movies It ★★
REVIEWS
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ow horrible a year is Hollywood having? Let’s see: Summer attendance was the lowest in a quarter century. Even factoring in the global market, 2017 is setting records for big-budget bombs. Foreign moviegoers famous for eating up anything with American stars in spandex are staying home in droves. It’s the industry’s worst nightmare. Everybody everywhere is tired of the same old crap. Ten years ago, it would have been impossible to imagine a new Alien or Transformers installment tanking, a Pirates or X-Men sequel being greeted by an intercontinental yawn, or the R-rated comedy being put on life support. Baywatch, Snatched, Rough Night — basically anything with punch lines except The Big Sick — came out of opening weekend without a pulse. People in Tinseltown are scratching their heads, wondering why the world didn’t go bananas over Tom Cruise cranking up a new Mummy franchise while the most recent is still playing on basic cable. Repeat after me: Everybody everywhere is tired of the same old crap. Audiences haven’t just been starved for good movies. They’ve been starved for movies, period. This Labor Day weekend was the
IT HAPPENS What’s more dispiriting than a lazily conceived remake of a lesser King adaptation? One with a sequel already in the works.
first in 25 years not to feature a wide release. Hollywood has thrown up its arms. Which was just fine with New Line Cinema. Guess what happened over the weekend when it released a lazily conceived remake with zero stars and a one-hit director — but the name Stephen King subliminally attached? Yup, Americans stampeded to the cineplex. Even though it’s the same old crap. Directed by Andy Muschietti (Mamá), It is less a remake than a recycling. The film tells only the first half of the story told in the book and the 1990 film adaptation. And Mus-
chietti reshapes the source material to allow appropriation of visuals and tropes from King-based classics such as Carrie, The Shining, Dolores Claiborne and, most flagrantly, Stand by Me. This homage, if that’s what it is, backfires by reminding us how infinitely superior those pictures were. I won’t even list the names of this film’s young actors. They probably wouldn’t mean anything to you, and each character is barely more than a pitch-session stereotype. An outcast group of kids in a small Maine town inexplicably attracts the attention of a super-
natural clown. The opening scene in which the psychotic carny lures an unsuspecting boy into a rain sewer is borderline creepy, but it’s all downhill from there. The tubby boy, the stuttering boy, the potty-mouthed boy, the girl who’s abused by her father until she triumphantly kung-fus him — all are put through two-plus hours of jump-scare, haunted-house and creaky-door paces. CGI and sudden soundtrack blasts stand in for authentic horror jolts. There are even basements not to go into which, naturally, are gone into. And the longer all of this drags on, the more of a drag it becomes. A number of scenes featuring nasty things happening to children are in bad taste, I’d argue. And just how terrifying is a clown whose supernatural ass can be kicked by a bunch of fed-up preteens, anyway? Did I mention he bears a striking resemblance to Gene Simmons? Try to remember the last really good film based on a King work. Unless I’m forgetting something (Firestarter 2: Rekindled?), it’s The Green Mile. And that came out last century. Yup, Hollywood has big problems. In 2017, King may still be a brand. But nothing based on his books comes close to feeling brand-new. RI C K KI S O N AK
88 MOVIES
SEVEN DAYS
09.13.17-09.20.17
SEVENDAYSVT.COM
Home Again ★★
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omecoming stories have become old hat for Reese Witherspoon. In 2002, the perky actress scored her biggest live-action box-office success with Sweet Home Alabama. A run-ofthe-mill but occasionally charming romantic comedy, it featured Witherspoon as an engaged New York socialite who returns home to the Deep South to finalize a divorce from her blue-collar husband. In Home Again, her profession has switched from fashion designer to interior decorator, and the locale has shifted from the Heart of Dixie to upscale Los Angeles, but the clichés are as familiar as a bad penny. This time around, Witherspoon plays Alice, a mother of two who moves back to her childhood home in SoCal following her separation from Austen, her New York-based music-exec husband (the woefully underutilized Michael Sheen). In short order, she hooks up with Harry (Pico Alexander), a fledgling 27-year-old film director, following a drunken 40th birthday outing. The morning after, Alice awakens to find Harry’s two screenwriter and actor buddies crashed out in her living room. (Picture a blander, less-funny version of the ensemble from the HBO series “Entourage.”) Then her mother (played by Candice Bergen, Witherspoon’s prospective mother-in-law in Sweet Home Alabama) shows up and implausibly invites the down-on-their-luck filmmakers to live in her daughter’s guesthouse until
they secure financing for a follow-up feature to their promising indie short. The plot device of a woman sharing living quarters with a group of strange men was employed to great comic effect in George Stevens’ World War II-era classic The More the Merrier, which used the wartime housing crisis in Washington, D.C., as an excuse to cram Jean Arthur into a cramped apartment with odd-couple roommates Joel McCrea and Charles Coburn. Here the setup feels contrived and utterly unbelievable. The humorous potential of the situation is also wasted. When Austen finally arrives in LA to try to win back Alice’s heart, he’s known about her unorthodox living arrangement for some time, leaving the comedic element of surprise out of the equation. Home Again was written and directed by Hallie Meyers-Shyer, the daughter of veteran rom-com filmmakers Nancy Meyers (The Holiday; It’s Complicated) and Charles Shyer (the remake of Father of the Bride and its unfortunate sequel). Though her mother shares a producer credit on the film, Meyers-Shyer seems to have inherited her parents’ worst cinematic impulses and few of their virtues. Party scenes are glossed over with nondiegetic music drowning out conversation. A potential love quadrangle including Harry’s screenwriter friend (“Saturday Night Live” alum Jon Rudnitsky) is briefly explored but never fleshed out. A fistfight scene that should have been a climactic
FULL HOUSE Reese Witherspoon stars as a single mom with multiple suitors in Hallie Meyers-Shyer’s forgettable rom-com.
encounter between Austen and Harry is instead an absurdly abrupt conflict between Austen and aspiring actor Teddy (Nat Wolff ), the least-developed character of the house-crashing trio. But the main problem lies in the film’s pedestrian direction and often-banal dialogue. A typical exchange: Austen: “Where do you keep your forks?” Alice: “In the drawer.” Witherspoon does her best with the limited material, but at times she’s a caricature of her former effervescent screen persona.
It doesn’t help that the chemistry with her younger love interest mostly fizzles. “What is happening here?” Alice asks Harry at one point about the nature of their relationship. “I don’t think either of us know the answer to that,” he responds. Unfortunately, neither does Meyers-Shyer. By the time Alice and Harry’s courtship reaches its illogical conclusion, one is left wishing the writer-director had followed Thomas Wolfe’s literary maxim: “You can’t go home again.” LU KE BAYN E S