The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

The wild thing about this is, Nicolas Cage is the straight man, dragged into misadventures. Pedro Pascal is the wacky, nutty, Nic Cage type of character. The other thing is, it isn’t really reliant on being Nic Cage as Nic Cage. It’s meta, but it’s not THAT meta. It could easily have been a fictitious actor. It’s an extremely light and fun action comedy. Not always laugh-out-loud funny, but clever and amusing. A worthy distraction.

Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off

Tony falls down a lot. Tony’s childhood was hard. Tony’s relationships were hard. Tony’s relationship with his severely disabled mother is hard. Getting to skate competitions was hard. Being booed was hard. Getting famous was hard. Getting rich was hard. Partying with the rich and famous was hard. Being addicted to prescription pain killers was hard. Being married four times was hard. Falling down and breaking many important bones was hard. Spinning 900 degrees in the air on a skateboard was hard. Getting older is hard. Tony’s life is HARD. Nope. No glamour or wealth at all. Nope. Just pain for Tony. Life was hard for Tony.

Everything Everywhere All at Once

** SPOILERS EVERYWHERE **

As much as busy mom and business owner Evelyn Wang tries to be the master of her domain, things are crumbling around her. She’s being audited by the IRS, her elderly, judgmental father is visiting from China, her meek husband isn’t happy, and her gay daughter is aggressively pushing away because traditional Evelyn doesn’t get her. This seems like a difficult but typical set of problems. And here’s where it gets complicated. According to a messenger from another realm, to combat these problems and also save multiple universes, she must learn Kung Fu and a variety of other skills from her other parallel lives to battle the creeps who prevent her from… connecting with her daughter. Do I have that right? 

 It’s a fantastic explosion of creativity. To watch it is a crazy experience, with a barrage of ideas, impossible to process all at once. But Kung Fu isn’t just Kung Fu. It’s a metaphor for battling your own demons and prejudices, and the courage to leap into other parts of your psyche to get to the core of who you wanted to be versus who you are. In her lifetime, Michelle Yeoh could not have asked for a better role. The rest of the cast is great, too, including a terrific, juicy part for Hollywood treasure James Hong and the welcome return of Ke Huy Quan. To write about this movie is to undermine it -- it’s so full of emotion and surprises. 

I love movies like this, made by people who love movies for people who love movies, that achieve great Kung Fu leaps in the art of storytelling, entertaining, and also pushing the limits of the imagination. The big, big, big point is: it wouldn’t work if it wasn’t fun.

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald

There are a lot of characters and a lot of creatures and a lot of action happens off-screen. There’s a lot of expository dialogue in important-looking, old rooms. It’s a hodgepodge of special effects and wizard politics. I should’ve read the book first.

The Bubble

It seems certain that they barely had a script when they started this, and they thought they would just wing it, or rewrite it during quarantine. It’s hard to imagine what it would be like sitting on a film crew, all masked up, and shooting people goofing off, pretending to exercise, and pretending to be on drugs. I guess you’d be grateful to be working during the pandemic. The flying dinosaur effects team was probably thrilled – the effects are way better than this movie deserves. Nevertheless, key members of the cast give it their all and manage to squeeze a few laughs and a few pathos out of this. It’s rarely painful, it’s just stale. It’s not really a great satire of film crews or filmmaking. The best comedy comes from the scenes of isolation, and the desperateness to, as an actor must, be showered with attention.