Short Takes: Zombieland Double Tap, Motherless Brooklyn, Midway, Parasite

I’m afraid I need to play catch-up after seeing a half-dozen movies in the last two weeks. With a couple of films I want to see arriving each week through the end of the year, I don’t want to fall too far behind with my reviews. Here are my thoughts on four movies.

Zombieland: Double Tap

A sequel separated by a decade or more from the original can be a dicey proposition. For every Incredibles II or The Color of Money, there’s a Zoolander II or Rings. Thankfully, Zombieland: Double Tap is firmly in the former group. Original stars Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, and Abigail Breslin reunite with director Ruben Fleischer to make a movie that builds on the original while recapturing the anarchic comedy mayhem that made the first film a major success. Part of the story was inherent with the cast, since Breslin is no longer the tween of the first film. Her leaving the nest to discover her place in the apocalyptic world sets the story in motion.

The cast is expanded with Rosario Dawson as an Elvis-loving hotel manager and Zoey Deutch as a ditzy blond who’s somehow managed to survive in a mall through the years since the zombies showed up. There’s also a fun moment when Harrelson and Eisenberg meet their literal match in Albuquerque (Luke Wilson) and Flagstaff (Thomas Middleditch).

Both Zombieland movies are very bloody versions of Roadrunner cartoons with higher body counts, as if George Romero overdosed on laughing gas. Still, they’re raucously fun and funny, and if you liked the original (or the other great zombie-comedy, Shaun of the Dead) you’ll thoroughly enjoy Double Tap.

Motherless Brooklyn

If you’re a fan of the 1999 novel that won a National Book Critics Circle Award and a Gold Dagger, you’ll likely want to skip this movie. If you haven’t read the book, you’ll find Motherless Brooklyn is a decent mystery that could be a love child of Chinatown. The film was a passion project of Edward Norton, who not only stars but wrote the screenplay and directed the film, yet apart from the main character and a couple others, everything else in the film is different from the book.

That starts with the setting in 1950s New York. Lionel Essrog (Norton) suffers from Tourette’s, a disorder that causes tics as well as verbal outbursts. He works along with a couple guys for Frank Minna (Bruce Willis), a low-rent detective who supplements their income by running a car service. Lionel’s challenge interferes with his work, but Minna knows he has a gift that makes up for it – Lionel remembers everything. When Minna’s killed on a job, Lionel and the others must figure out not only who did it but why. The investigation involves a ruthless builder (Alec Baldwin), his estranged architect brother (Willem Dafoe), a neighborhood organizer (Cherry Jones), and a woman fighting to preserve black neighborhoods (Gugu Mbatha-Raw).

At almost 2 ½ hours, the film meanders a bit, but sparkling performances from the entire cast help.

Midway

Roland Emmerich is known for disasters – movies of disasters (Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012) and disastrous films (1998’s Godzilla, Independence Day: Resurgence, 2012). With Midway, he’s turned his view to military history, but he still managed to tell the story of two disasters – one for the Americans, with the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the other for the Japanese with the Battle of Midway, during which three of their aircraft carriers were sunk. While the war lasted another three years, but after Midway the Japanese turned from offensive operations to defensive.

Similar to Tora, Tora, Tora, Emmerich balances the story from the viewpoint of both nations. A bridge between them is provided by Patrick Wilson, playing naval intelligence officer Edwin Layton. A prelude has him in Tokyo in the late 1930s, discussing with Admiral Yamamoto (Etsushi Toyokawa) what could cause war between the two nations. In December 1941, Layton is at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese launch their surprise attack. Advances in special effects allow Emmerich to create a pulse-pounding scene, in particular with the hellish destruction of the Arizona. Overall, the history of the battles, along with the Doolittle raid on Tokyo a few months after Pearl Harbor, are shown with historical accuracy, though the times in between battles are flat and pedestrian.

The film is filled with stars, including Woody Harrelson (again) as Admiral Nimitz, Dennis Quaid as “Bull” Halsey, and Aaron Eckhart as Jimmy Doolittle. Ed Skrein, Luke Evans, and Nick Jonas portray pilots and gunners in the torpedo and dive bomber squadrons posted on the USS Enterprise. Everything covered in this film has been filmed before, with the previously mentioned Tora Tora Tora, Michael Bay’s ponderous Pearl Harbor, which also covered the Doolittle raid, and an all-star Charlton Heston version of the climatic battle, also named Midway, released in 1976. The film doesn’t really add anything to the telling of the stories.

Parasite

Korean director Bong Joon Ho is one of the more interesting auteurs currently working in film. He’d broken out with The Host in 2006, a low budget and highly effective creature feature (not to be confused with the 2013 adaptation of a Stephanie Meyer novel that wasted Saoirse Ronan). His first English language film was the dystopia-on-rails story Snowpiercer. With Parasite, you think he’s decided to do almost a situation comedy for the first hour. By then it’s too late.

