Clouds: A ray of sunshine

Clouds (2020) • View trailer

Four stars. Rated PG-13, and too harshly, for brief profanity

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.20.20

John Kennedy Toole was 25 when he wrote A Confederacy of Dunces. He committed suicide six years later, having long suffered from grief, escalating paranoia and (very likely) despair over having failed to get his book published.

 

Zach (Fin Argus) and Sammy (Sabrina Carpenter) noodle their way through the first
few lines of a song-in-progress, little realizing where this creative burst will
eventually lead.

His mother found a carbon copy of the lengthy novel in his effects; she, too, struck out with several publishers before Louisiana State University Press accepted the manuscript. The book was published in 1980, became a best-seller and — the following year — won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: a level of recognition Toole was long past being able to enjoy.

 

Zach Sobiech, on the other hand, didget to watch one of his songs become a hit.

 

But only briefly.

 

Director Justin Baldoni’s deeply moving Clouds depicts Sobiech’s final tumultuous year — as a high school senior — after having battled osteosarcoma (bone cancer) for several years. Baldoni’s heartwarming film is a dramatized expansion of an episode of the documentary series My Last Days, which he produced in 2013, and which featured Sobiech.

 

This film’s screenplay — by Kara Holden, Casey La Scala and Patrick Kopka — is adapted from the memoir Fly a Little Higher, by Sobiech’s mother Laura. The scripters have taken a few liberties — shortening the key timeline, adding a bit of dramatic tension and a few “movie moments” — but the core story is quite accurate.

 

Accurate enough, in fact, to have earned the approval of Zach’s family and close friends (many of whom pop up in various background shots).

 

Fin Argus, best known for the TV shows The Commute and Total Eclipse, makes a solid feature starring debut as Zach. It’s a challenging role; under Baldoni’s careful direction, Argus deftly navigates the extremes of stubborn determination — without becoming some sort of overly cheerful poster child for cancer sufferers — and, alternatively, bouts of grinding despair.

 

The family dynamic also feels wholly natural, notably the good-natured teasing and jostling that takes place with older siblings Alli (Vivien Endicott Douglas) and Sam (Dylan Everett), and younger sister Grace (Summer H. Howell). The interactions between Argus and Howell are particularly strong, and one of their later scenes is a killer.

 

Jumanji: The Next Level — Droll derring-do

Jumanji: The Next Level (2019) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for fantasy peril, mild suggestive content, and fleeting profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.13.19

This sequel definitely fulfills its mandate: It’s fun, fast-paced and exciting.

Not exactly suspenseful — it’s hard to imagine anything really bad happening to these characters — but nonetheless laden with plenty of Perils of Pauline-style danger.

Having (mostly) survived an attack by a herd of killer ostriches, our heroes — from left,
Mouse Finbar (Kevin Hart), Dr. Smolder Bravestone (Dwayne Johnson), Dr. Shelly
Oberon (Jack Black) and Ruby Roundhouse (Karen Gillan) — contemplate how best to
proceed to their dangerous game's next level.

Jumanji: The Next Level isn’t as fresh as its 2017 predecessor, although writer/director Jake Kasdan — with co-scripter Jeff Pinkner — have made some clever refinements. At just north of two hours, the pacing flags a bit; Kasdan should have let editors Steve Edwards, Mark Helfrich and Tara Timpone tighten things up a bit. (Why else have three editors?)

A few years have passed since small-town New Hampshire teens Spencer (Alex Wolff), Martha (Morgan Turner), Fridge (Ser’Darius Blain) and Bethany (Madison Iseman) “became” fictitious video game avatars in a dangerously haunted old console edition of Jumanji. They survived that adventure — as depicted in the previous film — and have moved on to separate college lives.

Spencer, alas, feels unfulfilled. Juggling classes and a part-time job have worn him down; his long-distance relationship with Martha also has crumbled. Returning to Brantford for a reunion with his three friends leaves him uneasy: a feeling intensified when he discovers that his Grandpa Eddie (Danny DeVito) has become a semi-permanent houseguest, while recovering from hip surgery.

