Author: Amy Diaz

Amy Diaz is the executive editor and writes about movies and compiles the Kiddie Pool column. Reach her at adiaz@hippopress.com.

At the Sofaplex 21/05/20

Oxygen (TV-14)

Mélanie Laurent, Malik Zidi.

And Mathieu Amalric gives his voice to MILO, the computer system running the pod where a woman (Laurent) wakes up and finds herself locked in. She tries to calm herself — she’s in a hospital, she reasons, someone will realize she needs help. But MILO tells her that the 35 percent oxygen level in her locked pod means that someone only has about 43 minutes, best case 72, to find her before her air runs out.

This is a fun little thriller, with the woman, who can’t remember her name or anything about how she got in the pod, trying to puzzle her way out. She might not know basic facts about her life but she starts to make educated guesses about where she could be and how to find people who might know who she is. Laurent, whom I still pretty much just know from her Inglourious Basterds role, is excellent here. The woman struggles, breaks down, fights and digs in to old emotions — all while lying down in a box. Oxygen makes the most of the “one person in a box” structure, using flashbacks judiciously and spanning genres to create a story that is suspenseful and even hopeful with just the right dash of humor. B+ Available on Netflix.

The Paper Tigers (PG-13)

Alan Uy, Ron Yuan.

Also Mykel Shannon Jenkins, Matthew Page and Roger Yuan, as the father-figure-like Sifu Cheung, who taught three “we’re brothers forever”-type teenage boys kung fu. Decades later, Cheung has died and though his death is thought to be the result of a heart attack, his friends believe differently. Formerly called Cheung’s “three tigers,” the now grown-up Danny (Uy), Hing (Ron Yuan) and Jim (Jenkins) decide to investigate Cheung’s death to find out what really happened to their former teacher.

Except that they were teenagers A Long Time Ago and Danny and Hing aren’t really at fighting strength or flexibility anymore. Jim is some kind of MMA-ish teacher, but he hasn’t kept up with the kung fu specifics. These middle-aged dudes have baggage in addition to back pain — their once-close friendship broke down a while ago, as did their relationship with Cheung.

The Paper Tigers frequently has the rough-edge feel of the indie that it is and there are a few elements — everything to do with Danny’s relationship with his ex-wife Caryn (Jae Suh Park) and their young son, for example — that could have used some writerly polishing. But the movie has charm, particularly in the friendship among the three men. B Available for rent or purchase.

French Exit (R)

Michelle Pfeiffer, Lucas Hedges.

Michelle Pfeiffer gives a highly entertaining performance as a woman at the end of her fortune who escapes to Paris with her grown son in this movie that is very mannered and very weird but, mostly, strangely enjoyable.

Frances Price (Pfeiffer) leaves, like, $100 tips when she goes to the cafe for coffee so it’s not a surprise that she finds herself broke after what seems like a lifetime spent in old-money-style wealth. Her friend Joan (Susan Coyne) offers to let her and her adult but still quite dependent son Malcolm (Hedges) stay at her apartment in Paris, so Frances sells what possessions she can, turns it all into cash and sets out on her Atlantic crossing with cash, son and their cat in tow.

While on the voyage, Malcolm meets Madeleine (Danielle Macdonald), who gets fired from the on-ship psychic gig after being too honest with one of the passengers. Madeleine gives us one of many clues that there is more to the family cat than meets the eye. Once the duo have arrived in Paris, they meet Madame Reynard (Valerie Mahaffey), another gentle weirdo who seems to have decided that she and Frances will be friends.

French Exit starts out seeming like kind of a riff on a Whit Stillman movie, something about monied people with more taste and elocution than sense or coping abilities. But then it turns into something much, much weirder with a story so lackadaisical in its pacing that I kept thinking it was in its final scene, only to realize that there were some 30 or so more minutes left. For all of this, I basically liked it — particularly, I think, if you choose to read it as a kind of downbeat fairy tale — and liked what Pfeiffer did with a character that could easily have come off as cartoonish and unbelievable. B- Available for rent.

Jungle Beat: The Movie (G)

Voices of David Menken, Ed Kear.

