Elemental Review:

BY ALEX DE VORE alex@sfreporter.com

Pixar’s newest movie Elemental isn’t doing too hot at the box office. It had, in fact, the animation studio’s worst-ever opening weekend with a measly $25.9 million against a $200 million budget (that’s not even mentioning the $100 million in promotional costs). ‘Twas not much better for 2022’s Strange World, either. How, though, has this once-proud outfit fallen so far? It might have something to do with the city thing.

See, most of Disney and/or Pixar’s releases over the last couple decades—and really, most folks assume all of those company’s fully-CGI films are made by the same people even if they aren’t—a pattern emerges: It’s a city, but for cars; a city, but for animals; a city, but for dead folks; a city, but for element people. That last one’s the basis of Elemental, a star-crossed lovers thing mixed with the vaguest statement on immigration. Let’s face it, the different-kind-of-city thing has become tedious, and there are only so many times we can get a joke about how things would just plum work differently for a dude made out of water than they would for a human person.

Elemental follows Ember (Leah Lewis), a young fire woman who falls for a water guy named Wade (Mamoudou Athie), in a metropolis called Element City also populated by earth and air people. Ember is

Despite the Los Angeles Times reporting in 2021 that Pepsico/Frito-Lay janitor-turned-exec Richard Montañez did not actually invent the enduringly popular Flamin’ Hot Cheeto snack, actor-turned-filmmaker Eva Longoria sails full steam ahead in her first feature, Flamin’ Hot, a feel-good biopic that might actually feel alright if the ultimate premise weren’t that a dude helped a mega-corporation figure out how to market to Brown folks better and thus make way more money.

Oh, it’s not that Longoria’s adaptation of Montañez’s book, Flamin’ Hot: The Incredible True Story of One Man’s Rise from Janitor to Top Executive isn’t fun enough or heartwarming enough or even sincerely funny once or twice, more like it suffers under the weight of its own inaccuracies and formulaic storytelling. One assumes a movie based on real events will take artistic license and pad the truth, that’s a given. But knowing ahead of time that the central plot point—namely, Montañez purportedly bucked convention and corporate nay-sayers by calling up then-Pepsico top boss Roger Enrico to pitch a spicy chip—never actually happened ultimately cheapens the emotional beats, leaving viewers feeling as burned as the snack on which it’s based.

In Hot, Longoria follows Montañez from clever child entrepreneur selling his mom’s burritos at his elementary school to the executive suite at the Rancho second generation, with her father Bernie (Ronnie Del Carmen) and mother Cinder (Shila Ommi) having relocated before her birth from a place called Fireland. Nobody pulled any brain muscles dreaming up the names of places or characters there, jeeze. Anyway, Ember’s family owns a shop that sells fire products for fire folks (they eat wood and drink lava, etc.), and it’s located smack-dab in a vaguely ethnic part of town where all the fire folks live. Is the fauxlture (a term I just invented for fictional cultures) Middle Eastern? Greek? Indian? Kind of all of the above, though not really any; and mostly the particulars are conveyed peripherally, through environmental storytelling. We know the dad worships a blue flame and the mom can literally smell love, we know they’ve had a hard road in building their lives and shop.

That’s why it stings so bad when Wade shows up in his role as city inspector. He might shut down the shop, but he agrees to help Ember deal with the red tape because he’s nice. What follows is a grab bag of tropes about believing in oneself, being open with your parents, taking a chance on love and...doing art, maybe? There’s also a water guy character that seems to be a nod to Rip Taylor, so it’s hard to keep track, really. Of course, there’s no real peril because these movies are so formulaic that even kids feel underestimated. In a world with those Spider-Verse movies— which seem borderline experimental compared to this—it might be time for Pixar to dig a little deeper and trust kids to grasp more complex themes than water+fire = probably not gonna work. For now, though, it seems like another tough blow for Good Dinosaur director Peter Sohn (that movie didn’t do so well, either), both economically and artistically. The idea, sadly, just isn’t very good.

Cucamonga Frito-Lay plant in which he worked, making pit stops along the way at young parenthood, drug dealing and a complicated fatherly relationship. Oh, and he saves the chip factory and everyone’s jobs, too.

