Wendell & Wild: A fractured Halloween fable

Wendell & Wild (2022) • View trailer

3.5 stars (out of five). Rated PG-13 for dramatic intensity, violence, brief strong language, and an overall ookie-spooky atmosphere

Available via: Netflix

By Derrick Bang

The Brothers Grimm would have loved this film.

 

Director Henry Selick’s newest stop-motion fantasy is gleefully, grotesquely ghoulish: full-tilt macabre and disturbing at a level that absolutely warrants its PG-13 rating. (Parents, take note.)

 

While her sorta-kinda friend Raúl watches nervously, Kat prepares to have a close
encounter with something rather unpleasant.

But while the film looks fantastic, it’s somewhat over-written, with at least one sub-plot too many, and a tendency to short-change supporting characters who deserve more exposure. The clumsy script is by Selick and Jordan Peele, based on an unpublished book by Selick and Clay McLeod Chapman.

 

A fleeting prologue lasts just long enough to introduce 8-year-old Kat Elliot, who immediately loses her parents in a tragic car accident, for which she blames herself. (Bad enough that so many Disney films, animated or otherwise, feature characters who lose one parent; this poor girl loses both?)

 

Before we can wonder about Kat’s subsequent fate, we’re whisked to a cacophonous underworld setting, where an immense demon named Buffalo Belzer (voiced by Ving Rhames) has built a crazy-quilt amusement park for despondent lost souls on his massive chest. His two much smaller sons, Wendell (Keegan-Michael Key) and Wild (Peele), spend eternity by applying dollops of rejuvenating hair cream on Belzer’s balding pate … all the while dreaming of building their own, vastly superior amusement park for the dear departed.

 

(Amusement parks for the dead? On a demon’s chest? Seriously? No wonder Selick and Chapman haven’t been able to sell their book.)

 

Time leaps ahead in the surface world. Kat (Lyric Ross), now a defiant, punk rock-loving 13-year-old, has endured the worst of the foster care system; she’s brought back to her home town — in shackles — for her “last-chance placement” at the local all-girls Catholic school. She’s shocked to see that her beloved community of Rust Bank is a sorry shadow of itself; her parents’ brewery burned to the ground shortly after their demise, and most homes and storefronts are barricaded, with ugly “Klax Korp” posters warning people not to trespass.

 

Kat’s sullen attitude doesn’t dent the chirpy greeting from the school’s preppy “RBC Girls”: Siobhan (Tamara Smart), Sweetie (Ramona Young) and Sloane (Seema Virdi), accompanied by their adorable pet goat. They want to become instant BFFs; Kat wants no part of them. She’s a bit more tolerant of Raúl (Sam Zelaya), a quiet, artistic trans lad who has turned the school attic into a well-appointed studio workshop.

 

The school is run by Father Bests (James Hong) and Sister Helley (Angela Bassett), with assistance from a couple of squat, forever scowling nuns dubbed Penguins (old joke, right?).

Toy Story 4: Shopworn

Toy Story 4 (2019) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated G, despite some scary sequences
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.21.19

The familiar faces are as welcome as longtime friends; the new characters are both adorable and — in some cases — shiveringly disturbing; the dialog remains witty and funny; the incidental encounters are amusing, clever and well-paced; the voice talent is as sharp as ever.

Bo Peep, aware of the dangers awaiting those who unwisely venture into the antique
store's main aisles, carefully leads her friends — Buzz Lightyear, Woody, Bunny, Ducky
and (on her shoulder) Giggle McDimples — behind dusty cabinets, as they try to rescue
a captured comrade.

But the driving plotline for Toy Story 4 — arguably, the reason for the film’s existence — isn’t nearly as satisfying as those of its predecessors. It feels contrived, rather than organic. The whole remains less than the sum of its well-crafted parts.

One can’t help feeling that this is a case of Slinky Dog’s tail wagging the rest of its body: a film dictated more by crass commerce than artistic justification.

2010’s Toy Story 3 gave the franchise a warm sense of closure, with now-grown Andy passing his beloved plaything companions to preschool-age Bonnie. As we’ve constantly been reminded, a toy’s noblest endeavor is to bring comfort and enchantment to an imaginative child: a mission that cannot be accomplished if tucked into a box that gets stored in an attic, like Puff the Magic Dragon sadly slipping into his cave.

Toy Story 4 similarly concludes with a different sort of torch-passing, which — depending on one’s emotional involvement with these characters — will prompt tears, bewilderment, snorts of displeasure, or a feeling of outright betrayal.

Full disclosure: I don’t approve of what scripters Andrew Stanton and Stephany Folsom — working from a story by eight (!) credited writers, including John Lasseter and Rashida Jones — have wrought.

But that comes much later.

The film begins with a prologue dating back to Andy’s era, which explains why Bo Peep (voiced by Annie Potts) was MIA in Toy Story 3. She, her three sheep — Billy, Goat and Gruff — and matching lamp were tumbled into a box with other items to be donated elsewhere, much to the dismay of Woody (Tom Hanks). Turns out he’s long nurtured a crush for Bo Peep, likely to the surprise of those who figured he and feisty Jessie (Joan Cusack) were an unspoken item.

Back in the present day, Woody is enduring insult on top of injury, since little Bonnie prefers to pin his sheriff’s badge on Jessie. Woody, in turn, has been relegated to the back reaches of a closet laden with other neglected toys: among them Melephant Brooks (Mel Brooks), Carl Reineroceros (Carl Reiner) and Chairol Burnett (Carol Burnett).

That’s a cute bit of stunt casting, but their appearances are so brief, you’ll scarcely notice.

Us: Wasted potential

Us (2019) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated R, for violence, profanity and dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.22.19

Oh, dear.

This is what happens, when you succumb to the intoxicating warmth of too much fawning publicity.

We have met the enemy, and he is us: Gabe (Wilson Duke) and his daughter Zora
(Shahadi Wright Joseph) nervously confront a terrifying unknown, with the
only weapons at hand.

Case in point: Jordan Peele, likely still basking in the glow of a well-deserved Academy Award, for his big-screen writing/directing debut on 2017’s Get Out.

And then, for his sophomore follow-up, he pulls an M. Night Shyamalan.

Peele’s much-anticipated new film — teased for several months now, by deliciously creepy-crawly previews — is a profound disappointment.

Much worse than that, actually. Its beguiling first act notwithstanding, Us quickly becomes boring, stupid and relentlessly gory.

It’s a classic example of an enthusiastic one-sentence elevator pitch that has nowhere to go, because the premise remains half-baked and unfulfilled. All suspense-laden expectation, and no payoff. All style, and no substance.

Such a pity.

No question: Peele is a master of mood and scene-setting. He gets considerable mileage from cinematographer Mike Gioulakis’ disconcertingly s-l-o-w pans toward — or away from — a tight close-up, whether of somebody’s face or (ahem) hundreds upon hundreds of white rabbits in stacked wire cages.

Rarely have amusement park attractions and deserted — yet oddly pristine — subway stations been more unsettling.

And, yes, there’s no denying the utter horror of the moment when one faces a strikingly similar — and yet somehow defective— duplicate of one’s own self. Director Don Siegel knew that full well, when he helmed 1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Peele capitalizes on that same sense of paralyzing dread.

Trouble is, Siegel and screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring had a solid template from which to build their film: Jack Finney’s marvelously disturbing novel. Peele serves as his own quarterback — writer, director, producer — and fumbles the ball.