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.

Transformers: The Last Knight — Should be junked

Transformers: The Last Knight (2017) • View trailer 
No stars (turkey). Rated PG-13, for relentless sci-fi action violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.23.17

This isn’t even a good video game.

As a movie, it’s a $260 million disaster.

When Col. William Lennox (Josh Duhamel) inexplicably decides that the über-evil
Megatron might help U.S. forces find some all-important Transformers tech, he okays
the release of a ferocious quartet of evil Decepticons. Which immediately start fragging
every human being in sight. Like, anybody expected otherwise?

Actually, the term movie doesn’t even apply. Movies have plots. And characters. This cacophonous monument of soulless wretched excess has neither.

I’m frankly astonished that Art Marcum, Matt Holloway, Ken Nolan and Akiva Goldsman have the audacity to claim credit for a script. The spoken lines in this junkyard dog are so sparse — often limited to monosyllabic exhortations such as “We’ve got to go!,” “Hang on!,” “Good job!” and “Jump!” — and the action so haphazard, that one could watch the entire 149-minute mess with the dialog track eliminated entirely, and have just as much success trying to extract meaning from the bonkers narrative.

That also would spare us from the faux profundities in the film’s hilariously overwrought voice-over narration. The Monty Python gang, at their prime, could not have concocted more ludicrously silly monologues. But helmer Michael Bay intends us to take them seriously.

Bay began his career as a director of music videos, and it could be argued — particularly during the past decade — that he never shifted gears. Such video shorts are no more than a series of flamboyant, hyper-edited visuals solely in service of the music; with very rare exception, there’s no such thing as “story” or “character.”

The same could be said of Transformers: The L(e)ast Knight, fifth entry in this increasingly dismal franchise, which is no more than an overlong showcase reel for numerous special effects companies. Bay couldn’t care less about story, and he obviously couldn’t care less about character; his notion of an “emotional moment” starts and stops with a tight-tight-tight close-up of a given actor’s face, always bearing a silent, stricken, gape-mouthed expression. Pause and hold for what seems an eternity.

Tears are optional (but desired).

The result would be laughable, if the process of watching the damn thing weren’t so relentlessly repetitious, predictable, exhausting and tediously dull.

Bay doesn’t make movies; he makes product. Noisy, lowest-common-denominator trash designed for an indiscriminate international market.

Expensive and impressively mounted trash, to be fair ... but trash nonetheless.

Safe Haven: A truly delightful surprise

Safe Haven (2013) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rating: PG-13, for dramatic intensity and mild sensuality
By Derrick Bang

Films made from Nicholas Sparks novels tend to follow a predictable — and quite irritating — pattern.

Could anything be more cute and cuddly? Having finally learn to trust the joy of getting
to know new people, Katie (Julianne Hough, center left) finds herself falling in love with
Alex (Josh Duhamel) and his two children, Josh (Noah Lomax) and Lexie (Mimi Kirkland).
Alas, Katie's past threatens to catch up with her, a development that could mean ... ah,
but you'll have to discover that for yourself.

We meet two or more engaging characters in the first act, often but not always young people, at least one of whom carries a Heavy Burden. A relationship develops in the second act, often built on a foundation of Valentine’s Day-perfect dialogue that overcomes initial shyness or mutual wariness. Written correspondence often (always?) plays a key role.

We get to know and like this couple, and feel they deserve happiness. Then whoosh, fresh tragedy strikes — sometimes unbelievably contrived (remember what happens to Richard Gere, at the end of Nights in Rodanthe?) — that leads to a bleak and shattering epilogue. But that’s okay, y’know, because those left behind are grateful for the experience, having grown into better human beings.

Lather, rinse and repeat.

Message in a Bottle was the first Sparks novel to hit the big screen, back in 1999; true to form, it concludes on a grim note. Things improved with The Notebook, due both to that novel’s structure and the 2004 film’s sensational cast. But since then, we’ve slogged through a series of soggy, manipulative and increasingly unsatisfying tear-jerkers, often selected as vehicles for up-and-coming young stars: Dear John (Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfried), The Last Song (Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth) and The Lucky One (Zac Efron and Taylor Schilling).

Great stuff for folks who enjoy having their emotions yanked about, I suppose, but far too much been there, endured that for the rest of us.

No surprise, then, that I greeted the impending arrival of Safe Haven with very little enthusiasm.

Which simply goes to show the folly of assumptions. The thoroughly enjoyable Safe Haven is by no means typical of Sparks’ overworked formula; indeed, if I hadn’t known of his involvement going in, I’d have assumed that some other writer had concocted the tale. (Until the epilogue, anyway, at which point we smile, nod and say Ah, yes, there’s the Nicholas Sparks touch. But that’s okay in this case.)