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.
McKenna Grace as Phoebe, with Logan Kim as Podcast, in Ghostbusters: Afterlife
Ghostbusters is a prime example of lightning in a bottle. There are some things that are just unique products of the time and place where they were created. They defy formula. Even if you put the same team back together and gave them all the tools and time they needed, they couldn’t replicate their success.
The 1984 Ghostbusters was the product of the fevered mind of Dan Aykroyd. The story of a trio of misfit scientists who travel through time and space to battle supernatural threats was meant as a follow-up to his and John Belushi’s mega-hit The Blues Brothers, with the third part to be played by Eddie Murphy. After Belushi died in 1982, Murphy got his own franchise with Beverly Hills Cop, and Aykroyd retreated into a fallout shelter on Martha’s Vineyard with Harold Ramis to retool the script for Bill Murray and director Ivan Reitman. The Ghostbusters became supernatural entrepreneurs, more pest control than Doctor Who.
Grace, Kim, and Finn Wolfhard cruisin’ in the Ectomobile.
Genre-wise, the fantasy action comedy had very little precedent. Reitman got the tone exactly right. It was the post-Star Wars sci-fi boom, so there was an ample budget for special effects. Aykroyd was still at the top of his game, Ramis played Spock-but-funny, Ernie Hudson was the relatable everyman, Sigourney Weaver was sexy as hell, and Murray delivered one of the greatest comedy performances of all time. Propelled by a theme song by former Stevie Wonder sideman Ray Parker Jr. that became an unlikely No. 1 hit, Ghostbusters became the most profitable comedy of all time.
When the principals got back together five years later for Ghostbusters II, it wasn’t the same. The film has its moments, but the elements never gel the way they did the first time out. For years, Aykroyd worked on a third installment, called Hellbent, but Murray saw the writing on the wall and once Ramis died in 2014, that seemed to be the end of it.
But Ghostbusters is all about coming back from the dead, so in 2016, a gender-swapped version was produced with Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Leslie Jones, and Kate McKinnon. It, too, had its moments, but lacked that certain magic, and was the subject of a sexist social media backlash. Which might be why Ghostbusters: Afterlife exists.
At least it’s better than The Rise of Skywalker, the other film that was produced as a response to closed-minded people freaking out over changes to their favorite ’80s film franchise. Produced by Ivan Reitman and directed by his son Jason Reitman, Afterlife moves the action from New York City to rural Oklahoma. Callie (Carrie Coon) gets evicted from her New York apartment with her two children, Trevor (Finn Wolfhard), and Phoebe (Mckenna Grace), only to find out that her estranged father has died and left them a spooky old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. While Callie tries to deal with her late father’s estate, Trevor tries to fit in with the local teens — especially cool girl Lucky (Celeste O’Connor). Phoebe, a budding science geek who is too smart for her own good, is drawn into investigating unexplained earthquake swarms with her summer school teacher Gary (Paul Rudd). This part of the film is a solid kids-solving-mysteries story, like Goonies, but less annoying.
As the story threads come together, Phoebe and Trevor learn that their grandfather, whom they never met, was Egon Spengler, a member of the Ghostbusters who cleaned up the Manhattan ghost flap of 1984. Naturally, the reason he moved to central Oklahoma was ghost-related, and now his grandkids must clean up the mess he left behind or, you know … human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!
It’s weird to say, but it’s the familiar elements that derail Afterlife. Just when things get cooking with the new kids, we have to pause to re-introduce the Ectomobile. When the surviving old guys show up to help save the day, it seems perfunctory. Even the glorious moment when Bill Murray is doing Peter Venkman again undercuts the “action” part of “action comedy.”
You can’t catch lightning in a bottle a second time. But I’m willing to give Ghostbusters: Afterlife the benefit of the doubt for two reasons: one, the screenplay mostly works, with the story flowing from the internal logic Aykroyd set up in 1984, even though it’s not nearly as funny. And two, Mckenna Grace gives an absolutely crackerjack performance. Mark my words, she’s a movie star in waiting.
M: Chapter Two. You know, the sequel to the highest grossing horror movie of all time, It.
Y: Oh, yeah. I forgot about It. It seems like It came out a long time ago.
M: It was only 2017. That’s life in the Trump era.
Y: Huh. Well, how was it?
M: It was okay, I guess. I’ll have to admit, I thought the first one was overrated, even though I know most people don’t agree. It made $700 million domestically! There were some good performances, like Sophia Lillis as Beverly Marsh, the lone girl in the group of teenage friends who call themselves the Losers. They live in the small town of Derry, Maine, which, it turns out, has a kind of Hellmouth situation.
