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Mean Girls

“This isn’t your mother’s Mean Girls,” reads the marketing slogan. Whatever that means.

Twenty years ago, we were transported to a mini-skirt-clad world where pink was worn on Wednesdays and everyone had been personally victimized by Regina George. In 2004, comedian and writer Tina Fey brought the world of the Plastics to life in Mean Girls.

Defined by catty comebacks and irreverent humor, the mean girls in Fey’s world weren’t as dark as the ones at Westerburg High, nor did they cover up a murder-by-jawbreaker. Instead, they skillfully mastered a new level of manipulation and backstabbing, leaving behind a cult classic.

The 2004 movie holds a special place in pop culture, and now inspires a whiff of millennial nostalgia. Attempts were made to make fetch happen again with the made-for-TV film Mean Girls 2, but it paled in comparison to the original. Fey went back to high school for Mean Girls: The Musical, which opened on Broadway in 2018 and ran until Covid shut New York’s theaters down in March 2020. 

The Broadway play ushered in a new generation of fans, but the original fan base was still around and kicking, which means that when the trailer for the film adaptation of the musical adaptation was released with the tagline “Not your mother’s Mean Girls,” it was going to alienate somebody. 

Turns out, there was nothing to worry about. The 2024 adaptation of Mean Girls: The Musical serves as a nice entry point to the fandom for newer audiences, while embracing the elements that contributed to the phenomenon. 

Staying faithful to the Broadway source material, the film opens with narration by Janis Imi’ike (Auli’i Cravalho) and Damian Hubbard (Jaquel Spivey), who preface the story with the song “A Cautionary Tale” delivered in the portrait style of a vlog, which will become a recurring visual element of the film.

Similar to a Broadway stage change, we’re whisked to Kenya where Cady Heron (Angourie Rice) sits alone pondering if there is more to life than current circumstances (“What Ifs”). Her mother (Jenna Fischer) informs her that they will be moving from Africa to Illinois, thus presenting an opportunity for Cady, who had always been homeschooled, to find her footing.

Principal Duvall (reprised by Tim Meadows) introduces Cady (or Caddy)  to the less-than-welcoming Northshore community, including her homeroom teacher Ms. Norbury (reprised by Tina Fey). The hothouse world of high school throws Cady for a loop, and the infamous cafeteria scene only adds to her disorientation. 

As she settles into her canonical bathroom stall for lunch, Janis and Damian bring Cady under their wings to help her find her ideal clique. But first, Damian and Janis warn Cady, beware of The Plastics—notorious gossiper Gretchen Wieners (Bebe Wood), ditzy Karen Shetty (Avantika), and the queen bee, Regina George (Reneé Rapp reprising her acclaimed role in the 2019 Broadway production).

The chokehold that Regina has on the student body is displayed in the song “Meet The Plastics,” and it’s evident that Cady secretly yearns to be accepted by Regina and her friends. After being invited to sit with the Plastics for the remainder of the week, Cady goes to math class, where she meets Aaron Samuels (Christopher Briney).

Cady falls hard for Aaron, and sings “Stupid With Love,” but she’s warned by Gretchen to not pursue him any further, as Aaron is Regina’s ex. Oblivious to the deep politics of the situation, Aaron invites Cady to his Halloween party. Regina, who is now aware of Cady’s crush, plots to spite Cady by getting back together with Aaron, setting Cady on a path to revenge with a scheme to ruin Regina’s life with guidance from Janis and Damian.

The film is filled with blink-and-you’ll-miss-it references to the original movie, and fun cameos. Lindsay Lohan, who rode the original film to superstardom in 2004, plays the math competition moderator. But as is always the case with Broadway adaptations, some elements that made the original film so iconic are either toned down, or get lost in the theatrics.

Take, for instance, “Revenge Party,” which introduces Janis, Damian, and Cady’s plan to ruin Regina’s life. While it’s a fun number which translates to the screen beautifully, it sacrifices the cold-blooded sabotage our anti-heroic trio originally displayed. Sure, it’s a colorful sequence, accompanied by a skillful montage. But it lacks the queasy emotional impact of Regina’s fall from grace and Cady’s meteoritic, Machiavellian rise to popularity.

