SNL Love It/Keep It/Leave It: Halsey

February 10, 2019

jmunney Saturday Night Live, SNL Weekly Recaps, Television , , , , , Leave a comment

CREDIT: Will Heath/NBC

Jeffrey Malone watches every new episode of Saturday Night Live and then organizes the sketches into the following categories: “Love It” (potentially Best of the Season-worthy), “Keep It” (perfectly adequate), or “Leave It” (in need of a rewrite, to say the least). Then he concludes with assessments of the host and musical guest.

Love It

Virginia State Capitol – If all else fails, write a sketch about a group of people who just don’t get it, and have Kenan react to them with maximum frustration. Although I have a distinct suspicion that there was no “all else” that failed and that this was instead a sketch that someone was mighty inspired to write from the beginning as soon as all the Virginia blackface nonsense was blowing up. All in all, this is an ingenious dramatization of the rationalization people come up with when attempting to minimize explosive behavior.

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Movie Review: ‘Alita: Battle Angel’ Features Visionary Effects and a Convoluted Story

February 8, 2019

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CREDIT: Twentieth Century Fox

Starring: Rosa Salazar, Christoph Waltz, Jennifer Connelly, Mahershala Ali, Ed Skrein, Jackie Earle Haley, Keean Johnson, Michelle Rodriguez, Eiza González, Lana Condor, Jorge Lendeborg Jr., Idara Victor

Director: Robert Rodriguez

Running Time: 122 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for Cyborg Limbs Flying All Over the Place

Release Date: February 14, 2019

Can slightly-larger-than-normal human eyes in a motion capture performance exist anywhere other than the Uncanny Valley? That is the conundrum at the heart of Alita: Battle Angel‘s box office prospects, but from where I’m sitting, they’re clearly the best part of the film. Yeah, those peepers might be creepy, but they are also a deep wellspring of an infectious personality. Rosa Salazar may have given her performance while dressed up in a bodysuit with a camera mounted on her head, but her enthusiasm to be part of groundbreaking cinema is consistently palpable.

Based on the manga series Gunnm, Alita: Battle Angel was co-written and co-produced by James Cameron, but presumably because he’s busy with all those Avatar sequels, directing duties fell to Robert Rodriguez. This could have been a clash of auteurs, as both men are enamored with creating digitally rendered, visually rich fantasy worlds, but Rodriguez has never really worked on the same scale as Cameron. (To be fair, nobody works on quite the same scale as Cameron.) But the steampunk metropolis of Iron City in 2563 is a sight to behold, and its array of cyborg citizens are correspondingly fascinating. Rodriguez has mostly realized Cameron’s vision without putting his own unique stamp on the project, but even so, on a technical level, this is the best James Cameron movie that Cameron never directed.

Too bad the plot is incomprehensible. A bunch of sci-fi tropes about the dangers of creating and living alongside artificial life are thrown out there, but none of them amount to anything. There is some talk about how Alita resembles the deceased daughter of her scientist caretaker (Christoph Waltz), but that does not lead to any of the expected emotional confusion. Alita is also being hunted down by other cyborgs, but it is never clear what threat she actually poses to anyone. Also, she is centuries old and the last of her kind, which could mean that she is a sort of Rosetta stone to the past, and people treat her that way, but nobody ever clearly explains why that matters. With all the empty dialogue in Alita, it makes me wish that someone in 2019 would be bold enough to make a $200 million sci-fi extravaganza as a silent film.

Alita: Battle Angel is Recommended If You Like: James Cameron’s Brand of 3D Visual Effects, Overly Busy Impenetrable Screenplays

Grade: 2.5 out of 5 Big Eyes

Movie Review: ‘Everybody Knows’ is Another Devastating But Enriching Work From Asghar Farhadi

February 7, 2019

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CREDIT: Teresa Isasi/Focus Features

Starring: Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Ricardo Darín

Director: Asghar Farhadi

Running Time: 132 Minutes

Rating: R for Spanish Profanity

Release Date: February 8, 2019 (Limited)

If you sit down to watch Everybody Knows, you will probably wonder, “What is it that everybody knows?” I know I certainly did. About a half hour or so in, I had a pretty good idea of what it could be, then that suspicion grew into a more fully formed guess, and ultimately my powers of deduction proved to be precisely on point. I do not say this to toot my own horn, but rather, to explain that Everybody Knows makes the answers to its central mystery crystal clear. Far from being frustrated by obviousness, I appreciated that it guided me to exactly where it wanted me to go.

