MovieMonday: Smallfoot

This well-intentioned film is based on a long-forgotten book whose story has been kicking around Hollywood for at least two decades.  The resulting, much-revised script has been turned into a nice but sub-optimal animated movie.  

The hero is Mogi, a young, white-firred bigfoot (yeti, sasquatch, whatever) who lives in a happy community of similarly oversized Chewbaccas who live above the cloud line at the top of a Himalayan mountain.

Mogi's community has an origin story -- that it was pooped out by a larger being, which is less funny that it sounds -- and customs.  Each day begins when Mogi's father, the designated gong ringer, catapults himself a great distance to set off a noise that awakens a sleepy snail (the sun, hahaha) that lights the world as it oozes across the sky.

The village leader is Stonekeeper, a wise man who administers the rules of the place, as received in images on stones.  (Holy Moses!) The stones instruct that smallfoots (i.e., humans,) do not exist and that the known world ends at the clouds that sit below the village.  Obedience is expected. 

Mogi has followed the rules, but he succumbs to curiosity. With the help of other science-oriented yetis led by Stonekeeper's cute and smart daughter, he journeys below the clouds and sees forests, an airplane and town of smallfoots.

The fun ignites when Mogi meets up with Percy Patterson, the front man for a film company whose documentaries are not selling.  (This is illustrated when Percy performs his version of the1980s Queen song, "Under Pressure," which apparently is a great favorite with the pre-K to elementary-school demo.  FWIW, the rest of the film's music is, well, meh.)

Integrity-challenged Percy has been planning to film a fake Bigfoot to promote his program, and naturally, he meets up with Mogi.  The two make friends over time, then the story of the stones is revealed, then dangers arise and are averted, and then comes the happy ending.  

Like Aesop's fables long ago and animated offerings now, the story has a moral: "Be nice to other people and animals/primates of any size."  The more subtle themes -- think for yourself, challenge authority, be skeptical of all dogma -- may not resonate so much with small children but are standard grist for American drama.  No reason not to start early, I guess.

The best "Smallfoot" scenes are interactions between humans and yetis, particularly when they talk to each other.  Each group speaks its own English, but human ears register bigfoot talk as threatening growls;  when yetis listen to smallfoots, the messages are indistinguishable squeaks. 

Some famous actors and others voiced the characters in "Smallfoot," including Channing Tatum, Danny De Vito and LeBron James.  I'm sure that all did yeoman work with their lines, but I'm not sure it made much difference in the overall quality of the movie.

I watched "Smallfoot" in a theater with children aged four and up who seemed to enjoy themselves.  In American animation these days, it could be worse.




Note

"Smallfoot" is the fifth film from Warner Animation Group (WAG), which was founded in 2013.  Three of its five releases have featured Lego characters, and at least one (perhaps two) future Lego movies are in the works.  It's difficult to see such projects as dramatic releases and not product promotion.

There's nothing terrible about any of the WAG movies, but none comes close to the silliness and fun of Warner Bros.' storied animation shops, Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes.  I do hope children today are being introduced to Wile E. Coyote, Bugs Bunny, Tweety and the rest of the gang. Those cartoons were made for fun, not moral uplift or product promotion.

And while I'm on the topic, let me also mention the 100+ short films of The Three Stooges, which were released long ago by Columbia Pictures and are available now on many streaming services.  These may look crude and insensitive, but I know for a fact that children love watching silly grownups when they are frustrated and let loose their ids.    

Nyuk nyuk nyuk.  Seriously. 

MovieMonday: A Simple Favor

Here's a hybrid:  a noir-comedy-thriller whose original source material is a chick-lit novel with the same name.  Sadly, no single leg of this stool is sturdy enough to hold up any of its parts. 

I haven't read  the book -- "A Simple Favor" by Darcey Bell -- but have seen several other films directed by Paul Feig, who has earned some cred on women-driven projects, most notably, "Bridesmaids" in 2011, "The Heat" in 2013, and "Ghostbusters" in 2016, which I still maintain was unfairly reviled.

(Unless you count "Pride and Prejudice," my forays into chick-lit ended after I read as many Nancy Drew mysteries as I could get my hands on in third grade.)

