ELVIS

Directing: C+
Acting: B+
Writing: C
Cinematography: B+
Editing: C-
Music: B+

The most astonishing thing about Elvis is how a movie so long (159 minutes) could still be overstuffed—and somehow leave out crucial, well-documented details of the singer’s life. It barely mentions his movie career, which included over 30 film roles between 1956 and 1969. There is a depiction of Priscilla Presley (Olivia DeJonge), but no mention of the fact that she met Elvis when she was only fourteen and he was twenty-four. That wouldn’t be convenient for the depiction of Elvis Baz Luhrmann is going for—one of objective reverence, even in light of his infidelity and drug habits.

The second most astonishing thing about Elvis is that it’s biggest liability is, of all things . . . Tom Hanks. Why this script focuses so heavily on “Colonel Tom Parker,” as depicted by Hanks, is truly a mystery. Plenty of music biopics have adopted this framework of storytelling, with a person close in the star’s orbit telling the story, but Elvis feels just as much about Parker as it does about Elvis himself. And even by Luhrmann standards, Parker’s element feels like it’s a different movie, not least of which because Hanks is put into a poorly conceived “fat suit,” given a huge fleshy chin, and apparently encouraged to go with a Dutch accent far heavier than Parker reportedly actually spoke with. Everything about Hanks’s performance in this movie is a constant distraction, and never a good one—and yet the movie spends far too much time on him at the expense of relevant details in Elvis’s own life.

Is there a third most astonishing thing about Elvis? You bet there is! This movie addresses how so much of Elvis’s music was influenced by Black music and Black culture, but does it in a blatantly revisionist way. This movie would have us believe that Elvis Presley simply grew up in a poor white family in a predominantly black neighborhood, found success using the musical styles he was surrounded by, and the Black community was delighted by his success. This is demonstrably untrue. Now, no one would ever turn to a Baz Luhrmann film for historical accuracy, but this is egregious stuff, right there in “white savior” territory.

I’ve long said that the best biopics narrow their focus, on either a particular incident or at least a single period in a person’s life. Trying to tell a person’s entire life story in the space of just one movie—even a long movie—generally renders it dull, and Elvis is no exception, its frenetic editing notwithstanding. What’s more, this style is well suited to Luhrmann’s earlier work, most notably Moulin Rouge! (2001) but also Strictly Ballroom (1992) and even Romeo + Juliet (1996), those films being the only ones regarded as “classic” in Luhrmann’s filmography, even by Luhrmann fans. (Although a fair number seemed to enjoy The Great Gatsby in 2013; I wasn’t that impressed.) There’s something about Luhrmann’s style that sets the viewer at a remove from the story, never offering a chance to connect on a deeply emotional level—something that should really be possible in the telling of Elvis Presley’s story. Luhrmann was always more interested in visual innovations than emotional resonance, and his style is so recognizable now that it could hardly even be called innovative anymore.

In other words, Elvis would have been much improved if told by another director. Instead, we get a production depicting a quintessentially American figure that was filmed in Australia, exclusively on movie lots and with recognizable American landscapes and skylines rendered in obvious CGI. Luhrmann’s earlier films were set in obvious fantasy worlds, in which this sort of artifice worked for the story at hand.

But! All that said, Elvis does have some redeeming qualities, by far the most important of which is the performance of Austin Butler, who is eminently convincing as Elvis Presley. He has a naturally passing resemblance to the man, at least when he was young (oddly, Butler is never in any obvious fat suit when depicting “older, fatter Elvis”), and his actual singing voice is used in many of the performances. Butler has a magnetic screen presence, just as Elvis had a magnetic stage presence, and both of those facts are bizarrely obscured by telltale rapid-fire editing.

Elvis is also packed with music, though, and the music is almost uniformly great—at least when it’s classic Elvis tunes, as well as Black singers performing the songs Elvis later covered (those are arguably the best tacks on the soundtrack). Elvis does sprinkle in several contemporary tracks, often with rap vocals, as if in an attempt to acknowledge the lasting influence of Black music. The rap tracks are a bit misplaced, though. Honestly, someone should make a movie “about Elvis” that focuses on the Black artists who either “inspired” him or from whom he outright stole, depending on how you (or they) look at it.

Butler’s performance and the music throughout the movie are almost enough to make Elvis worth what is clearly made to be a theatrical experience rather than something viewed at home. Almost. It might well have gone all the way if there were less “Dutch Hanks” and a lot more of Butler, singing as well as acting (his performance is excellent).

