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.

AU REVOIR, HATCHET-FACE

RIP to Kim McGuire, who played Hatchet-Face in the John Waters movie Cry-Baby, passed on at 60.

 

By all accounts, beneath the grotesque makeup she was lovely, inside and out.

I had the honor to play one of the prison guards in that film, who chased Hatchet-Face and Milton (Darren Burrows) through the movie screen showing Creature from the Black Lagoon to a bunch of prisoners in 3-D glasses.

So, in remembrance of McGuire…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week the nod goes to that old fave the Creech, just as he appears before Hatchet-Face bursts through the screen.

I’ll never forget standing for hours behind the movie screen in the Cry-Baby prison location in Jessup, Maryland, watching the clip of the Creature climbing aboard the boat to grab Julie Adams played over and over again, while they worked out the timing of the precise moment when McGuire was to leap through the screen—only three takes were possible, as they only had three screens that had been dried out to burst outward with the proper “starring” effect when jumped through. Something about the repetition of the scene filled me with a weird compassion for the poor Creature and his hopelessly unrequited infatuation.

BACK TO THE LANDING

Opening this weekend: 

Sully—The famous belly-flop into the Hudson River by U.S. Airways Flight 1549, back in January of 2009, stands out where many plane crashes run together in memory. One reason for this, no doubt, is that everyone aboard survived. Another is that it wasn’t really a plane crash—it was a water landing, as this movie’s title character, Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, defensively points out when the NTSB investigators describe the incident using the C-word.

I was unaware that there was any controversy about Sullenberger’s conduct during the brief flight, interrupted by a collision with a flock of geese. But according to this dramatization, directed by Clint Eastwood, the title character’s decision to ditch in the river rather than attempt to return to LaGuardia was sharply questioned by the NTSB.

Sullenberger was hailed in the media as a feel-good hero for his calm during the crisis, but as Tom Hanks plays Sully—it’s been pointed out online that, after Apollo 13, Castaway, Captain Phillips and this film, it may be inadvisable to travel with Hanks—he wasn’t so calm in the days that followed. He was badly shaken, couldn’t sleep, and soon began questioning his own judgment, although his second officer (Aaron Eckhart) had no doubt he’d saved their lives.

A quiet, reserved man, Sully was further rattled by his new role as a media star. Here, as in the final scenes of Captain Phillips, Hanks seems to be reproaching the very idea of the movie action hero, riding out a terrifying experience with no aftereffects.

Todd Komarnicki’s script seems a bit haphazardly structured at first, but it hinges on gradually expanding flashbacks of the incident, giving us a greater sense each time of the shrinking set of options available to the pilots. Eastwood’s style, as usual, isn’t flashy—it’s simple, unpretentious, even a little prosaic, which means it’s just right for the world of conference rooms and airport hotels in which much of the story unfolds. Contrasted with the fine underplaying of Hanks, this visual and atmospheric banality makes the movie startlingly absorbing and emotional.

The Wild Life—This animated kidflick depicts another abortive journey. It’s yet another movie adaptation of Robinson Crusoe, maybe the oddest yet. No Friday this time; the story is seen from the point of view of the animals on Crusoe’s island, who decide to help him build a comfortable castaway lifestyle.

Since they’re a motley bunch representing various continents—a macaw, a Malaysian tapir, a chameleon, a pangolin, a goat and a kingfisher!—presumably we’re meant to understand that they’re castaways as well, organized into a loose family. The villains here are a pack of bedraggled, matted feral cats.

A Belgian-French co-production dubbed into English without name players, The Wild Life is visually striking, and you almost have to respect its hard-nosed old-school storytelling—an animal dies heroically in the course of the story, for instance. But somehow the movie just doesn’t work. Dafoe’s book is a fascinating, culturally troubling myth, and somehow trying to bend it into anthropomorphic cuteness feels forced and unconvincing.

TREKKING BALL

Happy 50^th Birthday Star Trek!

Yes, that’s right, fifty years ago today my favorite TV show, the original Star Trek, debuted on NBC with “The Man Trap.” This Saturday evening retro network MeTV celebrates the auspicious anniversary by showing “The Man Trap,” after which their horror host Svengoolie presents the Star Trek pilot The Cage—later abridged into the two-part original series episode “The Menagerie”—as his feature selection. Talk about your must-see TV!

Obviously a Star Trek monster is called for this week, and since the hideous salt-sucking shape-shifter (or shape-sucking salt-shifter?) from “The Man Trap” was a MOTW just last year, how about…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this snarling beast…

 

…from “The Cage,” played by Janos Prohaska, who also designed and played The Mugato and The Horta!

HOLLAR TREE

Opening this week: 

The Hollars—Even though the small-town middle American family of the title isn’t especially prone to raising their voices, the name somehow fits just the same. They’re an explosive bunch; you get the sense that hollering is what they’re always on the verge of.

John Krasinski plays John Hollar, the son who ran away from home. An aspiring but blocked graphic novelist, he’s been living in New York, working a day job he hates, and reluctant to marry his girlfriend Rebecca (Anna Kendrick) even though she’s in the homestretch of carrying his child. When John learns that his beloved Mom (Margo Martindale) has collapsed and is in the hospital, he hurries home.

