Category Archives: 2021

Luca

Luca       3 ½ stars

Luca, the animated feature from Pixar/Disney and directed by Enrico Casarosa, takes the theme of The Little Mermaid and puts it on the Italian Riviera. Thus we get some Italian flavor including a seaside village, some homemade tagliatelle, and riding bicycles over cobblestone streets. We also see a friendship formed between two young boys, the younger one being Luca and the older one is Alberto. They have a secret though. They are both sea monsters who are masquerading as humans. It seems that these creatures who live in the sea are occasionally glimpsed by humans from the village but after they leave the sea and dry off they can transform into human form and have the ability to walk and speak normally. This experience creates the desire in Luca to learn all about his new surroundings including to ride a Vespa and to make friends with a local human girl, Giulia. Unfortunately, for our sea monster friends they are under constant threat of getting wet which can make them change back to monster form and be revealed to the humans. It has some other elements similar to other Pixar movies like a local bully and a climactic event like a bicycle race so is not particularly original, but should be very enjoyable for the younger audience. Luca is not Toy Story but is worth a look.

No Time to Die

No Time to Die                  4 stars

I finally took in the most recent James Bond film, No Time to Die from 2021 and was not disappointed. It’s hard to believe that it has been 15 years and five films since Daniel Craig took on the role of MI6’s most daring and successful secret agent, 007. This is Craig’s last outing as Bond and it is very emotional as well. There are all the usual attributes of a James Bond film, the international locations, the over the top action scenes, the villains scheming to dominate the world, Bond’s high tech gadgets and of course the fem fatales. This time around Bond has officially retired from service to MI6 and is living in Jamaica with Dr. Madeline Swann (a returning and stunning Lea Seydoux), but his friend Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright also returning) of the CIA shows up telling Bond there is a new threat endangering the world and his help is sorely needed. It seems a Russian scientist (David Dencik) has access to a technology of a tiny nanobot virus capable of killing people based on their DNA structure and that can spread throughout the world. Somehow MI6’s M (Ralph Fiennes) plays a role in this, but the plan has gone wrong with the weapon of choice falling into some very dangerous hands. Also returning are Q (Ben Wishaw) and Moneypenny (Naomie Harris). There are other notable characters played by actors bringing the franchise into the 2020’s: new MI6 agent Nomi (Lashana Lynch) who is very resourceful and a scrappy fighter, a suspicious CIA agent (Billy Magnussen of Bridge of Spies and Velvet Buzzsaw) and a newcomer agent, Paloma (a very sexy Ana de Armas of Knives Out and Blonde) who puts up a good fight when needed. For the bad guys there is the captured head of Spectre, Ernt Stavro Blofeld, a name that goes back to the Bond movies of the seventies. This time he is played by Christoph Waltz (of Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained fame) to great dramatic effect. But the real villain this time is a man named Lyutsifer Safin (a very menacing Rami Malek), who plays a notorious role in Dr. Swann’s past. The director, Cary Joji Fukunaga, new to Bond films has put this all together, but it is Craig who makes it more than just another action movie and brings some emotional depth to a character who has plenty to lose but must carry on to save the world one more time. Even though this is Daniel Craig’s last time out as 007, we are assured that James Bond will return.

Raya and the Last Dragon

Raya and the Last Dragon             3 ½ stars

In 2021 the popular animated Walt Disney release was Encanto, the story of a magical family in Columbia. That same year Disney released the animated movie Raya and the Last Dragon which didn’t quite get the same attention in the era of Covid. This fairly typical Disney story concerns a fictional land called Kumandra, where 500 years ago a plague of sinister monsters that could turn people into stone was stopped by a race of dragons who lived peacefully with humans. But over time the humans broke up into factions leaving only one village to keep the dragon gem safe that continues to protect the people. That village is led by Benja, who has a daughter, Raya, a sort of young ninja in training. The peace is broken when another village breaks the gem, stealing pieces of it which releases the curse of the monsters again, spreading havoc across the land. The only hope is for Raya, accompanied by her pill bug friend, Tuk tuk to find the last remaining dragon who can defeat the monsters. She finds the dragon, a comical, energetic creature named Sisu who is powerful, but somewhat immature and needing guidance. Somehow, Sisu was chosen to be the last dragon after all the others were sacrificed to the magic, stone creating monsters. In classic Disney fashion, the pair and their friends must deal with many action filled dangers along the way to saving their people. The movie is rich in action and color, but was written by a team of writers so it is quite an amalgam of characters and references to Southeast Asia. It is not really a Disney princess movie but contains elements from a variety of Disney movies that we have seen before. The movie is very suitable for young audiences even including the monsters.