It’s also hard not to wonder if this movie kind of missed the boat, having been released about twenty years too late. There were some clear Elvis fans in the row behind me at the theater, and they were deeply invested in the story, quite openly commenting on how they felt about certain characters’ behaviors, all of them depicting as hangers-on who were bringing down an otherwise innocent Elvis Presley. Huge fans of Elvis today, who would now almost exclusively be among the elderly set, will surely enjoy this movie. But, Elvis has not been an active part of the pop culture conversation in decades, and this movie could have found a lot larger audience back when more of his own fans were still alive.

In other words, Baz Luhrmann stopped far short of the greatness his movie Elvis could have been, and is offering it too late. Clearly I am not the only one who feels this way; the film has already grossed over $55 million worldwide, although with a budget of $85 million, it will likely barely break even, if even get to that point. I don’t regret having gone to see it, and found it moderately entertaining for what turned out to be far too long a time, but this is not re-watch material. The memory of this movie will get filed away in the back of my mind, in a drawer that never needs to be pulled open again.

You can’t look away . . . whenever he’s actually onscreen.

Overall: B-

FREEDOM UNCUT

Directing: B-
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-

If you were already a fan of George Michael, then the documentary Freedom Uncut is likely worth your time. Otherwise, I’m not entirely sure.

We are told at the beginning that Michael was putting “the finishing touches” on this film when he died, on Christmas Day in 2016. That was five and a half years ago. There’s a deeply awkward attempt at a “sexy spin” by Kate Moss in a swivel chair to introduce the film, dated 2017. I had wondered why it had taken so long for any kind of release, but checked IMDb and discovered this had previous iterations: a Showtime documentary film just called George Michael: Freedom in 2017; then George Michael Freedom : The Director’s Cut in 2018. I guess this was just a special engagement theatrical release. Why am I even bothering to review it? Well, I did see it in a theater. Whatever.

Anyway, I am indeed a George Michael fan, and so I enjoyed this movie—mostly—but I also found it almost disappointingly self-indulgent. Michael was also charmingly self-deprecating and quick to admit his faults, but there’s still something about the fact that he is credited as co-director (with David Austin). Something made entirely by someone else would likely have been more reliably objective. George Michael is understanding about his criticisms, but arguably unapologetic to a fault. I can’t speak as confidently about how it would have been received in 2016, but from the vantage point of 2022, his winning the 1989 American Music Award for “Best Soul/R&B Album” is a little . . . cringey. Michael, on the other hand, at least at the time, was quick to defend himself: he’s proud of the accomplishment; he didn’t make the choice, the voters did. There’s no accounting for taste on the part of American Music Awards voters.

Freedom: Uncut had a strange presentation, beginning with the original music video for “Freedom ‘90” in its entirety, with no credit or title cards. That was followed with a full promotional video for his 1996 album Older, as though it were that year right now and we were being primed for its release. For a minute I began to wonder if I had misunderstood this as a documentary film and we were just going to sit through a bunch of videos. Then we see Kate Moss in the swivel chair, and she tells us this film was George Michael’s “final work.”

The film goes into a fair amount of detail regarding George Michael’s initial rise to superstardom, after initial fame with WHAM! (but literally nothing whatsoever about how or why WHAM! split up, after only two album releases in the early and mid-eighties) and then releasing his seminal work, Faith, in 1987. There are multiple references to George Michael being the best-selling artist in the world in 1988, using that fact to justify comparisons to superstars like Michael Jackson, Madonna, or Prince. There’s a key difference between George Michael and all those other artists, however: Michael Jackson and Madonna both released several albums that each sold over 10 million copies, and while Prince had only one album to exceed that amount, he was so prolific and had so many albums that went multiplatinum he outsold George Michael as well.

And George Michael had just that one megahit with Faith, which hardly puts him in the same league. His 1990 follow-up, Listen Without Prejudice Vol. I, sold 8 million copies worldwide and that’s a stunning achievement considering his infamous refusal to take part in any promotion of it whatsoever—he wouldn’t even put his own photo on the album cover. He wanted the music to speak for itself, and there’s some integrity in that; the choice to pack his video for “Freedom ‘90” exclusively with lip syncing models is now iconic.

But is it that memorable, thirty years later? Consider this: at the concession stand at the movie last night, the young woman at the register was 19 years old. That means she was born in 2003. She asked us what movie we were seeing, and when we told her, she said she didn’t know who George Michael was. The sad truth is, this is a guy who died five and a half years ago, and didn’t even have a modicum of cultural relevance since his 1998 arrest for cruising in a Los Angeles public bathroom, and the cheeky single he wrote about it for the release of a greatest-hits package the same year.

