Home Sweet Home Alone(PG)
Rob Delaney, Ellie Kemper.
Another kid is left at home during a family trip and another feckless duo of adults attempts to steal from his house in this remake/sequel of the 1990 holiday film.
This time, it’s Max Mercer (Archie Yates) who suddenly finds himself home alone when his family, including mother Carol (Aisling Bea), has had to take two separate chaotic flights to Tokyo. A few days before this, Carol used the interesting mom-hack of stopping at a real estate open house to let Max use the bathroom. It was there he met Jeff (Delaney) and Pam (Kemper), a couple reluctantly selling their family home because a job loss has required some financial downsizing. Jeff happens to be moving a box of weird dolls he inherited from his mother and Carol mentions in passing that one particularly creepy-looking one may be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Later, when Jeff checks this out with eBay, he finds that in fact, yes, the “ugly little boy” as he calls the doll may be worth more than $200,000 and be the answer to the family’s financial problems. But, when he goes to find it, the doll is missing. He suspects Max, who was sassy when Jeff denied him a soda, and he goes looking for the Mercer household to retrieve it. One thing leads to another and soon Jeff and Pam are trying to break in to what they think will be an empty home to steal back the doll they think Max has stolen from them. Except, of course, when Max overhears them talking about selling an “ugly little boy” he thinks they’ve come to kidnap him and thus does he plan an iced-over-driveway, butter-on-the-stairs series of booby traps to keep himself safe.
On the one hand, this creates a gentler setup — nobody’s really trying to harm Max. On the other hand, Max sets Pam on fire and uses thumbtacks as a weapon and just generally offers up a lot of interesting ideas for children looking to do some mayhem. So be advised if you’re thinking of showing this to younger kids (by which I mean “don’t show this to younger kids”). Common Sense Media gives it a 9+ age ranking but I might go even older than that.
As entertainment that parents might also be roped into watching, I’m equally unenthusiastic. There are some nice moments of broad comedy with Delaney and Kemper, including a few that skew a bit toward the weird, which is an appreciated bit of tartness in this corn syrupy Christmas cookie. And original Home Alone fans will like the nods toward the source material. But there is less exhausting fare out there for family viewing. C+ Available on Disney+.
Finch ( PG-13)
Tom Hanks, voice of Caleb Landry Jones.
Cranky engineer Finch Weinberg (Hanks) is desperate to help his dog Goodyear survive without him in a post-apocalyptic world in this movie with shades of Castaway, WALL–E and also George Clooney’s downbeat Midnight Sky, which you probably didn’t see and don’t need to.
Living alone with only the dog and rover-bot named Dewey, Finch is, as the movie starts, putting the finishing touches on a bipedal AI-run humanoid, which eventually calls itself Jeff (Jones). Finch needs Jeff to be smart and adaptive enough to take care of Goodyear in a world where all food must be scavenged from abandoned stores and the heat and ultraviolet rays of the sun can cause skin to sizzle after a few moments. Apparently solar flares at some point in the recent past have turned the ozone layer into “Swiss cheese,” as Finch explains to Jeff, and now much of the continental U.S. is a dune-filled desert, beset by sandstorms and other extreme weather. After some number of years living in such an environment, Finch is now dying from the radiation exposure.
Finch is not quite finished uploading data into Jeff when a superstorm is predicted to hit the wind-powered St. Louis-based factory where he and Goodyear (and Dewey and Jeff) live. Without the food (or the longevity) to last the 40 days that the storm is predicted to be overtop him, he decides to pack his canine and robot family into a fortified RV and head out toward San Francisco, the only region of the country he doesn’t know for a fact is some kind of hellscape.
So it’s a road trip movie! And along the way, Finch tries to teach Jeff, who is extremely emotive, how to be a real boy and convince Goodyear, who isn’t so fond of this new robot caregiver, to treat Jeff as his new “person.”
Granted, my current appetite for apocalyptic entertainment is at a particularly low ebb. But this movie grated from the beginning, with its seemingly-cobbled-together elements from previous movies and its insistence that I root for (and find charming) what is essentially a walking Siri.
