Film

Think Free

“How in the hell do you still have the ball?”

Dog days

A bunch of comedians lend their voices to some cartoon characters, and the results are moderately entertaining. Hey, it’s not a ringing endorsement, but The Secret Life of Pets is good for a laugh or two, and the occasional whacked-out moment that qualifies it as a semi-original animated movie.

OK, still not a ringing endorsement.

Louis C.K. voices Max, a Jack Russell terrier who loves his master, Katie (Ellie Kemper of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt), with that undying loyalty that makes dogs so damn cool. Katie brings home a new brother for Max, a big brown shaggy dog named Duke (Eric Stonestreet), and it creates some turmoil in the household.

Max and Duke eventually wind up in the hands of Animal Control, and eventually fend for themselves in the sewers of Manhattan. There they become enemies of the Flushed Pets, a group consisting of alligators, lizards, snakes and furry critters led by Snowball the Rabbit (Kevin Hart on a sound booth tear).

The advertised premise for the film suggests the movie might be about what our pets do in the house when we leave home. That part of the film is out of the way early in the movie’s opening minutes. (They basically eat all of our food, have parties, and listen to punk rock.) The rest of the movie is the band of pets in Max’s neighborhood trying to find him and Duke when they get lost.

Some of the sequences are borderline deranged. Max and Duke wind up in a sausage factory, where they gobble down hot dogs in an almost hallucinatory scene set to Grease’s “We Go Together.” This doesn’t feel like the stuff of kids’ movies; it’s a sequence that seems as if the animators took a little LSD break, came back to their computers, and dreamt up some wild shit.

The same can be said for the sewer stuff, which actually might terrify kids under the age of 8 and perhaps some of the softer, sweeter adults in attendance. There’s a snake down there that initiates new members of the Flushed Pets crew by biting or eating them, and that particular snake’s fate is something akin to the one suffered by Bambi’s mom. Directors Yarrow Cheney, making his feature film directing debut, and Chris Renaud (the Despicable Me movies) practice a very frantic pacing style that becomes a bit of a headache at times. Much of the movie goes by at whiz-bang speed, although the action is fairly coherent. The animators have come up with a fun vision of New York City, with apartment buildings squished into each other and a compressed Manhattan skyline. They manage to make the city look friendly and crazy at the same The Secret time, which is probably the way many of the city’s residents would Life of Pets describe their mega-famous home. One of the greater joys of the 12345 movie is hearing Louis C.K. toning things down for PG animated fare. Directors: Yarrow Cheney, It turns out he has a gift for playing Chris Renaud a dog, and Max even looks a little Starring: Louis C.K., Kevin like him. And since he’s such a Hart, Ellie Kemper passionate endorser of New York, he’s right at home in a movie where that locale is the setting. And he’s just sort of really cute playing a dog. Conversely, Hart goes for something a little more evil with his bunny rabbit, giving the killer bunny from Monty Python and the Holy Grail a run for its money. With this, and his recent pairing with Dwayne Johnson in the sort of OK Central Intelligence, Kevin Hart is having himself a sort of better than average, slightly better than fair-tomiddling summer. Where does The Secret Life of Pets rank in the list of animated movies released so far in 2016? Well below Zootopia, and somewhat short of Finding Dory, but still OK. No, you don’t need to run out and see this one, but if it should play in front of your face somewhere in the future, there’s a good chance you will enjoy substantial parts of it. Ω

1The BFG And with this, the startling run of Steven Spielberg duds continues. After delivering two of the dullest movies of his career (Lincoln, BridgeofSpies) Spielberg does the almost impossible; he makes Roald Dahl completely boring. Oscar-winner Mark Rylance delivers a motion-capture CGI performance as the central character, the Big Friendly Giant, that results in more yawns than smiles. His giant captures dreams and blows them into the sleeping residents of London. On one of his excursions, he kidnaps Sophie (Ruby Barnhill), and takes her to the land of giants, where most giants are meat eaters. Luckily, he’s a vegetarian, but he’s being bullied by a group of bad giants led by Jemaine Clement in the film’s most fun motion-capture performance. Despite a winning performance from Barnhill, a true star in the making, the film drags on and on, trying to get by on big special effects rather than an engaging story. Everything feels a little off for Spielberg. A visit to the Queen’s house, which should be bizarrely funny and subversive, winds up feeling awkward and uncomfortable. The whole movie seems to be playing it safe in Dahl land, as if it is E.T.in Dahl land, and it throws the tone completely off. It doesn’t help that John Williams rips off his own E.T.score. It never clicks. Nothing really works, yet again, for Spielberg, a director who seems to have momentarily lost his mojo, but if he makes stinkers for the rest of his life, he’s still one of the most amazing men to sit in the director’s chair.

3Central Intelligence While it doesn’t boast much along the lines of originality, this winds up being an above average action/comedy buddy movie thanks to its stars, Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart. The guys belong together. The plot feels like a bunch of parts from other movies cobbled together to make a whole. It has elements of LethalWeapon, GrossePointeBlank, JustFriendsand even a little SixteenCandles, all stitched together, albeit capably, by director Rawson Marshall Thurber (We’retheMillers). It’s a well-oiled movie Frankenstein. Johnson and Hart are a strong screen duo, with Johnson actually scoring most of the laughs. Hart, who certainly chips in on the laughs front, actually delivers one of the more well rounded, warm performances of his career. He plays Calvin, the most popular guy in high school who grows up to be humdrum. Johnson plays Bob, a former obese guy who Calvin took pity on. Bob grows up to be a rogue CIA agent who looks like the Rock. The two wind up on an adventure that, of course, eventually leads to their high school reunion.