Even by that point, George Michael had only released three full length studio albums. He only released another two after that, both completely unnoticed, the most recent in 2004, a good 12 years before he died. It probably tells us something that this film had a single showing in theaters and even that had maybe a third of the seats sold, residual effects of a pandemic notwithstanding. In other words, Freedom: Uncut exaggerates the lasting cultural impact of George Michael a bit—at least in the United States; we do see James Corden speaking about how he’s “part of the fabric” of culture in the UK, and I obviously can’t speak to that.

The impact he had on fans can’t be denied, nor can the impact of mega-stardom on him, which was the reason for his about-face with promoting his work only three years after Faith was released. Older was important thematically to his life, as the album is largely about the love of his life dying of AIDS and his eventual coming out. The film is engaging and interesting; it’s just that its mileage will vary depending on a host of factors, including both how big a fan you are and whether you even know who he was.

I’ll say this much: the man knew how to fill out a pair of jeans.

Overall: B

LIGHTYEAR

Directing: C
Acting: B
Writing: C
Cinematography: B-
Editing: C+
Animation: B

At the beginning of Lightyear, we are informed that in 1995, Andy’s favorite toy, Buzz Lightyear, was a toy from his favorite movie. “This is that movie,” it says. After that movie finishes, though, I was left thinking about how children often have bad taste. Like, why would he obsess over toys from this movie?

It’s not that Lightyear is bad. It’s just . . . bleh. And when it comes to the bar set by Pixar Animation Studios in the nineties and 2000s, it might as well actually be bad. If it were actively bad, at least then it would be more interesting. Also, there’s a truly strange irony in this film: easily the most fun character in it is a robot cat, the kind of thing tailor made for merchandising. But in 1995, the marketers of this “movie” never made any toy SOX the Robot Cats to sell? And Andy was only interested in Buzz Lightyear, and (in the case of Toy Story 2), Zurg toys? Apparently Andy was a lot weirder kid than we realized.

Lightyear is clearly, objectively, a crowd-pleasing movie. The showtime I went to had plenty of actively engaged children in the audience, which erupted in applause when the film ended. It’s always so strange to me when people do that. Who do they think is there to appreciate it? This movie is getting relatively mixed reviews, and it’s easy to see why.

That’s why, even though the movie is successfully, if formulaically, entertaining, I found it to be kind of a bummer. I won’t go so far as to say Pixar has jumped the shark, but this movie is a definite step in that direction. We already got an arguably unnecessary Toy Story 4 in 2019, but at least it had the comfort of a familiar universe with long beloved voices. Now Disney and Pixar is just milking the original Pixar intellectual property for all it’s worth, branching out into odd-angled spinoffs.

And the thing is, the principal characters in Lightyear just aren’t nearly as compelling as those in the Toy Story series. That franchise had a novel concept: kids’ toys come to life when they aren’t looking. Lightyear is just a straightforward science fiction tale, with a lot of production design oddly reminiscent of the Alien franchise. Nothing here feels particularly original. I should be lauding Disney, I suppose, for making Lightyear’s best friend a lesbian (voiced by Uzo Aduba). But the trouble I have with this “feature” of the film is that it feels written expressly for that purpose, and that purpose only.

The one character I kind of loved was SOX, the aforementioned robot cat. Nearly all of the humor in Lightyear that actually lands is in relation to SOX. Very little of SOX’s critical role in the plot makes sense, but then neither does the rest of the plot. But, there are several gags delivered by or through SOX, as voiced by Peter Sohn, that got to me. I love me a cat character, even if it’s actually a robot, and any humorous bit involving a hairball. Or robot-paws typing away at a computer and figuring out complex equations. Everything about SOX is amusing and cute as hell. I wish the movie had been about SOX.

Chris Evans is well cast as the voice of Buzz Lightyear, but Lightyear lacks a certain angle, maybe even a gimmick—like, say, a Buzz Lightyear toy who doesn’t realize he’s a toy. That’s funny stuff. The “movie character” Lightyear just has to learn to accept that he makes mistakes. Yawn!

There’s a lot of time-travel that happens in Lightyear, with the title character obsessively “testing the hyperdrive” of a ship meant to get a marooned community off of a hostile planet. These are complex ideas that must by definition be oversimplified in an animated feature, and every time Buzz leaves the planet, only a few minutes go by for him but anywhere from four to 22 years passes for the people on the ground. This is how he winds up returning after one of many trips to find his best friend has passed away, and later meeting her grown granddaughter, Izzy (Keke Palmer). I’d be a lot more interested in a live-action drama about the implications of these evolving relationships.

