Dig if you will, the pictures in The Screening Room this week:
Pete’s Dragon
by George Wolf, MaddWolf.com
Just a few months after a triumphant re-imagining of The Jungle Book, Disney heads back to the vault to give Pete’s Dragon a similar live action/animation reboot…with less magical results.
Much has changed from the 1977 cartoon, starting with the surprisingly tragic depiction of how a very young Pete becomes an orphan. Losing his parents in isolated woodlands deep in the Pacific Northwest, Pete is promptly befriended by the very dragon whose legend has been passed down for decades in local song and story.
Pete will call his dragon “Elliot.”
Well, we’re told it’s a dragon, but here he or she is more like a big, green dog with wings. Look at it chasing its tail and fetching a stick!
Six years later, park ranger Grace (Bryce Dallas Howard) encounters an injured Pete (Oakes Fegley) in the forest and takes him home, where stories of a dragon best friend intrigue Grace’s father Meacham (Robert Redford), who may have his own history with Elliot. These stories also catch the attention of local meanypants Gavin (Karl Urban), who quickly assembles a hunting parting with an aim to “put himself on the map” by bagging a giant green trophy.
Director/co-writer David Lowery makes a monster-sized pivot from the poetic desperation of his Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, and while Pete’s Dragon is rife with gentle sweetness, it’s lacking in both depth and wonder.
After the bracing prologue, characters and situations are broadly drawn, as if to never challenge any viewer older than Pete himself. It’s a curious approach for a PG-rated film, and the less than subtle, too often sappy treatment undercuts later attempts to resonate on a more metaphorical level.
Does Pete’s desire to stay with Elliot represent that wish to escape adult responsibilities and hold tight to childhood wonders? Maybe, but that Neverland remains out of sight.
We do get perfectly acceptable, albeit generically feel good lessons on the importance of family, and that’s fine. But despite those wings, Pete’s Dragon never quite soars.
Sausage Party
by Christie Robb, MaddWolf.com
I was expecting to hate this movie. At worst I was anticipating a series of increasingly forced rude jokes and at best a munchie-induced fever dream. Instead, I gotta say, Sausage Party stands up with the South Park movie as a pretty offensively entertaining animated movie for adults.
The film is set in a Shopwell supermarket where every morning the products sing about their desire be chosen by “the gods”—those big things wheeling the carts—and travel to the Great Beyond (via a song composed by Alan Menken—the guy who co-created the songs from The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin).
Little do the foodstuffs know what terrors await them on the other side of the pneumatic doors. It’s not nirvana. The Gods eat you.
As the Fourth of July approaches, Frank—a hot dog voiced by Seth Rogan—eagerly anticipates hooking up with his honey bun (Kristen Wiig) in the Great Beyond. But after they are chosen, they and a bunch of other products are separated from their packaging and fall to the supermarket floor.
Forced to traverse the enormous grocery, the fellowship has to navigate the aisles to get back to their packages, interacting with their fellow foodstuffs in various ethnic-food aisles, partying in the liquor aisle, and generally trying to evade the villain—a vampiric and increasingly unhinged literal douche.
The movie certainly employs a fair amount of wiener-based humor and a variety of food-centric ethnic stereotypes (for example, the sauerkraut jars are a bunch of fascists bent on exterminating “the juice”, the bagel’s voice is a Woody Allen impression, and a Peter Pan “Indian”-style pipe-smoking bottle of firewater dispenses wisdom), but the movie turns to a surprising exploration of faith vs. skepticism and the extent to which religious belief fosters divisions, hostility, and repressed sexuality.
Although the movie manages to provide enough offense to go around, the majority of the jokes are actually quite funny. The cast is certainly strong. Rogan and Wiig are joined by Nick Kroll, Salma Hayek, Michael Cera, James Franco, Bill Hader, Danny McBride, Edward Norton, Craig Robinson, David Krumholtz, and Paul Rudd, and the sex-positive food porn scene exceeded my expectations of what was bound to happen once the wiener and the bun finally got together.
Seeing Sausage Party ain’t a bad way to pass the time. But, for the love of God, please don’t take your kids.