Still, the Plastics are back with a fresh set of faces to invite audiences to “write it all down.” They may have lost a bit of their edge, but gained some catchy songs, and a new generation of fans. 

Mean Girls

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Indie Memphis Youth Film Fest

CrewUp Youth Mentorship film Fight 4 Your Love

Indie Memphis began in 1998 when University of Memphis film student Kelly Chandler wanted to create a space where her fellow students could showcase their work. As the festival grew into a major Memphis cultural event, artist development remained a major part of the mission. In 2016, the Indie Memphis Youth Film Fest was launched to help give middle- and high-schoolers a taste of the highs and lows of filmmaking.

“We’re giving these students an opportunity to really explore it before they say, ‘This is definitely what I wanna do,’” says Joseph Carr, Indie Memphis’ managing director.

Students in the CrewUp program are partnered with adult mentors, experienced filmmakers who will guide them through the process of writing, planning, and producing a short film. Carr says that even those who discover filmmaking is not for them get valuable experience in creative collaboration. “It can apply to every part of your life. If you can’t collaborate, you’re not gonna be successful in any field you work in.”

Memphis Youth Showcase feature Blood and Roots

One Youth Film Fest participant who did decide it was for her is Vivian Gray, who won awards at the 2017 and 2018 festival. Gray says she entered her work “on a whim,” but found “it was truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience. It shaped so much of my future, just by being able to participate, period. I met other peers who made films, I met the folks at Indie Memphis who are so supportive, and just to show my work for the first time publicly was really special, and I’m very grateful for it.”

Carr acted as her mentor when she won a production grant as a prize in 2017. (The grant program is now awarded by application, separate from the main student competition.) “When you’re young, you don’t have any concept of how much work it’s going to be,” says Carr. “You just have great ideas and you want your ideas to come to life. Vivian was just so game to jump in and just run with her idea. You could tell very early just how comfortable she was on set, and just how comfortable she was in her voice. When you’re in the presence of a true artist, you can tell very quickly that they have a lot to say.”

Gray went on to earn a degree from the acclaimed University of Southern California film program. Her short film, “Tape 23,” debuted at Indie Memphis ’22 and has spent the last year on the festival circuit with “Providence,” a television pilot she directed. She will return to Youth Fest as a juror this year. “I feel like it’s grown even more, and continues to do what it did for me and so many other young filmmakers and artists. It is near and dear to my heart.”

Another artist coming full circle this year is Vivie Myrick. The actor made her screen debut at the Youth Festival and recently appeared on the Showtime TV series, George & Tammy. “She directed a film last year as her last output for her age group in the Youth Film Fest,” says Carr. “Now she’s now back to host an acting workshop.”

The festival will kick off on Saturday, August 26th, with a keynote address by screenwriter Hennah Sekander. The recent Memphis transplant has written for the Apple TV+ series Hello Tomorrow! and the Amazon Prime Video Chris Pratt vehicle The Terminal List. “I’m gonna talk about ‘The Slingshot Effect,’ which is something that I coined under pressure on a phone call with Joseph Carr because he said we needed a title, and it just felt like the most potent symbol for how you marry character and plot to tell a good story.”

When Craig Brewer introduced Sekander to Carr, she immediately asked how to get involved with Indie Memphis’ youth program. “I think a big reason why this writer strike is happening right now is there’s this feeling of resistance from the studio side to invest in new talent and kind of support younger voices as they try to make their way up the ladder,” Sekander says. “So I think that means it’s all the more important for writers to do that work that probably wasn’t done for them.”

The festival is free for students who sign up for passes and pay-what-you-can for adults. The short films which premiere this Saturday at the Halloran Centre will represent the culmination of a year of work by the young filmmakers. “I’m always just beside-myself thrilled when these students finish their movies,” says Carr. “Some teams will drop out, or something will come up, and they can’t finish. But seeing these completed films on the big screen, all the problems we have leading up to it are just melted away.”

The 2023 Indie Memphis Youth Film Fest is Saturday, August 26th, at the Halloran Centre. For the schedule, visit indiememphis.org.

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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem

Cowabunga! Mutant Mayhem shows off the best versions of Leonardo, Michaelangelo, Donatello, and Raphel in years.

