REEL WORLD FILM SHORTS Reviewers: Bob Grimm and Juan-Carlos Selznick.
who wants to team up for one last heist. Listen for Julie Andrews as their mom. Cinemark 14. Rated PG.
Opening this week
Detroit
Annabelle: Creation
In the fourth film in the Conjuring supernatural horror series (and prequel to 2014’s Annabelle), a possessed doll terrorizes a group of orphaned girls. Cinemark 14, Feather River Cinemas, Paradise Cinema 7. Rated R.
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The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography
Dunkirk
The latest from acclaimed documentarian Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, Fog of War) tells the life story of Elsa Dorfman, known for taking large-format Polaroid portraits—including many of famous Beat generation personalities—in her Cambridge, Mass., studio for 35 years. Pageant Theatre. Rated R.
Faulty tower
The Glass Castle
Adaptation reduces Stephen King series to rubble
A
few years ago there was talk of Ron Howard direct-
ing a big screen adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower. The film was to be an introduction to the Dark Tower universe, to be followed by a TV series, and Javier Bardem was cast as by Roland Deschain the Gunslinger, the Bob Grimm main protagonist of King’s multinovel series. bg rimm@ newsrev iew.c om The main players were subsequently switched out for Idris Elba in the Roland role, and a relative novice in Nikolaj Arcel (A Royal Affair) for director, and the film’s budget was reduced to $60 million, a price you The Dark Tower would normally see for a Hollywood starring Idris rom-com, not for the launch of what Elba and Matthew was proposed to be an epic, blockMcConaughey. Directed by Nikolaj Arcel. buster franchise. All of the uncertainty and delays Cinemark 14, Feather River Cinemas and that plagued the production are Paradise Cinema 7. immediately apparent in the final Rated Pg-13. product. This movie is a catastrophe, and a complete slight to fans of the King books, fans of Matthew McConaughey (playing the Man in Black here), and fans of science fiction/fantasy. Oh hell, this thing slights everybody. It looks like a low-level episode of Dr. Who, the really schlocky 1970s Dr. Who. You get the sense watching it that they used the same sound stage for all of their interiors and just repainted shit. The CGI is terrible, the pacing is ridiculously, unnecessarily fast, and the plotting is confusing for those who haven’t read the books. I haven’t read the books and, after watching this, I don’t really care to. The story involves some kid named Jake (Tom Taylor), a sad teenager who is gifted with “the Shine,” the psychic powers Danny had in King’s The Shining.
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He dreams of another world where there is a Dark Tower that acts as some sort of barrier between other dimensions, protecting planets like Earth from evil. He also dreams of a gunslinger (Elba) who is trying to kill the Man in Black. No, it’s not Johnny Cash. McConaughey’s character is some sort of devil man whose intention is to hunt people with the Shine because their brains harness the power to shoot laser beams into the Dark Tower, thus destroying it and releasing goofy CGI monsters upon the Earth. Tom winds up traveling to something called the Mid World, where he joins forces for a brief hike with Roland before winding up back on Earth in present day New York City for some kind of apocalyptic battle. You can go ahead and badmouth me all you want if I got any of this wrong, but I assure you that’s the best I could gather from this hackneyed, rushed, underwhelming production. When considering the apparent scope of the novels, it’s a bit of a shocker that the film clocks in at 95 minutes. There is a definite sense that a lot of backstory and exposition has been removed in order to dumb things down and streamline the pace. Elba growls intermittent dialogue, with his character amounting to nothing more than shallow archetype. Also, if you are going to have a gunslinger with a western motif, give him a cool hat. Elba, as always, looks and is cool, but something as simple as a hat would’ve fleshed out the gunslinger character. McConaughey roams from sloppy set to sloppier set looking lost and perhaps even a little pissed that he signed on for this garbage. He’s not all bad; he’s just given next to nothing notable to do. There are still some sketchy plans to follow up this film with a TV series. Whatever the plan is, scrap it and start over a few years from now, when the memory of this unfortunate cinematic event has subsided. □
An adaptation of Jeannette Walls’ bestselling 2005 memoir about her tumultuous upbringing with her dysfunctional parents and three siblings. Cinemark 14 and Paradise Cinema 7. Rated PG-13.
