It’s a crowded weekend for new releases, so let’s get right to it. Blue Beetle is almost as old as Batman — so old, he once starred in a radio serial — but he never took off like the Bats. His current incarnation is Jamie Reyes, a Mexican-American undergrad who finds an alien robot scarab, and, well, just watch.
Memphis expat auteur Ira Sachs’ latest is his most controversial work to date. Passages is a film about a love triangle between a charismatic rogue film director (Franz Rogowski), his longsuffering printmaker husband (Ben Whishaw) and a meek school teacher (Adèle Exarchopoulos) that earned an NC-17 rating from the MPA for reasons that Ira Sachs explains in this interview I did with his for this week’s Memphis Flyer. This is one of the year’s best films so far, so don’t sleep on it.
Sure, dogs are great. But wouldn’t they be greater if they could talk? Sure they would. But let me up the ante for you: What if dogs could talk, and they talked dirty?
Uh huh. Now I got your attention. Will Ferrell, Will Forte, Jamie Foxx (that’s Academy Award-winning actor Jamie Foxx to you), and Randall Park are dirty, dirty dogs that talk in Strays. Since this is the Flyer, we’re running the red band trailer, so put on your headphones unless you want your boss to overhear and fire you.
Wesley Snipes is a national treasure who doesn’t get enough work because most Hollywood producers are weak and fearful. That’s why he’s producing his own joint with fellow under-appreciated talent Tiffany Haddish. Back on the Strip brings together a crackerjack cast, including JB Smoove and Bill Bellamy, to tell the story of Merlin (Spence Moore II), a wannabe magician who discovers his real talent is as a male stripper. Snipes co-stars as “Mr. Big.”
In a shocking twist, Tiffany Haddish’s film is opening against a film co-starring Tiffany Haddish. This one is Landscape With Invisible Hand, based on the science fiction novel by M.T. Anderson. When aliens come to earth, things go on pretty much as normal. A new social media niche opens up because the aliens don’t understand human emotion. They will pay people who are in love to livestream their lives, which are apparently very entertaining to the loveless blobs. But what happens when two livestreamers fall out of love? Litigation, apparently.
Foxx, Parris, and Boyega deliver near-perfect performances in this film.
They Cloned Tyrone seems like one of those movies like I Was a Teenage Werewolf or Snakes on a Plane where they came up with the title and worked backwards. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I mean, have you seen Sharknado? They made six of them!
Whatever method director Juel Taylor and Tony Rettenmaier used to come up with the concept, they should keep doing it. To me, They Cloned Tyrone is a very pure form of science fiction. Even after towering masterpieces like Frankenstein, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and The War of the Worlds, sci-fi struggled to gain acceptance in the literary mainstream. The genre was mostly relegated to cheap pulp magazines with pictures of little green men menacing scantily clad women on the cover. But many of the stories inside those lurid covers, from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation to Philip K. Dick’s “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” were serious works of art.
They Cloned Tyrone leans hard into disrepute with an appropriately sleazy Blaxploitation setup: Fontaine (John Boyega) is running a two-bit drug trafficking operation that is threatened by his better-capitalized rival Isaac (J. Alphonse Nicholson). One typical day on the job, he violently evicts one of Isaac’s guys from his territory and shakes down pimp Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx) and his ho Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris) for some money he’s owed. But after the shakedown winds down, Isaac’s enforcers catch up with Fontaine. Slick Charles and Yo-Yo see him gunned down in the parking lot. They’re shocked when Fontaine shows up the next day, none the worse for wear, demanding the money they already paid him.
Fontaine, it seems, is a clone. But who cloned him, and why? (We meet Tyrone much later in the story. Spoiler: He’s a clone, too.) Yo-Yo obsessively collects Nancy Drew books, and she’s itching to play girl detective in real life. The three not-quite friends start to see weirdness everywhere; little things they overlooked or took for granted start to take on a sinister aura. What is fake and what is real starts to get hazy. So does the question of who is fake and who is real. And just because you’re a clone, does that mean you’re not you? Since Fontaine is a clone — albeit one with a mixture of fake and real memories — whose side is he really on? Does he even know?
Imagine if Philip K. Dick wrote Hustle & Flow, and you’ll get a sense of what They Cloned Tyrone is like. Taylor is heavily influenced by Craig Brewer’s Memphis hip-hop opus. Parris plays Yo-Yo with the same sass-mouth accent Paula Jai Parker used as Lexus. Yo-Yo even says she’s just trying to get enough money to get back to Memphis. Very relatable.
Throwing DJay and Shug into They Live in the hood makes for some wildly entertaining scenes. But Taylor and Rettenmaier have a lot more on their minds than trash talk and jump scares. They stretch their premise into allegory like Jordan Peele, whose epochal Us is another clear influence.