I had one eyebrow raised as I walked into Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. I’d been burned by the turtles before. I watched the classic ’80s cartoon as a kid, but their previous big-screen offerings have featured bright green costumes that seemed more the stuff of nightmares than a stylish interpretation of their indie comics origin.

Mutant Mayhem, luckily, has no such missteps. Director Jeff Rowe and producers Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, and James Weaver embrace the good kind of weirdness that comes with the turtle territory. The success of Into the Spider-Verse has opened the door to fresh approaches in animation, and Mutant Mayhem takes full advantage. The visible brush strokes in an early shot of the moon over New York City set the mood for a film filled with jagged, scratchy lines. The artistic mayhem captures both the glamor and grime of the city’s sidewalks and sewers, while adding an air of controlled chaos during the rapid movements of combat scenes. Mutant Mayhem’s doodle aesthetics harken back to scribbled drawings in the corners of middle-school notebooks.

As baby turtles, our quartet of heroes are exposed to radioactive ooze which transforms them into humanoid form. Their adoptive father Splinter (Jackie Chan), a rat who was also exposed to the ooze, discovers them in the sewers and trains them in martial arts. Leonardo (Nicolas Cantu), Michelangelo (Shamon Brown Jr.), Donatello (Micah Abbey), and Raphael (Brady Noon) sneak their way through the streets of New York City to retrieve vital supplies like toilet paper and Cool Ranch Doritos. They watch humans from afar, idolizing Ferris Bueller during a movie night in the park and dreaming of one day joining the paradise that is high school. Like normal teenagers, they do things like bicker and film themselves as real life Fruit Ninjas slicing watermelons with a sword.

But the turtles are tired of living in the sewer. Their new human friend April O’Neil (Ayo Edebiri) needs to do something great to distract her classmates from an embarrassing high school moment. They hatch a plan to record the turtles performing heroic deeds and package it as the news story of the year. Luckily for their plan, a villain known as Superfly (Ice Cube) has been stealing fancy scientific equipment from armored cars around the city and needs stopping.

Sure, there are superhero elements, but Mutant Mayhem is a high school soap opera about a group of outcasts who just want to fit in. The turtles aren’t ready-made heroes or defenders of New York. Their teen angst eventually spirals into a large-scale city conflict, but it’s this grounded take that makes this the best TMNT film ever. According to Rogen, this is the first time that all the titular characters have been voiced by actual teenagers. It’s easy to tell when the voice actors are freed to riff off script, improvising with one another and bantering like kids at school.

Other longtime TMNT stalwarts pop up, including fellow mutants Rocksteady (John Cena) and Bebop (Rogen). As a fan of the original cartoon, I missed their arch enemy Shredder and members of the Foot clan, but really, they’re not needed here. Teen melodrama, cool visuals, and fancy fisticuffs earn Mutant Mayhem a deserved “Cowabunga!”

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
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Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One

Run, Tom Cruise, run! Run he does in Dead Reckoning Part One.

Last summer, the movie business had been all but pronounced dead. Conventional wisdom said that audiences, locked out of theaters by the Covid pandemic (remember that?), were now permanently captured by streamers. Then Top Gun: Maverick roared into wide release to the tune of $1.5 billion, and by the end of the year, Paramount had reversed course, proclaiming that the studio would only produce films intended for theatrical release.

The rest of 2022 and 2023 have turned out to be fairly average years, box-office-wise. Numbers are down from 2019, which was a banner year thanks to Avengers: Endgame, but nothing like the catastrophe of 2021. Then, there were the twin failures of Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania, which lost Marvel/Disney $120 million, and the $200-million bath Warner Bros. took on The Flash, which may end up being the biggest box office flop of all time.

Then, on May 2nd, the Writers Guild of America went on strike against the studios, and last week, the Screen Actors Guild joined them on the picket lines. Now, the doom and gloom is back in Tinseltown. The problem that the last few months has exposed is this: The alleged break-even point for a film like The Flash is $600 million. (I say “alleged” because “Hollywood accounting” is synonymous with “lying.”) This is not a business model; it’s a gambling addiction. And none of it is the fault of the writers who are paid a pittance by the flailing gamblers, or the actors, most of whom don’t earn the $27,000 a year necessary to qualify for SAG’s health insurance.

