Review: Where’d You Go, Bernadette (2019)

Richard Linklater’s latest work follows Bernadette Fox, a neurotic architect pushed to the breaking point when her daughter Bee suggests they go on a family trip to Antarctica over winter break. She spars with a nosy neighbor and hoards pills while ranting about her anxieties to an unseen personal assistant over email. All attempts to help form her husband Elgin are soundly ignored.

Everything about Where’d You Go, Bernadette suggests this should be a quirky experience. Antarctic trips, a bizarre estate, snobby rival parents, and a singular lead are all the right ingredients, yet every artistic choice seems designed to reduce these elements to the slightly mundane. Bernadette borders on lifeless, squandering its eccentricities while likewise failing to settle on a clear message – all of which is amplified when the film attempts to throw in some shocking turns that really don’t go anywhere.

Cate Blanchett is the one high note of this film as Bernadette; she fully embodies this character with a wonderful display of introversion and sometimes raving hysteria. She has a commanding presence that dominates the screen – which would be more compelling if the other actors didn’t appear to merely fold over while in her presence. Billy Crudup feels especially underwhelming as Elgin, his eyes darting around like an embarrassed teenager during at least one key conflict. Several of his lines feel rushed or wooden, and I wonder how many takes they shot to settle on what ended up in the final product. Kristen Wiig and Zoe Chao are cast as stereotypical gossip moms, a cliche that offers little room for nuance in their performances. It’s difficult to take the larger-than-life Bernadette seriously when everyone that surrounds her feels so underdeveloped. Who wouldn’t turn into a neurotic mess while surrounded by these bland cutouts?

The dip in quality anytime other characters are alone on screen is palpable. What I’m imagining were intended to be heartfelt moments between father and daughter as they search for a missing mother instead carry all the weight of an after school special. Their poor acting is paired with a nauseatingly saccharine score, the type of light music you could imagine a church pianist chiming in with during opening prayer to signal that something important is being said.

What doesn’t help these late discussions is that the film juxtaposes their search with scenes of Bernadette doing just fine on her own. It’s difficult to care about Elgin and Bee’s panic when we know they have no need. This ending is especially difficult because the opposite also wouldn’t have worked – the film is too centered around Bernadette that it couldn’t simply cut her presence out for the final act.

Even the visual elements feel unbalanced. Shots of nature and the house lend an air of gravity, yet the actual scenes between characters have such basic presentation. With the aforementioned score, the film teeters dangerously close to feeling like a soap opera – made worse when combined with the half-hearted attempts at quirk.

It’s honestly hard to understand how a movie with all these disparate elements falls so flat. The secondary actors aren’t incapable – they have plenty of better performances to prove otherwise. Director Richard Linklater has made three films that feature regularly in my all-time top 100, so it seems similarly unlikely that the blame falls squarely on his shoulders. His best works have a meditative quality, so it makes sense that he would have connected with the deeply troubled Bernadette. Yet he stumbles anytime he has to get out of that character’s head, which is particularly surprising considering his best work consists of finding meaning in the smallest of moments.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette is an unsure, tonal mess buoyed by a strong Cate Blanchett. It’s the type of work that feels just off in nearly every category. It can be fun in its moments, but any grander purpose is muted by odd choices, some of which are so questionable I legitimately had to stifle laughter near the climax due to how poorly it managed emotional weight.

2 Stars Out of 5

Review: The Art of Self-Defense (2019)

The Art of Self-Defense has been one of the tougher films for me to crack. There’s something insidious about its presentation, a dizzying dive into toxic masculinity that pushes so hard into black comedy that it borders on surreal horror. In 2019 and most of cinema it seems entirely singular – but there is one specific classic that it mimics so closely that it feels imitative.

Accountant Casey Davies joins a karate dojo after being assaulted by a gang of bikers. What starts as a mere riff on his social awkwardness as he gets in over his head transforms into something else entirely as the dojo master, a white man who goes only by Sensei, takes him on as a pet project. Casey soon begins to define himself entirely by his place within the structure of this karate system. Jesse Eisenberg is in fine form as Casey, though he’s not exactly breaking new territory as an emasculated nerd.

