Movie Review: Rom-Com Deconstruction Goes Down as Easy as a Cupcake in the Frothy and Insightful ‘Isn’t It Romantic’

February 12, 2019

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CREDIT: Warner Bros.

Starring: Rebel Wilson, Liam Hemsworth, Adam DeVine, Priyanka Chopra, Betty Gilpin

Director: Todd Strauss-Schulson

Running Time: 88 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for Stereotypically PG-13 Rom-Com Behavior

Release Date: February 13, 2019

Do romantic comedies offer any applicable lessons for our own lives? Or are they all just toxic fantasies and at best valuable only for the escapism they offer? Isn’t It Romantic would like us to believe that even the most unrealistic rom-coms can provide inspiration for how to navigate our love lives. It’s a lesson that its main character Natalie (Rebel Wilson) would be wise to take to heart (and ultimately of course, she will). An architect living in an accurately smelly and sweaty New York City, she has been raised to be cynical about the genre, and fairly enough, she calls out its most destructive tropes: from the female co-workers who are mandatory rivals to the gay best friend who has no personal life of his own. But her cynicism blinds her to the existence of potential true love around her, partly because she does not believe that most guys would be interested in a “normal” girl like her. She is someone who would clearly benefit from saying “yes” more often, even if what she says yes to is living out an over-the-top stereotypical rom-com. Somehow, that experience leads to self-acceptance and fully listening to the people who truly appreciate her.

Nat is transported to this fantasy world when she hits her head while getting mugged in a subway station. She finds herself in a suspiciously fragrant version of NYC in which just about everyone is a little too open to the possibility of random meet-cutes. For her, that means a whirlwind romance with Blake (a never-better Liam Hemsworth), a client of hers who speaks almost exclusively in Buddhist aphorisms. And for Nat’s best friend and co-worker Josh (Adam DeVine), that means falling into the embrace of Isabella (Priyanka Chopra), the improbably employed “yoga ambassador.” It turns out that the rom-com storyline at play here is actually “best friends realize they were supposed to be together all along, almost before it’s too late,” and chances are pretty high that the corresponding happy ending will come to fruition. But the real raison d’etre of this whole affair is for Natalie to separate the chaff from the wheat of what rom-coms have to offer. Yes, they might be unrealistic and sometimes even toxic, but that is no reason to be miserable and reject love in our own lives. Isn’t It Romantic deconstructs to remind us why these silly, frothy stories are still worth telling.

Isn’t It Romantic is Recommended If You Like: Enchanted, They Came Together, Rebel Wilson and Adam DeVine’s chemistry in Pitch Perfect

Grade: 4 out of 5 Mornings After

Movie Review: ‘Happy Death Day 2U’ Repeats Everything, But Nothing Was Ever the Same

February 12, 2019

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CREDIT: Universal Pictures

Starring: Jessica Rothe, Israel Broussard, Phi Vu, Suraj Sharma, Sarah Yarkin, Ruby Modine, Rachel Matthews, Steve Zissis

Director: Christopher Landon

Running Time: 100 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for Comically Absurd Death Scenes

Release Date: February 13, 2019

Happy Death Day 2U is a tricky movie to review while avoiding spoilers, because a lot of the fun is derived from the glut of surprises that the plot has in store. That may sound unlikely for a sequel to a film about someone repeating the same day over and over again. But it is true that one of 2U‘s great strengths is its unpredictability. In that sense, it is most reminiscent of The Cabin in the Woods, which is similarly impossible to talk about without spoiling at least a tad. But also like Cabin, Happy Death Day 2U is so chock-a-block full of twists that it is impossible to spoil entirely. So even if you go in knowing the first twist, there are about twenty-five more waiting for you, which is quite an accomplishment for any sequel. I will try to be as non-specific as possible for the rest of this review, but if you want to be thoroughly unspoiled, stop here and just know that 2U succeeds wildly in its go-for-broke mentality. (But if anyone wants to get deeper into the details, please feel free to send a comment my way because I happy to talk about this movie as much as possible.)

