Orion and The Dark: Joyously illuminating

Orion and The Dark (2024) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated TV-Y7, and suitable for all ages

Available via: Netflix

By Derrick Bang

As he introduces himself, at the beginning of this delightful animated film, Orion claims to be “a kid just like you.”

 

But that isn’t quite true.

 

Orion is understandably apprehensive when his late-night bedroom is invaded by a
partially shapeless, ink-black apparition that introduces himself as Dark.

All kids fret about this or that, but Orion’s fears are on an entirely different level. To quote Charlie Brown, his anxieties have anxieties.

As Orion soon confesses, he worries about...

 

• Murderous gutter clowns;

 

• Cancer-causing cell phone waves;

 

• Mosquito bites getting infected, causing a limb to wither and drop off;

 

• Falling off a skyscraper;

 

• Being responsible for his team losing;

 

• Being rejected by Sally, the girl he worships from afar;

 

• School locker rooms, particularly when local bully Richie Panici is present; and

 

• Bees, dogs, the ocean, haircuts and monsters.

 

All of this is depicted in a colorful, crayon-style animated rush lifted from the artwork in Orion’s personal journal: a style distinct from the more traditional animation work in this DreamWorks charmer from director Sean Charmatz, making an impressive big-screen feature debut.

 

Most of all, though, Orion is afraid of the dark. He insists on sleeping with night lights, and his bedroom door open. His tolerant parents haven’t quite given up on him, but they’re running out of ideas; he blatantly rejects their insistence that much of what he professes to fear would be fun, if he simply yielded to the moment.

 

“Fun?” he retorts. “Fun is just a word people made up, to make danger sound more appealing!”

 

Orion and The Dark is adapted from British author Emma Yarlett’s captivating 2014 children’s picture book ... although “adapted” isn’t quite the right word. Her book actually is a jumping-off point for a pleasantly mind-boggling script by Charlie Kaufman, who previously perplexed our brains with Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (the latter earning him a well-deserved Academy Award).

 

Trust Kaufman to weave a singularly unique, existentialist storytelling style into a children’s fantasy, while smoothly blending this with Yarlett’s gentle wisdoms.

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent: A cheeky romp

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022) • View trailer

3.5 stars (out of five). Rated R, for drug use, sexual candor, violence and relentless profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 4.22.22

Well, color me surprised.

 

Nicolas Cage has been turning out mostly violent stinkers like a man determined to secure a permanent place in the Razzie Hall of Shame: 39 films (!) in the past decade alone — the pandemic didn’t slow him down a jot — and that’s not including the four animated films to which he lent his voice.

 

Although initially wary of collaborating on a movie script with a newbie writer, Nick
(Nicolas Cage, right) finds it hard to resist Javi Gutierrez's (Pedro Pascal) enthusiasm.

Drive Angry, Rage, The Runner, Dog Eat Dog, Army of One, Vengeance, The Humanity Bureau, Between Worlds, Running with the Devil, Prisoners of the Ghostland … the list seems endless. (Honestly, I question whether some of them even achieved cable/satellite/streaming release; they certainly never played in theaters.)

I therefore approached this one with a gimlet eye, particularly since the exploitative advertising campaign gave no reason for optimism.

 

So much for assumptions.

 

Director Tom Gormican’s send-up of Cage — his career, reputation, fan base and constant financial peril — isn’t merely impudently self-referential; this audacious script, co-written by Gormican and Kevin Etten, is the most meta of meta. It’s a cheerfully deranged valentine to the “Cult of Cage,” those touchingly loyal fans — apparently they are legion — willing to forgive even his most deplorable turkeys.

 

This one’s no turkey. It’s actually quite entertaining, and frequently hilarious.

 

We meet Nick Cage (Cage, of course) down on his cinematic luck, desperate for the comeback potential of a film role championed by his perpetually harassed agent, Richard Fink (Neil Patrick Harris). Nick’s personal life is a disaster; his narcissistic megalomania has poisoned his relationships with ex-wife Olivia (Sharon Horgan) and teenage daughter Addy (Lily Sheen).

 

Cage is hard to watch, during these early scenes; his effort to upstage Addy’s 16th birthday is particularly cringe-worthy. He’s also prone to arguing with a younger version of himself — think lanky, long-haired, bomber jacket-garbed Cage Mark 1, from the Raising Arizona/Wild at Heart era — who personifies his worst characteristics.

 

And yes: This display of dual Cages is a deliberate nod to the peculiar twin roles he played in Adaptation. Indeed, identifying all the riffs from Cage’s (better known) earlier films quickly becomes part of the game; some are name-checked, some are film clips being watched by various characters, some are replayed scenes (the one from Leaving Las Vegas being the most obvious).

