Shadow in the Cloud: Totally demented

Shadow in the Cloud (2020) • View trailer

Three stars. Rated R, for violence, crude sexual comments and relentless profanity

By Derrick Bang

Director Roseanne Liang’s cheeky little thrill ride — available via Amazon Prime and other streaming services — is a tip of the aviator’s cap to an iconic Twilight Zone episode.

 

On steroids.

 

Flight officer Maude Garrett (Chloë Grace Moretz) expected a bumpy — but otherwise
uneventful — flight from Auckland to Samoa. Boy, does she get a surprise!

Back in the 1960s, this New Zealand import would have been relegated to the drive-in circuit. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, you’d have found it in Friday’s late-night pay-cable time slot. Even so, it won the People’s Choice Award for Midnight Madness at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival: an honor it richly deserves, and is a perfect indication of what you should expect.

 

The script, co-written by Liang and Max Landis — director John Landis’ son (also telling) — is defiantly whacked. Liang and Landis make no apologies for contrivance and the violation of all known laws of physics and aerodynamics; indeed, they gleefully revel in this stuff ’n’ nonsense.

 

That said, Liang and editor Tom Eagles deliver an impressive level of tension and momentum. This baby moves. 

 

Although … not right away.

 

The film opens with a WWII-era public service cartoon that parodies “Falling Hare,” the 1943 Warner Bros. classic that finds Bugs Bunny battling a little gremlin. This foreshadowing thus established, we meet Flight Officer Maude Garrett (Chloë Grace Moretz) on a military airfield in Auckland. It’s August 1943, late at night, and she’s scheduled to meet a B-17 bomber touching down only briefly, before resuming flight to Samoa with badly needed supplies.

 

The plane is christened The Fool’s Errand. (More foreshadowing.)

 

Maude’s left arm is in a sling, and she looks a bit worse for wear. She’s carrying a small dispatch case laden with top-secret papers.

 

Most of the seven-man crew is actively hostile to her presence, but her orders — verified by the plane’s pilot, Capt. Reeves (Callan Mulvey) — are emphatic: They’re to transport her and the case to Samoa. Lacking anything in the way of passenger space, the men get childish revenge by consigning her to the ball-shaped Sperry turret, fitted on the plane’s underbelly.

 

There’s no room for the dispatch case, which Maude insists can’t leave her custody. Quaid (Taylor John Smith), the top turret gunner — and the sole crew member treating her with kindness — promises to guard it.

 

So, into the turret she goes. We — along with cinematographer Kit Fraser’s camera — go with her. And stay with her.

Love, Simon: Utterly adorable

Love, Simon (2018) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, for sexual references, mild teen misbehavior and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang

Director Greg Berlanti’s teen-oriented charmer reminds me of how much I miss the great John Hughes years: the decade marked by Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Some Kind of Wonderful and numerous others.

Masters of all they survey (well ... maybe not): Simon (Nick Robinson, second from left) and
his friends — from left, Nick (Jorge Lendeborg Jr.), Abby (Alexandra Shipp) and Leah
(Katherine Langford) — chat while heading toward drama class, and another rehearsal
for the high school musical.

Back when movie teenagers displayed some intelligence, chatted using words of more than one syllable, and fell in and out of love in a manner that felt genuine.

No cheap vulgarity or offensively exploitative nudity. And none of the terminally ill — or already dead — kids who’ve been populating a recent sub-genre.

Indeed, Berlanti’s handling of Love, Simon feels like an engaging cross between Gregory’s Girl — now, there’s a classic — and Hughes’ Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, albeit reconfigured for the social media age. Elizabeth Berger and Isaac Aptaker have delivered a marvelous adaptation of Becky Albertalli’s 2015 young adult novel, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda; their script is funny, poignant, shrewdly perceptive and — on several occasions — devastatingly, hide-behind-your-hands shattering.

I wanted to sink through the movie theater floor at least twice. Been there, imagined that. Never made public mistakes quite so catastrophic, but hey: could have.

To cases:

Seventeen-year-old Simon Spier (Nick Robinson) lives a perfect life, blessed with kind and progressive parents — Josh Duhamel and Jennifer Garner, as Jack and Emily — and a doting younger sister (Talitha Bateman, as Nora) to who he is equally devoted. The comfortably secure family lives in a gorgeous home, complete with dog.

