Interesting event coming up at the VanCity Theatre: the renowned film editor Walter Murch will be talking about his craft Tuesday evening. Just naming a few of the films he’s cut should be enough of a draw: Apocalypse Now, The Talented Mr Ripley, Cold Mountain and The English Patient. He’ll have samples to show and a lot to say. He’s a writer too. There’s more information at https://www.viff.org
Meanwhile, there a long list of new movies now in town.
Mia and the White Lion: 3 ½ stars
Missing Link: 4
Little: 3 ½
Mary Magdalene: 2 ½
Stockholm: 3
Hellboy: 2
The Best of Enemies: --
After: --
Master Z: IP Man Legacy: --
MIA AND THE WHITE LION: This is a perfect film to take the kids to and maybe get a bit emotionally involved in yourself. It could be quite a bit because tension builds dramatically as the story progresses and then delivers a terrific cathartic moment, as the best of these animals-in-danger films do. You also learn a great deal about the wildlife tourism industry in Africa, some of which is not nice at all.
Mia is the petulant daughter of a family that’s returned to South Africa, after a few years in London. She’d rather still be there and isn’t interested in her dad’s hard work to set up a wildlife park as a tourist attraction. Until a rare white lion cub is born and bonds with her like a pet.
We watch their connection grow over three years but dad warns he’s a wild animal and “soon he’ll want to kill you.” A shady operator wants to buy him but dad refuses and in a foreboding comment says he doesn’t do that anymore. We eventually learn what “that” is. It shocks Mia enough to set her out on a desperate trek. The film is rich with drama about a young girl’s idealism and an expose of a dishonorable business. With lots of animals roaming through, it’s also something of a nature film. (International Village and suburban theatres) 3 ½ out of 5
MISSING LINK: Adults will get a lot more out of this animated film than children. The humor is very droll; there’s lots of it and most of it is based on classic situations reminiscent of novels and old movies. An exclusive explorer’s club in London, a saloon brawl in the old west, travelling to Shangri La and more get a send-up. A self-styled adventurer, voiced by Hugh Jackman, is barred from the club and heads all the way to Washington State on a tip that the Sasquatch is to be found there. What better way to prove himself?
He does find the creature who turns out to be surprisingly articulate (voiced by Zach Galifianakis) but lonely. He wants to find his cousins, the Yeti, and off they go to the Himalayas. A pushy widow (Zoe Saldana) comes along (she has a map) and a creepy hitman (Timothy Olyphant) is on their trail. He’s on assignment from the London club to stop them. An elder (Emma Thompson) offers the final bit of information but, of course, Shangri La isn’t what they had imagined. The film is full of surprises and gags as corralled by writer and director Chris Butler. He made it at Laika Studios in Oregon (his second there). The stop-motion animation is dazzling, especially in a scene with fragmented mirror images and a long sequence inside a storm-tossed ship. The story-telling shines. (International Village, Marine Gateway and suburban theatres) 4 out of 5
LITTLE: Take the plot of Big, turn it upside down, shift the culture and you’ve got this small and funny entertainer. It’s peppered with laughs, not sullied with a single obscenity and still presents a reasonably authentic view of life today. Much tinted by fantasy, though. Regina Hall is a demanding, high-powered boss at a small software design company. Just as her biggest client (SNL’s Mikey Day) is threatening to bail out, she is zapped with a magic spell by a young girl at a food truck. It works. She wakes up as a 14-year-old version of herself, played by Marsai Martin.
She’s a regular on the popular TV comedy Black-ish and came up with the idea for this film. She forgets she’s too young to drive and to drink, both bringing up many funny misunderstandings. She also can’t supervise her company and has to let the assistant she’s been disregarding (Issa Rae) do it. Worse, she has to go to school (a child welfare officer insists on it) and that brings back memories of being bullied when she was young because of her intelligence. She has to hang with the nerdy kids. The film, directed by Tina Gordon, avoids the trap of putting absolutely everything in parallel. But as a zippy, light and bright comedy it’s a winner. (International Village and suburban theatres) 3 ½ out of 5
MARY MAGDALENE: For 1,100 years she’s been called an ex-prostitute because Pope Gregory said she was. Three years ago, the Vatican re-wrote her reputation into an “apostle of the apostles.” This film follows that lead by recasting her story into a tale of a woman finding her power. She wouldn’t accept a forced marriage; joined the apostles around Jesus because she was keen on his message of peace, forgiveness and equality and eventually spoke out strongly: “I will not be silenced.” She was an early feminist as the script and the soulful acting by Rooney Mara portray her.
