When I first heard there was a new “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” movie in the pipeline, I wondered, “Why?” From their beginnings as a superhero parody comic by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird to becoming a surprise cultural phenomenon, the anthropomorphic turtle brothers have been rebooted as a television show, toys and a bunch of movies.
The difference this time around is that “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem,” a new animated adventure now playing in theatres, captures the irreverent, rambunctious spirit of the comics that inspired it, without losing any of the heart that made turtle brothers— Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello and Raphael—so beloved in the first place.
An origin story, the new movie is a coming of age for the resourceful Donatello (Micah Abbey), the charming Michelangelo (Shamon Brown Jr), the reliable Leonardo (Nicolas Cantu) and the brave Raphael (Brady Noon). Raised by a mutant rat named Splinter (Jackie Chan) in the sewers of New York, under the orders of their overprotective, adoptive father, they only visit the human world to gather supplies. Splinter does not trust humans, and fears for his son’s safety if they are exposed to the human world.
But the turtles are restless. They long to be accepted, to go to high school, to do the things they see human teenagers do on television and in movies. “If we weren’t monsters, shunned by society, what would we do?”
On one of their clandestine visits to the city, they meet April O’Neil (Ayo Edebiri), an aspiring journalist who wants to tell their story. “This is insane,” she says. “Turtles. Mutant. Karate. Teens. I want to know everything about you.”
Meanwhile, New York City is being terrorized by Superfly (Ice Cube), a mutant housefly with a plan to kill and capture all humans and turn all animals on Earth into mutants. “Humans will be executed, enslaved, turned into food. Could be pets,” he says. “Any crazy thing you can think of, pitch it.”
Teaming with April, the turtles plan to take on Superfly and become heroes. “We take out Superfly and then everyone will think we’re cool,” says Donatello. “They’ll accept us!”
“Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem” has a loads of scrappy heroes-in-half-shell spirit. The gorgeous rough ‘n tumble animation is computer generated, but feels organic, like a mix of the hand-drawn aesthetic of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth and Gerald Scarfe. It’s vibrant, exciting and will give your eyes a workout.
The story isn’t quite as exciting. It won’t take you anywhere really new, superhero movie wise, but it does update the TMNT lore. The use of actual teenagers to voice the four turtle brothers brings youthful energy that also adds some oomph and even poignancy to their coming-of-age/outsiders storyline.
The real stars of the show are Edebiri, Chan and Ice Cube. No longer just a supporting character, Edebiri gives April three-dimensions, with foibles–sometimes her nerves get the best of her—and objectives that help guide the story. Chan is very funny, but also humanizes the rat with his overly protective fatherly concerns. Ice Cube brings a considerable amount of swagger to the megalomaniac Superfly, spitting out his lines with humor and some cartoony menace.
Seven feature films in “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem” does something kind of remarkable. It takes a decades-old franchise and makes it feels contemporary with humor and heart while still providing a nostalgic blast for long-time fans.
“The High Note,” coming out this week digitally via video on demand, mixes ambition, romance and music in a movie that tries to hit a high C but actually works better when it plays the minor chords.
Set against a backdrop of the Los Angeles music industry, the new film from Nisha Ganatra, now on VOD, sees Dakota Johnson play Maggie, a music obsessed wannabe producer, currently working as a personal assistant to superstar singer Grace Davis (Tracee Ellis Ross). Between running errands and running Grace’s life, Maggie finds time to oversee production on a live album of her boss singing the old hits and discover a new talent, singer-songwriter David Cliff (Kelvin Harrison Jr.). Passing herself off as an experienced producer with loads of industry hook-ups, she inspires him to write great new songs that could launch him into the big leagues. When a plan to position David as the opening act for Grace’s upcoming tour backfires, it threatens to torpedo all of Maggie’s hopes and dreams.
