Shazam! Fury of the Gods

 

Frankly, they would have had to screw this up really badly for me to lose my enthusiasm for the character as created by the first film in the series. Fortunately, they not only failed to screw it up, they found a very reasonable approach to extending the story and then they cast some new characters that just tell you, the film is going to work. I can't say it is perfection, but I can say I had a great time, and enjoyed the movie almost as much as the first film. "Fury of the Gods" turns out to be a blast and a worthy successor to Shazam!. 

In the original film, our young hero is struggling to find a family that he lost. The gut punch of his Mother's brush off was one of the darker moments in an otherwise sunny story about a kid who gets superpowers. Billy this time is having a different crisis with family, he is struggling to hold on to the newly acquired group that has become his family, and to paraphrase Princess Leia, " The more you tighten your grip... the more that will slip through your fingers." A family of heroes working together is great, but each foster brother and sister needs to be their own person, and Billy gets frustrated as he tries to keep everyone together and antagonizes Freddy, his foster brother and best friend, and alienates Mary, who earned admission to Cal Tech but has sacrificed a dream for the core group of heroes. There is still fun to be had as we are learning of these troubles. The opening rescue on the bridge is only halfway successful and the Lair in the Rock of Eternity gets explored with some funny moments. Eugene's quest to map all the doors that lead to and from the rock give us plenty to laugh at. One of the best reminders that we are dealing with children in the form of adult heroes, is the utilization of "Steve", the magic pen that records their words on parchment, but does so literally and as a result we get to be reminded that these are kids. When Helen Mirren's character, Hespera, reads the note out loud, it is a moment to relish.

Mirren and Lucy Liu as Kalypso, are the daughters of Atlas, one of the gods whose powers, the kids have been imbued with. Their desire to reclaim the powers and inflict punishment on the human race for taking the powers in the first place, becomes the driving force of the plot. It does get a bit convoluted when n additional McGuffin, "The Seed of Life" is introduced. It is relatively easy to follow the plot, but there are many permutations that result from this device. For example, the city of Philadelphia, gets encased in an impenetrable dome,  and a plethora of monsters from mythology get released on the town. One of the things I liked is that the production design between the two films remains consistent when the monsters are a part of the story. Yes, it is a CGI sellout in the last part of the film, but at least it is interesting. Oh, and Unicorns are terrifying not cute. The biggest laugh I had in the film comes when a product placement slogan gets used in a non-PG form by youngest sister Darla.

For the most part, the film is family friendly. The bad guys are easy to identify, the monsters are scary but the violence is not particularly explicit, and there are some fun family themes that run through the movie. When the foster parents get in on the action, there are also some heartwarming moments, including one that addresses Billy's big fear about his new family, that he will lose them when he ages out of the system. However, there are some dark moments that might caution families a little bit to make sure their kids are prepared for some bad things that happen. A new character, who is supportive, friendly and easy for us to like by the way he connects with Freddy, is dispatched in an unpleasant manner and the tone seems at odds with the rest of the film. The climax of the film has a few moments of remorse and sadness, that you will find in a lot of films. We have an apparent loss that ultimately gets repaired, but for a few moments it feels more real than some of those Disney fake outs. 

Zach Levi is terrific as Shazam!, the hero at the center of the story. Asher Angel, who plays Billy, the kid version of the main hero, is appropriately angsty, but as he has gotten older, his immaturity will be a harder sell. Jack Dylan Green, who is Freddy, has to carry a pretty big emotional load for the film and he is clearly capable of doing so. I also thought that Rachel Zegler as Anne, was pretty effective as a love interest and as a fulcrum in the fight with Hespera and Kalypso. Djimon Hounsou returns as the wizard who gave the powers to Billy in the first place, and his interactions with Freddy during their time imprisoned by the sisters, was a lot of fun. To be honest, everyone here seems to know what this movie is and how to play their parts. The director David Sandberg, and the writing team, stick to the goal of the first film, let's have fun with this and worry about how it all fits in with the DC Universe, some other time. We do get a couple of references to the world of heroes and meta humans, but they are mostly just for fun rather than trying to build a bigger story.

I think superhero/comic book burnout is a real thing. There is a point at which, the audience will stop caring about the overarching end of the world scenarios that keep coming up. If comic book movies are going to get through this period, it will be because of films like this and "Guardians of the Galaxy", where the fun and laughter are at least as important as the plot, and are more important that the latest villain. I was happy to see a range of people in the audience for the show I went to. There were teens, families and older couples. A film that can cross a lot of sub groups and bring them together for two hours of fun in the dark, together, has got to have something going for it. 

