Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (Courtesy Sony Pictures)
It’s officially spring, but the weather is looking cool and breezy this weekend, so here’s what’s on tap in movie theaters around Memphis.
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
Following up on Ghostbusters: Afterlife, this one reunites the cast of Finn Wolfhard, Mckenna Grace, and Carrie Coon as the Spengler family who leaves Oklahoma to return to the old firehouse HQ in NYC. They arrive just in time to battle a new supernatural threat that will literally freeze the world with fear.
Kung Fu Panda 4
Jack Black is back as Po, the Dragon Warrior who is ready to ascend to a higher plane of existence, according to his master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman). He takes on a new sidekick Zhen the fox (Awkwafina) to help defeat Chameleon (Viola Davis), the shape-shifting sorceress, and her army of lizards. You can tell she’s bad because she says, “We are not so different, you and I,” to the hero.
Immaculate
Sydney Sweeney stars as Cecilia, a nun sent to a new convent where something is clearly amiss. When she becomes pregnant, although still a virgin, Father Sal Tedeschi (Alvaro Morte) reveals that the real purpose of this convent is to breed a new Jesus from cloned tissue recovered from one of the nails that pierced the savior’s flesh. What could possibly go wrong?
A lot. A lot of stuff could go wrong.
Dune: Part Two
But half a billion dollars worth of Frank Herbert fans can’t be wrong! Paul (Timothée Chalamet) fights against his fate alongside his lover Chani (Zendaya) as they battle the Harkonnens’ occupation of Dune, led by the psychotic Feyd (Austin Butler). Denis Villeneuve’s sand wormy sequel is the best sci fi film since Mad Max: Fury Road.
Paul Reubens passed away last summer, but Pee-wee Herman is immortal. Sunday morning at 11 a.m. you can have brunch with Pee-wee at Black Lodge. Breakfast, mimosas, and Pee-wee’s Big Adventure will get your day off to a rollicking start. To get you hyped, here’s one of the greatest scenes Tim Burton ever directed.
Nicholas Hoult in Renfield (Courtesy Universal Pictures)
Hear me out: Nicolas Cage deserves an Oscar nomination for his performance as Dracula in Renfield.
I know, I know. It’s Nic Cage, dude from Con Air and Kick Ass and a couple dozen direct-to-video cash-in schlockfests. And he’s playing Dracula in a cornball B picture directed by a former Robot Chicken animator named Chris McKay. But actors have gotten Oscar nominations for lazier performances in much crappier movies. And there’s nothing lazy about Cage’s Dracula — if anything, he put way too much effort into it! But as Penn Jillette said, “The only secret of magic is that I’m willing to work harder on it than you think it’s worth.”
It’s appropriate that, when Renfield finally got to be the star of his own story, Dracula steals the show. R. M. Renfield appears in Bram Stoker’s novel as a patient in an insane asylum who worships Dracula. He eats live bugs to gain their life force, like a vampire drinks the blood of living victims. (His doctor describes him as “zoophagous maniac,” proving they just don’t diagnose ’em like they used to.) Dracula gets Renfield to do his bidding by dangling the prospect of immortality, but never actually helping his thrall go full vamp.
Nicholas Hoult stars as Renfield, who we first meet in a group therapy session for people in codependent relationships. He recognizes the stories of abuse he hears from his own life with the big D. He and his bloodsucking boss have fallen into a pattern of dysfunction. They move to a new place, start to hunt in earnest, but Dracula gets too greedy, and the locals are tipped off. Then a vampire hunter, usually from the Catholic Church, arrives, and there’s a big fight in which Dracula is almost killed. Renfield has to pick up the pieces, move to a new town — this time, it’s New Orleans — and start collecting victims while Dracula convalesces.
Nicolas Cage kills as Dracula in Renfield. (Courtesy Universal Pictures)
With the encouragement of therapist Mark, Renfield takes the bold steps of getting his own apartment and wearing clothes that are not black. He still has to search for victims to feed his personal monster, but he decides to prioritize the abusers who are making his new friends’ lives hell. This leads to a confrontation with gangsters inside a Mardi Gras float warehouse where Tedward (Ben Schwartz), the scion of the Lobos crime family, sees Renfield’s magical murder talents first hand. When a beat cop named Rebecca (Awkwafina) investigates the bloody scene, she sees that the clues lead back to Renfield and Dracula, embroiling her in an escalating conflict between the drug cartel and the dark lord.