Simon has his own car, with which he collects his posse each school morning, stopping en route for a coffee fix shared with longtime BFF Leah (Katherine Langford), best guy friend Nick (Jorge Lendeborg Jr.) and comparative newcomer Abby (Alexandra Shipp). We don’t see much in the way of routine class work, but everybody is involved with the drama group production of Cabaret.

This musical’s haphazardly talented cast — drama teacher Ms. Albright (Natasha Rothwell) having been instructed to accept all students, regardless of thespic or singing ability — includes Martin (Logan Miller), the socially inept class clown who always says and does the wrong thing at the worst possible moment. Somebody to be pitied, but also somebody to be avoided.

Life couldn’t be better, right?

Well ... no, not really.

Everything, Everything: Adorable, adorable

Everything, Everything (2017) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG-13, and too harshly, for mild sensuality
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 5.19.17

Nicola Yoon’s fans will be over the moon.

They really couldn’t ask for more. Director Stella Meghie’s adaptation of Everything, Everything benefits from the savvy casting of two engaging stars — Amandla Stenberg and Nick Robinson — and a script (J. Mills Goodloe) that adheres faithfully to the 2015 young adult best-seller.

Once Olly (Nick Robinson) learns that Maddy (Amandla Stenberg) cannot ever leave her
house, he struggles for ways to help "imagine" her into the big, wide, outside world.

The film is swooningly romantic, start to finish, and guaranteed to send its target audience into dreamy euphoria.

The rest of us ... perhaps not.

Folks who enjoy both books and films have long known that some things work very well on the printed page, not so much on the big screen. Suspension of disbelief is easier, when we concoct the pictures in our minds; we gloss over inconvenient details likely to interfere with the unfolding narrative.

Having such a story translated into the real world of a motion picture brings such “problems” into the crisp focus of cinematographer Igor Jadue-Lillo’s lens, making them impossible to ignore. Contrivance becomes obvious, particularly since the story unfolds much faster, in a 96-minute film, than in a 336-page novel. Questions emerge; eyebrows lift; and — worst case — the spell is broken.

And, sadly, Meghie and Goodloe make that very likely to occur. They’re not sufficiently careful with niggly little details that Yoon’s readers will be happy to overlook, but which will prompt frowns from the uninitiated.

Suburban-dwelling Madeline Whittier (Stenberg), days shy of her 18th birthday, suffers from severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID), popularly known as “bubble baby disease.” Since infancy, she has been confined to a hermetically sealed wing of the Los Angeles house that she shares with her mother, Pauline (Anika Noni Rose), a physician who cares for her around the clock.

Maddy cannot leave the house, or come in contact with anything that hasn’t been thoroughly sanitized. Her sole contact with the outer world is Carla (Ana de la Reguera), the nurse who visits each day while Pauline is at work, and Carla’s teenage daughter, Rosa (Danube R. Hermosillo). Everything they wear must be disinfected, each time they enter the house.

(Just in passing, Pauline must be an über-specialist who makes more money than God, because the state-of-the-art medical and physical enhancements to this home didn’t come cheap, and would be atrociously expensive to maintain. And that’s niggly detail No. 1.)

Jurassic World: Dino-might

Jurassic World (2015) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for intense sci-fi violence and peril
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.12.15

We never learn.

Which is a good thing ... because, otherwise, where would Hollywood find most of its plotlines?

Having managed one narrow escape after another, our besieged heroes — from left,
Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), Owen (Chris Pratt), Zach (Nick Robinson) and Gray
(Ty Simpkins) — wind up trapped in a lab when yet another dino-menace appears out
of nowhere. These poor folks just can't catch a break...

In a few key respects, Jurassic World is an honorable sequel to the sensational 1993 film that Steven Spielberg made from Michael Crichton’s riveting, way-clever novel ... not to mention Spielberg’s almost-as-good 1997 follow-up, adapted from Crichton’s own sequel. (Equal credit also goes to scripter David Koepp, who worked on both films.)

We’ll just sorta pretend that the series’ third entry, in 2001, never happened.

Which also seems to be the attitude adopted by this new film’s director, Colin Trevorrow, and his three co-writers: Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver and Derek Connelly. Jurassic World does acknowledge the first two films with several nice nods toward those who sculpted this franchise so superbly. Even Michael Giacchino’s exhilarating score references key John Williams themes from the two Spielberg movies.

Visual effects supervisors Tim Alexander and Glen McIntosh also do phenomenal work, further enhancing the “you are there” verisimilitude that made the first film such a jaw-dropping wonder. It’s no imaginative stretch at all, to accept these various beasties as living, breathing ... and highly dangerous.

