Nope: My sentiments precisely

Nope (2022) • View trailer

No stars (turkey). Rated R, for bloody violence and relentless profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 7.22.22

Jordan Peele, who won a well-deserved writing Oscar for his breakthrough hit — 2018’s Get Out — has succumbed to the M. Night Shyamalan curse.

 

Each new film tries harder, yet achieves less.

 

Having learned enough to realize that they're dealing with something quite nasty, our
heroes — from left, OJ (Daniel Kaluuya), Emerald (Keke Palmer) and Angel
(Brandon Perea) can't imagine what to do next.

In this case, much less.

Nope — a terrible title, just in passing — obviously began life as a 10-word elevator pitch (which I cannot speculate upon, due to spoilers). It might have turned into a decently chilling 20-minute short, but as a 135-minute vanity flop, the result is a dull, interminable slog.

 

Ten minutes into this bomb, it’s blindingly obvious that we’re dealing with a world-class stinker. And it doesn’t get any better. Worse, in fact.

 

Following two brief prologues — I’ll dial back to those in a moment — we meet siblings OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald Haywood (Keke Palmer), who are struggling to maintain the legacy of their father’s specialty horse ranch, which provides animals for Hollywood shoots, theme parks and the like. Their operation, located in the isolated Agua Dulce desert in northern Los Angeles County, hangs by a thread.

 

OJ is expressionless and taciturn to the point of somnambulance, throughout this entire story; he makes Clint Eastwood’s “Man with No Name” — back in that actor’s 1960s spaghetti western days — look and sound Shakespearean. It takes genuine talent to guide an actor with Kaluuya’s significant chops into such a relentlessly dull and lackluster performance, but Peele — who wrote, directed and produced this turkey — somehow managed.

 

Emerald, in contrast, is shrill, profane, insolent, mean-spirited and — in short — absolutely intolerable. Palmer behaves as if she’s revved up on cocaine the entire time; her performance is unrestrained, unintelligible and unlikable. We loathe her character on sight, and Palmer isn’t helped by the stream-of-consciousness babble that Peele apparently believes passes for dialogue.

 

Rarely have two movie characters so effectively — and so quickly — turned an audience off. The very thought of spending more than two hours with them is unbearable.

 

First, though, we endure the travesty of prologue No. 1, as a TV family sitcom shoot goes awry when its star — a chimpanzee — suddenly attacks his human co-stars in a gory swath of blood-laden rage.

 

The notion that any filmmaker would be insensitive enough to mount such a tasteless spectacle — in our more enlightened, post-Jane Goodall era — is utterly appalling. It’s also an indication of unrestrained arrogance on Peele’s part, particularly since it adds nothing to his film.

Lightyear: Not quite a shooting star

Lightyear (2022) • View trailer

3.5 stars (out of five). Rated PG, for dramatic intensity

Available via: Movie theater

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.17.22

The opening text screen is quite clever:

 

In 1995, Andy got a Buzz Lightyear action figure after seeing his favorite movie.

 

This is that movie.

 

Things seem calm at the moment, but that's deceptive; Buzz, far right, and his new
companions — from left, Izzy, SOX the cat, Mo and Darby — are about to encounter
another bunch of Zurg's malevolent robots.

This explanation thus out of the way, director/co-scripter Angus MacLane — assisted by writers Matthew Aldrich and Jason Headley — plunge pell-mell into an exciting and suspenseful blend of every sci-fi franchise from Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, to Star Trek, Star Wars and even a touch of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

To infinity and beyond, indeed.

 

That said, this definitely is a case where action and momentum cover an increasing number of plot holes and unanswered questions. Considerable care is required, when concocting stories that involve time travel and alternate time streams; let’s just say things get a bit sloppy.

 

But that comes later.

 

The story begins quietly, as a massive spherical S.C.0.1 exploration vessel — dubbed “the Turnip” — heads home via automatic pilot, its 1,000-strong complement of crew, scientists and technicians in cryo-sleep during the lengthy journey. Roughly 4.2 million light-years from Earth, sensors detect T’Kani Prime, an uncharted but potentially resource-rich planet.