This cute if slight movie features a funny monkey and no recognizable voice talent, for all that I thought of the main characters as Ryan Reynolds Monkey (voiced by Menken) and James Corden Alien (voiced by Kear). According to Wikipedia this movie is based on a TV show (which, oddly enough, appears to have episodes available via Amazon Prime Video while this movie is on Netflix), but it doesn’t require any previous knowledge of the show to get the movie. The basic plot is that the alien named Fneep (Kear), who looks like a blue gummy bear and sounds like James Corden, comes to Earth and his universal translator tech allows the animals — Monkey, Trunk (voice of Ina Marie Smith) the elephant, Humph (voice of John Guerrasio) the hedgehog and Rocky (also Menkin) the hippo — to talk, to each other and to him. He has been sent to conquer Earth, which he does sort of hesitantly, primarily with a short speech because a frog eats his raygun. His new animal friends are chummily encouraging about his conquering (a concept they seem to understand entirely as a chore that needs completing) and try to help him get back to his spaceship so he can get home. In this loose framework, the movie works in a fair amount of just animal silliness: Monkey’s desire for a banana, the grumpy Humph getting lost in circles in a grassy plain, an ostrich and her runaway eggs, one of whom becomes a chick eager to fly. It’s mostly sweet, mostly menace-free stuff. It isn’t the cleverest or best executed “alien and animals become friends” G-rated movie (that is Farmageddon: A Shaun the Sheep Movie, also on Netflix), but it was entertaining enough for my kids, particularly the kid who is always up for monkey-related antics. B Available on Netflix

The Year Earth Changed (PG)

I don’t usually seek out content about Our Covid Year but this tidy 48-minute documentary narrated by David Attenborough was light, pretty to look at and even somewhat hopeful. The focus is animals — animals all over the world in 2020 and how, for example, reduced ocean traffic made life easier for a whale mom or fewer people on the beach meant breeding season was easier for sea turtles. Cheetahs who don’t have to compete with the noise from safari vehicles can more quietly (and thus more safely) call to their young to come feast on prey. Birds who don’t have to compete with traffic noise have their elaborate songs heard more clearly for the first time in decades. “Nature is healing itself” as the internet said — and it did, a little bit, for a little while, so argues this documentary which sort of “a-hems” at the idea about humans doing their part post-pandemic to keep the healing going without getting into the sort of bummer details that would make this a less appealing documentary to relax with. B Available on Apple TV+.

The Woman in the Window (R) | Those Who Wish Me Dead (R)

The Woman in the Window (R)

Poor Amy Adams plays a severely agoraphobic woman who believes she’s witnessed a murder in The Woman in the Window, a long-delayed movie (and not just because of the pandemic, as is clear from watching the movie) now available on Netflix.

I mean, like, poor poor Amy Adams, who can be so good (Enchanted! Arrival!) but has just been saddled with some real nonsense lately, to include all the Zack Snyder Lois Lane stuff, the mess that was Hillbilly Elegy and now this. And she tries, she gives this movie more than it deserves, but unlike Emily Blunt, who was the best thing about the otherwise borderline-silly The Girl on the Train, Amy Adams feels a bit like she’s being drowned by all the suspense melodrama.

Anna Fox (Adams) is a child psychologist but it seems like she is currently on a sabbatical and just focused on regaining her own health. Her own psychiatrist (Tracy Letts, the playwright and screenwriter who adapted this screenplay from the book by A.J. Finn) is working on finding her a medication that will help her with her anxiety and depression and with the agoraphobia that keeps her trapped in her thankfully large brownstone. Based on a conversation she has with her husband, Ed (Anthony Mackie), from whom she is separated and who is with their young daughter, Olivia (Mariah Bozeman), Anna spends a lot of her days staring out the window and watching her neighbors. She does some post-neighbor-watching Google-stalking as well, which is how she knows what the Russells, the family newly moved in across the street, have paid for the house and that they don’t have much of an internet presence.

Soon, though, the Russell family bleeds into her life a bit. Fifteen-year-old Ethan Russell (Fred Hechniger) brings over a gift from his mother. His father, Alistair Russell (Gary Oldman), hires David (Wyatt Russell), Anna’s tenant who lives in a basement apartment, to do some handyman work. And on Halloween, when Anna’s candy-free house is being pelted with eggs, Anna, who can barely bring herself to open the door and then faints when she does, meets and spends time with Ethan’s mom (Julianne Moore), who Anna’s snooping has told her is Jane Russell. Jane drops a lot of hints about the possible dark side of Alistair and is just generally kind of oddball in that way that certain Julianne Moore characters can be. But Anna has a good time with her and even seems to have made a friend.

