Tag: Chris Pratt

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Now Playing in Memphis: From Book Clubs to Blackberries

Book Club: The Next Chapter

Silver foxes Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen, and Mary Steenburgen head out on a bachelorette party trip to Europe in Book Club: The Next Chapter, a sequel to the 2018 sleeper hit comedy. Craig T. Nelson rand Don Johnson also reprise their roles as frigid husband and seasoned himbo with whom our heroines must negotiate new relationships. 

Before Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone to the world in 2008, there was the Blackberry. Known to its army of corporate users as the “crackberry,” it demonstrated both the advantages and disadvantages of 24/7 connectivity long before the first Instagram post. Blackberry by indie filmmaker Matt Johnson tells the story of Research In Motion, the company who ruled the mobile world in the Bush era. Wary of another disingenuous hagiography of a tech oligarch? Don’t worry, this one’s a comedy!

Charlie Day, star of the TV comedy staple “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia,” makes his film-directing debut by biting the hand that feeds him. For Fool’s Paradise he enlisted Ken Jeong, John Malkovich, Kate Beckinsale, Adrien Brody, Jason Sudeikis, Edie Falco, Jason Bateman, Common, and a whole bunch more, to satirize showbiz as it is practiced today. You can be excused if you get a strong Being There vibe from this one.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 represents the end of an era for Marvel and Disney. The main cast is retiring, and director James Gunn is moving to helm the rival DC movies. The Memphis Flyer‘s Sam Cicci says “Guardians Vol. 3 is the most creative Marvel film in years, a fitting end to Gunn’s time with Disney.” So far it’s pulled in $365 million worldwide, and shows no signs of stopping.

Judy Blume’s revolutionary young adult novel Are You There Go? It’s Me Margaret gets a worthy adaptation from director Kelly Fremon Craig and Simpsons producer James L. Brooks. Abby Ryder Fortson stars as Margaret, the confused middle-schooler who must navigate a move to the suburbs, puberty, and religious doubt all at once. Rachel McAdams and Memphian Kathy Bates give excellent support as Margaret’s mother and grandmother. Read my review, then watch the trailer.

Sam Raimi’s pioneering horror-comedy franchise continues its perfect record with new director Lee Cronin in Evil Dead Rise. This one’s definitely more scary than funny, but Cronin nails the franchise’s irreverent tone, and Alyssa Sullivan kills as a single mom possessed by demons who stalks a haunted apartment building. A must-see for horror fans, this one’s got legs.

South Korean director Hong Sang-soo and his frequent collaborator Kwan Hae-hyo are back together with Walk Up. Indie Memphis screens this affecting slice-of-life film, which premiered to laurels at the Toronto Film Festival, at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, May 17 at Studio on the Square.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie

 What’s the beeping noise in the distance? It’s the sound of The Super Mario Bros. Movie collecting coins. You just saw Guardians, but you can’t get enough Chris Pratt? Good news! You can hear him phoning it in as Mario in this animated adaptation that has earned enough to build Princess Peach a very nice castle. 

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Now Playing In Memphis: Classic Rock in Space

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 3, from left: Pom Klementieff as Mantis, Groot (voice: Vin Diesel), Chris Pratt as Star-Lord, Dave Bautista as Drax, Karen Gillan as Nebula, 2023. © Marvel / © Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures / Courtesy Everett Collection

Happy Guardians of the Galaxy weekend to all who celebrate! Marvel’s answer to Star Wars works best when the crew, led by Chris Pratt as Star Lord, simply ignores whatever is brewing in the rest of the MCU. This is director James Gunn’s swan song at Marvel, as he was just given the big chair of the rival DC universe, and Dave Bautista’s done with Dax after this one, as well. Karen Gillian, who has long been the best actor in the MCU, finally gets a spotlight worthy of her talents. This is gonna be a hot ticket, so reserve your seats now.

Running into the Guardians buzz saw is the British rom-com What’s Love Got To Do With It? Shazad Latif directs Lily James and Emma Thompson in this acclaimed film, which takes on arranged marriage and the limits of cultural assimilation.

The other attempt at counter-programming against the Guardians juggernaut this weekend is Love Again. You’ve seen this premise before with Sleepless in Seattle, and classic cinephiles will recognize the outlines of the Ernst Lubitsch/Jimmy Stewart masterpiece The Shop Around The Corner. Only this time instead of accidental lonely hearts pen pals or email advice columnists, it’s text messages. We get a reboot of The Shop Around The Corner every time a new communication method become popular.

