Space Jam: A New Legacy — Excessive jam

Space Jam: A New Legacy (2021) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five). Rated PG, for cartoon violence

Available via: Movie theaters and HBO Max

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 7.16.21

As the saying goes — and feel free to insert your debauchery of choice — one milkshake is delicious. Two, three, perhaps even four, are taste bud nirvana.

 

But 762 milkshakes become … well … stale. Tedious. Sensory overload.

 

As a crowd of thousands watches and worries, LeBron James and a digitally upgraded
Bugs Bunny wonder what unpleasant trick their revolting opponents will uncork next.

This new Space Jam goes way beyond sensory overload.

Which is a shame, because — at its core — this film offers a sweet story about the need for fathers and sons to relate to each other.

 

Alas, no fewer than six credited writers — and, I’ve no doubt, many more uncredited hands — turned the result into the world’s most frantic pinball machine. Actually, “frantic” isn’t strong enough. Frenzied. Berserk. Freaked out. Zonkers.

 

Out of control.

 

Definitely out of director Malcolm D. Lee’s control.

 

Lee is best known for overblown, slapstick-laden farces such as Undercover Brother, Girls Trip and Night School, often with stand-up comics in lead roles. He doesn’t know from subtle, pacing, or restraint. He definitely graduated from the school of Throw Everything On The Wall And See What Sticks.

 

And boy, he found a lot to throw on this wall.

 

LeBron James, playing himself, has become a basketball taskmaster with sons Darius (Ceyair J Wright) and Dom (Cedric Joe). The elder Darius is cheerfully eager to follow in his father’s size 16 footsteps, but young Dom has his head in an entirely different game. His passion is coding and IT development; he even has built his own way-cool computer game.

 

Dad is oblivious, much to the chagrin of wife Kamiyah (Sonequa Martin-Green). Basketball is everything; anything else is a distraction.

 

Elsewhere, within the massive server bank at Warner Bros. Studios, an egomaniacal digi-villain dubbed Al G. Rhythm (Don Cheadle) has been up to no good. Hoping to win real-world adulation, Al has developed cutting-edge tech that could digitally incorporate LeBron into an endless array of media projects.

 

LeBron declines, during a presentation meeting with execs played by Sarah Silverman and Steven Yeun. Actually, LeBron calls the proposal monumentally stupid, which enrages Al — monitoring via Wifi-linked devices — into monumental revenge.

 

In the blink of an eye, LeBron and Dom are sucked into Al’s digital realm, where he seduces the impressionable lad with the thrill of being able to fabricate anything — instantly — while employing crocodile psychology to widen the rift between father and son.

Trainwreck: Not a total disaster

Trainwreck (2015) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated R, for strong sexual content, profanity, nudity and drug use
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 7.17.15

This film is impressively schizophrenic.

On the one hand, it’s as jaw-droppingly vulgar and tasteless as the average Melissa McCarthy fiasco ... which is to say, pretty much what one should expect from something directed and produced by Judd Apatow (The 40-Year Old Virgin, This Is 40, Bridesmaids).

Although Aaron (Bill Hader) has no experience with being interviewed, he's savvy enough
to know when somebody is blowing smoke up his skirt ... and that's definitely the case,
as Amy (Amy Schumer) feebly tries to persuade him that she knows stuff about sports.

Then again, some of the crude bits are wincingly hilarious.

On the third hand, the seemingly relentless profanity and potty-mouthed sexuality are intercut with moments of tenderness that are touching enough to prompt tears ... as was the case with numerous patrons at Tuesday evening’s preview screening.

In the grand Hollywood tradition, then, you’ll laugh, you’ll cry and you’ll cringe ... although I rather doubt Trainwreck will change your life.

But it certainly does prove that Amy Schumer has arrived. And how.

Actually, she’s already been around for a little while, as fans of her TV series Inside Amy Schumer are well aware. Her shtick gets its momentum from the juxtaposition between her fresh-faced, doe-eyed, girl-next-door (seeming) innocence, and the breathtakingly blunt and appalling stuff that emerges from her mouth. The goal is shock value, with (she undoubtedly hopes) at least a few belly-laughs along the way.

Trainwreck may be helmed by Apatow, but the script comes solely from Schumer. It’s maladroit, to say the least, and — at 125 minutes — needlessly bloated and self-indulgent. And yet her storyline also possesses (at times) a sparkling sweetness that perfectly suits the gal-desperately-needing-redemption character she has written for herself.

Which is why this film resonates more than McCarthy’s big-screen vehicles, where it’s impossible to engage emotionally with any of the one-dimensional burlesques populating the screen. Schumer still has a lot to learn, when it comes to translating her stand-up routines to the demands of a two-hour narrative, but her big-screen writing debut here is, nonetheless, better than many.

She stars as Amy (not much imagination there), one of the staff writers at New York’s S’Nuff magazine, a slick, deliberately ghastly publication that exists solely to mortify, humiliate and otherwise offend anybody with mainstream sensibilities. Her editor, Dianna, is a superficial bee-yatch of astonishing heartlessness: a role delivered with spectacular cruelty by Tilda Swinton.