"Good Boys"

 ☆☆☆½ 

The R rating is the come-on, the gimmick to make you think Good Boys will be raunchier and much more shocking than it is. So, it's a little surprise that Good Boys is better than it needs to be, a foul-mouthed cross between "The Little Rascals" and Risky Business.

The boys in the movie call themselves "The Bean-Bag Boys," but someone wisely figured that would be a lousy name for a movie. They're a trio of hyper-hormonal 12-year-olds led by Max (Jacob Tremblay), who's the ringleader, with doting Lucas (Keith L. Williams) and dutiful Thor (Brady Noon) his hangers on. The coolest kid in school invites them to a "kissing party," and the movie follows their misadventures as they try to figure out just what that means.

The action is non-stop, and is often genuinely funny, frequently uncomfortable, and occasionally derivative -- like a crossing-the-freeway scene lifted straight from Bowfinger, but with a kicker that made me laugh harder than anything else in the movie.

Largely, your enjoyment of Good Boys will depend on whether you think it's funny for boys whose hormones are ranging to use the F-word and talk about sex and drugs. If you're instantly turned off, the movie is uninterested in bringing you around. Its filmmakers and its audience are probably unaware and unconcerned about how often this has all been done before, but fortunately Good Boys does most of it well enough. It'll make you laugh. Sometimes, that's all a comedy needs to do.

Viewed August 25, 2019 -- ArcLight Hollywood

1440

"Ready or Not"

 ☆☆☆ 

The opening half-hour of Ready or Not is so deliciously pitch-perfect that it seems impossible to sustain such a balance of black comedy, anxiety and satire. It tries, and for a very long time, it almost wins at its own game.

The idea is decidedly weird: Grace (Samara Weaving) marries the heir to the fortune of a worldwide board-game dynasty, most of whom live in a grand old gothic manor filled with secret passages and hidden doors. There's just one catch -- on their wedding night, new members of the family have to play a game with the others. Most options are benign ("Old Maid," anyone?) but one, hide and seek, is deadly. Guess which one she chooses?

She's got to stay hidden and alive between midnight and dawn, or else the lethal consequences of a long-dreaded curse will befall the family. It's a daffy setup, and when it takes the story purely at face value, it's bloody (literally) fun. Its satirical sendup of wealth, family relations, marital strife, and (yes) politics is giddy and effective -- while it stays in the background.

But as the screenplay by Guy Busick and Ryan Murphy begins running out of steam, a complex "mythology" comes to the fore and becomes distracting. Grace and the audience should never fully understand why the game is happening, for this to be a dastardly little chiller. As more and more is explained, Ready or Not becomes slightly less fun and its ultra-violence moves from devious to disturbing.



Viewed AMC Burbank 16 -- Aug. 24, 2019

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"Blinded by the Light"

 ☆☆☆☆☆ 

Blinded by the Light is about a boy obsessed with Bruce Springsteen as much as Lawrence of Arabia is about a man obsessed with the desert. The music is just the starting point.

The question is why Javed (irrepressibly played by Viveik Kalra) connects to Springsteen's music as deeply as he does -- and what does his sudden passion say about the spark of light anyone feels when they realize for the first time that they are not alone in their personal darkness?

As the film begins, he's spent the first part of his teenage years in Thatcher-era England thinking he's "into" synth sounds like Pet Shop Boys. And then, by accident, he's turned onto Springsteen, whose uniquely American sounds and themes have nothing to do with Javed's life as the only son of strict Pakistani parents living in a council flat.

Except that they have everything to do with Javed's life, as director Gurinder Chada (Bend it Like Beckham) beautifully shows in montage sequences that combine visual images with the soundtrack to illuminate how art can move someone in splendid ways. As Javed struggles against racism, unemployment and a gloomy ennui (uncomfortably similar to Trump-era America), this music stirs him to want more of his life.

Blinded by the Light doesn't care if you love Springsteen -- only that you've ever been moved by music or art in ways you can barely understand. This gem of a movie shows us what powerful thing that sort of passion really is.



Viewed August 18, 2019 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks

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"Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood"

 ☆☆☆½ 

Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood has everything a movie could possibly need – a magnificent cast, exquisite design, expert craftsmanship – except a compelling screenplay.

It's a beautiful but empty-headed piece of nostalgia, a splendidly gorgeous piece of nothing.  Watching it is like biting into an extravagantly hand-crafted eclair only to discover the baker forgot the filling.

It's the movie Quentin Tarantino probably needed to make, an ode to the movies he grew up watching and to the time in which they were made. For almost three hours, he lavishes over meticulous recreations of 1969 Hollywood; it's cinema as immersive experience.

Leonardo DiCaprio is Rick Dalton, a has-been movie star hurtling toward obscurity. His stunt double, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), is his co-dependent sidekick. Rick lives on Cielo Drive, just beneath the house Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate are renting in the winter and spring of 1969.

