Reminders of Him: A solid redemption drama

Reminders of Him (2026) • View trailer

3.5 stars (out of five); rated PG-13, for profanity, drug use and mild sensuality

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang 

Author Colleen Hoover has blazed an impressive trail in the young adult romance genre, with an astonishing 24 novels and novellas during the past dozen years.

 

After yet another near-miss effort to spend even a fleeting moment with the daughter she
never has known, Kenna (Maika Monroe) admits her fears and helplessness to Ledger
(Tyriq Withers), who is trying hard to be fair with her ... and with everybody else.

She’s perhaps best known for 2016’s It Ends with Us, which became her first big-screen feature adaptation in 2024. It was followed by last year’s similarly respectful handling of 2019’s Regretting You, and now director Vanessa Caswill has helmed a respectful, richly emotional adaptation of 2022’s Reminders of Him.

This is the first one Hoover has co-scripted, alongside Lauren Levine.

 

Hoover’s niche often concerns characters trying to navigate relationships that are fractured, damaged or even toxic. Although the atmosphere can be dark and moody, these are credible, relatable, real-world dramas; no surprise, then, that Hoover has an extremely devoted fan base.

 

The driving question in Reminders concerns the circumstances under which redemption and forgiveness are possible ... and whether the key character deserves them.

 

The story begins as Kenna Rowan (Maika Monroe) returns to her home town of Laramie, Wyoming. Her first act, on the city outskirts, seems spiteful; she angrily removes a cross and flower bouquet marking the site of a previous road accident. Then, left on her own — with very few possessions — she makes her way to the ironically named Paradise Apartment complex, and books a unit that almost maxes out her cash in hand.

 

The feisty landlady, Ruth (Jennifer Robertson, a hoot), offers a slight deduction if Kenna accepts one of the many kittens crawling around the check-in counter.

 

Her unit isn’t quite a pit, but it’s darn close. (Subsequent moments spent with the kitten, as the story proceeds, are a sweet touch.)

 

Finding a job is next. But all the doors slam shut when Kenna honestly admits, on the application forms, that she has just been released from prison. This frustrating first day concludes when she winds up in the bar that now occupies the bookstore she once loved. She has a flirty, but brief encounter with the owner, Ledger (Tyriq Withers); the dynamic seems oddly off.

 

Kenna finally secures a job at a local grocery store, thanks to the kindness of shift manager Amy (Grammy-winning country singer-songwriter Lainey Wilson), who doesn’t probe. Their initial conversation is telling; Amy believes in giving people the chance to prove who they are in the present, rather than who they were in the past. (Nice thought. We need more of that.)

tick, tick ... BOOM! — Explosively dazzling

tick, tick ... BOOM! (2021) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity, brief profanity and fleeting drug references

Available via: Netflix

By Derrick Bang

The creative process can be soul-deadening.

 

We in the outside world tend to think solely in terms of a result. For example, Rent was a smash success from the nanosecond it opened on Broadway in April 1996, and it brought creator Jonathan Larson the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, along with Tony Awards for Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical, and Best Original Score, along with a boatload of other honors.

 

While working his day job at the Moodance diner, Jonathan (Andrew Garfield) suddenly
finds himself dancing with — among many others — Bernadette Peters, during a
high-spirited production number titled "Sunday."

But how did Larson get there?

Like most so-called “overnight successes,” Larson was anything but, as this musical reveals. tick, tick … BOOM! got its start as a one-man autobiographical “rock monologue” initially titled Boho Days, and performed by Larson at the Village Gate and New York Theater Workshop on December 14, 1992. The piece is a painfully autobiographical account of the struggle he endured while spending eight years writing his first professional musical, Superbia.

 

Not quite a decade later, tick, tick … BOOM! was reconstructed by playwright/director David Auburn as a three-person show at New York’s Jane Street Theater, where on November 11, 1992, a 21-year-old theater major named Lin-Manuel Miranda attended a performance.

 

We all know what happened to him.

 

It’s therefore not merely serendipitous, but absolutely proper, that Miranda make his feature film directing debut with this screen adaptation. And — no surprise — he has done a superb job.

