Film

“Did i ever tell you about the time i got sucked up by the vacuum cleaner?”

The brick knight returns

Let’s face it, the Dark Knight has been really living up to his name since Tim Burton’s Batman came out 28 years ago. He can be a morose sourpuss in the middle of pretty heady stuff.

Wait a minute. Has it really been 28 years since Burton’s Batman came out? Holy crap, I just totally freaked myself out. Hang on. I need to catch my breath and gather my thoughts. It’s been nearly three freaking decades since Nicholson did Joker? I need to drink five beers.

All right. OK, back on point. Batman has been sort of a downer at cinemas. Even when he wasn’t being quite so dour, he was just plain sucking in Joel Schumacher’s Batman movies, which started coming out 22 years ago.

Wait a minute. Did Kilmer really do Batman over two decades ago? I think I’m having a panic attack. I have to do the breathing into a brown bag trick. I’ll be right back.

OK, back. So, granted, Batman is inherently dark by nature, being all orphaned, and inspired by bats, and dispatching vigilante justice at night, and whatnot. But, hey, sometimes it’s good to have a laugh or two while watching the Caped Crusader, if only because some of us have a sweet spot for when Adam West played the character for laughs 50 years ago.

OK, seriously. I have to take a long break and contemplate my life before finishing this review. I’ll be back in the morning after a good cry and extended sleep jag.

Sorry, where was I? Oh yes, Batman. Batman’s a trooper all right, having recently survived the debacle that was Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. (Affleck is a good bat; his cinematic vehicle was not.) The Lego Batman Movie is the great Batman story that Batman v Superman failed to be.

Even better, it has Will Arnett voicing Batman with a new, super amped, still dark, but amazingly well-rounded and sometimes humorous incarnation. After all these years of dark—and admittedly sometimes brilliant—Batman movies, it’s nice to have a vehicle where we can just have fun with the character. Director Chris McKay, along with a long list of writers, has come up with a story that will please adult Batman fans as much as the kids who will most assuredly be dropped off at the local Cineplex to watch a movie while parents catch a break from the little mayhem makers. Arnett’s Batman not only faces off against the Joker (a very funny Zach Galifianakis), but finds himself in a scenario where he’s battling a smorgasbord of movie villains including King Kong, the Gremlins, Dracula, evil British robots and Voldemort (Eddie Izzard), to name just a few. It’s a nutty plot element that The Lego also allows for Batman mainstays like Bane, Two-Face (Billy Dee Batman Movie Williams, who was Harvey Dent in Burton’s Batman) and the 12345 Director: Chris McKay Riddler (Conan O’Brien!) to get in on the act. It’s a geek fest, a movie lover’s Starring: Will Arnett, Zach delight that has a funny little trivia Galifianakis, Billy Dee Williams bit at nearly every turn, and an emotional center—Batman has family issues, and the Joker longs to be hated—that gives the movie a surprising depth among the chaos. Michael Cera and Ralph Fiennes bring good humor as Robin and Alfred, although Fiennes doesn’t voice Voldemort, which seems like a wasted opportunity. You had the real Voldemort on hand, in your employ for the same movie. It just seems like some money could’ve been saved. Oh, wait, maybe Fiennes actually costs more than Eddie Izzard, and Fiennes would’ve demanded full scale for two characters rather than one. OK, I’m distracted again. The Lego Batman Movie gives us a Batman tale that is a little brighter than those brooding Christopher Nolan films, and way better than last year’s Zack Snyder atrocity. It’s loaded with funny nods to the entire history of Batman, and fully functions as a standalone Bat story. May sequels abound! Ω

3The Founder Michael Keaton is flat-out great as Ray Kroc, the sorta-kinda founder of McDonald’s. Director John Lee Hancock’s film tells the story from when Kroc was selling milk shake mixers door-to-door up through his wife-stealing days as the head of the McDonald’s corporation. Hancock’s movie desperately wants you to like Kroc, but maybe we shouldn’t? After all, he swept in and took the name of McDonald’s from the McDonald brothers (Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch), effectively cutting them out of most profits and leaving them in his dust. The film is at its best when it is in old-time, Americana mode. It’s a beautiful looking movie that captures the essence of those old timey fast food joints that replaced the traditional drive-in diners. It slows down a bit and gets a little muddled when it tries to depict Kroc as some sort of commerce hero.

2Gold You have to give Matthew McConaughey an A for effort in his latest film excursion, the “loosely based on a true story” Gold. McConaughey not only stars as wannabe gold magnate Kenny Wells, he also co-produced the movie, thinned his hair, put in some weird teeth and gained some weight for the role. Sadly, maximum effort doesn’t result in optimized return. The movie is an uneven, confused endeavor, and McConaughey’s physicality comes off looking like a guy who’s in really good shape simply messing himself up for the few months it takes to shoot a movie. He doesn’t look like a real guy in the way Robert De Niro did when he destroyed his physicality for RagingBull. He just looks slightly out of shape and made up, which is distracting. Wells is a fictional character, and the film is based loosely upon the Bre-X gold scandal of the 1990s. The original scandal occurred in Canada, while director Stephen Gaghan (Syriana) brings the story to the U.S. It all winds up a confusing muddle, with action bouncing all over the place. As for simple storytelling, there’s nothing new here, and the big twist isn’t a surprise at all. The movie wants to be a jungle adventure movie and business adventure all in one, and the two don’t meld together well.