What sells The Art of Self-Defense is how matter-of-factly it sells the absurdity. The characters operate within a certain brand of nightmare logic but go about their actions plainly. Violence runs rampant with little to no consequences. The whole experience is as if we’re watching modern people role play a martial arts film, engaging in battles of honor and masculinity after a day at the office. It’s altogether uncanny; the presentation suggests a familiar world yet the narrative is so alienating.

On its own, The Art of Self-Defense could have been a truly mesmerizing work. However, I figured out exactly what it was doing with nearly all of its plot beats well before anything really happened – not necessarily because it was playing its hand too openly but because of how obviously it was playing from the same book as that other film.

The Art of Self-Defense is Fight Club for a generation that can now immediately summarize all the concepts at play with the phrase ‘toxic masculinity.’ The flaw of Self-Defense is that it speaks in that language. We are always put on the outside of Casey’s story – these figures are meant to be ridiculed from their first appearance.

Fight Club worked because it recognized how inescapable these ideas are in certain men. It resonated due to how intimately it captured the experience of a man lost to that system, to the point that some fail to recognize it as a critique since it so perfectly captures their own experience with masculine expectations. With The Art of Self-Defense, it’s all too easy to view oneself as above any of the characters. They exist solely to be mocked.

Ultimately, I’m not certain what this film is actually saying. It goes through the motions of black comedy so well that I almost mistook the atmosphere for meaningful social commentary. Obviously, toxic masculinity is a real issue – perhaps the flaw is Imogen Poots as Anna, who is a wonderful character on her own but her presence blurs the message. Anna is as caught up in the system and, though the film makes sure to highlight some mistreatment on account of her gender, she seems just as devoted to all the same toxic behaviors as the rest.

I’m breaking the film down this way not because I think it is a bad film but quite the opposite – this is a work that borders on greatness and I feel the need to explain why it doesn’t quite land. Its atmospheric mastery created one of the most spellbinding experiences I’ve had at the movies this year, and the screenplay is comparably uproarious. This movie hits far harder than I expected.

As such, I would easily recommend The Art of Self-Defense. If you can get past the gripes I had, I can easily imagine this being among some people’s favorite films for the year. Riley Stearns certainly appears to be a director to keep our eyes on.

3.5 Stars Out of 5

Review: Dora and the Lost City of Gold (2019)

Dora the Explorer popped up in that sweet spot where I was just a bit too old for it yet my youngest cousin was at just the right age. It became the bane of her visits alongside Blue’s Clues, yet it was the type of mockable show that offered some semblance of joy by playing along with the seemingly inane interaction. Adapting such a simplistic concept into a full-on adventure movie seemed laughable.

Yet here we are, and Nickelodeon has crafted a more engaging Tomb Raider movie than any of the actual adaptations. That is far from high praise, but Dora is largely successful at capturing the spirit of running through jungles and diving into temples. It doesn’t aim for much beyond being Indiana Jones for youngsters, but high art is far from a requirement.

What makes this such an effective adaptation of a rather minimal source is how effectively it brings Dora to life. Edutainment characters have a tendency to be overly bubbly to capture the attention of young children, and it’s easy to imagine a live action remake holding back. Instead, Isabela Moner plays Dora in the exact same manner. Contrasting this larger than life character with an otherwise mundane world really highlights her charm. Where many other works take familiar children’s characters and places them in more bleak circumstances, Dora rejects this notion and has its title character rescue the other characters from a boring existence.

Dora and the Lost City of Gold toys with these back-handed tropes but never embraces them. This film is completely aware of the absurdity of its existence and instead of trying to deconstruct itself, it runs wild. Dora’s spirit is presented as if it can never be broken. It’s a breath of fresh air when Disney’s live action films targeting a similar age group seem to openly reject the vibrancy of their origins. Dora is essentially a live action cartoon.

The film instead uses this toying for comedic purposes, and it can be rather charming in its humor. Early segments carry direct nods to Dora’s audience addresses and, though the movie slyly pulls back on breaking the fourth wall, later sequences have hints of edutainment as the teens try to solve puzzles. A lot of the humor runs off Dora experiencing a culture clash with her classmates – instead of trying to soften her characteristics, this film is molded around her traits.