But, of course, I’m a sometimes cynical 46-year-old, trying to hold Pixar to the same standards they had 27 years ago. That fact would be easier to dismiss if not for the fact that Lightyear exists on the assumption of an audience connection with a film that came out 27 years ago. True, the Toy Story movies have captured the imaginations of multiple generations of children, but it’s difficult to see how any of them will connect with Lightyear the same way just because of that tenuous connection. The young children dazzled by this movie don’t know any better.

The animation is competent, at least, if not jaw dropping the way that so many of Pixar’s previous films have been. And while Lightyear is engaging from start to finish, if a little rushed in its plot development (something no child is going to give a shit about), there’s a bit of Pixar soul that feels like it’s missing. I may need to rewatch Soul (2020) just as a palette cleanser.

We’re also treated to Taika Waititi and Dale Souls as … more forgettable characters. Stick with SOX the robot cat.

Overall: C+

JURASSIC WORLD DOMINION

Directing: C+
Acting: B-
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B-
Special Effects: B-

When push comes to shove, every single one of the Jurassic movies is dumb—yes, even the groundbreaking original 1993 film Jurassic Park, in spite of it being a justifiable favorite of many (including myself). News flash: cloning extinct animals is not actually possible. But! That first film is expertly paced, sprinkled with humor that reliably lands, is cleverly constructed, and all of that is on top of early-stage CGI effects that somehow still hold up nearly thirty years later.

There have now been two separate trilogies in this franchise, and it was never any surprise that, on average, it’s been diminishing returns. I would argue that the first Jurassic World (2015) was a step up from Jurassic Park III (2001), but Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) wasn’t quite as good—but it was close. It was close enough, in fact, that even with a worse script, it was still enough thrilling fun to give both of those films a solid B. Bad writing, great thrills—the net result was something I still very much enjoyed.

And I have been particularly excited for the third Jurassic World installment since the end of the last film, when (spoiler alert!) the dinosaurs were finally all brought to the mainland and let loose in the wild. It was clear that the next film would live up to that title, with dinosaurs roaming all around the world, interacting with modern environments. Exciting stuff. And indeed, the opening sequence of Dominion offers the very kind of thrill that promises, with a giant sea dinosaur chomping down on a crab cage off the coast of Alaska. It then cuts to a “Now This” video about the state of dinosaurs around the world. It feels, for just a moment, that it’s all uphill from there, but Colin Trevorrow—who also directed Jurassic World but not Fallen Kingdom, but he did co-write all three—takes it in the opposite direction, evidently so he could run this franchise into the ground.

It’s like Jurassic World Dominion is in a sprint to be by far the dumbest installment in this franchise’s 29-year history. I won’t deny there are some thrilling sequences, particularly a raptor-and-motorcycle chase through the streets of Malta (Dumb? Of course. Thrilling? You bet). Oddly, after the previous films wasted no time getting to the action, this one spends a lot more time on the characters, which would be a good thing if the characters were interesting. Even Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), arguably the most compelling character in the original Jurassic Park and now making his fourth appearance in the franchise, is rendered nothing more than a puzzle piece for contrivance, platitudes and a nostalgia trip.

I was so excited when the trailer to this film was first released, revealing the return of both Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and Ellie Satler (Laura Dern). I literally got chills. I had just loved that first movie so much. What a disappointment, then, to find them in this movie completely phoning in their performances, presumably struggling to hide their embarrassment over the lifeless dialogue they were saddled with. I kept imagining them reading the script for this movie for the first time—and then groaning. But then, I suppose, just throwing their hands up and saying, “Well, a check’s a check!”

I suppose this is where I should say something about the perennial Jurassic World leads, Bryce Dallas Howard and Chris Pratt, but why bother? They never did anything but serve as by-the-numbers human characters who were always secondary to the creatures who have always been the draw in these movies. But that’s what is perhaps most disappointing about Dominion: the creatures themselves. The special effects in Jurassic World movies never did break new ground and always just ran on the fumes of the stunning effects of the first films, but at least they were serviceable. In Dominion, there are several shots depicting a raptor suddenly turning around and running away, and they very much look like a computer effect, and distractingly so. The whole point of these films at the start was how stunningly realistic the dinosaurs were. Now they’re settling for what looks like a rush job, for what? A cynical expectation that the movie will make a ton of money regardless?

I hate to say it, but this movie is so badly written it makes the previous two, which had scripts plenty bad in their own right, look like masterpieces by comparison. Every turn of the plot, every corner a character goes around, is met with a preposterous lack of logic. Trevorrow regularly throws in clear visual references to the original Jurassic Park, maybe so we won’t notice. In one insanely stupid sequence, Grant and Satler infiltrate the lab of yet another villainous head of a genetics corporation, scanning a digital wrist band given to them by Malcolm in order to get through doors. The ease with which they do this strains plausibility even by the standards of these movies—and then they reach said lab and there’s not another human to be found anywhere. Jurassic World Dominion is full of these sorts of conveniences, designed to make it easy for the characters to get quickly to the next plot point.

