The Media Tourist

Kids make magic in sensitive, sad, moving, magnificent ‘Florida Project’

Bria Vinaite and Brooklynn Prince star in ‘The Florida Project’

The Florida Project
Starring Brooklynn Prince, Willem Dafoe & Bria Vinaite
Directed by Sean Baker
R

Purple, it’s said, is the color of royalty, so it suits the young pint-sized princess strutting around her lavender palace in this fractured fairy tale just a couple of wide miles, and a few aching dreams, away from Disney’s Magic Kingdom.

In director Sean Baker’s outstanding slice-of-life The Florida Project, six-year-old Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) and her ragtag playmates seek fun, friendship, mischief and adventure from their extended-stay homes in low-rent Orlando motels on the strip leading tourists straight into the money-fied maws of Disney. Moonee lives with her mom, Halley (Bria Vinaite), in a place called the Magic Castle—getting an unauthorized ride on Disney’s coattails—which the manager, Bobby (Willem Dafoe), has painted top-to-bottom purple.

Willem Dafoe

Bobby’s motel, with its plum-colored walls and faux parapets, fits right in with the other garish attractions on the busy freeway, which include a souvenir shop topped with the giant head of a wizard and a citrus palace called Orange World.

Every day, from a field across the bog, a helicopter repeatedly takes off and lands, whisking tourists away for birds-eye-views of Disney World, Epcot and other wonderful sights.

Baker’s 2015 indie, Tangerine, about a transgender prostitute on the gritty streets of L.A., was shot entirely on iPhones. The Florida Project has a similar down-low, street-level, quasi-documentary feel, as if we’ve been dropped into a setting with a small group of characters to watch them live their lives, just off to the side of where most of mainstream America usually travels—or would ever want to go.

The young cast of newcomers is outstanding, especially Brooklynn Prince as Moonie, a zippy, zapping combination of sass, innocence, vulnerability and pluck. Valeria Cotto plays her friend Jancey, who lives at the motel next door, Future World. Christopher Rivera is Scooty, whose mom (Mela Murder) slips Moonie and Halley food from the diner where she works.

Much of the movie is shown from the worldview of the kids, who revel in the simple delights of childhood—sharing a messy ice cream cone before it melts, spitting on a car from a balcony, burping, making fart noises, playing hide and seek. They also set fire to an abandoned apartment complex, turn off the power to the motel and sass grownups.

But you really come to care about these urchins, worry about them and empathize with their plights, especially when the movie heads into some inevitable danger zones—and it’s not just alligators lurking in the lagoon or a creepy old man nosing around the playground.

No one looks after the kids like Bobby, the beleaguered manager, who also serves as a surrogate father. Real dads are in short supply, and the young moms are floundering, too. Dafoe—whose lifetime of juicy roles has included playing Jesus of Nazareth and Spiderman’s nemesis, the Green Goblin—is already getting Oscar buzz for a Best Supporting Actor nomination. It’s one of his best parts, and best performances, in years.

And Bria Vinaite, as Moonee’s mother, also makes a remarkable debut. Halley is a mess, a scrawny, scrappy spitfire scrounging around for whatever she can find, do, scam or steal at the bottom of life’s scrap heap. She’s fiercely protective of her daughter and she’ll strike like a scorpion when provoked.

But mostly, The Florida Project is a tattered tale about kids growing up in the flotsam and jetsam of an American economy barely afloat offshore of Florida’s signature tourism mecca. Moonee and her friends use their imaginations, the way kids do, to make their own magic in the shadow of the Magic Kingdom.

At one point, Moonee and Jancey play in a downed cypress tree that’s been toppled, likely by a storm, or perhaps a hurricane. Moonee says it’s her favorite tree because “it fell down but it’s still growing.”

This saucy, sad, rousing, riveting drama gives you the same hope for Moonee and her friends—that life may knock them around, may knock them down, may topple them sideways. But you hope, somehow, they’ll keep going, and keep growing.