This film certainly falters. The actual temple exploration is handled a bit too straight by the end. A bit of energy is lost as the classmates begin to go along with Dora. This is far from a great film, but it’s fun and competent enough to be called a good one – which is much higher praise than I expected to give.

There’s not much more to say without digging way too deeply into a standard children’s film. Even as someone who dreaded having to turn the station over from Cartoon Network to Nick Jr. when the cousins were visiting, Dora and the Lost City of Gold is a charming work that not only captures the spirit of its origin but expands upon it. In a time where adaptations try to shed their more cartoonish aspects, Dora takes great pleasure in exploring how little the title character would fit in our world before letting her drag us into hers.

3.5 Stars Out of 5

Review: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019)

Adapting a classic children’s book series that is as dreaded as it is beloved, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark has a challenge in combining otherwise disparate pieces of micro-fiction. The source material consists of stories that end nearly as soon as they begin with little real substance, some so simplistic they merely ask the reader to jump out at their friends as they reach the end. The real selling point of this adaptation is to see the ghoulish illustrations brought to life – at least on that front, this is a moderate success.

The framing story carries a bit more weight than anything from the source, though that’s not enough to carry a feature film. Characters are cartoonish and shallow while the need to shoe in as many scenarios as possible leaves the entire work disjointed. Teenager Stella Nicholls is drawn to the macabre, a natural fit as the protagonist of a slightly cheeky horror film. The rest of the cast is typical monster fodder, there more to pace the scares than to get the audience invested. The one exception is Ramon Morales, who offers some light commentary on race and politics in 1960s America. It’s enough to stand out in this slight crowd but nothing beyond that, and his depth really just clues the audience into the fact that he’s the one to focus on.

Despite its attempt to offer up an overarching tale, this film comes off as little beyond a series of loosely connected vignettes. My umbrage with this is the total randomness of each encounter. The film starts strong with Harold, a terrifying scarecrow that lives on its eventual victim’s farm. Harold has a presence well before he bares his teeth and his sequence feels intrinsically linked to its target.

Every creature that follows feels pulled out of a hat. It’s clear the filmmakers combed through the most memorable designs from the books without considering how to incorporate them in a meaningful way. These individual sequences border on scary purely on a stylistic level but, as part of a larger piece, I instead found myself distracted by the total lack of symbolism. There’s no finesse, no reason why this character gets pitted against that monster. Most of the stories from the source are similarly shallow, but that’s a lot more acceptable in short form. Here, we have to sit through meandering exposition to get to the good stuff.

And don’t get me wrong, there is good stuff. On both a stylistic and technical level, this film looks pretty good. Despite their inexplicable nature, these creatures possess some gnarly designs. The actual horror sequences carry some disorienting twists – I was rarely sure how any individual encounter would end. While it never reaches outright scary it perfectly achieves ‘spooky’ – this is the right target considering its origins.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is popcorn horror with a slightly better than average visual edge. It briefly flirts with camp but drops that atmosphere when the monsters arrive, causing a stark tonal inconsistency that the film never shakes. Similarly, it’s easy to imagine that the filmmakers hoped the bizarre creatures would lend a sense of surreal horror but they offer nothing to dig into. Not dark enough to be scary and not light enough to be humorous, Scary Stories is lukewarm and inoffensive but fun enough if you somehow didn’t get enough horror over this overstuffed summer.

2.5 Stars Out of 5

Review: Yesterday (2019)

Danny Boyle’s Yesterday is built around a fun topic for debate – if The Beatles never existed, could their songs still carry a social impact in the modern day? Unfortunately, the possibilities are squandered in the service of a generic and frustrating romantic comedy.

Himesh Patel is Jack Malik, a failing musician on the verge of quitting when he wakes up in a world where The Beatles popped out of existence. Though he briefly struggles with some of the best songs ever written now under his name, he quickly becomes one of the biggest stars in the world.

This turns out to be a problem because he’s madly in love with his former manager Ellie and is completely incapable of just saying it – you’d think since she is open about being in love since her childhood and he returns those feelings, he could simply promise to come back after the tour or even offer to move her out with him once he receives the loads of cash that seem imminent if he stays course. The romantic tension of this movie rides entirely on the two being incapable of saying the most basic things to each other, and the fact it isn’t resolved until the end feels entirely inorganic. All this does is cast Jack Malik as a socially inept buffoon.

