Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget — Aardman hatches another winner

Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget (2023) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated PG, for dramatic intensity and humorous action

Available via: Netflix

By Derrick Bang

Children.

 

The moment you look away, they do something stupid.

 

Although Funland Farms appears to be a larkish paradise, Frizzle and Molly soon wonder
why all the other chickens seem ... well ... not in control of their own selves.

Such behavior obviously isn’t limited to human beings, given what kicks off the action in Aardman Animation’s marvelous new Claymation entry: another hilarious, stop-motion masterpiece from the folks who brought us Wallace & Gromit.

(This seems to be the season for animated poultry, given that this film follows hot on the wings of Illumination’s Migration.)

 

This sequel is something of a surprise, given that 2000’s Chicken Run was almost a quarter-century ago. But scarcely any time has passed in the lives of intrepid avians Ginger (voiced by Thandiwe Newton) and Rocky (Zachary Levi), since they orchestrated a mass escape from the farm run by evil Mr. and Mrs. Tweedy. The clutch has settled in an idyllic island sanctuary in the middle of an isolated lake, where life has been stress-free.

 

Their only visitors are skillful scavenger rats Nick (Romesh Ranganathan) and Fletcher (Daniel Mays), who pop up occasionally with supplies.

 

Ginger and Rocky soon are blessed with a hatchling, Molly, who grows into an adventurous — and restless — adolescent (now voiced by Bella Ramsey).

 

A surge of suspicious-looking trucks on the mainland fuel concern that a new chicken farm is being constructed, which prompts Ginger and the others to better conceal their community. Alas, that isn’t enough to deter the insatiably curious Molly, who crosses the water and then — having never before seen one — stops in the middle of a paved road.

 

(Insert the obvious joke.)

 

She’s rescued from a nasty death by Frizzle (Josie Sedgwick-Davis), a similarly adventurous young chicken beguiled by the slogan on all the passing trucks: “Funland Farms: Where Chickens Find Their Happy Endings.” All the trucks are filled with happily clucking chickens, apparently oblivious to the slogan’s implications; Molly and Frizzle hop aboard for what they believe will be a great adventure.

 

If that slogan seems a bit dire for a family-friendly comedy, the film’s title is significantly worse ... and the scripters — Karey Kirkpatrick, John O’Farrell and Rachel Tunnard, assisted by seven (!) more credited writers — also don’t shy away from depicting that consequence. (Remember, the Brits gave us Roald Dahl. They have faith in a youngster’s appetite for gruesome touches.)

All the Old Knives: Quite dull

All the Old Knives (2022) • View trailer

Two stars (out of five). Rated R, for profanity, sexuality, nudity and violence

Available via: Movie theaters and Amazon Prime

By Derrick Bang

Way back in the day, as his TV series The Outer Limits was becoming too expensive, creator/producer Leslie Stevens coined the phrase “bottle show” for a budget-saving episode that minimized cast members, sets, shooting schedules and effects.

 

It begins as an intimate meal, but no: Celia (Thandiwe Newton) knows that she's
actually being interrogated by former lover Henry (Chris Pine), regarding long-ago
events that could leave her continued survival in doubt.

He wrote and directed “Controlled Experiment”: the first known case of a deliberate bottle show, and one that indeed rescued his series from financial peril.

Bottle shows subsequently became ubiquitous, with prominent — and often popular — examples on series as diverse as Star Trek, The X-Files, Friends, Mad About You, Breaking Bad and Grey’s Anatomy.

 

When the pandemic closed down conventional filmmaking for well over a year, innovative directors responded with the cinematic equivalent of bottle shows; examples have been trickling into theaters and streaming services during the past few months.

 

Some, like The Outfit, made ingenious use of such limitations.

 

All the Old Knives, sadly, succumbs to every possible pitfall awaiting such a shoot.

 

Olen Steinhauer’s 2015 novel may have been another popular entry in his oeuvre of best-selling espionage thrillers, but its adaptation here by director Janus Metz is the very definition of boring: slow, dull, overcooked and seemingly interminable. The “bottle” restraints are obvious: incessantly repeated flashbacks, relentlessly tight two-shots during sluggish exchanges between stars Chris Pine and Thandiwe Newton, and ludicrously empty sets.

