Space Jam: A New Legacy (PG)

LeBron James joins the Looney Tunes on the animated basketball court in Space Jam: A New Legacy, a pretty impressive flex by Warner Bros.

More than anything else, this movie seems crafted to remind you of all the properties under the Warner Brothers umbrella — Harry Potter, the DC superheroes, Game of Thrones, The Wizard of Oz, the Matrix movies. It’s like Warner Bros. was like “what can we do to convince people Disney doesn’t own everything?”

I should admit up front that I don’t think I’ve ever seen 1996’s Space Jam. It’s not like there’s some overarching mythology that I’m not able to plug in to but if there is some kind of nostalgia factor, I’m not going to hear the sounds at that particular frequency. (On the flip side, this movie also isn’t going to destroy my childhood memories or anything. I suppose I can catch up if I want as the original Space Jam is available on HBO Max.)

Human LeBron James lives in live-action Los Angeles with what Wikipedia calls a fictionalized version of his real family: wife Kamiyah (Sonequa Martin-Green), young daughter Xosha (Harper Lee Alexander), oldest teen basketball-star son Darius (Ceyair J. Wright) and younger teen “basketball, meh” son Dom (Cedric Joe). Dom’s thing isn’t real-world basketball but a basketball themed video game he’s constructing. Despite the impressive graphics and potential profitability of the game, LeBron just sees it as a distraction from Dom buckling down to really work on his basketball skills. Why can’t you appreciate me for me, says Dom, echoing every movie kid ever.

As if to underline just how profitable Dom’s skills could be, LeBron and son go to the Warner Bros. lot to see a presentation for Warner 3000, a plan by Al G. Rhythm (Don Cheadle), a try-hard attention-seeking algorithm/artificial intelligence/sentient digital being that’s making content for Warner Bros.

Al demonstrates how he can put a computer-generated version of animated LeBron in a variety of Warner Bros. intellectual properties, thus making money for everybody without LeBron ever having to physically step on set. Dom is impressed by all the tech but LeBron says hard pass to this plan that he thinks will just pull his attention away from basketball.

Because Al is very upset that nobody recognizes his contributions and hurt that LeBron made fun of his Warner 3000, he sucks Dom and LeBron into the, uhm, digital “serververse.” He tells LeBron that if he’s so keen to focus on basketball now he can — the catch being that if he doesn’t win an in-the-digital-world game against Al’s team (crafted from Dom’s game with versions of current NBA/WNBA players) he and Dom will never get out of the Warnerverse.

When Al sends LeBron off to gather his team, a now animated LeBron winds up in Tune world, where he meets Bugs Bunny (voice by Jeff Bergman). Bugs tells him that Al convinced the other Tunes to scatter to other Warner worlds and thus do Bugs and LeBron set out to find Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Wile E. Coyote and the rest to fill up the Tune Squad and take on Al’s Goon Squad.

Just in case you needed another swing through Warner’s content offerings.

Do your kids like basketball? Do they like the Looney Tunes or cartoons in general? They will probably at least tolerate A New Legacy. I kind of feel like “parents will be familiar with it, kids will at least tolerate it” and “we can pull out all of our recognizable properties” are the point and driving purpose of this movie. A summer film with this mix of marketability would probably always do well but seems like it has particular potential now, with family movies being some of the most successful sustained hits of the pandemic era (it won its first weekend in theaters, making a little less than $32 million, according to IndieWire).

If it sounds like I’m talking about this movie solely as a product it’s because it feels very much like a product. Not a bad product; A New Legacy feels like the fast-food chicken sandwich combo meal with movie tie-in bag and collectible toy that can nonetheless really hit the spot sometimes. But there’s nothing deeper there. LeBron James is, well, not an actor but he’s plenty affable and he does what the story needs him to do. The movie doesn’t do anything particularly clever with its tooniness (though there are the occasional good jokes, such as when one of the toons reminds LeBron that they’re not called the “Fundamentals Tunes” when he tells them not to do anything looney out on the court).

Space Jam: A New Legacy doesn’t feel like a classic in the making but as someone always on the lookout for “mostly attention-holding and not inappropriate for kids” entertainment (with some general messaging about trying and being yourself) this meets that standard. C+

Rated PG for some cartoon violence and some language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Malcolm D. Lee with a screenplay by Juel Taylor & Tony Rettenmaier & Keenan Coogler & Terence Nance and Jesse Gordon and Celeste Ballard, Space Jam: A New Legacy is an hour and 55 minutes long and distributed by Warner Bros. It is available on HBO Max and in theaters.