Three near-perfect performances from Boyega, Foxx, and Parris keep all the plates spinning. When confronted by big weirdness, they freak out appropriately, then get down to the business of saving their hood. Boyega plays multiple scenes with himself but never looks like he’s bluescreening it in. Foxx’s “Playboy World Pimp Champion 1995” is funny but never demeaning. (Get well soon, Jamie Foxx! The world needs you!) Parris is constantly revealing new layers of Yo-Yo, who is largely responsible for keeping the plot moving forward. In the final act, when the screenplay starts to struggle to stick the landing, all the hard work the actors have done keeps the increasingly strange proceedings grounded in reality. They Cloned Tyrone smuggles gold inside a trash bag as only good sci-fi can.
Tom Cruise hangs on in Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning pt. 1.
After many pandemic-related delays and a storm of publicity, Tom Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie are back with Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Pt. 1. This time, the Impossible Mission Force is sent to take down The Entity, an advanced AI that has gained sentience and is threatening humanity. How does that lead to Tom Cruise jumping a motorcycle off a frickin’ mountain? We’re about to find out.
John Boyega stars with Jamie Foxx in They Cloned Tyrone, a sci-fi action comedy which pays homage to/sends up 70s Blackspolitation films. Teyonah Parris, David Alan Grier, and Kiefer Sutherland also star. Expect multiple Tyrones.
Hey, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is still in theaters, and it’s still good! Harrison Ford’s victory lap as the beloved archeologist/adventurer delivers the Spielbergian action beats you crave — even if James Mangold is at the helm this time.
While the big studios pour six-digit budgets into tent poles expecting to hit home runs, Blumhouse moneyballs the game with consistent base hits like Insidious: The Red Door, which made its $15 million budget back in two days.
On Wednesday, July 19, at Crosstown Theater, Indie Memphis will present a selection of short films from the Odú Film Festival in Brazil, which is a production of the Black Freedom Fellowship. These shorts include “Ara” (“Time”) a ghost story from director Laryssa Machada imagining a dialogue with her grandfather, whom she posthumously discovered was gay.
“Ara”
Then on Thursday, July 20, Crosstown Arts Film Series presents John Waters’ Female Trouble, the film which introduced viewers to the immortal drag legend Divine.
“The Simpsons Already Did It” is a 2002 episode of South Park. Trey Parker wrote the now-classic installment out of frustration, because he was always scrapping good ideas for episodes after someone remembered that The Simpsons had gotten there first. In sci-fi circles, there’s a lesser-known equivalent: “Doctor Who did it,” a recognition that, over the almost 60 years Doctor Who has been on the air, staff writers at the end of their wits have already tried everything. In the 1970s, for example, the Doctor Who serial “The Ark In Space” donated many plot points to Alien, including parasitic, wasp-like creatures who feed on human hosts, and an ending that is uncannily similar to Ridley Scott’s. In “The Deadly Assassin,” the Doctor must enter a computer simulated world called The Matrix to battle a malevolent intelligence that controls the fabric of reality. In 1973, Doctor Who celebrated its tenth anniversary with a very special episode, “The Three Doctors,” in which all three of the actors who had at that time played the regenerating Time Lord teamed up to defeat an ultimate evil.
Benedict Cumberbatch as Doctor Strange separates Spider-Man’s soul from his body.
Which brings us to Spider-Man: No Way Home. Since the new Marvel film just scored the second-biggest opening weekend in history, taking home a dizzying $637 million worldwide as of this writing, I’m going to assume you already know where I’m going with this Doctor Who digression.
The film, directed by Jon Watts, helming his third Spider-Man solo outing, begins immediately after the events of Spider-Man: Far From Home. Longtime spider-antagonist J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons) uses his paranoid tabloid website TheDailyBugle.net to broadcast a video from the dying Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaall) outing Peter Parker (Tom Holland) as Spider-Man. Peter, having just returned from saving London’s bacon, is intent on exploring his new relationship with MJ (Zendaya) and getting into M.I.T. Instead, he finds himself at the center of a media maelstrom, and the lives of the people around him, like Aunt May (Marisa Tormei), his bestie Ned (Jacob Batalon), and handler Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau), are thrown into chaos.
Since Peter knows that the post-Thanos world was set right by the reality bending power of Doctor Strange’s (Benedict Cumberbatch) magic, he seeks out help from his super-colleague. But when they try to cast the spell to erase the world’s knowledge of Spider-Man’s identity, Peter’s indecisiveness distracts Strange at the wrong moment, and the universe shudders. Suddenly, Spider-Man is called to fight some villains that are unfamiliar to him — but familiar to us in the real world who have watched nine Spider-movies in the last 20 years.