Having previously seen The Salesman and now this latest feature, I know the films of Asghar Farhadi to be about the trauma of outside forces testing the strength of familial units. In this case, the kidnapping of a teenage girl is the impetus for revealing one family’s most sacred secrets. Laura (Penélope Cruz) is a Spanish woman living in Argentina who has returned to her hometown with her two kids in tow for a wedding. When her daughter Irene (Carla Crampa) disappears, she is forced to resolve what lingers from the past with her childhood friend and former lover Paco (Javier Bardem). Farhadi has a knack for understanding that the potential paths of highly stressful situations can swing on a pendulum from further disaster to healing reconciliation. The resolution of Everybody Knows is profoundly, cathartically satisfying – the work of a master craftsman operating like clockwork.

Everybody Knows is Recommended If You Like: Asghar Farhadi’s filmography, The Vanishing

Grade: 4 out of 5 Family Secrets

Movie Review: ‘What Men Want’ Mines Humor, But Not Much Else, From Its Gender-Flipped Premise

February 7, 2019

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CREDIT: Paramount Pictures

Starring: Taraji P. Henson, Aldis Hodge, Tracy Morgan, Josh Brener, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Tamala Jones, Phoebe Robinson, Max Greenfield, Jason Jones, Kellan Lutz, Brian Bosworth, Chris Witaske, Erykah Badu

Director: Adam Shankman

Running Time: 117 Minutes

Rating: R for Aggressive Sex, Alpha Dog Profanity, and Bachelorette Party Drug Imbibing

Release Date: February 8, 2019

The ability to read minds is a rich comic premise. That holds true even when it is done in the service of outdated ideas about gender differences, or in service of a more enlightened view of gender differences, which perhaps demonstrates that any grand statement on this topic is quite possibly a folly. While saying “men are like this, but women are like THIS” can easily be a problematic minefield, as long as you show the distance between what characters say and what they leave unsaid, the formula for laughs is there. What Men Want does not screw that formula up, at least not completely. But does it offer anything more than raucous unintentional confessionals?

I have not seen What Women Want, but from what I know about it, it cannot be so easily pinned as too reliant on stereotypes or a deconstruction of said stereotypes. The same is true of What Men Went. Taraji P. Henson plays Ali Davis, a sports agent who can match her male colleagues in alpha dog aggressiveness, but she is struggling to make partner at her agency, and it is clear that that is because of assumptions of what women can or should do in a professional setting. Frankly, she does not need to read minds to know that, as she is already a decent judge of character anyway. Ultimately, her newfound ability is little more than a parlor trick. What she really needs to be able to get over the humps in her personal and professional lives is to fully listen to what the people who truly care about her are saying, which is not the same thing as hearing their thoughts.

That is a valuable lesson, but also fairly pedestrian considering the unusual circumstances. What Men Want is not fundamentally obvious, but it does feel like a bit of a wasted opportunity, because its premise is not really essential to its conclusion. Luckily, these types of movies are often reliable for memorable side characters, and we have got some delightfully kooky ones here. In particular, Tracy Morgan more or less plays himself as the father of a top NBA prospect, spouting claims like how Abraham Lincoln was “part Eskimo” and Richard Nixon “shot and ate a panda.” And then there is Erykah Badu as a self-made psychic/weed dealer, gloriously mystical and loopy as ever.

