Tag: Jack Black

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Borderlands

Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Ariana Greenblatt, Florian Munteanu, and Jamie Lee Curtis search for alien treasure in Borderlands.

“Zero percent! You don’t see that very often!” 

That’s Claptrap (Jack Black), the robot in Borderlands, after being asked to calculate the odds of surviving an encounter with some Psychos in the Caustic Caverns beneath Pandora. 

Coincidentally, “zero percent” was Borderlands score on Rotten Tomatoes when I checked it last weekend.

I only get preview screenings on very rare occasions these days. (Is it something I said? Knowing me, it probably was.) I usually don’t read any other critics before I watch a film for review. Like most pros, I have a love-hate relationship with Rotten Tomatoes. On the one hand, a congregator for reviews seems like a good idea. On the other hand, the site has reduced many people’s relationship with cinema culture and film criticism to a single statistical number, derived through means that sound scientific on the surface but are in fact quite dicey. On the third hand, they did invite me to contribute my reviews and remind me when I forget. So at least someone is paying attention to me! 

This week, I was trying to decide between It Ends With Us, based on a romance novel by Colleen Hoover, the bestselling author of the decade, and Borderlands, based on a video game series I was vaguely familiar with. Word on the socials was that Borderlands was an epic stinker, so I glanced at the RT score. Zero percent is, like the robot says, not something you see very often. It’s Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever and Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 territory. Now, my choice was clear. 

An RT goose egg doesn’t scare me. I saw Highlander II: The Quickening in the theater. Voluntarily. I had to see what was so bad about Borderlands. Maybe director Eli Roth would turn the aesthetic corner and create a film so bad it’s good! As a frequent flyer at Black Lodge Shitfest, I appreciate a good trainwreck. For me, the last so-bad-its-good pic — what the SubGenius community calls badfilm — was Gods of Egypt. It’s got everything: Geoffrey Rush phoning it in as the sun god Ra! Chadwick Boseman solving the riddle of the sphinx! Tiny Courtney Eaton! I can’t look away. 

Gods of Egypt got 14 percent “good” reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. Checking RT as I write this, after opening weekend, Borderlands has soared to 8 percent. The positive notices come mostly from sources that aren’t exactly cinematic tastemakers — like Polygon, who praise anything related to video games.

So how bad is Borderlands? I regret to inform you, it is a very bad film, but not badfilm. Borderlands the game is a first-person shooter released in 2009. Even the original was excessively derivative. Pandora, the planet on which the action takes place, shares a name with the homeworld of Avatar’s Na’vi, but it looks like Mad Max’s post-apocalyptic Australia. More accurately, it looks like Fallout, the classic video game from 1988 whose developers were among the first people to adapt George Miller’s outback junkyard aesthetic. It’s also the second film I’ve seen this year to rip off Miller’s Furiosa, the first being Deadpool & Wolverine. (Seriously, if you haven’t seen it, give Furiosa a chance.) 

The star of the show is Cate Blanchett as Lilith, one of four playable characters from the original Borderlands. Blanchett is cursed with a stiff red hairdo that, for badfilm aficionados, will bring up memories of Frances McDormand’s fright wig in Æon Flux. Lilith is a space bounty hunter who’s “getting too old for this shit.” When she’s offered a very impressive sum by Atlas (Édgar Ramírez) to rescue his daughter Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt) from rogue trooper Roland (Kevin Hart), who has taken her to Pandora, she responds by killing the messenger. Literally. 

After hooking up with Claptrap, the mandatory R2-D2 figure, Lilith finds Tiny Tina, who has befriended another playable character, Krieg (Florian Munteanu). He is a renegade Psycho, the oh-so creatively named legion of canon fodder every first-person shooter needs. After evading Atlas’ goon squad, they end up at, what else, a crazy frontier bar owned by Mad Moxxi (Gina Gershon). There, they meet Dr. Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis, feathering her 401(k)), an archeologist who knows the way to the Vault, the lost alien treasure repository that is Pandora’s only tourist attraction. (Get it? Pandora’s Box? It wasn’t funny in 2009, either.) 

Borderlands’ vibes feel as mercenary as the characters. Blanchett, who may be physically incapable of giving a bad performance, hits her marks and sneers. Hart and Curtis seem to be devoted to expending as little energy as possible. Ramírez delivers not one but two slow claps. Greenblatt’s screen presence is like nails on a chalkboard. Badfilm legend Gershon, of Cocktail and Showgirls fame, brings the same vacuous energy here. 