Director Kelly Reichardt’s latest is a comedy based in the always weird world of art. Showing Up stars Michelle Williams (a frequent Reichardt collaborator) as a mixed media artist preparing for a big show while her world falls apart around her.

On Wednesday night, Indie Memphis is throwing a pay-what-you-can MicroCinema night at Crosstown Theater called “Shifting Lines: New Queer Animation.” The six-film program will include Niki Ang’s terminally charming short “Were You Gay In High School?”

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Now Playing In Memphis: Dracula, Mario, and the Big Suit

Nicolas Cage as Dracula in "Renfield." (Courtesy Universal PIctures)

It’s a big weekend at the movies in Memphis, so let’s jump right in.

Dracula’s faithful thrall R. M. Renfield has been with him since the beginning. But this relationship is starting to show its age, as Renfeld slowly realizes he doesn’t have to live like this. This horror comedy features the casting coup of the decade with the great Nicolas Cage as freakin’ Dracula. Read my review.

In The Pope’s Exorcist, Russell Crowe stars as Father Gabriele Amorth, the real life priest and founder of the International Association of Exorcists, who claimed to have vanquished infernal hordes during his 24-year-career as the Dioceses of Rome’s official demon fighter.

Speaking of Italians, one humble plumber turned video game hero just launched a blue shell at the box office. The Super Mario Bros. Movie raking in $204 million domestic in three days means we’re going to be seeing a lot more Nintendo characters in IMAX. Get in on the ground floor of the critical backlash today!

It’s official: More people play Mario Kart than D&D. And that’s OK, because Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is actually good! (Read my review here.) Chris Pine, the superior of the Chrises, brings movie star charisma to this inventive and fun fantasy heist romp. 

The greatest concert film of all time, Stop Making Sense, just got a 4K remastering, courtesy of A24. Both Jonathan Demme and Talking Heads were at the height of their creative powers when the director shot three nights of the Talking Heads’ Speaking In Tongues tour on Hollywood Boulevard in December, 1983. On Sunday, April 16 at 7:00 p.m., Theaterworks in Overton Square will host a free screening of the film. The stage will be a dance floor for this fundraiser, so put on your big suits and sneakers and get ready to sweat. The original trailer looks just as radical now as it did in 1984.

Speaking of radical, on Tuesday, April 18 at Studio on the Square, Indie Memphis presents the controversial thriller How To Blow Up A Pipeline. Director Daniel Goldhaber’s film loosely adapts Andreas Malm’s 2021 book with Runaways‘ Ariela Barer starring as a would-be radical who gathers a team to stop a West Texas oil pipline by any means necessary.

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Jurassic World: Dominion

Chris Pratt does this move eight times in Jurassic World: Dominion.

How many ways can you screw up a dinosaur movie? It seems like a slam dunk. The people are coming for the dinosaurs, so you give them dinosaurs. When you’re not doing that, just point your camera at Jeff Goldblum — because if you’re making a movie about dinosaurs, I assume you’ve paid your Goldblum money. 

In attempting a Star Trek: Generations move by uniting the old and new casts of a legacy franchise, Jurassic World: Dominion inadvertently exposes the biggest flaw of the Jurassic Park reboot trilogy: The lack of Jeff Goldblum. The new film’s greatest accomplishment is the completion of Chris Pratt’s quest to render his character Owen Grady completely devoid of personality. The former Navy Seal turned velociraptor whisperer is just there to be good at things like riding motorcycles and wrangling wild theropods, not to feel any pesky emotions. His sole move is to straight-arm dinosaurs into compliance, which he does eight times, by my count, in Dominion.  Since appearing in 2018’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Bryce Dallas Howard has come into her own directing career, helming episodes of The Mandalorian, so her performance as former Jurassic Park manager turned dino-rights activist Claire Dearing is predictably checked-out. 

Director Colin Trevorrow struggles to fit his expanding cast of heroes into one frame in Jurassic World: Dominion.

