Brittany Runs a Marathon is a charming, funny trip through self improvement

Jillian Bell in Brittany Runs a Marathon. Image courtesy Amazon Studios.

The biggest depicted success in the delightful Brittany Runs a Marathon is one of the earliest, when the main character barely runs to the end of a New York City block. Eventually the character does complete the feat mentioned in the title, but the film's focus is not just on the grand moments but on accomplishing those little milestones along the way. Every step forward is a step toward something greater, even if the film sometimes can't stay on that path completely.

Jillian Bell stars as the eponymous Brittany, a hard-partying late 20-something with little direction and even less ambition. Pushed by a doctor to get into better shape, Brittany starts running alongside the energetic Catherine (Michaela Watkins) and the friendly Seth (Micah Stock). Brittany's dream becomes to run the New York City Marathon for the challenge and to spite her shallow roommate Gretchen (Alice Lee). Things start to turn around for Brittany as her health improves and she catches the eye of artistic slacker Jern (Utkarsh Ambudkar), but the good times can only last so long. As the training gets more difficult and life events turn against her, Brittany has to defeat her self doubts and begin to accept herself as a person worthy of friendship from Catherine, Seth, Jern, and her supportive brother-in-law Demetrius (Lil Rel Howery).

The charm of Brittany Runs a Marathon starts with Bell, a terrific comedienne who brings out both the best and the worst of her character. Brittany isn't that far from being a tepid character – movies about emotionally delayed white folks are a dime a dozen – but Bell keeps Brittany tolerable even as she drifts into caustic self loathing and lashes out at others. The inevitable coming through the wilderness moment in the third act is validated because Bell makes for a brilliant, lovable underdog one step at a time. This is the theme of Brittany Runs a Marathon, that people can achieve far more than they think they can through incremental success. Brittany is designed to be a normal person, someone who went from doing nothing to finding purpose and self satisfaction with who she is. Running makes for the perfect woman versus self story because it requires Brittany to defeat her self hatred to achieve a greater purpose of being. Bell makes Brittany worth rooting for, but the journey is relatable for the weekend warriors who grind through streets with no intention of actually winning the race. For Brittany Runs a Marathon, just getting through that first block is a massive success.

 

The cracks of Brittany Runs a Marathon begin to show as the films moves away from Brittany. While Watkins and Stock are good in their roles, neither is a particularly fleshed out character, designed to be there more for Brittany's sake then themselves. The film throws in a subplot in the third act for Catherine, but the timing is too late to establish it as a crucial part of Catherine's characterization. Gretchen exists solely to be hated, never allowed to overcome her initial awfulness and be more than a barrier for Brittany to overcome. Seth is the stock gay friend who exists as a support structure. The worst though is Jern, who is described as a man-child in the film and doesn't evolve beyond that. For a woman who seeks growth and self improvement, it's strange for Brittany to come back to someone who never shows any burning desire to better himself. Jern is a problem because he is uninterested in growing up in a movie that emphasizes personal growth over almost everything else.

At the least though Jern is often funny, as are the rest of the characters. First time writer/director Paul Downs Colaizzo has a good ear for banter and a solid sense of comedic interaction. Colaizzo throws in some pretty good one liners for Bell and company to chew on, and even uses some clever bits of visual humor to punctuate the jokes. Colaizzo and the film don't go for broke, but they get the little things – Brittany's growth, her relationships with Demetrius, Catherine, and Seth, the final race – right more often than not and create an endearing movie worth rooting for.

*This movie was produced by Amazon Studios. I work in a different department at Amazon.

Review: Four out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 103 minutes

Genre: Comedy

tl;dr

What Worked: Jillian Bell, Story, Humor

What Fell Short: Secondary Characters

What To Watch As Well: Rudy

The bride comes with a vengeance in the viciously funny Ready or Not

Samara Weaving in Ready or Not. Image courtesy Fox Searchlight.