Or has she? Has she even met Jane Russell? And later, when she thinks some harm befalls Jane, what has she actually seen, if anything at all? Despite advice, Anna can’t seem to stop herself from mixing her powerful psychiatric drugs with what seems like a steady stream of red wine. Between this mix of intoxicants and her general jumpiness that has her quick to call 911 at every hint of trouble, not only are police detectives Little (Brian Tyree Henry) and Norelli (Jeanine Serralles) unsure what to believe but even Anna can’t be sure of what she’s seen.

On paper, all of this is fine — Rear Window-ness, unreliable narrator, spacious if spookily lit real estate. And the movie has a cast of solid performers. But I feel like tone is where this movie sort of falls apart. It can’t decide if it’s playing things straight: the drama of Anna’s condition meets the suspense of the mystery of the Russells, or some pulpier blend of suspense and thrills peppered with some very dark comedy. I feel like we get examples of both — with more pulp as the movie goes on — but the lack of tonal consistency makes it hard to, say, enjoy it for the melodrama or take Adams’ performance very seriously. She’s giving A Lot of performance — which also doesn’t seem to hit exactly the right tone ever — but it feels like she is often more serious or more sudsy than the movie around her.

I didn’t dislike The Woman in the Window much in the same way I didn’t dislike last fall’s unremarkable Rebecca or the recent, slightly goofy ghost story Things Seen and Heard. Netflix actually feels like it would be a sensible outlet for prestige, movie star versions of cheap thrillers, higher-budget versions of basic cable movies about shady husbands and Muhr-Der. It’s just too bad for Adams in particular that this movie couldn’t be a nudge or two better. C

Rated R for violence and language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Joe Wright with a screenplay by Tracy Letts (from the book of the same name by A.J. Finn), The Woman in the Window is an hour and 40 minutes long and is available on Netflix.

Those Who Wish Me Dead (R)

Angelina Jolie is a forest firefighter running from flames and assassins to keep a kid safe in Those Who Wish Me Dead, an entertaining-enough action movie available on HBO Max and in theaters.

Hannah (Jolie) drinks too much and does potentially self-destructive stuff like parachuting off the back of a pickup truck driving fast on a wooded road. As her ex-boyfriend, Sheriff Ethan (Jon Bernthal), knows, this tough-lady stuff is all her way of self-destructively coping with her trauma and regret from a fire that trapped her team, resulting in the deaths of one firefighter and a group of kids who were stuck on a hillside. She is punished for this by being assigned to a forest fire tower for a year. On the downside, she is stuck here alone (with no toilet), but on the bright side (not really) it gives her lots of time to stare at the horizon and cry.

On the slightly brighter side, Hannah’s exile means that she is in the woods when the 11-ish-year-old Connor (Finn Little) needs someone to turn to. Connor and his father Owen (Jake Weber) are on the run after Owen’s boss, a Florida district attorney, is killed. Owen believes that the criminal organization (whose representative here is played by Tyler Perry, who is fun and could have used more screen time) that he has been investigating is now after him. Owen heads to Ethan, his late wife’s brother, whose ranch-y home, shared with pregnant wife Allison (Medina Senghore), seems like a good place to hide out. That plan would have been more successful if he didn’t have a picture of Ethan and his ranch hanging on the wall of his house as a big clue for assassins Jack (Aidan Gillen) and Patrick (Nicholas Hoult).

When Hannah finds a frightened Connor wandering in the forest, she is able to convince him that she’s a friendly but they face a series of obstacles: Hannah’s communication equipment has just been fried by a lightning strike. It’s a significant walk into town. Some of that walk will be through what is essentially a field of lightning. Jack and Patrick are on the hunt for Connor. And lastly, a big chunk of the forest they’re in the middle of is on fire.