The Nutcraker and the Four Realms

There are a lot of things I see in this idea that might make sense for a Holiday movie. The opening is set at Christmas time, the motif uses the Nutcracker Ballet and music, and it is family friendly. Having seen the film however, I can't really say who it is for. The music is incidental to the story, as is most of the Nutcracker story itself. This is a stand alone movie that is too weird for it's own good. It lacks the charm to overcome it's weaknesses and frankly, it is not very well acted.

Set in Victorian Times, this new telling of the Nutcracker focuses on a young girl named Clara, who is mourning her Mother but also trying to be a bit independent. The family dynamic suggests a close bond with her younger brother and older sister, but neither of them become a part of the fantasy here. Her widowed Father also mourns but in the style of keeping a stiff upper lip and conforming to expectations and appearances. This drives a wedge between the two of them which is more appropriate for a contemporary film than one set in the 19th Century. When Clara is lead into the fantasy Realms of the Nutcracker, it is then she discovers how her Mother created this world and brought it to life. The four realms are sometimes ignorant of the real world but at other times seem to be well aware of what is going on there. The world building in this fantasy makes very little sense and never seems consistent.

Morgan Freeman appears as Drosselmeyer, and in this story, he gives gifts and is an inventor, but not as good an inventor as Clara's Mother or her. He is in the bookend segments of the film only. Occupying the main story, which involves a war between one of the realms and the others, is Keira Knightly as the Sugar Plum fairy and Helen Mirren as Mother Ginger. We at first do not understand what is at the base of the conflict, and at the end we are equally ignorant. The contrivances the story comes up with are just odd. The mouse king is not really a king, the evil is very unclear, and the ray gun that transforms toys into soldiers is ridiculous. The fact that it operates using the key that Clara is searching for is so forced as to make this film feel more mechanical than it intends to be.

No one in the movie is very good, with the exception of maybe Matthew Macfadyen as Clara's father. Mirren gets little to do and Knightley overplays both the sweetness and the reveal. Jaden Fowora-Knight is well cast as the Nutcracker, because he is as wooden as you can get. He is a handsome young man with some potential but even this children's story seems out of his grasp. Mackenzie Foy has the look that Clara needs but her skills are also a bit weak, She is trying to carry this whole production on her shoulders with her charm, and frankly that is an unfair assignment.

The production values on the film are impeccable however. This movie looks like a Christmas picture book and both the "real world" settings and the four realms are lavishly decorated and use color design in interesting ways. The CGI exteriors are picture perfect but the best things are the costumes and the practical set designs. There is a five minute segment where Clara watches an abbreviated version of the Nutcracker Ballet, and the stage craft there is the most inventive aspect of the film and it doesn't use CGI at all. There is a stacking clown sequence that uses a combination of CGI and costumes to achieve it's look and that was also worthy. Lasse Hallström with an assist from Joe Dante, directed this film. It reminds me a lot of the  Barry Levinson misfire from 1992, "Toys". Both have mildly interesting premises and are being sold as Family Holiday movies, but despite amazing art direction, they just don't connect with an audience.  

F8 of the Furious

OK, it's time to fill your tank, strap yourself in and forget everything you learned in science class. We have another entry in "The Fast and the Furious" franchise to watch.This logic defying, cheesy dialogue spewing, CGI mismash, is what I like to refer to as "Craptacular". It doesn't need to make any sense, it just needs to entertain us for a couple hours on a sunny weekend afternoon after we've had a nice lunch and we are looking for some air conditioned silliness. "F8 of the Furious" as I insist it should be spelled,  has a lot of things going for it despite the cockamamie story telling, paper thin characterization and 1000 yard stare machismo. I don't anticipate these films like some people do, In fact I was not even sure I would see this one. But when the history of my life is written, I won't hate myself for having enjoyed these movies a bit. They feel like summer.

From where I sit, the best things about this series are it's most recent additions. I missed the film where Dwayne Johnson first showed up as a character in these, but he is a guy that oozes charisma. Jason Statham is in his third one of these movies, having a brief cameo in 6 and then being the main bad guy in 7. Whatever they are paying these guys it is worth it because they inject the most energy into the movies of any of the actors. Kurt Russell shows up in a suit and tie for a few scenes, and his swaggering smarminess as a spook with no name, brings a smile to my face. If only Scott Eastwood were as much fun as the intern version of Russell's character.

Two new additions for this film are the ladies that figure heavily in the plot. Charlize Theron steps in as the villain for this edition of the story. She has tightly weaved hair extensions and a badass attitude. It looks like she was saving all her action chops for "Atomic Blonde" later this summer, because in her role as Cipher, she primarily barks orders and frantically types. In another of the mindless film sequences over the years, cyber hackers attack, block and outwit each other as we see who can really reach 70 words a minute on their laptop. Maybe if we edit it together tightly enough and inject some screen shots of computer graphics, it will feel like an action piece. [No it doesn't]. After giving us a dozen reasons to hate her and be ready to cheer for the comeuppance that we have been waiting for, there is an unsatisfactory close to her story. In all probability, we will see the same plot twist that has happened in every one of these films happen in the next one. Also stepping in in a brief scene is Dame Helen Mirren. She doesn't get to do much but she can act everyone else in the film right off the screen just by sitting there.

