“The Angry Birds Movie” is an exemplar of the generational divide: I loathe it, but my kids love it.
Since the Blu-ray showed up in the mail, my 5-year-old has watched it twice and asked about a third, at which point a parent’s protective instincts kick in. The quality of entertainment for children has gone through the roof since my day, so lazy and inept stuff like this is even more egregious.
People like to disparage movies based on video games as dredging the bottom of the cultural barrel. But Angry Birds isn’t even a real video game, in the same way that tic-tac-toe bears little resemblance to Monopoly. It’s a smartphone app in which birds hurl themselves via a giant slingshot at the buildings and other structures of evil green pigs.
(Oddly, no one has ever thought to question why none of these birds have functioning wings. I mean, you figure any multicultural bird community is going to have a few penguins, ostriches and the odd emu here and there. But 100% flightless? Darwin says, “Uh uh.”)
Directors Clay Kaytis and Fergal Reilly and screenwriter Jon Vitti give us a paint-by-numbers cast and story. Red (voice of Jason Sudeikis) is a bird with anger management problems and the ostensible hero. His buddies include Chuck, a motor-mouth yellow guy voiced by Josh Gad, and Bomb (Danny McBride), who does as his name implies when he gets excited.
There’s also Terence, a massive red fellow who just growls at everyone, never speaking. He’s voiced (if you can call it that) by Sean Penn.
When the pigs land on bird island, they befriend the locals before making off with all their eggs. Bill Hader does the voice of Leonard, their smarmy leader. It’s only a matter of time before Red and company follow them back home and start slinging themselves at piggy places.
Perhaps the film’s only genuine laugh is provided by Peter Dinklage as Mighty Eagle, the mascot/mythical protector of the birds, who lives the high life up in his eyrie.
The rest is a generic jumble of fart jokes and zippy pratfalls. It’s just lazy moviemaking.
But enough parents got dragged to the theater by their kids to make this a huge hit, so get ready for the sequel. In the meantime, “The Angry Birds Movie” is the sort of thing you set your little guys up with in the living with some popcorn, and go get 97 minutes to yourself.
Bonus features are middling. With the DVD there is a single deleted scene; the Blake Shelton music video, “Friends”; character sketch gallery; music vignettes with composer Heitor Pareira; and a “symphony mode” where you can watch the movie with only music.
Upgrade to the Blu-ray version and you add five making-of featurettes; more deleted scenes; several mini-movies featuring the Hatchlings characters; and the short film, “The Early Hatchling Gets the Worm.”
Movies nowadays tend to fall, like our beleaguered politics, into silos. Superhero movies and gross-out comedies are aimed at men under age 30, animated flicks have lots of colors and boingy action for tykes, there are grim dramas and action movies for older men, a few pictures aimed at adult women are sprinkled here and there, often with a romantic flavor and usually as an antidote for the other stuff.
It’s all rather neat, and dreadfully boring.
“Pete’s Dragon,” beyond being utterly charming, is a throwback: a true family picture. Literally anyone from little children to oldsters to in-betweeners like me will fall under its sway.
It bears little resemblance to the 1977 Disney movie with a cartoon-y green dragon named Elliot who befriends an orphan. Here, the magical creature is part parent, part pet, all best friend. He protects and nurtures Pete, here played by Oakes Fegley as a 10-year-old feral boy who was lost in the woods six years earlier after a tragedy befell his family.
The dragon is portrayed effectively through CGI, with just enough realism to make you feel like he could exist, but fantastical enough that he still seems mystical. He’s green, but with plush fur instead of scales, a body that is leonine (though the belly is a tad soft) and a dog-like snout with one broken fang. He seems to have human-level intelligence, and can fade into invisibility when pesky hunters or tree-cutters come snooping around.
Robert Redford turns up as a crusty old grandfather who had a run-in with Elliot decades ago, and his stories have become part of the lore of the town of Millhaven. No one really believes him, but they like having the yarn to spin for kids and visitors. His daughter Grace (Bryce Dallas Howard) grew up into a park ranger who’s protective of the trees and critters.
Her husband, Jack (Wes Bentley), is nice in a bland sort of way, but her brother-in-law, Gavin (Karl Urban), is a jerk who likes to take his woodcutting crews too deep into the forest. This results in the discovery of Pete, who’s taken back to civilization while a lonely Elliot wanders along the trail looking for his little boy.
There follows some predictable but still poignant stuff where the grown-ups fail to believe Pete and his stories about his dragon guardian, but Grace’s wide-eyed daughter, Natalie (Oona Laurence), bonds with him immediately. Pete starts to see the appeal of leaving the woods to live with people again, but pines for his dragon.