Cruelty is the joke that makes Ready or Not's nasty heart beat. The film's purpose is to inflict as much pain as possible via grotesque slapstick while layering the endeavor with an ample amount of gallows humor. Ready or Not is just clever enough to pull off a pretty basic story while ramping up the insanity more and more until a gloriously bloody conclusion.

Ready or Not stars Samara Weaving Grace, a newlywed adjusting to the immense wealth she has married into. Her husband Alex Le Domas' (Mark O'Brien) family – father Tony (Henry Czerny), drunken brother Daniel (Adam Brody), sister Emilie (Melanie Scrofano), mother Becky (Andie MacDowell), and Aunt Helene (Nicky Guadagni) – has an odd tradition in which the newest member has to play a random game on their wedding night. Grace draws Hide and Seek, which ends up being a rather dangerous game. As Grace navigates through an unfamiliar mansion hiding, her new family members clumsily hunt her down to save their own lives from a potential family curse.

Ready or Not is a vicious movie, devilish in a delightfully entertaining fashion. It's cringe-worthy and gross, lingering on shots to build the anticipation that something wicked is about to happen. The filmmakers like to turn the screw tighter and tighter, setting up little things broadly yet leaving just enough doubt for the audience to pretend there is no way the movie would possibly go that far. But Ready or Not does, and then it goes just a little further because restraint is for the unimaginative. The target, with one notable exception, is the Le Domas family and its associates, who are designed as caricatures of the unfathomably wealthy and privileged. If the film is cruel, it's cruel mostly to the idea of a level of wealth that effectively saps the humanity out of its hosts.

But then there's Grace, who is put through all hell sorts of hell. She's physically battered by a collection of idiots and emotionally wrecked by rejection of the only thing she's ever wanted in life. Ready or Not paints her suffering as a purification from naivete and dehumanization of the soul; the sweetness she exhibits in the beginning is replaced with rage and vindictiveness. Weaving, who is pretty brilliant in this movie, shows this change through a little snort toward the beginning and toward the end of the film – what starts as innocent turns cruel as the night continues and her vengeance roars out. Her survival is rooted in hatred, which is an odd thing to root for in a character. Kindness is an odd weakness for a movie to exploit, perhaps a little too cruel for a movie in which the hate is otherwise directed at rich ghouls.

This is also a bit of a downside to the script. Ready or Not has a difficult time knowing when to show and when to tell, sometimes being a little too blunt with the message or opening with a moment that kills the twist prematurely. The logic for opening 30 years prior is sound: The additional history establishes character motivations for Daniel, Helene, and Alex to a degree while tossing in a nifty '80s joke. The surprise though is a little more valuable than the character points, which are set up rather well in other parts of the film, and the joke is not good enough trade for suspense. Ready or Not would be more interesting had it kept the audience on the same page as Grace in lieu of the quick prologue.

 

That is a pretty minor nit to pick for a movie as funny and ridiculous as Ready or Not. Aside from a lack of narrative subtlety, the script itself has a bounty of clever jokes and macabre sight and sound gags that run right through a marvelously bloody end. Directors Mark Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett keep a pretty excellent tempo and maintain a near perfect blend of comedy to suspense, using the inherent silliness of the premise to create some chills. The movie is about the lengths people will go to survive, and whether or not those lengths are worth surviving for, which is unnerving to say the least. The film's tone is humorous, but the content is mildly terrifying because of how easy it is to be heartless and cruel if one's survival is on the line.

Review: Four out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 95 minutes

Genre: Thriller

tl;dr

What Worked: Samara Weaving, Sense Of Humor, Tone

What Fell Short: A Little Too Much Exposition

What To Watch As Well: House of the Devil, You're Next

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark has fun with its frights

Michael Garza and Zoe Margaret Colletti in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Image courtesy Lionsgate.