In theaters Oct. 8, 2017

Stephen King’s creepy clown is back for another round of nightmares

It
Starring Jaeden Lieberher, Finn Wolfhard & Sophia Lillis
Directed by Andy Muschietti
Rated R

The creepy clown is back.

Clowns have been giving some people the willies for a long, long time. But Stephen King put a fine line on the phobia in 1986 with his masterful horror opus novel about a group of kids terrorized by a supernatural, shape-shifting predator particularly fond of taking the form of Pennywise, a dancing circus clown.

King’s novel, set in the 1950s, was made into a popular ABC miniseries in 1990.

The new movie, which resets the story in the late 1980s, hews true to the dark, twisted soul of King’s source material with a bright cast of youngsters who portray a group of outlier friends who call themselves “the Losers” as a show of solidarity.

Stuttering Bill (Jaeden Lieberher from St. Vincent, The Book of Henry and Midnight Special) reels from guilt over the gruesome death of his younger brother a year earlier. Stanley (Wyatt Oleff) is having trouble mastering his Torah—and haunted by a painting in his rabbi father’s study. Frail germaphobe Eddie (Jack Dylan Glazier, making his movie debut) carries his inhaler and other meds in a fanny pack.

Mike (Chosen Jacobs, who played Will Grover on TV’s Hawaii Five-O) was orphaned when his parents died trying to save him in a tragic house fire. Finn Wolfhard (Mike Wheeler on Stranger Things) is wisecracking Richie, who provides many of the movie’s raunchy gag lines and much of its comic relief. Ben (Ray Taylor) is the new kid in school, who’s obsessed with the history of the community—and the singing group New Kids on the Block.

Sophia Lillis gives a particularly nuanced performance as Beverly, the only girl in the group, who harbors a deep, troubling secret at home.

All the Losers are bullied by a gaggle of older kids led by the psychotic Henry (Nicholas Hamilton). The grownups in their lives are either not around, hostile, indifferent or worse—much worse.

As Pennywise, Bill Skarsgård (son of actor Stellan Skarsgård) is a cackling, drooling nightmare, aided by CGI when his mouth becomes an abyss of hundreds of tiny pointed teeth, or he morphs and mangles into something even more monstrous.

Pennywise knows what each of the Losers are afraid of, and he becomes horrific manifestations of those fears.

The Losers call the evil entity “It” and eventually figure out it’s been reappearing in the town every 27 years to feed on a new crop of kids. (The movie comes 27 years after the TV miniseries, a nice creative touch.)

“It knows what scares us most,” says Stanley, “and that’s what we see.”

The Losers band together to find It when Beverly is taken away into its subterranean sewer lair. That sets the stage for an epic clown showdown.

It has a vintage retro, throwback feel that recalls several other touchstone movies of its 1980s era, notably Stand By Me (adapted from another Stephen King story) and The Goonies. And of course, there’s also Netflix’s Stranger Things, also set in the ’80s, also starring young Finn Wolfhard, and also about a group of kids battling the supernatural—and searching for a boy who’s disappeared.

A bloody bathroom scene looks like a salute to Carrie by way of The Shining (two other King movie adaptations), and it’s hard to see any movie with kids racing along on bicycles and not think of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.

Director Andy Muschietti (Mama) creates some truly bold, creative sequences. The opening—when Bill’s younger brother meets Pennywise in a storm-water grate—is a stylish, gory shocker, and when Pennywise emerges from the flicking images of a garage slideshow, watch out!

Although the movie is built around kids, it’s definitely not a kids movie. It earns its R rating in many ways. Body parts are severed, blood spews and splatters and f-bombs fly. Kids talk about…well, things that kids would have talked about in the late 1980s.

And unlike the book and the miniseries, this It clearly sets itself up for a sequel, when the kids vow to come back, in 27 years, if It does.

“I’m not afraid of you,” Beverly tells Pennywise.

“You will be,” Pennywise tells her.

If you’re not already creeped out by clowns, It will definitely scare you over the line.