The film is directed and co-written (with Toby Halbrooks) by David Lowery, whose last feature, 2013’s “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints,” is as different thematically as you can get from this Disney remake. Still, that drama about a convict on the run to be reunited with his family, was filled with a lyricism that segues naturally into the tone of “Pete’s Dragon.”
Alas, childlike wonderment seems to be in short supply these days, both among filmmakers and film-goers. “The BFG” bombed horribly at the box office, and there were more empty seats than filled at the preview screening I went to for “Pete’s Dragon.”
But, if for a precious few, there is still a magic that lingers.
What’s worse, a passionate hack or an artful fraud?
Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant play two sides of a coin in “Florence Foster Jenkins,” the true-ish story of a wealthy socialite who lived to sing, and was unspeakably awful at it. She lived until nearly the end of her days before anyone bothered to tell her how terrible was her voice.
Florence is one of those creatures of history whose story we would call too farfetched for fiction. Her recitals became the stuff of New York legend, with carefully cultivated lists of hifalutin guests for the invitation-only affairs.
Critics were forbidden, except those who could be relied upon to pen effusive, vaguely-worded reviews. Her common-law husband, British thespian St. Clair Bayfield (Grant), managed her career, which was another way of saying he took great pains – and spread lots of gratuities – to ensure nary a negative word ever reached her ears.
Last year the French made their own version of Jenkins’ life, “Marguerite,” which won actress Catherine Frot their equivalent of the Oscar and took great historical liberties. Now America’s grand dame of cinema makes her own go at the tale, more or less following the known biographical facts but adding a heavy ladling of artistic interpretation, courtesy of director Stephen Frears and screenwriter Nicholas Martin.
It’s another stupendous turn from Streep, playing a woman who led a life of happy delusion. Her Florence brims with a burning passion for music, with carefully hidden reservoirs of self-doubt. She’s domineering in a benevolent sort of way, a woman who’s spent decades expecting everyone around her to bend to her will.
Streep does her own singing, and it’s a testament to her skill that she’s so good at sounding so bad. Florence is off-key, off tempo, off everything. Her pitch is shaky and her diction questionable.
Grant has a nice turn as Bayfield, a cad who lives a double life with another woman (Rebecca Ferguson), but truly is devoted to Florence. Every night he tucks her into bed, puts her to sleep with a recitation of Shakespeare, and then carefully removes the vestiges of vanity she clings to: the wig, the fake eyelashes, and so on.
He’s not so much Florence’s lover as caretaker of her carefully preserved mausoleum-in-waiting.
Simon Helberg plays Cosme McMoon, the meek but talented young pianist hired for $150 a week (that’s about two grand in today’s dollars) to accompany Florence during practices and, later, live performances. Cosme acts as our entrance into this constructed little world, where everyone up to famous conductors and composers go along with the ruse in return for money and patronage.
It’s easy, Bayfield instructs young Cosme, once you agree to “live life free from the tyranny of ambition.”
Eventually, of course, Florence is confronted with a dash of reality after she insists on funding a live performance for soldiers – at Carnegie Hall, no less. Then the proceedings, which have thrived on a fun and frivolous note, take on a tragic tone with a surprising amount of dramatic weight.
“People can say I can’t sing, but nobody can say I didn’t sing,” she says.
Is it really so hard to believe that a person could go so long completely deluded about their own merits? I’m sure Donald Trump is constantly surrounded by hangers-on who tell him his hair looks terrific, and Hillary Clinton’s sycophants give constant assurances her misstatements have an air of authenticity.
Seventy years after her death, Florence’s recordings and playbills are highly sought after, there have been plays about her life, a French movie and now an American one. Was ever a worse artist so lionized?
It’s often said it takes a great deal of bravery to get up in front of an audience and risk making a fool of yourself. “Florence Foster Jenkins” is the story of one of the fools.
If “Batman v Superman” was a hot mess, then its DC Comics companion, “Suicide Squad” is an even hotter mess -- but also a more enjoyable one.
It’s essentially a “Dirty Dozen” spin on the superhero genre, taking a disparate gaggle of bad guys out of the clink and throwing them into a squad of supposed do-gooders. They fight with each other and rebel against their overlords, and eventually get around to doing some good.
The movie takes waaaaay too long during the “putting together the team” portion of the movie, but it pays off with a second half that is virtually non-stop action and CGI-heavy mayhem. Our gang of misfits actually transforms from sneering baddies into those in whose hands the fate of the very world rests.