When Dominion begins, they’re living together in a cabin in rural Montana with Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon), the clone of the daughter of OG Jurassic Park researcher Benjamin Lockwood. Instead of instantly dying from the Anthropocine world’s onslaught of pollution and disease, the dinosaurs who escaped from the exploding volcano on Isla Nublar have spread across the planet. This sounds like the basis for a good story. Imagine dinosaurs tearing a swath through the modern world, while our heroes, led by Jeff Goldblum, tries to find a solution that preserves both humankind and dino-kind. It’s the proverbial un-screwable pooch. 

Life, in the person of writer/director Colin Trevorrow, finds a way. It turns out that Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) has been spending the years since her 1993 visit to Jurassic Park studying the effects of genetic engineering on the ecology. She’s hot on the trail of a mysterious new species of giant locust that have been bioengineered to eat everything not produced by megacorp Biosyn. This will cause a worldwide famine if she and her old palentologist flame Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill, remarkably well preserved) can’t find proof of the plan. Lucky for them (and us) Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff freakin’ Goldblum) has already infiltrated Biosyn by gaining the trust of its founder Dr. Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott, in a Shatnerian performance). Even though dinos are now roaming wild through the woods and plains of the world, Biosyn has gathered a collection of the creatures into a large, protected space — a kind of Jurassic park, if you will — through which our ever-growing collection of heroes will have to navigate in order to save a kidnapped clone, a baby velociraptor, and also the world’s food supply.  

Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) faces down Dr. Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott) in Jurassic World: Dominion.

Maybe a more skilled filmmaker would be able to successfully juggle three competing storylines, but the truth is, a skilled filmmaker would know better than to try. The giant locust attack seems to be an attempt at a climate change allegory, which is weird choice for a story that features a world overrun by already allegorical dinosaurs. Were the filmmakers under the impression that we’re begging for a stealth remake of  Beginning of the End, the 1957 giant locust movie skewered by Mystery Science Theater 3000? I thought we were here for dinosaurs. 

In fairness, there is some crunchy dino-action. The second act features a solid Spielbergian set piece, with trained velociraptor assassins under the command of a smuggler named Santos (Dichen Lachman) chasing a motorcycle-mounted Pratt through the streets of Malta. But even when Trevorrow manages to conjure a string of exciting images, the Adderall-addled script can’t sustain any momentum. 

T. Rex searching for snacks in Jurassic World: Dominion.

When things do perk up, it’s usually because of Jeff Goldblum. He effortlessly dominates the screen, delivering schtick with his trademark sly wink at the audience. I was reminded of the infamous story of when Michael Caine, another actor who was always the best thing in bad movies, was asked about appearing in another rock-bottom sequel of a great Steven Spielberg film, Jaws: The Revenge. “I haven’t seen it, and by all accounts, it is terrible,” he said. “But I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.” 

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Onward

It’s strange to contemplate how Dungeons & Dragons has conquered the world. The game began in the early 1970s in a Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, hobby shop. Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson, and the shop’s owner, Jeff Perren, were avid wargamers who created sets of rules to govern battles between brigades of miniature army men. During one game set in medieval times, someone (exactly who is the source of much controversy and a few lawsuits) had the idea that, instead of controlling whole armies, they could try playing as individual heroes. Gygax added rules for using magic and fantastic monsters to fight and published the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons in 1974.

For a game that has been described as combining “the charm of a Pentagon briefing with the excitement of double-entry bookkeeping,” the nerdy hobby spread like wildfire. By 2017, after the game’s fifth edition was released, there were an estimated 15 million players in the United States. But D&D’s legacy goes far beyond the tabletop. The basic concepts introduced by the game — characters defined by a set of skills and statistics whose success or failure is based on random rolls of the dice, and who gather treasure and useful items as they gain experience and advance in level — underlies video games from The Legend of Zelda to Call Of Duty to Grand Theft Auto. But I think D&D’s greatest cultural contribution was the creation of the “generic fantasy setting.”

Tom Holland and Chris Pratt voice the Lightfoot brothers.

J.R.R. Tolkien had taken a scholarly approach to creating Middle Earth, using elements of myth and legend from Northern European antiquity. His numerous imitators were much less rigorous about who they stole from, and Gygax read all of them, gleaning their best ideas and combining them into one syncretic setting. Everything from Shrek to Game of Thrones to Skyrim seems to take place in variants of the D&D world.