The Hunt: Deplorably tasteless

The Hunt (2020) • View trailer 
One star. Rated R, for relentless profanity, gore and strong bloody violence
By Derrick Bang

To coin a phrase — quite aptly, since a little porker figures in this grisly exercise in sadism — you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.

The only thing worse than a gratuitously brutal horror flick, is one that attempts to “justify” its mayhem with a clunky political subtext.

Kidnapped and dumped in the wilderness for no apparent reason, a group of strangers —
from left, "Staten Island" (Ike Barinholz, back to camera), "Trucker" (Justin Hartley),
"Big Red" (Kate Nowlin), "Yoga Pants" (Emma Roberts) and Don (Wayne Duvall) —
wonder what they're supposed to do with an armory of weapons.

Rubbish is rubbish, no matter how it’s dressed.

In a better film, scripter Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof’s jabs at “elites” versus “deplorables” could have been suspenseful and uneasily relevant: a cheeky update of Richard Connell’s classic 1924 short story, “The Most Dangerous Game,” most famously filmed in 1932 with Joel McCrea and Leslie Banks.

But director Craig Zobel’s horror-porn sensibilities are so gratuitously low-rent, that any semblance of social commentary is lost amid gore-laden blood, guts and entrails. Most of the so-called “characters” are too one-dimensional; the intended-to-be-astute remarks are too lame, obvious and random. This is filmmaking by arrested adolescents who enjoy pulling the wings off flies, and who delight in sharing the experience with us.

Let’s plunge in:

Eleven people, all with their mouths painfully collared, regain consciousness in random spots of a forest that surrounds an open meadow. They gradually assemble around a huge crate which, when opened, proves to contain a piglet in a T-shirt (don’t ask) and a weapons rack (a rather blatant swipe from The Hunger Games).

Alas, these hapless victims barely have time to contemplate whether they even know how to use such artillery, when they start getting picked off by explosive, high-powered rifle fire from a distant, well-stocked duck blind.

Not exactly sporting. Less “The Hunt,” and more “The Slaughter.”

Zobel and his scripters obviously enjoy toying with us, because in veryshort order, cinematographer Darran Tiernan’s systematic designation of such a film’s traditional survivors — the cute girl, the stalwart guy, etc. — is rent asunder. Within minutes, the group has been whittled down to just a few.

No surprise, since these poor souls aren’t even granted names, and instead are designated (but only in the press notes) as “Yoga Pants” (Emma Roberts), “Trucker” (Justin Hartley), “Big Red” (Kate Nowlin), “Vanilla Nice”(Sturgill Simpson) “Staten Island” (Ike Barinholtz) and “Dead Sexy” (Sylvia Grace Crim).

Considering what happens to the latter, her label is beyond offensive.

Snatched: Send it back

Snatched (2017) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated R, for profanity, crude humor and fleeting nudity
By Derrick Bang

It’s pretty sad when the star of a film is overwhelmed and out-funnied by her co-stars, and that’s definitely the case with Snatched.

On the run and lost in the Amazonian jungle, with a vengeful kidnapper on their trail,
Emily (Amy Schumer, left) and her mother Linda (Goldie Hawn) haven't the faintest idea
what to do next. Neither do this tawdry flick's director or writer.

Amy Schumer is by far the weakest link. Goldie Hawn, as her mother Linda, is funnier. Bashir Salahuddin, as a desk-bound U.S. State Department clerk, is much funnier. Joan Cusack, as a retired special ops agent, darn near steals the show ... and she doesn’t speak a word.

Mind you, Hawn, Salahuddin, Cusack and a few others are tiny bits of spice in very thin gruel. It’s hard to believe that Katie Dippold got paid for this miserable excuse for a script, particularly since it sounds like Schumer ad-libbed all of her dialog (scarcely an improvement). But, then, Dippold’s previous big-screen solo credit was 2013’s execrable The Heat, so clearly we shouldn’t have expected better.

Dippold seems to have become the go-to scripter for today’s two hottest foul-mouthed female comics, which makes sense; in terms of their big-screen personas, Schumer is basically a smuttier version of Melissa McCarthy (which is saying quite a lot). Schumer hasn’t yet met a situation that she couldn’t debase with a vulgar reference to sexual or bodily functions, and hey: If crude, tasteless potty humor is your cup of tea, you’re bound to have a good time with this flick.

Not that it features much else that could be considered entertainment value.

Schumer stars as Emily Middleton, a useless semi-adult introduced as she’s dumped by her musician boyfriend. Concerned less about her derailed love life and more about her two non-refundable tickets to an Ecuadorian tourist trap, Emily rattles unsuccessfully through her meager list of friends, and finally — as sloppy sixths or sevenths — persuades her mother to come along.

Such a trip is far outside Linda’s comfort zone, she being the type of stay-at-home, overly protective single mother whose idea of excitement is a pottery class. But Emily prevails, and the two unattached gals are off to paradise.