Blood Father
by Hope Madden, MaddWolf.com
Back in 2008, the inexplicable popularity of the mid-budget action flick Taken accomplished two things. (Three, if you count exacerbating my cynicism with the film industry.) The two noteworthy accomplishments, however, were extending the career of an aging male actor and creating a new genre of film.
If two sequels and at least half a dozen copycats (including one currently listed as filming) could turn a sixty something character actor into a mainstay action figure, couldn’t the same be done for, say, an aging action hero? Why not Stallone? Why not Schwarzenegger?
Here’s why not – they can’t act. You know who can, though? Mel Gibson.
Right, he’s looney as a tune, not to mention being a professional and social pariah, but Mad Max can whip Rambo any day and who doesn’t want to see that?
Maybe next time. Right now, though, talented French action director Jean-Francois Richet directs the lunatic in Blood Father.
The story is right out of the Liam Neeson playbook: ex-con father, clean and sober but struggling to suppress his rage and shame, needs to take action to save his teenage daughter from a drug cartel.
How will he do it? Will it be his particular set of skills?!
Of course it will. And while Blood Father is absolutely faithful to its genre, there is genuine craftsmanship in the effort. Richet allows the California desert to cast an apocalyptic spell over the tale, then brings in just enough Mad Max touches to command a burst of joy.
Gibson’s character doesn’t call for a great deal of nuance, though the actor does deliver a gruff and realistically damaged performance. He’s aided by the kind of supporting cast you just don’t find in films like these.
The great William H. Macy, the underappreciated Diego Luna, the effortlessly badass Dale Dickey, and the always welcome Michael Parks round out an ensemble talented enough to find the sun-scarred and chemical-damaged humanity in every character.
A tale told in tattoos and bullet wounds, Blood Father is still, at its heart, a love note from a shitty father to his damaged daughter – a welcome dose of near-reality in a genre saturated with creepy paternal child worship.
This is not a great movie. But you know what? I swear to God, it is not bad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJHL3srsMy8
Florence Foster Jenkins
by Hope Madden, MaddWolf.com
Brace yourselves – Meryl Streep is wonderful in her new film Florence Foster Jenkins. Great to know she’s finally found her footing with this whole acting thing.
Yes, Meryl Streep can act. Thanks to a string of recent films like Into the Woods, we learned that Streep can sing, too. Maybe not as well, but passably. She’s also great in a comedy (Julie & Julia, The Devil Wears Prada).
How good? Well, she did grab Oscar nominations for all three of the above efforts.
In the title role of Stephen Frears’s new 1944-set biopic, Streep gets to strain those vocal cords while showing off her comic sensibilities. No surprise, she does both with aplomb in the role of the NYC heiress who loved music far more than it loved her. Streep delivers a vibrant central performance in a charming if forgettable end-of-Summer comedy.
The film gets so much right, though. There could not have been a better choice to play Florence’s devoted yet philandering husband than Hugh Grant, whose scheming is rarely in the service of self. His every expression exposes such tenderness and protectiveness, whatever his cagy action.
Big Bang Theory’s Simon Helberg, playing Florence’s talented if green accompanist, steals scenes – from Meryl Streep, no less! – with the barely contained giggle or outright expression of bewildered wonder. To a certain degree, he represents the audience, forever asking: How is all this possible?
Because the film remains relatively faithful to the truth of the events: Jenkins honestly believed her caterwauling to be the tones of a sublime soprano. Her husband had so insulated her from critics who might burst that delusion that she willed herself to the stage of Carnegie Hall.
Florence is the butt of this joke, and to Streep’s credit, we all feel as protective of her as her husband and accompanist do. She finds the right combination of entitlement, tenacity, vulnerability and true, blinding love of art to make the character more than just a joke. Everyone can understand deeply loving something you simply don’t have the talent to succeed in.
Unfortunately, Frears can’t quite deliver the poignancy or even the universality that should undergird the giggles and screeches. Despite moving performances, the film dips too frequently and too deeply into sentimentality. Worse though, is the fact that you come away from the film thinking: Can you believe she really sang at Carnegie Hall? She’s still a joke. She should be a bit more of an inspiration.