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Don’t look

Sandra Bullock puts her supreme talents in a Netflix sensation movie that is only half good with Bird Box, a film that feels like a bunch of overused horror gimmicks mashed into one messy entity.

Malorie (Bullock) is a gloomy painter. The film shows Bullock only painting black backgrounds to make her look authentic. She’s dealing with an unwanted pregnancy. Sister Jessica (Sarah Paulson) tells her to get out of the dumpy-dumps, and takes her to the doctor for a checkup, shortly after seeing a strange report on TV about people killing themselves in Russia.

While visiting with the doc (Parminder Nagra), all hell starts to break loose in the hospital and, even more so, on the streets. It appears as if people are seeing some sort of entity and deciding it’s far too much for them to handle, so they kill themselves in creative ways (stepping in front of buses, bashing heads into windows, walking into fire, etc.). Malorie manages to navigate through a hellish urban landscape, and winds up trapped in a house with a few others.

Until the point where Malorie winds up in the house, the film looks promising. The street suicides scene is genuinely scary, and flash forward scenes show Malorie trying to find some sort of safe haven with two children, all wearing blindfolds to avoid seeing the killer vision. Those scenes work OK as well, although they are very much just a play on last summer’s A Quiet Place, with characters simply not able to see rather than prohibited from making noise.

The movie hits a total dead end once Malorie goes in that house. It’s pretty much the same scenario as that remake of Dawn of the Dead, right down to the pregnant women and shopping scenes.

John Malkovich is one of the house survivors, and he’s just doing a variation on the usual John Malkovich. After witnessing the death of his wife, he just gets Malkovich angry, yelling at Malorie in that deliberate, pause between the words kind of way. (“You … are the reason … she … is dead!”)

Seems to me your average male would be curled up in a fetal position in the corner bawling his eyes out after witnessing such a thing as their beloved wife’s demise, but Malkovich just gets pissed Malkovich-style. I was laughing, and I’m quite sure that wasn’t the desired reaction from filmmaker Susanne Bier.

As for the other survivors, there’s the young punk, the female cop, the other pregnant woman, the older mom type, and the Malorie love interest. When Bullock is trading lines with most of these folks, they are clearly and obviously outmatched, especially in some of the moments that seem more improvised. They just shouldn’t be in the same room with Bullock, who is top-notch despite the hackneyed scripting.

The title of the film stands for a shoebox that Malorie keeps birds in as a monster alarm. This, to me, makes no sense. It’s established that if you are outside, and if you look, you will inevitably see “the monster” that will make you off yourself. Why put a bunch of birds through hell? There’s no escaping the monster, who inevitably shows up within seconds of you opening your eyes. A bird chirping is just incidental.

The scenes with Bullock and the children on the river, while not all that original are, nonetheless, riveting and tense. Much of this is due to the excellent child actors, simply named Girl (Vivien Lyra Blair) and Boy (Julian Edwards). The little expressions they make while Malorie lectures them on how one stupid move could kill them are heartbreaking.

There is one thing totally amazing about Bird Box. BD Wong, who plays one of the house survivors, is 58 years old. The man looks like he’s 35! As for the movie itself, I credit Netflix for doing a great job hyping it and Bullock for acting her ass off even when the material drifts into dreck. Ω

“Wait, where is this surprise party again?”

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1Aquaman The latest DC effort, Aquaman, is middling fun for about 20 minutes before it becomes one of the worst films of 2018. It’s the typical DC garbage can of a film and proof that Warner Brothers has learned next to nothing when it comes to making a good comic book movie since Christian Bale took off the cowl (Yes, Wonder Woman was good—the lone exception.) Jason Momoa returns as big, tattooed, beefy Arthur, the dreamy son of a Lost City of Atlantis queen (Nicole Kidman) and Jango Fett (Temuera Morrison), a lowly lighthouse keeper. Fett finds the queen washed up on the rocks and takes her home, where she promptly eats his goldfish. (What a laugh riot! She ate his pet fish!) She gives birth to Arthur, and the origin story part of the movie is well on its way. We see a few more moments in the fish man’s young life. Arthur is bullied in an aquarium, where he gets a tiger shark all riled up to the point that it almost breaks through the glass and kills his entire elementary school class. (That would’ve made for an interesting twist.) Momoa eventually shows up in full party mode, and it looks like we could be on our way to some goofy fun. Alas, like Zack Snyder before him, director James Wan doesn’t know how to keep a leash on his epic, and this things goes bonkers in a bad way. The undeniable charms— and admittedly glorious hair—of Momoa can only go so far in this unholy mess.

1Bohemian Rhapsody Rami Malek gives it his all as Freddie Mercury, the late lead singer of Queen, in the new biopic Bohemian Rhapsody. That, and a competent recreation of Queen’s Live Aid domination, are just about the only good things you can say about this mostly embarrassing effort to memorialize an incredible person and his sadly short life. The movie basically takes Mercury’s legacy, completely screws with his life’s timeline and makes up a bunch of unnecessary events to pad its 135-minute running time. Malek, acting through a big set of fake teeth made to capture the look of Mercury’s four extra incisors, is decent in the role. He actually sang on set, his voice blended with a Mercury soundalike to keep the movie from being a completely lip-synched affair. There’s a movie happening between those musical sequences, and that movie is terrible, a messed-up bit of fakery that prompts a lot of unintentional laughter. There’s a great, truthful movie to be made about the life of Freddie Mercury. Bohemian Rhapsody doesn’t even come close to being that movie.

3Green Book Director Peter Farrelly gives us Green Book, essentially a remake of Driving Miss Daisy with the roles reversed and starring Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) and the Academy Award winning actor from Moonlight (Mahershala Ali). It’s a feel good movie about race relations that goes light on the grit and heavy on the sentiment. Based on a true story, Mortensen plays Tony Lip, an Italian bouncer at the Copacabana who finds himself temporarily without a job while the club is being renovated. His next gig installs him as a driver and bodyguard for Dr. Don Shirley (Ali), an African-American classical pianist who is touring a jazz trio in the early 1960s Deep South. There is nothing in their dialogue that is anything remotely original or surprising, but Farrelly is lucky to have these two guys in the car. Without them, this film would be a total slog. Mortensen, who has had his share of dramatic and action roles, gets a chance to show off some comedic timing. He also put on over 40 pounds for the role. Mahershala is good as Shirley, so good you wish the script matched the majesty of his work. Seamless special effects make it look like he can play a mean piano. The movie is average at best, delivering a relatively good time while feeling quite dated. I expect a little more heft from a movie with this subject matter.

3Mary Poppins Returns Casting Emily Blunt as the iconic title character in Mary Poppins Returns, a sequel 54 years in the making, proves to be a stroke of genius. Casting Lin-Manuel Miranda in the role of Jack, a copycat character modeled after Dick Van Dyke’s Bert in the original classic, well, not so much. Blunt plays the role with her own sensible spin, not by any means copying what the great Andrews did over half a century ago, but nonetheless giving us a practically perfect variation on the infamous nanny. Miranda sports the same cockney accent (not nearly as gloriously, wonderfully bad as Van Dyke’s) and plays a lamp lighter in London instead of a chimney sweep. His part of the film feels like a giant missed opportunity because, while he can sing and dance up a storm, he isn’t funny. Van Dyke was funny. The result is a movie that has a lot of charm and some amazingly good sequences—with Blunt powering us through. But while I might’ve been sitting on the fence as the film headed into the final turn, my attitude went full positive when none other than Dick Van Dyke shows up as a helpful banker. He not only shows up but gets on top of a desk and dances better than anyone else in the movie. It’s only a few seconds but, I’m telling you now, they are some of the best seconds any 2018 film has to offer—pure nostalgia heaven.

5Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse While Tom Holland’s live action Spider-Man remains in limbo due to that infamous Thanos finger snap, Sony Pictures ups the ante on the Spidey franchise with the eye-popping, all around ingenious Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, one of 2018’s greatest cinematic surprises. While there have been awesome superhero movies and terrific movies based on comic books, this very well might be the best “comic-book movie” ever made. Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) is trying to adjust to a new, upscale school after winning a scholarship. He’s away from his big city friends and getting some guff from his wellmeaning police officer dad (Brian Tyree Henry), who wants him to appreciate the chance he’s been given. Miles’s uncle (the ever busy Mahershala Ali) keeps him grounded, encouraging him to continue as a graffiti artist. On one of their painting excursions, Miles is bitten by a strange spider and then—well, you know. He eventually crosses paths with the original Spider-Man, Peter Parker (Chris Pine). And, as the plot would have it, parallel universe portals open and allow in a whole fleet of different Spider-Men, Spider-Women, Spider-Pigs and SpiderRobots. That group is comprised of Peter B. Parker (the invaluable Jake Johnson), Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld), SpiderHam (a mishmash of Spidey and Porky Pig voiced by John Mulaney), Peni Parker and her robot (Kimiko Glenn) and, best of all, Nicolas Cage as the black-and-white Spider-Man Noir. So Miles is one of many Spider entities on hand to go up against Wilson Fisk, a.k.a. Kingpin (Liev Schreiber), whose corporation is responsible for the time hole rip allowing all of his adversaries into his corner of the universe. Like any good comic book, the movie is stacked with action, plot threads and many twists and turns.