 

The ship wakens Space Ranger Buzz Lightyear (voiced by Chris Evans, taking over from Tim Allen), commander Alisha Hawthorne (Uzo Aduba) and a rookie named Featheringhamstan (Bill Hader). They land the Turnip; Buzz and his companions reconnoiter and quickly discover that this swampy world is laden with giant swarming bugs and subterranean vines that burst through the surface, latch onto anything foreign, and drag it below ground.

 

Anything … including the Turnip.

 

Buzz, Alisha and the rookie battle bugs and vines during their frantic dash back to the Turnip. They board; Buzz takes the helm, and tries to defy physics in a heroic effort to get the massive ship free of the vines, and off this inhospitable planet.

 

He fails.

 

Worse yet, the resulting crash destroys one of the Turnip’s fuel cells and its essential hyperspeed crystal, without which the journey home cannot be made. The entire crew settles in for a long stay on T’Kani Prime, as it’ll take years to fabricate a replacement fuel cell and crystal that’ll hold up to a test flight.

 

(It seems unlikely that all of these folks would cheerfully forgive Buzz for the error in judgment that has stranded them, but that’s something we cannot dwell upon.)

 

(One also wonders how the Turnip could possibly have contained enough raw materials and infrastructure to construct the mini-city that soon houses all of these folks, but that’s something else we cannot dwell upon.)

 

Hustlers: Don't be conned

Hustlers (2019) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated R, for nudity, pervasive sexual content, profanity and drug use
By Derrick Bang

Sometimes the elements simply don’t gel.

The whole winds up less than the sum of its parts. And in the case of Hustlers, the parts aren’t that engaging to begin with.

Having fleeced hundreds of thousands of dollars from drugged marks, the gals — from
left, Annabelle (Lili Reinhart), Ramona (Jennifer Lopez), Mercedes (Keke Palmer) and
Destiny (Constance Wu) — treat themselves to some party time.

Director/scripter Lorene Scafaria’s lurid little drama is “inspired by” Jessica Pressler’s lengthy December 2015 feature article in New York magazine. Scafaria actually strip-mined Pressler’s piece quite extensively; in terms of detail, the resulting film is much more authentic to its source than most claiming to be “based on actual events.”

But that’s far from satisfying. The major problem is that both Pressler and Scafaria have hitched their respective narratives to highly unreliable narrators. Pressler wisely adopted a clinical journalist’s approach, putting more faith in details subsequently verified by police investigations.

Scafaria, in contrast, constructed a story inhabited by characters who — if not sympathetic — would at least be interesting.

In this, alas, she failed. 

More than anything else, Hustlers — with its quartet of scheming escorts — is boring. Extremely boring. It also falls into a trap common to films that attempt to illuminate exploitative behavior: It becomes relentlessly exploitative.

On top of which, it’s difficult to ignore the cynicism of this film’s creation. It’s clearly a vanity project for Jennifer Lopez, who — in her parallel role as producer — ensures that Jennifer Lopez (as star) gets plenty of exposure. That descriptor is deliberate; there’s no question that Lopez wants us to be impressed by her 50-year-old body, much the way Demi Moore strutted her stuff in the 1996 adaptation of Carl Hiaasen’s Striptease.

So, okay, yes: Lopez is in phenomenal shape. Truly stunning. No argument.

But therein lies another problem: Her presence overwhelms this tawdry saga. It’s always Jennifer Lopez, walking, talking and stalking. At no time does she transcend her own self in order to become Ramona, ringleader of a coterie of cuties who graduate from pole twirling and lap dancing to the unpalatably larcenous — and, for a time, highly successful — fleecing of wealthy Wall Street jerks.

Ice Age: Collision Course — Thawed too soon

Ice Age: Collision Course (2016) • View trailer 
Three stars. Rated PG, for no particular reason
By Derrick Bang

In theory, a 94-minute animated feature paced with the manic intensity of a 7-minute Warner Bros. cartoon must’ve seemed like a great idea.

In practice ... not so much.

The gang's all here: clockwise from left, Julian, Peaches, Ellie, Manny, Shira, Diego,
Granny, Sid, Crash and Eddie. As for what they're all staring at ... well, that would be
giving away too much!