Enter Tom Cruise and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. Director Christopher McQuarrie and the returning Impossible Mission Force had their budget and schedule blown by Covid delays, but promised a big on-screen payoff. They delivered on that promise.

The film’s dense, fast-moving cold open harkens back to the franchise’s roots as a Cold War-era spy series. The Sevastopol, a Russian nuclear submarine testing out a new AI-powered stealth system, is discovered and fired upon by an American sub. When they return fire, the American sub is revealed to be a WarGames-style computer mirage, and their own torpedo turns against them. Meanwhile, back in Washington, CIA Director Kittridge (Henry Czerny, returning) is briefing DNI Denlinger (Cary Elwes) on the Entity, a cyberweapon that achieved sentience and escaped into the wilds of the internet after sinking the Sevastopol. Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise, running) is dispatched to retrieve a key that may be the key to controlling the rogue AI. But Hunt and IMF ops Benji (Simon Pegg) and Luther (Ving Rhames, sitting) have other ideas. Burned by six films’ worth of betrayal and disavowal at the hands of their bosses, they decide that no one can be trusted with the Entity’s power, and vow to destroy it.

MI represents both the good and the bad of Hollywood in 2023. It is a $295-million film in a 25-year-old franchise built around an aging movie star and an intellectual property whose origin few remember. But unlike butt-ugly CGI fests like The Flash and Quantumania, all that money is on the screen. Yes, there’s CGI in MI, but that’s really Tom Cruise jumping a motorcycle off a cliff in the Alps. When the climax pays tribute to The General, they really drive a locomotive off a real bridge, just like Buster Keaton. Yes, it’s too long (geez, this is only part one?), but the story is clear and the editing brisk. Unlike too many big-budget gambles, I never felt bored and ripped off. Plus, Tom Cruise fighting an AI in the middle of a strike triggered by a threat to replace actors and writers with AI is just too perfect. I’m rooting for Cruise.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One
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Joy Ride

(l to r) Sabrina Wu, Sherry Cola, Stephanie Hsu, and Ashley Park

The road trip comedy is an ancient and hallowed form of trash cinema, encompassing everything from It Happened One Night to Bob Hope’s career to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Adele Lim knows a good road trip story when she sees one. Crazy Rich Asians, the film she wrote in 2018, was a light romp about Asian-American immigrants going back to discover their roots. That’s the same territory she explores with her directorial debut, Joy Ride — only this time, she explores it with exploding rectal cocaine balloons. 

Audrey (Ashley Park) and Lolo (Sherry Cola) have been best friends since they met as primary-schoolers in their suburb, White Hills. True to the name, Audrey and Lolo are the only Asian kids in their school. Audrey is the adopted daughter of white parents, while Lolo’s parents own the local Chinese restaurant. The friends, who never miss an opportunity to turn a photo op into a flippy, are a perfect match. Audrey’s the overachiever brought out of her shell by Lolo’s free spirit, and in turn she keeps Lolo from diving off the deep end. Together, they terrorize White Hills until they leave for college and go their separate ways. 

Lim and writers Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao set the plate for the adult hijinks to ensue with such verve, I would have watched an entire film of the adventures of Young Audrey and Lolo. 

Flash forward to the present day, where Audrey is an overachieving associate at a white-shoe law firm who regularly bests her office of hard-charging white males on the squash court. Her boss Frank (Timothy Simons) taps her for a crucial trip to Beijing, where she will close big deal with Chao (Ronny Chieng), a Chinese tycoon. Lolo is living rent-free in Audrey’s garage while she pursues her art projects, which include an “adult playground” with vagina-shaped slides. Audrey takes Lolo along as her translator, warning that this is not a fun-filled girl’s trip, but a serious business venture. But Lolo has already invited her cousin Deadeye (Sabrina Wu), a nonbinary Gen Z K-pop stan. 

In Beijing, Audrey meets up with her college roommate Kat (Stephanie Hsu), a successful actress on the set of her TV show The Emperor’s Daughter. Lolo, as Audrey’s childhood best friend, is instantly jealous of her college best friend. When the fast friends learn that Audrey is meeting Chao in a swanky nightclub, they tag along. Audrey first struggles to keep Chao on task, and then struggles to not vomit from the Thousand Year Old Egg shots. When she loses that struggle, the only way to salvage the deal is to accept Chao’s invitation to his mother’s birthday party. He insists she bring her birth mother, whom Audrey has never met. The gang sets out on a high-speed train trip through “real China” to find Audrey’s parentage, which results in one raunchy comedic misunderstanding after another. 

