The Media Tourist

Jim Carrey all but steals the show from the little blue multimedia mammal

Sonic the Hedgehog 3
Starring Jim Carrey, James Marsden, Tika Sumpter and the voices of Keanu Reeves, Idris Elba, Ben Schwartz and others
Directed by Jeff Fowler
Rated PG

In theaters Friday, Dec. 20

Since 1993—and Super Mario Bros.—Hollywood has been capitalizing on videogames and their built-in fan base of passionate gamers. Sonic the Hedgehog, the Japanese-based Sega series of the early ‘90s, has been one of the most successful, and most prolific, spilling over into television, comics and related games and generating its own galaxy of characters.

This third big-screen movie in the Sonic franchise continues the adventures of the quippy little blue computer-generated anthropomorphic hedgehog who can run faster than the speed of sound. Ben Schwartz (from TV’s Parks and Recreation) returns as the voice of Sonic, who’s joined again by his teammates, the brawny anteater Knuckles (voiced by Idris Elba) and Tails (Colleen O’Shaughnessy), a gadget-guru fox.

It’s action-packed, zingy with wit and geared toward the generation-spanning audience the Sonic games and their multimedia spawn have been cultivating now for more than three decades. It’s a kid-friendly spy movie, a sci-fi tale, a meta heist comedy, a perilous adventure and a riff-tastic spin through time and space as Sonic faces off with another super-powered hedgehog named Shadow (voiced with just the right amount of angst by Keanu Reeves), discovering Shadow’s wrenching backstory and unraveling a sinister plot to, well, destroy the Earth.

There are shades of Mission Impossible, Raiders of the Lost Arc, Ocean’s 11, Armageddon, Austin Powers and James Bond, with nods to Godzilla and Casper the Friendly Ghost, loads of far-out gizmos and gimmicks and full-on montages orchestrated to the music of the Beach Boys and Jelly Roll. Even the Beatles’ “Abbey Road” album cover gets a nod. And the moon gets sliced in half, like it was indeed made of cheese, and Sonic gets sucked into a gaping black hole. This little hedgehog sure covers a lot of ground.

Other familiar faces get in on the zaniness, including James Marsden, Tika Sumpter, Krysten Ritter, Shemar Moore and Natasha Rothwell. And Alyna Brown, the young Australian actress who played young Furiosa in this year’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, has a small part that resonates throughout the film.  

But the movie really belongs to Jim Carrey, who doubles down on his gonzo, over-the-top Jim Carrey-ness in a double role, returning as the rotund mad scientist Dr. Robotnik and also Robotnik’s mad-scientist grandfather. “It’s like we’re two characters, played by the same actor!” they both exclaim when they meet, looking into the camera for wink-wink emphasis. Carrey’s jokes fly fast and furious—even giving Sonic a run for his ha-ha’s—as he reflexively punches up nearly every scene with quips and puns and mannerisms and movie lines, from across the spectrum of his movie-comedy career, like he’s filling a carnival funhouse with his own greatest hits. If they handed out awards for best performance by Jim Carrey doing Jim Carrey alongside another Jim Carrey in a videogame franchise about a blue hedgehog, he’d be a solid shoo-in.

But for all its gung-ho go-for-it-ness, the movie has a soft, sensitive underbelly about friendship, family, making good choices, love and loss. It’s the awwwwwww at the center of all it all.

Fans of the franchise, of any age, will find a lot to like—especially in its end-scene hint of more to come. And everyone else, well, just sit back, buckle up and let Jim Carrey and Sonic take you on a way-out trip that suggests this speedy bright blue videogame breakout still has even more places for his blurry little legs to take him.

—Neil Pond

Angelina Jolie is magnificent as the late, great grand dame of opera in her faltering later years

Maria
Starring Angelina Jolie
Directed by Pablo LarraÍn
Rated PG-13

In theaters Wednesday, Nov. 27 (and on Netflix Dec. 8)

Angelina Jolie gives a committed, center-stage, Oscar-bait performance as temperamental diva Maria Callas, a 20^th century singing superstar who thrilled audiences all over the world. But by the 1970s, Callas’ voice and body were fading and faltering, and the distant applause of the opera houses—and the adulation in which she once basked—were becoming lost in a swirl of hallucinatory memories.

Jolie, whose multi-faceted career includes playing a rock-em, sock-em spy (Salt), a slam-bang videogame heroine (Lara Croft) and a regal Disney villainess (Maleficent), adds another bright plume to her cap as the once-heralded soprano, basking in glorious fantasy in the final weeks of her life in the 1970s. In the kind of sympathetic, deep-dish performance that tends to get awards attention, Jolie—as gorgeous as ever—reportedly prepared for the role for more than six months, learning the physicality and bold body mechanics of singing opera to realistically lip-sync to Callas’ actual vocals throughout the film. She gets a big bravo from me.

Kodi Smit-McPhee (The Power of the Dog, Let Me In) has a recurring role as a filmmaker—a figment of her imagination—interviewing Callas for a documentary about her. (Tellingly, the filmmaker’s name, Mandrax, comes from the sedative Callas has squirrelled away through her ornate Paris apartment.) The dreamscape documentary becomes central to the film, as it allows for numerous flashbacks illuminating Callas’ tumultuous life, including the traumas of her childhood (her mom, who told her she was “fat and unlovable,” and pimped her and her sister out to Nazis), her highly publicized affair with gazillionaire Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis (Turkish actor Haluk Bilginer), and her encounters in the 1960s with a handsome young JFK (Caspar Phillipson). And how Callas found herself in the middle of a scandal when Onassis began having extramarital affairs with both Callas and JFK’s wife, Jackie; yes, he was a lecherous filthy-rich asshole who loved ancient art, his luxury yacht and leggy brunettes.