The fact is, Spencer suffers from a syndrome all too familiar to those who’ve survived harrowing, life-or-death experiences; he misses the opportunity to be heroic. He misses the rush.

When Spencer fails to show up for the long-awaited get-together, his friends go looking for him. By coincidence, they find Grandpa Eddie reluctantly hosting a long-estranged friend: Milo (Danny Glover), with whom he once shared a thriving local restaurant business. Martha, Fridge and Bethany are barely inside the door when they hear the characteristic rumbling drums that signal Jumanji-style peril.

Tracing the sound to the basement, they’re shocked to find the malevolent game console … which they all assumed had been destroyed. Worse yet, there’s every indication that it has been re-activated. With Spencer nowhere to be found, the conclusion is inescapable.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle — Fast-paced fun

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, for fantasy action, mild profanity and considerable blue humor
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.22.17

When it comes to the action comedy genre, the pitfalls awaiting careless directors and scripters are far more dangerous than anything faced by the characters in this film.

Too many dumb jokes. Relentless mugging by unrestrained cast members. Too much slapstick. Eye-rolling vulgarity. Gratuitous property damage. The list goes on.

Conquering one difficult task merely leads to a harder challenge, as this saga's reluctant
gamers repeatedly discover: from left, Dr. Sheldon Oberon (Jack Black), Jefferson
"Seaplane" McDonough (Nick Jonas), Ruby Roundhouse (Karen Gillan), Dr. Smolder
Bravestone (Dwayne Johnson) and Franklin "Moose" Finbar (Kevin Hart).

Happily, director Jake Kasdan sidestepped all those miscalculations, which is a surprise — frankly — given that his résumé is littered with disposable junk such as Sex Tape, Bad Teacher and Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.

Much-deserved credit also goes to writer Chris McKenna, whose initial story was deftly fine-tuned with help from Erik Sommers, Scott Rosenberg and Jeff Pinkner. And, of course, they all borrowed a bit from the 1995 Robin Williams version, which in turn was adapted loosely from Chris Van Allsburg’s popular 1981 children’s picture book. (Got all that?)

However the gestation played out, this new film is a very welcome surprise: droll, clever, fast-paced, exciting and laden with enough gender-based humor to fuel the next half-dozen relationship comedies. I can’t quite call the result family-friendly, because the PG-13 rating is well earned by risqué one-liners ... but they’re all quite funny, and crisply delivered by a quartet of practiced scene-stealers.

This’ll be a popular repeat-viewing experience, because half the fun is zeroing in on everybody else’s expression — not possible, the first time through — as each verbal zinger is unleashed.

While it’s true that veteran video gamers will most enthusiastically embrace (and understand) the core premise, the learning curve is gentle enough for uninitiated mainstream viewers, who will return home well-versed in jargon such as “game lives” and NPCs (non-player characters).

As those familiar with Van Allsburg’s book know, Jumanji is a “haunted” board game with the disorienting ability to amaze — and endanger — players by bringing actual jungle environments and animals into the real world. No surprise, then, that such a game would adapt to changing times — in order to remain seductively enticing — by re-inventing itself as a late 20th century-style home video game.

The new roster of unsuspecting victims, initially associated solely by their presence in the same high school, includes Spencer (Alex Wolff), a smart but neurotic hypochondriac; Fridge (Ser’Darius Blain), an overly cocky jock too “busy” to do his own homework; Bethany (Madison Iseman), the school’s condescending, self-obsessed queen bee-yatch; and the outspoken but socially awkward Martha (Morgan Turner). Only after-school detention could bring this quartet together, at which point a make-work assignment to clean up an unused classroom takes a sinister turn, when Spencer finds a dusty, long-unused video game console.

With you-know-what stuck in the game slot. Which we already know is dangerous, thanks to an intriguing prologue set 20 years early.