This fifth (!) entry in the popular Ice Age series is relentless: a never-ending succession of hyper-paced slapstick, sight gags and one-liners, all of which overwhelm the gentle family-unity message that struggles to be heard amid the chaos. Watching this film rapidly becomes an endurance test, after which one is utterly overwhelmed and exhausted.

Additionally, the four credited writers — Aubrey Solomon, Michael J. Wilson, Michael Berg and Yoni Brenner — have augmented the already enormous ensemble cast with a wealth of new characters. The result is total overload, to the detriment of several regular players, most notably Diego, the sabertooth voiced by Denis Leary. He contributes absolutely nothing to the narrative, and his recently acquired gal pal Shira (Jennifer Lopez) fares even worse.

It’s all too much. As the third act introduced yet another set of blissed-out newcomers, shepherded by the fortune cookie-tongued Shangri Llama (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), Constant Companion and I glanced at each other and mouthed, Seriously?

If all concerned — co-directors Galen T. Chu and Mike Thurmeier, and the aforementioned writers — are looking to kill this once-charming franchise, I can think of no better way. The tenderness and wit have been lost.

Everybody involved with 2002’s original Ice Age understood the importance of balance. The bulk of the story was fairly serious — disparate prehistoric creatures banding together for the common good — with the occasional silly one-liners limited to the slovenly Sid, the sloth (John Leguizamo). Machine-gun slapstick was the sole province of the frantic, twitchy Scrat, whose rodent quest for precious acorns served as brief madcap “bumpers” between the core story’s various acts.

This fifth entry is nothing but madcap bumpers. It’s soulless.

Joyful Noise: An irritating din

Joyful Noise (2012) • View trailer
2.5 stars. Rating: PG-13, and too harshly, for brief profanity and a vague sexual reference
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.13.12


It must be January; Hollywood is serving holiday leftovers again.

Despite having its heart in the right place, this film is a mess: too long, too slow, too clumsily melodramatic and too old-school, with respect to its too many songs. Remember the worst 1960s and ’70s musicals, when the story simply stopped every 10 minutes, so that some other cast member could warble a tune?

The Pacashau Sacred Divinity Choir — featuring G.G. Sparrow (Dolly Parton,
center left), Olivia Hill (Keke Palmer, center) and her mother, Vi Rose (Queen
Latifah) — gets plenty of respect in their home town, but the competition is
much tougher during the annual Joyful Noise choir competition.

That’s what we have here: a total throwback. And not in a good sense.

Todd Graf definitely loves the let’s-put-on-a-show genre, having turned writer/director with 2003’s sweet and quite entertaining Camp, which translated the young folks’ performance school template from Fame to a summer camp setting. Graf waited six years before modifying the formula slightly for 2009’s equally appealing Bandslam — new kid in town assembles fledgling rock band, accompanied by his school’s two hottest chicks — and suffered the indignity of copycat bad timing, since TV’s Glee had debuted that same year.

Which brings us to Joyful Noise, wherein Graf has layered the same concept — with less success — onto a church choir setting in the tiny community of Pacashau, Ga.

Unfortunately, Glee has raised the bar on all such performer-wannabe musicals. And that’s the major problem here: An average 42-minute episodes of Glee delivers far more credible angst, integrated much more smoothly with the obligatory songs, than this lumbering, 118-minute behemoth.

Matters aren’t helped by Graf’s kitchen-sink script, which doesn’t overlook a single opportunity for tragedy or misery. He opens his film with a sudden death — an eyeblink cameo by guest Kris Kristofferson — and it’s all downhill from there. Resentful, abandoned wife? Check. With a son who suffers from Asperger’s syndrome? Check. And a daughter suddenly attracted to the newly arrived “bad boy” in town? Check. The small-town setting, with desperate residents losing homes and businesses left and right, due to the lousy economy? Check, check and check.

This is supposed to be a light-hearted, feel-good musical?

Indeed, that’s a serious problem: Graf can’t decide what he wants his film to be. These morose characters are bad enough; far worse are the occasional attempts at comic relief, as when one poor woman — Angela Grovey, as Earla — has a rather disastrous night of passion with a fellow choir member. I can’t imagine what Graf was thinking, with this subplot.