Catching up with a few flicks

Catching up with a few flicks

By Robert Garver Sometimes, there are just too many movies. If you’re like me, you will sometimes get excited about seeing a film, only to have other movies get in the way (or, you know, other nonmovie related responsibilities), and you miss one here and there.

So, here are a few mini-reviews of the ones that got away over the past few months that I was able to finally sit down and watch at home. If you’re looking for a flick for family movie night, date night, or just a little solo cinema, you might want to (or might not want to) consider one of these…

• Crazy Rich Asians For about a year now, I’d been hearing about the impending release of “Crazy Rich Asians”. I tried to get into an advance screening last week, but it was sold out on two screens. I was almost shut out of a Wednesday screening this week, but I was able to get one of about a dozen remaining seats with over 90 minutes until showtime.

Clearly this was going to be an event movie, and since I knew it was based on a series of books, I likened it to “The Hunger Games” or “Twilight”. The film’s national box office ultimately fell well short of those other franchises, but in a way it did remind me of them. Stay tuned to the end to find out how.

The story follows humble, hardworking NYU professor Rachel Chu (Constance Wu) as she travels to Singapore to meet the family of her seemingly equally humble boyfriend Nick Young (Henry Golding).

Surprise, surprise, it turns out that the Young family is one of the wealthiest families in all of Asia. Not only is Rachel going to spend the weekend in the lap of luxury, but Nick is in line to take over the family business, and it looks like a proposal is on the horizon.

She may be on the verge of a lifetime of crazy richness. With the story needing some sort of conflict, it isn’t all about first-class flights and mansion parties. Rachel wants desperately to impress Nick’s family, especially his mother Eleanor (Michelle Yeoh) and grandmother (Lisa Lu). And why shouldn’t they like her?

Rachel’s best friend Goh (Awkwafina) advises her to stand up to Eleanor to earn her respect. And of course Rachel’s mother (Tan Kheng Hua) is always there for support.

Characters like these make “Crazy Rich Asians” an enjoyable movie. And the spoiled, meaner characters are at least fun to detest. And the two leads are no slouches either. And even the often-chilly Eleanor is never portrayed as monstrous or unloving. It’s not “bad”, it’s just pretty bythe- numbers lighthearted romance stuff.

But the movie is just so much fun that it can be forgiven for not really covering any new ground.

Grade: B ***

Early on in “The Meg”, it occurred to me that sharks just aren’t very scary. I don’t mean this movie’s shark (although some unconvincing CGI doesn’t help), but all sharks. Their teeth are always so small in proportion to the rest of their mouths that they don’t register the way they’re supposed to, and their eyes and faces perpetually have this expression that tells me they’re just minding their own business. Even definitive scary shark movie “Jaws” knew to keep actual shots of the creature to a minimum or else people would stop taking it seriously. So this movie is already hurt by being a monster movie with a nonthreatening monster.

Jason Statham stars as Jonas Taylor, an underwater rescuer in need of redemption. We see his initial failure at the beginning of the movie, where he’s forced to leave two colleagues behind to die. The sequence is so choppy and poorly-edited that when another colleague rhetorically asks “What have you done?” I was actually wondering what exactly he had done. It’s up to Jonas and his ragtag team of unprepared scientists to save the world from the horror they’ve unleashed.

The action sequences are entirely what you’d expect from a movie like this.

Jonas’s rescue of Lori and her team is supposed to be harrowing because there’s a bunch of lights and alarms warning of an impending breach, but the situation never looked that dire to me. The crew sets off on a few missions to destroy the Meg, but you know they’re not going to be successful because it’s early and we haven’t yet gotten to the much-hyped scene where the shark invades a crowded public beach.

“The Meg” knows that it’s not a good movie, so it’s trying to market itself as a self-aware bad-but-fun movie. The problem is that it lacks the creativity or charisma to pull of that kind of identity. It comes close a few times, in scenes where Statham, Wilson, or Cai are having fun with the movie’s blatant badness, but those moments are fleeting.

Grade: D ***

• Christopher Robin

Sometimes it’s best just to stay in one’s comfort zone.