What Men Want is Recommended If You Like: Taraji P. Henson Upgrading Average Material, Tracy Morgan Running His Mouth, Erykah Badu at her zaniest

Grade: 2.5 out of 5 Head Konks

Movie Review: ‘Cold Pursuit’ Brings Liam Neeson’s Revenge Shenanigans to the Rocky Mountains

February 6, 2019

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CREDIT: Doane Gregory

Starring: Liam Neeson, Tom Bateman, Emmy Rossum, William Forsythe, Julia Jones, Domenick Lombardozzi, Raoul Trujillo, Benjamin Hollingsworth, John Doman, Aleks Paunovic, Christopher Logan, Nathaniel Arcand, Ben Cotton, Tom Jackson, Mitchell Saddleback, Laura Dern

Director: Hans Petter Moland

Running Time: 118 Minutes

Rating: R for Drug Content, Angry Man Profanity, and Truly Wild Death Scenes

Release Date: February 8, 2019

Cold Pursuit appears to take place in a scenario where the souls of everyone involved have disappeared. That makes sense, because stripping away all of your morality is just about necessary to make working for a drug cartel or going on a reign of vengeance bearable to one’s psyche. This is perhaps the bleakest of any Liam Neeson actioner, but that darkness is alleviated by the fact that it is also the most offbeat. Neeson plays Nels Coxman, a snowplow driver in a Rocky Mountain resort town. He’s just been named Citizen of the Year, but now he has ventured out to kill every member of a notorious cartel who have killed his son. His wife (Laura Dern) leaves him as soon as she realizes what he is up to, but we stick with him, not because the revenge tastes so sweet (it doesn’t, or at least it isn’t designed to), but because the killings all go down in such deadpan fashion. That tends to happen in such a harsh and unforgiving climate and terrain as this one.

Nels’ primary adversary is the drug lord Viking (Tom Bateman), who is the breed of testosterone in a suit who tells his son that “all the answers” he’ll need to in life are in Lord of the Flies. His performance is just the right mix of hammy and deranged to make Cold Pursuit palatable. Without him or the whole film’s gallows humor ethos, this would be the type of movie to make me despair about the end of civilization. In a battle between the soulless, style is essential for the audience’s sustenance, and director Hans Petter Moland has style like you could never imagine. It also helps that there are some flashes of thriving humanity, in the form of a love story for one of the cartel members as well as a dogged detective played by Emmy Rossum. But for the most part, this is “No Country for Those with Love in Their Hearts.”

Cold Pursuit is Recommended If You Like: Taken, Fargo, Scandinavian Humor

Grade: 3.5 out of 5 Tree Impalements

Movie Review: ‘The Prodigy’ Plays Around a Bit with the Evil Child Formula, But Proceeds Mostly Predictably

February 6, 2019

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CREDIT: Rafy/Orion Pictures

Starring: Taylor Schilling, Jackson Robert Scott, Peter Mooney, Colm Feore, Brittany Allen, Paul Fauteux

Director: Nicolas McCarthy

Running Time: 101 Minutes

Rating: R for Disturbing Juvenile Behavior, A Fair Amount of Gore, and Momentary Graphic Nudity

Release Date: February 8, 2019

It’s better to be unfailingly nice and decent than it is to be preternaturally smart. It’s great if you can be both, and the two certainly are not mutually exclusive. But the worst-case scenario is when you have no control over your skills and personality. So it is in the case of Miles, a young boy whose advanced intellect is paired with some sociopathic tendencies. He had the misfortune of being born on the same day that a serial killer met his end one state over. This murderer’s soul is now trying to take over Miles’ body to complete his lethal work. That is not a spoiler – while the trailers play coy about the true nature of Miles’ disturbing inclinations, the beginning of The Prodigy is edited in such a way to make it unmistakable what we are dealing with.

As is the case with so many bad seed movies, this one is about the efforts of the mother to figure out what is going on and to keep the evil at bay. But The Prodigy differs from the likes of Rosemary’s Baby in terms of how much everyone else believes what is really going on. As mom Sarah, Taylor Schilling is as open-minded as she ought to be given the situation. She takes her boy to a therapist (Colm Feore), who turns out to be a specialist in reincarnation. For a movie that mostly plays by the rules of the real world, it is a little jarring to see it be so matter-of-fact about its supernatural forces. But if you are going to confirm that souls of the dead can indeed inhabit the bodies of the living in this reality, why beat around the bush? Feore is certainly up to the task to convey professionalism, confidence, and normality, or at least normality in a certain context.