Hoult has plenty of choices for inspiration, from Klaus Kinski to Tom Waits. He has the haircut and bug eyes of Dwight Frye, who originated the character in 1931. But Hoult seems to be channeling Harvey Gullén’s Guillermo from What We Do In The Shadows. When he and Cage share the screen, sparks fly.
Cage is not a madman. He is an extraordinarily talented screen actor in the tradition of James Cagney. His approach to Dracula is downright scholarly, mixing bits of Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, and Gary Oldman with his own personae. His every gesture is perfectly calibrated for the moment. If you’re used to seeing a bored Cage vamp in roles that are frankly beneath him, watching him sink his teeth into Dracula will be a revelation.
Unfortunately, this movie is also beneath him. Awkwafina, bless her heart, is left completely at sea in a role that shouldn’t have existed. The whole crime family vs. corrupt cops subplot is stupid, disjointed, and unnecessary. It seemingly exists only to provide Marvel-esque moments of fight choreography — except the fights are the most boring part of the MCU movies! “Renfield tries to save his therapy group from an angry Dracula” is plenty of plot for a film where the real meat is a Nic v. Nicolas thespian cage match. Every second they’re not on screen is wasted.
Renfield is a must for Cage watchers, which are legion, and vampire obsessives who walk the night but could use a good chuckle to break up the gothic ennui. Others will find it a pleasant but ultimately bloodless diversion.
Hi! It’s me again, with a Radical New Theory (TM).
For the last 13 years, the Marvel movie machine Borg (to mix pop culture metaphors) has been assimilating all other genres. Do you want a spy movie? A space opera? Well, Disney has sucked up all the available resources and slapped a thin layer of Marvel branding on it. Spy movie? Captain America: Winter Soldier. Space opera? Guardians of the Galaxy.
Now, it’s kung fu movies’ — or, more accurately wuxia, the Chinese blanket term for stories that blend martial arts, fantasy, and East Asian history — turn. With all of the first-gen Avengers like Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans out of contract (and Scarlett Johansson suing the studio), Marvel needs a new breed of stars. To tap into a fresh supply of those sweet, sweet yuans, the first order of New Avengers business must be introducing Shang-Chi, a character modeled after Bruce Lee, to the masses. Since Iron Man was on the superhero B-list as late as 2007, Marvel considers this a solved problem. Thus, we get Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.
Simu Liu creating corporate synergy.
Shaun (Simu Liu) is a carefree young guy in San Francisco, spending his days working as a valet at a fancy hotel and nights carousing at karaoke bars with his bestie, Katy (Awkwafina). But one day, on the bus to work, Shaun is attacked by a bunch of karate-chopping thugs, led by a guy named Razor Fist (Florian Munteanu, aka Big Nasty) who has, you guessed it, a giant razor where his hand should be.
The big fight on the bus that ensues, in which Shaun reveals he has mad kung fu skills, is one of the best fight scenes the MCU has produced. The attackers were after a jade pendant Shaun’s dead mother Ying Li (played in flashback by Fala Chen) gave him. His estranged sister Xialing (Meng’er Zhang) has a matching pendant. So Shaun tells Katy his real name is Shang-Chi; his father Wenwu (Tony Leung), The Deadliest Man Alive, is a semi-immortal leader of an international crime syndicate called the Ten Rings, last seen in the MCU battling Iron Man. They’ve got to go to Macau to preemptively rescue Xialing from whatever the Ten Rings wants the pendants for.
Once in Macau, they discover Xialing has been much more industrious than her older brother. She has built a small empire out of a quasi-legal street fighting league that rakes in the cash by streaming death matches on the dark web. After Shang-Chi survives a main-event dust-up with sis (Katy makes bank by betting against him), they are attacked by the Ten Rings, which precipitates another instant classic set piece on a bamboo scaffolding.
One thing that distinguishes this film from most MCU fare is its frequent flashbacks. The Ten Rings group was named after a set of magic bracelets that grant Wenwu both practical immortality and extreme kick-assery. But the old warlord decided to settle down after getting his butt whooped by Ying Li, who was the guardian of the magic village Ta Lo. Now, Wenwu has been receiving psychic messages from Ying Li’s spirit, begging him to rescue her from captivity in Ta Lo, and he has retrieved his wayward children to help. Once Shang-Chi and Xialing reach Ta Lo, they discover the truth is quite different from what their father told them.
Awkwafina steals the show as Katy.
Shang-Chi is directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, whose debut, Short Term 12, is one of the best independent films of the 2010s. The screenplay, which he co-wrote, is both more complex and clearer than most MCU fare, even considering the time devoted to retconning the Yellow Peril aspects of the Ten Rings so as not to offend cash-bearing Asian audiences. Simu Liu is fine as a bland everyman hero, but it’s Awkwafina as the normie sidekick comic relief who repeatedly steals the show.