The film focuses on a poor family in Seoul – husband, mother, grown daughter and son – trying to get by anyway they can, including folding (badly) pizza boxes. Their fortune begins to change when a friend of the son offers to let him take over his job when the friend heads overseas to college. He’s been tutoring the daughter of a wealthy couple in English, and the son’s experienced enough to handle it. Seeing the luxury in which the other family lives stuns the son, and through some brazen lies along with sabotage of prior employees, the other three family members find work in the house. But then the plot twists in surprising and, in the end, devastating ways.

Parasite unanimously won the Palme d’Or this year at the Cannes Film Festival, and it likely will pick up an Oscar for Best Foreign Film. While you think the title refers to the poor family, Bong Joon Ho takes the theme in an unexpected direction. It’s a movie that you won’t easily forget.

Belle of the Ball

With all the movies released each year, it’s impossible to see them all. Even established critics for media sources will miss some. And much of what slips by under the radar are the dregs that deserve to be missed. However, sometimes a gem gets flushed away with the silt that’s surrounding it. The premium channels and streaming services give us a second chance to uncover the missed diamonds. Currently HBO is featuring a British beauty that was only in limited release in the US last year: Belle.

The titular character is Dido Elizabeth Belle, the daughter of Capt. (later Admiral) Sir John Lindsay (Matthew Goode) who saved her mother from a slave ship. After her mother’s death, Lindsay arranges the child’s passage to England where he places her in the home of his granduncle, William Murray (Tom Wilkinson), the 1^st Earl of Mansfield and the Lord High Magistrate of England. Lord Mansfield and Lady Mansfield (Emily Watson) had no children of their own, but along with Dido they raised their niece Elizabeth Murray following her mother’s death and her father disowning her in favor of his new wife and family. Dido (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and Elizabeth (Sarah Gadon) grow into beautiful women, but both are constrained by 18^th Century society.

Elizabeth has no inheritance or land, which handicaps her when seeking a suitor. One who is interested is James Ashford (Tom Fenton), though he is offended by Dido’s existence, even though his brother Oliver (James Norton) finds her attractive. Dido’s not allowed to join the family for dinner when they have guests. Even though Sir John acknowledged her as his daughter and made her his heir, he wasn’t married to Dido’s mother. After dinner she’s allowed to join in by the rules of society, since it is a more casual time.

While she’s mostly been protected on Mansfield’s estate, the world starts to impose on her. Part of her awakening comes from John Davinier (Sam Reid), a vicar’s son who’s studying the law under Mansfield’s tutelage. He tells her of a case Mansfield is considering between the owners of the slave ship Zong and their insurers. The owners claim that the ship ran low on water so they had to throw their cargo – slaves – overboard so the crew could survive, but the insurers have refused to reimburse them for their loss. Davinier, an ardent abolitionist, believes there is more to the case, but his passion gets him dismissed by Mansfield. Still, it has begun an awakening in Dido.

The movie begins with the “based on a true story” notation, which for Hollywood is code for “most of this is made up.” However, English films usually stay very close to the actual events, and that is the case with Belle. Zong was a landmark case – it was also known as the Zong Massacre – and Mansfield was a major force in English government and jurisprudence. One of his friends and clients was Sarah Churchill, the wife of the first Duke of Marlborough. His decision in the Zong case and others had a profound effect on England. Some of the details of Dido and Davinier are more fanciful, but it does make for a wonderful love story.

I’d first noticed Gugu Mbatha-Raw when she played Martha Jones’ sister Tish during the third season of the new “Doctor Who.” She was the best part of the Tom Hanks movie Larry Crowne, and she has three upcoming features in postproduction or filming where she stars with Matthew McConaughey, Will Smith, and Keanu Reeves, so her profile should definitely rise. The camera loves her and it reads every nuance on her face and in her body language. Her performance as Dido is seamless and beautiful to behold.

The rest of the cast is sterling, especially Wilkinson and Watson as Lord and Lady Mansfield. While showing characteristic English restraint, you also see the depth of their love for Dido. Rounding out the cast is Miranda Richardson as Lady Ashford and Penelope Wilton as Mansfield’s spinster sister.

The movie was directed by Amma Asante, who began as a child actress but moved up to the hyphenate writer-director-producer. The Writer’s Guild of America gave credit for the screenplay solely to Misan Sagay, who also wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God. There was a question, however, about multiple of rewrites that Asante did. Regardless, it is an effective screenplay that both presents the story and captures the era.

Look for this movie, and if you get the chance, watch it.

Detail from a painting of the actual Dido Belle and Elisabeth Murray