So I will stipulate that I am probably not this movie’s ideal viewer. And, look, Hanks is fine in this role — I mean, of course he is, he’s done it before. And the movie has some nice visuals — both in terms of scenery and how Jeff and Dewey are presented. But it’s not an enjoyable watch and it does not give me the “triumph of the human spirit” glow that it seems to want to deliver. C+ Available on Apple TV+.
Madres (18+)
Ariana Guerra, Tenoch Huerta.
A couple expecting their first child and newly moved to a rickety old farmhouse is terrorized in Madres.
Diana (Guerra) and her husband Beto (Huerta) leave 1970s Los Angeles to move to a small town in agricultural California where Beto will manage a large farm and pregnant former reporter Diana plans to write a book. They get to the house that Beto’s boss Tomas (Joseph Garcia) has secured for them to find a lot of faded paint, creaky floorboards and a shed whose door can scarily flap open at random. Beto tries to calm Diana by explaining it’s the country, weird sounds abound, but pretty quickly visions of a ghostly woman in red and a creepy music box that seems to follow her around convince her that there is more going on than Beto wants to believe. She also finds a cache of pamphlets and newspaper clippings from the home’s former occupants, many of which suggest that a condition called Valley Fever, experienced by lots of the Latin American women in town, may be related to the pesticides the farm uses.
Diana’s ability to suss this out — and just to make friends in general with Beto’s coworkers — is stymied a bit by a language barrier. Beto, a recent immigrant from Mexico, speaks fluent English and Spanish but Diana, a woman of Hispanic background born in the U.S., is shaky at best when speaking Spanish, the main language of many people in their new town.
Are the women of this town cursed, as local healer Anita (Elpidia Carrillo) says they are? Or is something more man-made causing the illness (and strange dreams and odd visions) that Diana herself begins to experience?
This movie won me over almost instantly with its little moments exploring Diana’s self-consciousness about not speaking Spanish and various socioeconomic tensions within the Mexican-American community in this town. These elements offer a nice bit of complexity to the story.
Then we get to the real evil and, if it isn’t the most horrifying Bad Thing I’ve seen in a horror movie ever, it is still pretty high on the list. This movie winds up in a pretty unsubtle place but it is well done and the impact is exactly as gut-punching as it should be. A- Available on Amazon Prime.
Zog and Zog and the Flying Doctors
Lenny Henry, Hugh Skinner.
Both of these shorts are unrated and based on books by Julia Donaldson, both illustrated by Axel Scheffler, who also illustrated her Room on the Broom and The Gruffalo books. These shorts very much have the look of those books and the same gentle rhythm in their tale of the dragon Zog (voiced by Rocco Wright as a young dragon, Skinner as an older one), who learns assorted dragon skills like breathing fire and roaring but eventually becomes part of a team of flying doctors with Princess Pearl (voice of Patsy Ferran in both movies), a young woman who prefers medicine to fancy dresses and crowns. Also patching the ouchies and illnesses of the enchanted land is Gadabout (voice of Kit Harrington in the first movie, Daniel Ings in the second), a knight who has realized that splints and bandaging is his true calling.
The movies — from 2018 and 2020 — are charming, funny and pretty adaptations of the books, with very little in the way of story addition. Instead, the movies fill in the expanded storytelling space with dragon silliness and often impressively light-touch visual gags. I think I laughed as much as my kids when we watched these two. While perhaps not the absolute perfection of the 2012 Room on the Broom short (which is a must-see), these two shorts are a sweet delight and perfect for, maybe, kindergarten and up. The stories subtly reinforce the “you can be who you want to be” message while providing plenty of gentle fun. A- Available for rent or purchase.
Queenpins (R)
Kristen Bell, Kirby Howell-Baptiste.