The Hand of God

The Hand of God              4 ½ stars

Academy Award winning Italian director Paolo Sorrentino creates a Fabelman-esque story in The Hand of God, a sort of coming of age story loosely based on his own upbringing in 1980’s Naples. If you have seen one of his previous movies, The Great Beauty, you know he has set some high standards. In The Hand of God, we follow 18-year-old Fabietto (Filippo Scotti) who lives with his mom and dad and spends his time going to large family gatherings, going with his brother Marchino to acting auditions and dreaming about sex and soccer (European football), though it’s hard to tell which interests him more. He also has an interest in the movies. The early scenes are amusing in this two hour and ten minute movie, such as when his aunt Patrizia takes the opportunity at a family outing to sunbath nude in the presence of the entire family. Other relatives create equally absurd situations. A central element of the film comes when real life Argentinian superstar Diego Maradona joins the Naples soccer team creating a sensation for young Fabietto and the whole city. It is when a great tragedy strikes that forces the young man toward making decisions about what he should do with his life and is steered toward filmmaking. The Hand of God is largely fictionalized, but it does mirror events from Sorrentino’s life including the life changing tragedy. (The meeting with film legend Frederico Fellini did not actually happen though.) It’s worth viewing provided you can commit for the full duration. The Hand of God was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.

Coming 2 America

Coming 2 America            2 stars

It took thirty-three years for a sequel to be made of the Eddie Murphy/Arsenio Hall comedy Coming to America. The original movie was a hilarious fish out of water story about Prince Akeem, an African prince from the country of Zamunda who comes to Queens and meets Lisa (Shari Headley), his true love and brings her back home to share his life in the royal palace. This time around in Coming 2 America it is his illegitimate son, Lavelle (Jermaine Fowler) of Queens who must make the journey to Zamunda and assume his place in the royal family, something that seems like a dream come true at first. The hitch is that he has been promised as a mate to the daughter of the general (Wesley Snipes) from the neighboring country of Nexdoria in order to prevent the two countries from going to war. The main draw of the original movie is the many comedic moments involving Murphy and Hall which includes various other characters played by the pair thanks to the HEAVY use of makeup. This is especially true for the gang from the MY-T-SHARP barbershop in Queens. These old men appear again in the sequel but their roles don’t seem as significant, though they are very funny. There certainly are some very funny moments, but this movie just doesn’t measure up to the original which was the second most popular movie of 1988. I certainly do credit the appearance of Leslie Jones as Mary who is just as funny as I remember her from Saturday Night Live. There is also a great scene with Colin Jost appearing briefly as a racist hiring manager that I found quite hilarious. Somewhat distracting were the flashback scenes that made use of de-aging CGI to feature younger versions of the prince (Murphy) and his assistant, Semmi (Hall). I recommend that you see the original movie again and skip the sequel as it is a less funny imitation of the first film.