The problem with a mainstream story that could question The Beatles’ legacy is that it has to play within certain rules. To feature a character playing their music requires legal agreements, which means the music is treated as an objective good. As Jack dots the walls of his room with Beatles’ song titles, one of the first we see is “Revolution 9” – even their generally agreed upon lesser tracks are spared any criticism.

A big issue at the heart of this film is convincing us that Jack is capable of reproducing these songs to nearly the same level. We’ve all heard lesser cover versions, and I’m sure one of them would pass as great without the original to compare. What stops me from believing the way it’s presented here is that Jack seems to largely work alone. How does he pull off their more elaborate work? The movie largely sticks to showing their simpler songs, and it was never clear if Jack himself was doing the same, realizing his own limits.

Even accepting that this movie is going to paint The Beatles as ‘objectively’ good, it could have at least explored Jack’s morals in this scenario. We teeter on the edge of interesting scenes when a few people ask how he came up with the songs and he simply can’t explain, but these moments are rarely pursued. Imagine how much more engaging this story could be if the public grew aware he was somehow plagiarizing seemingly non-existent songs. But again, this movie is a simple fluff piece with no deeper thoughts.

The use of Ed Sheeran in this movie seems rather out-of-touch. While he may be a megastar as far as sales go, his music lacks critical acclaim. Is this the closest equivalent they could think of in the modern scene? It again highlights a central flaw, the belief that this music can exist without the context of its time; there are, in fact, modern bands that do a phenomenal job capturing the sound of the Beatles. However, bands like Tame Impala rarely break through to the mainstream despite their adherence to this once classic sound. This is a film that correlates quality with an overly simplistic understanding of popularity. If The Beatles wrote the exact same songs yet never achieved as much success, would these same works somehow be lesser?

Luckily, Danny Boyle is still a stylish director. Musical sequences are full of energy, and it manages to be enjoyable despite all its shallow elements. That doesn’t add up to much, though, as I’d sooner recommend his other works.

Yesterday is a mediocre romantic comedy with Beatles as a stuffing. The leads are too annoying to sympathize with, despite their actors being fine enough. These performances are backed by an even more annoying Kate McKinnon and the groan-inducing presence of Ed Sheeran throughout.

The saddest bit? They get the severely underappreciated Michael Kiwanuka to cameo at the beginning. Could they not have graced us with anyone of his level instead of Sheeran?

2 Stars Out of 5

Review: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)

From its announcement, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood threatened to be Tarantino’s most self-indulgent work. No matter his choice of subject, his love of cinema shines through each one of his films, and it’s a surprise it has taken this long for him to make one explicitly about the movie industry itself. That initial threat came true, and this is Tarantino at his most uninhibited. But like Fellini before him, this is a man who justifies his excess through the sheer artistry of it all.

This is the story of fading star Rick Dalton and his stunt double Cliff Booth, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt respectively. One of Tarantino’s better talents as a writer is his ability to capture close friendships, and this pair is one of his tighter bonds. These two characters convincingly have each other’s backs even as the film draws attention to the disparity of their situations.

Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate lends a certain enigmatic quality to the experience. She is never explored in the same way Rick and Cliff are, but that’s the bait. This film rides off creating dread due to our knowledge of what actually happens to her. Though these stories rarely intersect, her mere presence gives an endgame to a narrative that would otherwise seem aimless. Tarantino successfully plants the climax in our mind purely due to history.

The distance makes sense here. This was a real woman with aspirations of stardom cut down before we ever really knew her. Most of us have only heard of her as a murder victim and it’s a struggle to picture her beyond that framing. To be any closer to Tate would read as inauthentic, as the tragic irony is the fact we want to live in a world where we could have known her but also only care because we can’t. Robbie playing this role so charmingly only makes that harder to swallow.

While that particular longing plays out on the meta-level, it is that same feeling that guides Rick and Cliff. This is a narrative of longing for alternative realities, Rick desperate for a roll that will grant his second wind as he is haunted by memories of the almost successes. Cliff seems desperate for any work at all, and that guides him to perform unfulfilling tasks. He’s recklessly eager to play the hero that places himself in danger.