Callas’ housekeeper (Alba Rohrwacher) and manservant (Pierfrancesco Favino) are big parts of the story, trying to keep their boss grounded, anchored and safe as she drifts off, in more ways than one. “What’s real and unreal,” Callas says at one point, “is my business.”

Director Pablo LarraÍn utilizes a variety of techniques—mimicking cinéma verité, old newsreels and flights of sprawling psychological fantasy—to bring the story to immersive, vibrant life. Maria nowcompletes the Chilean director’s masterful trilogy of biopics about famous females, including Jackie (with Natalie Portman as Jacqueline Kennedy) and Spencer (Kristin Stewart played Princess Diana).  

It’s all a mad, magnificent swirl, with Jolie in the middle as the tragic diva whose escape—from harsh reality and the woes of her world—was her voice, her music…and then, her inner space. In a subtle grace-note touch, the film depicts Callas’ expired body, on the floor of her apartment filled with sculpted relics and fine art…where the whelps, whimpering and howls of her two little poodles become a sort of eulogy for the sublime high notes of her now-silent voice.

Fitting, that even dogs would want to continue her song, for a woman who once filled the cavernous spaces of the world with music. And Maria picks up her songful story again, hopefully for a new generation to discover one of the greatest, most acclaimed and sublimely troubled vocalists to ever grace an opera stage.

—Neil Pond

Biopic about German minister who openly opposed Hitler reverberates anew today

Bonhoeffer
Starring Jonas Dassler, August Diehl and Flula Borg
Directed by Todd Komarnicki
Rated PG-13

In theaters Friday, Nov. 22

It’s impossible to miss the parallels to today’s fractured politics in the new biopic about the German theologian who stridently opposed the Nazi takeover of his country. The film’s warnings about fascism, dictatorship, authoritarianism, Christian nationalism and antisemitism are at the heart of the story, then, as now.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a pastor and author whose “radical” interpretations of Christianity became theological building blocks for generations to come. But his outspokenness about Hitler—and his association with a failed attempt on Dur Fuhrer’s life—sealed his fate.

There have been almost 10 movies already about Bonhoeffer, and this one mostly soft-pedals through its story about the firebrand man of the cloth who infiltrated the Nazis as a spy, became implicated in an assassination attempt, and spent the last days of his life as a prisoner of war. Bonhoeffer believed that his faith obligated him to take decisive action against Hitler and his genocidal movement against Jews, in the same way that he’d feel obligated to stop a madman driver intentionally trying to kill other motorists on the road. There’s a lot of “action” around the movie’s edges, but onscreen it’s largely a lot of talking—about what’s happening, what happened, what might happen, and what should happen as Germany slides into the dark abyss of the Third Reich. I wish the filmmakers had taken a cue from Elvis for “A Little Less Conversation” (and “a little more action, please.”)

It’s a modest production with no recognizable names attached, at least for American audiences.  Jonas Dassler, who plays Bonhoeffer as an adult, is a young German actor likely a bit better known in Deutschland, and maybe—maybe—you’ll recognize another German actor, August Diehl, from his role in Inglourious Basterds, as the Gestapo officer who horns himself into a tavern guessing game. Germany’s Fuela Borg was Javelin in The Suicide Squad, had a small role in one of the Pitch Perfect movies and appeared in an episode of TV’s Ghosts. Irish actor Muiris Crowley, who plays a sneering Nazi, popped up (as the “Third Saxon noble”) in a couple of episodes of Vikings.

The film shows Bonhoffer as a young lad frolicking in lederhosen, spending time in seminary, getting exposure to Black church services, jazz music and stinging American racism, and finally enduring his incarceration (where he serves communion to his fellow inmates—12 of them—in a scene obviously modeled on The Last Supper.) Winston Churchill (Tim Hudson) and Louis Armstrong (John Akunmu) get cameos. But I kept thinking the movie’s roving eye, hop-skipping across time and place and people, should settle down and sharpen its focus.

But it’s certainly a movie for thinkers, as well as doers, and it offers a lot to think about.

You might recall that a certain 2024 presidential candidate—now the president-elect—made no secret of his admiration for dictators and Hitler’s military prowess, and was supported by white nationalist extremists waving Nazi swastikas. Well, you don’t have to squint to see the movie’s connective tissue between past and present. (Not to mention the film’s pointed reference to Hitler replacing Holy Bibles in German churches with his own version, along with a copy of Mein Kompf—shades of the so-called Trump Bible, which contained copies of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights…and a snippet of Lee Greenwood’s song “God Bless the U.S.A.”) The movie’s an echo from the past with a resounding relevance today, about a man with bedrock beliefs remembered for taking on Nazi Germany, for confronting the menace and calling out its evil—and warning about the dangers of dragging the church into a political fray, kowtowing to government and getting trampled by jackboots. His life, and his words, ring true anew.

—Neil Pond