Movie Reaction: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Formula: Hail, Caesar! ^ Burn After Reading

I admit that I've got a lot of "film bro" tendencies. I'll see any Christopher Nolan movie opening weekend argue that the wooden characters and questionable sound mixing were a feature, not a bug. I'll insist that Martin Scorsese hasn't lost his fast ball, 40 years into his career and 2.5 hours into the inert Silence. I'll talk about how you can't just watch a Paul Thomas Anderson or Coen Brothers movie once to fully appreciate what they're doing. However, one "film bro" trait I don't have is an unyielding love for Quentin Tarantino. I appreciate his strengths - the unique rhythm of his dialogue, his control over every scene, the way that his love of film bleeds into every frame. I really like Reservoir Dogs and I enjoyed The Hateful Eight more than most. Overall though, I'm pretty indifferent about his work. I've never understood why Pulp Fiction is so highly regarded*. I had a hard time even finishing Kill Bill. And, Inglourious Basterds went significantly downhill after a great opening scene. I don't have anything against Tarantino though. I don't think he's washed up either. My second favorite movie of is was his most recent one before this year. So, I came into Once Upon A Time in Hollywood excited for what it could be, rather than preparing to have it confirm all my prior issues with Tarantino.

*My best assessment is that it's credited for starting a movement that it was really just a part of.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (OUATIH, for short) continues Tarantino's trend of writing alternate (or extended) histories. It follows Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), a washed up Western star trying to keep his star from fading for as long as her can. He spends most of his time with his personal stuntman and friend, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). The movie is set in 1969 and Rick lives next door to Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) and Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha). You know, the place when the most infamous Manson family murders occurred. The majority of the movie takes place over a single day, several months before the murders and follows Rick, Cliff, and to a lesser extent Sharon as they live their lives. Rick works a gig as a guest heavy on a new Western show and tries not to sabotage himself. Cliff meets a young woman (Margarey Qualley) who leads him to a run in with the Manson family. Sharon is just enjoying her life as a rising star. I won't say where things go by the end, but you can guess pretty easily, given Tarantino's last decade of movies.

It's sort of a "slice of life" or "hang out" movie, similar to Hail, Caesar!, only set a decade later and less manic. There is no excuse for this being 2h41m long, although it didn't feel that long when I watched it. I'm a sucker for old Hollywood stories, so I was happy with most of the detours, whether it was Rick discussing method acting with a little girl, Cliff getting in a fight with Bruce Lee, or Sharon showing up at an old timey (for us now, not her) movie theater that's playing one of her movies. The setting and style of the movie leaves a lot of room for familiar actors to show up in small parts. I won't even try to name them all.

DiCaprio, working for the first time since winning an Oscar for The Revenant (2015) and Pitt are a great duo. DiCaprio plays Rick very big. He's silly and sympathetic without moving into caricature. Pitt balances that out by playing Cliff with the ease and movie-star charisma that he often tries to tamp down. By design, Robbie doesn't do much as Sharon Tate. Tarantino isn't interested in rewriting her story. She's mostly in the movie as a tease for the events we know are coming. Margaret Qualley is probably the biggest scene-stealer. I've liked her since The Leftovers, but between this and Fosse/Verdon in the last year, I'm starting to think she has star potential.

This is a strange kind of comedy. There are some laughs as things are happening, but it's more of a comedy in the Burn After Reading sense. There's a lot of escalating story. The audience (in my theater, at least) mostly held back from laughing because they were trying to figure out where things were going. Then, the biggest laughs came at the end as different setups got paid off and a couple characters matter-of-factly summarized the events.

It's hard for me to talk about my issues with the movie without spoiling the end, so I'll stop here. OUATIH isn't Tarantino's best by any measure. I'd argue it has the least to say of any of his movies. That's not an indictment of it. I like plenty of movie without a lot of purpose, but it does make the long run time harder to excuse. The pair of movie star lead performances keep it moving at a good pace and never lets it get boring. Oh, and - no surprise here - the music is great. It avoids most of the obvious needle drops.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

After the Credits

This movie suffers some from being a Quentin Tarantino movie in 2019. We know his tricks. Because of Inglourious Basterds and to a lesser extent Django Unchained, I spent most of the movie knowing how the end would play out. I always assumed that Rick and/or Cliff would stop the Manson family from murdering Sharon Tate somehow. So, I was never nervous. Had I not known that, then seeing poor, unsuspecting smiling Sharon Tate throughout the movie would've made me queasy and worried. So, when the Manson family decides to target Rick's house instead, it all felt perfunctory. The Manson family went from genuinely intimidating when Cliff visited Spawn Ranch to silly lunatics at the end. When it devolved into the over-the-top violence, that just felt like Tarantino including it because that's what people expect from him. There wasn't really anything bold in the movie. Cutting off before the murders happened or not preventing them would've been a way to zig when everyone expected him to zag. Instead, Tarantino's fingerprints were all over this to the point of smudging it.