BD Wong appears yet again, also his fourth appearance in the franchise as Dr. Henry Wu—he was in the original Jurassic Park and is in all the Jurassic World movies—and his moral place in the franchise has been all over the map. It seems he’s given a shot at redemption now, somehow using the existence of human clone Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon, returning from Fallen Kingdom) to solve the problem of giant mutant locusts threatening to eat up the world’s grain supply. Did I mention literally none of the plot mechanics in this movie make sense?

The only thing left to admire are the dinosaurs themselves, when they are convincingly rendered anyway. We get the obligatory fight between a tyrannosaur and a “gigantosaurus,” and as always the film finds one way or another to make us cheer for the T. Rex—no matter how many species of theropod are discovered to be bigger, T. Rex still wins the popularity contest. It’s also interesting to see some dinosaurs with actual feathers for once, after years of speculation regarding birds having evolved from them. A couple of “harrowing” sequences feel a lot like people getting chased by a giant chicken.

I was never a big fan of the concept of Chris Pratt’s Owen Grady character “training” velociraptors; that’s a thread of idiocy that runs through this entire trilogy. It largely takes the bite (so to speak) out of the unexplored danger and terror they represented in the first trilogy, and particularly the first Jurassic Park. By the time we get to this movie, we see Grady literally herding Parasaurolophus while on horseback, even lassoing one like a cowboy. That hokiness is the tip of the iceberg here, and it comes very early in the film.

In other words, plainly speaking, Jurassic World Dominion is a mess. It’s an entertaining mess, but still a mess, wasting far too much time on dull, one-note characters when it could be spending more time wowing us with special effects its makers didn’t even bother to perfect. With a bit more time and a modicum of effort, this movie, even being the sixth in the franchise, could have been so much better. The return of original-film cast is little more than stunt casting that ultimately serves only to disappoint. But hey, it did manage to get me to jump about a foot off my chair at least once, and once the film finally gets its shit together and has dinosaurs chasing and/or eating people, it becomes gripping again for a few minutes at a time.

“Nobody move!” someone shouts, right before . . . everybody moves.

Overall: C+

CRIMES OF THE FUTURE

Directing: C+
Acting: B
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-
Special Effects: C

I don’t think David Cronenberg has a plausible grasp on what evolution really is. In his mind, it’s connected to the idea that a little boy could wind up with the ability to digest plastic, and so he treats us with an opening sequence in which said boy is literally eating a plastic wastebasket.

I have a very simple understanding of evolution, but even I know that it’s not an active process, but a passive one: it’s about elimination, the disappearance of traits that are no longer useful, thereby allowing the surviving useful traits to flourish. In the world of Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, from a script he first wrote in the nineties and which still feels like it’s from that era, human bodies have begun randomly generating new organs with no known function. They have also stopped getting infections (one character marvels at how no one ever washes their hands anymore, blech), and people’s pain tolerance has skyrocketed, resulting in a trend of sort of sensual body mutilation just to get to the point of feeling something. And from an evolutionary perspective—ostensibly the perspective this film takes—absolutely none of that makes any sense whatsoever.

Science fiction works best when you can easily draw a logical line from what is known currently to the future being depicted—that is, when it has a sound scientific starting point. This was why Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey still wows audiences, and even why Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner still impresses. These depictions of a then-far future have anchors in the real worlds in which they were created. Crimes of the Future does not. Instead, it’s far more concerned with “body horror” wrapped in a cocoon of pretensions, the kind with which self-serious “art film aficionados” might have a heyday.

In terms of credit, I’ll give Cronenberg this much: he knows how to establish and maintain tone. Granted, his score composer on this film, Howard Shore, is doing much of the heavy lifting for him on this front. It’s only due to his synth-heavy, “haunting” score that an otherwise innocuous shot of a little boy milling about the beach is telegraphed as ominous. And not for nothing, but that score has its own echoes of Vangelis’s far superior score for Blade Runner.

Furthermore, Cronenberg is on record as having an incredibly hands-off approach to directing his actors, and it shows. He must have given them all one consistent note, though: everybody speak in halting, hushed tones! His “future” here is curiously unpopulated, the rare exterior shots depicting derelict, graffiti-riddled buildings on mostly empty streets. Yet, at the performance art events put on by the lead characters, Saul (Viggo Mortensen) and Caprice (Léa Seydoux), in which Caprice uses a repurposed old autopsy machine to extract his useless organs for a live audience, the audiences tend to be packed, all of them holding up recording devices of varying design (curiously, all of them a bit bulkier than one might imagine). But never noisy—they stand in rapt, silent attention.