Borderlands channels all of the worst tics from the two decades of mediocre blockbuster cinema. It’s got that flat Marvel lighting; characters who appear just to check a box on some Reddit filmbro’s wish list, then disappear without a trace; hyper-violent yet listless action sequences; an off-putting sadistic streak; and the kind of quippy dialogue that would cause Joss Whedon to yell at an entire writer’s room. (Credited writer Joe Crombie is a pseudonym. At least eight other writers reportedly worked on the script, but none of them would put their name on it.) Everything about Borderlands reminded me of, and made me wish I was watching, another, better movie. 

Anyway, I hear It Ends With Us is okay. 

Borderlands
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Now Playing in Memphis: Cuckoo for Borderlands

Borderlands (Courtesy Lionsgate)

It’s August, traditionally the tail end of the summer blockbuster season. But there’s still plenty of choices for your big screen viewing pleasure.

Cuckoo

Gretchen (Hunter Schafer), an American teenager, moves to the German Alps to live with her divorced Dad (Jan Bluthardt). But things are not all as they seem in the picaresque mountain town. Her father’s wealthy boss Herr Koing (Dan Stevens) has some plans that seem … unnatural. This psychological horror by German director Tilman Singer is giving off heavy Midsomer vibes.  

It Ends With Us

Gossip Girl’s Blake Lively stars in this adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s popular romance novel of the same name. Lily (Lively) has just opened her own floral shop in Boston when she has to return to her Maine hometown to eulogize her abusive father. She finds herself with a choice between an emotionally distant neurosurgeon boyfriend (Justin Baldoni) and an old flame (Brandon Sklenar). 

Borderlands 

The first person shooter hit from 2009 gets a film adaptation. The great Cate Blanchett stars as Lilith, an adventurer who descends to the planet Pandora (no relation to the Avatar homeworld) in search of a rumored vault full of alien treasure. To help her navigate the savage planet, she bring along her robot Claptrap (Jack Black), the mercenary Roland (Kevin Hart), demolitionist Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt) and more familiar characters from the game. 

Lawrence of Arabia

If you loved Dune: Part Two earlier this year, now you can see the inspiration for Denis Villaneuve’s sweeping desert landscapes. David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia is one of the great masterpieces of cinema, and was actually one source of inspiration for Frank Herbert’s original novel. On Sunday Aug. 11 and Monday Aug. 12 at the Paradiso, there’s a special Fathom screening of the film, which starred Peter O’Toole as British intelligence officer T.E. Lawrence who tried to rally Arab resistance against the Ottoman Turks during the First World War. If you’ve wondered why things in the Middle East have been so screwed up for so long, this film will give you a little bit of insight. Lawrence was, depending on who you ask, either the guy whose arrogance started the still-roiling conflicts or the guy who saw the future and tried to head it off. Both points of view are aired in Lean’s immortal epic, and O’Toole’s legendary performance hints that maybe they’re both right. Unlike some films, this is one you’re going to want to watch on the biggest screen available. But don’t take my word for it, ask Steven Spielberg.

Breakin’

Breakdancing is making its debut as an Olympic sport this weekend, so it’s appropriate that Crosstown Arts is screening the first film focused on the dance phenomenon. Breakin’ is about as 1984 as you can get. Helmed by exploitation director Joel Siberg, who tried to recapture the dance magic a few years later with Lambada, it’s got a paper thin plot, but memorable characters and no shortage of great dance moves. Check out this scene, featuring a very young Ice-T.

Breakin’ screens on Thursday, August 15 at Crosstown Theatre.

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Now Playing: Love, Magic, and Kung Fu Panda

Katy O'Brian and Kristen Stewart get pumped in Love Lies Bleeding. (Courtesy A24)

Here’s your weekly guide to what’s new and worth your time on the big screen in Memphis.

The movie with the buzz this weekend is Love Lies Bleeding. Kristen Stewart stars in this erotic thriller from director Rose Glass and A24. Stewart is Lou, a gym manager in the steroid jungle of Las Vegas in the 1980s. Her life is upended when Jackie (Katy O’Brian from The Mandalorian) starts training at her gym, and spending the night in her bed. When Lou’s mob boss dad (Ed Harris) gets involved, bodies start to hit the floor. 

The second film opening this weekend which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival is The American Society of Magical Negroes from first-time helmer Kobi Libii. The magical negro, a stock Black character who shows up in stories to make white people feel better about themselves, is a long tradition in American fiction. David Alan Grier stars as a trainer for the secret society, designed to keep on a lid on race relations, who bites off more than he can chew with his hapless new recruit Justice Smith. 