(Have you noticed that all superhero movies lately are about the end of the world? That ol’ Earth sure is a vulnerable planetoid.)
The best bet writer/director David Ayer (“End of Watch”) makes is not trying to spread around the screen time and backstory evenly. It’s a first-among-equals approach, with Will Smith’s Deadshot and Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn as the main characters. Everyone else is essentially an add-on.
Deadshot is a merciless assassin who never misses with a firearm, but has a soft spot in the shape of his beloved 11-year-old daughter. He’s a “serial killer who takes credit cards,” so if fighting for the U.S. government is the price he has to pay to be reunited with her, then so be it. Viola Davis is commanding and ice-blooded as Amanda Walker, the intelligence chief running the show.
I should mention all the squad members have an explosive device implanted in their spine, and if they disobey the hardcase leader of their unit, Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman), they get blown up.
Harley Quinn is written as a scene-stealer, and Robbie milks it for everything she’s got. Harley is a former psychiatrist who got turned bad by her jailbird boyfriend (more on him in a minute), and is now a flirty, sexy, homicidal maniac. Her superhero costume consists of barely-there shorts, cutoff shirt, smeared makeup and fishnets. Her favorite M.O. is to bash people in the face with a baseball bat.
It’s a crazy, off-kilter character, a woman who uses her sexuality as a weapon and a tool. She’s somewhere between a feminist nightmare and empowerment icon.
Her guy is the Joker, played in this iteration by Jared Leto, utterly horrifying in bright green hair, facial tattoos and apparently stainless steel teeth. If Harley’s unhinged, he’s the claw hammer that pulled her screws loose. Jack Nicholson’s J-man was murderously theatrical and Heath Ledger’s was crazily calculating; Leto’s is just crazy for the sake of crazy.
For a while we think the movie’s building Joker up as the main villain. But it turns out he’s basically just a street gangster, not a world-beater.
The rest of the team, in quick order, is: Boomerang (Jai Courtney), an Aussie blade master who’s got a lot of ‘tude; El Diablo (Jay Hernandez), a South-Central gangbanger who can produce ferocious flames from his hands, but has made a vow of pacifism after personal loss; Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Abgaje), a misanthropic lizard dude with super strength and reptilian skin; Slipknot (Adam Beach), a Native American warrior and mystery man; and Katana (Karen Fukuhara), a Japanese swordswoman whose blade steals the souls of her enemies.
Certainly the most visually interesting is Enchantress (Cara Delevingne), a dark sorceress who has actually possessed the body of a goody-goody archaeologist. She becomes a ghost-like apparition, seemingly made out of smoke and ash, with baleful eyes glowing out at us.
(At one point Delevingne breaks out into an odd, snake-y, vaguely Egyptian dance move. I kept wondering, “Is this supposed to be… scary? Because it’s actually kinda making me laugh.)
No one is going to confuse “Suicide Squad” with great moviemaking. It’s carelessly plotted and has too many hanger-on characters. But I can genuinely say I was entertained during long stretches, especially in the second hour.
Look at it this way: if the first DC Comics movie wasn’t any good, and this one is half a good movie, maybe the next one can get all the way to super.
The magic of movies knows no limits. Films entertain, they broaden our minds and make our hearts grow larger. As Roger Ebert aptly put it, “Movies are like a machine that generates empathy. It lets you understand a little bit more about different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us.”
One of those people is Owen Suskind. Twenty years ago, at age 3, he was diagnosed with severe regressive autism. As his parents, Ron and Cornelia tell it, he was a normal, happy kid who liked to play and romp. Then one day he stopped talking. Sometimes he would spout gibberish, but mostly he kept silent.
It felt like someone had kidnapped my child, Ron says. And in a way, Owen was stolen from them, and from the world. Unable to cope with the barrage of sensory input, he essentially shut down and hid in the dark forest of his mind.
“Life, Animated,” the new documentary by Oscar winner Roger Ross Williams, shows us a haunting photo of the tyke standing frozen in a hallway, staring at nothing. This became his life.
It went on like this for years.
Specialists and schools made little progress. The only thing that truly seemed to lift Owen’s spirits was watching movies, especially Disney animation. He would start to repeat bits of dialogue he had memorized. He would engage more. Hope glimmered.
Ron, a noted political writer, tells of a revelatory and heartbreaking moment when Owen was 9. Seeing a puppet of Iago, the evil little parrot sidekick from “Aladdin,” he put it on his hand and hid behind the bed, speaking to Owen in an imitation of Gilbert Gottfried, who gave Iago his voice.
“Owen, how does it feel to be you?” Iago/Ron asked. “Not good,” Owen replied, clearly and sadly. “Because I don’t have any friends.”