Following up on Ganatra’s last film “Late Night,” which starred Emma Thompson a late-night talk show host whose career is revamped by the influence of a younger, ambitious woman (Mindy Kaling), comes a story that sounds like an echo of the first. There’s more flash here and fewer laughs, but the essential story of a showbiz icon given a new lease on popularity by a newcomer with fresh ideas has a sense of déjà vu to it.
Originally scheduled for a big screen release “The High Note” moved to a digital release in the wake of the pandemic, which may have been a good thing. Its movie-of-the-week plotting and familiar premise feels suited, in a good way, to the smaller screen.
It’s a story about ambition, empowerment and music geekery given charm by Johnson and Ross. Johnson brings her trademarked steely-yet-vulnerable charm to the role of Maggie, while Ross—the daughter of iconic superstar Diana Ross—is a diva with flamboyant clothes and a temperament to match.
Despite the charismatic performers, both characters feel like caricatures. Maggie is a “High Fidelity” reject, a music junkie who speaks as though she’s reciting the liner notes of her favorite album. Ross does some powerful singing but plays Grace in broad diva-esque notes.
“The High Note” is a pleasant enough diversion as a story of empowerment but doesn’t have enough range to make it memorable.
Fourteen years after the first “Barbershop” movie the recession has caught up to Calvin Palmer, Jr. (Ice Cube). Due to changing times the barbershop he took over from his father has been forced to amalgamate with a beauty salon run by his business partner, Angie (Regina Hall). “This was the original man cave,” complains one regular, “now it’s just a club with no drinks.”
The customers are divided by sex, men on one side, women on the other, but there’s plenty of back-and-forth, especially between flirty beautician Draya (Nicki Minaj) and the very married Rashad (Common).
Outside the atmosphere isn’t as playful. Out of necessity they have a No Guns Allowed sign in the shop. “Can’t even get a haircut without some knucklehead carrying a gun,” says Eddie (Cedric the Entertainer). “Barbershop used to be a place of peace.” Gang violence is at an all time high, putting Calvin’s teenage son Jalen (Michael Rainey Jr.) at risk. With the neighbourhood in tatters and his son in danger Calvin contemplates moving his shop and family out of the only home they’ve ever known, South Side Chicago. “What are we supposed to do,” Calvin asks his wife, “wait here until something happens?” Before taking that dramatic step the staff stages an intervention, calling for a forty-eight hour ceasefire. Setting up the shop as a safe, neutral space for everyone from all over the city to come and hash out their differences and get a free haircut, they hope to “Increase the Peace.”
“Barbershop: The Next Cut” breathes the same air as “Chi-Raq,” Spike Lee’s recent satirical look at gang violence in Chicago. Director Malcolm D. Lee does away with the stylish flourishes that made his cousin Spike’s movie so memorable, but doesn’t skimp on the social commentary. Wedged between sometimes sharp, sometimes silly one-liners are keenly observed remarks on everything from racism and street violence to monogamy and the importance of community building. The presentations are different—call this “Chi-Raq Lite” if you like—but the pleas for peace are the same.
Working from a thoughtful although occasionally unsubtle script, the large ensemble cast has the chance to provide laughs and heart. Cedric, former Conan O’Brien writer Deon Cole and JB Smooth are in charge of the chuckles, while Cube and Common’s family storylines provide the sentiment. Other standouts include rappers-turned-actors Minaj and Eve.
The humour in “Barbershop: The Next Cut” is the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down. What could have been a heavy-handed treatise on urban violence is instead an enjoyable romp that shines a light on a very important topic.
Your enjoyment of “Ride Along 2” will be directly linked to your enjoyment of Kevin Hart. The follow up to the wildly successful 2014 buddy cop comedy once again pairs Hart and Ice Cube but it is the comedian who dominates.
Ben Barber (Hart) is a beat cop one month out of the academy. He seems to have learned more about being a cop from playing video games than from the Academy, but nonetheless, he is determined to shadow his soon-to-be-brother-in-law James Payton (Ice Cube) when the Atlanta vice cop travels to Miami to track down a hacker (Ken Jeong). Ben thinks the Miami run will prove to everyone he should be a detective and while James doesn’t want the young cop tagging along, he agrees in the hope that the trip will prove Ben isn’t ready to move up the chain. In Miami they team up with a homicide cop (Olivia Munn) as the case takes a new and dangerous turn.
