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.
omnivorous cinephile 