Movie Reaction: The Lion King

Formula: The Lion King ^ The Jungle Book

A Dog's Purpose is a family movie that came out in 2017. It's a story narrated by a dog about the journey the humans in his life are going through from his perspective. I saw the movie. I thought it was OK. But, let's pretend I loved that movie.

Jump to 2019. I'm in a theater, about to see The Lion King. I see a trailer before it for a movie called The Art of Racing in the Rain. It's also a movie narrated by a dog commenting on the journey the humans in his life go through. Earlier this year, there was a movie called A Dog's Way Home that was also the same basic idea. Then there was A Dog's Journey based on the exact same idea as well. No matter how much I liked A Dog's Purpose a couple years ago (and remember, I said I loved it last paragraph), three relatively identical types of movies in less than a year is too much.

I hope you see where I'm going with this.

I try not to be too negative about Disney's release strategy. They aren't taking a lot of chances, but I mostly like the variety they are producing. For example: A Marvel movie the first week of May. Another one the beginning of November. A less proven Marvel property in early August. A Pixar movie mid-June. A Disney Animation movie over Thanksgiving break. Maybe a live action remake of an animated classic for mid-March. A Star Wars movie before Christmas. In late January, throw away a failed project based on a real-life act of heroism that no one ends up seeing. An inspirational sports movie in October. A Disney Nature movie on Earth Day. Another movie based on a theme park attraction on Memorial Day weekend. That still leaves room for a re-imagining of an old Live-Action  property and a $100 million bet on a classic children's book. There. That's a 13-movie slate. Disney hasn't released more than 13 movies in a year since 2011. And that's a healthy variety of movies that can still take in over 20% of the domestic box office. Disney could stick to that formula for the next decade and fatigue would barely set it.

Instead, we've barely passed the halfway point of 2019, and this is the third movie they've released that is a live-action (or "live-action") remake of an animated classic. They are overplaying their hand, similar to when they released Solo: A Star Wars Story only 5 months after The Last Jedi. This is too much at once. The only reason people accept it with Marvel is because they spent a decade easing audiences into the idea (and those are at least new stories). Even though I liked this remake of The Lion King more than Dumbo and Aladdin, I'm fatigued by it. I'm not sure I have it in me to find any energy to talk about it.

But, that's sort of what I do. So...

This Lion King is the exact same story as the 1994 version. I can't say if it's a shot-by-shot remake, but it feels pretty close. Same characters. Same songs. Same everything. If you like the story in the original movie, then you'll like the story here. One thing I've noticed though: the story problems I never noticed in the original animated movies stick out more in the Live-Action. So, something like "everyone getting over the fact that Simba is actually alive super quickly" bothered me more this time. That's probably because the movie is 30 minutes longer than the original buy has same amount of story. The original movie is a lean and efficient 90 minutes. It's a perfect amount of story for that length. Stretch it to 120 minutes without adding anything leaves this version with a very thin story. The extra time is mostly used for longer establishing shots and new scenes to give Beyonce more lines where she just repeats the subtext of what's going on. The best of these remakes find a new angle to attack the story (ex. Maleficent - the villain's perspective, Cinderella - no songs and light on the magic) so they can get past the hurdles of changing the medium. The 1994 story was designed for non-realistic animation. It relies on expressive animals and the ability to move into non-real locations (i.e. the "I Just Can't Wait to be King" sequence). It shouldn't be a surprise that it doesn't quite work as well for photo-realistic animation when everything else about it is left the same. That's ideally why it's called an adapted screenplay. It should be adapted to fit the new style or context, not simply mimicked.

The animation is incredible. All the animals look great. When they aren't talking, the photo-realism is as good as anything I've seen. Even when they talk, it's not that awkward. Caleb Deschanel's cinematography is marvelous. The work of the Visual Effects team deserves every award they can get. Director Jon Favreau quarterbacks the whole effort impressively. I can't comprehend how all the pieces of this came together as well as they did.