Immediately he’s dropped back into the squabbles between his blubberingly emotional, short-fused father (Richard Jenkins) and his divorced, underachieving, angry older brother Ron (Sharlto Copley), whose ex (Ashley Dyke) and two daughters are now living with a maddeningly nice, patient pastor (Josh Groban). Ron, by contrast, is living back at home with the ‘rents, even though Dad has fired him from the family plumbing business, which John also learns is about to go belly-up. Interrupting all of this drama is Mom’s massive brain tumor, for which she’ll quickly need surgery.

If you’re not hearing anything particularly groundbreaking in this synopsis, you’re not wrong. The Hollars, written by Jim Strouse and directed by Krasinki, is fairly standard dysfunctional family comedy-drama, the sort of modest, “character-driven” piece that actors have a hard time resisting.

Fortunately, the actors who couldn’t resist this script include several of the best now in American movies, and Krasinski managed them briskly. There are scenes that seem heavy-handed and obvious, as when the brothers confer with their mother’s Asian surgeon (Randall Park) and the anxious Ron can’t stop himself from bringing up the man’s race. But most of the interactions between these frightened, pissed-off, loving people ring more or less true, and the actors get all that there is to get out of them, and maybe a bit more.

Vibrant as the whole ensemble is, Krasinski deserves highest marks for giving Margo Martindale a juicy opportunity in a feature film. Long valued as a supporting player, Martindale is showcased here, and has a couple of Oscar-clip-worthy scenes with real punch. But her quiet scenes with the lantern-jawed, sadly smiling Krasinski are even better—John and Mom are the soft-spoken, mild-mannered Hollars, and their conspiratorial, amused alliance is the heart of the movie.

WILDER THING

RIP to the beautiful Gene Wilder, whose one-of-a-kind combination of gentleness and manic intensity places him among the greats of American comedy. I love him most for perhaps his least manic role, as Jim, the amiably detached Waco Kid, in Blazing Saddles...

...and also as Willy Wonka, dreamily singing “There’s no earthly way of knoooowing….Which direction we are gooooing…” He was a terrific foil to Richard Pryor in Silver Streak and Stir Crazy, and he gave classic performances in The Producers, Start the Revolution Without Me and few other uneven films. But many regard the 1974 Mel Brooks favorite Young Frankenstein, which Wilder co-wrote and in which he played the title character, as his finest hour. It’s certainly wonderful, so…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week we can hardly do other than give the nod to the Monster in that film, splendidly played by Peter Boyle…

…with whom young Dr. Frankenstein (FRONK-en-steen) performs “Puttin’ on the Ritz.”

BLIND RAGE

Opening this weekend:

Don’t Breathe—It’s sort of like Wait Until Dark in reverse: Three crooks are in a blind person’s home, but this time they’re the victims and the blind person is the menace.

Like the 2014 chiller It Follows, this shocker is set in the deserted economic wasteland of Detroit. It follows a trio of attractive young burglars (Jane Levy, Dylan Minnette and Daniel Zovatto) who learn of a blind guy living in the last occupied home in his ghost-town neighborhood, and reportedly sitting on a fortune.

They get into the once-beautiful, now fortified house, and discover that the man in question (Stephen Lang), an Iraq war veteran with, apparently, some specialized training, may be sightless, but he isn’t helpless, and has reasons beyond protecting his money to want them not to escape. They’re soon fighting for their lives.

Directed by the Uruguayan Fede Alvarez from a script he wrote with Rodo Sayagues, Don’t Breathe has some obligatory scenes early on meant to make us sympathize with the robbers. From there, though, it gets off to a sensational start—tense, atmospheric, simultaneously poignant and grimly funny.

After a while, the strain of maintaining its rather narrow central premise starts to show, but just as the complications are starting to seem contrived, Alvarez and Sayagues throw us an unsavory, messed-up plot twist that I didn’t see coming. And then, just as that’s sunk in, they throw us an even more unsavory, more messed-up plot twist that I really didn’t see coming. How plausible it all is, I can’t say, but it’s nasty and wild and I, at least, hadn’t seen it before.

Jane Levy and Dylan Minnette are likable (Zovatto is odious, on purpose), but what elevates the film from mere skillful lurid thrills is Stephen Lang. With only a few lines, spoken in a disused croak, and his craggy face adorned in a regal halo of silver-gray hair, he brings a Shakespearean bearing to this boogeyman part. The veteran Lang is a great actor who’s never quite had a great movie role, but through sheer force of his presence he makes this one come pretty close.

Opening in the Valley at Harkins Shea, and also available on DirecTV:

 Morris From America— Markees Christmas plays the title role in this coming-of-age tale. He’s a 13-year-old black kid from New York living with his widowed dad (Craig Robinson) in Heidelberg, Germany.

An aspiring rapper whose chubby cheeks undercut his attempt at a badass scowl, Morris is a miserable stranger in a strange land but, encouraged by his Dad, he gamely tries to make some German friends, and catches the interest of a flirtatious blond (Lina Keller). She probably honestly likes him well enough, but she really likes his potential to upset her mother. She gets Morris into mischief, with his eager consent.

Simply and tightly written and directed by Chad Hartigan, Morris From America is one of the funnier and sweeter films I’ve seen this year. Christmas makes an impressive movie debut as Morris, and he shows a nice rapport with Carla Juri as his German tutor. But the standout performance is by Craig Robinson as his Dad, trying to communicate with his kid, wanting him to experience life while knowing full well that he’s having the sort of adventures that terrify parents—trying, simply, to stay calm.

In the opening scene, the Dad, an old-school rap nut himself, tells Morris that he’s grounded, on the charge of “liking terrible music.” I wasn’t aware that this was a parental prerogative. Good to know.