There’s one exchange of dialogue I particularly liked. Saul says: “She said sex is surgery.” Caprice corrects him: “She said surgery is the new sex.” The latter is the basic premise of this film, but I’m much more interested in the implications of the former as an idea. I want someone to flesh out a sensual film from that idea. Maybe not David Cronenberg.

Trying and failing to find something of lasting interest in there.

Overall: C+

FIRE ISLAND

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

There’s a lot to love about Fire Island, this year’s first major “Pride Month Movie” release, streaming on Hulu since its release yesterday (June 3), and most of it has to do with representation. Written by and starring comedian Joel Kim Booster, and co-starring viral sensation and SNL cast member Bowen Yang, this is a movie clearly aimed to be a “mainstream release,” itself no longer unusual for a story focused on queer people—what sets it apart is its unapologetically plausible and realistic representation. This is definitively not a “family-friendly” movie, and not because it happens to be about a group of gay friends, but because it includes frank depictions of gay sex and casual drug use.

To be clear, though, the overall plot is surprisingly chaste, largely because it’s a modern adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice—very much in the vein of the classic 1994 high school adaptation of Emma that was Clueless. Granted, Fire Island has no chance of becoming the cult classic that Clueless did, but that’s just because of how much the movie industry has changed in the past thirty years.

Anyway, the casual observer might be forgiven for thinking the story is only about Howie (Bowen Yang), and his sweet, budding relationship with Charlie (James Scully), initially at the behest of Howie’s best friend Noah (Booster), who is so intent on getting Howie laid on an annual friends-group trip to Fire Island that he’s committed to not having sex with anyone himself until it happens. But, Charlie’s own group of friends are a much wealthier group, who overall rub Noah the wrong way, particularly a lawyer named Will (Conrad Ricamora), who Noah quickly writes off as a snob, responding in ways that only increase tension between them. Spoiler alert! By the end, this movie becomes just as much about the predictable trajectory of the slowly evolving relationship between Noah and Will.

If you are at all familiar with Pride and Prejudice, identifying which characters parallel those from the novel becomes a fun game. Noah is narrator Elizabeth; Will is Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy; Howie is Elizabeth’s sister Jane; Charlie is Jane’s love interest Charles Bingley. The diverse group of friends along the ride with Noah and Howie are, broadly speaking, the Bennet sisters.

The overall plot points of Fire Island do hew incredibly close to those of the novel, which is why, for instance, most of the time none of the aforementioned sex is ever centered in the plot. Noah and Will spend most of the story annoyed with each other, and Howie and Charlie spend most of it innocently getting to know each other. The unusual frankness comes in as background, sometimes as part of a punch line, such as when Noah crashes a bedroom orgy while looking for Howie, and all the guys stop their fucking just quickly enough to look around politely to see if there’s a Howie in the room. There is another scene in which Noah takes a potential hookup into a back room also filled with sex at a party, and yet another in which the group of friends are taking stock of their relatively pathetic collective stash of recreational drugs.

The great thing about all these details is just this: none of it is ever looked upon with judgment. It’s just, part of these gay guys’ world, secondary background details that they may or may not partake in depending on the circumstances or the mood. There is no self-loathing to be had in this movie, at least not as a result of one’s sexuality (they do discuss body image issues, in some cases in a way that’s a bit of a stretch, considering the conventional fitness of many of these guys who apparently feel out of place on Fire Island). There’s no tragic subplot about addiction, and there’s no hand-wringing or grappling with homophobia, a fact made easy by the convenient setting in one of the nation’s few small-town gay utopias. This story could just have easily been set in Provincetown or Key West.

All that said, if you strip away all these trappings that set Fire Island apart, and look strictly at its simple plot arc, as well as most of it’s dialogue, and it’s reduced to something little more than adequate. I can’t quite call this film “exceptional,” much as I really would love to. If I had my wish, it would be something with the staying power of The Birdcage, just without the conservative judgmentalism used for punchlines. Fire Isand could have been a great movie about gay guys on vacation, or it could have been a great modern adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, but apparently it can’t be a great combination of both.

Don’t get me wrong, though: I still thought it was a fun, worthwhile way to spend a couple of hours at home. I might even have enjoyed seeing this in theaters. That said, the “house mother” who owns the place this group of friends goes to every year is played by Margaret Cho, whose comic talents are criminally underused and whose presence seems only to serve as “gay icon cred.” And although the guys who round out Noah’s and Howie’s group of friends are diverse in both ethnicity and—critically—body type, their existence as a bunch of flamboyant femmes seems a little too amped up at times. This is a movie clearly meant to feel unusually grounded, but then at times the wrong “camp knobs” seem to get cranked up to 11. At least Will is unusually quiet and reserved—elements that are used by Noah to judge him.