I like all the voice performers. Donald Glover is my favorite thing in any category at any time. Beyonce is perfectly fine and carries "Can You Feel the Love Tonight"*. Chiwetel Ejiofor finds room to make Scar his own. James Earl Jones (now 88), has understandably lost a step or two, but he IS Mufasa. Billy Eichner and Seth Rogen's Timon and Pumbaa made me laugh. John Oliver's Zazu annoyed me in the intended way. Really, I have no qualms with the voice performances, except for a few moments when they have trouble delivering the most earnest dialouge.

*At least, I tended to hear her more than Donald Glover as they sang.

I have the same big issue that everyone has. By aiming for realism, the animation* lost all emotion and character. Adult Simba is virtually indistinguishable from Mufasa. All the female lions look exactly the same. I couldn't read emotion on any character's face. The voice-acting had to work overtime to convey how characters felt. This then heightened the discrepancy between how the characters felt and what I actually saw on their face. It's not an "uncanny valley" problem. Rather, it's that the photo-realism comes at the expense of expressiveness. There really isn't a solution to this problem. It's fundamental to the idea. This does highlight why the original was in the style that it was. I appreciate the effort, and I assume all the new technology they developed for this will be put to good use in future movies.

*I'm calling the movie "Live Action" because that's what it's meant to replicate, but it's actually all animation.

Let me sum things up. I liked it, albeit a lot less than the original. It's exactly the same story. It doesn't add much anywhere. Good voice-cast. Great animation. Poor job combining the voice-cast with the animation. I'm glad I saw it. I'm not surprised that I had the issues I did with it. Please, Disney, spread these remakes out a little more. You are making it really hard for me to disagree with the people calling you creatively bankrupt and valuing short term profit margins over long-term sustainability.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Movie Reaction: Stuber

Formula: Nothing to Lose * Lethal Weapon

The buddy movie is one of those things that never gets old. It's endlessly recyclable. Mix the genders, personality types, power dynamics, motivations, and you easily have a movie distinct enough that it can be judged on its own merits. And ultimately, the only thing that actually matters is the chemistry between the two leads. Lethal Weapon is a really generic movie, but with two leads in Mel Gibson and Danny Glover who perfectly compliment each other. One of my favorite movies in years, The Nice Guys, is nothing without the interplay between Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling. Sometimes, even bad movies get saved by a couple strong leads. Kate McKinnon and Mila Kunis' relationship is the entire reason I came away from last year's The Spy Who Dumped Me so favorable about it.

Stuber is definitely a movie that comes down to the strength of its two leads. The story is plain silly and implausible: An Uber driver gets roped into a murder/drug investigation because a cop who just had eye surgery can't get around on his own and was told by a superior to let the case go. This doesn't even begin to pass a plausibility test. That's fine though. It's all about Kumail Nanjiani and Dave Bautista.

This is the perfect time in both of their careers for this sort of movie. Nanjiani proved himself as a leading man (albeit, in an autobiographical story) in The Big Sick and has been a go-to punch-up actor for laughs in supporting roles for years. Bautista went from wrestler to proven laugh-generator in the Guardians of the Galaxy movies. Buddy cop movie is the natural next step for him. I like this pairing in principle. I don't think Stuber gets their dynamic right though. Bautista is at his best as the happy warrior. Drax in Guardians is an extreme version of that, but even a less cartoonish version of that is where he's best. Stuber has him more mono-focused and intense. He spends most of his time being patronizing to Nanjiani. He's punching down far too much, and it isn't as fun to see. Nanjiani is a little closer to his strengths. He's best when he's a little frustrated but still a little bit in control; when he can comment on the situation while still being fully invested in it. A good example is his character on Silicon Valley. Dinesh hates competing with Gilfoyle but can't help himself from doing it. In Stuber, he has all the attitude but none of the agency. Both men are still able to milk some laughs out of their roles, but they didn't endear themselves to me very much.

Stuber is a perfectly fine buddy comedy. It hits jokes at a consistent rate. It doesn't sag or forget that it's a comedy in the third act. Natalie Morales is a breath of fresh air whenever she shows up (Seriously, when is someone going to find a starring role that knows how to use her?). Really, it has an impressive roster of supporting actors all-around. A little Mira Sorvino in my life is always welcome. The same goes for Betty Gilpin and Steve Howey. A little more tweaking with the dynamic between the two leads would've endeared me a lot more to the movie. As is, I got a few laughs but will quickly forget it.

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend