FILM

Anytime, any swear

You have to have big balls to release a movie like Good Boys in today’s PC environment. Kids swear like sailors, unknowingly sniff anal beads and run across busy highways without looking both ways in this movie. It might just be the winner for child-delivered profanity when it comes to cinema, easily topping the likes of the original The Bad News Bears. Actually, delete the word “might.” It’s the winner for sure.

Sweetheart Jacob Tremblay, the cute little dude from Room, goes full stank mouth mode as Max. He’s a member of the Beanbag Boys (they call themselves that because, well, they have beanbags), along with pals Lucas (scene-stealing Keith L. Williams) and Thor (wildly funny Brady Noon). Their junior high social activities consist of bike rides and card games, but things are taken up a notch when they are invited to a party that will include a—gasp—kissing game.

The Beanbag Boys get themselves into trouble involving the ruination of Max’s dad’s (Will Forte) drone, a predicament that involves a stash of Molly/ Ecstasy pills and two older, meaner girls, Hannah and Lily (Molly Gordon and Midori Francis). The goal to reach the kissing party unscathed, and with a bottle of beer so that they look cool, is blocked by many tween drama obstacles.

This film lets you know it’s not playing around instantly, with the Beanbag Boys unleashing a torrent of obscenities that lets you know that they’ve been familiar with these words for at least a couple of years despite their young ages, and they say them frequently. As a former adolescent, I can attest to this reality: kids curse, and they love to curse. Deal with it.

Hearing kids—real kids—talk like this in an American movie is oddly refreshing. It’s also laughout-loud funny to hear these words coming out of Tremblay’s cherubic face. As the title of the movie implies, these are good boys, even though they curse like Samuel L. Jackson in a Tarantino movie. They have dirty mouths, but they are anti-drug and anti-bullying, so much so that the film actually belabors those points a little too much and too obviously at times.

It’s no big surprise that Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, the men behind Superbad, had a hand in producing this. The plot is very similar, with Good Boys almost qualifying as a Superbad prequel or reboot. Three kids try to get to a party with alcohol in tow while cursing a lot. While Jonah Hill’s Superbad kid kept getting hit by cars, Lucas also suffers grave, humorously depicted injuries along the way. It’s the same movie. It’s funny as all hell, but it’s the same movie set in junior high rather than high school.

Director Gene Stupnitsky, making his feature debut, gets a gold star for getting kids to say this stuff with a straight face. (Lordy, there must’ve been a lot of takes.) Sometimes the film feels a bit hollow, as if its only reason for existence is to hear kids curse a lot. Still, hearing kids curse a lot is hilarious, and worth a night out to the cinema.

Tremblay, Williams and Noon get a lot of credit for making this all so much fun. Tremblay, who has the most serious acting chops of the trio, is a natural, and provides a great anchor for the madness. Williams is, at times, heartbreakingly sweet, especially when his character is dealing with the breakup of his family. Noon brings a pretty stellar singing voice to the proceedings, and it’s put to good use on a rousing Foreigner track.

The summer needed a big blast of funny stupidity, and Good Boys provides it. It’s ripe for a sequel where these kids are freshmen in high school. I have to think that premise is going to get the greenlight here real soon. Maybe McLovin will make a cameo. Ω

“That’s disgusting! Is that ... the president’s Twitter feed?”

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3Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw While the poster for Hobbs & Shaw declares it is presented by Fast & Furious, it has very little in common with that franchise other than the participation of Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham reprising their characters from the Furious films. In other words … rejoice! … the leaden, dreary Vin Diesel is nowhere to be seen in this movie! Hobbs & Shaw is a bizarre hybrid of spy thrillers, action pics and science fiction. While Fast & Furious movies are certainly outlandish, they remain somewhat grounded in reality, except for my personal favorite sequence of a car jumping from skyscraper to skyscraper. This movie goes totally off the rails of realism. It’s too damn long, but when it works, it works well. It also functions as a comedy in that Johnson and Statham have great timing and work really well together. Hobbs (Johnson) and Shaw (Statham) find themselves protecting Shaw’s sister, Hattie (Vanessa Kirby of Mission: Impossible – Fallout), after she injects herself with something that will have worldwide consequences if she’s captured. It all comes together in a big, dumb summer fun kind of way.

5Midsommar Writer-director Ari Aster’s Midsommar, the sophomore effort following his masterpiece Hereditary, is two and a half hours of nerve-fraying terror staged mostly in broad daylight, and it is a thing of demented beauty. Dani (dynamite Florence Pugh) and Christian (excellent Jack Reynor) are having relationship issues. Dani is super dependent on Christian during a major time of need, as her sister is constantly bombarding her with dark mood swing modern correspondence (translation: toxic emails). Then, tragedy strikes Dani’s family, and it’s time for Christian to step up. His solution? Take Dani along on what was supposed to be a bro trip to Sweden for a traditional family summer festival. Shortly after arrival, Dani and friends ingest hallucinogenic mushrooms. The weirdness kicks in immediately, and the movie comes off as a really bad trip. Pugh, so good in this year’s Fighting with My Family, makes a grand statement with this movie. She’s an acting force that puts her in the upper echelon. One of the pleasures of Aster’s latest is that it’s obvious where things are going. It’s a mystery that puts a ton of clues right in front of your face in vividly visible fashion as the sun shines brightly. While the movie is a deliberately paced slow burn, it’s nearly two and a half hours pass by pretty quickly. Aster never loses the sense of dread, so while you could call his movie predictable in some ways, it’s not even close to being a letdown. It’s a movie that constantly delivers on the dread it promises.

5Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood The ninth movie from Quentin Tarantino is a dreamy doozy, his most unapologetically Tarantinian film yet. History and conventionality be damned, for QT is behind the camera, and he favors mayhem and a little thing called artistic license. Set in 1969, Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood captures the ’60s film scene and culture as they are dying, and they most certainly die hard. Making a run at Newman and Redford, we get Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt as insecure, has-been actor Rick Dalton and his trusty stuntman, Cliff Booth, respectively. Dalton’s career has devolved into playing the bad guys on TV’s The F.B.I. while past-his-prime and blackballed Booth is relegated to driving him around and being his confidante. The setup allows Tarantino to go hog wild with the ’60s visuals and soundtrack. Hollywood is a monumental achievement on the art and sound direction fronts. Some of Tarantino’s soon-to-be most famous shots are in this movie. The looks and sounds are so authentic that you might wonder if Dalton and Booth were real people. They were not, but they’re based on folks like Burt Reynolds, Clint Eastwood and Hal Needham. The end of the ’60s was bona fide nutty times, and this is a nutty movie. It also manages to be quite heartfelt and moving. 2 Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark Alvin Schwartz’s collection of short horror stories for kids gets a big-screen attempt with Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, directed by Andre Ovredal and produced by Guillermo del Toro. The three original books gathered together some stories from folklore and urban legend, with Schwartz putting his own spin on them, even instructing young readers on how to scare their friends while reading them aloud. They were micro-short, they were sometimes grisly, and they had no connective thread. They also managed to make their way into campfire stories in the ’80s. Rather than do an anthology movie, like a Creepshow for kids, Ovredal and del Toro opt for a framing device that is a direct nod, one could say rip-off, of the Stranger Things/ Stephen King’s It nostalgia genre involving plucky kids dealing with various horrors. The resultant film feels derivative, disconnected and quite boring, a bunch of decent ideas crammed into a storyline that just doesn’t work. The gimmick attempting to hold everything together is the story of Sarah Bellows (not a character in the books), an abused, long-deceased girl whose journal of stories is discovered by the aforementioned plucky teens led by Stella (Zoe Colletti) in 1968. Others in the group include Auggie, the slightly intellectual guy (Gabriel Rush); Chuck, the goofy guy (Austin Zajur); and Ramon, the mysterious newbie (Michael Garza). All the group really needs is a young, quiet girl with a short haircut and an affinity for Eggos, and the Stranger Things circuit would be complete.

3Skin White supremacist Bryon Widner (Jamie Bell), after being raised on a doctrine of hate within a skinhead camp, has a change of heart when he finds love with a single mother (Danielle Macdonald). Of course, putting a skinhead past behind you, especially when you’ve opted to tattoo your face with hate images, is not an easy thing. Writer-director Guy Nattiv, basing his film on the true story of Bryon Widnor, does a nice job of showing that redemption sometimes comes at a high price. Bell is great here as Widnor, as is Macdonald as the woman who manages to love him even though he’s a complete asshole. The film feels like a distant cousin of the Edward Norton starring American History X, although it doesn’t have near the artistry of that movie. Still, the movie is a solid story, well-acted, and proof that Bell is perhaps a bigger actor than his resume has revealed. Supporting cast includes Bill Camp as the leader of the skinhead camp, and Vera Farmiga as his nurturing yet classless and evil wife. Blink and you’ll miss a quick appearance by Mary Stuart Masterson as Agent Jackie Marks. She acts that part like she’s in a different movie, but it’s fun to see her all the same. (Available to stream during a limited theatrical release.)

3Spider-Man: Far from Home Tom Holland cements his status as bestever Spider-Man with what amounts to the goofiest, but still major fun, Spider-Man movie yet. Jon Watts once again directs as Peter Parker looks to vacation with his friends after the events of Endgame, traveling to Europe and leaving his superhero responsibilities behind. When a strange breed of elemental monsters start striking the planet, Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) interrupts Peter’s sojourn and gets him back into the swing of things. Jake Gyllenhaal gets into the shenanigans as Mysterio, a crime fighter from another dimension that slides right into the Tony Stark mentor role. Holland is good fun as Spidey, giving him a nice, youthful effervescence to go with his comic timing. Zendaya rules as MJ, Jon Favreau gets a lot more screen time—it’s a good thing!—as Happy, and the film doesn’t have nearly enough Marisa Tomei. It’s a bit lightheaded at times, but it’s the sort of breezy affair that the Marvel universe needed to get things revved up again. Hopefully, this is just the beginning for Holland and he has a bunch of these in his future, because he’s perfect for the role.