Nostalgia is the heartbeat of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. From the retro 1960s setting to the familiarity of the folklore, Scary Stories is soaked in memories, of childhoods spent reading under blankets with a flashlight in one hand and a collection of macabre tales in the other. Scary Stories gets a lot of mileage from that nostalgia, which elevates the film in its more entertaining moments but hurts it when it strays too far from fond memories.

Based on the eponymous book series by Alvin Schwartz, Scary Stories centers on life in a small Pennsylvania town right around Halloween circa1968. Friends Stella (Zoe Margaret Colletti), Auggie (Gabriel Rush), and Chuck (Austin Zajur) meet Ramón (Michael Garza) on Halloween night as they evade the wraith of local sociopath Tommy (Austin Abrams). To complete their Halloween adventure, they go to the abandoned mansion of Sarah Bellows, the focus of an urban legend for her storytelling prowess and accusations of poisoning local children a generation prior. Stella leaves the mansion with Sarah’s book of scary stories, which soon start becoming all too real nightmares. Stella, her friends, and Chuck’s sister Ruth (Natalie Ganzhorn) must figure out how they are becoming characters in Sarah’s book before they vanish from existence.

The Scary Stories book series is beloved by millennials, serving as an introduction to horror for many children. The series is an equally valuable resource for understanding how these stories came to be, with Schwartz outlining each story’s origins and how interpretations change across regions. But the stories themselves are hit or miss: For every terrorizing short like Harold and The Wendigo there is a silly interlude like The Viper or The Hearse Song. The film focuses on the more terrifying tales, driving home some of the fears inherent to the legends. Director André Øvredal does a splendid job of developing a chilling, eerie, and bizarre atmosphere for his retelling, ratcheting up the tension by disorienting the characters and the audience. One of the driving themes of the movie is the fatalism of life, how people react once they know their time is running out. Øvredal often frames his stories to match this feeling of doom, tightening the character’s environments until only the inevitable can occur.

And, honestly, the books are less memorable for the stories – Schwartz’s storytelling is more entertaining than discomfiting – than Stephen Gammell’s illustrations, which often made the stories seem far more terrifying than they were. Scary Stories uses his art as inspiration for its character design, and while the film doesn’t meet the level of fear conjured by Gammell’s work – his style is too simple and brutal to nail in film – it adds a bizarre feeling to the movie. There’s an appreciated contrast between the reality of the film and the surreal nature of the art, particularly with the characters in Harold and The Dream. They are in essence still fantasies pulled into reality, never quite fitting into their surroundings and thus standing out for their peculiarity.

Where things get a little troublesome and where the film’s overarching shortcomings shift into focus is the third act. Scary Stories has difficulty finding an appropriate ending to the supernatural frights, shifting instead to a generic pursuit with a lackluster resolution. The movie dedicates so much of its efforts to setting an eerie environment while emphasizing efficient storytelling that ending on an exposition-laden chase is tonally incorrect. The resolution to the ghost problem is similarly off, failing to find a balance between invoking terror and finding sympathy for the villain. Explaining why the ghost is angry is more interesting as a concept than the results shown in the movie, especially with an explanation as forced as rage. There’s also an unnecessarily epic ghost scream because the filmmakers thought it appropriate to have the ghost not go quietly into that good afterlife. The movie generally falls short when it strays too far away from the stories and into generic horror filmmaking, which hits the final act and spoils some of the good vibes.

Where the books and the movie align though is an emphasis on the enjoyment of being scared. Scary Stories in all its forms is accessible horror, a strange introduction into the world of fear and chills. Diehard horror film fans won’t get a ton of frights from this movie, but for less versed viewers this will jolt and disturb with great efficiency. The movie is fun, and there’s always room for one more bit of fun in horror.

