Ella McCay: Savvy dramedy showcases a star on the rise

Ella McCay(2025) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for occasional profanity and fleeing drug content

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang 

We don’t often get to witness such an extraordinary, star-making performance, but that’s certainly the case here.

 

(I vividly recall watching Emma Stone, in 2010’s rather modest Easy A, and knowing — with certainty — that she’d go far.)

 

When her father, Eddie (Woody Harrelson), once again lives down to lowest expectations,
Ella (Emma Mackey, center) has no time to react before her Aunt Helen (Jamie Lee
Curtis) — Eddie's sister — threatens to throttle him.

Actually, it’s not entirely fair to call Ella McCay a breakout role for star Emma Mackey — or Emma Margaret Marie Tachard-Mackey, to use her mellifluous full name — since she already made significant waves in the British 2019-23 TV series Sex Education. Even so, seeing her wholly inhabit this big-screen character — with every word, gesture, expression, flip of her hair and sideways glance so perfectly delivered — is enchanting.

Credit where due, Mackey is matched — scene for scene, moment for moment — by an equally riveting (and hilarious) performance by co-star Jamie Lee Curtis.

 

Writer/director James L. Brooks’ political-hued dramedy is an intentional throwback to classic, socially conscious screwball comedies such as His Girl Friday, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Sullivan’s Travels … but with a modern spin that reflects contemporary bureaucratic intransience. On top of which, Brooks also paints a deeply intimate portrait of estranged family dynamics and the difficulty of navigating — let alone moving beyond — festering old wounds.

 

The story is narrated by Julie Kavner — her gravelly voice immortalized forever as Marge Simpson — who cheekily breaks the fourth wall, during her introduction, to inform us of her role. Ella McCay (Mackey) debuts in mid-flurry, as a poised, caring, idealistic, ambitious and highly intelligent 34-year-old who happens to be Lt. Governor of an unidentified state. (Filming took place throughout Rhode Island.)

 

We’re scarcely given time to digest this, when her friend and mentor, affectionately known as Governor Bill (Albert Brooks), reveals that he has just accepted a cabinet position in the forthcoming presidential administration. He immediately resigns, leaving a breathless Ella to serve as governor for the remaining 14 months of his term.

 

However … with a little help from our narrator …

 

… we’re also whisked back in time, to Ella’s 16-year-old self, confronted by yet another extramarital scandal involving her father, Eddie (Woody Harrelson). It’s a crucial moment, and everybody is dressed to perfection; Eddie expects his family to stand united, at his side, as he confronts the reporters waiting outside the front door of their home.

Haunted Mansion: Should be repossessed

Haunted Mansion (2023) • View trailer

Two stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for scary images and dramatic intensity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang 

Disney really needs to stop trying to transform this theme park attraction into anything resembling a coherent film.

 

The best that can be said about this second effort, is that it’s not quite as dreadful as its 2003 predecessor … but that’s damning with very faint praise.

 

Our reluctant heroes — from left, Harriet (Tiffany Haddish), Ben (LaKeith Stanfield),
Gabbie (Rosario Dawson) and Bruce (Danny DeVito) — have just discovered a trunk
in the mansion attic, which contains a book of incantations that'll prove useful.

If director Justin Simien and scripter Katie Dippold set out to make a movie for 5-year-olds, they definitely succeeded; I can’t imagine anybody else having the patience for this interminable dollop of random nonsense.

Indeed, one of the 2003 film’s major problems is equally true here, and the relevant paragraph from my two-decades-gone review can be repeated verbatim, updating only the name of the guilty party:

 

Rather than imaginatively spinning a wholly original yarn, Dippold instead includes everything from the namesake theme park attraction, while trying to cobble up a story after the fact: the ghostly hitchhikers, the dancing ballroom ghosts, the graveyard specters mixing it up with each other, the busts that watch as somebody turns a corner, the paintings that turn skeletal with a burst of lightning, and pretty much everything else.