Connie (Bell), a former Olympic athlete who medaled in speed walking, and JoJo (Howell-Baptiste), a victim of identity theft who is trying with minimal success to make her makeup business work, are best friends, neighbors in their Phoenix suburb and couponers, who load up on deals so that they can “buy” more than a hundred dollars worth of groceries but only pay $16. Does Connie, who is struggling after the miscarriage of a baby, really need all the diapers and toilet paper she stockpiles? Maybe not but she definitely doesn’t need IRS auditor husband Rick (Joel McHale) and his constant badgering her about money and their debt to the fertility clinic. The coupons are, as she tells us in voiceover, her only real wins right now. But then a chance encounter with that biggest of big wins, the “one item free” coupon, sets her on a path to an international crime caper: She and JoJo find employees at the printer in Mexico that produces all the “free item” coupons to help them obtain (i.e. steal) coupons that they can then sell in the U.S. for half the value of the item. The buyer gets a good deal and the women make a very tidy profit.
They make so much money — and the sudden influx of coupons becomes so noticeable to the companies making the cereal and diapers — that they attract the attention of a supermarket’s loss prevention investigator, Ken (Paul Walter Hauser), for whom the illegal couponers become his white whale. He attempts to get the FBI to join him on the case and eventually gets the Post Office involved in the form of postal investigator Simon (Vince Vaughn).
I get the sense that the movie has some opinions about, like, gender and corporations but it has too much going on to really be able to do much with these ideas. Still, I liked all the performances here and even some of the sillier stuff. You get the sense that this movie sometimes thinks it’s doing a The Big Short but it reminded me more of Buffaloed, another recent light ladies-doing-crime movie. B- Available on Paramount+.
The Guilty (R)
Jake Gyllenhaal, Adrian Martinez.
Joe (Gyllenhaal) is a Los Angeles police officer working as a 911 operator. We learn through bits of dialogue that he is in deep personal and professional trouble and perhaps staring down more trouble due to something that’s going to happen in court tomorrow. His stresses are all the greater as he works a shift in a smoke- and fire-filled Los Angeles with all sorts of frantic calls coming in. But then a woman who Joe eventually learns is named Emily (Keough) calls pretending to talk to her child, allowing him to figure out that she’s been abducted. Joe quickly becomes invested in Emily’s predicament, leaning on various law enforcement agencies to try to get her situation investigated.
I don’t know that I buy everything the movie seems to be saying message-wise (if it is saying anything) but as a straightforward “90-ish minutes of tension” exercise, performed by a very small cast in a very small number of locations (basically just Joe’s call center and a few neighboring rooms), The Guilty is sort of fun. It’s a little bit puzzle, a little bit chase, a little bit detective story. It’s like a less goofy version of Fox’s 9-1-1 drama but just as stripped down when it comes to the action.B- Available on Netflix.
The Protégé(R)
Maggie Q, Samuel L. Jackson.
And having a boatload of fun is Michael Keaton, playing somebody IMDb claims is called Rembrandt, though actually I don’t recall his character having a name. He’s sort of a “vice president in charge of killing” type for a rich and powerful Big Bad. Michael Keaton is sent to “take care of” Anna (Maggie Q), the titular protege for Moody (Jackson), a top-notch assassin. An inquiry about a person connected to one of Moody’s old assignments gets her and Moody the notice of Michael Keaton’s employer. Anna finds Moody dead and decides to go after everybody involved.
Along the way, Keaton’s character and Anna develop a kind of “game recognizes game” relationship of mutual respect, trying to kill each other and also having the hots for each other. I suppose I can suspend disbelief and buy this aspect of the movie, but I also don’t know that it was entirely necessary and it is one of the times the movie needs to be either smarter or way dumber to really work. As it is, The Protégé is doing its best work in its choreographed fight scenes and feels a little half baked at all other times. Maggie Q, Jackson and Keaton are all good in these roles, but — outside of the action sequences — they don’t always feel like they are exactly in the same movie. I liked this movie fine as low-effort, lazy-night- on-the-sofa entertainment but I don’t think I’d rush out to rent it or anything. C+ Available to rent or own.