In theaters Sept. 8, 2017

Spunky ballerina tale takes wing but has trouble with landing

Leap!
Starring the voices of Elle Fanning, Nat Wolff, Carly Rae Jepsen & Kate McKinnon
Directed by Eric Summer & Éric Warin
PG-13

Go ahead, jump!

That was the advice of Van Halen in the 1980s. And it’s the advice of this spirited animated yarn about a spunky orphan girl who takes a leap of faith to follow her dream of becoming a ballerina.

Felicie (voiced by Elle Fanning) lives in rural Brittany, France, in the early 1880s. She escapes from the secluded orphanage with her best friend, Victor (Nat Wolff), headed for the City of Lights, nearly 400 kilometers away, and the Ballet de Paris.

Against a gorgeous backdrop of a partially constructed Eiffel Tower and other luminous Paris sights, Felicie manages to weasel her way into auditions for the Ballet’s big production of The Nutcracker. She’s mentored by a former star dancer, Odette (Carly Rae Jepsen), who’s now a despondent cleaning lady.

But another young dancer, the snooty rich-girl Camille (Maddie Ziegler), also has her eyes on a coveted ballerina spot. And her ice-cold, Cruella de Ville-ish dance mom (Kate McKinnon) will do whatever it takes to ensure she gets it.

Meanwhile, Victor has found a job apprenticing in the shop of an eccentric inventor who’s working on both the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty. (The movie isn’t much of a stickler for historical accuracy.) He’s making “leap” plans of his own, crafting a set of mechanical wings that will factor into the movie’s final moments, not to mention its overall theme of positivity, pluck and determination.

Felice recalls the long-ago words of her mother: “If you don’t leap, you’ll never know what it’s like to fly.”

Young tween girls, in particular, will probably love Leap!, especially those who might—like Felice—pine for tutus, tights and pointe work. The ballet sequences, animated from actual movements of star dancers from the Paris Opera, are lovely, graceful and majestic, even when they push well beyond the boundaries of real-life physics and gravity.

This French-Canadian production, originally called Ballerina and released last year in France and the United Kingdom, was retitled for its American release, and retooled. Saturday Night Live’s McKinnon and comedy icon Mel Brooks were added to the vocal cast, and Wolff replaced Dane DeHaan, the original voice of Victor.

The filmmakers also must have felt the movie’s Old World setting needed a little freshening up, so they added some contemporary touches. They don’t quite fit, like pieces of American bubble gum tossed onto platters of French pastry. Boppin’ pop songs from Jepsen, Sia and Demi Levato bump abruptly up against Swan Lake and Sugar Plum Fairies. Much of the humor is sitcom 101. There are fart jokes, a barf joke, a pee joke and a nutcracker gag that doesn’t have anything to do with Tchaikovsky’s ballet.

Characters speak with a movie lingo that mixes American teen slang, fake French English and quasi-Euro-whatever, and their animated designs often make them look several years “older” than the tender ages they’re supposed to be.

Felice is (supposedly) only 11, which makes a scene where she dances on the tables of a Paris tavern, Coyote Ugly style, all the more unsettling—especially when the inebriated, leering men in the place excitedly cheer her on. “Anybody check her ID at the door?” someone shouts. Indeed.

Did tween ballerinas in Paris in the early 1880s really wear hip-hugger shorty shorts, leggings, little vests and booties? Did they train Karate Kid style? Or have epic snippy dance-offs that begin on the stage, continue through the seats of the theater and end up in the lobby—or high in the air of the lobby?

This sweet-natured, well-intentioned movie shows that there are other players in the animation field beyond Pixar and Disney, doing commendable work with a fraction of those company’s blockbuster budgets. Leap! boldly takes the plunge, even if it doesn’t quite nail the landing. But if you’ve got a little one who wants to someday be the swan in Swan Lake, well, as Van Halen says, you might as well jump.

In theaters Aug. 25, 2017

Reynolds, Jackson blast away in retro-flavored, buddy-cop road-trip action comedy

The Hitman’s Bodyguard
Starring Ryan Reynolds & Samuel L. Jackson
Directed by Patrick Hughes
R

“Boring is always best.”