 

The film is anchored by a sensational lead performance from Andrew Garfield, starring as Larson: a mesmerizing blend of acting chops and heartfelt singing, given that he anchors or solos most of the musical numbers. It’s the sort of exhilarating effort that transcends artifice; not even half an hour into this film, we’re firmly convinced that it is Larson on the screen.

 

Steven Levenson’s screenplay follows Jon during the eight frenzied days leading up to a crucial workshop performance of Superbia. This coincides with the looming arrival of his 30th birthday: a milestone that weighs heavily, because he regards it as the last-gasp chance for being “discovered” at the appropriate point of what he hopes will become a career.

 

The pressure of this “ticking clock” — which we occasionally hear, albeit faintly, when it isn’t overwhelmed by the frequently passionate songs — acts as a metronome for everything else being balanced: his day job as a waiter at the Moondance Diner; the dwindling relationship with girlfriend Susan (Alexandra Shipp), whose desire to pursue her own ballet career is pulling her elsewhere; and the decision by longtime best friend Michael (Robin de Jesús) to abandon the acting grind for a stable, 9-to-5 job in advertising … which Jon regards as a sell-out (while nonetheless being envious of Michael’s doorman apartment).

 

And, as these eight days pass, the advancing specter of the AIDS epidemic also looms large.

The Call of the Wild: Bad dog!

The Call of the Wild (2020) • View trailer 
Two stars. PG, for dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 2.21.20

This certainly isn’t Jack London’s Call of the Wild.

To a certain degree, that’s good; among other things, the novel’s handling of Native Americans is a lamentable reflection of its 1903 origins.

As they spend more time in the wilderness of the Canadian Yukon, John Thornton
(Harrison Ford) senses that his canine friend Buck is responding to something
instinctively more powerful than his attachment to mankind.

But prudent adjustment on behalf of cultural sensitivity does not justify the insufferable Disney-fication of this otherwise classic saga. Although Harrison Ford does his best — as both narrator and human star — the story’s nobility has been lost in scripter Michael Green’s clumsy, tone-deaf and wildly uneven adaptation.

On top of which, the decision to rely on CGI fabrications — as opposed to actual dogs — is a serious miscalculation. That may fly with the wild animals in The Lion King and The Jungle Book; most of us aren’t intimately familiar with how lions, tigers, elephants and the like actually move. But we all know how dogs think, behave, walk, run and jump … and this film’s faux canines frequently look wrong, wrong, wrong.

No surprise, given that visual effects supervisors Ryan Stafford and Erik Nash “built” their canine star — Buck — from the athletic movements of a former Cirque du Soleil performer pretending to be a dog.

Are we to imagine that Hollywood lacks real dogs that could have served as models for London’s powerful, 140-pound St. Bernard-Scotch Collie mix?

Poppycock.

OK, fine; the SFX grants Buck more insight, sensitivity and expressive personality than we’d likely get from an actual dog actor (although seasoned canine trainers likely would argue that point). But this anthropomorphization constantly feels false and phony; it was fine for the wholly animated pooches in Lady and the Tramp and 101 Dalmatians, but here it’s merely distracting.

Green’s script follows most of the significant plot beats in London’s novel, so we initially meet Buck as the pampered, wholly out of control pet in the genteel, staff-laden household of wealthy Judge Miller (Bradley Whitford). This prolog marks an inauspicious beginning by director Chris Sanders, who unwisely channels the dreadful 1960s Disney comedies that involved animals — often dogs — running amok and destroying furniture, spilling the contents of every container in sight, and generally making as huge a mess as possible … supposedly because this was the height of hilarity.

It wasn’t then, and it isn’t now.

Godzilla, King of the Monsters: Gawd-awful

Godzilla, King of the Monsters (2019) • View trailer 
One star. Rated PG-13, for relentless monster carnage and fleeting profanity
By Derrick Bang

Sigh.

I’ve seen a lot of stupid over the years, but this one takes every cake in the bakery.