At the “Ride Along 2” screening I was at I sat across the aisle from a man who must be the world’s biggest Kevin Hart fan. He giggled and guffawed throughout. I’m glad he enjoyed the movie and hope Hart continues to delight him for years to come. Me, I didn’t find his antics quite as funny. He’s a whirling dervish, a nonstop bundle of energy who will do anything to get a laugh. He’s like a Jack Russell puppy that is always happy to see you and jumps in your lap all the time. At first its cute but as time goes by it gets annoying.
I admire his commitment but think he’s caught a bad case of Will Ferrellitus, a disease that affects famous comedians who have no self-control in the urge to get a giggle. The only cure is a director who understands that often less is more. Tim Story is not that director.
Ice Cube, on the other hand, is used well, displaying his trademark scowl with menace and humour. It’s a shame that Maya, film’s primary female character played by Olivia Munn, isn’t given more to do. Her presence here adds marquee value but little else.
“Ride Along 2” is a simple movie that relies on the A.B.C.’s of buddy cop movies: A.) Action. B.) Broad comedy. C.) Cleavage. All three are on display, although the action is by-the-book except for one sequence that blends video game action with real life. If more of the movie had this same kind of inventive spirit it might have been more fun.
“It’s impossible to talk about N.W.A without talking about South Central LA in the late 1980s.”
Straight Outta Compton is the legendary album by gangsta rap group N.W.A, released Aug. 8, 1988. It’s a sonic blast that plays, as Rolling Stone said, like a “bombastic, cacophonous car ride through Los Angeles’ burnt-out and ignored hoods.” It became the first platinum album to reach that status with no airplay or major tours and now it’s also the title of a biopic that documents the group’s beginnings and turbulent history.
Writing for theverge.com, Lizzie Plaugic observed, “It’s impossible to talk about N.W.A without talking about South Central LA in the late 1980s.” Infected by crack and gang violence, the area was so rough the LAPD created a special unit known as CRASH — Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums — and it was these surroundings that helped birth the ferocious beats of Straight Outta Compton and a genre known as gangsta rap.
Music is unavoidably influenced by the surroundings of those who make it and music biopics have always been quick to use location as a shorthand to help the audience understand how and why musicians produced the music they did.
Just as South Central sets the scene for Straight Outta Compton, Manchester’s drug-fuelled “Madchester” club scene of the late 1980s and early ’90s informs 24 Hour Party People and the mean streets of Brooklyn set the stage for the meteoric rise of rapper Notorious B.I.G. in the 2009 film Notorious.
There is no shortage of John Lennon or his birthplace on celluloid. There are five official Beatles movies, documentaries like The U.S. vs. John Lennon, a 2006 movie that focuses on Lennon’s transformation from musician into antiwar activist, and even experimental short films like the John and Yoko shorts Two Virgins and Apotheosis.
Portrayed by everyone from Paul Rudd (in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story) to Monty Python’s Eric Idle, rarely has any actor captured both Lennon’s rebelliousness and vulnerability as Aaron Taylor-Johnson does in Nowhere Boy, the story of the musician’s formative years.
Taylor-Johnson, recently seen in blockbusters like Avengers: Age of Ultron and Godzilla, is aided in his performance by a gritty portrait of Lennon’s lower-working-class neighbourhood in Liverpool, England. You can almost smell the bangers and mash coming off the screen and the vivid Merseyside backdrop provides subtle clues about the man Lennon would become.
Set back when you could still drink a bottle of stolen booze in the shade of the Hollywood sign without being arrested for trespassing, The Runaways focuses on two glue-sniffing, glam-rock obsessed tough girls named Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart) and Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning). Disaffected SoCal teens, they see an exit from their mundane suburban lives through rock ’n’ roll.