Angelina Jolie is never not Angelina Jolie in this movie; there is nothing about her that believably suggests a hard-living firefighter. But as a movie star in an action film, she’s fine. She can sell the physicality of the part well enough and once we get over the hump of setting up Hannah’s backstory situation, the movie is pretty immediate-problem-solving-based. The problem is getting through this lightning field, the problem is hiding from Jack and Patrick, the problem is getting Connor in touch with “the News,” which was what his father told him to do if they were ever separated. (That plan has some practical flaws but in the general “don’t worry about it too much, this is an action movie” sense is fine because it gets the information disseminated and removes the point of killing Connor — aside from just revenge, I guess.) Chases through the forest and fights in front of a scary fire-lit background are the point of this movie and it executes them competently. I basically enjoyed this movie as I was watching it — particularly Senghore’s performance and character, she is the movie’s truly believable bad-ass — and while I wouldn’t recommend going out of your way to find it, if you already have HBO Max, it is perfectly acceptable low-effort entertainment. B-

Rated R for strong violence and language throughout, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Taylor Sheridan with a screenplay by Michael Koryta and Charles Leavitt and Taylor Sheridan, Those Who With Me Dead is an hour and 40 minutes long and distributed by New Line Cinemas. It is available on HBO Max and is screening in theaters.

Featured photo: The Woman in the Window (R)

Kiddie Pool 21/05/20

Family fun for the weekend

Mr. Aaron. Courtesy photo.

Jam with Mr. Aaron

Sing and dance your way through fun story songs and jams with Mr. Aaron during a free virtual interactive musical journey hosted by the Stockbridge Theatre in Derry on Saturday, May 22, at 3 p.m. Award-winning musician Mr. Aaron will perform pop favorites, kids’ classics and hits from his latest release, Intergalactic Music Spectacular. You can access the livestream at youtu.be/Yl6vWe31EdY. There is no cost, but a $10 donation is encouraged at stockbridgetheatre.showare.com.

Live festival

Enjoy food, live music and arts vendors during the first installment of the 2021 Exeter Arts & Music Fest, happening Saturday, May 22, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. in Swasey Parkway. Throughout the day there will be 30 artist vendors, 15 musical acts and eight food vendors. TEAM (Town.Exeter.Arts.Music) has expanded the festival to feature an event each month, June 19, July 17, and Aug. 21, with a final event on Sept. 18 to coincide with its annual Fall Equinox Festival. Food at the May event will include Cafe El Camino, Memories Ice Cream, Sweet Crunch Bakeshop and Vernon Family Farm. Musical acts on the main stage will be Qwill at 11 a.m., Bitter Pill at 12:30 p.m., Red Tail Hawk at 2 p.m., Groove Lounge at 3:30 p.m. and Cold Engines at 4:30 p.m. There is a $10 suggested donation per person and $20 per family (pre-event cashless donations are recommended via TeamExeter.org).

Go fly a kite

On Saturday, May 22, from 1 to 3 p.m., head to the Word Barn (66 Newfields Road, Exeter) for an afternoon of kite-flying, food and live music to support the Beyond the Rainbow Fund, which helps Exeter Hospital cancer patients in need. You can bring your own kite or buy one at the event for $10. The Reconstructed will perform, and there will be a food truck there to serve those who don’t want to pack a picnic. The event is free for kids 10 and under, but registration is required at thewordbarn.com.

Get messy

Get ready for water play and messy art when the Children’s Museum of New Hampshire (6 Washington St. in Dover; children’s-museum.org, 742-2002) opens its new outdoor Play Patio exhibit on Thursday, May 20, with features like sensory tables, a water circuit wall, an oversized paint wall and a chalk spinner. The outdoor space is meant to allow kids to get wet and get messy with hands-on activities. There’s the Evaporation Zone, a three-sided wall for brush painting with water, a giant Color Caster sculpture with colorful lenses shading the ground, two sensory tables with materials that will change over time, starting with kinetic sand and tools for molding and creating designs in one, and water beads with hidden sea creatures in the other. For musical fun, Tube Tones is a series of connected PVC tubes that let you pound out a musical beat in the manner of the Blue Man Group. Access to the Play Patio is included with museum admission, which is $11 for adults and children over 1, $9 for seniors 65+, and free for museum members and children under 1. Current hours are Wednesdays and Sundays from 9 to 11:30 a.m. and Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays from 9 to 11:30 a.m. or 1 to 3:30 p.m.