The Malco Summer Drive-In is reopening for spring, and Time Warp Drive-In is back with Night In The City: The Deadly Urban Worlds of Martin Scorsese. The first of the triple feature is a favorite of Marty heads everywhere. Goodfellas is a flawless film about the lure of the underworld and the consequences of the lifestyle. Early in the film, Scorsese drops one of the all-time great long takes, called a “oner” in movie parlance. Watch as Marty simultaneously introduces Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco’s characters Henry and Karen Hill and paints the world around them in a single tracking shot that lasts a little over three minutes.

Taxi Driver is where the legend of Marty really got rolling. Robert De Niro stars as Travis Bickle, a cabbie with a violent streak who develops a crush on a campaign worker played by Memphian Cybill Shepherd. On set, De Niro served as a mentor to Jodi Foster, who was twelve years old when she was cast as a child prostitute who Bickle tries to rescue from a life on the street.

I’m just going to say it: Oppenheimer was mid. Killers of the Flower Moon should have won the Best Picture Oscar. It’s now my favorite Scorsese joint. Anyway, here’s the trailer to my now second-favorite Scorsese, and the third film on the Time Warps’ killer triple bill, which rolls on Saturday at dusk, After Hours.

Credit where it’s due, Kung Fu Panda, the animated series of furry wuxia parodies is way better than it has any business being. That’s mostly thanks to the flawless voice work of human cartoon character Jack Black, but you gotta give the inventive animators props, too. The fourth one in the series is currently the number one movie at the American box office.

If you haven’t caught Dune: Part Two yet, the sci fi epic is worth seeing on the biggest screen you can find. If you have seen it, maybe go again. 

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Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is an adequately constructed, reasonably functional piece of entertainment. Maybe that doesn’t sound like much — being merely adequate seems like a ridiculously low bar to clear for a major studio production that cost $100 million. Imagine saying that about any other industry’s product. “My car doesn’t explode and kill me when I start it” is hardly an endorsement. You don’t have to say “This food processor won’t inject deadly blowfish toxin into your infant’s pureed carrots.” That’s pretty much expected, right? But this is the state of big-budget Hollywood filmmaking as we open 2018 — I am shocked when a film that cost enough to pay the salary of 2,080 Tennessee middle school teachers doesn’t make me pray for the sweet release of death.

Make no mistake — this is exactly the extruded, film-type product that is the big studios’ reason for being these days. It’s a remake of the 1995 Robin Williams film Jumanji, directed by Joe Johnson, the special effects wizard whose most recent credit is the first Captain America movie. In that not-very-well-remembered non-classic, kids (including a 13-year-old Kirsten Dunst) find a magical, explorer-themed board game that causes things to appear in real life with a roll of the dice, including Williams, who had been trapped in the game’s jungle setting since 1969. But as Welcome to the Jungle‘s Alex (Mason Guccione) says in the film’s brief intro, “Who plays board games any more?” So the board game magically upgrades itself to a console cart, and when Young Alex picks up his controller, he is sucked inside to an uncertain fate.

That was in 1996. Cut to present day, where four high schoolers are trying to make it through their day. Nerdy Spencer (Alex Wolff) is splitting his time between playing video games and writing papers for his hunky football player friend Fridge (Ser’Darius Blain). When their cheating is discovered, they get detention together. Selfie-obsessed Bethany (Madison Iseman) gets detention for making a Facetime call during a quiz, while bookish Martha (Morgan Turner) gets thrown in the teen clink for disrespecting her gym teacher. Our Breakfast Club heroes are assigned to help clean out the school basement, where they find the 20-year-old Jumanji console gathering dust. Once they plug it in and choose their characters, they are sucked inside the game. It’s like Tron, but with less neon.

Inside the game, they inhabit the bodies of the characters they chose. Spencer is now Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, aka Dr. Smolder Bravestone; Fridge is now Kevin Hart, or Professor “Mouse” Finbar, Bravestone’s sidekick; Martha is Karen Gillian, aka Ruby Roundhouse, the Laura Croft figure in midriff revealing short shorts; and, worst (or best) of all, comely Bethany is now Jack Black, aka Professor Shelly Oberon, the cartographer. Once they’re on the virtual ground, they learn the ropes of the video game world (everybody gets three lives, hippos are deadly, cake makes Finbar explode) and set out on the quest to complete the game and gain their freedom. Along the way, they hook up with Alex, now played by pop star Nick Jonas.