When it comes to this film, I'm not sure whether the story is unfocused or too true to the sprawling plot of the book.  For me "A Simple Favor" is simply a favor too far.

 Here are the three main characters:  Emily (Blake Lively), an impossibly glamorous Manhattan career woman; Stephanie (Anna Kendrick), Emily's country-mouse suburban friend, and Sean (Henry Golding,) Emily's handsome husband whose job is to react to the other two.

After Emily has befriended cloddish, houswifey Stephanie by plying her with gin martinis and advice -- "Stop saying you're sorry!"; "You are so nice I have no idea how you survived this long!" etc. etc. etc. -- she asks for the "simple favor" that is the title of book and film.  

Emily phones to ask Stephanie to watch Emily's son for a few hours while Emily attends to an emergency at work and Sean is out of town.  Sweet, naive Stephanie agrees immediately.

After about five days, Stephanie gets curious.  She applies some of the lessons she has learned from her sophisticated friend and does some "sleuthing" (as Nancy Drew used to do.) Things just get curiouser and curiouser.

Then Sean (Emily's husband, remember?) comes home from nursing his hospitalized mother in London, and he and Emily seem to get interested in each other.  Then the police get involved.

Then a body turns up in a lake.  Then the names "Faith" and "Hope" turn up.  Then the police stir the pot some more and Stephanie does more research to discover who Emily really is.  Then come about five new plot twists (maybe more; I lost count) and several rabbits are pulled out of hats.  

Many questions are answered in a final humorous gunshot scene.  Then the coda reveals each character's happy ending.

If you choose to see the movie, ignore the acting.  Anyone could act in "A Simple Favor," even playing the Emily role if given the right wardrobe and hair styling.  The biggest bit of character development occurs in Stephanie, who has an often-referenced mom vlog ("Hi moms!") and over time wears nicer shoes and socks.

This isn't the actors' fault.  The characters are unsympathetic and flat, and except for some brief added sex scenes (hurray, R-rating!) they don't have much to do except recite their flat lines.  

To be fair, the movie is enjoyable to watch, but not nearly enough to justify a drive to the cineplex.  

Maybe later in the fall, when serious films are released "for your consideration" as the ads in Los Angeles papers suggest, there will be better options. 


Note

Feig and team have added a bunch of French music, including a couple of breathy Brigitte Bardot numbers, to the score to enhance the idea that the film is stylish and chic.  Not quite enough, alas.

MovieMonday: White Boy Rick

It's hard to know which is more surprising about this movie -- that investors paid $29 million to make it, that theater owners were willing to open it on more than 2,500 screens last week, or that Matthew McConnaughey agreed to appear in the thing.

The essential problem is the script.  Scripts are reviewed pretty carefully by funders, actors and actors' agents before they commit themselves to projects.  And this script stinks.

The story, drawn apparently from stomach-churning reality, is about Rick Wershe, Jr., (newbie Richie Merritt), a young teenager who gets involved in the crack cocaine dealing community in mid-1980s Detroit.   The African American dealers give him the moniker that is the film's title.

WBR, a dropout, lives with his junkie sister, Dawn (Bel Powley,) and dad (McConnaughey) in an old house across the street from his grandparents (Bruce Dern, Piper Laurie), who are there to reaffirm the family theme and complain when their car is stolen.

Dad's a devoted father who worries about his daughter and raises money by buying fake AK-47s, which he outfits with silencers and then sells at huge profits to gang members.   His goal is to open a movie rental store.

WBR sees the luxy gang life, carries guns frequently and sometimes shoots rats for sport as Detroit declines around him.  He is recruited by law enforcement as a snitch and gets shot for it.  Then, in a move for which the film congratulates him, he decides to help his family by selling crack again.  He succeeds nicely until the law catches up with him at age 17 and deals with him harshly.  

The movie ends on a note of outrage about the lengthy prison sentences that were handed down for non-violent drug dealers during the crack epidemic.  This is a worthy point but an old one, and not one that justifies the dismal squalor of the story that precedes it.  Without the dismal squalor, however, the movie wouldn't have been made.