Books for the family

The Nashua Public Library (2 Court Street, 589-4610) is hosting a Pop-Up Book Sale Saturday, May 22, from 9:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. on the library plaza. The book sale will include mainly fiction for all ages, and most items will be $1 or $2. The rain date is Saturday, June 5.

New camp for theater-loving kids

The Community Players of Concord and the Boys & Girls Clubs of Central New Hampshire have announced that they are offering a new theater camp at the Christa McAuliffe School in Concord. The camp is for any kids in grades K through 5, with or without theater experience. There will be five two-week sessions, and campers can register for one or more: Acting and Intro to Theatre, Improv Theatre, Musical Theatre, Acting (Part 2) and Improv (Bigger and Better!). Each session will be led by camp counselors from the Boys & Girls Club who are skilled in theater, and Community Players volunteers will offer help with everything from acting and singing to set design. There will be opportunities for outdoor recreation and other non-theater fun each day as well. The fee is $320 per session, with financial assistance available. Space is extremely limited. Registration is online at centralnhclubs.org or contact Cady Hickman at 268-9568 or chickman@centralnhclubs.org.

Featured photo: Mr. Aaron. Courtesy photo.

At the Sofaplex 21/05/13

Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street (PG)

I know Oscar the Grouch, Big Bird, Bert and Ernie, Gordon, Luis, Mr. Hooper and Maria but one name I didn’t know from the early days of Sesame Street was Joan Ganz Cooney. Cooney, one of the talking heads in this charming documentary, was one of the major forces in bringing Sesame Street to life with the goal of using the techniques that so successfully sold children candy and cereal and got everyone singing ad jingles to sell letters, numbers, reading and basic concepts. This documentary is heavy on the early years — how the show came together in 1969 and recruited its core cast and crew, the public’s reaction to the show and the show’s revolutionary approach to teaching and talking with children. We also get discussion of the real-life death of Will Lee in 1982 and how it was handled by working the death of his character Mr. Hooper into the show and the documentary touches on the 1990 death of Jim Henson. The discussion of the ruling principles for how the show reaches children is fascinating and, if you’ve watched the show in more recent seasons, you can see how the child-respecting approach and concept-teaching ideas continue to direct the show even decades later. I always love the story of people making something; Street Gang offers a smart, affectionate look at the creation of something so fundamental to the childhoods of Gen-Xers and beyond. B+

The Courier (PG-13)

Benedict Cumberbatch, Rachel Brosnahan.

And Merab Ninidze as Oleg Penkovsky, a Russian who passes secrets to the British and Americans in the early 1960s. Because Penkovsky is a high-profile official, the British send in an “amateur,” businessman Greville Wynne (Cumberbatch), who has already done some business in Eastern Europe. An ordinary salesman, looking to open a market in the Soviet Union, Greville ferries documents in and out of the Soviet Union until, of course, the Russians get suspicious.

The movie has a Bridge of Spies vibe but peppier, with Greville and Oleg forming a friendship even as they’re mostly just play-acting at “doing business” as cover for a passing of documents. Their work touches the Cuban Missile Crisis and is, apparently, based on a true story. It’s a suspenseful spy tale and Cumberbatch sells his “regular guy, extraordinary circumstances” situation. B Available for rent.

Golden Arm

Mary Holland, Betsy Sodaro.

Longtime best friends Melanie (Holland) and Danny (Sodaro) hit the road so Melanie can train for and compete in an arm wrestling competition in this lightweight but sweet movie that feels like a good Galentine’s Day watch. Melanie is a baker whose business could use an infusion of cash and who seems a little uncertain about the direction of her life after a recent divorce. Danny is an arm wrestling champ who loses her shot at that year’s national title after a fight with Brenda (Olivia Stambouliah), a take-no-prisoners competitor. This movie is part road-trip movie, part sports competition movie (complete with training montages) and part friendship movie that reminded me a bit of Bridesmaids with Holland’s Kristen Wiig energy and the way that female friendship is shown as a strong and resilient thing. B Available for purchase or rent.