Free Guy

Free Guy              4 stars

In the 2021 action comedy Free Guy, directed by Shawn Levy (the Night at the Museum movies) we first meet Guy (Ryan Reynolds), a very chipper guy who greets his goldfish, puts on his blue dress shirt and goes to his job at a bank where he cheerfully greets everyone. He and his best friend, Buddy the security guard (Lil Rel Howery of Get Out) seem unsurprised when the bank is robbed by masked villains with very large guns and calmly drop to the floor and have a casual conversation. As he walks through the streets of Free City he is surrounded by the mayhem of crashing cars, people shooting at one another, and falling debris from damaged skyscrapers. Yet none of this disturbs him, not even when he wakes up again in his room and repeats the day, just like the previous one. We soon see that all of the characters in Free City are part of a video game played around the world and Guy is simply a NPC (non-player character) in this game where the players operate their characters from home. Then one day he spots an attractive woman on the street that he thinks must be the girl of his dreams. She is known only as Molotov Girl (Jodie Comer of Killing Eve) in Guy’s world, but is also named Millie as the woman who is operating the avatar from her computer. In the real world Millie and her friend Keys (Joe Keery) are the coders who created the popular game that is owned by a giant corporation run by an authoritative tech lord called Antwan (Taika Waititi). When Guy follows Molotov Girl he discovers the truth about his existence in the game. Millie puts a pair of sunglasses on Guy that shows him the mayhem that the players of the online game see. This leads him to the decision to play his own game gaining experience and fame, making him a celebrity among the players in the real world. The movie combines elements from The Truman Show, Wreck It Ralph and Groundhog Day but with a great deal of comic action and impressive special effects aided by some amusing cameos from action movie-stars (such as Channing Tatum, Hugh Jackman and Dwayne Johnson). As the action progressed the idea came to me that this was like a type of West World where nobody gets hurt and with music that lightens the mood. (There is a great use of the theme song from The Greatest American Hero.) This is a fun movie that is silly and sweet and quite a departure for Ryan Reynolds who is best known for his superhero roles in action movies.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings           4 stars

I’m not a great fan of the Marvel movies but I took in the acclaimed Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings from 2021 to see what it was about. This is certainly an action filled story with plenty of martial arts fighting and CGI effects combined with an intergenerational origin story about characters trying to find their place in the world while dealing with family expectations. There is a lot of back story involved despite most of the time seemingly devoted to one extended fight scene after another. I can’t go into great detail, but the two main heroes are Shang-Chi (Simu Lui) and Xialing (Meng’er Zhang), brother and sister who are each on their own having left their father’s world who is a legendary warlord (Tony Leung as Wenwu) who has great power due to the ten rings he wears on his arms when engaged in battle. The pair are drawn back to their father when he reaches out to them to confront a great wrong done to their family many years before. The past events took place in a magical place called Ta Lo, hidden in a deep forest where many strange creatures live with the humans. The village is protecting the world from a great evil force that would like to take the souls of all the creatures it can, as happens in a superhero movie. Shang-Chi and Xialing find themselves on the opposite side from their father, thus we have the setting for the many fights that take place. The story is interposed with the action scenes along the way allowing the characters to show off their martial arts skills and their powers over the forces of nature. Special mention must go to Michelle Yeoh as Jiang Nan who shows off her fighting skills before she was in Everything, Everywhere All at Once. As well as Awkwafina as Shang-Chi’s girlfriend from San Francisco, a civilian who gets caught up in the action. There is a lot more to the story than I have described, and a lot of action packed into the two and a quarter time of the movie. As with any superhero movie you must suspend your disbelief when characters take all sorts of punishment from super destructive forces without sustaining injuries (something that tends to bore me). As Marvel movies go, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is better than most and I understand that there should be more expected from this lesser known hero of the MCU.