  

Review: Three out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 111 minutes

Genre: Horror

tl;dr

What Worked: Atmosphere, Character Design, Folklore

What Fell Short: Third Act, Dialog, Character Motivation

What To Read/Watch As Well: The original book series, Trick ’r Treat, A Nightmare on Elm Street

Stars' charisma carries Hobbs & Shaw

Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham in Hobbs & Shaw. Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

The beauty of Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw lies in the simplicity of its existence. This film’s reason for being resides solely in watching two of the biggest action stars in the world action their way through a series of explosions, because watching megastars banter and bicker is an American pastime. This is a pretty old recipe for success, defined around three decades ago but rarely repeated well in the ensuing decades. At the least, Hobbs & Shaw proves the recipe can still produce a fun, albeit very silly, movie.

Hobbs & Shaw stars Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham as Hobbs and Shaw, who are brought together to find a virus currently in the possession of Shaw’s long-lost sister Hattie (Vanessa Kirby). Hot on their trail is the committed Brixton (Idris Elba), a borderline cyborg who is part of an international cult dedicated to wiping out the weakest parts of the human race. Hobbs and Shaw must put away the differences carried over from two Fast and Furious movies to stop Brixton and once again save the world from nefarious forces.

Objectively speaking Hobbs & Shaw is not a particularly good film. The dialogue is dopey and hammy, existing as either lazy exposition or juvenile insults directed largely at levels of virility. The run time is overly long, filled to the brim and beyond with extraneous scenes and jokes that go far longer than they should. The story is bonkers and nonsense in the way that movies about technology with no understanding of how technology works are. It’s clear from the get-go this movie is a marketing ploy, especially in those awkward shots that highlight brand sponsors like McLaren. Hobbs & Shaw is fortunate to be a mediocre piece of filmmaking, just good enough to avoid the dustbin.

But, honestly, few if any of those problems matters for Hobbs & Shaw. A lot of the fun from this movie is a result of how gloriously dumb it is. All of the plot holes, silly dialogue, and the abundance of hyper-masculinity that stays just on the right side of toxic because of Hattie’s overarching competence are more selling points than flaws. Providing a proper critique for this movie is nearly impossible, because all of the things it does wrong are utterly immaterial to its sole purpose of watching Johnson and Statham bicker and punch their way around the world. And, well, there are far worse things to spend money on than watching the most charismatic action hero alive argue with a smooth talking Brit with a list of insults 40 meters long. Hobbs & Shaw sell Johnson and Statham, and the movie delivers exactly that with the added bonus of Elba as the villain and Kirby as a more than competent female protagonist.

Hobbs & Shaw is still a lot in both run time and action, often coming close to exhaustion because the loose plot while lacking the verve and energy of the best Furious films. Yet the insanity of it all carries it through, and director David Leitch escalates the explosions throughout to minimize the monotony. He uses as many excuses as possible to blow something up, because explosions are fun and interesting and allow Hobbs and Shaw repeated excuses to demolish the laws of physics. Leitch is also a capable action director, playing around with the fight sequences with Johnson and Statham are brutal and the booms are much larger than necessary.

Despite the super-modern tech, Hobbs & Shaw is a throwback to ’80s flicks like Lethal Weapon and Tango & Cash, buddy comedies where the action and the stars are more important than plot or logic. The film is an ode to a lost genre, a reminder that bankable stars can sell ridiculous stories based on star power alone. It’s a level of sincerity that’s missing with action movies, which often center so much on winks to the audience about the silliness of the expenditure the implausibility becomes a crutch instead of an asset. For movies like Hobbs & Shaw, the madness of impossibility is the attraction; the beauty and brilliance lies in the spectacle of Johnson and Statham driving through an exploding nuclear plant because it’s there to be exploded. Hobbs & Shaw isn’t art at its finest or most divine, but it’s still worth admiring for its bravado.

Review: Three and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 135 minutes

Genre: Action

tl;dr

What Worked: Dwayne Johnson, Jason Statham, Idris Elba, Vanessa Kirby

What Fell Short: Plot, Dialogue, Logic

What To Watch As Well: Fast Five, Furious Seven

Nostalgia carries The Lion King to mediocrity

Simba (voiced by JD McCrary) in The Lion King. Image courtesy Disney.