Not yet having realized that she's standing alongside a deranged sociopath, young
Madison (Millie Bobby Brown, right) watches while her mother, Emma (Vera Farmiga),
activates a whatzit in order to unleash a whozit.

Rarely has a big-studio blockbuster been directed this clumsily, written this poorly, and acted this atrociously. Doctoral theses could be written, about everything wrong with this misbegotten mess.

It’s a $200 million embarrassment.

When a film is this bad, every minute wasted with it — and we’re looking at 131 minutes here — is an exercise in put-me-out-of-my-misery tedium. Root canal surgery would be preferable.

This second entry in the modern Godzilla series once again demonstrates the folly of pleasing too many international masters, given that this is a co-production by Warner Bros. and China’s Legendary Entertainment. In theory, that should be a good thing, since it assures international casting; in practice, it has been the death of quality cinema.

Recent exhibits of shame include Skyscraper, Pacific Rim: Uprising, Man of Steel and, yes, the previous Godzilla. Among many others.

Each one is characterized by noisy, cataclysmic, landscape-leveling mayhem that goes on and on and on and on. Along with atrociously dumb dialogue, and performances so wooden they could warp.

And — worse yet in this case, with respect to emotional resonance — people who mostly stand around, slack-jawed, impotently staring at screens, or out windows. It’s difficult, nay impossible, to get involved with characters in a thriller of this sort, unless they’re pro-active and do something to make a difference.

One of this film’s major stars checks out so quickly, we scarcely have time to register the individual’s presence.

Three-quarters of the way into this debacle, somebody finally does something heroic. And then there’s an act of noble self-sacrifice, and for a moment — just a fleeting moment, but still — we actually care. A teeny-weeny bit.

Prior to that…

The Post: Fast-breaking drama

The Post (2017) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, and too harshly, for profanity and brief war violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.19.18

Although Steven Spielberg’s riveting new film gets most of its dramatic heft from the democracy-threatening events that swirled around the release of the Pentagon Papers in June of 1971, we’re most emotionally involved with the plight of Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham: at the time, the only woman in a position of power at a major national newspaper.

The entire Washington Post editorial staff — including executive editor Ben Bradlee and
publisher Katharine Graham (Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep, third and fourth from left) —
reacts with stunned silence after learning that The New York Times has been forced, by
a federal injunction, to cease reporting on the Pentagon Papers.

As the film begins, and as we’re introduced to Graham via Meryl Streep’s thoroughly engaging performance, the poor woman is hopelessly — helplessly — out of her depth.

We spend almost the entire film waiting for her epiphany, and for the “Meryl Streep moment” when the actress — Graham finally having found her spine — verbally eviscerates one of her patronizing male colleagues.

It’s a long wait ... and well worth the anticipation.

The Post isn’t opportune merely as a reminder — at a time when the White House is occupied by an infantile gadfly who defends his lies by screaming “Fake news!” — of the crucial role played by our Fourth Estate. Scripters Liz Hannah and Josh Singer couldn’t have known, as their film was being shaped, that its parallel focus on Graham would resonate so well at a moment when American women have risen en masse to challenge male hegemony.

The resulting drama serves both mindsets, while also taking its place alongside top-drawer journalism dramas such as All the President’s Men and Spotlight (the latter having brought Singer — also a veteran of TV’s West Wing — an Academy Award).

The sequence of events taking place during just a few days in the early summer of 1971 almost defy credibility. The film opens on a sidebar issue, as Graham prepares for a presentation to The Washington Post Company board of directors, in anticipation of raising badly needed capital via a stock offering when the paper goes public, on June 15.

Streep’s Graham is nervous and flustered, despite having solid notes prepared with the assistance of longtime friend and confidant Fritz Beebe (Tracy Letts, nicely understated), a former Wall Street lawyer and chairman of the board. Even before knowing anything about this woman, we feel for her; Streep makes her anxiety palpable.

We therefore groan inwardly, when — her moment having come — she’s too tongue-tied even to speak, and her carefully prepared details are introduced by Fritz.