 

The result isn’t anything approaching an actual story; it’s merely a two-hour commercial for Disneyland. Judging by the dreary manner in which Simien orchestrates this mess, and the lackluster performances by the entire cast, nobody even tried to turn this sow’s ear into a silk purse.

 

Needless to say, this is no way to make a movie.

 

The story, such as it is:

 

Single mom Gabbie (Rosario Dawson) and her 9-year-old son Travis (Chase Dillon), looking to make a fresh start, move to New Orleans and purchase an oddly affordable antebellum-style spread on the bayou, just outside the city. They don’t even make it through the first night, thanks to an unexpectedly ambulatory suit of armor.

 

“And … we’re out,” Gabbie quite reasonably says, with Travis right behind her.

 

Ah, but this mansion’s 999 ghosts don’t want them to leave. No matter where Gabbie and Travis go — hotel, B&B, whatever — they’re pursued by haints that emerge each evening, demanding their return. Which, eventually, they reluctantly do.

Halloween Ends: As well it should

Halloween Ends (2022) • View trailer

One star (out of five). Rated R, for bloody horror violence, gore and relentless profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang

This is a sorry, tawdry excuse for a movie.

 

Producer Malek Akkad, whose family has owned the Halloween franchise since the first one back in 1978, obviously believes his property is bullet-proof.

 

Although Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) initially feels sorry for Corey (Rohan Campbell), 
because they're both social outcasts, she soon begins to see something troubling
in his eyes ... something very, very dark.

Meaning, that any gaggle of hack writers can be hired to throw together a flimsy excuse for a script, as long as it contains the obligatory number of slashed throats, smashed heads and other bodily mutilations.

This pathetic entry’s writers — Paul Brad Logan, Chris Bernier, Danny McBride and director David Gordon Green — deserve some sort of award, because their so-called storyline makes no sense, and is populated by numb-nuts characters who never once behave in a credible manner.

 

This is another textbook example of the “idiot plot” … which lurches forward, from one eye-rolling moment to the next, only because each and every character behaves like an idiot at all times.

 

The sole bright note — and the only reason this misbegotten junk gets even one star — is the gently flirty relationship, during the rare calmer moments, between franchise stalwarts Jamie Lee Curtis and Will Patton, as long-beleaguered Laurie Strode and protective Officer Hawkins. These moments feel real, and heartfelt.

 

The film opens with a brief prologue in 2019, as 21-year-old Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell) is hired to babysit the brat from hell. The evening doesn’t end well, effectively ruining Corey’s life.

 

Flash-forward to the present day, as we peer over Laurie’s shoulder, busily typing her magnum opus memoir of Life With The Boogeyman (a subplot that goes nowhere, I hasten to add).

 

Corey, equal parts taunted and haunted, has become a pariah in the long-beleaguered Illinois community of Haddonfield; he works part-time at the mechanic and wrecking shop owned by his sympathetic stepfather (Rick Moose). Corey is immediately targeted by a quartet of local bullies — two guys, two gals — led by Terry (Michael Barbieri); Laurie, knowing what it feels like to be an outsider, comes to Corey’s rescue.

Halloween Kills: Send it to an early grave

Halloween Kills (2021) • View trailer

One star (out of five). Rated R, for strong gory violence, grisly images, profanity and drug use

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang

What. A. Stinker.

 

Unless I’m missing one, this is the 12th entry in the undead franchise that began with 1978’s Halloween, a modest little shocker that still out-performs all of its descendants.

 

Having barely survived what they felt was their final encounter with the murderous
Michael Myers (hah!), Karen (Judy Greer, left) and Allyson (Andi Matichak, right)
rush a badly wounded Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) to the hospital.

The series has been wholly re-invented at least twice, and Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode has been killed the same number of times … only to be resurrected by subsequent filmmakers anxious for her dwindling fan cred, who explained this away by insisting, “Oh, that one (or those several) didn’t count.”