Whatever artistic purpose exists in converting classic Disney animated films into the husk of brilliance remains well beyond my understanding. Take The Lion King, Disney's newest reboot, a film that largely copies the original a la Psycho 1998 and yet has very little substance to add to its template. All of these Disney reboots exist for profit, but The Lion King is a rather egregious attempt to feed off nostalgia.

The movie has effectively the same plot as the 1994 original. Simba, voiced as a cub by JD McCrary and as an adult by Donald Glover, is stuck in the middle of a power play between his father Mufasa (James Earl Jones) and scheming uncle Scar (Chiwetel Ejiofor) for control of Pride Rock, which his father loses in rather dramatic fashion. Cast out of the kingdom, Simba is taken in by snarky meerkat Timon (Billy Eichner, a step up from Nathan Lane) and sweet warthog Pumba (Seth Rogen), who teach Simba to let go of the past and enjoy today. That's easier said than done though, especially after childhood friend Nala (Shahadi Wright Joseph as a cub and Beyonce as an adult) asks him to return to reclaim the throne and live up to his father's legacy. Joined by faithful servant Zazu (John Oliver), the wise Rafiki (John Kani) and his mother Sarabi (Alfre Woodard), Simba returns to battle Scar, hyena leader Shenzi (Florence Kasumba) and her army of hyenas (Keegan-Michael Key and Eric André among them) for control of the kingdom.

The biggest compliment to offer this new Lion King is also the root cause of one of its biggest flaws. This is a legitimately good looking film, from the lush scenery to the impressive CGI that does a phenomenal job making the animals look fairly authentic. Yet the CGI is a major weakness for The Lion King because the conversion from animation to realistic CGI removes a lot of the film's charisma. By aiming for verisimilitude with the lions, elephants, hyenas, and multitude of critters, the characters lose much of their personality because they can't emote. Take a character like Zazu, who is memorable in large part because his animated facial expressions enhance the wry dialog delivered by Rowan Atkinson. Poor Oliver is stuck voicing a literal bird, which puts the onus on his vocal abilities to carry the character and removes a layer of uniqueness from the character. Even the musical numbers are dinged by this; because the animals are supposed to be “real”, director Jon Favreau can't stage the elaborate musical numbers that highlighted the original. What's left is outright boring musical numbers that exist in a faux reality, which runs counter to a genre defined by its flights of fancy.

The Lion King is ill served by the transition to a real-life setting, which is one of the few real methods it attempts to distinguish itself from the 1994 version given how many shots this version borrows. Favreau does have a little wiggle room though, interpreting minor scenes to make subtle, often deleterious, changes to the source content. One example worth highlighting is transporting Can You Feel the Love Tonight in the middle of the afternoon, dulling a lot of the romanticism of the moment. To be fair, some of the tweaks work pretty well – an indulgent Disney reference in the third act is an improvement over the scenario from the original – but most of the tweaks do not benefit the film. Where Favreau and writer Jeff Nathanson, and by extension The Lion King, have control is in the approximately 30 minutes of extra run time. One of the main target areas is the development of the female characters, which is hit or miss. Having Senzi lead the Hyenas instead of serving as a Stooge is a step up, resulting in a pretty nice payoff during Scar's demise. The film is less effective with Nala, giving her a couple extra scenes that try to add courage to a character that was already pretty courageous. Favreau and Nathanson simply don't do enough with the extra time to justify having it, and the added time hurts the narrative flow while stagnating the musical numbers.

The one benefit of adapting The Lion King is the quality of the source material. The original is so good the ersatz version can't be all bad. Playing it safe saved the film from being anything less than mediocre, but it prevents it from achieving anything much greater than that. And without any interest in exploring the text, the film lacks an artistic reason to exist. The point is purely profit, and it makes for an uninteresting movie.