Chadwick Boseman: Portrait of an Artist (TV-MA)

This 21-minute documentary looks at the work of Chadwick Boseman primarily through the lens of his Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom performance (which everybody assumed was going to win him a posthumous Oscar right up until the final moments of the award ceremony). Spike Lee, Danai Gurira, George C. Wolfe, Glynn Turman and other actors and directors who have worked with Boseman talk about his style and approach to a part. Perhaps most illuminating are the sequences with Viola Davis, Boseman’s Ma Rainey co-star and a fellow Oscar nominee for the film, who gives a window into not just how Boseman thought about his part but how all actors work to build a character, reading in part from his notes about the screenplay. It’s a short celebration of Boseman’s craft and it’s only available through, I think, this Saturday. B+ Available on Netflix.

Monster (R)

Kelvin Harrison Jr., Jeffrey Wright.

Also Jennifer Hudson, Jennifer Ehle, Tim Blake Nelson, Nas, Rakim Mayers (known in his music career as A$AP Rocky) and a very young-looking John David Washington. According to Wikipedia, this movie, which

hit Netflix on May 7, premiered at the 2018 Sundance, and from a read of Washington’s Wikipedia page and late 2017 previews of the festival I get the sense that this movie was shot a good while ago. (Also credited on this film: Radha Blank, writer/director/star of the recent The 40-Year-Old Version, is listed as one of the screenwriters.) .
While not as strong as some of the cast’s subsequent work, this movie has some solid performances. Harrison plays Steve, a 16-year-old aspiring filmmaker who gets tangled up in charges related to a robbery in a neighborhood store that ends in the murder of the clerk. Steve is held in jail awaiting and throughout his trial and we see his shock and fear at being in this situation. Largely through flashbacks, we learn about Steve’s strong relationship with his parents (Hudson, Wright) and supportive teacher (Nelson) and his budding romance with a fellow student at his prestigious magnet school. Steve also has what he later calls an acquaintance but might be better described as a fascination with James King (Mayers), a guy from the neighborhood who eventually ends up as a co-defendant at Steve’s trial.
While Monster has good performances and an interesting story it also has a not-always-successful structural element in the form of a voiceover narration by Steve that frequently puts the setting in screenplay terms. The idea that the frightened, traumatized Steve might put his ordeal at the remove of watching it as though he were watching or shooting a movie makes sense (might even make more sense in a book, where we are more naturally in his head) but it frequently gets in the way and does an amount of “telling” when “showing” would have let the emotion of the story come through more. B- Available on Netflix.

WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn
Way back before the pandemic, if you can remember that far, financial news was obsessed with the saga of WeWork in late 2019 and its failed IPO. This Hulu documentary offers a (frequently gleeful) history of WeWork’s rise and fall, packed full of more Silicon Valley nonsense than, well, Silicon Valley or any other industry parody. Stories of extraordinary excess and mission statements about changing the way people live that sound, as several people observe, like a cult are juxtaposed with people reminding us that “for God’s sake, they’re renting [bleeping] desks.” B Available on Hulu

NH Jewish Film Festival
The New Hampshire Jewish Film Festival kicks off (virtually) Wednesday, May 19, featuring 11 films and a short film presentation.
The short film program, which will be viewable for free, is available anytime between Wednesday, May 19, and Thursday, June 10 (the closing day of the festival), and will explore food themes such as “the secrets of cooking artisan pastrami, the origins of chocolate soda ‘egg creams,’ and the reason why cheeseburgers are forbidden by Jewish dietary laws,” according to an event press release. The movie available on the first day is When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, a movie in German that is getting its U.S. release on May 21. This movie and all other festival movies are available for 72 hours after their festival date, starting at noon on that day. Buy a ticket for $12 to see one movie or get a $43 four-film pass or a $110 all-access pass. The festival will also feature post-film discussions with directors for five of the films and there will be a closing day event featuring a water cooler discussion in Red River Theatres’ virtual lobby.
See a schedule of the films and events and find more on purchasing tickets at nhjewishfilmfestival.com.

Wrath of Man (R)

Jason Statham is a man bent on revenge in a Los Angeles full of dubious accents, face-obscuring beards and excessive plot cleverness in Wrath of Man, a movie I saw in an actual theater.