While The Prodigy is admirably out-there in its supernatural status quo, it does not have the idiosnycratic climax to match it. It’s bracingly brutal, but fairly predictable. There could be a happy or a depressing ending, and the option taken goes down about exactly as you would expect it to. There is enough in there to satisfy the bloodlust of a particularly sanguine audience, but it will be a little less than filling to any horror gourmand on the hunt for new flavors.

The Prodigy is Recommended If You Like: The Omen, The Good Son, Generally any and all evil kid movies

Grade: 2.5 out of 5 Hungarian Dialects

Movie Review: ‘The Lego Movie 2’ Has Some More Valuable Lessons to Teach Us With Bright Colors and Peppy Songs

February 5, 2019

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CREDIT: Warner Bros.

Starring: Chris Pratt, Elizabeth Banks, Will Arnett, Tiffany Haddish, Stephanie Beatriz, Charlie Day, Alison Brie, Nick Offerman

Director: Mike Mitchell

Running Time: 107 Minutes

Rating: PG for Traumatizing Lego Destruction

Release Date: February 8, 2019

Where does a sequel go after the original makes such a definitive statement? This is the conundrum facing The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part. (That subtitle is infinitely unnecessary, but not indicative of the movie’s humor as a whole, and also this title would have looked rather naked without a subtitle.) 2015’s first part summed up in cinematic form the whole ethos of the iconic Danish building blocks: in a world that often favors rigidity and conformity, you cannot give up on your individuality, because everyone can be and is special. Childlike imagination and wonder are what fueled The Lego Movie to be as successful as it was. Those values will get you pretty far in life. So why do any more statements need to be made?

It turns out that while The Lego Movie offers a philosophy with wide-ranging applicability, it is not quite a grand unified theory that covers absolutely everything. It spoke to the power of a singular creative vision, but The Second Part demonstrates how collaboration is equally vital. Emmet Brickowski (Chris Pratt) and his Lego friends are now living in the wasteland Apocalypseburg, because in the human world that is controlling them, a little sister has invaded the playspace of her big brother. So Emmet, Lucy (Elizabeth Banks), Batman (Will Arnett), and company head out to broker a peace with some differently designed block-creatures. This leads to permanent bachelor Batman becoming engaged to a sparkly shape-shifter voiced by Tiffany Haddish, while Superman (Channing Tatum) lives happily alongside General Zod in a Stepford-esque perfect suburb.

Sizing up the situation, Emmet believes that his mission is to free his friends from the brainwashing of strangers. But while it may seem that all is not what it seems, it turns out that that particular mystery trope is not being played as straight as you might expect. The Lego Movie taught us to be skeptical about a constantly smiling world insisting that everything is awesome, but it also taught us that awesomeness sometimes really is awesome if it has genuine feeling behind it. The candy-coated invading milieu of The Second Part initially appears to be fundamentally suspicious. But sometimes a bright, peppy outer layer is only covering a bright and rewarding core. Sometimes a catchy song that jams itself right in your head is so buoyant that you’re happy it’s stuck there. Belief in yourself is important, but don’t forget to be open-minded about everyone else.

The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part is Recommended If You Like: The Lego Movie and its spin-offs, Playing with your siblings

Grade: 4 out of 5 Catchy Songs

Best 2019 Super Bowl Commercials

February 3, 2019

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It’s time to reboot the Super Bowl commercials. What was the deal with Bud Light’s corn syrup obsession. It wasn’t annoying, nor was it anti-brilliant (I don’t think), it was just puzzling. Here’s my top 5:

5. Dietz and Watson, “Craig Robinson Likes Dietz Nuts” – Craig Robinson saying “Dietz nuts”: I can’t help but laugh.

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Movie Review: Gina Rodriguez Enlivens the Otherwise By-the-Numbers ‘Miss Bala’

January 31, 2019

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CREDIT: Columbia Pictures

Starring: Gina Rodriguez, Ismael Cruz Córdova, Anthony Mackie, Aislinn Derbez, Matt Lauria, Cristina Rodlo, Ricardo Abarca, Thomas Dekker

Director: Catherine Hardwicke

Running Time: 104 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for Drug Trafficking, Violence Shot Far Enough Away That You Don’t See the Worst of It, and Nudity Covered Up by Towels and Shower Steam

Release Date: February 1, 2019

What if you found yourself embroiled in a series of criminal activities because some bad actors forced you to do their bidding, and you somehow made it out alive? Would you think that this is a sign that you should transform yourself into a full-time badass? Would you maybe even suspect that the whole thing was engineered as a training exercise? This is the ringer that Gloria Meyer (Gina Rodriguez) goes through, and anyone watching Miss Bala (a remake of the 2011 Mexican film of the same name) cannot possibly be anything but impressed by her resourcefulness and gumption.