That’s the motto of Michael Bryce (Ryan Reynolds), the crack bodyguard whose Triple A Protection Service is at the top of everyone’s list for smooth, safe efficiency. He’s “very good at keeping people alive” when other people want them dead.

Until one day, when something goes terribly wrong with a big-ticket job, sending his “ratings” plummeting. Soon Bryce has dropped to the bottom of the bodyguard business.

Gary Oldman

But he gets a shot at rebuilding and restoring his reputation with an assignment to escort a dangerous hit man, Darius Kincaid (Samuel L. Jackson), who’s being released from prison to testify in Amsterdam at the trail of a notorious war criminal (Gary Oldman) from the former Soviet Union.

A lot of folks want to make sure Kincaid never makes it to the courtroom.

It doesn’t sound like a comedy, does it? But it is. Keep reminding yourself of that, especially in the opening minutes, when you see a bullet punch a bloody hole in a man’s forehead and a young child is executed in front of her father.

The highly contrived plot combines two well-worn Hollywood formulas, the buddy-cop comedy and the road trip, as Reynolds and Jackson embark on an action-packed, 27-hour race to the courthouse in Hague, blasting their way through waves of murderous Euro-assassins, trailing a wake of destruction and spewing a fountain of profanity-laced banter.

Jackson, in particular, is a maestro of expletives. He gives f-bombs syntax, if not musicality, like a Bach of bad words, and The Hitman’s Bodyguard is another of his movie mini-symphonies, like Snakes on a Plane, Pulp Fiction and The Hateful Eight.

Elodie Yung

Reynolds mixes the mad splatter with droll chatter as Bryce, who’s pining for Amelia (Elodie Yung, Elektra on TV’s The Defenders), the French Interpol agent from his past. Salma Hayek plays Kincaid’s wife, Sonya, a hilariously foul-mouthed Spanish spitfire. If Kincaid testifies, Interpol has agreed that Sonya, who’s being held in an Amsterdam prison for some unspecified crime, will go free.

The movie has a rollickingly retro throwback feel, with warmed-over Cold War baddies, big-rock anthem ballads from the ’80s and nearly nonstop, on-the-move action—armored vehicles, motorcycles, cars, a helicopter, an 18-wheeler with a bomb inside. Almost everything explodes at some point. I halfway expected to see Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone or Chuck Norris walk out of the flames.

Two of the best sequences involve a speedboat chase on the canals of Amsterdam, and a hyper-kinetic, drag-out fight that begins in a restaurant kitchen and ends up in a hardware store. If you drop your pistol, just slam someone’s head on the sizzling grill or grab a skillet, a nail gun, a hammer or a chain!

For laughs, it’s hard to top Bryce and Kincaid each trying to annoy the other in the car by singing. Or the flashback sequence where we learn how Bryce met Amelia at a funeral, making out to Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love Is” as slow-mo mayhem erupts all around them. Or that Kincaid and Sophie met in Mexico after he watched her, gobsmacked, handle a bunch of troublemakers in a bar to the tune of Lionel Richie’s “Hello.”

At times it made me think of what Midnight Run might have been if Quentin Tarantino had directed it about 15 years later. (Interestingly, one brief little musical snippet, as Bryce and Kincaid roar out of a parking garage, echoes Danny Elfman’s theme music to that 1988 comedy.)

And having a character named Kurosawa—well, that’s either a wild coincidence, or a deliberate nod to the iconic Japanese filmmaker, considered a world cinema icon. The Hit Man’s Bodyguard isn’t exactly world cinema, but hey, at least it apparently knows what that is.

It’s funny, it’s violent and it feels like bits and pieces of a lot of other movies over the years, all held together by a couple of solid, prolific actors riffing off each other and knowing they’re really just marking time between other, better, bigger projects—like Reynolds’ Deadpool 2, coming summer of 2018.

But whatever else it is, it’s rarely ever boring.