Y: You mean like Sunnydale in Buffy the Vampire Slayer?
M: Not exactly. It was built on the site where an ancient evil crashed to Earth from the sky, presumably from space. Now it’s haunted by Pennywise, a demon who looks like a clown who dances and sings little songs.
Y: A clown, huh? That doesn’t sound so scary.
M: The clown eats children.
Y: Huh.
M: Also, it sometimes takes the form of a semi-humanoid spider thingy. And it knows your worst fear and will taunt you with it before it eats you with its thousand-toothed maw.
Y: That’s messed up.
M: That’s Stephen King for you. It’s based on one of his most beloved novels.
Y: What’s it called?
M: It.
Y: Right. Shoulda seen that one coming. So how does it compare to the book?
M: I don’t know; I never read It.
Y: Not a Stephen King fan?
M: No, I like King just fine. ‘Salem’s Lot was my jam. Vampires crossed with Lovecraftian, New England, existential horror — someone should adapt that one. Shut up and take my money!
Y: Stephen King’s had a lot of movies made out of his books, hasn’t he?
M: He’s the most adapted author in history. The trailer for Doctor Sleep, the sequel to The Shining, ran before It Chapter Two. Looked pretty good.
Y: He wrote The Shining, too? That guy gets around!
M: He sure does. He’s got a cameo in It Chapter Two as the owner of a pawn shop, playing opposite James McAvoy as Bill, who grows up to become a horror writer. King was my favorite part of Creepshow, where he played the farmer who gets eaten by meteorite slime. He’s a much better actor than he is a director. You ever seen Maximum Overdrive?
Y: No!
M: Don’t bother, unless you want to see what the product of full-blown cocaine psychosis looks like.
Y: Maybe I do …
M: That’s on you. Anyway, when they’re kids, the Losers have a run-in with Pennywise the clown; afterwards, they make a blood oath to reassemble if he ever comes back. Now, it’s 27 years later, and kids are disappearing in Derry again. Mike (Isaiah Mustafa/Chosen Jacobs) stayed in town, living above the library, obsessed with figuring out how to defeat Pennywise once and for all. He calls the now-grown-up Losers back together. The first film was set in 1989, which means It is kind of like The Big Chill for Gen Xers, only with a demon clown who feeds on your fear. It’s kinda like the Trump era.
Y: That’s a little too real.
M: Yeah. Pennywise the clown is a metaphor for coming to terms with your anxiety and past trauma. That’s what It is about. Fortunately, Bill Hader is in it, as Old Richie, who used to be Finn Wolfhard from Stranger Things. Hader saves It from its own increasingly ponderous mythology by basically playing himself. (If you haven’t seen Barry on HBO, it’s a must. He’s brilliant in it.) Jessica Chastain plays Old Beverly, and she’s got that Molly Ringwald haircut, to keep it authentic.
Y: Bottom line: Should I go see It Chapter Two?
M: Sure, if you like It. It doesn’t really hold together as a movie, but if you’re invested in It, you’ll probably dig It Chapter Two, even though it’s really long and a bit of a slog in places.
When it comes to film and TV, my viewing experience is different from yours. The average American sees four films in the theater every year. In 2019, I’m on pace to see well over a hundred films in theaters and probably at least an additional hundred films at home.
I’m also a filmmaker, which makes me a functionalist. When I watch something, I think in terms of what works and what doesn’t. Does a scene do what the filmmaker intended it to do? Does it transmit the information and convey the emotional impact needed at this moment in the piece? “Does it work?” is a subtly different question than “Is it good?” A film or show can “work,” but the piece itself can be bad. Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper is one of the most loathsome films of the decade, but it works because it effectively uses all the little tricks of film grammar to make you sympathize with a guy we first meet slaughtering Iraqi women and children. I recognize the craftsmanship, but you couldn’t pay me to watch it again — and I got paid to watch it the first time.
(l to r) Sadie Sink, Noah Schnapp, Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, and Caleb McLaughlin
It’s easy for me to crawl up my own … crawlspace and just tell everybody to pack it in and go watch Shoplifters because the modest little Japanese film about a dysfunctional family of petty criminals rocked my world. But as a reviewer who writes for a general audience, I feel like it’s my duty to be aware of and reveal my biases, so even if you don’t agree with me, you can say, “Well, he wasn’t into Fast & Furious 27: Bald Men Punching Each Other, but it sounds like something I’d like.”
All this is to say, I am an absolute sucker for Stranger Things.
