Tag: John Goodman

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Film Features Film/TV

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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.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

True Stories, Zombi Child, and Teen Wolf This Week at The Movies

David Byrne and John Goodman hit the mall in True Stories.

Happy Super Tuesday. Hope you’re all out voting today. Once you’ve made that decision, it’s time to go to the movies.

Tomorrow night, Wednesday, March 3rd, Indie Memphis’ film series presents Zombi Child. Bertrand Bonello’s film takes the zombie myth back to its Caribbean roots. Before Night of the Living Dead, zombies were always associated with Hatian Vodou. Practitioners would prepare a powder containing pufferfish toxin that would paralyze the victim and make them appear dead. Then, once the funeral was over, they would revive the victim and enslave them. How often, or, even if, this ever happened is the source of much dispute, but Bonello uses the legend as a jumping-off point to tell a story of high school intrigue and body horror. This film has a look that reminds me of the hugely underrated Raw. The show starts at 7 p.m. at Malco Powerhouse.

True Stories, Zombi Child, and Teen Wolf This Week at The Movies

On a completely different note, Malco’s Throwback Thursday at Studio on the Square brings us a horror-comedy from the 80s with some higher-than-average star power. Michael J. Fox cashed in on his newfound Back To The Future stardom with Teen Wolf. The not-really remake of I Was A Teenage Werewolf has its moments, but it’s no I Was A Zombie For The FBI.

True Stories, Zombi Child, and Teen Wolf This Week at The Movies (2)

Over at Crosstown Theater on Thursday, the Arthouse series serves up a cult classic. David Byrne burned down 30 Rock last weekend with his performance on Saturday Night Live. Let’s just take a moment to watch before proceeding.

True Stories, Zombi Child, and Teen Wolf This Week at The Movies (4)

Wow.

Anyway, in 1986, Byrne wrote and directed his only feature film, True Stories. It’s an unconventional and difficult movie to describe — kind of a set of interlocking character sketches of people Byrne read about in supermarket tabloids, kind of a travelogue of the middle America the consummate New York art-punk discovered while on tour, and kind of a cross between a music video and traditional musical based on the underrated (there’s that word again) Talking Heads album of the same name.

True Stories, Zombi Child, and Teen Wolf This Week at The Movies (5)

Byrne, who appears in the film as the narrator but doesn’t sing, elevated a little-known character actor named John Goodman to what passes for a leading role in this meandering mini-masterpiece.

True Stories, Zombi Child, and Teen Wolf This Week at The Movies (3)

See you at the movies! 

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Film Features Film/TV

Kong: Skull Island

I’m just gonna go ahead and say it: Kong: Skull Island is a bad movie.

That doesn’t really tell you much, because movies can be bad for many different reasons. Unlike the cynical cash grab of Independence Day: Resurgence, I got the impression that director Jordan Vogt-Roberts was attempting to make an enjoyable film. So rather than just lambasting everyone involved, I’ve decided to use this as a teachable moment. Here are five lessons to take home from Skull Island.

1. There’s a difference between a screenplay and a list of things that would be cool to put in a movie. Granted, a screenplay is, on some level, a list of things that would be cool to put in a movie. But a good screenplay must put the cool things in the correct order, something that does not seem to have been a priority here. Effect should follow cause, and then each effect should become a cause for another effect, and so on. Emotions should ebb and flow, and the screenplay’s job is to map out those beats. A lot of stuff happens on Skull Island, but none of it makes much sense, so there’s no emotional movement. It’s 1973, and as the Vietnam War winds down and Nixon’s grip on power is failing, Bill Randa (John Goodman), director of a shadowy group called Monarch, is eager to get to Skull Island. He sees his chance in the chaos (“There will never be a more screwed-up time in Washington,” he says in the film’s only real laugh line.) to piggyback on an expedition to the South Pacific mounted by Landsat. Which brings us to …

2. Suspension of disbelief is a gift from the audience. Don’t abuse it. King Kong is a giant monster, but monsters don’t really exist. (Insert your own Trump joke here.) People going to see a King Kong movie know this, but they are willing to accept the existence of cryptids for a couple of hours in exchange for some entertainment. But just because they’ve accepted one impossible thing doesn’t imply permission to just throw a bunch of other unbelievable stuff at them without some background work. Take the Landsat expedition, for example. Why are a bunch of space scientists humping it halfway across the planet to look at an island? Why introduce them at all when you’ve got a perfectly serviceable secret government agency to mount the expedition — led by national treasure John Goodman, no less! Which leads to …

