After that, look for my 2019 best-of lists to kick into gear, likely starting with music, then TV. I'll try and use that extra time to play a little catch-up with some of the movies I haven't seen yet as well, as I don't plan to do my best-of movies until towards the end of the month.
As I also mentioned, I'll actually be doing two best-of movies lists, one this month, and another a few months later, as I watch more of the stuff I missed in the meantime- that way, I get to honor another slew of worthy films I just didn't get around to in time. Let's get things started with the epic new version of...
A truly remarkable achievement in cinema, the "live-action" remake of Disney's animated classic, The Lion King is, in fact, technically also animated, but, in this case, using CGI instead of traditional animation. If you thought director Jon Favreau's previous Disney remake effort The Jungle Book was impressive, just wait until you see his work here, which, unlike that film, features no humans whatsoever.
I know what you skeptics are thinking: what's the point? I mean, it's basically just the same movie all over again, right? Well, yes and no. Incorporating elements of the successful Broadway play, as well as elaborating on other things, including expanding the role of Nala, and making her more fit for a Queen- as in Queen B, Beyoncé, who also wrote a new song for the film, as well as helping out on the score with returning conquerors Elton John, Tim Rice and Hans Zimmer.
So, basically, it's bigger and I would argue, even better than the original. The characters are all deepened, and the photo-realistic imagery makes the infamous tragedy that occurs early on in the film that much more nail-biting and emotional, as well as the fiery climax that much more thrilling and exciting. All the iconic moments are present and accounted for and that opening scene is wow-inducing.
The characters we know and love are all expertly recast, save the irreplaceable James Earl Jones as Mufasa, and the music is as riveting (that souped-up Zimmer score), fun (Seth Rogen and Billy Eichner singing "Hakuna Matata"!) and lovely (anything involving Beyoncé) as ever. I just loved it. People talk about how Star Wars: The Force Awakens took them back to their childhood- well, this one did the same for me.
I get the criticism that Disney is just cashing in on all their older properties with all these live-action remakes, but if they were all this good, no one would be complaining. I didn't hate the ones I've seen, but, save The Jungle Book, this is the only one I didn't have any complaints about overall. (Full disclosure: I haven't seen Aladdin or Lady & The Tramp as of yet, but I plan to soon.)
In fact, this was easily one of my favorite movies of the year, bar none- more on that later on in the month. It's an absolute must-see, if you're a hardcore fan of the original, at the very least, but be prepared to get the feels all over again if you're of a certain age.
Decidedly not for the kids is the deceptively-titled Good Boys, which must have realized how the film could fall into the wrong hands in time for the Blu-Ray/DVD release because it has the biggest R-rating insignia I've ever seen on the cover of a movie, as if to scream: "Don't say you haven't been warned!" Duly noted.
Be that as it may, it is pretty shocking to hear how foul-mouthed these tweens truly are. Kids swearing for shock value is admittedly nothing new: see also The Bad News Bears, The Goonies, Stand By Me, The Sandlot. etc. However, this film takes that to a whole new level- it's basically Superbad, the tweens version, from many of the same people that made that film, including producers Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill and Evan Goldberg.
After a while, as one might expect, the effect loses its ability to shock, but thankfully, the film has other tricks up its sleeve. It's kinda-sorta the tween male equivalent of Booksmart, only not quite that good. As with that film, it deals with the efforts of a group of social outcast friends to get to an epic party, and their adventures along the way.
In this case, it also involves the tweens trying to replace a drone one of them "borrowed" from his father- without his permission, of course- and crashed while trying to observe some teenage girls making out. Not, mind you, because they're perverts, but because they want to learn how to kiss, as they've been told there will being making out at said party.
As the girls later point out, they could have just simply Googled "how to kiss." Actually, they sort of do, but they get a lot more than they bargained for when they go to a porn site and they see someone kissing someone else in a place one doesn't typically see in normal society and it scares them off! Hence Plan B- the drone mission.
The movie is filled with all sorts of off-color stuff like this- in one memorable scene, the gang decide to auction off a prized collector's card for money, but are wary of weirdos coming over to get it, so they go into one of their parent's bedrooms to get some weapons to protect themselves. Cut to: the boys answering the door to prospective buyer Claude (Stephen Merchant, of the original British The Office), clad in bondage masks and clutching sex toys and whips as "weapons." It's pretty hilarious.