For thirteen years people have piled on Pierce Brosnon's last outing as 007, for some of the same reasons that they have embraced this franchise. CGI cars that defy gravity, preposterous super villains with all powerful knowledge, stunts that induce as much laughter as excitement, and jokes that don't produce either laughter or much character. With the exception of Statham's sequence on a plane, the humor here largely falls flat. Since I am at heart a sentimentalist, I sometimes find myself being drawn into the "Family" motif that strings these films together. Who doesn't like a hardy laugh as you celebrate your victory of a new bad guy by breaking bread and forming an alliance with the last bad guy. As I said earlier, it doesn't make a lot of sense but cracking the whip on a movie like this is a little like kicking a puppy. It ties so hard to please you that it is just wrong to punish it when it drops a turd on your carpet.

If you think you can take a giant grain of salt and choke it down, than you will almost certainly enjoy a car chase with a submarine, or a parachute jump that would make D.B. Cooper proud. You probably won't care that a convoluted double cross is arranged without any explanation or that people leaping out of cars traveling well in excess of the speed limit results in no physical consequences. "The Rock" doesn't need the force to levitate his opponents off the ground, Statham doesn't need gravity to interfere with a good fight or foot chase, and Vin Diesel doesn't need to act to star in a movie. All of these things are still more believable than finding enough clear road to chase on in New York City on a weekday afternoon.

Trumbo

Well here is a movie that I don't have to worry about spoilers for at all. "Trumbo" is a biopic that follows a well known chronology concerning events that occurred about sixty years ago. Film fans will be familiar with the lead character, they know the end of the story and the villains for the most part are identified early on. Hedda Hopper would be the main figure of evil in this piece but there is plenty of vitriol to be spread around, and most of Hollywood gets some on them. The script plays it as if Trumbo were a saint with magical powers and a short sighted ego that crushes his family as much as the events that take place do. As with all stories, the history is more convoluted than the film is and we will not in that direction here. Instead we will focus on the film and it's many fine qualities and few weaknesses.

The greatest asset the film has is it's star, Bryan Cranston. In the last few years he has moved from being the excellent but often overlooked comic performer in "Malcolm in the Middle" to a celebrated TV performer, who impressed for multiple seasons of "Breaking Bad" and enjoyed the endorsement of many in the industry for his fine work there. He has worked effectively in an ensemble including the award winning "Argo", but he has not yet shined as a movie star, that is no longer the truth, he fills the screen with talent in this movie. His line delivery is distinctive and works well with many of the grandiose passages of dialogue that have been written for him. Even when he is in simple conversation he sounds as if it could be a speech he is delivering to an audience. That fits the character quite well. His sly smile, furrowed brow and mannerisms with a cigarette holder all feel genuine for the outlandish egocentric that Dalton apparently was.

The supporting cast is also excellent, ranging from Elle Fanning as the apple that does not fall far from the tree to John Goodman as the crass studio head that exploits the blacklisted writers but also respects their work. The film is a who's who of Hollywood talent. Diane Lane is effective as Trumbo's wife Cleo and she gets a juicy scene with Cranston when they fight over his behavior. Helen Mirren is Great Britain's answer to Meryl Streep, always cast well and always excellent in her scenes. With the exception of Dean O' Gorman as Kirk Douglas, most of the actors portraying famous performers from the period have little resemblance to their real life counterparts. Some nice digital work inserts O'Gorman's face into a scene from "Spartacus" and that did enhance the believably of that sequence. While John Wayne would probably be considered on the wrong side of the issue, the screenplay makes him a fairly sympathetic adversary, at least one who has a true sense of morality concern the human beings involved. Trumbo is shown to have flaws (although they are largely skimmed over) when he uses Wayne's military status during the war as an attack point and then self righteously suggests that he be allowed to remove his glasses before being punched by a man whom he has just invited to do so. It was one of a few ugly moments that Trumbo as a character is allowed to have.

Not faring quite as well is Edward G. Robinson, a supporter of the Hollywood Ten until his career is mangled by the blacklist.  Another opportunity to show Trumbo's vindictive side occurs when he confronts Robinson, who ultimately testified as a friendly witness, and Trumbo dismisses Robinson's justification for his actions, despite the fact that he gave many of the same justifications earlier to fellow refusenik Arlin Hird ( a very solid Louie C.K.), an apparently fictional character that espouses some of the true philosophies of the Communist Party of the United States. Whether the confrontation took place or not, it must surely have been endemic of Hollywood at the time since there were so many people effected in some way by the blacklist.