Believe me, I know all the counterarguments: “Playing it safe is boring,” “You’ll never get anywhere if you don’t push yourself” and of course, “No risk, no reward.” “Christopher Robin” takes a risk by taking Winnie the Pooh and his friends out of their familiar setting of the Hundred- Acre Wood and transporting them to the real world. And the whole time I couldn’t stop thinking that the characters should have just stayed in the Wood. The real world would have been spared from their irritating presence and we would have been spared from this unnecessary movie.

The story is that Christopher Robin is an unhappy pencil-pusher who doesn’t have time for something as important as family, let alone his glorified imaginary friends from childhood.

But one day Pooh (Jim Cummings) finds himself in a situation he can’t handle and decides to take an unprecedented journey to London to seek out help from Christopher Robin, who himself is over his head dealing with a budget crisis. He’s none too thrilled to see the silly old bear, but resolves to return him to the entrance to the Hundred-Acre Wood in the country.

Probably the biggest problem with the movie is that I just couldn’t bring myself to cheer for things that I know are supposed Pooh because he’s friendly and well-meaning, but I’m sorry, he has no business inserting himself into social situations where he’s well out of his depth. Having a play date with Pooh and having him as company when there’s urgent work to be done are two vastly different things. It seems like all he does for half the movie is whine about hunger and boredom and other trivial inconveniences while Christopher Robin has to worry for the both of them.

The best I do for “Christopher Robin” is compliment the movie on what it doesn’t do. It doesn’t force the beloved “Winnie the Pooh” characters to be cynically “relevant” like you see in lesser kids’ movies. There’s no rapping or break dancing or pop culture references or crude jokes about Pooh’s name or his habit of not wearing pants. It really is trying to be a sweet movie, it’s just coming up short because the decision to take Pooh out of the Hundred Acre Wood is a risk that doesn’t pay off.

Grade: C ***

• Mission Impossible – Fallout

Like any proper franchise, “Mission: Impossible” has to up the ante with each new installment. This concept means different things to different people. Maybe it means that Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team are up against their most diabolical villain yet. Maybe it means their challenge is the hardest-to-crack yet.

But “Mission: Impossible – Fallout” knows that what the majority of fans want is the best action yet. The film certainly gives us the “most” action yet – it’s the better part of three hours if you include trailers – but it’s also action of the highest quality, and the highest craziness.

I won’t give myself a migraine trying to recap the plot, just know that the world is in danger and it’s up to Hunt and his team to do their secret agent thing and save it. This is the kind of movie where you know there will be a lot of twists, so the fact that there are a lot of twists is ironically predictable, even boring.

Before I get into the action, let me say that the film succeeds on levels other than action. The dry humor with Cruise works, the broad humor with Pegg works. There’s some stirring material on the relationship between Hunt and his exwife (Michelle Monaghan).

As this is a “Mission: Impossible” movie, there are a few twists where characters disguise themselves with latex masks of other people.

These scenes have a tendency to be contrived, but at least one makes for an interesting cameo.

And then of course there’s the action.

Before the opening titles, we get a tense shootout and an interrogation that threatens to turn unusually ugly.

Then there’s a harrowing skydiving sequence where it’s clear that megastar Cruise is really jumping.

Also jumping is at least one camera operator, kudos to them for their dangerous work. After that, we get a bone-crunching fistfight and an air-swooshing knifefight (kudos to the sound people as well). The bulk of the film takes place in Europe, so we get some of those close-quarters car chases where the characters (and again, the camera operators) are consistently about an inch away from catastrophe. Hunt engages in a heart-pumping foot chase in the way that only Tom Cruise can. The climax of the film involves a death-defying climb onto a helicopter, some death-defying antics with two helicopters, and a death-defying showdown on a cliff where the two helicopters are still very much in play.

It’s hard to imagine a movie packing in more action than “Mission: Impossible – Fallout”. It’s even harder to imagine what the next “Mission: Impossible” movie is going to have to do to up the ante from this one.

Grade: B

to be cheered. For example, I know I’m supposed to sympathize with

• The Meg