 

(A posh Carmel restaurant, with nobody else in it during an entire afternoon and evening? Puh-leaze.)

 

The story is pure John Le Carré territory: the eight-years-later search for a mole who compromised a critical operation in the CIA’s Austrian field office, with catastrophic results. 

 

The year is 2020. Ilyas Shushani (Orli Shuka), a long-hunted terrorist, finally has been captured, and — just before he dies (we know not how or why, which seems odd) — he shares a juicy nugget of information that reaches the CIA’s Vienna section chief, Vick Wallinger (Laurence Fishburne). He assigns veteran field agent Henry Pelham (Pine) to investigate all staff members who monitored a horrific attack on Flight 127, grounded by terrorists at the Vienna Airport back in January 2012, when everybody aboard ultimately was killed.

 

Although half a dozen people were intimately involved with the unfolding 24-hour crisis — including one who committed suicide just a few months later, which seems very suspicious — Henry focuses on only two (a decision undoubtedly prompted by bottle shoot limitations, rather than anything remotely approaching logic or common sense).

 

They are second-in-command Bill Compton (Jonathan Pryce), retired and living in London; and fellow operative Celia Harrison (Newton), retired and living in Carmel with her family.

 

And, small detail: Henry and Celia were lovers, back in 2012.

 

Which seems an insane breach of protocol, but — as Henry assures Wallinger — “I’ll know if she lies.”

 

Whatever. 

Reminiscence: Not worth remembering

Reminiscence (2021) • View trailer

One star (out of five). Rated PG-13, for violence, drug use, sexual candor and profanity

Available via: Movie theaters and HBO Max

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.27.21

Ugh.

 

Plodding, ponderous, pretentious twaddle.

 

Not even Hugh Jackman’s considerable charisma can save this one.

 

Nick (Hugh Jackman) and his colleague Watts (Thandiwe Newton) begin a memory
retrieval session with an uncooperative client, who's about to reveal something
that'll come as a nasty shock.

Actually, that’s part of the problem. Writer/director Lisa Joy obliterated Jackman’s charisma, transforming him into a mope with very little in the way of redeeming qualities.

Lineage counts for a lot; my expectations were low, knowing that Joy is one of the key show-runners who turned HBO’s update of Westworld into similarly tedious nonsense with delusions of grandeur. And — sure enough — she lives down to my worst fears with her feature film debut.

 

Reminiscence steals the futuristic Blade Runner look as the setting for an Inception-style dive into a reality constantly muddled by recaptured memories, the “twist” being that we’re often not sure which is which. That’s hardly a novel concept, nor is this clichéd premise helped by the fact that we don’t give a damn about any of these characters.

 

They’re worse than one-dimensional; they’re simply dull. 

 

Joy’s clumsy attempt to further spice this thin gruel with Raymond Chandler’s hard-edged noir sensibilities — as was done so much better in Blade Runner — is laughable.

 

Were it not for the stunning visuals crafted by production designer Howard Cummings and special effects maestro Peter Chesney, this would be a total bomb.

 

The setting is Miami, at some undetermined point in the future. The ocean has risen, due to a climate apocalypse, transforming the city into an American Venice. Water is everywhere; the lower floors of entire blocks of buildings are submerged. (Apparently this hasn’t affected anything structurally, which seems highly unlikely; Joy’s script isn’t long on real-world consequences.)

 

The chasm between the rich and everybody else has shifted onto fraught new territory: those who can afford to live on dry ground — giving an entirely new meaning to the phrase “land baron” — and everybody else. The result was some sort of war, its outcome left vague (along with everything else in Joy’s sloppy narrative).

 

Daytime temperatures are dangerously hot, prompting most people to live at night. Even allowing for this narrative element, Joy and cinematographer Paul Cameron go overboard with dark rooms, darker shadows and even darker streets; it’s sometimes difficult to determine what’s happening in a given scene. (If Cameron had dialed the illumination down a bit further, we’d have been spared having to watch the film at all.)