Trevorrow and editor Kevin Stitt concoct a hell-for-leather third act, with each suspenseful encounter and/or chase building to an even better one. Additionally, the script is laden with perceptive social commentary, taking some well-deserved jabs at our jaded 21st sensibilities, while reminding us anew that — to paraphrase a droll 1970s TV commercial — it’s not nice to mess with Mother Nature.

Sounds great, right?

Well ... not entirely.

Despite its many virtues, Jurassic World is marred by an abundance of unpleasant, mean-spirited and just plain stupid characters who spend the entire film behaving like complete idiots. On top of which, Trevorrow seems to have coached everybody to play at hyper-melodramatic, back row/third balcony opera house levels.

That’s frankly surprising, since Trevorrow’s sole previous credit is 2012’s droll Safety Not Guaranteed, a little sci-fi mystery that gets its oomph from being so deliciously coy, subtle and quiet.

So why switch gears here? Did Trevorrow worry that his human players had to compete with their dino co-stars, when it came to chewing up the scenery?

Whatever the reason, it’s hard to like or admire most of these characters, including the few whom we’re definitely supposed to root for. Brainless behavior demands the opposite; I’d have been perfectly content to watch a few more become dino-chow.

The Kings of Summer: This film rules!

The Kings of Summer (2013) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rating: R, and rather harshly, for occasional profanity and teen drinking
By Derrick Bang

This is why I love my job.

The Kings of Summer marks an impressive feature debut for director Joran Vogt-Roberts and writer Chris Galletta, the latter with nothing more to his credit than a brief 2005 stint as a production staff member for The Late Show with David Letterman. Vogt-Roberts’ résumé includes several shorts and a lot of TV series work, the latter suggesting the hilariously snarky mind set on ample display in this film.

Having more or less completed their new home away from home, our three young
renegades — from left, Joe (Nick Robinson), Patrick (Gabriel Basso) and Biaggio (Moises
Arias) — contemplate the next challenge: putting food on the table. That'll prove far
more difficult than anticipated, since they've no experience with traps, lures, bare-handed
fishing or any other woodsian skills.

Actually, calling this picture “impressive” isn’t nearly strong enough. It’s a sure-fire audience pleaser: one of those so-called “little films” — like Little Miss Sunshine or Juno — guaranteed to take off like a rocket, once word gets out. This year’s enthusiastic Sundance Festival audience certainly thought so, granting a nomination for the Grand Jury Prize (not won, alas).

As a collaborative team, Vogt-Roberts and Galletta demonstrate a striking degree of creative synch; the latter’s dialogue sounds just right coming from the naturalistic ensemble cast, granting a level of verisimilitude that makes these characters feel like the folks next door.

Allowing, that is, for a left-of-center gaggle of eccentrics commonly found in films by Wes Anderson or the Coen Brothers. But I mean that in the gentlest way: However funny the lines, however warped some of the emotional behavior by sidebar adults, this is — first and foremost — an intimate coming-of-age saga.

In the truest sense of the old cliché, we laugh with our young protagonists, not at them.

The contemporary setting is a smallish town in Northeast Ohio, the sort of all-American community that typifies such narratives. Best friends Joe (Nick Robinson) and Patrick (Gabriel Basso) are strongly bonded, in part, by their inability to cope with utterly impossible parents.

Joe’s father, Frank (Nick Offerman), hasn’t yet recovered from his wife’s untimely death, years earlier. He has become bitter, condescending and imperious: a combination that doesn’t blend well with a teenage son’s instinctive rebelliousness. Joe’s favorite method of revenge, when sufficiently annoyed, is to summon the local law — personified by the competent Capt. Davis (Mary Lynn Rajskub) and her absolutely useless rookie companion (Thomas Middleditch) — on some trumped-up accusation.

Frank responds to such hijinks the way he deals with everybody: angry sarcasm delivered by Offerman with a relentlessly straight face ... which, of course, makes every bile-fueled line that much funnier. (And they’re pretty funny to begin with.)

Joe’s older sister, Heather (Alison Brie), fled the tension-laced home awhile back, although she still visits. That speaks well of the young woman; her choice of male companions, however, does not. Colin (Eugene Cordero) is a misfit who’s as oblivious to social cues, as he is to the fact that Frank constantly winds him up.

In this case, we can hardly blame Frank; Colin’s much too easy a target. Which Heather is aware of, and Brie’s face is an amusing study in conflict: clearly annoyed by her loutish father, but equally embarrassed by her clueless boyfriend.