Patrick Hill (Statham) is a new hire at an armored car company in Los Angeles where everybody gets a “fun” nickname like Bullet (Holt McCallany) and where guys like Terry (Eddie Marsan), the manager (and a Guy Ritchie regular) seem to be really reaching for that not-British accent, like yikes just let him have a British accent. Like a reality show contestant, Hill, whose fun nickname is “H,” is not at this armored car company to make friends and he quickly angers several of the other security guys, though lady security truck person Dana (Niamh Algar) likes him just fine. In H’s defense, all of the guys seem to dislike him primarily for the purpose of trading Guy Ritchie insults with him. But, after an attempted robbery of an armored truck ends with H taking out all of the assailants singlehandedly and saving Bullet, he does earn the respect and admiration of the men. Some, of course, are suspicious how a guy who was such a mediocre shot in his training could suddenly hit everything he aims at. Other random corporate dudes are not just suspicious but certain that “it’s him” — who “him” is and what his true aims are being unfolded in a series of flashbacks and flashforwards and flashbacks again as we see the incident that sets off the plot from multiple angles.

When you get to the end of this nearly two-hour movie, you find that there are a lot of little plot detours or character bits that are either completely unnecessary or could have been consolidated so that fewer bearded dudes cluttered the action. That and the many jumps to “three months ago” or whatever to see different elements of everybody involved in a crime and its planning and aftermath give the movie a kind of “too much, not enough” feel — too much story stuff, not enough attention to some of the main story threads. The movie drags and I felt like I did a lot of time-checking, with a lot of “gah, it’s only been five minutes? How?” reactions to the at times sluggish pacing.

If you’re not going to have Jason Statham playfully sparring with Dwayne Johnson in their Fast & Furious offshoot (or being an entertaining blowhard in Spy), this is a good speed of Statham. I just wish the movie had been as streamlined as his “single-minded man on a mission” character. C+

Rated R for strong violence throughout, pervasive language and some sexual references, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Guy Ritchie with a screenplay by Guy Ritchie & Marn Davies & Ian Atkinson (based on the French film Cash Truck), Wrath of Man is an hour and 58 minutes long and distributed by United Artists Releasing. For now at least, this movie is only in theaters.

Featured photo: Wrath of Man

Kiddie Pool 21/05/13

Family fun for the weekend

The tipi set up at Mt. Kearsarge Indian Museum. Courtesy photo.

Virtual field trips

Watch on-stage performances of Pete the Cat, Dog Man the Musical, We the People: America Rocks and other kid-friendly shows as part of the Theaterworks USA Virtual Field Trip series, available through the Capitol Center for the Arts’ website (ccanh.com). The series was created for schools, home-schooled children and families. Non-school groups can purchase tickets through theaterworksusa.uscreen.io, where there is a full list of productions that are available for in-home rentals. Most shows are $20 per household, and once purchased they are available to view for 48 hours.

Free fun for military families

The Children’s Museum of New Hampshire (6 Washington St. in Dover; children’s-museum.org, 742-2002) kicks off its Military Appreciation Summer on Armed Forces Day, Saturday, May 15, allowing all current and retired military personnel and their immediate family members free admission. From this Saturday through Sunday, Sept. 5, military members with an ID will receive free admission, plus free admission for dependent children and spouse — up to five family members. The museum’s current hours are Wednesdays and Sundays from 9 to 11:30 a.m., Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays from 9 to 11:30 a.m. or 1 to 3:30 p.m., and reservations are required. Admission is $9 per person ages 3 and up.

Explore Native cultures

The Mt. Kearsarge Indian Museum in Warner (18 Highlawn Road, 456-2600, indianmuseum.org) is now open for the season, offering self-guided tours Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sunday from noon to 4 p.m. The museum features exhibits that explore Native cultures and encourage respect for nature, including historical and contemporary crafts and customs. Two new exhibits are a scenic mural in the Northeast Region and an 1800s Cree man’s outfit from the Plains Region. Outside, the Medicine Woods Trail features native plants that were commonly used for food, medicine and shelter, the Janeway Arboretum includes 85 species of trees, and there are 20 new birdhouses throughout the property. The cost of admission is $9 for adults, $8 for seniors and students, $7 for kids ages 6 through 12, free for kids under 6 and Native Americans, and $26 for families of two adults and children under 18.

Featured photo: The tipi set up at Mt. Kearsarge Indian Museum. Courtesy photo.

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