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Canine lives

So, if you’ve been sitting around waiting for a Wes Anderson film featuring a stop-motion dog cast and influenced by Akira Kurosawa and the guys who made Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, wait no more!

Isle of Dogs is one of the strangest—and coolest—experiences you will have in a theater this year. Anderson’s second foray into stop-motion animation (after 2009’s excellent Fantastic Mr. Fox) is another visual masterpiece. While the story itself goes a little flat for stretches, it’s a nonstop visual splendor for its entire running time.

Two decades in the future, Megasaki, a fictional Japanese city, is ruled by the evil Mayor Kobayashi (Kunichi Nomura). Kobayashi is a cat person, and after the nation’s dogs come down with a strange strain of dog flu, all canines are banned to Trash Island to live out their days scavenging through garbage and rumbling in the junkyards.

Kobayashi’s nephew, Atari (Koyu Rankin), misses his dog, Spots (Liev Schreiber), and sets out to find his beloved pet on Trash Island. The island is occupied by various dog gangs, one of them consisting of Chief (Bryan Cranston), Rex (Edward Norton), King (Bob Balaban), Boss (Bill Murray) and Duke (Jeff Goldblum). Whether it’s live action or stop-motion, you can count on Anderson’s usual gang of performers to show up. (Welcome to the Wes Anderson party, Bryan Cranston!)

There’s some dog gang squabbling for leadership honors, with Rex often calling for votes that the rebel Chief always loses. When Atari shows up on the island, Chief winds up spending the most time with him, and he learns a little bit about bonding with a boy, as dogs do.

There’s a very sweet “love your dogs” message at the center of Anderson’s story, which he wrote with story contributions from Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman and Nomura. This is one of the rare Anderson films in which neither Schwartzman nor Owen Wilson appear.

Of course, there’s a budding love story, with Chief coming across Nutmeg (Scarlett Johansson) who, unlike Chief the stray, has papers and can do tricks. (A bit where Nutmeg reluctantly shows off a few provides some of the film’s best laughs.)

Story elements are secondary to just how goddamned good this movie looks. While Fantastic Mr. Fox had the better overall story, Isle of Dogs is, hands down, the best-looking stop-motion animation film ever put to screen. Each one of the dogs is a marvelous creation unto itself, and their human counterparts are just as amazing. Anderson and crew get extra credit for taking fight scenes and explosions to a new level through their use of what appears to be cotton.

This is Wes Anderson, so, yes, you are going to see a stop-motion animation kidney transplant with a bird’s eye view. Hey, it wouldn’t be a PG-13 stop-motion Wes Anderson film without a relatively vivid and detailed—yet somewhat tender—kidney transplant toward the end of it, right? The man is a beautiful nut.

Other voices that show up include Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, F. Murray Abraham, Yoko Ono and, most notably, Greta Gerwig as Tracy Walker, an American exchange student with a crush on Atari.

Much of the film is spoken in Japanese with no subtitles, but it’s never hard to understand what is going on. (Thankfully, all of the dog barks have been translated into English.)

With every passing second of this movie, I was thinking “How the hell does Anderson even think up this stuff, let alone get it on the screen?” It’s safe to say this movie is a feat that will never be duplicated. I seriously doubt anybody in the future will make a movie that reminds us of Isle of Dogs. It’s off in its own unique cinematic zone. Ω

“You want to do what with my testicles?”

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4Black Panther Scoring director Ryan Coogler to helm Marvel’s latest proves to be a major triumph. His entry into the Marvel universe is a majestic, full-bodied, exhilarating treatment of the African king title character with the crazy cool suit (Chadwick Boseman). This is Coogler’s third collaboration with actor Michael B. Jordan, who brings a fully fleshed, complicated villain to the screen in Erik Killmonger. Man, you just have to be bad with that last name. The pre-opening credit scene involves Black Panther’s predecessor father having a confrontation in 1992 Oakland, California. A major event takes place as some kids playing basketball look on. It turns out to be one of the more brilliant and heart-wrenching setups for a Marvel movie character yet. The action cuts to present day, where Black Panther/T’Challa is dealing with the passing of his father due to an event that took place in Captain America: Civil War (massive credit to the producers and screenwriters who interlink these films together so well). He’s to become king but must pass through a ritual with some risk involved. He overcomes the obstacles, gets his throne and prepares for his rule. His kingdom doesn’t get a moment to breathe before trouble ensues. In London, Killmonger comes across an ancient weapon forged in Wakanda, Black Panther’s homeland. It’s made from Vibranium, a precious resource that fuels much of Wakanda’s advanced technology, including the Black Panther suits. With the help of Wakanda enemy Klaue (Andy Serkis acting with his real face as opposed to a motion-capture suit), Killmonger obtains the weapon, threatening world stability.