Director Jake Kasdan (son of Raiders of the Lost Ark scribe Lawrence Kasdan) should be credited for excellent casting. The main quartet has great chemistry and consistent comic chops. Hart particularly is pitch perfect as a vain football star who can’t get used to not being physically dominant. If all The Rock does for the rest of his career is comedy, it will be best for everyone. Gillian, who propped up the Doctor Who franchise for three seasons as companion Amy Pond, tackles the job of Token Leia with wry fun while sporting an amazing mane of red hair. And all you need to know about Jack Black’s role as a teenage girl trapped inside a pudgy middle aged man’s body is that there’s a scene where she/he has to figure out how to pee with a penis. Up against these four powerhouses, Jonas is clearly the weak link, barely able to hit his marks and squeak out his lines.

Everyone takes the material exactly as seriously as it deserves to be taken, which is to say not seriously at all. The plot is barely existent, but the fact that it’s a video game allows the folks inside it to crack constant meta jokes. Kasdan knows this is all about his stars’ charisma, and keeps them bouncing off each other in pleasing ricochets. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle will fade from memory as soon as you leave the theater, but at least you won’t feel ripped off. And yes, Guns N’ Roses got paid.

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Film Features Film/TV

Kung Fu Panda 3

It’s a good time to be an animation fan. Television is filled with cutting-edge work, from Adventure Time to Adult Swim. In theaters, the reign of Pixar has produced a string of masterpieces, the latest of which was last year’s Inside Out. Even though it’s been overshadowed by Pixar, and still extruding corporate product like Rise of the Guardians, DreamWorks Animation has stepped up its game after years of floundering in the Shrek doldrums, led by a panda who does kung fu.

Has there been a more obvious-only-in-hindsight film premise in recent memory than Kung Fu Panda? Once those three words were spoken in the DreamWorks executive suite sometime in the middle of the last decade, it was inevitable that they would be followed by “Get me Jack Black!” Po, the dumpling-obsessed, orphan panda turned dragon warrior, is the perfect conduit for Black’s hyperkinetic charisma. It would be hard to imagine the franchise banking a billion and a half bucks without Black providing Po’s animus.

But this installment of the panda’s adventures in the stylized feudal Chinese setting of the Valley of Peace has more going for it than just Black. It seems to be one of those rare bits of corporate synergy where the right players were assembled, beginning with director Jennifer Yuh Nelson, a 43-year old Korean American whose work on Kung Fu Panda 2 made her the highest-grossing female director of all time. For this installment, Nelson shares the big chair with longtime DreamWorks animator Alessandro Carloni, and their direction keeps Kung Fu Panda 3 nimble and assured.

The film opens in the spirit realm, where Grand Master Oogway (Randall Duk Kim), having achieved ultimate enlightenment, is chilling on a Roger Dean-inspired floating rock, when he is attacked by his old enemy Kai (J.K. Simmons). The immortal bull-being wants to collect Oogway’s qi, or spiritual energy, and use it not to conquer at Scrabble (where qi is valuable because it is a “q” word you can play without a “u” in your rack, and also because its alternate spellings “ki” and “chi” are legal words), but to bring the entire world under his hoof. Any movie that starts off with a bull and turtle battling through the astral plane with magical, zero-G kung fu has my attention.

Meanwhile, back in the land of the mortal anthropomorphic animals, Po’s teacher Master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman) is retiring and appointing Po as his successor at the Jade Temple kung fu school, just in time for our hero to fight off an onslaught by Kai and his pop-up army of jade zombies. Po’s worldview is further shattered by the arrival of his long-lost father, Li Shan (Bryan Cranston), who offers to take him home to the secret, Shangri-la-like village of pandas to perfect his knowledge of qi (which will get you 33 points on a Triple Word Score). Po’s adopted father Mr. Ping (legendary character actor James Hong, who achieved immortality as Lo Pan in Big Trouble in Little China) is suspicious, and tags along for the journey, leaving Po’s sidekicks the Furious Five to fight a rear-guard action against the rampaging Kai.