It’s wonderful to see a movie like this, not just made by and about gay people, but gay people of color: the director is Andrew Ahn, whose short film First Birthday was made as a means of coming out to his Korean parents. I’ve been a fan of Joel Kim Booster as a comedian for a short while (ditto Bowen Yang, but given his rising fame that’s less surprising), and I do think he has talent. But, this script focuses more on the Pride and Prejudice angle than on the humor that could have been added; it did make me laugh several times, but the script still could have used some punching up. It could be argued, actually, that the whole Pride and Prejudice thing is more of a distraction than it needs to be, and the movie would have been better served just as a wholly original story about gay friends on Fire Island.

This is the movie we got, though, and it still works for what it is, and the significance of what its very existence represents cannot be overstated. The more broadly the queer community sees themselves in film, and the more films are made with that in mind, the better off we’ll all be.

You’ll have a generally good time.

Overall: B

TOP GUN: MAVERICK

Directing: B+
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: A-
Editing: B+

There was a time when a sequel produced three decades after the original was a transparent cash grab easily predicted to fall on its face. Think 1998’s The Odd Couple II . Or better yet, don’t: some classic movies are better left to stand on their own. On the other hand, given the right production team, maybe even that sequel could have been made better today. In the right hands, Hollywood has the means to be far more sophisticated these days.

Such is the case with Top Gun: Maverick, a sequel 36 years in the making, and an objectively, notably superior film to the original. You don’t have to re-watch 1986’s Top Gun to fully appreciate Maverick, but it helps; it also demonstrates how the original film only barely holds up. It’s easier to imagine how novel it was three and a half decades ago, and thus how exciting and massively successful it was. But, the plot is exceedingly simple, serving mostly as (wildly successful) military propaganda.

The same could be said of this new film—and it does seem strange for me to admit how much I truly enjoyed 130 minutes of military propaganda. But, Tom Cruise’s star power cannot be denied, nor can the fact that movie stars of this sort are a dying breed. No one under the age of fifty these days falls in the same category. In a long career of countless massive hits, Tom Cruise is arguably still best known for this role as Navy pilot Maverick, and this film expertly trades on that nostalgia.

Credit must be given to director Joseph Kosinski (whose resume includes lesser fare like Oblivion, also starring Cruise), a team of writers including Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects, Edge of Tomorrow), and a team of producers including Cruise himself, for how deftly it’s done. Top Gun Maverick hits all the right beats, is expertly paced, has spectacular action sequences but is not over-stuffed with them, and even features an appropriately affectionate scene with long-ailing Val Kilmer. For fans of Top Gun, or even fans of Tom Cruise, this movie has just about anything you could ask for. One might consider Jennifer Connelly as one of only two female parts and as Maverick’s love interest to be extraneous, but I’m just happy to see an age-appropriate relationship (Cruise is 59, Connelly is 51).

Most crucially, and surprisingly, I would place Top Gun: Maverick in the same class as Mad Max Fury Road (2015), an action movie I adored because of its stunningly achieved practical stunts, with very minimal use of CGI effects. The same is the case with Maverick: the jet flight sequences were all shot inside and around real planes actually flying. The difference from what this film would have looked like shot mostly against green screens is striking, and the massive amount of work put into getting the footage proves it. The actors themselves got pilot licenses, and although they usually flew in the planes with another pilot, they were always in those planes, in the air.

Just like the previous film, the “enemy” they are up against—in this case, a uranium plant under construction in a “rogue state” strategically located to be very difficult to hit—is never named, for transparently political and particularly economic reasons: they don’t want to alienate any country where they could rake in box office revenues. In years past I might have been more cynical about this than I seem to be now. I get it. Plus, the vagueness of this “enemy” keeps the focus on the pilot characters themselves and off of any other particular nation. It may seem ironic for a movie so blatantly celebratory of a military branch, but it’s really the only way the film can work, particularly for a broad audience. This film’s massive box office take thus far bears that out.

Cruise and Kilmer are the only characters who return this time out, although Miles Teller is exceedingly well cast as “Rooster,” the resentful son of “Goose,” Maverick’s friend who (spoiler alert!) died in the previous film. Teller has arguably never disappeared so well into a role, thanks to an effective combination of a mustache much like Anthony Edwards’s had been, and a stunningly ripped physique. (That physique is displayed by most of the men filling out the “Top Gun” class this time out—with one woman, and whether that’s tokenism is up for you to decide—and yes, it’s all once again showcased in a shirtless sports montage, this time playing football on the beach.)