1Independence Day: Resurgence I enjoyed the goofy, funny, balls-out alien invasion movie that was IndependenceDay(1996). The film was dumber than a stoned golden retriever in a Harvard calculus class, but Will Smith, Jeff Goldblum and, yes, Randy Quaid made the grandiose stupidity somewhat of a blast. Two decades after the original, IndependenceDay:Resurgence finally arrives, without Smith, who probably didn’t think the check was big enough. While the original was a stupid blast, the sequel is the equivalent of a nasty two-hour alien fart. Goldblum, Bill Pullman and Brent Spiner return for alien nonsense that is fast paced yet dull, and utterly void of laughs. It’s evident in the first 10 minutes that the movie will somehow manage to be lethargic even though the editing is frantic, and lots of things are exploding. Returning director Roland Emmerich is clearly not on his disaster-epic game. It’s a wasteful effort, where camp has been replaced by total ineptitude, and the performers look lost. And, let’s face it, Liam Hemsworth is no Will Smith. He’s a dud, and the movie’s a dud.

3Finding Dory This sequel to FindingNemogoes a little darker than its predecessor. Ellen DeGeneres returns as Dory, the lovable fish with short-term memory loss. An event triggers a memory of family in her little brain, and she sets off on a journey to find her mom and dad (voiced by Diane Keaton and Eugene Levy). Pals Marlin (Albert Brooks) and Nemo (Hayden Rolence) join Dory on her quest, which culminates in an aquarium amusement park graced with voice announcements by the actual Sigourney Weaver. Dory winds up in a touch pond, in a bucket of dead fish, and swimming around in a lot of dark pipe work. In some ways, this is to FindingNemowhat TheEmpireStrikesBack was to StarWars. It’s a darker, slightly scarier chapter, that still delivers on the heartwarming elements and laughs.

3Free State of Jones Newton Knight (Matthew McConaughey), a Confederate army medic, decides he’s had enough and deserts. He returns to Mississippi where his people are being harassed by looting soldiers. He winds up in the swamps with escaped slaves, where they form a pact and eventually create a militia to rebel against the Confederacy. Based on a true story, director Gary Ross definitely delivers on the brutality and terrors of the Civil War. McConaughey is powerful in the central role, as is Mahershala Ali as Moses, leader of the escaped slaves. The film stumbles a bit in trying to do a too much. There are courtroom scenes 85 years after the Civil War’s where a relative of Knight is in a civil rights dispute. These scenes feel completely out of place, and they sort of muck up the film’s ending. It’s too bad, because the movie winds up being good instead of great. The battle scenes are harrowing. The tensions are frightening and real, and there’s not a bad performance in the lot. Yet, because Ross has overstuffed the film, aspects like the rise of the KKK are almost glossed over. This project, with its dual storylines and many plot points, probably would’ve worked better as an extended series on HBO.

3The Shallows Blake Lively, whose best role until now was the secretary in that SNL“Potato Chip” sketch, is terrific as Nancy, a medical school dropout who goes to a secret beach in Mexico in the wake of her mother’s death. She sets out for a day of surfing and reflection in what she thinks is a completely solitary setting (with the exception of a couple of other friendly surfers). Turns out, there’s a big-assed Great White shark, and this is its territory, and no trespassers are allowed, even if they are as pretty as Blake Lively. As shark movies go, this is a good one, with decent CGI effects, a couple of tense shark attacks, and a constant level of terror that never lets up. The only thing really keeping this from being “very good” rather than “nice and good” is the ending, which made me laugh a laugh I shouldn’t have laughed.

4Swiss Army Man Like the dead corpse at its center, this film is a multipurpose entity. It can be a lot of different things to the viewer. It can be a story about the wild things starvation and desperation can do to the brain, and the strange movies that play in your head when you are losing it. It can be a story about how a deranged stalker deals with the end of his life and afterlife. It can be a story about how funny it would be if somebody’s farts could propel him like a jet ski across the ocean and how funny it would be if his erect dick were a compass. I’ve made my choice what this movie is about, but you could walk away from it thinking something completely different. As Hank, Paul Dano gets yet another career-defining, nutty role. He’s seemingly stranded on a desert island, at the end of his rope, literally. Just before killing himself, a corpse (Daniel Radcliffe) washes up on the beach, and starts farting. It starts farting—a lot. Before much time has passed, Hank is riding the corpse, dubbed Manny, across the ocean as its farts provide jet propulsion. Hank, with the arrival of his new friend, decides suicide is a drag, and takes Manny along with him on a trek through the forest to find civilization. Manny eventually starts having conversations with Hank. Sound weird? It is. It most assuredly is. It’s also strangely beautiful, deeper and richer than most movies with this many farts in it, and, depending upon the way you take the movie, super disturbing and sad.

This guy saves you money.

Rn R sweetdeals.news R eview.com