Flowing freely between styles inspired by anime, Pixar, and Asian woodcuts, Kung Fu Panda 3 is easily the most visually lush film DreamWorks has ever produced. The combination of the over-the-top aesthetic of Chinese wuxia films with the Western animated tradition, where animals like Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny assume human traits, has produced a cool, original cross-cultural mashup. Like the work of Jackie Chan (whose Master Monkey is all but neglected in this film), the meticulously choreographed fight sequences are played for slapstick. The basic concepts and iconography, while they may sound confusing in a review, are easily grasped by kids raised on Dragon Ball Z. Po’s journey of self-acceptance lacks the psychological insight of Inside Out, but what it lacks in sophistication it makes up for in good-spiritedness. Kung Fu Panda 3 may be empty calories, but it tastes pretty good going down.

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The Man Behind the Mask

There’s a scene midway through Nacho Libre that is as exciting to me as anything I’ve seen in a movie in quite some time. In it, men stand around at a party, drinking cerveza and noshing on chips and salsa. To American eyes, though, this isn’t just any old gathering: The men at the party are wearing garish masks and three-piece suits. The scene is compelling not just because it’s so fantastical but because no one in the scene acts like it’s out of the ordinary: Because it’s not.

This is the world of the luchadores, practitioners of Lucha Libre — a form of Mexican wrestling. Successful luchadores are some of the biggest celebrities in Mexican society, so much so that they are, as a nun in the film describes, false idols that the people worship. They wear their wrestling masks all the time — not just in the ring — their identities a secret to all but their inner circle. Nacho Libre is not as good as its topic, however. It merely scratches the surface of its setting, and the best thing that can be said about it is that I now know what I’ll be for Halloween this year.

Nacho Libre is the sophomore effort from co-writer/director Jared Hess, whose debut film, Napoleon Dynamite, achieved cult status with scads of eminently quotable dialogue and an impossibly nerdy — and charming — protagonist. Also notable about Hess’ first film is the seeming ease with which it communicates its filmmaker’s voice.

In this regard, Nacho Libre may be most notable for the revelation that Hess longs to make movies like Wes Anderson (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums). At times, Hess mimics Anderson so totally that it’s unnerving, employing Anderson trademarks like the slow-motion depiction of a character’s walk, caption descriptions of on-screen people and items, and the love of boyhood paraphernalia. Unfortunately, Nacho Libre is best when it is at its most Andersonian, and it feels adrift when it loses that focus.

In concept, Jack Black is perfect for the role of Nacho. Black understands that his body looks utterly unathletic, and he plays up this fact with poses that mock the failures of his physique. But his body is actually graceful and the juxtaposition of fat and nimble makes him a perfect candidate for a wrestler.

Black is the whitest actor playing a Mexican since Charlton Heston in Touch of Evil, but at least it’s explained in the film, as Nacho’s mom is said to have been a Lutheran missionary from Scandinavia (his dad was a Mexican deacon). Black also sports the worst Mexican accent in recent memory, with phrases like “nitty gritty” churned out like he has a mouthful of guacamole. Black channels Antonio Banderas at his cheesiest, and in a movie this silly, it absolutely works.

He also provides Nacho with a wide-eyed, sometimes even cross-eyed, dumbness that is perfect for the character in the world outside the ring. But one of the main problems with the movie is that Nacho needs to be a more competent wrestler.

Like Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre is about misfits trying to find a place in a misfit society. In Dynamite, the main character is shown to achieve a grace not normally achievable when he performs a choreographed dance. The moment the dance ends, his body sinks back into discomfort, as if gracelessness were a kind of gravity.

In Nacho Libre, a similar scene is needed. Nacho struggles to be accepted in the Catholic mission where he lives and the social world of the luchadores. Nacho is shown early to have some physical skill, but inexplicably, though the story seems to have carefully laid groundwork otherwise, Nacho doesn’t achieve fame in wrestling through his animal talents. In matches where he should be destroying opponents that are more experienced but less gifted, Nacho instead suffers defeat after defeat. Shouldn’t Nacho win some of the time?

All sports fans want to root for athletes who are good at what they do (except maybe Cubs fans). Filmgoers are no different. The audience shouldn’t be rooting for Nacho just because he’s a good guy. He should earn and elevate our admiration through his joint-snapping destruction of opponents. By the time the film does finally warm to the concept, it’s too late.

There’s a compelling story in the detritus of the wasted opportunity that is Nacho Libre. With but a simple rewrite to infuse the movie with a more honest depiction of Lucha Libre, Nacho Libre could have been great. As it stands, however, it’s little more than another Jack Black comedy — plenty entertaining and a reasonable excuse to escape the summer heat, but not something that will be remembered beyond Halloween.

Nacho Libre

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