Just a few short notes on these three that come out in local cinemas this week.
Ralph Breaks the Internet
Directed by Phil Johnston, Rich Moore
Based on video game and Disney characters and the 2012 animated film
Rated G
Six years after the events of Wreck it Ralph, it’s Vanellope’s turn to get tired of the same old stuff she does racing the familair tracks of Sugar Rush at Litwak’s Arcade. But when the video game gets broken, Ralph (John C. Reilly) and Vanellope (Sarah Silverman) must navigate the digital world of the internet to secure a piece that will get the video game running again, or else the old cabinet is shut down for good.
Images and links from Walt Disney Studios
In a rare feat of ingenuity that improves on the original, Disney manages to level up the visuals and scenarios here with a better flow in the narrative, significantly more textured palettes, and a show-stopping song worthy of a Disney princess.
While the first film mines gaming nostalgia for the laughs, RBTI satirizes almost everything humans obsess with the internet – from multi-platform gaming to algorithms to memes to the dark web and also the harsh commentary on social media. It’s a sly commentary on the funny and sometimes absurd things we do online – without mentioning porn, of course.
Interestingly, the two leads are engaged in a heroic quest that has no actual villain. They’re up against their own selves, with friendship and trust on the line. Those are themes were also in the first film, but the sequel presents these in ways that are more heartfelt. Until the last few minutes when an enemy emerges, then it’s back the the old adventure business.
But where it comments on the things we do on the internet, it forgets why we spend so much time, sometimes too much, of our real lives being online. Nearly half the world is yet to be connected. So it gets a score for being smart, but not enough to take the entire thing seriously. This is still within the realm of Disney, and Disney does fantasy exceptionally well.
Poking fun at all of its princesses, the film’s clear highlight is a hilarious encounter between Vanellope and the Disney princesses in a dressing room. Later in the film, Venellope realizes the fullness of her Disney princess status when she bursts out with a full-fledged princess song, composed by none other than Alan Menken, who is responsible for many of the most popular Disney songs to date. We can now add Vanellope’s “A Place Called Slaughter Race” to this list.
Voice acting is quite decent, too, with Gal Gadot’s race girl Shank as strikingly appropriate. But let’s not forget that, with the exception of veteran actress Mary Costa, all of the voices are played by the original actresses.
Make sure to sit through the credits for a worthy stinger.
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The Girl in the Spider’s Web
Directed by Fede Alvarez
Based on the books by David Lagercrantz and characters from Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series
R13
The goth girl with the perpetual bad hair day is back, this time not as the avenger of violence against women but as a Swedish James Bond out to thwart nuclear holocaust.
Images and links from Columbia Pictures
Golden Globe winner Claire Foy is the third actor to play antisocial hacker turned vigilante Lisbeth Salander in the third installment of the Dragon Tattoo series. A botched hack job nets Salander in the titular spider’s web spun by the Russian mafia Spider, US NSA spies and corrupt Swedish officials. In the film, Salander must retrieve nuclear code data stolen from her by Russian mafia before it lands into the wrong hands. That surely sounds like a James Bond plot.
Swedish actor Sverrir Gudnason is the latest to play investigative journalist Mikel Blomkvist who chronicles Salander’s missions. Everyone else in the film is either a new character or a replacement actor. New to the conflict is Lisbeth’s estranged sister Camilla (Sylvia Hoeks) who has a score to settle.
There’s some nice visuals here – it looks and feels like a slick European thriller, from the cold Swedish landscapes to strong color palettes in some scenes – until you remind yourself that Paul Greengrass reinvented the spy genre and made it more propulsive in Jason Bourne, and the stunning first Dragon Tattoo movie by David Fincher whose jarring images and editing allowed for goosebumps and chills down your spine. Watching Spider’s Web, one surely misses the Fincher touch.
With this installment’s pivot towards action, Spider’s Web plays down the psychological aspect of Salander’s methodology, betting on slick set pieces like the scene where she escapes on a motorcyle above a frozen lake instead of say, why she cant outwit her sister. Foy does enough to show some weight on the hacker’s implied dark past, but nowhere is this hacker equipped to take on a whole Russian mafia, let alone save the world, especially when the Russians seem to be always two steps ahead of her. Yes, she gets some help from Blomkvist and NSA agent Ed Needham (Lakeith Stanfield) – but that is the point: gone is the empowered female Batman who does things on her own terms. The slight improvement is that Salander is the center of the story here, as opposed to the previous installments which had Blomkvist leading the investigation while telling her story.
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Bad Times at The El Royale
Written and Directed by Drew Godard
R16
Bad Times at the El Royale is actually a good time to see a movie. If that blurb doesn’t make you scramble to the cineplex, maybe a half-naked Chris Hemsworth for nearly an hour will.
Images from 20th Century Fox
It’s the late 1960s, a time when the sexploits of politicians made current scandals look like kindergarten play. Strangers descend separately on a seedy hotel on the border of Nevada and California, and no one looks like who they say they are. A priest (Jeff Bridges), a singer (Cynthia Erivo), a vacuum cleaner salesman (John Hamm) and a snobbish, sarcastic woman (Dakota Johnson) arrive one by one at the hotel and meet its only employee, Miles (Lewis Pullman.)
The story unfolds in one night from the perspective of each character, as they each settle in their rooms, beginning with the salesman who discovers that the hotel has its own secrets that it wants to keep. In a tragedy of errors, one character ends up dead, one character is shot, two characters are at each other’s throats, and the last one is joined by two more, with deadly consequences. The final two are the woman’s virginal younger sister (Cailee Spaeny,) and finally, the bare-chested Chris Hemsworth playing, of all things, an enigmatic cult leader.
From the director of The Cabin in the Woods (2012) comes a stylish mystery suspense that’s actually enjoyable to watch. I was not expecting anything prior to seeing the film, but so far Godard has yet to disappoint completely. There’s humor, a lot of mystery, and some suspense. It may burn slowly, but ends quite strong.
Watching the film reminded me of a stage exercise on timing actors’ cues and blocking, each time the story changes from the perspective of the succeeding character. There’s some humor in that by itself. Had the film been narrated and set a few more decades before, this movie would have easily been categorized as noir. What I mean is, the film definitely has a sense of style – maybe some references to Hitchcock humor – with design and lighting working in synergy to create appropriate tones.
The actors also seem to have had some fun while making the film, because it showed in their performances. Specifically: Bridges as the (supposedly) priest suffering from the onset of Alzheimer’s; Erivo who indeed turns out to have impressive vocals worthy of Las Vegas; and behold, Chris Hemsworth of Charles Manson proportions.
But however fun the movie is to watch, there seems to be nothing more underneath all the retro carpeting and hardwood floors. There’s no deep message, no poetry for introspection, no subversive undertones allegorical to the present day – just good craftsmanship, great ensemble chemistry and a juicy story (if macabre) that’s easy to digest. Maybe something about racial tensions, maybe something about the losses of war. Maybe nothing more. Just fun.
Hemsworth’s bare torso can sometimes be a distraction to the story, but that can’t be a complaint, right?
acid reflects 
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