Even by such increasingly contrived standards, in a textbook case of rapidly diminishing returns, director David Gordon Green’s Halloween Kills is an insufferable waste of time.

 

For starters, Curtis’ top-billed credit is a bait-and-switch; her Laurie Strode is present for only five, perhaps 10 minutes … and she spends the majority of that time moaning in a hospital bed.

 

Instead, our nominal “heroes” are Laurie’s daughter Karen (Judy Greer) and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak), returning from 2018’s Halloween, the most recent re-boot, which kicked off a trilogy that’ll conclude (yeah, right) with next year’s Halloween Ends.

 

And while it’s nice that Green — along with co-writers Scott Teems and Danny McBride — have name-checked characters and events from John Carpenter’s 1978 classic, it would have been even better if they’d written a coherent script. Seriously, nothing that happens in this misbegotten flick makes any sense — except as a means to set up another welter of gory deaths — and every character’s dialogue is random, hysterical gibberish.

 

So okay: It’s fun to see the now-adult Kyle Richards, reprising her role as Lindsey Wallace, one of the kids Laurie babysat back in 1978; and Nancy Stephens, as Marion Chambers, the nurse accompanying Donald Pleasance’s Samuel Loomis (also glimpsed in fleeting flashbacks); and Charles Cyphers, as Haddonfield’s former Sheriff Leigh Brackett, who lost his daughter during the masked Michael Myers’ initial rampage.

 

But it would have been even more fun, if this new film gave them something intelligent to do.

 

Sigh.

 

By way of quick recap, the 2018 film concluded as Laurie, Karen and Allyson cleverly trapped Michael in a long-planned basement dungeon, and then set the entire house on fire. At long last, the demise of Michael Myers, right?

 

Of course not.

Knives Out: A cutting romp

Knives Out (2019) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, for brief violence, profanity, sexual candor and drug references
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.6.19

I haven’t had this much fun since 2001’s Gosford Park.

From the opening scene — as two large dogs charge ominously across the grounds of a massive secluded estate, accompanied by an unsettling warble of violins from soundtrack composer Nathan Johnson — we’re obviously in good hands.

While Marta (Ana de Armas) watches uncomfortably, private investigator Benoit Blanc
(Daniel Craig) puzzles his way through one of the many inconsistencies in the
"suicide" that he increasingly believes was staged.

Writer/director Rian Johnson’s Knives Out is a droll, clever riff on classic, Agatha Christie-style drawing room murder mysteries. It’s not quite a spoof — the plot is powered by a devilishly twisty whodunit — but one nonetheless senses that all concerned had a great time in the process.

The top-flight cast is headed by Daniel Craig, resolutely solemn as debonair Benoit Blanc, a Southern-friend private investigator who channels Christie’s Hercule Poirot by way of Colonel Sanders. (Once again, British actors are surprisingly convincing with their Deep South accents.) Craig almost never cracks a smile — it wouldn’t suit Benoit’s character — but the more gravely earnest he remains, the funnier the performance.

And Benoit certainly has a puzzler for his little gray cells.

As the film opens, world-famous and wealthy mystery writer Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) has been dead for a week, his passing written off as suicide: not an unusual a call, given that he was found with the knife that slashed his throat, his fingerprints all over the handle.

As far as local cops Lt. Elliott (LaKeith Stanfield) and Trooper Wagner (Noah Segan) are concerned, the case is closed. They’re therefore baffled when Benoit shows up, claiming to have been hired to investigate the “suspicious circumstances” of Harlan’s death; the gumshoe requests re-interviews with the entire Thrombey clan.

At first blush, they seem united in genuine grief … but after even minimal probing, they turn out to be quite the collection of grasping, spiteful, self-centered, back-biting misfits.

Halloween: All trick, little treat

Halloween (2018) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated R, for strong violence, gore, profanity, brief drug use and fleeting nudity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.19.18

You can’t go home again … but boy, the Hollywood sausage-grinders do keep trying.

