Category Archives: Now Showing

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FREAKY TALES

Producers: Poppy Hanks and Jelani Johnson   Directors: Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck  Screenplay: Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck   Cast: Pedro Pascal, Jay Ellis, Ben Mendelsohn, Jack Champion, Ji-young Yoo, Dominique Thorne, Normani, DeMario “Symba” Driver, Jordan “StunnaMan02” Gomes, Natalia Dominguez, Angus Cloud, Kier Gilchrist, Marteen, Too $hort, Eric “Sleepy” Floyd and Tom Hanks  Distributor: Lionsgate

Grade: C-

“Freaky Tales” is set in 1987 Oakland, California, and perhaps you need a personal connection to the time and place to enjoy its grubby in-joke vibe; it depends largely on nostalgia for its appeal, and in this case the nostalgia is of a curdled provincial variety.

For the writing-directing team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, “Tales” represents a return to their indie roots after a detour into the MCU with the dreary 2019 “Captain Marvel.”  They’ve reached back nearly half a century to construct a celebratory fable of Fleck’s childhood hometown out of four separate but vaguely interlocking chapters, all of which come across as pretty obvious genre rip-offs.  Compared to their powerful 2006 debut “Half Nelson,” which starred Ryan Gosling and Anthony Mackie, this goofy riff is an empty exercise, a sad disappointment.

The first chapter is a tribute to the punk rock movement of the time, represented by a couple of progressive-minded kids, Lucid (Jack Champion) and Tina (Ji-young Yoo).  They enjoy spending time at the local theatre, where the marquee advertises titles like “The Lost Boys,” but are more devoted to a music venue where they and others dance to live local bands; upon entering one sees a placard announcing intolerance of racism, homophobia, sexism and other such social ills within its walls. 

But that just acts as an incentive for a bunch of neo-Nazi thugs who inflict their hatred on the neighborhood, first with drive-by taunts to moviegoers and then with a direct assault on the dancers.  The violence leads to a decision by Lucid, Tina and their like-minded friends to resist, and the result is a street rumble in which the forces of good repel them.

The second installment introduces Entice (Normani) and Barbie (Dominique Thorne), who work at an ice-cream shop where they have to endure the taunts of a racist police detective (Ben Mendelsohn).  A music promoter (Jason StunnaMan02 Gomes) invites them to face off in a rap contest with his boy Too $hort (DeMario Symba Driver), in which they win over the crowd by countering misogynist put-downs.

These initial chapters have lots of energy; the tone grows more somber in the third, which stars Pedro Pascal as Clint, an about-to-retire mob debt collector with a pregnant wife (Natalie Dominguez) whom he leaves outside in a car while he goes into a video store whose back room hosts a poker game.  He’s there to collect from a player, but the person who suffers is his wife.  She’s shot by a man who accosts Clint when he emerges after completing the job, blaming him for killing his father years before.  She doesn’t survive, and whether Clint’s daughter will is uncertain until the final moments in the police station.

The final episode can be dated specifically to May 10, when Golden State Warriors star Eric “Sleepy” Floyd (Jay Ellis) scored a record twenty-nine points in the fourth quarter of a playoff game against the Los Angeles Lakers.  Feted for his feat, he returns home to find it’s been the site of a violent robbery by a gang of thugs.  His revenge takes the form of a martial arts rampage against the villains, who are, of course, the neo-Nazis of the first chapter, led by the racist cop of the second.

Those aren’t the only tie-ins from one chapter to another; and there are other connective devices, including some antic animation, some green rays suggesting a supernatural or extraterrestrial force at work, and periodic commercials about a consciousness-raising system called Psyotics.  Then there are the meta in-jokes—cameos by the actual Too $hort (whose 1987 rap song provides the title) and Floyd.  Topping it all off is an extended cameo by Bay Area native Tom Hanks as the video store clerk in the third chapter, a guy who can’t help blabbing smugly about his encyclopedic knowledge of movies, including what he claims are the five best pictures about underdogs—which, of course, is the category into which “Tales” falls itself.  Hanks’s character is obviously modeled on Quentin Tarantino, whose style and attitude Boden and Fleck are trying to mimic here—without much success.

Hanks is slumming, and his performance shows it.  Of the others Pascal comes off best with his gruff understatement, and Mendelsohn the worst with his lip-smacking viciousness.  The rest are okay, though amateurishness infects some of the lesser roles.  The tech team—production designer Patti Podesta, costumer Neisha Lemle, DP Jac Fitzgerald—obviously relish the garish possibilities, and Fitzgerald and editor Robert Komatsu happily embrace the opportunity to play around with different formats, frayed image edges and the like.  It’s all part of the desperate desire to be cool, something the needle drops—and Raphael Saddiq’s score—aim for too.

“Freaky Tales” is splashy but vacuous, a gonzo time capsule with a ready audience in Oakland that will have limited appeal elsewhere.