Yeah, there it is. I admit it. Matt and Ross Duffer have my number. I am powerless against their Spielbergian riffing. I understand at some level that Stranger Things, whose third season premiered on Netflix on Independence Day, is basically just Happy Days if it was set 30 years later and directed by John Carpenter. I understand that I would use “cheap ’80s pastiche” as a withering criticism for most other shows. I think the level of nostalgia the show trades in is probably unhealthy. And yet, here I am, ravenously chomping down on it and then sopping up the sauce with a biscuit.
In my defense, Stranger Things still works. The ensemble cast of teenagers, led by English actress Millie Bobby Brown as the psychic superweapon known as Eleven, is one of the finest on any screen right now. And at least there is an acknowledgment of the passing of time. The first season’s core group — The Party, as they refer to themselves in D&D terms — of Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), Will (Noah Schnapp), and Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), with the second season addition of Max (Sadie Sink), begin season three united, then, as any group of kids do, start to slowly come apart. Dustin’s pet project Cerebro, named for Professor X’s telepathic enhancer, is really just a souped-up shortwave antenna he wants to use to contact his girlfriend from Utah he met while away at summer camp. Sure, like he’s got a girlfriend in Utah, right?
The onset of puberty is hitting The Party pretty hard. Will and El have discovered puppy love, until her guardian Hopper (David Harbour) intervenes, and Max teaches El when it’s time to “dump his ass.” This group discord comes at an inopportune time, as mysterious forces are once again messing with the portal to the Upside Down, and the spectral Mind Flayer is back, this time with a side order of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
The Reagan ’80s had a lot of good movies, but there was a lot not to like. Stranger Things season three points more clearly toward the bad parts, beginning with the soundtrack. The first two seasons were awash with the rediscovery of vintage synth sounds, while the new crop of songs draws from the pop sludge that dominated the airwaves in 1985. The corporate colonization of the economy is represented by the new mall, which is shiny on the surface but evil on the inside. Joyce (Winona Ryder, effortlessly incredible) feels her job in Downtown slipping away and distracts herself with yet another paranormal investigation. Economic insecurity manifesting as creeping paranoia was a subtext in the ’80s horror and sci-fi films the show references, and that remains as relevant as ever. Maybe William Faulkner understood the real secret of Stranger Things‘ success when he said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
John Carpenter’s 1978 Halloween must be regarded as one of the most influential films of all time. Horror films have been around since the dawn of moving pictures, but the smashing success of The Exorcist in 1973 and Jaws in 1975 had loosened film investors’ purse strings and given the genre back some of the respectability it had squandered at the drive-in. But it was Halloween that would define the horror vibe for the next decade, horror’s silver age.
Today, ’80s horror is associated with the over-the-top gore of the slasher movie, exemplfied by Friday the 13th. But the original Halloween is not really like that. After a shocking start, it’s a creepy, slow burn that gets its power from the familiarity of the soon-to-be-deceased teenage characters, particularly Jamie Lee Curtis’ breakthrough performance as Laurie, the original Final Girl. In the ’80s, a big part of the appeal of horror was as a cinematic depiction of teen life. No film did that better than Wes Craven’s 1984 A Nightmare on Elm Street, which launched the career of a guy you might have heard of, Johnny Depp.
It is ostensibly a Stephen King adaptation, but it owes as much to A Nightmare on Elm Street as it does to its source material. King’s gritty, working-class characters from his 1970s potboilers like Carrie were a big influence on the horror auteurs of the ’80s, and by the time he finished It in 1986, he was watching his own ideas thrown back at him on the screen.
Meet the Losers Club — (left to right) Oleff, Grazer, Wolfhard, Jacobs, Lieberher, Lillis, and Taylor
Of course, after The Shining, King was on his way to being the most adapted writer in all of film history. That has resulted in some all-time classics, like Stand by Me and The Shawshank Redemption, and also big balls of dumb like Maximum Overdrive and this summers’ eye roller The Dark Tower. It is definitely a mark on the good side of the King ledger.
We first meet Bill Denbrough (Jaeden Lieberher) in his bedroom in Derry, Maine, making a paper boat for his little brother Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott) to sail in the rushing storm gutter on a rainy day. Bill is sick, so Georgie goes out alone, and when the boat gets swept into the sewer, he meets Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård). Lured by his boat — and an entirely plausible story about a super-fun circus that lives in the sewer — Georgie goes a little too far and becomes the first victim in a wave of missing children that sweeps through the small community.