Hollywood has unleashed 10 sequels, remakes or re-boots of John Carpenter’s modest — but undeniably ground-breaking — 1978 chiller, and not oneof them has anywhere near the original’s intensity or suspense. Instead, they’ve all succumbed to the ever-increasing gore quotient much more reminiscent of the deliberately disgusting Friday the 13th series that kicked off two years later.

As Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) has just discovered, not even a heavily fortified home
can stop a homicidal maniac crafty enough to punch through a window.

This one’s no exception.

The butchery here adheres to the usual formula: exercises solely designed to challenge the imaginations of make-up and special effects crewmembers. Of particular delight is the carving knife thwocked into the back of a woman’s skull, the blade’s front emerging between her agonized eyes; and the head that gets stomped into hamburger beneath a heavy boot. Tasty.

Carpenter must be of two minds. On the one hand, he’s likely pleased that every one of these misbegotten offspring have made his first film look ever better with time. On the other hand, he’s gotta be dismayed by what that film has wrought, and how it keeps getting blamed — unfairly — for all the gruesome “doomed teenager” franchises that have erupted in its wake.

The saddest part is that director/co-scripter David Gordon Green hasn’t even tried to make this new film halfway decent. He and co-writers Danny McBride and Jeff Fradley merely introduce a sizable stable of one-dimensional doofus characters who exist solely to be slaughtered. I mean, really: With almost no exception, these are numbskulls who’d wander into night-time freeway traffic, in order to marvel at all the pretty headlights.

Factor in the first resort of lazy horror-franchise filmmakers — the idiot plot, which lurches forward only because each and every individual behaves like an idiot at all times — and there’s very little to recommend this early Thanksgiving turkey.

Green and his cohorts probably would argue that such behavior is expected of the characters in horror flicks, and that this adds a desired note of dark humor. In the first place, that’s nonsense; in the second, I’m not willing to credit them with that much insight. This is hack work, plain and simple.

This Halloween rebelliously insists that none of the other franchise entries existed, save Carpenter’s first film. (That’s somewhat essential, since Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode was killed toward the beginning of 2002’s Halloween: Resurrection, and yet here she is again.)

Forty years have passed — as actually is the case — during which the homicidal Michael Myers has been locked up in a reasonably comfortable mental facility, where he has been carefully studied by psychiatrist Dr. Sartain (Haluk Bilginer, standing in for Donald Pleasance’s Dr. Sam Loomis, in the first film). Michael hasn’t spoken a word the entire time.

Veronica Mars: Back on the case

Veronica Mars (2014) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rating: Rated PG-13, for profanity, sexual content, drug content and violence
By Derrick Bang

Rob Thomas obviously is an honorable fellow, and he deserves considerable credit.

Veronica (Kristen Bell) is surprised to discover that yet another intimate video of Logan
(Jason Dohring) and his recently murdered girlfriend has been posted to the Internet,
further swaying public opinion into believing that he's guilty of the crime. But this begs
the more pressing question: Who shot this footage, and how?

Mindful that his big-screen Veronica Mars project owes its very existence to the crowd-funded Kickstarter campaign that raised $5.7 million, Thomas — as director and co-scripter, sharing the latter credit with Diane Ruggiero — did his very best to deliver a film that meets fan expectation and smoothly updates events from the cherished 2004-07 TV series ... while also functioning as a self-contained adventure that (hopefully) is approachable to first-time viewers with no reference to the original show.

A tall order, and one that Thomas mostly pulls off.

Full disclosure demands that I acknowledge being one of the 91,585 Kickstarter backers, from 3,655 different cities in 88 countries, who pledged some $$$ to help create this film. It made perfect sense to me, since I’ve also (for example) supported PBS programming with pledges since being old enough to write checks.

As one of the show’s longtime fans — star Kristen Bell refers to us as “marshmallows” — I’m quite pleased by the results. That said, this big-screen Veronica Mars looks and feels less like a full-blown movie, and more like a two-part television episode granted a bit more budgeting juice. I recall, back in the day, that several of the 1960s Man from UNCLE two-parters were re-cut and released theatrically, particularly in foreign countries; this Veronica Mars update shares that pedigree.