Turns out, wuxia is the perfect fit for the superhero formula. Which brings me to my Radical New Theory: What if the MCU films have always secretly been wuxia at heart? Think about it: an elite class of super-warriors defend civilization and the innocent with martial arts. No matter how out-there superhero storylines are, problems are always solved by people in tights punching each other. So Shang-Chi does not represent Marvel co-opting East-West crossovers like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as much as it is reconnecting with its roots. Regardless, Shang-Chi definitely ranks among the more entertaining installments as the MCU grinds endlessly on, devouring everything in its path.
When I interviewed Tom Shadyac for this week’s cover story about the making of Brian Banks, I asked the director about a certain phenomenon I and others have commented on over the years. Why is it that actors who started off in comedy have a much easier time transitioning to drama than vice versa? Tom Hanks, America’s stalwart everyman actor, started off in the groundbreaking, cross-dressing TV comedy Bosom Buddies. Robin Williams, whom Shadyac directed in Patch Adams, started out in stand-up and on the classic comedy Mork and Mindy and then found great success in character-driven dramas like TheFisher King.
“Comedians always act,” Shadyac says. “We’re putting on a face, putting on a character. That is a much easier transition than teaching a dramatic actor the rhythms and the comedy timing it takes to be funny. It’s a point of view, it’s a delivery, it’s a worldview, it’s everything. It’s a gift. I believe you can cultivate that gift, but you can’t give the gift. You’ve either got the gift or not.”
Awkwafina (center) stars in Lulu Wang’s new heartfelt film The Farewell.
After seeing The Farewell, I can tell you that Awkwafina has the gift. Born Nora Lum in New York, she first attracted attention as a YouTube rapper with a satirical flow called “My Vag.” She broke into film as the funniest thing in the dire comedy Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising and provided comic relief in the female-driven heist romp Ocean’s 8. Her role as the wisecracking best friend to the reluctant bride in last year’s Crazy Rich Asians threatened to overshadow star Constance Wu. Her vocal prowess and physical control in that film are a wonder to behold — playing the floppy party girl is a lot harder than it looks.
When we meet Awkwafina as Billi in The Farewell, she’s in a familiar context — walking down the street in New York City, doing a comedy bit. She’s talking on the phone with her grandmother (Shuzhen Zhao), whom she calls Nai Nai, and both of them are lying their assess off. Billi says her career as a writer is going great, when in fact it’s going nowhere and she’s in danger of getting kicked out of her apartment for not paying rent. Nai Nai says she’s at her sister’s place (named Little Nai Nai, and played by Hong Lu), when in fact she’s at the hospital getting a CAT scan.
The results of the scan are very bad. Nai Nai has Stage 4 lung cancer, and the doctor tells Little Nai Nai her sister has only months to live. But instead of telling her the truth, Little Nai Nai lies and says the tests only returned a “benign shadow” in her lungs — shades of the “brain cloud”, the ludicrously shoddy fake malady from Joe Versus the Volcano.
Awkwafina (left) and Tzi Ma.
Instead of helping her make arrangements and peace with her life, her family decides to just not tell Nai Nai she’s sick, citing an old Chinese folk belief, “It’s not the cancer that kills you, it’s the fear.” They pressure cousin Hao Hao (Han Chen) to marry his Japanese girlfriend Aiko (Aoi Mizuhara) so the far-flung family will have an excuse to gather at the matriarch’s side one last time.
At first, Billi’s dad Haiyan (Tzi Ma) and mother Jian (Diana Lin) insist that she not come to the wedding because she can’t be trusted to conceal her emotions. But she can’t bear the thought of never seeing her grandmother again, and she shows up anyway — only to be greeted by Nai Nai as “stupid child.”
Written and directed by Lulu Wang, The Farewell plays out around dinner tables like an Ira Sachs family drama with a cutting, deadpan sense of humor. Billi can’t believe that no one is going to tell Nai Nai the truth, and at first, she seems determined to find the right time to break the news to her feisty grandmother. But opportunity after opportunity passes, and Billi finds herself playing along with the epic gaslighting. The internal conflict plays out over Awkwafina’s face and body language in the way her shoulders slump a little when Nai Nai’s back is turned and how she steels herself before giving a fake cheerful speech at the wedding.