Review: Two out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

 

Rating: PG

Run time: 118 minutes

Genre: Drama

tl;dr

What Worked: Billy Eichner, James Earl Jones

What Fell Short: Extended Run Time, Live Action Setting, Musical Numbers

What To Watch Instead: The Lion King

Midsommar is a waking nightmare

Vilhelm Blomgren and Florence Pugh in Midsommar. Image courtesy A24.

Midsommar milks a lot of terror out of predictability. It's made very clear very early something bad is going to happen, and a passing familiarity with a certain horror genre prepares viewers for how poorly everything ends. Yet the film not only overcomes the obvious result, it uses the inevitability to its advantage to make things even more horrifying than before. Midsommar is a distorted countdown toward doom, with the horror stemming from the time-confused journey to the chaotically drug-soaked finale. 

 

Midsommar stars the ferocious Florence Pugh as Dani, a grad student constantly on the verge of both tears and breaking up with her boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor). They stay together though heading into a midsummer festival in Sweden organized by Christian's friend Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren) and his commune. Flanked by Christian's bros Josh (William Jackson Harper) and Mark (Will Poulter), Dani and Christian dive into the life of the peaceful, drug-fueled world of a small town where the sun never fully sets. The festival is not quite as it seems as a sinister undertones percolate up and the trip takes a dramatic turn for the worst.

Midsommar is a master class in film directing. Every shot has a purpose, every frame reveals a lot without telling too much. This film is about as close to technically perfect as a horror film can get, crafting an intense and discomfiting atmosphere that absolutely swallows people into its strangely sunny heart. Even the coldness that results from such technically precise filmmaking adds an untrustworthy layer of removal, an illusion of distance befitting a film about the distance between people and the ease of which it spreads. Kindness in this movie is a falsity, and writer/director Ari Aster's most vicious act is to allow the audience to even slightly pretend everything is safe.

Except for the special effects. Aster loves some blood and guts, showing as much violence as he can and leaving precious little to the imagination; if there's a body to throw down a mountain, he's going to show you exactly how hard it lands. This is a good idea for this film, with the initial shock of a sudden act of violence ultimately melting into the film's otherwise fever dream sense of reality. But the props he uses look terrible, clearly false and resulting in moments that are more funny than jarring. Midsommar depends so much on its atmosphere to carry the proceedings having one element look bad comes perilously close to revealing the facade behind it all. It's more effective on principle for this film to show the gore, but the lack of quality in the gore itself nearly cancels out the benefits.

The bodies are an unfortunate reminder of poor cinema craftsmanship, but the rest of Midsommar is a waking nightmare. It's a bloody trip, an experience to survive and wade through as the wait for the bad things to happen intensifies. And all of this happens in under the sun, with barely any darkness to be found. Fear is conveyed best in the dark, where the imagination replaces the senses and bad dreams overwhelm good nights of sleep. Aster shoots almost everything in the light, which is traditionally safe and warm and a refuge from the evils that lurk in the shadows. How then does one make the light even more terrifying than the dark? The effect is due in part to the copious drug use from the characters that eventually seeps into the filmmaking – it's difficult to have a firm grasp of exactly what's going on over the last 30 minutes.

 

Aster's most interesting trick is playing with the concept of safety in daylight. The film is so bright, so filled with white and purity it should come across as impossible for anything bad to take place. But removing darkness creates a distrust of the light – no community can be this friendly, no place can be this innocent. The thought is disorienting by intention, designed to confuse and to horrify as the validity of those doubts gains more and more truth. The evil in Midsommar hides in plain sight, only revealing itself far too late to do anything about it.

Review: Four and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

 

Rating: R

Run time: 140 minutes

Genre: Horror

tl;dr

What Worked: Atmosphere, Florence Pugh, Directing

What Fell Short: Special Effects

What To Watch As Well: The Wicker Man