Unfortunately their ticket out comes in the form of impresario Kim Fowley, a record producer and self proclaimed “King Hysteria.” He cobbles together the band, trains them to be rock stars, convinced that they will “be bigger than the Beatles.” Before they can play Shea Stadium, however, the band breaks up — knee deep in ego, drug abuse and bad management. Set in and around the Sunset Strip’s late 1970s seedy underbelly, the movie perfectly captures the sun-dappled decadence that illuminated the time.
In the movies, like real life, it’s about Location! Location! Location!
“Straight Outta Compton,” the new biopic of original gangster rap band N.W.A. and their turbulent rise and fall, is at once a very specific look at the birth of a musical genre and a universal music industry story about how money, ego and bad management will break a band a part faster than you can say, “Boyz-N-The Hood.”
We first meet MC Ren (Aldis Hodge), Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins), Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell), DJ Yella (Neil Brown, Jr.) and Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson, Jr) as young men growing up in Compton, the most notorious neighbourhood of South Central Los Angeles. Dre and Cube are music obsessed teens, trying to avoid getting “locked up or laid down.” Dre is a genius DJ, a master of beats, while Cube is a journalist of sorts, writing rhymes that report on life in the hood. Their reality is near constant police harassment, casual violence and intimidation by gangs.
Eazy-E, a local drug dealer looking or a way out of the life, puts up the seed money to start a record label and soon he moves from banker to frontman and NWA is born. A couple local hits later they’re approached by Jerry Heller (Paul Giamatti in another role, following this year’s “Love and Mercy” that sees him exploiting a Californian musician) an old school manager with a plan to make them famous and himself rich. They become a sensation, birth gangsta rap and fall to pieces under the weight of their success. Heller, Eazy-E and the shards of NWA on one side, Dr. Dre and Suge Knight (R. Marcos Taylor) on another with Ice Cube completing the triangle. Bad blood and bad business deals blow apart their once tight relationships and it isn’t until they consider getting back to basics that old wounds begin to heal.
“Straight Outta Compton” plays like dozens of music bios that came before but despite featuring music industry clichés—sometimes the clichés of cheating managers, ego and excess are clichés because they’re true—it spends more time on the characters than the situation. It’s funnier and warmer than you might anticipate a movie about the ferocious and profane beginnings of gangster rap, a music born out of frustration and a need to be heard, but the emotional truth of the film is based in the relationship between the leads, particularly Dre, Eazy and Cube. A palpable sense of camaraderie is present throughout, and it grounds the film during its more excessive moments.
Mitchell’s Eazy-E has the widest emotional arc and he pulls it off, bring a steely vulnerability to the character that humanizes him and makes his (SPOILER ONLY IF YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT N.W.A.!!) early demise all the more devastating.
Jackson Jr., Ice Cube’s real life son, dispels any talk of nepotism, handing in a performance that captures the familiar mannerisms and essence of his father.
Also strong are Hawkins as the budding megaproducer Dre and Keith Stanfield as the young Snoop Dogg.
On the downside the movie doesn’t have much use for its female characters unless they are playing stern mothers, compliant groupies or supportive wives. We may have to wait for the Salt-N-Pepa biography for a look at the female side of hip hop.
At two-and-a-half hours “Straight Outta Compton” is a detailed look at the band that, although it takes liberties with the facts in favour of drama, grabs the rhythm of the time by the throat and doesn’t let go. Echoes of the Rodney King trial reverberate throughout the film giving the movie, in light of Black Lives Matter, a timely feel that showcases the prescient nature of Ice Cube’s rhymes.
Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum are producers on “22 Jump Street,” which, I guess, explains the large number of jokes about how much everything cost. At one point Hill actually says, “It’s way more expensive for no reason at all.”
I don’t know how much the movie cost to make, but the self-aware jokes did make me laugh even though “22” is essentially a remake of the first film, with a few more Laurel and Hardy slapstick gags and amped up explosions.