This mixture of longing and stardom produces a bittersweet atmosphere. Tarantino appears at his most optimistic here, even as he laments loss. To see a child actress commend Dalton for a good performance at the end of a hard day, or Tate gleefully listening to an audience enjoy her movie, there’s something inspiring here that is only brought down by the constant reminder that there could have been more.

This movie is stuffed with scenes that would seem unnecessary if the minor characters weren’t so immediately able to steal their scenes. Bruce Lee is cast as a braggart dying to grandstand at any opportunity, and the result is hilarious. The child actress first appears reading her script and tells Rick of all the extreme ways she prepares for a role, a scene that almost reads as subtle mocking of DiCaprio’s experience with method acting. Excess works as long as it’s fun.

Tarantino is desperate for any opportunity to use stylistic flairs, and the Hollywood setting gives him an easy excuse. We get constant cuts to Dalton’s works, allowing the grainy colors of old Hollywood alongside occasional dips near the Academy ratio. Even the more mundane moments are loaded with stellar framing, long takes, and the rare jump cut. The whole film is cast with the sort of saturation that suggests its placement within the era it tackles.

Tarantino feels at home playing around in 1969. This timing allows him to again explore his recent fascination with the Western, focusing in on an actor whose career is declining just as that legendary genre is starting to fade. The sets and costumes are peppered with reminders of the era, with Tarantino’s ear for music helping transform this into an effective nostalgia piece for an era I never lived through.

Like the actual Sharon Tate, this is a story that will be hard to talk about without jumping to the ending. I’m not going to dive into the details in a simple review, but this is perhaps the best finale of a director who always sticks the landing. While I love nearly all his works, they usually carry a certain distance that feels cold. This is his most straightforward emotional work, and I honestly felt myself near tears even as I laughed. All of the story’s ambling is justified by the payoff.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is among Tarantino’s best because it allows him to play with his favorite subject matter with no reservations. What once were sly winks and nods now serve as surface text. This is a work that’s joyous and affirming in Tarantino’s uniquely twisted way, even as darkness teeters on the edge. The Hollywood system is painted as wondrous as it is frustrating. It’s rare that I walk out of a theater longing for more, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood manages that even as it gleefully plays in its own excess.

5 Stars Out of 5

Review: The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019)

The Last Black Man in San Francisco is the directorial debut of Joe Talbot, who could certainly pass as having several decades more experience. This is the story of Jimmie Fails, a young black man played by an actor who shares the same name, as this is a movie that speaks of certain emotional truths. Jimmie begins to squat in the suddenly unoccupied house that was once his childhood home, a symbol of both his family’s former pride and the increasingly gentrified city San Francisco has become.

From the beginning, The Last Black Man in San Francisco sets itself apart from most films this year with stellar cinematography. Every shot of this film has lovely composition, each image suggesting a certain sense of relationship between humans and the city. Many moments act as motion paintings, portraits of people in their everyday environment.

The opening is evocative, following a young girl as she walks along a sidewalk swarming with men in Hazmat suits, a suggestion that this neighborhood is either unsafe for its inhabitants or at least viewed as such by outsiders. We soon follow Jimmie and his friend Montgomery Allen as they share a skateboard through the city, an image that establishes their closeness quicker than any words could. This is a film that finds beauty in everyday life, letting its camera linger on people passing by or within the rooms of the great estate at its center.

As that girl walks down that Hazmat-riddled road, a soapbox preacher derides the city for failing to take action sooner. His words are repeated throughout, this film operating as a poem with several key lines serving as refrains. Most important is the phrase “you can’t hate it unless you love it,” so succinctly summarizing Jimmie’s relationship to this city, to his life, to each person in it.

The beauty of this language and imagery is matched by Talbot’s sense of sound. Conversations and city noises are frequently silenced and replaced with music. The opening is dotted with a minimal but bombastic score, recalling Phillip Glass in the way it paints a city in decay. This muting creates a distance that adds to the sense of this being a more poetic than narrative film, its concepts representative of an issue that stretches far beyond its characters.

The film likewise makes great use of more familiar songs, such as a cover of Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco” or an unexpected yet effective use of Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” over a group of rowdy young men who spend most of this film mocking the lead duo. Again, these moments suggest a sense of sadness not immediately apparent in the images being captured, as this is a film riding on a sense of aimlessness.