Wilem Dafoe as The Green Goblin
For, you see, Spider-Man: Far From Home is the result of a long-running dispute that has made many a corporate lawyer’s boat payment. Spider-Man has been the jewel in Marvel’s crown of classic characters since his introduction in 1962. When the company fell on hard times, back in the 1980s, it sold Spidey’s movie rights to stay afloat. This resulted in a series of collapsed projects and lawsuits that stretched over 16 years. Ultimately, Columbia Pictures traded its claim on the James Bond franchise to MGM in exchange for the spider-rights, and parent company Sony footed the bill for the excellent 2002 Spider-Man, directed by Sam Raimi and starring Tobey Maguire as the friendly neighborhood webslinger. After three movies, Raimi and Maguire handed the baton to Marc Webb and Andrew Garfield for The Amazing Spider-Man, which was decidedly less than excellent.
Meanwhile, Disney CEO Bob Iger (who is retiring at the end of 2022 to go count his money) had the bright idea to just buy Marvel outright — albeit without Spidey. Disney took the Marvel B-team, the Avengers, and made them the core of a cash machine. Meanwhile, Sony was thrown into crisis when the North Korean government hacked its computers as retaliation for the Seth Rogen comedy The Interview, and it was forced to the bargaining table with Disney. After unfathomable amounts of money changed hands, Spider-Man could once again share the screen with other Marvel characters.
Zendaya as MJ flees the paparazzi with Spider-Man.
Far From Home is essentially a reunion show, bringing back familiar faces from the franchise’s multi-corporation evolution. First, there’s Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina), who confronts Spidey on the now-mandatory bridge fight scene. Also from the Sam Raimi Spider-years is Sandman (Thomas Hayden Church), and The Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe). From the Amazing Spider-Man years come Lizard (Rhys Ifans) and Electro (Jamie Foxx), and they’re all confused when they see that the MCU Peter Parker doesn’t look the same as he did when the intellectual property was controlled by Sony.
Surprise! Doctor Strange’s magic also brought Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield, both sporting their respective spider-jammies, to Earth C-53, and the aforementioned classic Doctor Who episode breaks out. If it ain’t spider-broke, don’t spider-fix it!
Seeing the three Spideys together, it’s safe to say the hero has had good luck with casting. Maguire, nowadays mostly a producer, exudes emo gravitas. Garfield, saddled with bad scripts and indifferent direction during his tenure, blossomed as an actor in his post-superhero career. He looks like he’s having the most fun. Holland, meanwhile, tries valiantly to hold the whole mess together, one reaction shot at a time. On the other side, the always brilliant Alfred Molina and Willem Dafoe deliver better than the material deserves. Meanwhile, current it-girl Zendaya outshines everyone whenever she and Holland scheme together to, as Doctor Strange says, “Scooby Doo this shit.”
As a stand-alone work, No Way Home can’t match either the Raimi-Maguire era or even Holland’s first outing, Homecoming. But the film, which just had the second biggest opening box office weekend of all time and is being hailed as the savior of the theatrical experience, is better understood as the successful culmination of a decades-long branding exercise by the two largest intellectual property conglomerates on the planet. Hooray for Hollywood!
In the beginning of this version of Annie, Quvenzhané Wallis, starring as the famous cartoon orphan, gives a presentation to her class about her favorite president, Franklin D. Roosevelt. During the Great Depression, lots of people were poor and very few were rich. It was like today, only without the internet, she explains as her classmates beat light hip-hop rhythms on their desks, Stomp style. But then FDR made all the poor people rich, and everybody was happy.
This is not quite how the history books record it, of course, but I guess family entertainment needs an educational aspect to partially justify its existence, or, in the case of Annie, to justify two hours of product placement.
Annie has the feel of a vanity project for Jay-Z. The hip-hop mogul who had one of his biggest hits in 1998’s “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem),” which samples one of the two songs everyone knows from the 1977 Broadway musical. But poverty must seem like a distant memory to Jay-Z at this point, since his musical output for the past few years has pretty much been songs about how rich he is, and how he wants to get even richer. So as part of his “getting even richer” program, he enlisted fellow super-rich dad hip-hop star Will Smith to co-executive produce this remake of the class-conscious musical for the mobile phone age.
For Wallis, however, the memory of poverty must be much clearer. At age 5, the child of a teacher and truck driver was found at a cattle-call audition by the director of 2012’s Sundance winner Beasts of the Southern Wild, and subsequently became the youngest person ever nominated for a Best Actress Oscar. She was reportedly paid more to play Annie than was spent in total on her film debut.