The “21 Jump Street” high school undercover cops Schmidt and Jenko (Hill and Tatum) are back, but this time they’re narco cops. That is until they botch an investigation into drug lord Ghost’s (Peter Stormare) operation. Their failure gets them demoted back to the 22 Jump Street (they moved across the road) program.
Jump Street’s Captain Dickson (Ice Cube) sends them undercover as unlikely brothers Brad and Doug McQuaid, to college to arrest the supplier of a drug named WHYPHY (WiFi). The bumbling, but self-confident duo infiltrates the college, but campus life—frat house parties, football and girls—threaten to blow apart their partnership. “Maybe we should investigate other people,” says Jenko, “sow our cop oats.”
“22 Jump Street’s” end credit sequence, which maps out the next sequels from number 3 to installment 43—they go to Beauty and Magic School among other places of higher learning— is probably the funniest part of the movie. Co-directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller—they also made “The Lego Movie”—expertly parody Hollywood’s obsession with grinding a good thing into the ground and grab a few laughs while they do it.
The stuff that comes before is amiable, relying on the Mutt and Jeff chemistry of the neurotic Hill and all-American Tatum for laughs. It’s boisterous and aims to please, but best of all are the self-referential jokes. By clowning around about the difficulty in making the sequel better than the original they’re winking at the audience, acknowledging that this is basically a spoof of Hollywood sequels. It’s meta and kind of brilliant.
It isn’t, however, a laugh a minute. Ill-timed jokes about Maya Angelou and Tracy Morgan are sore thumbs, while the bromance between Schmidt and Jenko is played out until it begins to feel like the punch line to a bad, politically incorrect gag.
Better are Tatum’s malapropisms. The dim-witted cop says, “I thought we had Cate Blanchett on this assignment,” when he means “carte blanche,” and confuses “anal” and “annal.” They’re easy jokes, but Channing milks laughs out of them.
There will likely be a “23 Jump Street”—the film shows us an under-construction condo at that address—which will hopefully have the same subversive sense of fun, but more actual jokes.
Blame Rocky for the state of sports movies. The come-from-behind-to-win-or-almost-win the big game was used very effectively in the first (and most recent) Rocky movies but unfortunately filmmakers have been using that set-up as a plot template ever since. That’s more than thirty years of inspirational coaches and underdog players. The sports and that faces change, it’s just the story that remains the essentially same. The Longshots is the latest movie to recycle the tired formula to tell the real-life story of the first girl to compete in the Pop Warner football tournament.
Ice Cube is Curtis Plummer, a former high school football star whose dreams of a professional career were cut short by injury. On a downward spiral since his accident, he rediscovers a sense of purpose by molding his socially awkward niece (Akeelah and the Bee’s Keke Palmer) into the star quarterback for the local team, the Minden Browns. When she leads the team to the Pop Warner Super Bowl she not only gives Curtis a new lease on life, but inspires her entire hometown.
The most amazing thing about The Longshots isn’t the story—we’ve seen and heard it all before—nor is it the performances—Ice Cube is fine and Palmer is engagingly natural; no, the most striking thing about the movie is its director. If the name Fred Durst sounds familiar it’s because maybe you spent some time slam dancing to his nu metal band Limp Bizkit’s hit Re-arranged or maybe you downloaded his notorious sex tape off the net. The rock star and bon vivant of the 90s has matured into family friendly filmmaker in the new millennium.
The man who once choked out lyrics ripe with scatological references and used the Anglo-Saxon word for sexual intercourse 48 times in one three minute and fifty second tune has mellowed into the kind of director that has his characters say things like “If we got heart we got everything we need!” He shows an unexpected light touch, but by the time we get to the inevitable “What are you running from,” speech the build-up of clichés threatens to squash any goodwill the movie garnered in its better moments.
The Longshots isn’t a horrible movie, it’s just really average. Durst does his job adequately, giving the whole thing a kind of music video slickness, but despite Palmer’s efforts and Ice Cube’s likeability the whole thing feels like something we’ve seen before, and is quite forgettable.