Escape Room: Tournament of Champions (PG-13)

People you probably remember as “oh yeah, that girl” and “right, that guy” return for another bout of puzzle-solving and death in Escape Room: Tournament of Champions, a sequel to the 2019 movie.

That fact right there might be the most shocking thing about this movie: its preceding entry was released in January 2019. That’s a mere two and a half years ago but also, like, easily a decade or two ago in terms of how far it feels from now and how much I even remember January 2019. This movie seems to know this and shows you clips of the first movie with some voiceover that basically gives you the gist: This escape room puzzle competition is actually To The Death with nameless rich people out there in the world watching and betting on the hapless “players.” Someone survives sometimes, I guess, and in one of the games (the one we in the audience saw in 2019) two people survived: Ben (Logan Miller) and Zoey (Taylor Russell), who was smart enough to kind of break through the game and save Ben from a murderous game master.

After they escaped they couldn’t get anyone to believe their story that a company called Minos was killing people for entertainment, but Zoey is still determined to find evidence that will bring that company down. She found a clue leading to New York City and eventually worked up the nerve to go there with Ben. (This is more or less where the first movie ended, with the pair planning to go to New York. In this movie, they make the trip.)

While investigating, they wind up in a subway car, just a totally normal mostly empty subway car with a few similarly aged people, all of whom seem to be sporting some kind of scar or visible sign of a past trauma. When that subway car comes loose from the rest of the train and goes hurtling toward an empty stretch of track, Zoey, Ben and four people (Thomas Cocquerel, Holland Roden, Indya Moore, Carlito Olivero), who hopefully are paid up on their life insurance, pretty quickly figure out that they have all experienced a Minos game before and are now in some kind of “tournament of champions,” as one person correctly guesses/states the movie’s title. Since they all know how the game is played, they quickly get to work trying to figure out how to not die but this game is deadlier than their first outing. I think, or maybe they’re just more freaked out from the jump so it seems more intense. It also feels snappier than I remember, which I appreciate.

So, do you personally need to know the mythology of Minos and the game or can you just live in the moment? If, like Zoey, you want to know who is behind this and bring the whole system down and make them pay and yada yada yada, this is probably not your movie, in that “yada yada yada” seems to be the overall approach to the grand story here. If you can just be in the moment of each puzzle room and ride the rollercoaster that is spotting the clues and figuring out how that particular room is likely to kill one of the people who is left (and then you get the fun of guessing who that is going to be), then this movie is fine. Not thrill-a-minute but not boring, not smart but not too dumb and with a kind of silly cleverness. It’s fine, it’s adequate, it meets the basic requirements of entertainment in that you can watch it and be distracted from your immediate surroundings.

There’s nothing here that in the slightest reaches out to anybody not already inclined to go see this second of what I suspect will be at least three movies but I feel like if you liked the first Escape Room movie enough (enough to say remember that there was a first Escape Room and basically what it was about without having to look up details) this won’t disappoint you. C+

Rated PG-13 for violence, terror/peril and strong language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Adam Robitel with a screenplay by Will Honley and Maria Melnik & Daniel Tuck and Oren Uziel, Escape Room: Tournament of Champions is an hour and 28 minutes long and is distributed by Columbia Pictures. It is in theaters.

Pig (R)

Nicholas Cage wants his pig back in Pig, a movie whose basic description does not match its surprising amount of grace.

Rob (Cage) lives somewhere in the woods of Oregon, hunting truffles for a living but otherwise shutting out the rest of the world. His hunting partner is a pig who is clearly not just a working animal but his one living source of emotional connection. When two people break into his cabin, beating him and stealing his pig, the first thing Rob does when he wakes up is to start searching.

Because a busted old truck can’t take him much beyond his own property — and probably because he wants to start his search with the one other human he sees regularly — Rob calls Amir (Alex Wolff), the guy who buys his truffles. After some searching around his rural area, Rob gets a clue — the guy his pig was sold to was “from the city.” Though Amir thinks that’s not nearly enough information to go on, Rob gets Amir to drive him to Portland to search for his beloved pig.