What makes this really work isn't the foul-mouthed kids, per se, as it is the kids playing them and the strength of the script. As with the best teen movies, a lot of thought went into these characters, including the aforementioned teen girls (one of which is Booksmart alum Molly Gordon), and into coming up with amusing scenarios in which to put them. For added laughs, the filmmakers surround them with comic pros like Will Forte, Lil Rel Howery, Retta, Michaela Watkins and Sam Richardson.
The end result is a lot of fun, and if it's not quite as brainy and clever as Booksmart or heartfelt and emotional as the best parts of Superbad, then it's, at the very least, in the same ballpark as those modern-day classics, which is saying something. I guarantee that somewhere, right now, a group of kids that are way too young to be watching this, are 100% watching this and loving it. It's the way of the world, and besides, it's one hell of lot easier to do such things than it was when I was a kid. They could do a lot worse, as it's well worth a watch.
Interestingly, this one has the plot that I thought Widows had, which is that a group of mob wives take over their husband's business after they are put out of the picture by a job gone wrong. (Widows is actually about women who inherit their husbands' debts when they are killed in a job gone wrong, and who have to pull off a heist to pay back the bad guys in question- read more about it here.) Only here, the husbands don't die, they go to jail, leaving the wives in question to wonder how things will change once they get out- will they also be put out of the picture?
Based on the graphic novel of the same name, The Kitchen has a high-profile cast that includes Melissa McCarthy as the most sensible of the wives in question, Tiffany Haddish as the most volatile, and Elisabeth Moss as the most shell-shocked, being a victim of spousal abuse. There's also Domhnall Gleeson (the Harry Potter films, which co-starred his dad, Brendan), Margo Martindale (The Americans, Justified), rapper-turned-actor Common (Smokin' Aces, Selma) and James Badge Dale (The Departed, Iron Man 3).
Critics actively hated the film, and it tanked at the box office, but I enjoyed it overall. Yes, there are some mob movie clichés on display, and the scenario is perhaps a little unlikely, but it's a movie, not based on a true story, and it's fun seeing women tackle roles typically reserved for men. I know some people- read: sexist men- may see this as yet another thing that's gone wrong in Hollywood these days, but they need to get over themselves.
Besides, I'm not afraid to call out a bad movie when I see it: the lady Ghostbusters wasn't bad because of the women in it or because it was women in the first place, it was just bad because it was poorly written. This isn't so bad. If anything, it's actually pretty gratifying to see Moss stand up for herself after putting up with a lot of crap throughout the first half of the movie; McCarthy take a stand when people go behind her back and do her dirty; and Haddish do her bad-ass gangster thing- though she did do a sort of dry run for this sort of character in Keanu.
Anyway, I enjoyed it for what it was, and the soundtrack is great, the period detail was impressive- though not quite on the level of something like The Deuce- and the cast was good across the board, albeit some better than others. It's no Widows, to be sure, but it's pretty damn enjoyable, nonetheless. I say check it out if you like a good mafia movie- just know that it's a female-led one. If you don't have problems with that, saddle up and ride. If you do, your loss.
Not to be confused with the horror flick The Vault, with James Franco, this film, simply titled Vault, is a 2019 release about a safe-deposit vault heist in Rhode Island- one of the biggest in American history- and the subsequent fallout from it. Based on a true story, the film mainly follows the trials and tribulations of two characters: Robert Dussult, aka Deuce (Theo Rossi, of Sons of Anarchy and Luke Cage) and Charles Flynn, aka Chucky (Clive Standen, Vikings, the TV version of Taken).
Deuce and Chucky are two small-time criminals that mostly pull off minor robberies, until they get a little too ambitious and try to rob two banks in the same day in the same town! They're caught when their driver abandons them, and while in prison, they meet Gerry Ouimette, aka "The Frenchman" (Don Johnson). Gerry resents that the Italian-led local mob, led by Raymond Patriarca Sr. (mob movie regular Chazz Palminteri) won't let him become a "made" man, on account of the whole French thing, so he hatches a scheme to rob the mob- or rather the savings deposit boxes they use located underneath a furrier store.