Dune

Dune     4 stars

I finally saw 2021’s Dune by Denis Villeneuve having missed it in the theaters. It has to be one of the greatest challenges in making movies to attempt to bring Frank Herbert’s epic science fiction novel to the silver screen and Villeneuve was feeling up to it. In the story we follow young Paul Atreites who is destined to lead his house and people through a great struggle across the galactic empire. Timothée Chalamet with his ability to convey a dark sullen mood is excellently cast as Paul who is plagued with frightening visions of the future because he was bred to be the one to guide mankind through this period by the witches of the Bene Gesserit. If you are not already familiar with the book, I certainly can’t explain this complex story to you here, but I can say that the movie does capture the grand scale of Dune with the huge set pieces of the cities, the flying ships, the immense temples and of course the giant sand worms of Arrakis. The importance of Arrakis lies in its abundance of mélange, the spice that makes galactic space travel practical. There are some well staged hand-to-hand combat scenes both between armies and individuals that even show the effects of the Holtzmann shields. We get a good taste of the vastness of the Arrakis desert and the devotion of the Fremen to the land and their way of life. Many of the cast do credit to their Dune characters including Oscar Isaac as Duke Leto Atreites, Rebecca Ferguson as Lady Jessica, Jason Momoa as the charismatic and loyal Duncan Idaho and Stellan Skarsgárd as the obese and beyond evil Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. There are many other cast members who played their limited parts well that I can’t name here. For the most part the characters seem faithful to the book. One change was to make the Fremen scientist Liet Kynes a woman as played by Sharon Duncan-Brewster. The character was even expanded compared to the book. Two characters missing from the movie are Feyd Rautha Harkonnen and Princess Irulan. The nature of the story requires a certain quality of mysticism, especially with the scenes dealing with Paul and the Bene Gesserit, so there is not always a completely human aspect to the story. The movie is necessarily the first part of a pair of movies so while it ends on a hopeful note, it does not feel quite complete. We are still waiting for part two which is promised to show up next year. I am to understand that the job of playing Feyd Rautha will fall to Austin Butler (from Elvis). I look forward to seeing what he does with that. There have been other versions of Dune in the past and this one is likely the most faithful to the book, but we will have to see what Part 2 has to offer. Also, I have read that there is a prequel in the works that focuses on the origins of the Bene Gesserit 10,000 years in the past.

Spider-Man: No Way Home

Spider-Man: No Way Home         3 ½ stars

I know I am late to the party on the Spider-Man movies, but I just saw Spider-Man: No Way Home, directed by Jon Watts and starring Tom Holland as the crime fighting webslinger, a.k.a. Peter Parker. The last Spider-Man movie I saw (not counting the animated ones) was back in 2007 when in Spider-Man 3 Tobey Maquire was Peter Parker and he fought two major villains plus his own suit. That was two iterations ago and things have changed quite a lot since then. For one thing that was before the Spider-Man character was added to the Marvel universe which sort of explains why this Peter Parker doesn’t know about the Avengers. Also, the idea of the multi-verse was added, meaning that this Spider-Man is from a different universe than the earlier versions. This plot device is needed since in the previous Spider-Man movie, Spider-Man: Far From Home, Spider-Man’s secret identity has been revealed by Mysterio before he was killed, something that had not happened before. Is that complicated enough for you? Now Peter is being bombarded by the press and onlookers, threatening him and girlfriend M.J. (Zendaya) and preventing them from getting into MIT as engineering students. (Parker and friends are still high school students and behave like it.) Fortunately for Peter, he is familiar with one of the Avengers, the sorcerer Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) who can cast spells and change the past. So, he asks Strange, “Call me Stephen” to remove the knowledge of Spider-Man’s secret identity from everyone’s memory and make things return to normal. Of course, this plan backfires enabling five villains from other universes to come and challenge Spider-Man to some colossal battles. But things are not all bad because two other Spider-Man’s from other universes come to join our Spider-Man to even things out. The other Spider-man’s are Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield who previously took their turns in the role and none of them are aware of each other before meeting. Apparently, this means that whenever there is a new Spider-Man in the movies, we are actually going to a different universe. This is a very convenient tool for the screenwriters of Marvel movies since this means they never have to worry about maintaining continuity from one movie to the next. It’s just a different universe. And we can credit Doctor Strange with making this possible with his ability to open portals to the multi-verse. (It seems to me that this power would make him by far the most powerful super-hero in the Marvel universe, but maybe I am just over-analyzing.) The movie keeps a high level of comedy throughout, even if most of it is at a juvenile level. The most notable things about Spider-Man: No Way Home are the creative visual effects, especially the contorting of reality done by Doctor Strange when he unleashes his magic spells. The CGI people really work wonders. Otherwise, this is just another Marvel super-hero movie that is mainly about the action fight scenes with the super villains. It’s not one of my favorites.