The next summer, 1989, Bill and his friends in the Losers Club — chubby new kid Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor), bespectacled loudmouth Richie (Finn Wolfhard), schlubby germophobe Stan (Wyatt Oleff), overprotected Eddie (Jack Dylan Grazer), and the home-schooled farm kid Mike (Chosen Jacobs) — set out to find the truth behind the disappearances while dodging the malevolent attention of a gang of bullies, led by budding psychopath Henry Bowers (Nicholas Hamilton). Meanwhile, Beverly Marsh (Sophia Lillis) is having some bully troubles of her own. The town mean girls have branded her a slut and unpopular loser. (As she says before getting trash water dumped on her “Which is it? Make up your mind!”) Fleeing her abusive father, she finds a natural kinship with the Losers Club and catches the eye of both Bill and Ben. The kids start to have visions invoking their worst fears, intertwined with the town’s dark past of murder, disappearance, and racist riots, which get more intense and dangerous as they close in on Pennywise, a malevolent supernatural force that feeds on fear. And what better way to generate fear than by manifesting as a clown?
Sharp-eyed genre observers will note that this is all very Stranger Things — right down to the presence of Wolfhard, who will return as the young hero Mike on the hit show next month. They share the core appeal of the plucky band of young nerds solving supernatural mysteries in the 1980s and the influences, which include The Goonies and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, currently still in theaters after a surprisingly successful 40th anniversary re-release. It delivers the atmospheric horror and jolts of big scares, but the core of the film is the chemistry and talent of its young ensemble cast. It turns into what Tarantino has called a “hang out movie,” and in this case, you’ll be hanging out in a sewer with a bunch of nerds and a scary clown — and having a blast.
Unlike a movie studio or traditional broadcast network, Netflix is not in the business of appealing to a mass audience with each new release. Instead, for their original productions, the streaming service tries to create shows that will find a niche audience. The business model for a show like NBC’s America’s Got Talent involves delivering ads to the largest number of people at once. But Netflix doesn’t sell ads. It sells subscriptions, and its execs know that it will only take one great show to hook someone into paying that monthly fee. Netflix doesn’t release rating numbers, but shows such as Orange Is the New Black, House of Cards, Sense8, and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt have enjoyed critical praise while amassing large enough loyal audiences to justify their existence. In the traditional advertising model, the interests of the networks are more closely aligned with their advertisers, but selling subscriptions directly to the audience switches that allegiance to the fans.
The latest successful product of this realignment of forces is Stranger Things. Netflix took a chance on a pair of twin brothers from North Carolina, Matt and Ross Duffer, a pair of newbies with a killer pitch: What if we remade all of the films of the 1980s at once? Well, not all ’80s movies, just the low- to mid-budget sci-fi and horror films of the type Hollywood rarely makes any more. Like The Goonies, the heart of the story lies with a group of precocious kids. Mike (Finn Wolfhard) is introduced as the dungeon master in the midst of the weekly Dungeons and Dragons session with fellow tween dweebs Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) and Will (Noah Schnapp). After a 10-hour bout of snack food and polyhedral dice, the boys bike home, but Will is intercepted in the dark woods of rural Indiana by a sinister, faceless monster who kidnaps the boy into a spooky parallel dimension that resembles the spirit world from Poltergeist. The next morning, Will’s mom, Joyce (Winona Ryder), calls the police, sending Chief Hopper (David Harbour) on a search for the missing boy.
Winona Ryder
Meanwhile, a young girl wanders out of the woods. Disoriented and almost mute, she has a shaved head and a tattoo on her wrist identifying her as “11.” When the owner of a diner offers her aid, a group of shadowy government agents show up in pursuit. Led by Dr. Brenner (Matthew Modine), the staff of Hawkins National Laboratory seem to be somehow involved with the monster’s parallel universe and responsible for Eleven’s telekinetic powers, whose depths are slowly revealed as the series progresses through eight episodes.
Matarazzo, Brown, and Wolfhard channel ’80s horror.
The Duffer Brothers follow the Tarantino formula of creating a pastiche out of loosely related genre films, taking images and moments from films like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Stand by Me, and Flight of the Navigator and sculpting them into something fresh. Stranger Things subverts as it mimics. Mike’s older sister, Nancy (Natalia Dyer), escapes the sexual punishment aspect of ’80s horror, while her prudish bestie, Barb (Shannon Purser), disappears into the netherworld. The crumbling Midwest of the Reagan era is painstakingly reconstructed, and the Duffers’ meticulous world-building pays off again and again, such as the way they luxuriate in 1983’s lack of cell phones, allowing them to keep information selectively hidden from their characters while letting the audience in on the bigger picture.
None of that would work without good characters, and Stranger Things has those in abundance, led by Winona Ryder in pedal-to-the-metal parental hysterics mode. The other adult standout is Harbour as the deeply damaged police chief, haunted by memories of his dead child. The heart of the show is Millie Brown as Eleven, whose combination of spooky intensity and wide-eyed innocence personifies the appeal of Stranger Things.