He can't do the job himself, so he hires Deuce and Chucky to do it instead, along with a group of other thugs. Not unlike the Reservoir Dogs, they all go by aliases to protect their real identities: Buddy, followed by the city they're from. So, there's Buddy Providence (William Forsythe, another crime movie regular, including the classic Leone film Once Upon a Time in America), Buddy Roxbury (Sean Ringgold, Notorious) and Buddy Barrington (Eric Lutes, Blood, Guts, Bullets & Octane).
The film also features Orange is the New Black and The Handmaid's Tale star Samira Wiley as the female lead, and cameos from two more crime movie/TV luminaries: Vincent Pastore, aka "Big Pussy" from The Sopranos, and Burt Young, best-known for the Rocky movies, but also in such classics as the aforementioned Once Upon a Time in America, The Gambler, The Pope of Greenwich Village, Chinatown and lots more where that came from.
The film has a nice sense of humor, and it's kind of cool seeing a solid character actor like Rossi headline a movie of his own, to say nothing of the rarity of seeing an African-American lead in a movie like this that's primarily comprised of white guys, albeit mostly Italian. I read up a bit on the actual heist and the film mostly hews pretty close to the facts, though there are some changes here and there, such as the fact that Ouimette and his brother actually did take place in said heist (I'm guessing that the low-budget production only had Johnson for a limited time, hence the change) and the criminals went by Harry, not Buddy, but other than that, it sticks fairly close to the truth.
Remarkably, the film was shot in a matter of weeks on location, mostly in Rhode Island, where the incidents actually took place. Considering the low budget, I was even more impressed by the authentic 70's look of the film than I was by the same in The Kitchen. Even better, there's a dead-on Blaxploitation-style funk score, courtesy of co-scripter B. Dolan, that you would mistake as the real thing if someone played it for you out of context. I would 100% buy or download that soundtrack, and probably will ASAP.
Now for the bad news. Some of the acting is a bit spotty- I had to try hard not to laugh at the broad antics of Standen, complete with a wacky wig, after seeing him play the always-stoic Liam Neeson role in the TV series adaptation of Taken. Can't blame the guy for wanting to have a little fun after that serious role, but he goes a bit overboard here. Rossi and Wiley fare pretty well, and the longtime actors I mentioned are all great, but most of them aren't in the film for long, despite top billing.
Johnson and Palminteri do the best they can with what they have, and the latter has a particularly amusing scene with Pastore, but really, this is Rossi and Standen's show, with an able assist from Wiley, though it's hard to believe her character would go out with Rossi's after he robbed her place of business, much less that he would take her home to meet his family on the first date and they wouldn't bat an eye! I mean, it was the 70's, and I'm guessing interracial dating was still controversial at best.
The film also has some pacing issues, even at a mere 99 minutes, it feels a lot longer, and the events after the heist about halfway through the film really drag. Still, actor-turned-director Tom DeNucci (The Opposite Sex) does a good job with such a low budget and such a tight shooting schedule, so I'm going to cut him a little slack. Even with its faults, the film is still worth a watch, if only once. If you love heist films, you might rate it a little higher.
After his sci-fi passion project Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets bombed big-time at the box office worldwide (see review here), writer/director Luc Besson took a step back and retreated into his go-to filmic obsession, the kick-ass female, with Anna. More low-key than the over-the-top Lucy, Anna cost a mere $30 million, a considerable drop-off from the $200 million plus he spent on Valerian. However, where Lucy grossed over $463 million on a $40 million budget, Anna merely broke even, basically just grossing back its budget.
Of course, Anna lacks the big-name lead of a Scarlett Johansson, starring instead relative newcomer Sasha Luss, a Russian model-turned-actress. Factor in some troubling accusations of sexual improprieties against Besson in the interim, and mixed reviews for the film, with some critics saying Besson was repeating himself, and it's perhaps understandable why the film underperformed, in spite of the presence of a solid supporting cast that includes Helen Mirren, Cillian Murphy and Luke Evans, and a clever "Russian Doll"-style structure.