I’ve seen at least one headline that called this movie “John Wick with a pig” and while that’s not untrue in terms of some of the themes and there are some similarities to the basic details of the plot, the movie I thought of most while watching this was First Cow. Something about the relationships between people and animals, the Pacific Northwest setting and the way food is a source of comfort, memory and commerce kept bringing me back to First Cow. That and something in the way the movie can be mournful but dryly funny, grimy (both visually and in tone) but also full of grace (again, both visually and in the way it displays people’s core emotions).

While we get a few clues about Rob pre-pignapping, it’s when Rob and Amir get to Portland that we learn Rob has A Past. I like how the movie unfolds this information — which is why I’m not getting more into it — and what the movie chooses to tell us about Rob. In the end, we don’t know his whole biography, but we do get to what kind of person Rob is. And, as much as I credit the script for this, Cage deserves a lot of the credit as well. This is a restrained but rich performance from him.

Pig has that satisfying feel of a really good short story — sure, you don’t get every answer but you get a thoroughly engrossing experience with a fully realized world and set of characters. A

Rated R for language and some violence, according to MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by Michael Sarnoski, Pig is an hour and 32 minutes long and distributed by Neon. It is in theaters.

Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain (R)

Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain is probably well titled in that it is “a” documentary, not necessarily a definitive documentary, about the late chef turned author turned TV personality.

Though, “TV personality” doesn’t seem exactly right for Bourdain or for the legacy of his TV shows. Some of the people here argue that his shows, which changed titles and channels and eventually became Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown on CNN, are doing journalism, or at least a kind of journalism. And, they say, the more he traveled, the less they were about food and the more they became about people and even the impact that traveling to new places and meeting new people has on the traveler. This feels true. I watched Bourdain’s shows on and off over the years but the ones I saw most frequently and that really stick with me are Parts Unknown, particularly the last four or so seasons, which really seemed to capture the mood of the world at the time in addition to talking about food. (All 12 seasons are available on HBO Max, which is one of the producers of this film. The show before that, No Reservations, appears to be available on Discovery+.)

Here, we get something like a biography of Bourdain, focusing on the period starting in his early 40s, when he was a working chef at Les Halles in New York City, through his fame as an author and then as the host of TV shows. The shows started as, roughly, food-themed travel but morphed into something that captured the “be a traveler, not a tourist” saying. In addition to his career (though not all of his career; I recall some Top Chef years that aren’t mentioned here) we get a look at his personal life. We see the toll the course of his career takes on two marriages, his desire to be a good father after having a daughter late in life, his love for/obsession with travel, the lingering effects of his addiction to heroin and his general life outlook that is frequently described by friends and coworkers as “dark.”

The movie does a good job showing how Bourdain found his groove as a host of his shows, how it brought out his voice and how he was able to mold the shows into something more complex than food tourism. Because this movie is so focused on his TV career, we get a lot of what went in to developing these shows and I always enjoy this kind of processy element. Bourdain comes off as a kind of artist — largely an artist of things (food, cable TV shows) that exist in the moment.

This movie definitely has a point of view. The people interviewed here are, in addition to friends, largely people connected with the production of his shows. Asia Argento, whom he had been dating at the time of his death by suicide in 2018, doesn’t give an interview and it’s been reported (all over the place but I read it in Vulture) that this was a choice that the director made. This wouldn’t matter so much except that Bourdain’s TV coworkers who speak here do not seem to like Argento and did not enjoy working with her around. The crew is self-aware enough that one of the directors realizes what he’s saying comes off as a kind of blame that is maybe not fair, but everything about Argento here is just odd in its presentation. Like elements of Bourdain’s life, it’s a situation for which there is no easy solution. It would have been odd not to mention her; it would have been odd to make the movie more about her.

As has also been widely reported, the movie uses some deepfake vocal effects to have Bourdain’s voice say things he wrote but which there is no recording of him saying out loud. This is an odd choice. Bourdain has such a distinctive writerly voice, as is evidenced by an instance of someone reading a note from him, that we don’t need some simulacrum of his voice saying the words for us to know they’re from him.

These things get in the way of what is often a funny and puffery-eschewing documentary that calls nonsense on some of the “foodie bad boy” stuff and also offers an interesting examination of his work.

The documentary isn’t perfect but I suppose that fits — Bourdain wasn’t perfect. And there’s something very affecting about the way the movie talks about his death and his mental health and how his friends and longtime coworkers wrestle with it.