But the movie is only kinda-sorta about the Manson murders. Played by Margot Robbie, Tate is merely a distraction; her biggest scene simultaneously pities and mocks her desire for celebrity, and is indicative of how tonally off the movie is. It all winds as circuitously as a road in the hills to the night of the murders. Its final 30 minutes are as sadistically violent as they are unexpectedly wrong-headed.

Tarantino has made, it turns out, the cinematic equivalent of a red Trump hat: It's so damned sure that things were better back then that it never stops to ponder its garrulous insistence.



Viewed July 28, 2019 -- AMC Burbank 16

1040

"Crawl"

☆☆☆

Crawl is a movie about alligators that attack a Florida home during a Category 5 hurricane.

That is what it is about.

If you think that movie sounds good, Crawl will not disappoint you.

It is reasonably well-made, sometimes laughably stupid, and frequently very effective.

If you thought Jaws would have been good if they had cut out all the stuff about the adventure and the boat and the three guys chasing a shark and had just focused on the shark eating people, Crawl is a movie you'll like.  There are a lot of gruesome and gory scenes of people being eaten by alligators.  Those are the scenes people want to see in a movie about alligators attacking a Florida home during a Category 5 hurricane.  Those are the scenes Crawl gives people.

By far the most disturbing thing I saw in Crawl was the number of people who took their children to see it.

Don't take your children to see it.

And if you come out of Crawl saying, "Boy, that was a dumb movie," can I please refer you to the opening sentence of this review/

That is what it is about.

You get what you pay for.  How many movies can you say that about?

Viewed July 27, 2019 -- AMC Universal Cinema

1750

"The Lion King"

 ☆☆½ 

Does every generation get the movies it deserves? If so, what, I shudder, does The Lion King say about today's audiences? That they lack imagination? That they'll take anything they're given, as long as it's sold to them with a massive marketing campaign? Or is it that they seek the comfortable, want no challenges?

It is not easy to find a note of happiness in anything director Jon Favreau's relentlessly, almost impossibly exacting replica of the original 1994 film might be saying. It is purely an exercise in creatively bankrupt marketing prowess. It is a soulless effort to showcase technological superiority. It is an important piece of "creative content" that will be shortly used to market Disney's streaming service.

It is not lacking in entertainment value, any more than a full-size, high-resolution photo replica of the Mona Lisa is lacking in beauty. There is still grace in the opening "Circle of Life" theme, still humor in Pumbaa and Timon (despite some grating and stereotypical gay lisping of Billy Eichner as the latter), still emotion in Rafiki's revelation to Simba about the lion's destiny.

And yet, to what end?  It is often visually stunning, more often visually weird -- rendered realistically, it is non-sensical to hear animals sing and talk. Its story takes place across one of the strangest African geographies (sand dunes give way to jungles within moments). And on the whole it's entirely adequate. No more, no less. Undemanding audiences will adore it and will ignore the more insidious message lurking within its computer-generated wonders:

By taking a classic of hand-drawn animation and turning it into a mega-budgeted CGI extravaganza, Disney is saying that its own past -- our own past -- isn't good enough. That its movies are as disposable as sneakers or Mickey Mouse ears from Disneyland. No, not even that good, because Disney doesn't even want its own movies to be souvenirs anymore. In this new Disney world, movies are ... old sneakers. That's distressing.




Viewed July 19, 2019 -- AMC Burbank 16

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"Toy Story 4"

 ☆☆☆½ 

The toys in Toy Story 4 are close to outliving their usefulness. They're already hand-me-downs, and after several years of playing with them their current owner, Bonnie (to whom Andy gave them when he went off to college), is moving on from them, too.

Even though they are as bright, happy, fun and cuddly as ever, they seem to lack for things to do, a problem that afflicts the bright, happy, fun and cuddly movie in which they star, Toy Story 4, which also frequently lacks for things to do.

The idea this time around that the toys are just one level above trash, which is quite literally what makes up their newest cast member, Forky (voice of Tony Hale). That idea wears itself out after a while, though fun to watch Woody (Tom Hanks) and Bo Peep (Annie Potts) as they inevitably head down a path that leads away from the playroom.  Toy Story 4 looks spectacular, too; without doubt, this is the most eye-popping of all Toy Story movies.

But what's the point? Toy Story 4 struggles to find its purpose, meandering through a collection of vignettes, some of which are better than others. Despite its visual and musical (thanks to Randy Newman) excellence, Toy Story 4 feels more like an afterthought than a full-blown movie, a film that needed to be made to please the accountants instead of the storytellers. It'll be right at home on Disney's streaming service. That can't be a coincidence. Can it?



Viewed July 14, 2019 -- AMC Century City

1945