3. Good casting will not save you. Kong: Skull Island has a great cast. There’s Goodman, 2015’s Best Actress winner Brie Larson as a photographer, the legendary Samuel L. Jackson as an Air Cavalry officer who is none too thrilled about losing ‘Nam, comedic genius John C. Reilly as a World War II aviator whose been stuck on the island for 28 years, and Loki himself, Tom Hiddleston, looking buff as a jungle guide. Dozens of people of questionable utility tag along on the expedition to deliver a couple of quips before being eaten by Skull Island’s spectacular collection of megafauna. Not that you’ll care about any of them, because they’re not characters, just loose assemblies of traits pulled out of a hat marked “Hollywood cliches.” Even the marquee star, King Kong, lacks depth, having somehow overcome his two greatest weaknesses — pretty girls and military aircraft.

4. Movie references are harder than they look. Quentin Tarantino has made an entire career out of stringing together borrowed scenes from other movies, so why not Kong? But here’s the thing: QT isn’t just throwing stuff in there to look cool (see #1). He knows the emotional beats he wants to hit and chooses a scene to reference that evokes the desired emotions. Thus, his references work on two levels at once. Kong: Skull Island throws out references left and right, most notably to Apocalypse Now. But director Vogt-Roberts does not seem to understand that. For example, the scene where Robert Duvall’s air cav cowboys attack a village to the tune of “Ride of the Valkyries” is meant to evoke horror at kids with guns treating battle as a lark. Nor does he understand that when Kubrick used the song “We’ll Meet Again” over images of detonating atomic bombs at the end of Dr. Strangelove, it was the blackest irony — nobody is meeting anybody again, because we’re all dead in a nuclear holocaust. When Vogt-Roberts uses the song as our surviving heroes ride to safety, the movie’s not even over yet.

5. It’s probably not the director’s fault. According to Hollywood Reporter, Kong: Skull Island will have to make $500 million just to break even. With half a billion bucks on the line, why did Warner Bros. choose an unprepared director whose only credits are a cheap Sundance comedy and Nick Offerman’s stand-up concert? Was it because he had a unique vision? No. It’s because he’s a rookie with no power whom the producers know they can steamroll, and he’ll make a good scapegoat if and when the whole thing blows up in a giant ball of red flame. I suspect Vogt-Roberts is about to learn that lesson.

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Film Features Film/TV

10 Cloverfield Lane

One time-honored method to make movies on the cheap is the “bottle show.” The idea is simple. Building sets costs money, and location shots present their own logistical problems, so when you’re short on cash, just come up with a reason to keep all of your characters trapped in one place and watch the sparks fly as characters bounce off each other. In the world of ever-expanding movie budgets, where you can’t put on a cape and fight crime for less than $150 million, 10 Cloverfield Lane is a bracing blast of old-fashioned thrifty craftsmanship.

You can’t get any more bottle show than the “group of survivors trapped in a bomb shelter” scenario, and first-time director Dan Trachtenberg makes the most of it. His sense of economy is obvious in the opening shot, a languid track across a New Orleans apartment that establishes who Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is: an aspiring fashion designer packing up to leave her boyfriend Ben (Bradley Cooper, who appears only as a voice on the phone). Her angry drive up I-55 is an homage to Janet Leigh’s escape with the stolen money in Psycho, complete with pounding, Bernard Herrmann-like score from Bear McCreary. But instead of stumbling into the Bates Motel, Michelle’s car runs—or is run—off the road, knocking her unconscious. When she wakes up, she’s chained to a bed in an anonymous basement, and the only door she can see looks suspiciously jail-like. She’s understandably alarmed, and meeting her new “host” doesn’t help. Howard (John Goodman) is a hulking Navy veteran who decided to build a survival bunker underneath his house sometime after his wife left him with their teenage daughter in tow. He tells Michelle that he rescued her from the car crash, but while she was unconscious, civilization collapsed, and they’re the only survivors.

John Goodman and Mary Elizabeth Winstead

This, naturally, raises a lot of questions, but there’s all the time in the world for answers. Howard’s not sure of the exact cause of the calamity—it could be nuclear or chemical, but whatever it is, the air outside is not fit to breathe, and nothing’s coming through on the radio. Howard’s story is more or less confirmed by the only other person in the bunker, Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.), a none-too-bright country boy who helped Howard build the bunker and thus knew where to go when the world went to hell. Holes in the story start to become apparent, and Howard’s giving off a real rapey vibe, even if he did save their lives, so Michelle has to decide if she’s in more danger in the bunker or facing the unknown on the surface.