The challenge of any time loop narrative is making each successive go-round interesting instead of frustrating in its sameness. That pitfall would seem exponentially more challenging for a sequel. As the person who has to live it, Tree Gelbman is suitably enraged, perhaps even deranged, about being stuck in the predicament she thought she had just escaped. It plays to Jessica Rothe’s comic strengths to be able to just scream at the forces of fate torturing her. But it turns out that this same loop is just different enough for Tree and the audience to be optimistic. The tone shifts from the original so significantly, in fact, that 2U is essentially in an entirely different genre than its predecessor (to say which genre would constitute a spoiler). In that way, it is like Aliens, which shifted from the one-by-one elimination horror of Alien into a war-style action flick. That change was understandable given the succession from Ridley Scott to James Cameron. But in this case, Christopher Landon stayed on as director (while also taking over scripting duties from Scott Lobdell). That diverse tonal skillset is heartening to see in any filmmaker, and it makes me believe that the Happy Death Day franchise could actually pull off a third entry that is hinted at the end here.

Other highlights include beefing up the best parts of the first film. Tree gets wrung through an even more outrageous death montage, this time involving electrocution, skydiving in a bikini, and falling from a clock tower (in a possible nod to another time-based franchise). Meanwhile, Tree’s sorority sister Danielle is even more fleshed out as her own singular brand of clueless. Rachel Matthews has only a few credits to her name, but she deserves to be a star based on her Happy Death Day performances alone. With all this surplus of beef, 2U is perhaps a little busy. The slasher aspects might actually be unnecessary, though they do provide ample tension. Overall, this film has such a strong intellectual foundation for something so cheeky and demented that any slight misstep is easily forgiven once the next mind-tickling idea comes along.

Happy Death Day 2U is Recommended If You Like: Happy Death Day, Back to the Future Part II, Primer, Rick and Morty

Grade: 4.5 out of 5 Loops

Movie Review: ‘Birds of Passage’ Presents the Early Days of the Colombian Drug Trade with Transfixing Imagery and Brutal Violence

February 11, 2019

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CREDIT: The Orchard

Starring: Carmiña Martínez, Natalia Reyes, José Acosta, Jhon Narváez, Jose Vicente Cotes, Juan Bautista, Greider Meza

Directors: Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra

Running Time: 125 Minutes

Rating: Unrated, But It Would Be R for Gun Violence

Release Date: February 13, 2019

As a movie critic who does not focus on any one particular genre, I aim to be as omnivorous as possible, watching as many new releases as I can, covering as many subjects as are available. Certain times, I will encounter perspectives similar to my own, and I will be able to offer my more or less expert expert take in those cases. Other times I will come across films so far removed from my background that I can only offer my first-hand experience of what it is like to witness them. So it is in the case of the Colombian film Birds of Passage, a sprawling tale of a Native American Wayuu family’s chronicle through the drug trade.

As far as I can gather, Birds of Passage (which is divided into five chapters, or “cantos”) is in favor of staying close to home and fostering strong familial and community relations. Living a violent life in service of those values can only lead to destruction back home. And make no mistake, this is a violent film. Taking place in the sixties and seventies, it covers the early days of the Colombian drug trade, but it did not take long for gunfire to become a staple of the business. There are plenty of scenes of women getting pushed around and abused, but there is also a heavy implication that the female characters with significant parts are strong and wise leaders, and this society would be a lot better off if it did a better job listening to them. There are also some transfixingly dreamy scenes that convey the importance of being in tune with a collective inner spirit. The drug trade in this film starts off with American Peace Corps members looking to score some weed, but that foreign influence is a red herring. Everyone has their own soul and that of their community to look after.

Birds of Passage is Recommended If You Like: The Other Films of Ciro Guerra, Probably

Grade: 3.5 out of 5 Cantos

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

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

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