In theaters Aug. 18, 2017 

All-star cast pulls off rollicking Dixie-fried hillbilly heist

Logan Lucky
Starring Channing Tatum, Adam Driver & Daniel Craig
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
PG-13

Director Steven Soderbergh’s high-spirited hillbilly-heist caper, about a couple of born-loser West Virginia brothers who scheme to tap into a multi-million-dollar NASCAR jackpot, sometimes feels like a rollicking, redneck riff on his Ocean’s Eleven franchise.

But Logan Lucky has its own pace and personality, a crackpot comedy yarn with a dynamite, all-star ensemble cast.

Channing Tatum stars as Jimmy Logan, a former high school football jock and divorced dad who’s just been let go from his hard-hat bulldozer job. Adam Driver is his gloomy younger brother, Clyde, who wears a prosthetic left hand as a reminder of his two tours of duty in Iraqi and now tends bar at the local watering hole.

In addition to losing his job, Jimmy has forfeited custody of his young daughter (Farrah Mackenzie, who played Dolly Parton’s sister, Stella, on the TV movie Coat of Many Colors) to his flinty ex-wife (Katie Holmes). Clyde has already served time in jail for a minor offense.

Riley Keough

Both wonder if the Logan family “curse” they’ve heard about all their lives is true.

Jimmy’s former employment had him filling in dangerous sinkholes underneath the Charlotte Motor Speedway over the state line in North Carolina, and it gives him an idea. He knows the money—a torrent of bills—from the massive complex is routed underground directly to the bank during racing events. And he knows just how to get to it…

The sets in motion a crazy-quilt, cracker-barrel scheme that involves a prison break (out as well as back in), color-coded cockroaches and a bomb made out of bleach sticks, salt substitute and Gummi Bears.

Daniel Craig

You’ll get a hoot out of seeing “James Bond” in pinstripes: Daniel Craig is a beefed-up, backwoods, buzz-cut rascal as Joe Bang, the jailbird whose expertise with explosives is key to the job. Riley Keough plays Mellie, the Logans’ firecracker little sister who works as a hairstylist. Country singer Dwight Yoakam gets a nifty role as the bully prison warden, who can’t admit his facility ever has any problems, big or small.

Seth (Family Guy) Macfarlane is almost unrecognizable as a detestably flamboyant British racing sponsor. Hillary Swank plays a dogged FBI agent determined to make her case. Sebastian Stan is a rock-star racer who treats his body as a clean machine. Katherine Waterson’s mobile health-care provider carries a long-burning torch for Jimmy. Joe Bang’s dim-bulb little brothers Sam (Brian Gleeson) and Fish (Jack Quaid) also sign on for the action, boasting of their savvy and their value to the team.

“I know all the twitters,” says Fish.

This collection of oddballs, misfits, lowlifes and small-town joes and janes clicks together into one hilarious groove, overflowing with twists, turns, screwball gimmicks and inevitable mishaps. Soderbergh certainly knows how to steer a sizeable cast through the in-and-out mechanics of a crazy caper, and he even weaves in a surprisingly sentimental subplot around a tiny-tot Little Miss West Virginia contest and John Denver’s song “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”

Though it’s set in the South and it’s a comedy about Southerners and Southern culture, Logan Lucky never feels like it’s making sport of its characters, their way of living or their institutions. You laugh at them—but you also root for them.

When the heist is referred to in the movie as the “Ocean’s 7-11,” it’s a reference to the local convenience store central to some of the action as well as a meta nod by the screenplay to the movie’s pedigree in director Soderburgh’s hit trilogy of Oceans con-comedy movies.

But unlike the Oceans flicks, this Dixie-fried delight of a heist is dressed down, not spiffed up. And it’s happy to play in its own backyard instead of glitzy Las Vegas casinos or ritzy European hotels. A rowdy, fun-filled romp with an A-list cast having a summer blast, Logan Lucky will leave you feeling lucky you came along—and remind you that good fortune sometimes snaps open with a Southern drawl.

In theaters Aug. 18

The terrifying devil doll that launched ‘The Conjuring’ is baaaaack! 