This is before Graham learns, a few days later, that the stock offering could be scuttled by her paper’s growing involvement in the nation-shattering spat between Richard Nixon and The New York Times: the first time, in the history of the republic, that a U.S. president has attempted to silence a national newspaper.

Megan Leavey: A doggone good tale

Megan Leavey (2017) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for war violence, dramatic intensity and mild profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.9.17

Next time my parents grouse that movies aren’t like they used to be, I’ll point them toward this one.

Newly deployed in Fallujah, Iraq, Cpl. Megan Leavey (Kate Mara) and her explosives-
sniffing dog, Rex, are assigned to detect the improvised explosive devices (IEDs)
hidden in and alongside the road on which their vehicles need to travel.

Director Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s Megan Leavey is a straight-ahead drama with plenty of heart, told in the uncomplicated manner that marked family-friendly movies back in the day ... and I mean that as a compliment. Scripters Pamela Gray, Annie Mumolo and Tim Lovestedt tell this story efficiently and poignantly, without needless emotional angst, and Cowperthwaite ensures that the narrative doesn’t slide into manipulative bathos.

Best of all, this is a true story: one likely to be remembered by those who followed the saga’s final chapter in 2012. While events have been compressed — as often is the case, with big-screen adaptations — Cowperthwaite and her collaborators hit the essential high points; the result is a thoroughly engaging and deeply poignant drama. And if you’re not moved by the final scene, you’re truly made of stone.

On a sidebar note, it also marks a solid star turn by Kate Mara, who has spent the last decade impressing TV viewers with memorable supporting roles in 24, American Horror Story and House of Cards. She hasn’t been as lucky with big-screen work — and probably wishes that 2015’s Fantastic Four hadn’t happened — but this new film should enhance her profile, and deservedly so.

Her Megan Leavey is introduced here in 2003, as an aimless, desperately unhappy 20-year-old New Yorker taking up space in her bedroom. Her mother, Jackie (Edie Falco), has become disgusted by this daughter who, we can assume, probably has been a nightmare child for many years. Then again, Jackie is no prize; Falco makes her such a believably horrid shrike that Leavey’s actual mother might have grounds for character assassination.

At low ebb and with no other plans, Megan impulsively joins the Marines, surviving boot camp and subsequently attending military police school at San Diego’s Camp Pendleton. But her “wild child” tendencies haven’t quite been eradicated; an ill-advised night of misbehavior results in a week of scut detail in the camp’s kennel unit ... and the promise of a dishonorable discharge, if she screws up one more time.

Not to worry. Megan is immediately fascinated by the K9 unit, and particularly by a massive, apparently unruly German shepherd named Rex. Gaining permission to have anything to do with this dog, however, means buckling down in all sorts of ways, before the K9 unit’s gruff Sgt. Gunny Martin (Common) will give her even a second glance.

I Saw the Light: Needlessly dim

I Saw the Light (2015) • View trailer 
2.5 stars. Rated R, for profanity and brief nudity
By Derrick Bang

During a remarkably prolific career, Hank Williams released 35 singles that reached the Top 10 in Billboard’s Country/Western best-sellers chart, 11 of which hit the coveted No. 1 spot. Many of the latter — among them “Lovesick Blues,” “Hey, Good Lookin’ ” and “Jambalaya (On the Bayou)” — continue to be covered, to this day, by new pop and country artists.

Hank Williams (Tom Hiddleston) indulgently allows his wife Audrey (Elizabeth Olsen) to
join him at the microphone, during one of their live shows on radio station WSFA ... while
the members of his backing band, the Drifting Cowboys, try not to wince.

All the more remarkable, considering that Williams’ recording career was so brief. To paraphrase an old chestnut, when Williams was as old as Mozart, when the latter died at age 35, he (Williams) had been dead for six years.

Writer/director Marc Abraham’s biographical drama focuses exclusively on William’s professional career, from shortly before his first recording session, to the substance abuse and weak heart that claimed his life at age 29. But despite being based on the respected 1994 biography by Colin Escott, George Merritt and William MacEwen, Abraham’s film is a maddeningly superficial affair that devotes far too much time to Williams’ alcoholism and his prickly, on again/off again relationship with Audrey Mae Sheppard, at the expense of conveying even the slightest sense of the singer/songwriter’s creative spark.