Jesse Garcia (Quinceñera) plays the adult version of Montañez, a wide-eyed optimist who turns a janitor job into a learning opportunity and, along the way, teaches the ’90s corporate drones what it means to make a spicy snack, thereby tapping into the Chicano market like no mainstream company had before. Garcia narrates the film, too, and represents the best it has to offer, even if Gentefied star Annie Gonzalez does provide context and levity as Montañez’s wife, Judy. She just doesn’t have enough to work with, which often relegates her to pseudo-emotional moments before we get back to Richie eating elote while a light bulb flashes above his head.

Elsewhere, screen vets like Dennis Haysbert and Tony Shalhoub deliver lines such as, “You can do it, Richie!” Of course this film needs folks like that, but Shalhoub’s turn as Enrico feels like he was told to bring Santa Claus energy to his scenes, which makes for a certain cheesy warmth that seems unlikely for a top business guy in the ’90s—it’s weird.

Even so, you’d have to be heartless to not get a little pumped for the movie version of Montañez as he shakes things up and gets those hot chips made. New Mexicans might be proud to know it was filmed here, too. Still, if you go looking into the story too deeply, those feelings dissipate easily. Whoever invented those chips, good on ‘em, maybe, just...are we really supposed to root for big business? Gross. (ADV) Hulu, Disney+, PG-13, 99 min.

8

+ STUNNING ANIMATION; SO FUN

- EXPOSITION IS CLUNKY; MAIN VILLAIN IS SO-SO

If we’re counting teen hero Miles Morales as a SpiderMan across both film and video games, that brings the tally of folks who’ve donned the Marvel hero’s mask in recent years to something like six performers since Sam Raimi’s inaugural 2001 live action Tobey Maguire movie. Given Marvel’s propensity for multiversal travel, too, perhaps no property better fits the concept of infinite realities (sorry, Dr. Strange). But whereas a titanic pop culture phenomenon like Rick & Morty takes the nihilistic route by positing that an infinite number of possibilities means nothing truly matters, filmmakers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (Clone High) wager that even just one good soul can effect change when ennui sets in.

In Sony/Marvel’s newest animated entry, SpiderMan: Across the Spider-Verse—the sequel to 2018’s Into the Spider-Verse—our hero Miles (Shameik Moore) is still thinking about Spider-Gwen (Hailee Steinfeld) from his last outing (it’s complicated, but she’s from another dimension; they met). That adventure, however, wound up destabilizing time ’n’ space, leading to a sort of unpredictable system of portals that throw folks from any conceivable universe into other ones. Since Miles got his powers from a radioactive spider not of his own dimension, he’s thrown things out of wack pretty much everywhere. Understand? Good!

After tangling with a villain called Spot (Jason Schwartzman) Miles learns there’s a sort of Hall o’

Sohn

With Lewis, Athie, Del Carmen and Ommi Violet Crown, Regal, PG, 109 min.

Spider-People in the distant future of a neighboring dimension to his, and its leaders (Oscar Isaac and Issa Rae) spend their days making things right across the multi-verse. Miles, though, isn’t invited to the HQ for every conceivable Spider-Man/Woman/Enby/Child/ Horse, and learning why proves a total bummer for the lad; he’s just not like the others and they’re all trying to bring him down!

Across the Spider-Verse somehow ups the quality of presentation from its first most excellent iteration by merging so many types of animations, frame rates and design aesthetics. The stacked streets of a hybrid Mumbai/Manhattan in one universe are particularly gorgeous, and notable as well are the ’70s/clip art accoutrements belonging to Spider-Punk (Daniel Kaluuya), a character that simultaneously lambasts and pays respect to the anarchic leanings of the genre’s roots. Moore has really settled into the Miles role, too, phasing effortlessly between the confidence of superpowers and the challenges of teen-dom.

Thus, while the creators of Across the Spider-Verse aim squarely at kids, the adults who take them to the show or continue to live out their love affairs with comics-turned-movies, kids or no, will find lots to love. Still, we can only hear that family matters or love conquers all so many times before the law of diminishing returns sets in. Luckily, this one is so beautiful and fast-paced it’s often on to the next big thing before we have time to nitpick. Spidey swings, villains get bad and explosions flare in the distance—that’s pretty much all folks are looking for from movies like this. (ADV)

Violet Crown, Regal, PG, 140 min.

by Matt Jones