Joy Ride is the kind of post-Animal House comedy Hollywood used to mass-produce, with a difference. Lim’s directorial style is an unapologetically female gaze — this film is filled with good-looking men with their shirts off. She’s at her best when playing in the Bridesmaids mode of women finding freedom through over-the-top raunch, such as when our heroes disable a basketball team with a night of cocaine-crazed sex, or the Cardi B-inspired musical number that results when the gang is forced to impersonate a K-pop band. The only reason it doesn’t fall into a pit of sentimentality when the search for Audrey’s mom gets serious is that the excellent ensemble cast steps up to sell it. It’s that camaraderie that makes Joy Ride worth it.

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Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret

Well, the book banners are at it again. Since the good ol’ U.S. of A. was founded by a diverse (from a theological perspective, anyway) group who had just witnessed a couple hundred years of bloody religious civil war in England, freedoms of belief and expression were enshrined as fundamental rights in the new country. So those who would impose their religion on others start by whipping up moral panics about “pornography! In the schools!”

Long before the words “Ron DeSantis” first passed fascist lips, they came for Judy Blume. Her 1970 middle-school coming-of-age novel Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. has everything: frank talk about sex, a skeptical view of religion, and worst of all, a female protagonist learning about her period. The horror! Children should know nothing about sex except that God hates you for it.

The bannings in the 1970s made it a widely read Gen X classic. Blume resisted offers from Hollywood until The Simpsons executive producer James L. Brooks and director Kelly Fremon Craig finally convinced her it was time to film the unfilmable.

Rachel McAdams as Barbara Simon and Abby Ryder Fortson as Margaret Simon in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.

We first meet Margaret Simon (Abby Ryder Fortson) having the time of her life at summer camp. When she returns home to her mother Barbara (Rachel McAdams) and father Herb (Benny Safdie), she’s quick to notice something is afoot. Grandma Sylvia (Kathy Bates) blurts out the news: Dad got a promotion and the family is moving from Brooklyn to the suburbs of New Jersey.

While the family is still unpacking, neighbor Nancy (Elle Graham) introduces herself. Margaret is attracted to her new friend’s self-confidence, and she gets a boost when Nancy asks her to join her girl gang. But navigating her new school’s social scene becomes Margaret’s minefield.

Meanwhile, a long-simmering situation in Margaret’s family life is coming to a boil. Barbara’s Christian fundamentalist parents disowned her when she married Herb, who is Jewish. Margaret must choose which religious tradition she wants to join, if any. Margaret prays her own way in private, and her missives to God give the film narrative structure. When Margaret finds out why she’s never met her grandparents, it fills her with horror — the more she sees of religion, the less she wants to do with it.

Craig nails the feel of the wood-paneled 1970s. Her technique is conservative, compared to The Diary of a Teenage Girl and Eighth Grade. It’s the acting that sends this adaptation into greatness. Fortson’s performance is wise beyond its years, and Graham’s a natural. Craig’s screenplay increases the role of Barbara, and McAdams makes a meal of it.

Margaret’s choices — to be a mean girl or not; to be Jewish, Christian, or none of the above; to be fake and popular or risk being real; being forced to choose between competing branches of her family — are so universal that they transcend the 20th-century setting. What has scared the pearl-clutching book banners for 50 years is that Margaret makes her own choices for her own reasons and lives more or less happily ever after. That kind of freedom is not something the reactionary mind welcomes.

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
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Oxford Film Festival Celebrates 20th Anniversary

Little Richard: I Am Everything opens the 20th annual Oxford Film Festival on Wednesday, March 1.

Matt Wymer’s first year as executive director of the Oxford Film Festival is a special milestone for the organization. “This is our 20th Anniversary edition and we’re celebrating the audiences that allowed the Oxford Film Festival to inspire and entertain our community for the past two decades. To show our appreciation, we are providing more free screenings, more panels, and bigger parties than ever before.”