Although I Saw the Light is laden with Williams’ songs — performed with impressive faithfulness by star Tom Hiddleston, who sings every note — they all arrive whole and complete, as if God simply dropped them, fully formed, into Williams’ head. We see no scribbled lyrics and crossed-out rhyme schemes; no late-night experimentation with guitar chords; no real-life incidents that bring a smile to Hank’s lips, and prompt him to sit down and pen a tune.

That’s simply nonsense.

By dropping us abruptly into the rising, post-WWII arc of Williams’ career, we also get no sense of back-story: the boy who took guitar lessons from Alabama blues musician Rufus Payne, and how that shaped what followed; the kid who was isolated from his peers because of spina bifida, which left him unusually gaunt. Abrahams opens his film with Hank’s marriage to Audrey (Elizabeth Olsen), thereby bypassing all sorts of essential details that would explain why she and his mother Lillie (Cherry Jones) despise each other so much.

Granted, the broad strokes are obvious: Both women want to control Hank’s career. But that alone isn’t enough to justify the obvious contempt Lillie shows for Audrey, and we’re left to wonder what went down before this movie begins.

Mostly, though, Abrahams gives us a thoroughly unflattering portrait of Williams, played to insolent, short-tempered and highly unstable perfection by Hiddleston. He’s an excellent actor, easily able to project the charisma with which Williams could light up a stage. But the unflattering emphasis on Williams’ flaws frequently feels like character assassination.

Saving Mr. Banks: Deplorably heartless

Saving Mr. Banks (2013) • View trailer 
Three stars. Rating: PG-13, and needlessly, for "unsettling images"
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.20.13

Pamela Lyndon Travers published Mary Poppins in 1934, and quickly followed it with Mary Poppins Comes Back. Shortly before the series’ third book arrived, she was approached by Walt Disney and his older brother, Roy, about bringing her character to the big screen.

As screenwriter Don DaGradi (Bradley Whitford) sinks ever further into his chair,
P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson) painstakingly nitpicks the proposed script for
Mary Poppins, questioning increasingly inane details such as the placement of
punctuation marks.

She declined.

Walt, never one to surrender easily, persisted. Indeed, he persisted for roughly two decades, at which point a crack appeared in Travers’ armor.

Director John Lee Hancock’s rather unusual film, Saving Mr. Banks, suggests that financial necessity drove Travers to contemplate Disney’s offer. This seems a reasonable assumption; Travers’ literary output inexplicably stopped in 1953, shortly after the series’ fourth entry, Mary Poppins in the Park. (Travers also wrote other books in between.)

Scripters Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith had at least four biographies from which to fashion their narrative, along with a 2002 Australian television documentary (The Shadow of Mary Poppins) and the voluminous recordings and internal documents made during Travers’ two-week visit to the Disney Studios, in the spring of 1961. We therefore can assume reasonable historical accuracy, although — this being a Disney production — the portrait can’t help being shaded in favor of Uncle Walt.

All that said, unknowing viewers are likely to be quite surprised by this film, and perhaps not in a good way. Everybody will bring iconic memories of the cheery 1964 musical, with its effervescent songs and marvelous star turns by Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke. Hancock’s film, in great contrast, is a serious downer: frequently depressing and, ultimately, unforgivably mean-spirited.

Emma Thompson is a precise, highly skilled performer who never wastes a word or gesture, and her take on Travers brings new meaning to the word “shrew.” The author depicted here is arrogant, boorish, condescending and hyper-critical to a degree that suggests mental illness. She demands polite behavior from others but gives none in return. One searches in vain for kindness.

This film’s split narrative — the other half taking place during a crucial year of Travers’ childhood, in rural Australia in 1906 — offers ample reason for the impregnable, emotionally withdrawn shell she’d construct, as an adult; it’s a saga of great sorrow, and we grieve for this little girl, played to apple-cheeked perfection by young Annie Rose Buckley.