Pixar’s newest picture Onward takes the generic fantasy setting as its jumping-off point. “Long ago, the world was full of wonder!” the opening narration exclaims. Bearded wizards in pointy hats palled around with pegasus-unicorns. But magic is famously not user-friendly, so some spoilsport had to go and invent technology, and now the elves and trolls and centaurs live in a world that looks like a Northern California suburb. It’s elf Ian Lightfoot’s (voiced by Tom Holland) 16th birthday, and he’s an awkward nerd who can’t get anyone to come to his party except his big brother Barley (Chris Pratt) and his mom Laurel (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). The boys’ father died when they were very young, but Laurel reveals that he left a gift for them to be delivered when Ian turned 16. It turns out that accountant dad was secretly a wizard, and his legacy is a magic staff, a Phoenix jewel, and a spell that would bring him back to life for one day only, so he could meet the children he left behind.

Barley is an avid player of Quests of Yore, a D&D-equivalent game that, in this world, is strictly historically accurate. He tries and fails to make the spell work. But when Ian tries, his latent magical powers activate, and he succeeds. Well, he partially succeeds — meaning he brings back just the lower half of his father. The brothers have 24 hours to complete the spell and materialize the rest of dad.

Directed by Dan Scanlon, a longtime Pixar staffer who wrote and directed 2013’s Monsters University, Onward never fails to be fun and engaging. But I think the Pixar label actually hurts Onward. Had this come from any other creative team, it would be hailed as a fantastic film. But since it’s Pixar, it invites comparisons to masterpieces such as Toy Story 2.

Onward is a beautiful piece of animation, even if it doesn’t quite rise to the level of Coco. It features a relationship between two brothers that feels deep and real, even if it doesn’t reach Inside Out‘s depths of psychological insight. Its action sequences are thrilling, particularly the climax where our heroes fight a magic dragon assembled from the rubble of technological society, but they never touch the complexity of The Incredibles.

Onward does have one element superior to its Pixar equivalents: Guinevere, Barley’s custom van airbrushed with a fantasy scene of a pegasus, has more personality than the cars from Cars, and even though it never talks, it still gets a heroic moment inspired by Mad Max: Fury Road.

Like Corey (Octavia Spencer), the manticore restaurateur who has to answer to her investors, we’ve become jaded to Pixar’s techno-magic and worn down by Disney’s domination. But don’t let that discourage you from taking up Onward‘s magic quest.

Onward
Now playing
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Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 never gets better than its opening sequence. To bring Vol. 1 to a successful conclusion, Groot, the mono-phrased, living tree-man portrayed, as far as it goes, by Vin Diesel, had to sacrifice himself. But, since he’s a tree, he budded and was replanted by his platonic life partner Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper) — now known simply as Rocket, because apparently it’s okay to have a talking raccoon heavy weapons specialist in your movie, but using the word “Raccoon” in his name is just a step too far for the Disney marketing department.

Anyway, Groot has now grown enough to walk, and when you’re traveling in Star-Lord’s company, you’re going to get into some weird scrapes. The camera follows Baby Groot through a battle with a rando glitter octopod, introducing the perpetually bickering Guardians of the Galaxy in turn: the giant, blue Drax the Destroyer (Dave Bautista), green-skinned daughter of Thanos Gamora (Zoe Saldana), and the self-appointed Star-Lord, Peter Quill (Chris Pratt). Like most of the rest of the movie, it’s practically all computer animated, but director James Gunn and the Marvel team simulate an Alfonso Cuaron-style, single take tracking shot focusing on what all the laser-fueled mayhem looks like to the sapling Groot.

In addition to being visually thrilling, the shot immediately establishes Baby Groot as the audience surrogate and sets the tone for what we’re about to see: spectacular scenes of stylized, bloodless battle delivered with a wink and nudge.

Science fiction started out in the 1800s as a fairly serious-minded enterprise. Then in the early 1900s, it devolved into lurid stories for pulp magazines. Since then, sci-fi books and movies have either embraced the pulp tradition or pushed against it — is it better to be respectable, or is it better to be fun? It seems weird that Arrival and Barbarella are in the same genre, but they represent its two extremes. Star Wars straddled the line between serious and silly by mapping pulp tropes onto a mythological framework. Perhaps because its source material is the descendant of the pulp magazine, comic books, Guardians of the Galaxy sees no need to feign seriousness. Gunn and company just go for whatever feels good from moment to moment. They’ve got jetpacks, and they’re not afraid to use them.