Gloria is a makeup artist living in Los Angeles who heads south of the border to Tijuana to make her friend Suzu’s (Cristina Rodlo) face a work of art to help her win a beauty pageant. But then a trip to the nightclub leads to a disorienting succession of gunfire, kidnapping, and irreversible new life paths. As Gloria attempts to find Suzu after the two get separated, a drug cartel grabs a hold of her and forces her to do their dirty work. Then the DEA gets their paws on her as well, offering a potential chance to escape this predicament, though the price will not exactly be cheap. She quickly realizes that within the arena of the drug war, nobody really has her back. But as this is a star vehicle for Rodriguez, you know that Gloria will some way, somehow, emerge alive and on top. By the end, you might wonder if this was all a simulation designed to test her mettle, but that conclusion would ignore how chaotic the whole ordeal is, and the filmmaking makes it clear that her survival is never a guarantee.

Miss Bala hits hard as a character study, but it is fairly standard-issue as an action film. Gloria’s psychological development is abundantly present all over the screen, and there are few actors who can combine steely commitment and vulnerability the way that Rodriguez does. Director Catherine Hardwicke has a knack for getting her actors exactly where they need to be, but when it comes to the particular demands of the genre, she plays it safe. That means a standard-issue rough-and-tumble (though thankfully not too frenetic) editing style and a thrum-thrum-thrum score that sounds like it came from the stock music catalogue. So Miss Bala hardly reinvents the wheel, but it’s worth it to see Rodriguez’s face light up when she realizes that she’s a winner, baby.

Miss Bala is Recommended If You Like: Jane the Virgin but wish it had more drug trafficking storylines

Grade: 3 out of 5 Survival Tactics

Movie Review: ‘Arctic’ Strands Mads Mikkelsen in a Survival Story Stripped to Its Barest Essence

January 28, 2019

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CREDIT: Helen Sloan SMPSP/Bleecker Street

Starring: Mads Mikkelsen, María Thelma Smáradóttir

Director: Joe Penna

Running Time: 97 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for Bloody Accident Images and the Effects of Extreme Cold

Release Date: February 1, 2019 (Limited)

Arctic is like a cinematic version of The Oregon Trail, that old computer game standby, insofar as it’s all about getting from point A to point B, with lots of deadly peril along the way. It also resembles many-generations-ago gaming in its decidedly no-frills nature. Mads Mikkelsen plays Overgård, a man who has been stranded alone in the title tundra for an unspecified period of time. There is hardly any dialogue because the only other credited character is a woman (María Thelma Smáradóttir) in a helicopter crash who is barely, if at all, conscious for most of the running time. The video game comparison does not track completely, as you never really got to know anyone in your Oregon Trail party, beyond all the diseases and snake bites they succumbed to. Arctic, on the other hand, does allow you to spend plenty of time getting up close and personal with Mikkelsen, but in fact you don’t get to know him that well, because he’s too busy just surviving.

Your appreciation of Arctic will depend a great deal on whether or not you believe minimalism is the best approach for this type of story. It certainly has its advantages, as the sheer imposing scope of the setting ensures that director and co-writer Joe Penna does not have to do anything fancy to convey the truth of Overgård’s situation. I enjoyed watching Arctic about as much as an afternoon spent playing The Oregon Trail. But I appreciated it much more deeply for its technical astuteness and efficiency. And it’s also now perfectly clear, if it wasn’t already, that Mads Mikkelsen is ideal company no matter what the occasion.

Arctic is Recommended If You Like: Survival Stories, Snow, Minimalism

Grade: 3 out of 5 SOS’s

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