This was, Ron says, his first real conversation with his son.
Like many amazing stories, it’s one that if you read it in a book, you wouldn’t believe it. Through years of therapy and using the portal of Disney movies, Owen returned to the world. Through watching film, he learned to talk, to relate to other people, to open up.
We meet him as he is today, a thoughtful, handsome young man – he bears an uncanny resemblance to the kid from the TV show, “The Wonder Years.” Now he’s about to graduate from school, get his own apartment and go out into the world.
Owen has the amusing odd habit of high-pitched muttering to himself as he walks, chin down as he plows ahead. Then we listen a little closer, and realize he’s doing an unending stream of imitations of Disney dialogue.
Williams deftly mixes contemporaneous footage of Owen and his family with old photographs, home video and such. He also uses animation to illustrate Owen’s inner mind, first as little “chapter” introductions in his story, but then moving on to entire cartoon sequences. Depicted as moppet-headed little boy, he does battle with a villain he invented, the Fuzzbutch, who threatens his favorite Disney characters.
Interestingly, rather than identifying with the heroes, Owen adores the sidekicks. In the inner movie playing in a loop inside his head, he sees himself as their friend and protector.
The documentary traces Owen’s long journey from “The Glop” – his own term for his dark, uncommunicative years – and maps out the road ahead, one that contains both joy and uncertainty. We see him in a tender romance with Emily, another young person with special needs, and witness the fragility of that. We talk to his older brother, Walter, who knows that one day their parents won’t be able to watch over Owen.
“I’ll be ready. I’ve been getting ready my whole life,” Walter says.
“Life, Animated” is a movie about love. It’s about a boy who was lost, and then found, one who never wanted to grow up, and did.
If you’re looking for a fair and balanced depiction of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court, you won’t find it here. “Confirmation” pretty well stacks things against Thomas, who was accused of sexual harassment by a former employee, and in favor of Anita Hill, his accuser.
She is the main character, who “changed history” by “making a stand.” The story, and the filmmakers’ sympathies, are clearly in her court.
What you will find are a pair of fine performances by Kerry Washington as Hill and Wendell Pierce as Thomas, playing two smart and ambitious African-Americans who braved the fiery hell of the media frenzy. Greg Kinnear also shines as feckless then-Senator Joe Biden, whose often inept chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee led to the spectacle of elected officials publicly discussing pubic hairs and the authenticity of Long Dong Silver’s… uh, assets.
Director Rick Famuyiwa and writer Susannah Grant do an excellent job of capturing the political climate of the early 1990s. The Republican operatives are shown as willing to do just about anything to support the nomination of Thomas, including conjuring up kooky diagnoses of Hill’s supposed “erotomania.” Meanwhile, the Democrats are transparently looking to “Bork” another conservative nominee because he won’t vote the way they like.
Sexual harassment was the cudgel they came up with, but anyone would do.
Without overtly depicting their relationship in flashbacks, the HBO film leaves some doubt as to the veracity of Hill’s claims. The film short-changes the other witnesses who testified for and against Hill, with several other former employees corroborating Hill’s statements about sexually graphic discussions in the office, but also omitting a dozen or so women who denied the claims and testified on behalf of his character.
Still, it’s never unclear where the filmmakers’ sympathies lie. Hill’s account is never doubted, while Thomas never receives the benefit of that doubt.
Perhaps the most egregious example is having Charles Ogletree (Jeffrey Wright), a revered Harvard law professor, telling Hill he’s supporting her because Thomas is “less qualified than some of my students.” Really? One wonders how many of his students had headed up two key federal agencies and been appointed a U.S. Court of Appeals district judge.
It’s a hallmark of the age we now live in – which the Thomas hearings helped usher in – in which disagreement is tantamount to revulsion. Our nation’s sense of civil discourse has never really returned.
In the end, “Confirmation” amounts to little more than picking at old scabs. We don’t learn anything we didn’t know already, though we get a better sense of Hill and Thomas as three-dimensional human beings.
Bonus features are rather thin. There are brief Q&As with Washington and Pierce on the historical impact of the hearings, plus a “Character Spot” featuring other cast members discussing the roles they play.
I can't quite decide if "How to Marry a Millionaire" is a daringly progressive film or a horribly anachronistic throwback. Probably one for 1953, and another for 2016.
It's silly to judge the social politics of a 60-odd-year-old movie by today's standards. Back then as women who worked in factories during World War II were pushed back into the home, "marrying well" was not a topic people shied away from talking about openly.