4Blockers A trio of deranged parents (Leslie Mann, John Cena and Ike Barinholtz) discovers a pact by their three daughters to lose their virginity on prom night, so they stalk them on their special evening. This sounds like the basis for a crap movie but, as things turn out, it results in what will surely stand as one of the year’s funniest movies. Directed by Kay Cannon, the movie pushes the boundaries, for sure, pouring it on thick with the profanity— very funny profanity—and frank talk about high school seniors treading into sexual activity (not to mention drug experimentation and drinking). It handles its subjects in a surprisingly mature and even sweet way in the end, with the teenaged daughters (Kathryn Newton, Geraldine Viswanathan and Gideon Adlon) having their acts together far more than their bumbling parents. The always reliable Mann gets a chance to really shine here; she is one of the best comic actresses in the game. Barinholtz gets a lot of laughs as the movie’s most messed-up character, while Cena continues to prove that he has the comic chops to hold his own with some of the best. This is one of those rare comedies that gets consistent laughter from the opening scene until its ending.

3Borg vs McEnroe The legendary rivalry between tennis players Bjorn Borg (Sverrir Gudnason) and John McEnroe (Shia LaBeouf) was insane while it was happening. I’m old enough to remember it, and Janus Metz’s film does a pretty good job of reliving the moment. If the film suffers from anything, it’s that Borg was a pretty boring figure, as opposed to the fiery McEnroe. Since much of this film deals with Borg’s side of the story, a good chunk of the film winds up being, well, boring. Such is not the case with the McEnroe side, because LaBeouf turns in his best performance yet as the temper-tantrum-throwing American sports star who came rolling into Wimbledon to face off against the four-time champion Borg. LaBeouf takes a historical figure in McEnroe and avoids caricature in a role that could so easily become cartoonish. He finds the human competitor at the core of McEnroe, and while he can deliver a very mighty “You can’t be serious!” he finds a lot of sensible levels in the man. The match itself is all kinds of crazy, and since I forgot the outcome, completely unpredictable. The circumstances of that particular sporting event are as intense as any sporting event in the last 50 years, and the film works as a nice time stamp. (Available for digital download during a limited theatrical run.)

1Pacific Rim: Uprising While the original Pacific Rimhad some definite problems, its sequel is a big, stupid waste of time. Uprising takes an original idea—big Kaiju monsters fighting man-made robots—from director/creator Guillermo del Toro. That Del Toro idea resulted in an OK first movie in Pacific Rim, with great elements but troublesome issues (robots/monsters, good … people, bad). Uprising takes that original idea and turns it into something akin to the average Transformers movie. It’s a watereddown, cheap joke of a film that obliterates anything good del Toro started. Without del Toro directing—he dumped out a few years back to assume a producer’s role—the film loses all sense of style and artistic direction. Steven S. DeKnight, who has directed such TV shows as Smallville and Daredevil, makes his featurefilm-directing debut with something that screams “Maybe I should’ve stuck with the TV gigs!” Replacing Charlie Hunnam as the original franchise star, John Boyega jumps headlong into this mess as Jake Pentecost, son of Stacker Pentecost, played by Idris Elba in the first movie. Jake is a former Jaeger (Giant Robot) pilot who, after the death of his dad and a bad Jaeger experience, has taken to partying and trading black market hot sauce in a post-Kaiju world. While Elba’s character supposedly closed off the monsters from our world, they find a way back (of course). This results in subpar CGI battles and lousy performances all around.

4A Quiet Place Noise-intolerant neighbors are taken to all new levels in A Quiet Place, a new horror film from director John Krasinski. Krasinski also stars as Lee, a father trying to protect his family in a post-apocalyptic world besieged by horrific aliens who will tear you apart if you make so much as a peep. The aliens are blind, so they hunt by sound. Not, say, the sound of a river running or a bird chirping, but sounds that are more “interruptive,” like fireworks, a person screaming after stepping on a nail, or really loud farts. The gimmick lends itself to some faulty logic at times, but it does provide an overall interesting premise: Speak audibly in relatively quiet surroundings, and you will get your head bitten off. Krasinski’s film gives you no real back story about the aliens. A few glimpses of newspaper front pages let you know that the world has been wiped out by the species. One look at them—they are a cross between Ridley Scott’s Alien and the Cloverfield monster—and you know that just a few days with these things running around would decimate the world population. Blunt gives the film’s standout performance as somebody forced to keep quiet after not only a painful injury but, on top of that, having to give birth in a bathtub while an alien clicks and claws nearby.

2Ready Player One Steven Spielberg goes for broke but leaves you bleary-eyed in a bad way with Ready Player One, based on the very popular Ernest Cline novel. The film is so full of pop culture references that it doesn’t so much deliver them as visually vomit them into your face. Rather than relishing the opportunity for ’80s nostalgia, Spielberg opts for whiplash pacing and miscasting, squandering the chance to allow any of the fun elements to really sink in. The futuristic storyline involves something called the OASIS, a virtual reality world that is not only a pastime, but a total escape from real-world poverty and pollution. Wade (Tye Sheridan) lives in a place called the Stacks, basically manufactured homes piled on top of each other, and he whiles away many hours in the OASIS as his alter ego/avatar Parzival. There’s a plethora of pop culture cameos inside the OASIS, including King Kong, Freddy Krueger and the Iron Giant, but there’s very little substance. The whole thing amounts to a lot of imagery, occasionally interesting but mostly dull, flying by with little impact. 04.19.18 | RN&R | 25