Goodnight Brooklyn
Documentary on the legendary NYC underground venue Death by Audio that was destroyed by gentrification. A benefit for Blackbird, a soon-to-open Chico bookstore/DIY space. One showing: tonight, Aug. 10, 7 p.m. Pageant Theatre. Not rated.
An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power
Former Vice President Al Gore is featured in this sequel to the Academy Award-winning An Inconvenient Truth, as he continues his efforts to help in the battle against climate change. Cinemark 14. Rated PG.
The Little Hours
An outrageously raunchy comedy set in a Medieval convent and packed with funny stars—Aubrey Plaza, Molly Shannon, John C. Reilly, Fred Armison, Dave Franco, Nick Offerman, Alison Brie, Kate Micucci—that is sure to piss off more than a few Catholics. Pageant Theatre. Rated R.
CN&R
August 10, 2017
Christopher Nolan’s extraordinary new movie has gotten widespread raves and praise from reviewers and critics. And, somewhat to the surprise of the usual “observers,” it has also done very well at the box office in its opening week. It’s a riveting tale about a major event from World War II—the 1940 rescue and evacuation of the massive numbers of Allied troops trapped and hemmed in by the German army on the beaches of Dunkirk on the French side of the English Channel. As such, it has great appeal both as a fast-moving, multicharacter action drama and as an artfully complex war film in which the stories of several sets of individual characters are intricately intertwined with each other and with the unfolding events of an epic moment in modern history. The best performance of all, however, may belong to Kenneth Branagh. He plays Commander Bolton, the British naval officer in charge of the evacuation to the hospital ship who stays on to oversee further evacuations when the civilian vessels arrive. Branagh quietly brings a full range of large-scale emotion to key scenes with little or no dialogue. Cinemark 14, Feather River Cinemas, Paradise Cinema 7. Rated PG-13 —J.C.S.
The Emoji Movie
An emoji named Gene has an adventure inside a smartphone. Cinemark 14, Feather River Cinemas. Rated PG.
Girls Trip
Four lifelong friends (Regina Hall, Queen Latifah, Tiffany Haddish and Jada Pinkett Smith) reconnect during a wild “girls trip” to New Orleans. Cinemark 14. Rated R.
The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature
Kidnap
Now playing
The third iteration of Spider-Man film franchises continues sometime after the events of Captain America: Civil War, with the young web-slinger (played here by Tom Holland) being mentored on superhero life by Iron Man/Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.). Cinemark 14, Feather River Cinemas. Rated PG-13.
Halle Barry stars as a single mom who goes full action-hero as she chases down the kidnappers who abducted her son. Cinemark 14, Feather River Cinemas, Paradise Cinema 7. Rated R.
A 3-D animated feature about a purple squirrel and his animal friends trying to save a natural park from being bulldozed to build a less critter-friendly amusement park. Cinemark 14, Feather River Cinemas, Paradise Cinema 7. Rated PG.
Spider-Man: Homecoming
Baby Driver
A jukebox musical in which a young getaway driver (Ansel Elgort) is coerced into working for a kingpin (Kevin Spacey) in exchange for a better life. Cinemark 14. Rated R.
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War for the Planet of the Apes
The Dark Tower
See review this issue. Cinemark 14, Feather River Cinemas, Paradise Cinema 7. Rated PG-13 —B.G.
Despicable Me 3
Gru (voiced by Steve Carell) meets his longlost twin brother, Dru (yes, also Carell),
The third and final entry in the Planet of the Apes reboot finds ape leader Caesar searching for a way to save his species in their ongoing war with the humans. Cinemark 14, Feather River Cinemas. Rated PG-13.
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Katherine Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty, The Hurt Locker) directs this crime drama based on the real-life Algiers Motel incident (during racially charged riots in Detroit in1967, during which police and National Guard members killed three black teens. Cinemark 14, Feather River Cinemas, Paradise Cinema 7. Rated R.
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