Annabelle: Creation
Starring Anthony LaPaglia, Talitha Bateman & Stephanie Sigman
Directed by David F. Sandberg
R

The demonic backstory to the evil plaything that inspired The Conjuring and later got its own spin-off, Annabelle: Creation effectively fulfills horror fans’ need to be scared—and reminds us of just how creepy dolls can be.

In the opening credits, we watch in the 1950s as a toymaker (Anthony LaPaglia, best known for playing Jack Malone on TV’s Without a Trace) carefully puts the finishing touches on the doll that will become Annabelle, a gift for his young daughter, Bee.

Bee is struck by a car in the very next scene and killed.

Then, 12 years later, the heartbroken toymaker and his mysteriously bedridden wife (Mirando Otto, Rebecca Ingram from 24: Legacy) open their home to a group of orphan girls and a young Catholic nun, Sister Catherine (Stephanie Sigman).

The girls are told they can freely go anywhere in the house, except for one place—Bee’s old bedroom, which is always locked.

Swedish director David F. Sandberg, whose resume includes last year’s horror flick Lights Out, doesn’t really do anything flashy or new. But he certainly knows how to solidly ramp up the suspense, and once he turns on the jolt juice, it really starts to flow.

The setting of a big, rambling, Victorian-style farmhouse, on a desolate hilltop in the middle of nowhere (actually, Southern California) makes a great place for the spooky shenanigans. Sandberg keeps gore—and slaughter—to a minimum, especially for an R-rated flick, and gets maximum value out of things that are only glimpsed briefly, seen in the shadows or stirred in the darkness of the imagination.

That’s not to say you won’t see some things that will make you gasp, and if you come to see bodies torn apart, walls smeared with blood and eye sockets missing eyeballs, well, you won’t be disappointed.

The device of a houseful of young women, or girls, is a well-worn horror cliché. Here, the orphans, who range in age from kids to older teens, provide several creative opportunities for interaction with Annabelle and the house, from telling spooky stories underneath a bedsheet to exploring the grounds and outbuildings. A game of hide-and-seek holds quite a surprise, and that sinister-looking scarecrow in the barn—well, there’s a reason he looks so sinister.

This is definitely the kind of movie you need to see in a theater with other people. It certainly adds to the enjoyment to hear a whipped-up audience chiming in, shouting at the screen, offering characters advice: “Don’t open that door!” “Close that door!” “Get away from that!” “Don’t go in there!”

A woman in front of me could barely stay in her seat; several times, she literally leaned forward, arms extended, as if reaching into the screen to extend a helping hand.

One of those times was the dumbwaiter scene, when one of the smallest girls was trying to get away from one of the other little girls—who had turned into a demon—in the shaft of the house’s dumbwaiter, and the ropes were stuck. Yikes!!!

Talitha Bateman

Much of the focus is on little Janice, played by Talitha Bateman (her brother, Gabriel, starred in Lights Out). Janice is recovering from polio, hobbling around in leg braces, and Annabelle singles her out for particular attention.

The Annabelle and Conjuring movies walk a profane line between good and evil—and evil always seems to have the upper hand. No amount of prayers, holy water, priests, nuns, rosary beads or pages from the Bible plastered over a door can keep the malevolent spirt of Annabelle from raging across the decades. The doll, a priest says, is a conduit for evil. Mullins’ wife says it’s “the devil itself.”

Whatever it is, it’s on the way to being a lynchpin of one of the most successful horror franchises ever, a nearly $900 million part of director-producer James Wan’s creepshow empire, which includes Saw (six movies and counting), Insidious and now the ever-widening world of Annabelle. Next year we’ll see The Nun, of which Annabelle: Creation provides a peek—a dark, spectral presence in the corner of a picture frame.

Even if you don’t buy into believing that Annabelle is a conduit for evil, you have to agree: This devil doll has certainly tapped into the box office. And as long as people enjoy being spooked by creepy dolls, she’ll be around—somewhere, in the shadows, behind a door, inside that locked room.

“Don’t go in there!”

In theaters Aug. 11, 2017