Ultimately, the movie made me want to revisit Bourdain’s work, maybe check out some of the books I haven’t read over the years. He was a massive talent and the movie offers a bittersweet reminder of this. B+

Rated R for language throughout, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Morgan Neville, Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain is an hour and 59 minutes long and distributed by Focus Features. It is currently in theaters and, according to a July 18 story on The Hollywood Reporter website, it will be available on VOD in a few weeks and later be broadcast on CNN and stream on HBO Max.

Featured photo: Space Jam: A New Legacy

FILM

Venues

Chunky’s Cinema Pub
707 Huse Road, Manchester;
151 Coliseum Ave., Nashua;
150 Bridge St., Pelham, chunkys.com

O’neil Cinemas at Brickyard Square
24 Calef Highway, Epping
679-3529, oneilcinemas.com

Red River Theatres
11 S. Main St., Concord
224-4600, redrivertheatres.org

Rex Theatre
23 Amherst St., Manchester
668-5588, palacetheatre.org

Wilton Town Hall Theatre
40 Main St., Wilton
wiltontownhalltheatre.com, 654-3456

Shows

• Hotel Transylvania (PG, 2012) a “Little Lunch Date” screening at Chunky’s in Manchester, Nashua & Pelham on Wednesday, July 21, at 11:30 a.m. Reserve tickets in advance with $5 food vouchers. The screening is kid-friendly, with lights dimmed slightly, according to the website.

• Grease(PG, 1978) a senior showing on Thursday, July 22, at 11:30 a.m. at Chunky’s in Manchester, Nashua and Pelham. Admission free but reserve tickets in advance with $5 food vouchers.

• 21+ Scratch Ticket Bingo on Thursday, July 22, at 7 p.m. at Chunky’s in Manchester and Nashua. Admission costs $10.

• The Sandlot 21+ trivia night at Chunky’s in Manchester on Thursday, July 22, at 7:30 p.m. Admission costs $5, which is a food voucher.

• Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain(R, 2021) Friday, July 23, through Sunday, July 25, at 12:30, 3:30 & 6:30 p.m. at Red River Theatres.

• Pig (R, 2021) Friday, July 23, through Sunday, July 25, at 12:30, 3:30 and 6:30 p.m. at Red River Theatres in Concord.

• I Carry You With Me (R, 2021) Friday, July 23, through Sunday, July 25, at 4 & 7 p.m. at Red River Theatres in Concord.

• Summer of Soul (PG-13, 2021) Friday, July 23, through Sunday, July 25, at 1 p.m. at Red River Theatres in Concord.

• 21+ “Life’s a DRAG” Show on Saturday, July 24, at 9 p.m. at Chunky’s in Manchester. Tickets cost $25.

• Branded a Bandit (1924) andThe Iron Rider (1926) silent film Westerns with live musical accompaniment by Jeff Rapsis, on Sunday, July 25, 2 p.m., at Wilton Town Hall Theatres. Screenings are free but a $10 donation per person is suggested.

• Jaws screening and kitchen takeover with Chef Keith Sarasin of The Farmers Dinner on Sunday, July 25, at 7 p.m. at Chunky’s in Manchester. The dinner costs $65 (plus tax and tip). Vegetarian option and a wine pairing option are also available. Buy tickets in advance online.

• The Goonies (PG, 1985) at the O’neil Cinema in Epping on Monday, July 26, and Wednesday, July 28, at 10 a.m. Tickets $2 for kids ages 11 and under and $3 for ages 13 and up. A $5 popcorn and drink combo is also for sale.

• High School Musical 2 (TV-G, 2007) screening on Wednesday, July 28, 7 p.m. at the Rex Theatre to benefit the Palace Youth Theatre. Tickets cost $12.

• Jaws 21+ trivia night at Chunky’s in Manchester on Thursday, July 29, at 7:30 p.m. Admission costs $5, which is a food voucher.

• Jungle Cruise (PG-13, 2021) a sensory friendly flix screening, with sound lowered and lights up, on Saturday, July 31, 10 a.m. at O’neil Cinema in Epping.

• The Wizard of Oz (1939) at the O’neil Cinema in Epping on Monday, Aug. 2, and Wednesday, Aug. 4, at 10 a.m. Tickets $2 for kids ages 11 and under and $3 for ages 13 and up. A $5 popcorn and drink combo is also for sale.