All of these elements are in service of an effectively symbolic narrative, a story as much about gentrification as it deals with concepts of selfhood. Jimmie defines himself with this old house, desperate to reclaim what his grandfather built. His identity is tied into this location that is largely rejecting people like him. There are certain moments within this film where concepts seem to be laid on too thick, but it largely succeeds at painting a picture outside its own limits.

The relationship between Jimmie and Montgomery guides us through most of this film, and their bond is one of surprising beauty. This is the type of closeness that comes from an unabashed sense of platonic love, and both actors fully sell their roles. It’s as if both men would be lost without each other’s support, their bond allowing one to speak hard truths the other would rather deny. Montgomery is key in helping Jimmie find his own worth.

The Last Black Man in San Francisco is film as poetry, a work that places its imagery and statements above all else. Despite this, it approaches every element with a fantastic eye for detail, a rare film where every frame could pass as a painting due to its choice of lighting and positioning of figures. This is a work of pure aesthetic beauty with a meaningful heart, bubbling with love for a city that never quite seems to love back as much as its people deserve.

4.5 Stars Out of 5

Review: The Lion King (2019)

In many ways, the 2019 version of The Lion King is a difficult film for me to review fairly. The original is my definitive childhood classic, a videotape I played to the brink of my family’s sanity. This is a story I knew by heart before forming any lasting memories of my personal life. The natural response to such a shameless cash-in is annoyance, but an even more bothersome fact is that my knowledge of the original work fills in the gaps of what the remake lacks.

This is rooted in the elements we all knew were wrong from that first trailer, the ads conspicuously shy about showing the lions actually speaking. It’s the words that have plagued every review so far, that these animals lack a visually emotive language. As someone experienced with this story, I perhaps filled in the lines too easily, accepting the emotions I knew hid behind these emotionally void faces. I can’t begin to imagine how these moments read to someone unversed in the narrative.

The problem is not solely the lack of expression failing to sell half the emotions, but that the voices rarely match the characters they represent. The young Simba is paired with a particularly weak actor, but it goes beyond the delivery. Words rarely line up with the movements of the mouth. Director Jon Favreau, in his pursuit of so-called realism, misses the fact that we vocalize through certain shapes. Certainly, lions don’t express with their faces the way we do, but they also don’t speak. Neither end is going to be convincingly real – so why go all in on pursuing ‘realism?’

Favreau chose the wrong side, and this underlines what I find most problematic about these ‘live action’ remakes. They’re produced with the apparent suggestion that the animated films were only made as such because the stories couldn’t be made realistically with contemporary technology. It treats animation as an inferior medium, as if this story is somehow being brought to life by shedding as much vibrancy as possible.

As much as it follows the plot beats, this remake fails to grasp the spirit of the original. That film was in a state of constant motion, unafraid to embrace over-the-top musical numbers while filling every frame with color during even its quietest moments. This is a story written to take place in a fantastical world, despite its setting being grounded among believable animals.

Let’s compare the entrance of the hyenas. In the original, they step out from the inside of an elephant’s skull. This is stunning and blunt, immediately linking them to death purely through the image. Here, they simply walk into frame. Characters perform the necessary actions, but never with style. Much like Zack Snyder’s take on comic book adaptations, this new Lion King seems ashamed of its brighter origins.

The musical numbers are largely embarrassing here. “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King,” with Favreau afraid to embrace even the slightest hint of surrealism, devolves into Simba and Nala just running alongside some animals. “Be Prepared” is gutted, Scar doing little more than speaking the lines and sounding completely off as the song should be rising. Again, no visual creativity here; Scar simply climbs to the top of the jutting rock as the hyenas look on. Meanwhile, “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” doesn’t work without the questioning looks between Simba and Nala. Here, they’re two animals looking blankly at one another.

The one shining moment is “Circle of Life,” a perfect showcase for this particular technological achievement. Even in the original film, this scene was presented from an emotional distance, lingering on unimportant animals before focusing in on Simba and his family. It’s where The Lion King is most rooted in the natural world, a perfect fit for Favreau’s otherwise misguided style.