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A MINECRAFT MOVIE

Producers: Roy Lee, Jon Berg, Mary Parent, Cale Boyter, Jason Momoa, Jill Messick, Torfi Frans Olafsson and Vu Bui   Director: Jared Hess   Screenplay: Chris Bowman, Hubbel Palmer, Neil Widener, Gavin James and Chris Galletta   Cast: Jason Momoa, Jack Black, Sebastian Hansen, Emma Myers, Danielle Brooks, Jennifer Coolidge, Hiram Garcia, Rachel House, Allan Henry, Matt Berry, Jemaine Clement and Jared Hess   Distributor: Warner Bros.

Grade: C

If you’re looking to be bludgeoned by noise, garish visuals and puerile humor for a couple of hours, “A Minecraft Movie” is for you.  The latest adaptation of a popular video game—indeed, one of the world’s most popular—is as much of a knucklehead exercise as you’d expect from director Jared Hess, who hasn’t had much luck with features since his surprise hit debut “Napoleon Dynamite” (2004) and its gonzo follow-up “Nacho Libre” (2006).  But you have to admit that as is usual with his work, his newest—an amalgam of live-action and animation—at least has the courage of its own stupidity: it’s shamelessly dumb.  The problem is that the dumbness rarely takes flight into exhilarating absurdity.

The story, cobbled together by no fewer than five scribes, starts with reams of exposition about the Minecraft universe from Steve (Jack Black), a bored doorknob salesman who long dreamt of becoming a miner and, rebelling against conformity to do so, discovers not only the orb of dominance but a loyal friend in a wolf he calls Dennis.  His discovery leads to a joyous time in the Overworld, the realm of creativity where one’s imagination can run rampant in world-building using its cubes, but is nonetheless threatened by the villainous Malgosha, the Piglin queen of the dark Nether (performed by puppeteer Allan Henry with the voice of Rachel House).  She imprisons Steve, but not before he’s had Dennis take the orb to the human world and hide it.  There it’s found in Steve’s storage unit by Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison (Jason Momoa), a preening has-been gamer whose shop in Chuglass, Idaho, a center of potato chip production, is in dire financial straits.

Simultaneously Steve’s abandoned house in Chuglass is rented by exuberant realtor Dawn (Danielle Brooks) to Natalie (Emma Myers) and her younger brother Henry (Sebastian Hansen).  On his way to school—where he’ll attempt to build a jetpack that misfires and damages the potato chip factory where Natalie’s taken a job—he stops by Garrett’s shop, and the two quickly bond, using the orb to find their way through the portal to the Overworld.  There Henry finds unlimited scope for his creativity.  Natalie and Dawn are in close pursuit, and the quartet will soon join with Steve, who’s made a deal with Malgosha to save Dennis’ life but now joins with the newbies to battle against her plan to destroy Overworld and, with it, the creative impulse.  This entails doing battle with the minions she sends to destroy them while travelling through various territories to retrieve the thingy into which the orb must be placed to work its power, save the day and get them home.  Lots of fight scenes, earthbound and airborne, and plenty of explosions ensue, with a predictably triumphant outcome.

Presumably aficionados of the game, kids mostly, will already be familiar with the details of this rigmarole; those not already indoctrinated must simply swallow the nonsense or not, as they choose.  But as if this narrative were not sufficiently complicated, it’s periodically punctuated by a subplot involving Marlene (Jennifer Coolidge), the principal of Henry’s school to whom he’s sent for chastisement.  Her desperate need for romance leads her to connect with a Villager, a mute inhabitant of a peaceful community in Overworld who’s made a reverse journey through the portal Henry and Garrett created with the orb, and her gushing attraction to him is intended to be hilarious.  But though Coolidge employs her customary over-the-top comic chops, and the animation of the Villager is somewhat amusing, the idea turns out to pretty much a non-starter.

Not that the central adventure is much better.  Black and Momoa are the sparkplugs, the former doing his familiar shouting shtick (getting a chance to do some singing, too) while the latter gobbles up the colorful scenery playing an arrogantly self-promoting doofus; their interplay drives things.  Hansen is given his moments to take center stage in scenes where Henry must navigate potentially dangerous tasks—he’s the surrogate for the target audience of young gamers after all—but Myers and Brooks mostly serve background functions, though Dawn is occasionally called on to play the aggressive sidekick.  On the other hand, House has a field day as nasty Malgosha, issuing orders to lackeys voiced by Matt Berry and Hess himself with malicious glee; she even gets a backstory to explain her evil temperament, as well as a bit with daggers at the close that’s one of the few instances in which Hess’s absurdist impulse really comes through.

Otherwise “A Minecraft Movie” is a depressingly formulaic ode to a game that’s meant to inspire players’ imaginations.  But it is incessantly busy and splashy, thanks to the in-your-face work of VFX supervisor Dan Lemmon, production designer Grant Major, cinematographer Enrique Chediak and editor James Thorne, whose visuals are further bolstered by Mark Mothersbaugh’s antic score.  There are occasional glimmers of cheeky goofiness here, but for the most part the movie comes across as just another crass attempt to plunder a popular toy or game for purely commercial reasons, and managing to do so in a most uninspired way.  Its spirit, in the end, is more of Malgosha than Steve.