And I’ll have to say, it’s pretty refreshing. We live in, as Obi-Wan Kenobi would say, the Dark Times. We need escapism. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is providing exactly what Hollywood has historically done best: cinematic comfort food.

The Character Formerly Known As Rocket Raccoon (voiced by Bradley Cooper) and Baby Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel).

Zoe Saldana as Gamora

Besides, Kurt Russell is in it. He plays Ego, the Living Planet, who is pretty self explanatory. The question of whether or not Ego is Star-Lord’s long-lost father provides the plot-like structure to prop up one eye-popping space action sequence after another from Disney’s golden hoard of digital artists. It’s a tribute to Chris Pratt’s charisma that he can share scene after scene with Russell and not be overwhelmed by the actor’s epic facial hair.

The other bit of silly alchemy that continues to work for the Guardians franchise is marrying 1970s cheese rock with insane space action. Both Star Trek: Beyond and Doctor Strange tried the same trick, only to fall flat. Guardians nails it repeatedly. Sure, he’s got a knack for snappy dialog and endearing character beats, but Gunn’s unerring ear is his secret weapon.

It’s cool to be back in these characters’ colorful, crazy world, but the story seems like a thin, disjointed collection of leftover ideas. The swashbuckling is first rate, but the scale of the violence and the casualness with which it is dispatched by our heroes is occasionally icky. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 may not be a masterpiece, but it’s a movie that knows exactly what it’s trying to accomplish. Sometimes, that’s enough.

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Passengers

Douglas Adams said it best. “Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.”

Combine that really impressive bigness with Einstein’s hard speed limit, and that means f you want to get anywhere in space, it’s going to take a long time. Storytellers who want to write stories that take place on other plants have come up with all sorts of work arounds, like hyperspace and warp drive, to let people get from one star to another in a human lifetime, but there’s little evidence such things could work in real life. Therefore, the other option is to extend the human lifespan by putting passengers into extended hibernation, so you go to sleep on Earth and wake up on the exoplanet of your choosing a century from now.

Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence in Passengers.

That’s the departure point for Passengers. The starship Avalon’a 5,000 colonists and 200 crew are barreling towards the planet Homestead II with  at half the speed of light when the ship hits an unexpected swarm of space rocks. The impact causes a power surge that wakes one of the passengers, Jim Preston (Chris Pratt), from cold sleep. The problem is, the ship is only 30 years into its 120 year journey, meaning Jim is going to die of old age long before the ship makes it to Homestead. He is destined to spend the rest of his life alone.
The good news is, he’s alone in a kilometer-long luxury hotel staffed by robots. Soon, he befriends Arthur (Michael Sheen), the bartender droid whose establishment bears a striking resemblance to the bar of the Overlook Hotel where Jack Nicholson went insane in The Shining. This is probably not a coincidence.

Passengers is a story in the tradition of “The Cold Equations”, a pulp sci fi story adapted into a Twilight Zone script that highlighted ethical problems posed by the limitations of long distance spaceflight. It’s rare for being good sci fi that doesn’t involve zapping things with ray guns. It’s a story about how technology sometimes puts people in impossible situations that no human has ever been faced with before. (Before now, no generation has had to ever learn Instagram etiquette.) Jim is on his own in deep space, and it seems to be impossible for him to get back into hibernation without the help of a whole lot of specialized equipment and a team of doctors. Should he wake someone up to get help? Or maybe just for company? Faced with a totally unique moral dilemma, he does the only logical thing and starts drinking heavily.

Eventually, he makes the worst possible decision and wakes up a fellow passenger named Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence), not because she can help out with the situation, but because he thinks she’s cute. Pratt’s lonely agonizing over the decision to basically commit slow murder by waking Aurora up 89 years early is the best part of Passengers.

Writer John Spaihts wrings as much drama and pathos as he can out of the impossible situation, carefully throwing new wrinkles into our heroes paths at regular intervals. The script for Passengers floated around Hollywood for years, and was at one point going to be produced with Keanu Reeves for $30 million instead of the $100 million that Sony spent on this production. Frankly, that might have been a better move. The production design on Passengers is top notch, but it doesn’t really add much to the interesting part of the story, even after the ship starts to break down and Jim and Aurora have to try to fix it with the help of a reanimated crewman named Gus (Lawrence Fishbourne). In the third act, the film’s courage suddenly fails as it tries to fit its unconventional story into a happy (or at least, happy-ish) ending. But hey, at least they were trying! If the preview audience I saw the film with was any indication, it still works, and will very likely provoke some extended conversations on the way home.