"White Boy Rick" has been described in some reviews as "action comedy drama."  For me it was 116 minutes of unremitting punishment.


Note

Rick Wershe's life-without-parole sentence was ended by the Michigan parole board after 29 years, at which point he was transferred to Florida for another sentence.  Apparently he introduced his sister to someone who helped her sell cars and some of the sold cars were stolen; Wershe (but not his sister) copped to two more felonies and may be released in a couple years, when he is 50.  He has three children and six grandchildren.  

Wershe also has a loyal cadre of supporters who say that, while in prison, he helped law enforcement round up a bunch of crooked cops who were prosecuted and sentenced.  The movie might have benefitted from information about this.   Wershe has acknowledged and apologized for everything.  He may yet have a life ahead of him. 

MovieMonday: The Wife

The script for "The Wife" is drawn from a 2003 novel by Meg Wolitzer, and if I'd read the novel first, I don't think I'd have gone to see the film

But never mind that.  The book is about Joan Castleman (Glenn Close) a long-married woman who reflects on her life as she accompanies her husband, Joseph (Jonathan Pryce,) to Europe where he is to receive a major literary prize.

The movie's backstory (featuring Annie Starke and Harry Lloyd) gives us younger Joan and Joe's first meeting -- she as a talented writing student and he as her professor at Smith College.

The professor introduces Joan to a Smith alumna, a published author who discourages Joan's writing ambition.  "Don't do it," says the writer.  "The men are the ones who get to be taken seriously."

Joan falls in love with Joe, who leaves his wife and child to marry her.  Joan is the nice lady who takes care of him and raises their children while he writes books that are published to gathering acclaim.  

Jane Anderson, the screenwriter for "The Wife" takes the novel's story out of Joan's stream of consciousness and makes it a reality with the introduction of a new character, writer Nathaniel Bone (Christian Slater.) Bone has interested a publisher in a Joseph Castleman biography and has been doing research that suggests the famous author is a jerk, a serial womanizer and, possibly, a fake.  (This leads to a not-entirely surprising revelation later in the plot.)

Joan, having begged off a "wive's" outing during the award weekend, agrees to have a drink with Nathaniel.  He tells her that Joe's first wife is grateful to Joan for having got him out of the first wife's now-successful life.  Nathaniel further shares that he has found and read Joan's early writing in the Smith archives.  He asks why she hasn't published work of her own.

Joan puts him off calmly.  "I had very low expectations about what I could achieve as a female writer," she says.  

(This is a weak answer.  Between the year when the Castlemans met and 1992, the time of the movie, 11 women had won the Pulitzer Prize for American fiction, including Harper Lee, Eudora Welty, Marilynn Robinson, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. Literate Joan would have known very well that times had changed.) 

As the prize ceremony nears, Joan continues to be the gracious, ever-thoughtful wife through further insults.  When she asks one thing of Joe -- that he not thank her in his acceptance speech -- he refuses adamantly.   

"I have to thank you.  Everyone thanks their wife. If I don't I'll come off as a narcissistic bastard."

Well, yes.  The point of the story is that Joe is bad and Joan is good.  Things come to a head, and Joan reacts a bit and then must stop, with a dollop of hope for the future.

Besides congratulating Joan for her unending forbearance, the script (and perhaps the book) misses a piece -- the part where Joan acknowledges the role she has played in her unhappy situation.  

This could have been done without a screaming match or crockery getting thrown around.  Glenn Close could have made it work.  But she didn't get a chance.

If you enjoy movies about smart women who are victims of male dominance, "The Wife" might appeal to you.  But if you admire women who assert some agency over their own fates, maybe not so much.

Grandma's Celebrity Gossip

After a restorative hiatus, our popular California columnist returns to praise Aretha Franklin and Della Reese and compare them with their successors.

Grandma

So sad I was when I heard that Aretha Franklin had died. One of the greats she was -- a real mechaieh. Once on TV I saw her sing a quiet little love song that stirred my soul and made me think of my Sidney and how I miss him. Beautiful. There will never be another Aretha Franklin.