For men, that meant finding a spouse who was pretty, kind and a good mother. For women, it meant marrying a stable guy with a good income.
The problem comes when you put these foremost qualities on a scale, with the assumption that more must be better. If a well-to-do man of prospects is desirable, then why not a fabulously rich fellow? Why settle for next-door beauty when you can get Marilyn Monroe?
Speaking of Monroe, "Millionaire" more or less marked her ascension from breakout star to screen icon. Betty Grable was billed first in the movie, though the blonde WWII pinup girl was closing in on 40 and her legendary duels with the studios meant her career was crumbling. Monroe actually took over her part in "Gentleman Prefer Blondes," which came out a few months earlier and made her a star.
(Though Grable received top billing in the credits, Monroe was usually listed first on the posters and advertising.)
Grable's screen persona was actually somewhat similar to Monroe's, the bubble-headed blonde with hidden qualities beyond a gorgeous face. Their characters in "Millionaire" are rather the same, too; both are sweet and rather dim. They play man-hungry Loco Dempsey (Grable) and nearsighted Pola Debevoise (Monroe), who's constantly bumping into things because she fears to wear her glasses in public.
"Men aren't attentive to girls who wear glasses," Pola says, echoing Dorothy Parker and setting up an inevitable romance with a four-eyed suitor (David Wayne) who appreciates her spectacles.
The funny thing is, the movie really belongs to Lauren Bacall. She plays Schatze Page, the smartest and most outgoing of the trio. She hatches the idea for the girls, all fashion models, to pool their resources and rent out a New York City penthouse as a man-trap for rich men. She's calculating and rather mercenary, but in the end the frozen cockles of her heart melt for a guy she assumes is a gas station jockey (Cameron Mitchell), but is actually worth $200 million.
That's $1.8 billion in today's dollars, folks. Dude even has a city named after his family.
I was pleasantly surprised by the character of J.D. Hanley, a 56-year-old widower played with charm and class by William Powell. He becomes Schatze's main target, but he puts her off due to their age difference. Hanley later changes his mind and agrees to marry her, though she undergoes her own change of heart at the altar.
Hanley is gracious and considerate throughout, even when Schatze breaks his heart. That's the beauty of getting old, he says: you learn how to deal with disappointment.
Probably the most cringe-worthy scene in the movie is when Schatze dreams of how her life will be after she marries Hanley, as she leans over a display of jewelry and points, telling the salesman she would like "That... and that... and that... and that and that and that..." My modern sensibilities recoil at the notion of a woman seeing a man as simply a path to comfort and baubles.
But eventually Schatze evolves from gold-digger to kind heart.
I should point out that models of this era were not the high-paid celebrities we know today. In one of the film's signature scenes, a whole gaggle of women, including our trio, try on clothes and parade around for a client at a snooty retail store, like living, breathing mannequins. (Though how this is less degrading than doing the same thing on a runway for a hundred people escapes me.)
Palo initially falls for a rich Arab oilman, but he turns out to be a conman. She has several unwitting conversations with the man who owns their apartment, who's on the lam with IRS troubles -- he blames them on a crooked accountant -- and sneaks in to retrieve papers from a hidden safe. She doesn't know who he is and assumes it's Hanley because of her poor vision.
They later bump into each other on a plane and share love at first sight -- fuzzy first sight, to be sure, until she dons her glasses.
Loco's story is the most convoluted, and least interesting. She agrees to go up to a lodge in Maine with a crabby millionaire named Brewster (Fred Clark), thinking a "lodge" means a large gathering of men. It actually means his cozy cabin, and she's mortified at the implication.
But then she catches sick and falls into the arms of Eben (Rory Calhoun), a good-looking local bumpkin. She assumes he's rich when he shows her the mountain range and calls it "his" as far as the eye can see, but he's actually a forest ranger talking about his scope of responsibilities. Loco is disappointed when she finds out the truth, and he's disappointed that she's disappointed, but they patch things up in the end.
So when it all shakes out, two of the three women actually do marry millionaires, though Schatze didn't know it at the time and the other fortune is currently in government hock.
It's a beautiful film to look at, with vivid colors and striking costumes (which earned an Oscar nomination.) It was actually the very first film shot in CinemaScope, though "The Robe" beat it to the box office by a few months. Journeyman director Jean Negulesco makes very good use of the widescreen format to show off New York's locales.
Nunnally Johnson produced and wrote the script, which was actually based on two different stage plays, "Loco" and "The Greeks Had a Word For It."
Though it may seem terribly outdated, "How to Marry a Millionaire" is enjoyable as an artifact of a bygone era and (mostly) outgrown attitudes.