Luss plays the titular Anna, an abused drug addict that has the opportunity to leave her old life behind and become a KGB assassin. I'm not entirely sure why the KGB would be recruiting random girlfriends of deadbeat druggie guys, but you know, this sort of thing only happens in movies, I guess- especially Luc Besson movies. (See also Nikita and, to a lesser extent, The Professional, in which a hit man randomly trains a tween to follow in his footsteps.)
Well, wouldn't you know it, Anna takes to the gig like a fish to water, and before long, she's wiping the floor with the bad guys, taking out an entire bar full of armed guards to kill her first target in near-record time. (Emphasis on the "near.") Eventually, she's planted as a- wouldn't you know it? - a fashion model who is hired to work in Paris, where she takes on a variety of hit jobs on people while working her way up the food chain to her main target.
Later on, she gets made by the CIA and is basically forced to work as a double agent, but also sees it as a potential way out of being a paid assassin. She was initially promised that she would only have to work for the KGB for five years, then she would be dismissed, but the head of the organization scoffs at letting her go, so Anna attempts to leverage her position with the CIA to get put into the witness protection program. The rest of the film is her doing what she needs to do to fulfill her promises to all involved and make a clean getaway, perhaps with a little double-crossing along the way.
As I mentioned, aside from the solid cast, the major thing the film has going for it is an interesting structure. The film goes back-and-forth in time repeatedly throughout the proceedings, each time shedding a little more light on the situation and giving the viewer more information on what's going on in between what we do see and what we don't. The end result is a pretty clever way of telling a relatively straightforward story- think Pulp Fiction- that will work like gangbusters for some and probably seem like a gimmick to others that is meant to mask that this is the sort of story that Besson's told several times before.
I personally really enjoyed the film, much more so than the heavily-flawed Valerian, which was incredibly imaginative, but dropped the ball in terms of characters and plot. Here, we have a genuinely intriguing, sexy, no-nonsense central character that is basically the smartest person in the room at all times, despite some missteps in her life early on. It's fun seeing her play both sides against the middle, and it's always gratifying to see such a strong female character in a genre typically dominated by men.
Yes, the accusations against Besson are problematic, and normally, I would almost automatically side with the women in cases like his, but after the initial accusations, literally nothing has come of it since, and the charges have since been dropped after a lengthy investigation. Unlike, say, Harvey Weinstein, where the proof is overwhelming, this seems, at least in the case of the initial accuser, to be the case of a relationship gone horribly wrong.
It's worth noting that the actress in question appeared in both Valerian and Anna, although she was subsequently cut out of the latter, I believe- understandably, after her accusations were made- which would mean she continued to work with Besson after the alleged events took place, which would be a pretty odd thing to do, given the circumstances. I don't have all the facts at hand, though, so, for the time being, at least, it remains a "he said she said" kind of thing.
But I'm not here to judge the man, I'm here to critique his film, and for what it was, I really enjoyed it. Somewhat ironically, given the situation, Besson has always been known for creating strong, tough female characters in his films, so it would seem pretty out of character for him to be one of these guys that takes advantage of women, but it's also not unprecedented, i.e. the accusations about Joss Whedon from his ex a few years back, which weren't nearly as serious as the ones here- he was basically just accused of cheating on his wife- but nonetheless called into question his identifying as a feminist.
So, maybe Besson isn't quite the feminist he claims to be, but his films certainly fit the qualifications, at the very least, and as long as there's nothing concrete proven against him, I'm going to keep enjoying them as such. Of course, this gets into the whole territory of "should we continue to enjoy the work of an artist whose personal life have proven problematic?", but that's a much larger conversation, obviously.
For the time being, I love his stuff, for the most part, and I really dug this one, much more so than Valerian, critics be damned. I say, if you do, too, and/or you like films with strong, kick-ass female protagonists, then you'll want to check this one out. It's a lot of fun, action-packed, excellently choreographed and shot, and the pay-off is ultimately pretty rewarding in the end, despite the admittedly convoluted structure, which may infuriate some. The jury on Besson himself may still be out, but this one-man jury dug his Anna, at least.
Well, that about does it for now. Look for more reviews of the stuff I watched over the holidays later in the week, and thanks for reading! 😀
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