I never got to see Aretha perform in person, but Sid and I almost managed to see Della Reese’s show at a nightclub in Harlem. That was before she was somebody. We went with Sid’s cousin, Leon Schmidlapp, a real nudnik. A wooden leg he had, and he did what for a living? What didn’t he do? He played the flugelhorn in a mariachi band. He sold 8-track tapes under the boardwalk in Atlantic City. He repaired TVs so bad that afterwards you got cross-eyed from looking at them. Oy, gevalt!

So, a nice table they gave us in front. The house lights go down, the spotlight comes up, and Della glides onto the stage. It’s at that moment when Leon reaches down and pulls a bottle of Schnapps (or who knows what!) out of his dummy leg, and out they toss us for bringing our own booze. So much for seeing Della Reese.  Oy, gevalt again!

Adele Luskin thinks Beyonce will be the next Aretha. Hoo-hah! She’s got no voice, that Beyonce. All she can do is wiggle her ample toches.

And then Madonna, who’s got some chutzpah going on TV to eulogize Aretha Franklin, and instead kvell about herself, and her own sordid career. She’s another one who can’t sing without the auto-lube (Auto-Tune.) Most of her public life she’s spent cavorting half-naked with shikkers like Sean Penn and Dennis Rodman, making movies nobody wants to see, and studying the Cabala. And did anybody see her on “Live with Kelly and Ryan?” So frumpy-looking she was in a shlock house-dress, I thought she was Ethel Mertz.

Madonna, bubeleh, you’re 60. Do us all a favor and get yourself to a rocking chair.

I’ve said enough already.



Editor's Note

Below is a photo of the dress Madonna wore for the Kelly and Ryan interview.

Here's a link to the event itself.  The Id cultural team believes Grandma's point merits consideration.  

MovieMonday: Alpha

Here is a rare and beautiful film, most notable for its unusual setting:  Europe in the very late Stone Age.

It  concerns Keda (Kodi Smit-McPhee), the son of a tribal chief, who joins his clansmen on a hunting journey to harvest food for the coming winter.  

Initially, Keda's mother says he is "not ready" and that he "leads with his heart, not his spear."  His father disagrees and encourages his son with manly bromides. “Life is for the strong. It is earned, not given,” he says.

In the course of the hunt, Keda is thrown over a cliff and appears to have died.  His father and tribe leave him behind.

Then the real action begins.  Keda lives, but with an injured leg.  He sets out to find his way home through bitter cold and against the attacks of predatory hyenas, wolves, and very big cats.  Along the way he tends to an injured wolf, and the two travel together. 

The cinematography in this movie is grand and beautiful, especially when seen in the IMAX format.  The story has a basic theme -- the young man proving himself -- that resonates very well against the unusual backdrop.  

If you want to see a new film (and one that does not involve Melissa McCarthy embarrassing herself yet again, this time in a buddy detective story with raunchy Muppet costars), "Alpha" is the one to choose.



Notes:

Skeptic that I am, I had doubts about the "Alpha" environment, but a little research afterward convinced me that director Albert Hughes had constructed his story with great care. A few points:

-- The weather and scenery are accurate.  The story is set during the last ice age, when northern Europe was frozen over and the rest of the continent was treeless steppe with only grasses for vegetation. 

-- The inhabitants of the period (technically the Upper Paleolithic) lived in tribes, had their own languages and likely charted their journeys by consulting stars and/or very early monolithic guideposts.  (Stonehenge was built 17,000 years later.)

-- Humans had begun to domesticate animals during the time of the story.  

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The part of "Alpha" that may be unnecessary is its subtitles.  The themes -- family love, a young man's struggle and growth, trust between man and wolf -- are conveyed perfectly well by the very capable actors.  An authentic-looking story set 200 centuries ago with dialogue translated into perfect modern English feels a tad jarring.  It would be interesting to see the piece again without the printed words.

I don't know what the title should have been, but the word "alpha" dates to the Phoenician period, which also is a little awkward.

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The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals group thinks the film should be avoided at all cost because it involves the death of bison.  "Alpha" was shot in British Columbia, home to a number of bison ranches, which cultivate animals that are butchered and sold as meat.  I don't know whether the dead animals involved in the filming were killed just for camera shoots or were processed later for food, but it seems fair to guess that PETA would object in either case.