Wang not only knows how to get the best performance out of her star, but, in keeping with the film’s themes of Asian collectivism versus Western individualism, she spreads the love around the ensemble. Tzi Ma, a veteran character actor who played opposite Tom Hanks in The Money Pit, shines as Billi’s alcoholic father who has been beat down by the domineering women around him. Aoi Mizuhara gives a mostly wordless performance as the hapless bride-to-be who doesn’t speak either of the film’s two languages and seems to have only a vague idea of the drama that’s swirling around her wedding. But ultimately, it’s Awkwafina who walks away with the picture, and it feels like the revelation of a major new talent.
What is the appeal of the heist movie? Is it about watching a supremely clever person concoct an elaborate plan, and then reveling in the OCD perfection when all the pieces click into place? Is it about the powerless getting one over on the powerful? Or is it all about the charisma of the criminal mastermind, a way for the audience to harmlessly indulge their need for a leader?
The history of heist pictures goes all the way back to the beginnings of American cinema, and they’ve always been popular. The Great Train Robbery held the record for highest grossing movie from 1903 until Birth of a Nation in 1915. It was also the subject of the first remake in history, when Edwin S. Porter’s original film was redone by Sigmund Lubin and released under the same title in the same year.
The only heist movie that’s been remade almost as often as The Great Train Robbery is Ocean’s 11. The original is a curious artifact: a massive vanity project put on by the Rat Pack as their Las Vegas decadence reached fever pitch. It’s not a great movie. Frank Sinatra is visibly distracted, while Martin is visibly drunk. It’s a bunch of celebrities cynically cashing in on their fame, best enjoyed by fans who are content just to look at their heroes.
Anne Hathaway and Helena Bonham Carter star in writer/director Gary Ross’ Ocean’s 8.
That’s one of the reasons Steven Soderbergh’s 2001 Ocean’s 11 remake was so surprising: It was actually a pretty good movie. Just as the original cemented the Rat Pack as the pre-eminent stars of the early 1960s, so too did Soderbergh’s Ocean’s 11 define the first batch of 21st-century superstars: George Clooney, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, Don Cheadle, Bernie Mac, and Andy Garcia. Julia Roberts was the lone feminine presence to redeem the sausage fest.
Soderbergh took the barely-there plot of trying to rob a bunch of casinos at once and honed it to a razor edge. His editing was tight and cinematography outstanding. The 2001 Ocean’s 11 wasn’t just an object of fan admiration — although it unmistakably was on some level — but unambiguously good filmmaking. It’s trashy fun, but incredibly well executed.
A female driven remake was inevitable in the #MeToo era. The ragtag band of thieves camaraderie translates perfectly into the girl power moment, and high-powered talent agencies would love to see their clients put into the roles that women all over the world would imprint on. In the Sinatra/Clooney slot is Sandra Bullock as Debbie Ocean, the younger sister of Danny Ocean, who, we find out in the opening shots of the film, is dead. Probably.
The film gets off to a good start with Bullock faking sincerity in her parole hearing. She’s got the smooth prattle and irresistible charisma of the Ocean family down pat. Less than a day after being released from her five-year stint in the pen, she’s shoplifted a whole new wardrobe and fraudulently ensconced herself in a luxury hotel. Then, there’s the requisite gathering of the team: Lou (Cate Blanchett), a crooked New York nightclub owner; Amita (Mindy Kaling), a jeweler; Constance (Awkwafina) the pickpocket; a hacker known as Nine Ball (Rihanna); and Tammy (Sarah Paulson), a big time fence hiding out as a suburban mother of two. The plan, which Debbie came up with while in solitary confinement, is to steal a necklace called The Toussaint, valued at $150 million. To steal it, it has to be lured out into the open at the Met Gala, an annual, super ritzy fashion world party thrown by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. To do that, the gang targets Rose Weil (Helena Bonham Carter), a fashion designer drowning in debt, to convince superstar actress Daphne Kluger (Anne Hathaway) to use her clout to convince Cartier to let the necklace out of the vault so she can wear it for the party.
During the scenes inside the simulated Met Gala, Ocean’s 8 functions extremely well as lifestyle porn with a more propulsive plot than Fifty Shades of Grey. The actresses are rarely called upon to do much more than stand around and look cool, so heavy hitters like Blanchett and Paulson are out-cooled by a spliff-smoking Rihanna. In that way, Ocean’s 8 is much more like the 1960 Ocean’s 11 than the 2001 version. Unfortunately, director Gary Ross fundamentally lacks the Soderbergh snap that was on display in last year’s Logan Lucky. But if you’re just in it to look at some of the best actresses in the business pal around for a frothy summer treat, Ocean’s 8 will do just fine.