I have more mixed feelings on the treatment of Timon and Pumbaa. Their dialogue is switched up a bit, and where they used to rely largely on gross-out humor, it’s now mixed with a certain meta-humor. These new jokes were surprisingly effective. However, it gives the pair a certain distance from the story, and the film seems to gloss over their bonding with Simba.

That’s the oddest thing about this film. It adds half an hour to the runtime yet covers no additional ground, sometimes even seeming to have less content. How is that possible? Simply put, everything happens at a slower pace. The original was cut with a certain rhythm, a slim film that made every moment count. With this new version, every movement is drawn out for the sake of realism. Favreau apparently hoped to replace facial expressions with body language, but it does nothing but make an expertly timed story trip over itself.

While the visual effects are stellar, the other technical elements are phoned in. As with every other Disney remake, the film is shot and edited from the most convenient angle possible. During the “Hakuna Matata” sequence, the camera follows as Simba runs alongside Timon and Pumbaa, doing nothing but singing. These moments carry no dynamic energy, not in the actions of its characters or how it captures them.

The 2019 version of The Lion King is an exercise in how to drain all life from an animated classic. It’s by no means the worst film of the year, merely dull and unnecessary, but it might be the most easily hate-able. Its purpose is questionable at best, a testament to Disney misunderstanding the significance of their own properties. But it’s not a misunderstanding – this is a company fully aware they don’t need to try to make money. It’s bizarre that a film pushing technical capabilities to this level has no consideration for how to make proper use of it. Instead, it takes the backbone of the original and skins it down to basic plot beats, completely dropping several visual motifs in favor of nothing at all. Despite its surface luster, this is a film completely lacking in style. This is Hollywood at its laziest, cannibalizing its own classics and acting as if the most basic visual mimicry can hide the lack of care given to the image as a whole.

2 Stars Out of 5

Review: Crawl (2019)

Alexandre Aja’s Crawl is an exercise in minimalist horror, trapping protagonist Haley Keller in a Florida crawlspace alongside her estranged father as alligators pour in with the rushing water from an incoming hurricane. The scares are ever-present and blunt, the film committing to a brisk 87 minutes and not wasting a second of our time once it reaches an end point.

Here is a film that pushes no boundaries, happy to dive into the familiar waters of disaster flicks and creature features – but by keeping its goal so simple and focused, it works at a level beyond standard expectations for that genre. There’s no wasted time on grand statements about the environment, and the threat of gators lacks a need for explanation. Crawl goes far beyond jump scares, letting the horror linger in the distance. This film starts off with an understanding that the gators are only animals, aimlessly wandering while not actively pursuing prey.

There’s a sense of dread that builds through this film; though the runtime is short, our scope stays so focused on Haley’s perspective that it captures a sense of this being an endurance test. This design is so effective because Aja exploits his environment well. While the alligators offer this violent threat, the building water is what pushes the two to leave their relative safety; it becomes a balancing act, deciding when one threat turns dangerous enough that they must confront the other.

This film really captures its basic location. Entirely mundane under normal circumstances, standard features become sources of anxiety. Water rushes through openings in the foundation, too narrow to offer escape while granting glimpses of the building danger outside. When routes aren’t blocked by gators, they’re instead made inaccessible due to the family’s own carelessness from an earlier time. Before the storm reaches its height, this film captures such a strong sense that safety is only feet away at any given time.

Kaya Scodelario makes the most of her minimal character, her initial terror soon matched by a certain sense of determination. She’s no scream queen, rather operating as an action heroine caught in dire circumstances. Due to this, Crawl spends a large chunk of its runtime operating more as a survival film, giving Haley minimal tools to offer narrow escapes. The film rarely falls back on luck, instead granting its characters just enough to fend for themselves.

The one truly negative trait of this movie, as most others can add to the camp charm of such a feature, is the relationship between Haley and her father. The parents are divorced, and for whatever reason, Haley seems to blame herself. It’s the type of childish self-blame that is hard to believe from someone her age. The father also never shuts up about Haley’s swim meets. They’re so shallowly defined, teetering on the absurdly niche but played too straight to offer anything enjoyable. The only time that it feels this movie is wasting our time is when it lingers on their bond.