There remains a lot of angles by which one could criticize Top Gun: Maverick, but mileage will certainly vary. I was so genuinely entertained by it, I’m not much inclined to complain. I would hesitate to say this film has any particular point of view beyond “flying fighter jets is cool and fun,” which is very much to its benefit. It’s easily enjoyed by people of all walks of life, an increasingly difficult thing to pull off. I found its action and suspense so well executed, easily more so than its predecessor, that I will likely see it again.

The few. The proud. The actors.

Overall: B+

CHIP 'N DALE: RESCUE RANGERS

Directing: B-
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-
Animation: B

I went back and forth as to whether I would even review this movie, my reaction to it was so . . . lackluster. I daresay I was disappointed, but that’s not entirely the movie’s fault: I let people whose opinions I respect convince me to expect something far better than it was.

The common comparison is to Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, the groundbreaking film blending live action and animation in 1988, now a marvel also because of its unique blend of both Warner Brothers and Disney cartoon properties. Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers is also packed with cultural references, not all of them Disney—but I didn’t notice any Warner Brothers cartoons.

I even heard someone call this movie a new “classic,” and that was really what finally cinched my decision to fire up Disney+ and watch it. A “classic,” this movie is not. If you want to see what a classic really is, just watch Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, right there on that same streamer. It’s a far, far superior film. Not only that, but it’s a period piece and it holds up: that film could have been released today and it still would have impressed.

Plus, it’s packed with both verbal and visual gags that are far quicker and far smarter than the ones peppered in Chip ‘n Dale. To be fair, the original Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers TV show that ran on the Disney Channel from 1989 to 1990 was not something I ever saw, and nostalgic fans of the show will likely delight in this film and how it trades on that nostalgia. I can understand that much, and appreciate the conceit in this film, in which the characters are the chipmunk actors who played Chip ‘n Dale in the TV show over thirty years ago, and are now a bit washed up. Chip (John Mulaney) works as an insurance agent (“Coercive Insurance” being one of my favorite subtle gags). Dale (Andy Samberg) is attending fan conventions to sign autographs—something that provides ample opportunity for the presence of many other kids’ programming character cameos.

Their friend and former coworker Monterey Jack (Eric Bana) finds himself kidnapped by a shady organization that alters cartoon characters for the purpose of overseas bootlegging, itself a running gag that runs kind of stale, and thus the estranged Chip and Dale reteam in order to attempt a real-life rescue.

It should be noted that the Chip and Dale characters speak with regular voices, not the high-pitched, sped-up voices of their “characters.” This film is filled with meta jokes about “making it” in Hollywood (or not), as well as the seedy side, and has some surprisingly adult jokes that little kids won’t understand: “Now he can’t have kids.” There’s a fun sequence on “Main Street” in which we discover the seedy underbelly of Hollywood toons, who push things like cheese as though they are drugs (Monterey Jack has a problem).

My main criticism is that not all of the gags land, and sometimes there is too much time spent between the gags for things like exposition or character development. I’m sorry to keep coming back to Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, but that film expertly blended all of those things with its clever humor, and often Chip ‘n Dale goes for easy rather than clever humor. Admittedly, it did get me to laugh out loud a few times.

The overall sense I got from Rescue Rangers, however, was one of a “direct to streamer” movie—and I mean of the sort that was typical before the pandemic. We now can get true quality films direct from streamers, but what Chip ‘n Dale is, is . . . fine. I can’t muster enough enthusiasm to think of it as something to get excited about, and that’s what disappoints me. I had hoped that, at the very least, I could tell people you don’t have to be familiar with the original Disney Channel show for this movie to come highly recommended. Instead, I think perhaps you do need to have seen the show. I have no connection to it, so, in spite of this movie’s many pop culture references, it just didn’t land the way I wanted it to.

At the very least, I will compliment the voice work: John Mulaney and Andy Samberg are great; as are the vast supporting cast of characters, including J.K. Simmons as the police “Captain Putty”; Will Arnett as “Sweet Pete,” an overweight, grown-up Peter Pan; and even Flula Borg as “DJ Herzogenaurach.” We also get Dennis Haysbert as Zipper; Seth Rogen as several characters; and Tim Robinson as “Ugly Sonic,” playing on a notorious internet controversy that no one knows about, and I am unconvinced will be as hilarious as intended for those who do.

Basically, Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers is entertaining enough, for something to watch at home with the family. It just fell short of what I wanted or expected.

Did I mention that Dale got “CGI” surgery? Hilarious!

Overall: B-