This year’s festival includes 15 narrative and 18 documentary feature films, 93 shorts, and 18 music videos. The opening night feature is Little Richard: I Am Everything, Lisa Cortes’ portrait of the R&B iconoclast. This film is so new it doesn’t have a trailer yet, but here’s the director talking about tackling the story of an often misunderstood musical genius.

In a festival year with history on its mind, OFF goes way back into the archives. The first film shot in Mississippi is believed to be The Crisis from 1916. It’s the story of an ill-fated love triangle between a St. Louis lawyer-turned-Union officer, a Southern belle, and her Confederate fiancé. The Mississippi Film Commission is sponsoring the screening as part of their own 50th anniversary celebration.

The Crisis

Oxford’s most famous native is brought to life by the present day Mississippi production William Faulkner: The Past Is Never Dead by director Michael Modak-Truran.

The closing night feature is The Banality, a Southern Gothic tale of recurring nightmares, small town eccentricities, and murder.

You can buy tickets and passes, and get more information about all the festival screenings and events, at the Oxford Film Festival website.

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Now Playing in Memphis: Murder Bears Everywhere

Cocaine Bear roars into theaters this weekend.

It’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for—the weekend when Cocaine Bear comes out to play! Based on the true story of a God-fearing Tennessee ursine led to drug-fueled damnation in Georgia by a forest cachet of yayo, this promises to be the most accurately named junt since Snakes On A Plane. Elizabeth Banks directs Keri Russell, O’Shea Jackson Jr., and one completely wrecked bear.

Murder bear week continues with Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey. To answer your first question, yes, this is a real movie. British schlockmiester Rhys Frake-Waterfield noticed that Winnie the Pooh passed into the public domain in 2022, and now he’s here to destroy and corrupt the only thing in your childhood that gave you comfort. Thanks a lot, dude.

In Bunker, a squad of soldiers is trapped underground with a malevolent presence in this atmospheric horror flick. Is it a bear? Probably not, but a guy can dream, can’t he?

Director M. Night Shyamalan returns with his latest psychological thriller, Knock at the Cabin. A young family on a mountain vacation is terrorized when a hulking figure appears at the door. Is it a bear? Kinda—it’s Dave Bautista, here to present the mother of all trolly problems. 

If you’ve had enough of bears, Saturday night is the February edition of the Time Warp Drive-In, where you can watch two towering masterpieces of Blaxploitation cinema. Shaft was a huge hit in 1971 that won Isaac Hayes an Academy Award. That meant that in 1972, Shaft’s Big Score could afford to blow up a helicopter. Witness the power of Shaft.

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Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania

Like stepping on an anthill, Marvel’s antics in this romp will have you itching to leave your seat.

When, exactly, did the MCU jump the shark? For me, it was with Avengers: Age of Ultron. Things were fun and getting funner on Earth-616 until 2015, when Joss Whedon assembled Earth’s mightiest heroes to fight another army of faceless, disposable enemies.

There has been a lot of ups and downs in the approximately dozen lifetimes that have transpired since then, but the one thing we could take solace in was the comforting mediocrity of Marvel movies. The MCU had a low ceiling, but a high floor. They were never great — the demands of branding always weighed the stories down with extraneous fluff — but they were never as awful as the DC super-turds they were extruding over at Warner Brothers.

I’m sad to report that with Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania, the floor has finally dropped out.

Let’s begin with the title. When presented with director Peyton Reed’s idea to call the third Ant-Man film “Quantumania,” who was the coward at Disney who failed to tag an exclamation point on it?

“Quantumania!” See how much better that is?

Second, let’s talk about The Wasp (Evangeline Lilly). She is not so much a character as she is an afterthought. Occasionally, you can catch writer Jeff Loveness remembering Hope van Dyne is in the movie. Lilly plays her with a resigned detachment I find relatable.

Third, is there something I’m missing about Paul Rudd? He brings to Ant-Man a weird kind of anti-charisma, in that everything he does seems repulsive and wrong. Did he get this job because he is so bland and flavorless no one finds him offensive? Is “tolerability” really all we ask of our movie stars?