Back during Hollywood’s golden age, this would have been a respectable B-feature. Nothing wrong with that; indeed, many so-called B films are remembered far more fondly today, than the higher-prestige A pictures with which they shared billing.

By way of contrast, the many Star Trek films that followed the original show’s three 1960s seasons definitely look like big-screen spectaculars quite far removed from their humbler TV origins. Joss Whedon’s Serenity, as well, granted impressively opulent closure to the short-lived Firefly, which had gone off the air several years earlier.

It’s an intriguing distinction, perhaps having something to do with the modest, easily relatable sensibilities that made Veronica’s television adventures so approachable in the first place. Veronica also owed her quick popularity, in part, to good timing: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (also from Whedon) had just gone off the air, and Thomas’ plucky high school heroine — and the coterie of friends, frenemies and enemies she gradually accumulated — admirably filled the niche left empty after Buffy had staked her last blood-sucker.

From Up on Poppy Hill: Young love and simpler times

From Up on Poppy Hill (2011) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rating: PG, for dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang

From its very first frame, From Up on Poppy Hill is breathtaking.

You’ll literally gasp at the hand-drawn watercolor lushness of the opening tableau, as the young heroine’s neighborhood is unveiled, her home set high on a hill that overlooks Japan’s Yokohama Port. Computer animation, for all its delights, never looks like this; one must go all the way back to the Walt Disney Studio’s early days, and Snow White or Bambi.

When Umi forgets some ingredients for the evening meal, her new friend Shun offers
to speed her down the hill, in order to reach the market as quickly as possible. The
resulting trip is exciting for its breakneck danger, and also for Umi's close proximity to
a young man she's beginning to care for quite deeply.

Or any of the recent offerings from Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli, of course, which deliver the same painstaking level of luxurious quality.

From Up on Poppy Hill — incidentally, Japan’s top-grossing 2011 film — marks the first feature collaboration between the legendary Miyazaki and his son, Gorō; Hayao wrote the screenplay with Keiko Niwa, while Gorō directed. The film is adapted from a 1980 manga series by Tetsurō Sayama (writer) and Chizuru Takahashi (artist); the story is a gentle and poignant coming-of-age saga about a teenage girl who can’t let go of a past tragedy.

Aside from the visual splendor, we’re immediately struck by the fact that this is a real-world period piece. For the most part, animated features are set in fantasy realms that involve magical creatures, talking animals or other mythological tropes. Exceptions, such as 2007’s Persepolis, tend to rely on grim political content.

But while From Up on Poppy Hill certainly has its solemn moments, they result from family secrets and unexpected revelations, rather than complex issues playing out on a broader national or global stage.

The year is 1963, a time of great excitement in Japan, as ambitious plans are made to showcase the country during the upcoming Tokyo Olympics. References to construction and renewal allude to Japan’s emergence from the still-recent horrors of World War II, but the script never calls undo attention to this sobering element.

Nor do the upcoming Olympics have any impact on Umi Matsuzaki (voiced in this American release by Sarah Bolger). The 16-year-old lives in Coquelicot Manor, a boarding house she essentially runs, while caring for her grandmother and two younger siblings, Sora (Izabelle Fuhrman) and Riku (Alex Wolff). Their mother, Ryoko, is studying abroad in the United States; their father was killed in the Korean War.

Every morning before school, Umi rises early to handle various chores and prepare an elaborate breakfast for her family and the manor’s residents. She does the same with each day’s evening meal. We immediately realize that this dutiful young woman maintains an exhausting schedule from before dawn to late at night, while diligently keeping up with her studies.

Her final ritual each morning, before walking to school, is to raise a set of signal flags on the manor flagpole that her (now deceased) grandfather built for her long ago.

The flags’ message: “I pray for safe voyages.”