Otherwise, this is pure B-movie fun, loaded with high tension and absurd violence. Little details are added to the crocodile attacks to make each one fresh, such as the downpour drowning out a looter’s screams and a moment where bloodied water is lit from below with a hand-crank flashlight. It’s simple but never lazy, maintaining our suspense by keeping us guessing not just when but how the next attack will come.

Crawl never aspires to much beyond being an effective creature feature, but it captures exactly what makes that genre work without falling into tedium or pure kitsch. A tough woman, nature’s threat in all its glory, and sparks of brutal violence, all delivered in the time it needs and nothing more. This is a small horror movie that actually deserves a cult status.

3.5 Stars Out of 5

Review: Stuber (2019)

Michael Dowse’s Stuber follows Kumail Nanjiani as Stu, a man working a soul-crushing job at a sporting goods store earning some extra cash by driving for Uber. One day he picks up Dave Bautista’s detective Vic, who forces Stu into his hunt for the man who killed his partner. Will Stu learn how to be a real man?

Whether intentional or not, that question appears to be the heart of Stuber, a film that feels a decade or two behind the curve, or at least written from the perspective of someone longing for the day men return to being ‘real men.’ Predictable for a film so stuck on classical gender roles, the characters that inhabit this movie fill simple niches and pursue shallow goals.

At times, Stuber threatens to say something, sometimes dabbling with the concept of toxic masculinity. Yet that central figure, detective Vic, is free to cause mayhem, the film gleefully embracing his violent acts to satisfy its action needs. Whatever backwards views he pushes, it feels that Stu is the one being prompted to change.

The problem with this is rooted in the film’s treatment of police. Vic is indisputably a bad cop, essentially going rogue and at one point straight up torturing a suspect. The film only rewards him for these actions. There’s a suggestion that police brutality is acceptable as long as the victims are bad people and if it serves as a means to an end. When it comes time for the leads to tear each other down, it’s not Vic’s brutality but his failure as a father that is treated as his defining flaw – it’s as if the film views these violent acts as emblematic of a certain flavor of masculinity, treating it as a legitimate alternative to Stu’s reserved nature. This is a buddy cop film that never convinced me to view one of its two protagonists with sympathy.

Being an action comedy, one would hope it could deliver on either front, but the very first scene gives us fair warning on how underwhelming that first descriptor will be. We begin in a shootout, the camera shaking and staying far too close to the action. When we do get a clear picture, the action is too simple in its choreography. This is all cut at such a rapid pace to cause disorientation – the whole experience is a chore, and the action sequences that follow are much the same.

The comedy is similarly shoddy, much of the humor living up to the easy pun in the title – it feels as though the team behind this film was setting itself up for ‘Stupid Uber’ jokes. That name is given by Stu’s boss at the sporting goods store, a complete caricature of annoying coworkers, so dully constructed that any joke he’s granted falls flat due to his artifice. Similarly, due to Vic’s failure to garner any form of sympathy, his banter with Stu carries little pulse.

The characters of Stuber are guided less by logical decision-making and more by the raw needs of a shoddy comedy writer. I never once believed Stu would stick around, his motivation literally limited to trying to earn a 5-star review to keep his Uber rating above a certain threshold. We at least have it established that Vic is desperate to find his partner’s killer, but would he really start that hunt a few hours after receiving LASIK eye surgery? Yet another highlight of his total lack of sympathetic traits, this quest begins with him barreling down a street and crashing into a manned construction site. He proclaims a desire to keep drugs off the street while happy to make himself a more immediate threat while under zero pressure – he is simply following the first lead at that point, so why the desperation?

The one positive that keeps Stuber above water is Kumail Nanjiani, this desperate driver caught between awful jobs and an inability to express himself. He does an excellent job capturing the ball of anxiety named Stu, and I wish he was dealt a better script. His characters spends much of the movie choosing between enabling Vic’s violence for a good Uber rating and visiting a friend for sex right after her breakup; the only reason he manages any sympathy is due to Nanjiani’s charisma.

Stuber is a largely mean-spirited action comedy that rarely lands its punches. It stumbles to establish any major themes, sometimes even seeming to embrace toxic masculinity and police brutality. The worst sin of all, however, is that it’s a comedy that rarely garners a laugh.

1.5 Stars Out of 5