Michelle and Howard’s characters are perfectly matched for confrontation: She runs at the first sign of trouble, while his instinct is to hide in situations he can control. Goodman puts on a powerhouse of a performance, vacillating back and forth between sympathetic and scary, often within the space of a sentence or two. Winstead, a horror movie veteran who has always risen to the challenges presented her, tops her former career best performance as Ramona Flowers in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.

The efficient screenplay, credited to Josh Campbell, Matt Stuecken, and Damien Chazelle, started life as an unrelated script J.J. Abrams bought for his Bad Robot production company and was rebranded as a spiritual sequel to the 2008 found-footage monster movie Cloverfield. That may have been a stroke of genius on the part of Abrams. Even though 10 Cloverfield Lane is not a found-footage movie, and even at the end it is still unclear if its alleged apocalypse is related to New York’s giant monster issues from the first film, the two works share a philosophy of assuming the point of view of ordinary people caught up in giant, inconceivable disasters to posit that the monsters in our minds are more dangerous than the ones outside the bunker.

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Film Features Film/TV

Trumbo

As a writer, I’m always suspicious of movies about writers. The protagonist is always hailed as being exceptionally talented but probably troubled. But when our hero is called upon to read his writing that everyone in the film says is so great, it turns out to not be very impressive, because the film’s writer is not as much of a genius as his character is supposed to be. And let’s face it: The life of the writer is not very interesting. It mainly consists of sitting still in front of a laptop and fretting.

But Dalton Trumbo was interesting. He didn’t just sit still in front of a typewriter — he sat in a tub surrounded by booze, ashtrays, and a typewriter. Trumbo won the National Book Award in 1939, got nominated for a screenwriting Academy Award in 1940, joined the Army after Pearl Harbor, and, after the war, became the highest paid writer in Hollywood. He was also, for five years, a member of the Communist Party of the United States, which would come to cost him dearly when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) called him to testify in 1948. Trumbo considered himself a patriot, and thought that HUAC had no legal or ethical right to persecute an American citizen for his political beliefs, so he and his compatriots refused to answer the committee’s questions and were convicted of contempt of Congress. Trumbo became known as the leader of the “Hollywood 10” who were blacklisted and no longer allowed to work with the major Hollywood studios.

Helen Mirren and Brian Cranston in Trumbo

Bryan Cranston plays Dalton Trumbo in Jay Roach’s adaptation of the writer’s life, and as you would probably expect, he does a tremendous job. Cranston’s work as Walter White on Breaking Bad has cemented him as one of the best actors working today, and he fully inhabits the role of the too-smart-for-his-own-good leftist with a big mouth and a precision-guided pen. Trumbo wrote scripts the old-fashioned way, buoyed by a heroic intake of scotch, nicotine, and amphetamines, and there is rarely a shot in Trumbo where Cranston is without a lit cigarette curling smoke from a long filter. There’s so much smoking going on that when Trumbo’s fellow traveller Arlen Hird (Louis C.K.) tells Trumbo he has lung cancer, it’s completely unsurprising. There are a lot of acting heavy hitters in Trumbo, but the scenes between Cranston and C.K. are by far the sharpest. Hird sees through Trumbo’s prodigious bullshit, but he plays along because he both agrees with and respects the older man. Cranston also gets to match wits with Helen Mirren as Hedda Hopper, the arch anti-communist gossip columnist whose column in the Hollywood Reporter reinforced the blacklist. Diane Lane plays Trumbo’s wife Cleo, and Elle Fanning his daughter Niki, both of whom feel the negative effects of Trumbo’s crusade. Other welcome actors include the underutilized Alan Tudyk as Ian McLellan Hunter, Trumbo’s friend who served as a front writer for the Academy Award-winning screenplay for Roman Holiday; John Goodman as hack studio head Frank King; and Dean O’Gorman, last seen as the dwarf Fili in The Hobbit trilogy, does an absolutely uncanny impression of Kirk Douglas

The actors are having such a good time that Trumbo‘s weaknesses in the story department are mostly papered over. Cranston’s huge, humane portrayal is great fun to watch, but he may come on too strong for the overall good of the picture. His confidence never wavers, even when he’s being strip-searched in prison, which means his character never changes. This is a common malady of biopics and historical dramas shared by, among others, Selma. Like Ava DuVernay in that film and F. Gary Gray in Straight Outta Compton, director Jay Roach plays it pretty safe, style-wise, choosing to focus on the characterization. Writer John McNamara’s dialogue gives the actors plenty of material to work with, but he lacks his subject’s talent for structural clarity. It would probably please Trumbo to hear a critic say Trumbo would have been better had Trumbo written it himself.