Fourth, M.O.D.O.K. (Corey Stoll) Where to even begin? Sorry, Jack Kirby heads, but M.O.D.O.K. is just a goofy character design that’s impossible to take seriously outside his Silver Age comics context. Every moment he’s on screen is excruciating.

The only characters I really liked in this meandering multiverse were Hank Pym’s (Michael Douglas) uplifted ants. When they’re sucked into the quantum realm alongside the aging super-scientist and his screwup family, they spend their time dilation doing something useful, like developing a Kardashev Type II civilization, so they can ride to the rescue like diminutive Rohirrim.

Speaking of the Pym family, all this Quantumania(!) could have been avoided if Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) had told her granddaughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) what happened while she was trapped in the quantum realm for 30 years. Janet claims she didn’t tell her family about the exiled supervillain Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors) because she wanted to protect them. Not to second guess a super-scientist, but wouldn’t it have been logical to just tell them, “Hey, there’s this dangerous supervillain who is trapped in the quantum realm, so maybe don’t go poking around down there?” She wouldn’t have even had to broach the subject of her affair with Lord Krylar (Bill Murray, going big) or of her role in fomenting a minuscule rebellion against the forces of Kang’s tiny tyranny.

But the worst part of Quantumania is not the stupid characters or the Baskin-Robbins product placement. This movie looks bad. I saw it in 4K, and most of the time it was a dark, swirling CGI soup. The haphazard lighting and aggressive color grading conspire to make poor Majors look constantly sweaty. I thought the Marvel shark had been well and truly jumped, but it turns out the Fonz was just getting warmed up.

Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania
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New On The Big Screen: Viola Davis, Pearl, and The Evil Dead

Viola Davis stars as General Nanisca, a real-life African warrior from the 1820s, in The Woman King.

August is traditionally a slow month at the cinema as the summer tentpole season plays out. But this August, we’re also seeing the downstream effects of the pandemic production bottleneck. The surprising upshot is that the dearth of megabudget projects has created openings for a wide variety of new films to hit theaters, many of which are well worth your time.

The biggest release this weekend is The Woman King. Viola Davis is the only Black woman to have achieved the “Triple Crown of Acting” — winning an Oscar, an Emmy, and a Tony. She’s one of the elite group of actors who have an entire Wikipedia page devoted to listing her awards. Now, at age 57, she finally gets the big action role that all movie stars get these days. Davis stars as General Nanisca, the leader of the Agoji, an all-female group of warriors who defended the West African kingdom of Dahomey. Think The 300, but with Black women.

The surprise success of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out spawned a mini-wave of cheeky murder mysteries. The latest is See How They Run. Yes, we’ve gathered you all together because one of you is a murderer. Maybe more than one. We’re not sure. It’s complicated. This one is set in the 1950s, when a hit play in London is being adapted for a Hollywood movie by director Leo Kapernick (Adrian Brody). When the director turns up dead, Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell) and rookie Constable Stalker (Saorise Ronan) are assigned to crack the case. The suspects are an all-star cast of pretentious theater people including Ruth Wilson and David Oyelowo. Watch Ronan’s hilarious deadpan in this fun trailer.

Ti West’s X was another surprise hit last spring. Now, the director and his star Mia Goth return with a prequel to that juicy bit of neo-exploitation cinema. Pearl tells the origin story of the elderly killer in X by flashing back to the silent era, where the titular Texan only wants to get out of the sticks and get famous. Early reviews have generated Oscar buzz for Goth, who, as you can see, is absolutely killing it.

It’s Time Warp Drive-In weekend, and if you’re a horror fan, this one is a can’t-miss. Sam Raimi scored the year’s second-biggest box office hit with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. You can see how he got his start with 1981’s The Evil Dead. Now considered a masterpiece of horror, The Evil Dead was shot on a shoestring budget in East Tennessee, and gained a big enough cult following to greenlight a sequel. Evil Dead 2 returned star Bruce Campbell to the Rocky Top hills, this time with more money and more know-how. Just look at this incredible scene, a masterclass in both practical effects and walking the thin line between horror and comedy.

The evening at the Malco Summer Drive-In will conclude with the third Evil Dead film, 1992s Army of Darkness, in which our not-too-bright hero Ash is transported back in time to save a medieval kingdom from the Deadites. Listen up you primitive screwheads! This is how it’s done!