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The Magnificent Seven

2016 has had more than its share of remakes, both good (Ghostbusters) and not so good (The Jungle Book). Director Antoine Fuqua’s version of The Magnificent Seven gives us something new: A remake of a remake.

I’ll cut Fuqua a little slack here: People have been remaking and reimagining the Seven Samurai practically since the moment Akira Kurosawa locked picture. First up was John Sturges’ 1960 western The Magnificent Seven starring Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, and five others, which made “assemble a team of misfits to perform a seemingly doomed and intractable task” a thing in American film. Then there was The Guns of Navarone, which put Gregory Peck and David Niven in charge of a group of misfit soldiers in World War II (It had a sequel starring Harrison Ford). The Dirty Dozen kept the World War II motif and postulated, if seven is good, 12 must be great! In 1980, Roger Corman cashed in on the Star Wars craze with Battle Beyond the Stars, which he successfully pitched as “The Seven Samurai — in space!” Pixar got into the act with A Bug’s Life. The upcoming Star Wars film Rogue One features a group of misfits recruited by the Rebellion to steal the plans for the Death Star. Guess how many people are on the rebel team!

Standard operating procedure is to give your Seven Samurai remake a different title, but this is 2016 Hollywood we’re talking about here, so we’re sticking with The Magnificent Seven. Taking up the leadership mantle left behind by Yul Brynner is Denzel Washington as Sam Chisolm, a tough but fair bounty hunter whom we meet single handedly busting up a saloon as he brings an evildoer to justice. Denzel (who is one of those actors whose reputation is so huge you only have to use his first name) sports the same all-black cowboy getup as Brynner and some impressive frontier facial hair. This is the kind of action role he’s mostly been relegated to in the last decade or so, which is kind of a shame, because the Malcolm X actor could use some good juicy parts besides Flight. Denzel’s been phoning it in the last few movies — most notably in director Fuqua’s 2014 snoozer The Equalizer — but there’s more pep in his step this time around. Denzel looks like he’s having fun riding high in the saddle through the Painted Desert.

Luke Grimes (left), Haley Bennett, and Denzel Washington saddle up.

Denzel’s opposite is Peter Sarsgaard as Bartholomew Bogue, a well-heeled mining magnate who aims to clear out the little frontier town of Rose Creek so he can extract the mineral wealth underneath it without paying any pesky royalties to the landowners. The film opens with the town’s denizens debating their best course of action in Rose Creek’s idyllic clapboard church, and Fuqua gives Bogue a mustache-twirling entrance, ringed by shotgun-toting heavies. It’s the first sign that this is going to be an old-fashioned, Western shoot-’em-up with well-defined good and bad guys. One of the casualties of Bogue’s opening strong-arm tactics is the husband of Emma Cullen (Haley Bennett); as she sets out to find armed help, she’s moved at least as much by revenge as she is by saving the town.

The other notable members of the band of seven heroes include Chris Pratt as Josh Faraday, a gambler who is pressed into service when Chisolm gets his horse out of hock. Pratt’s job, like Toshiro Mifune in Seven Samurai, is to provide a side order of comic relief to the relentless gun-toting heroism. Ethan Hawke plays a former confederate sharpshooter named Goodnight Robicheaux as a PTSD case seemingly held together only by the marijuana cigarettes his sidekick Billy Rocks (Byung-hun Lee) provides at crucial moments. Vincent D’Onofrio’s Jack Horne is a tracker who is introduced just after receiving a major head injury, and he plays it to the hilt by quoting jumbled, half-remembered biblical passages. It’s inevitable in a cast this size that some of the members are going to get short shrift, and that’s what happens with Vasquez (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), the Mexican outlaw, and Red Harvest (Martin Sensmeier), the Comanche warrior.

The best way to sum up this Magnificent Seven‘s strengths and weaknesses is to say that it’s an old-fashioned Western, with all that implies. Fuqua and company construct some killer action sequences, and at least make a nod toward multiculturalism with the integrated cast. But it doesn’t expand the genre in a significant way like Clint Eastwood did with The Unforgiven, and it lacks the verve of the Coen brother’s True Grit remake. Ultimately, it’s the reinvigorated Denzel Washington that makes this worthwhile, if not essential, viewing.