I am usually suspicious of a movie that works in a speech to an audience as a story telling device, it seems a lazy way to sneak in narrative with an emotional content, but the speech given at the end to the Writer's Guild appears to have been genuine and it is suggested that it went a long way to healing the wounds of the blacklist. That makes it all the more odd that after finishing with an effective dramatic moment, the film turns polemic with a series of screen scrolls that start the argument all over again. The sour tone is probably designed to make the political message more important, but it feels like the screenwriter simply felt like the drama had failed to do so and therefore a post script was required. I thought it undercut what was to that point a human drama that showed the turmoil of the times and the confusion of the figures involved. That's too bad because for the most part, what came before really was compelling.

The Hundred-Foot Journey

For the second time this summer, the focus of a movie is on food and the Chefs that make it so appealing and interesting. Much like the film "Chef", earlier this summer, "The Hundred-Foot Journey focuses on the potential of a chef if only his ambitions can be met halfway. In this case, a family that has taken refuge from violence at home is the source of transition. The limitations imposed on the young cook are sometimes self imposed and sometimes a result of the situation the family finds itself in. There are also multiple romantic stories being told and some cross cultural tension that have to be overcome before the stories can resolve themselves.

Manish Dayal plays Hassan, the second son of an Indian family with a long tradition of cooking. From the time he was a young boy, he learned at his Mother's table the secrets of good food. Everyone knew from an early age that he had a special gift for food. As a young man, he and the rest of his family, including older and younger siblings, are lead by their father to Europe to start a new life and a new restaurant. The young star of the film is required to be confident in some scenes and uncertain in others. The romantic relationship parallels the gastronomical relationship. Marguerite, the sous chef in training who comes to the families rescue when they initially land in the small French town they make their home, becomes a foil for his pursuit of culinary greatness. The best romantic scene in the movie involves Hassan attempting to woo her with his preparation of the five sauces that are the building blocks of French cuisine. As she samples each, the expression on her face and the anticipation in his eyes strongly suggests an exchange of kisses that each leads to a more passionate engagement with the partner. Whenever someone suggests that food and eating is a metaphor for sexual longing in a story, this will be a moment that will pop into my head.

While the young couple are the center of the story, the engine driving this vehicle is Helen Mirren. As Madam Mallory, Mirren begins the relationship looking down her nose at the immigrants and the foods they bring with them. As the owner of a highly rated restaurant merely a hundred feet across the street (hence the title) she is standoffish, antagonistic and outright devious in her quest to bring the "Masion Mumbai" to an end.For a character that has a minimal amount of dialogue in the picture, she has the biggest impact on the story. Mirren can convey so much with her face through an arched eyebrow to a blank stare or pursed lips, she often needs no words.It is her obstinance that must be overcome, well his Father too presents an obstacle. Each of the older characters have reasons for wanting to hold Hassan back at first and ultimately each wants the young prodigy to soar as well. Indian Actor Om Puri has his biggest English language film role in this picture, and it is his success at matching Dame Helen that allows the story to crackle as much as it does.

Nothing is going to happen in the story that you could not predict from seeing the trailer or hearing the set up. This is not a film based on surprise but rather one designed to meet our expectations in the most pleasurable ways possible. Lasse Hallstrom has been a director I've enjoyed since "My Life as a Dog" way back in 1985. I've not seen all of his films but I do admire the ones that I have seen. His light touch with "Chocolat" was just right and the tone and look that he put together for "The Cider House Rules" was one of the few successful adaptions of a John Irving story. This middle brow film is made more effective and more beautiful by the choices he brings to it. Maybe the fantasy of the French countryside is a little extreme but who would not want to fall in love with a beautiful part of the world? People have struggled in movies for years to make computer programming look interesting on screen, but it appears that cooking on screen comes so naturally that it is hard to screw it up. Hallstrom never lingers over the food shots for longer than it takes to tell the story or allow us to imagine what the characters are feeling. The back and forth editing of the food preparation process of the two restaurants does create some nice tension and energy over the issue of food. The actors also do not overdo the confrontation scenes or the romantic moments, they are kept in tasteful check and the audience's understanding of the situation is allowed to fill in the blank spaces.

The vast majority of audiences who see this picture will be like me, they will appreciate food but not to the degree that the characters in this film do. The relationship of taste, smells and tactile experiences will be conveyed but we are all going to need to use our imagination. Food criticism, like literary or film criticism, exists on different levels. Some of us are hackers, like me, who can see excellence but not always write in it's language. Others are experts who not only savior, analyze and enlighten but also raise our expectations. The story might be something even a journeyman can see and explain, but the talent to award a Michelin star for food is well beyond my ability to distinguish, but it is now something I can more clearly understand.