If only the film weren’t so sluggish getting that message across. She’s slow and drifting; Jesus, with whom she has inspiring talks, is played by Joaquin Phoenix as pale and sparkless. She’s there when he brought Lazarus back to life, expelled the moneychangers, carried the cross, died on the cross and came back to life himself. But in most of these scenes, and even in her disagreements with Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Judas (Tahar Rahim) the film prefers solemn piety over energy. The Australian Garth Davis directed it. We got it a year later than most of the world because it was caught up in the bankruptcy mess at the Weinstein Company. (International Village) 2 ½ out of 5
STOCKHOLM: You’ve surely heard of 'Stockholm Syndrome': when hostages who come to sympathize with their captors. Patty Hearst is the most famous. This film re-enacts the incident that coined the term, a bank standoff in Sweden in 1973. A Swede with an infatuation for American culture struts in, fires several blasts at the ceiling with a machine gun and tells most everybody to get out. He’s played with scenery-chewing gusto by Ethan Hawke. One of the people he allows to stay is a teller played by Noomi Rapace, acting timid and mild, not at all like the Girl With the Spider Tattoo she once was. These two will define the syndrome for us, at least as hazily as this film manages that.
The gunman wants a pal (Mark Strong) sprung from prison and brought to the bank. He wants a Mustang car (like Bullitt drove) to make a getaway. The police chief (Christopher Heyerdahl) and Prime Minister Olof Palme (Shanti Roney) play bureaucratic delaying games. The teller (Rapace) senses their insincerity and that may be why she shifts her support to the gunman. It’s the best we can do because the few heartfelt talks we hear from them don’t explain much. The details of the incident are there, efficiently directed by Robert Budreau, who also wrote the script, but not the deeper analysis. The film says right off the top that the story is true but absurd. That makes any chaos that erupts feels more clumsy than menacing. The film was up for several Canadian Screen Awards and won two, one of them for its screenplay. (International Village) 3 out of 5
HELLBOY: This is just adolescent stuff. The first f-bomb comes in the second sentence. Within five minutes you get a beheading. Within another five, an impaling. And it doesn’t stop there. The blasting off of body parts and the mutilations keep coming, to the delight of … well, I’m not sure. I found it driven by a “see what I can get away with” cheekiness by Neil Marshall, a director known for horror movies and a couple of Game of Thrones episodes. Guillermo del Toro directed the two previous films and that raised some expectations for this reboot. The film dashed them fast.
It’s a twisted variation on a super-hero story. Hellboy, according to the comic books he comes from, was a late World War II creation by the Nazis. They summoned him from Hell. He now works for an American paranormal institute and in this film is attracted by an English counterpart to track down three pesky “giants” and help “preserve the secret history of Great Britain. That brings in King Arthur and Merlin, believe it or not, a “Blood Queen” (Milla Jovovich) and efforts to revive her. Actually, that means sew her back together. She’s been cut into pieces and hidden in far flung places. There’s an effort to find every part of her and reassemble her. Hellboy (played gruff by David Harbour) has an uneasy relationship with his father (Ian McShane) and pretty well everybody else. They destroy the inside of St. Paul’s Cathedral in the best of the many battle scenes. The film is disjointed, lacks style and thrives on shouted proclamations. (Scotiabank, Marine Gateway and suburban theatres) 2 out of 5
Three others not made available for preview …
THE BEST OF ENEMIES: You’d think there’d be interest in this one, but the studio didn’t preview it here and the box office last week in the US wasn’t great. It tells a true story about racism and coming to an understanding. After a fire closed a black school in North Carolina in 1971, white people refused to share their school and a civil rights activist (Taraji P. Henson) verbally battled a local KKK leader (Sam Rockwell) until they were able to broker a deal.
AFTER: The online publishing sensation by Anna Todd becomes a moody (it seems) film about mismatched lovers. A straight and dutiful daughter goes to college and meets a dark and brooding rebel who changes her life. Not enough to get much promotion by the studio though.
MASTER Z: IP MAN LEGACY: While we wait for a fourth installment in the Chinese series about the martial arts fighter to taught Bruce Lee, here’s a spin off about one of the challengers he defeated along the way. Cheung Tin Chi tries to settle down to a quiet life in Hong Kong but trouble finds him anyway. Legendary director Yuen Woo-Ping choreographs almost two hours of back to back fighting.