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“Parks and Recreation”: The Final Goodbye

“Previously on” the Flyer‘s TV review page: Contemporary scripted TV is our equivalent of masterpieces of fine art. Our museums and galleries are HBO, AMC, Showtime, the basic networks, FX, and Netflix. The Sopranos is a Caravaggio; Breaking Bad is Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Triumph of Death; Mad Men is an Edward Hopper.

NBC’s Parks and Recreation is a Keith Haring: an energetic, animate, joyous pop dance — a celebration of life with social commentary encoded in the brushwork.

Haring’s work: a celebration of life with social commentary in the brushwork

At the heart of Parks and Recreation are Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) and Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman), the deputy director and director, respectively, of the parks and rec department in the fictional small town of Pawnee, Indiana. A most cheerful, well-intentioned, and indefatigable soul, Leslie serves the town she loves with a civil-service glee rarely found in nature — she wants to help everybody. A political feminist, she displays photos of the likes of Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright in her office.

To the naked eye, Leslie and Ron could not be more different. He’s a gruff, masculine outdoorsman and devout libertarian who is in charge of Pawnee’s parks department because that’s the best place he can ensure that the citizens will not begin to rely upon government services. Ron would like nothing more than to spend his time self-reliant in the woods with a whittling knife in one hand, a bottle of dark liquor in the other, and a fire at his feet.

What Leslie and Ron lack in shared perspective they make up for in mutual, sometimes begrudging respect. They genuinely like each other and put up with each other’s peculiarities because they are both good people, and they recognize that quality in one another. Their differences are diminutive compared to their commonalities. Writ large, this is the quality that sets Parks and Recreation apart from any other show: a seam-splitting generosity and humanistic altruism for all mankind.

Though considerably political in theme, Parks and Rec is not divisive in delivery. Most anybody anywhere on the left-right spectrum can find something or someone to relate to. But, the positive slant shouldn’t be mistaken for naiveté on the part of the creators, Greg Daniels and Michael Schur. Because, though the show is always looking for the good in people, Pawnee is filled with a rabble of narrow-minded, mean citizens who usually don’t act in their own best interests because they’re too dumb to identify them. This jibes with reality, and so Parks and Recreation is on some levels not just an infinitely enjoyable show but also a counterrevolutionary one in American television. It’s the good twin to the other inarguably great half-hour of the past few decades, Seinfeld. Parks and Rec never tires of trying to find the good in people, even when individuals prove unworthy again and again. Meanwhile, Seinfeld never had anything good to say about anybody.

That Parks and Recreation has maintained its spirit of goodwill toward man despite the coterminous real-world rancorous politics is all the more remarkable; 2009 saw the birth of both Parks and Recreation and the national Tea Party movement. As the axiom goes, “All politics is local.” Parks and Recreation, set in the calcified strata of small-town government and a myopic populace, somehow still manages to make one believe that maybe America is going to be all right, after all.

The terrific Parks and Rec cast prepares for its final season.

The ensemble cast is expertly designed and deployed; no two characters serve the same purpose, and no two inter-character relationships play out the same: Ann Perkins (Rashida Jones), Leslie’s BFF, a pragmatic nurse who wears her beauty uncomfortably; Tom Haverford (Aziz Ansari), a metrosexual serial entrepreneur whose schemes frequently put him in over his head; April Ludgate (Aubrey Plaza), an unexcitable hipster who disdains everything and everybody (with a heart of gold); Andy Dwyer (Chris Pratt), a goofy underachiever who gleefully dives like a puppy into every scenario; Donna Meagle (Retta), a pop culture diva who knows what she likes and usually gets what she wants; Chris Traeger (Rob Lowe), the literally flawless city manager who uses extreme positivity to hide the fact that he’s freaking out about aging; and Jerry Gergich (Jim O’Heir), the oft-abused bureaucratic functionary who can’t get out of his own way.

Last but hardly least is Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott), the love of Leslie’s life, nerdy and competent, deadpan and romantic. The relationship between Ben and Leslie is surpassed in charm only by Leslie’s platonic one with Ron. If every embellishment was stripped away from the show, what would remain are Leslie and Ron — a chaste kind of opposites attract.

