The Boss Baby: Goo-goo-good!

The Boss Baby (2017) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG, for mild rude humor
By Derrick Bang

Many of Hollywood’s sharpest, wittiest scripts continue to be written for animated features, and The Boss Baby is no exception.

After discovering that his new baby brother has the voice, comprehension and experience
of an adult, Tim is warned not to reveal this information to their parents ... lest his new
sibling really turn the screws during some ramped-up sibling warfare.

Scripter Michael McCullers uses Marla Frazee’s popular 2010 children’s “board book” as little more than inspiration, for a laugh-a-second saga with the rat-a-tat pacing of a classic Road Runner cartoon. Although plenty of savvy humor is milked from the obvious premise — the tsunami-scale chaos that a newly arrived infant inflicts on an unprepared household — McCullers boldly takes this notion where no baby has gone before.

Director Tom McGrath and editor James Ryan keep the action fast and furious; although things sag a bit during the third act — 97 minutes might be a tot too long — all concerned have built up enough good will to surmount potential viewer restlessness. Besides, the story’s characters are cleverly conceived and well cast, with shrewdly selected voice actors: particularly the scene-stealing Alec Baldwin. It’s fun simply to spend time with them.

The story is narrated by an adult Tim (Tobey Maguire), looking back on his long-ago days as a 7-year-old only child who enjoyed his doting parents’ full attention, up to the multiple hugs, stories and songs requested each evening at bedtime. Life couldn’t be better.

It’s important to note, up front, that Tim (now voiced by Miles Christopher Bakshi) has a hyperactive imagination worthy of Bill Watterson’s comic strip star Calvin, and therefore qualifies as a wholly unreliable narrator. You’ll not want to forget that crucial detail, as the droll and quite clever story progresses.

The news that he’s able to have a baby brother sends Tim into a tizzy: on the one hand fearful that his stranglehold on parental affection might be compromised; on the other hand genuinely curious about where babies “come from.” Cue the first of the film’s genius montages, as Tim envisions a heavenly assembly line process that progresses through numerous stages — the application of diapers, booties and binkies, and so forth — before a final shuttle-gate separates the infants into two categories.

Most swoop downward into the loving arms of waiting parents. A select few, however, are judged to have a greater desire for business than nurture, and therefore wind up in functionary or management positions at Baby Co., which runs the entire operation.

Which explains, when Tim rises the next morning, why his new baby brother arrives via taxi, wearing a three-piece suit (details that don’t seem to bother his parents).

Labor Day: Belabored

Labor Day (2013) • View trailer 
Three stars. Rating: PG-13, for dramatic intensity and mild sensuality
By Derrick Bang

Good artists love to stretch, and should be encouraged to do so; nothing is worse than getting stuck in a rut.

With Frank (Josh Brolin, right) keeping a wary eye on her, Adele (Kate Winslet) quietly
pays for her purchases, afraid that any effort to raise a fuss about this menacing
stranger might endanger her son, Henry (Gattlin Griffith).

Still, it’s puzzling that Jason Reitman — a director/scripter best known for deliciously snarky dialogue and the piquant social commentary of Juno and Up in the Air — would settle for the soggy melodrama of Labor Day. At best, Joyce Maynard’s source novel is one step up from a Nicholas Sparks weeper, and Reitman’s approach slides right into the sloppy sentimentality of a big-screen Harlequin romance, with an endless parade of stricken expressions and long-suffering sighs.

Honestly, this film has so many pregnant pauses, they should have delivered twins or triplets. Strip out the long wordless takes on young Gattlin Griffith alone, and Labor Day would be half an hour shorter.

Okay, that’s unduly harsh and somewhat unfair. When the anguished gazes come from Kate Winslet, they contain undeniable dramatic heft; her every glance and gesture convey a wealth of emotional data. To his credit, co-star Josh Brolin also delivers a persuasive performance, and Griffith — his protracted silences notwithstanding — capably holds up his end of the equation.

Somehow, though, the dramatic whole is less than the sum of these thespic parts. I simply couldn’t get beyond the story’s contrivance and constricted timeline: shortcomings that may have been less conspicuous during the leisurely reading of a 288-page novel, but which confront us aggressively during a two-hour movie.

The story is a memoir shared via adult hindsight by Tobey Maguire, whose narrative voice always is a treat; he delivers just the right blend of wistful nostalgia and reflective insight. He tells us of a most unusual event that took place when he was 13, amidst a particularly sweltering New England summer weekend in 1987.

Young Henry (Griffith) is the sole companion to his mother, Adele (Winslet), who has become reclusive following the quiet tragedy that led up to an unhappy divorce. Henry is her lifeline; to the degree allowed by his youth, he conducts modest financial transactions and handles small shopping chores. But he’s still a boy; larger responsibilities elude him, and their house is sliding slowly into disrepair.

Neighbors, although observant and well-intentioned, respect Adele’s desire for isolation.

The Great Gatsby: Not mere hyperbole

The Great Gatsby (2013) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rating: PG-13, for sexual candor, violence and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 5.10.13

Teachers have been aggravated for generations, when Hollywood brings a classic novel to the big screen; too many lazy students then seek answers from the film, rather than reading the book.

The pomp and splash of a fancy nightclub cannot prevent Tom (Joel Edgerton, far
right) from noticing that his wife, Daisy (Carey Mulligan), is being wooed shamelessly
by Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio, far left). Nick (Tobey Maguire), growing accustomed to
the emotional chaos that inevitably erupts when in the company of his new friends,
adopts his favorite means of retreat: another stiff drink.

Well, here’s a twist: Director Baz Luhrmann’s vibrant, mesmerizing adaptation of The Great Gatsby likely will encourage people to buy and read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel. Rarely has a movie so successfully breathed fresh excitement into a literary work which, no matter how well regarded by scholars, often is regarded as a yawn by readers.

It’s like struggling through Shakespeare’s prose on the printed page, absorbing very little along the way, and then seeing the play come to energetic life when staged with a cast of articulate and charismatic actors.

Yep, Luhrmann’s accomplishment is that impressive.

For openers, the film is a visual masterpiece; it’s literally breathtaking. (Cinematographer Simon Duggan, take a bow.) Never has 3-D cinematography been used so cleverly, or so successfully; the dimensionality opens up the narrative’s symbolic settings, thus lending greater emotional weight to the class-burdened archetypes represented by the five primary characters.

At the same time, Luhrmann and co-scripter Craig Pearce are impressively faithful to Fitzgerald’s original prose, at times bringing large chunks of text to life via the hyper-realism that Luhrmann employed so well in Moulin Rouge.

You’ll not soon forget production designer Catherine Martin’s grandiosely ghastly realization of Fitzgerald’s so-called “Valley of Ashes,” the desolate, begrimed region that separates the decadence of both New York City and the outlying aristocratic enclave of West Egg. (Fitzgerald was inspired by the hellish trash-burning zone along the road from Great Neck to Manhattan, the sole transit in an era before the Long Island Expressway or the Grand Central Parkway.)

Given Luhrmann’s sensibilities and visual pizzazz, it’s easy to imagine him particularly captivated by one element in Fitzgerald’s description of this site: the huge “eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg” that stare out from the remnants of an oculist’s long-discarded billboard. Almost more than Gatsby’s palatial estate — also a spectacular setting — these giant eyes become one of the film’s driving images: the blank stare of an omniscient being who catalogues but does not interfere with the events that take place in the gas station located in a small settlement — not even a town — perched on one edge of this stygian, lung-fouling inferno.