Cameron Diaz as Miss Hannigan
You may have noticed that I have been writing about money for this entire review. That’s appropriate, since that’s pretty much what Annie is about. As a little orphan, Annie doesn’t have any. Instead of an orphanage, she lives in a foster home/child services scam run by Miss Hannigan (Cameron Diaz, who at least looks like she’s having fun most of the time) with a bevy of other unfortunates. She pines for her parents until one day, while chasing a stray dog she names Sandy, she is saved from certain death by Mr. Will Stacks (Jamie Foxx, who is usually more able to convincingly look like he’s having fun), a cell phone mogul whose Bloomberg-like mayoral bid is floundering. His two campaign handlers, Grace (Rose Byrne) and Guy (Bobby Cannavale) think he needs to look more human to the voters, so he takes Annie to live in his Tony Stark-like penthouse high above New York City, where she charms him and the rest of the city with her wit and spunk.
Wallis remains a compelling screen presence, but for any actor, it’s one thing to do indie realism and quite another thing to do musical theater. She’s game, even when she’s being out danced and out sung by her fellow orphans, and she at least doesn’t embarrass herself like Foxx, who will likely go to his grave remembering the time a director told him to stand still and hold the Purell bottle so the camera can get a nice long shot of the label. Product placement has long been a scourge of Hollywood filmmaking, but Annie is the most egregious offender in recent memory. When a character takes a moment to read off the model number of the Bell helicopter he’s piling into for the big chase scene, it’s clear the balance has tipped from escapist movie musical to extended infomercial. It’s so egregious that the film finds itself compelled to comment on it, with Grace wisecracking to Annie at the clumsy film-within-a-film Twilight parody they attend, “Product placement is the only thing keeping the film industry afloat these days.” Annie is an argument that it’s time to let that kind of filmmaking sink.
Would it surprise you to learn that Horrible Bosses is the highest-grossing black comedy ever? It surprised me, mainly because I didn’t think they kept statistics for that kind of thing. Don’t get me wrong, I love black comedy as much as any good, cynical movie critic. But they don’t usually make a lot of money — as the old saying goes, “Satire closes on Saturday night.” And yet, Horrible Bosses raked in north of $200 million on a $35 million budget. So they made another one.
The would-be murderous trio from the first one, uptight accountant Nick Hendricks (Jason Bateman), dental assistant Dale Arbus (Charlie Day), and clueless finance drone Kurt Buckman (Jason Sudeikis), have started a business to market their invention, the Shower Buddy. After they bicker, bumble, and pantomime hand jobs on a TV morning show, they improbably get a call from someone at a boutique mail-order business, Boulder Stream, who thinks the Shower Buddy is a “home run.” After turning down a buyout offer from Boulder Stream executive Rex Hanson (Chris Pine, the guy who plays Captain Kirk but isn’t William Shatner), they strike what they believe is a favorable deal with his father, CEO Bert Hanson (Christoph Waltz). But once they fulfill their part of the contract, Bert double crosses them, and they have only a few days to save their company from his clutches. Naturally, they decide to kidnap Rex for $500,000 and use the ransom money to pay off their loan to the bank. Maybe, they “reason,” they’ll be better at kidnapping than they were at murder.
They aren’t, so they meet again with “MF” Jones (Jamie Foxx), who gives the gang some vague plans about sedating the victim, which leads them to break into the office of Dale’s old boss, Dr. Julia Harris (Jennifer Aniston). The film reaches its comedic high point when Nick must bluff his way through a sex-addiction recovery group to save his co-conspirators from discovery. Armed with a canister of anesthetic, they attempt to kidnap Rex, who immediately gets the better of them and takes over the plan. They’ll fake his kidnapping and split $5 million, because Rex is the kind of guy who thinks big.
The central comedy trio works well enough: Bateman is the straight man, the Groucho figure, while Day and Sudeikis goof it up. Pine is deliciously douchebaggy as the devoid of all human empathy scion of wealth, and Waltz plays to type as his calmly evil father. Aniston is apparently incapable of partial commitment to a role, and there’s a beautiful cameo from Kevin Spacey, who looks like he just showed up for one day and nailed his profanity-filled monologue.
But for this kind of comedy to work, the actors need a pretty tight plot to mug against for laughs.The Hangover was a good example. Unfortunately, Horrible Bosses 2 takes after Hangover 2 instead, cynically pilfering plot points from better movies like Raising Arizona when it’s not just replaying beats from the original. While the original got subversive laughs from the class tensions, making the central trio businessmen like their targets instead of employees defangs the premise and makes them into just another set of amoral, plotting sharks in an economy filled to the brim with them. As Foxx’s character says in a failed joke that reads like a screenwriter’s uncomfortable moment of clarity, these characters are just a bunch of criminals who still think they’re nice guys. But with this much star power on display, they should at least be funny criminals.