4Hidden Figures Katherine Johnson was part of a segregated division at NASA in the ’50s, a wing of mathematicians who did the work that computers do today. HiddenFiguresdepicts the humiliation she and two other historical African-American figures, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, went through while solving equations that helped put men safely into space. The women had to put up with a lot of racist bullshit, and the film shows their hardships, albeit in PG fashion. Taraji P. Henson plays Johnson, the “smart one” astronaut John Glenn personally demanded check the coordinates before his historical flight launched. Octavia Spencer is her usual great self as Vaughan, doing the work of a supervisor without the title and curious about that new IBM thing they just installed down the hall. Vaughan would become crucial to the implementation of computers at NASA, as well as being the agency’s first African-American supervisor. As Jackson, NASA’s first female African-American aeronautical engineer, singer Janelle Monae is so good, it’s easy to forget that this is just her second movie role. As a composite, fictional character named Al Harrison, Kevin Costner does some of his best acting in years.

4John Wick: Chapter 2 A whole lot of people get shot in the face during this worthy sequel to the 2015 breakout hit. Keanu Reeves—totally bummedout Keanu Reeves—returns as the lone assassin, originally brought out of retirement after somebody killed his dog and stole his car. Many deaths later, Wick is back in his stylish home, with a new no-named dog, intent upon burying his guns and taking a long break. No such luck. A man from the past shows up with a marker, giving him a killing assignment that will take him to Italy and have him facing off with the likes of Common. (It turns out Common is built like The Terminator and makes for a good villain. Oh, wait … he’s sort of the good guy. Wick is actually a villain.) Balletic violence begins and never ends. This time out, Wick is wearing some sort of bulletproof lining under his suit. He was unstoppable before, but now he can take a bullet! Reeves is the perfect guy for this role, physically believable as an aging, unstoppable assassin, and pretty great with the stoic line deliveries. He’s in one mode for this movie, and that mode is badass. You really only need one movie like this every couple of years, and trying to copy the grandeur of the Wick films with other characters or stories seems pointless. Reeves has himself a brand new franchise, and this one is very ripe for the next story. It also has another Reeves franchise guy, Laurence Fishburne a.k.a. Morpheus from TheMatrix. Thankfully, this sequel is much better than The Matrixsequels.

5La La Land This is an all new, original musical from director Damien Chazelle (Whiplash) that’s surprisingly low on melodrama while full of vibrancy, beautiful tunes, outstanding set pieces and a stunning sense of realism for a movie where the characters bust out singing. It’s the best original movie musical ever made. The story follows wannabe actress Mia (Emma Stone) and jazz composer Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) as they try to make it in crazy Los Angeles. They meet, they don’t like each other much at first, but then they fall in love, which provides Chazelle and his performers ample opportunities for musical numbers that surprise at every turn. This solidifies Gosling as one of the best actors of his generation. He can wow you with insightful indies and carry big-budget blockbusters. Now, with LaLaLand, he takes his game to a new level. He can sing and dance with the best of them. Stone doesn’t just make her mark with a beautiful voice and expert footwork—she embodies the character with the honest and almost tragic drive to “make it” in the business.

1Rings A quick scan of this horror sequel’s cast reveals Vincent D’Onofrio has a role in it. That’s good, right? It also has Johnny Galecki of TheBigBangTheoryin it. Not too shabby if you like unfunny, overrated TV shows, right? So, OK, before the movie even starts, there’s enough to think the film has a fighting chance of being reasonably good. Then, the movie starts, and that fighting chance is defeated—quicker than Ronda Rousey in her last two bouts. Ringsis a slog from the get-go, a poorly conceived follow-up to what was a decent American remake of a great J-Horror film, Ringu. (For the purpose of this review, we won’t discuss the American TheRingTwo. Let’s just skip that one, shall we?) Nothing in this movie is worth your time. The film was shot around three years ago and experienced various delays. This year looks to be the recipient of another long-delayed horror sequel, Amityville: TheAwakening, which has been bouncing around for three years, as well. Oh, lucky day!

4Split Writer-director M. Night Shyamalan has finally made his first good movie since Signs(2002) with Split, a down-to-thebasics, creepy thriller propelled by excellent performances from James McAvoy and Anya Taylor-Joy (TheWitch). The film reminds us that Shyamalan can be a capable director and writer when he’s not getting too carried away. Taylor-Joy plays Casey, a high school outcast who attends a birthday party but soon finds herself and two classmates imprisoned by a strange man with multiple personalities (McAvoy). In addition to the angry man who kidnaps them, he’s also a stately, mannered woman, a 9-year-old child and, well, a few others. One of those other personalities plays a big part in taking the film into other realms beyond psychological thriller. McAvoy goes nuts with the role, and Shyamalan takes things into supernatural territories in a chilling climax. Taylor-Joy is quickly becoming the new scream queen, and McAvoy’s work will surely stand as one of the year’s most fun performances.