Parks and Recreation is the true heir to two of the other greatest half-hours of all time: The Andy Griffith Show and Cheers. All three are regionally attentive, smartly written, finely tuned sitcoms about the family we make out of our friends and loved ones, except Parks and Rec has the added benefit of being able to be more topically adventurous and demographically diverse. Plus, the only true villain in Parks and Recreation, Pawnee’s neighboring town of Eagleton and its residents, is the geospatial mash-up of Mount Pilot and Gary’s Olde Towne Tavern.

The difference is that Cheers and Andy Griffith never made me emotional, whereas Parks and Recreation is so moving it makes me cry on the regular. The show is coming to an end; its seventh season is its last. Perhaps it’s where I am in life or just appreciating where it’s taken me, but this ending is going to make for a tough goodbye.

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Film Features Film/TV

Guardians of the Galaxy

Guardians of the Galaxy

I’ve long been of the opinion that the comic book movie hot streak would be over once all of the big superheroes the mainstream public has heard of — the likes of Batman, Spider-Man, and Captain America — were exhausted and movie companies were forced to get around to the C- and D-list titles on the comic book newsstand. Once fly-over America got a taste of the utter nerdiness of the Blue Beetle or Dazzler, the gig would be up. Because the truth is that even the great comic titles feature weird plotlines (explain Crisis on Infinite Earths to a non-nerd and see what happens) and goofy villains (Captain Boomerang? Egghead?).

So, when Marvel announced the movie version of Guardians of the Galaxy, a space adventure co-starring, among other things, a talking raccoon and a sentient tree, I thought: Here it is; the end of the run for the nerds and the regression toward the mean after the blaze in recent history for comic book cinema.

And, after having seen Guardians of the Galaxy, one of the patrons that led to a colossal, $94.3 million weekend, I must admit: I was so, so wrong — and damn glad to be so.

Guardians of the Galaxy is based on comic book characters introduced in the 1960s and ’70s. That’s how you get the strange mix of principals such as the raccoon (Rocket) and tree (Groot), plus a revenge-minded alien who doesn’t understand metaphor (Drax the Destroyer), a weaponized green-skinned babe (Gamora), and, leading them all, an earthling space cowboy who is hard to take seriously (he wants you to call him Star-Lord). But the story is based on a Marvel series from the last decade, so the misfits are banded together with a self-awareness that takes the form of extreme wit, satire, and charm.

The film starts on earth in 1988. Young Peter Quill has just watched his mom die, and then he’s abducted by a UFO. Jump ahead 26 years, and Quill (Chris Pratt) has fashioned himself as an intergalactic thief/plunderer/adventurer named Star-Lord. If he reminds you of Han Solo or Indiana Jones, that’s because Quill is knowingly modeling himself after them. Because he was taken from terra firma when he was, and since he never returned, Quill is locked into place as a child of the ’80s. His most valued possession is a Walkman and the cassette tape his mom made for him, “Awesome Mix Volume 1.” The movie fashions such contextual mashups as fighting alien varmints to the sounds of Redbone’s “Come and Get Your Love” and a prison escape sequence set to “The Piña Colada Song.”

The cultural references do some heavy lifting to set the stage for the film’s charm, but the follow-through is with the characters. Pratt is as completely lovable as a dashing but bumbling alpha male; Zoe Saldana effortlessly sells the frosty assassin-with-a-heart-of-gold Gamora; Dave Bautista steals the show as the hulking, sober Drax the Destroyer, who wants nothing more than to kill his enemies; Bradley Cooper provides the voice for Rocket, a wise-cracking, intelligent anthropomorphic rodent who overcompensates for his size with big guns and elaborate plans; and Vin Diesel voices Groot, the ineffably sweet but powerful tree creature who expresses himself through three words only: “I am Groot.” (And, yes, the joke must be made: It’s a role that captures the limits of Diesel’s acting range.)

The ragtag bunch makes for a more compelling team-up than the recent Avengers film. It’s surprising, but maybe it shouldn’t be. Cleared of having to shoulder so many all-stars, Guardians of the Galaxy can enjoy the ride more than Avengers could. Plus, Guardians‘ writer/director James Gunn is a significantly better filmmaker than Joss Whedon.

Put it all together, and Marvel serves up a completely winning product, no matter how unlikely: a freak out in a moonage daydream that frees the film genre of its recent seriousness. I don’t care anymore that the nerds have won, so long as they keep it up with more films like this.