the life forms on Earth have evolved to kill humans—odd, since it’s only been a thousand years—and Kitai does indeed encounter souped-up versions of baboons, raptors, tigers and other creatures. He’s also stalked by an Ursa that was aboard the spaceship (being transported for training purposes) and has escaped.

Except in its opening quarter, and a few flashbacks and dream sequences, the movie is essentially a two-character play. The dialogue given to Will Smith is in a stiffly military idiom, and he plays it very straight, but skillfully. Jaden Smith, rightly top-billed, has a little trouble with his diction, but as in the Karate Kid remake in 2010, he has a touchingly vulnerable-looking physicality, and his put-upon facial expressions are amusing.

The theme of After Earth—that “danger is very real, but fear is a choice”—is problematic. It’s expressed by Cypher in a showcase monologue, in which he describes realizing, in a life-or-death moment, that his fear was a fantasy, based on a story he was telling himself about the future. I would point out that the physiological symptoms of fear usually are not a choice, and that they’re just as “real” as, say, the tornado or the charging lion that causes them. More importantly, fear isn’t always debilitating; sometimes it’s lifesaving, as Liam Neeson’s character pointed out in the similarly-themed (though much less pleasant) film The Grey.

I don’t think this is hair-splitting. I think misunderstanding this point—confusing caution with paralysis—is what leads to stupidly reckless risks, especially by the young. Bravery isn’t about suppressing fear, it’s about acting, when necessary, in spite of fear. Besides, most threats to life and limb aren’t like the Ursas—they can still see and smell (and taste) you whether you’re afraid of them or not. Lack of fear in the face of legitimate danger really should be called “ghosting,” because it can quickly make you into a ghost.

US URSAS THEM

With the sci-fi adventure After Earth opening Friday…

Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s give the nod to the beasties in that film, the “Ursas,” seen here in conceptual art…

More about the Ursas, and After Earth in general, tomorrow…

ALIEN-NATION

Men In Black 3 opens tomorrow, so…

Monster-of-the-Week: …here’s a specimen of the resident aliens that the title characters are tasked with controlling, and keeping secret: