The Media Tourist

New Animated ‘Grinch’ is Groovy Green Kickoff to Holiday Movie Season

The Grinch
Starring the voices of Benedict Cumberbatch, Rashida Jones, Kenan Thompson & Cameron Seely
Directed by Scott Mosier & Yarrow Cheney
PG

You’re a mean one, Mr. Grinch.

The perennial holiday pest has been a part of our pop culture since 1957, when Dr. Seuss introduced him in the storybook that quickly became a children’s classic. He’s been the star of a TV Christmas special (1966) narrated by horror icon Boris Karloff, a movie starring Jim Carrey (2000) and a Broadway musical (2006).

The latest version is a brisk, crisp, charming, 90-minute computer-animated romp from Illumination Entertainment, the same folks who gave us the Despicable Me franchise and the critically lauded The Secret Life of Pets. A groovy, green movie kickoff to the Christmas season, it will delight children and remind grown-ups why Dr. Seuss (author/illustrator Theodor Geisel, who died in 1991) still rocks.

Benedict Cumberbatch provides the voice of the Grinch, the grumpy, green grouch with a lifelong Yuletide bone to pick: He absolutely hates Christmas. He lives with his loyal dog, Max, otherwise alone in a craggy mountain lair above the teeming town of Whoville. And it’s really ruffling his fur that, down there, the merry folks are hustling, bustling, smiling and singing as they prep for yet another happy holiday.

The Whoville mayor (Angela Lansbury) has proclaimed that this year’s celebration will be three times bigger than ever before. That means a bigger tree, bigger ornaments, and more of everything. Grrrr—it also means the Grinch will have to come up with an even bigger plan to somehow ruin Christmas for everyone in Whoville.

Co-directors Scott Mosier and Yarrow Cheney keep things brisk, light and lively, fleshing out the familiar storyline with visual flair, additional characters and witty details that hew closely to the wildly creative imagination of Dr. Seuss’ curiously surreal illustrations and the spirit of inspired anarchy that ran throughout all his work. When the Grinch tells Max about his new “gizmos and gazmos,” he’s not kidding—and he uses them all in the nifty Christmas-stealing sequence as he sweeps, siphons and stows away every scrap of Christmas from every home in Whoville.

And of course, it wouldn’t be a story about the Grinch without Little Cindy Lou Who (voiced by Cameron Seely, who played Helen, the young daughter of P.T. Barnum in The Greatest Showman). The precocious tiny tot hatches a plot of her own—a ploy to trap Santa Claus on Christmas Eve—that accidentally provides a twisty, fateful encounter with the Grinch.

That’s Rashida Jones as the voice of Cindy Lou’s harried, overworked mom, and Saturday Night Live’s Kenan Thompson gets plenty of chuckles as the boisterously cheerful, lumber-jack-like Bricklebaum, who would certainly be a contender if TV’s The Great Christmas Light Fight ever rolled into Whoville.

Max the dog is a real scene-stealer, as is Fred, the extremely rotund reindeer the Grinch corrals to pull his sleigh. “Santa had eight,” the Grinch grumbles, sizing up Fred. “He looks like he ate the other seven.”

Grammy-winning musician and producer Pharrell Williams narrates, informing us that one of the reasons the Grinch is a frosty frump is because his “heart is two sizes too small.”

For several generations that grew up with the original TV version of the Grinch, there are a couple of musical touchstones—like when the Whos gathering around the (massive!) Christmas tree and lifting their voices in “Welcome Christmas,” or the theme song, “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch,” this time a new rap version by Tyler, the Creator, performed over the end credits.

New musical spices include the Grinch’s alarm clock, which pesters him each morning by playing snippets of holiday wake-up songs like “Feliz Navidad,” “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” and “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” Listen for Buster Poindexter’s “Zat You Santa Claus?” and some rockin’ Christmas cuts from the Brian Setzer Orchestra. Max has a daydream to Lou Bega’s “Mambo No. 5.”

The movie’s big feat is finding the funny in the Grinch’s frumpiness. He’s a character who’s impossible to hate, especially when you get to know him—and learn the heartbreaking reason he’s the way he is. Kids will laugh, a lot, at his “childish,” sometimes slapstick antics, and be touched by the way he comes around—moved by the innocence and goodwill of a little, big-eyed girl—to embracing Christmas, family and friendship by the end of the movie.

And everyone’s heart, like that of the Grinch, will grow three times bigger by the time the Grinch gives a toast to “kindness, love and the things we need most.”

He may be green, but turns out he’s not so mean, after all.

In theaters Friday, Nov. 9, 2018

New ‘Nutcracker’ is an Overcooked Christmas-Movie Meatloaf

The Nutcracker and the Four Realms
Starring Mackenzie Foy, Keira Knightley & Helen Mirren
Directed by Lasse Halleström & Joe Johnson
PG

Only in Hollywood can li’l vampires become Disney darlings.

Mackenzie Foy stars in this lavish House of Mouse retooling and respooling of the beloved Nutcracker holiday musical. You might remember her as the child who played the half-vampire, half-human spawn of Edward (Robert Pattinson) and Bella (Kristen Stewart) in two Twilight movies.

In the time-warp-y Interstellar, she was Matt Damon’s young daughter, who grows up to be Jessica Chastain.

So as an actress, Foy, 17, is certainly no stranger to strange things happening.

Mackenzie Foy

In The Nutcracker and The Four Realms, based on the Tchaikovsky ballet—and mainly on the book, The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, which inspired it—she’s Clara, a young British lass who discovers a hidden parallel kingdom crawling with colorful, wacky characters and divided by old grudges.

It turns out that Clara’s late mother was actually the queen of the Realms, making Clara a princess—a Disney princess!

Clara’s on a quest for a key to unlock a musical egg, a cryptic Christmas gift from her mother. The same key may also be essential to saving the Four Realms. Interesting! If only she can retrieve it from that pesky rodent, Mouserinks, known far and wide as a scampering scallywag—and stay away from the Mouse King, an oversized beast of a creature that’s actually thousands of teeming, swarming mice.

Morgan Freeman

Keira Knightly is a winged, pixie-fied delight as the Sugar Plum Fairy, with a wad of cotton-candy hair, a sweet tooth, an agenda of her own—and a soft spot for big tin soldiers. Morgan Freeman has a couple of scenes as Clara’s godfather, a wise, one-eyed inventor and tinkerer who points her on the path into the Realms. Helen Mirren plays Mother Ginger, the “banish-ed” Queen of Amusement now reigning over an abandoned circus and some super-creepy, somersaulting harlequins.

Misty Copeland

There’s also the icicle-covered Shiver, King of the Snow Realm (Richard E. Grant), and the Flower Realm King, played by superstar Mexican actor and filmmaker Eugenio Derbez.

Acclaimed pro ballerina Misty Copeland, the principal dancer for the American Ballet Theater, performs an elegant classical number in the movie’s only real tie to theatrical productions of The Nutcracker.

A princess, a castle, a cute critter or two, beauty, a beast, music and magic dust—that’s pretty much been Disney’s bread and butter for decades. But The Nutcracker and the Four Realms feels more like a snack than a meal, a Disney diversion instead of a main course.

It looks sumptuous, with lavish sets, extravagant costumes and whimsical designs—that don’t really add up…to much of anything. It’s a hodgepodge, a beloved holiday musical based on a musty book from 1816; a shoehorned ballet performance; fantasy elements that feel drawn from a variety of other sources, including The Chronicles of Narnia, The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland and Babes in Toyland. Sometimes the clever, plucky Clara seems like a cross between Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft and Victorian London’s smartest STEM student. She can jailbreak clockwork doodads, plop down a rope from a castle tower, scale across rocky cliffs, crawl through massive churning waterwheels and even—yes—build a better mousetrap.

It’s all “science, mechanics and a bit of luck,” she says.

But you’ll be out of luck if you come to this Nutcracker wanting to see actual nutcrackers—you know, those ornamental, toy-soldier dolls people unbox at Christmastime. The nutcracker in this Nutcracker is a real person, played by Jayden Fowora-Knight, a British actor in his first major film role. He’s a handsome guard who’s around for most of the movie, but he doesn’t get a lot to do.

And he’s no nutcracker.

Swedish director Lasse Halleström (The Hundred-Foot Journey, Safe Haven, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen) passed the baton to Texan Joe Johnson, whose resume includes Captain America: The First Avenger, The Wolfman and Jurassic Park III, when rewrites and reshoots were required last year. That’s usually a signal of some kind of trouble—just like Princess Clara finds in the Four Realms. This overcooked, Texas-Swedish Christmas-movie meatloaf is a Disney dud that just doesn’t quite measure up.

Not every Disney princess can be Cinderella, and not every Disney movie can be a classic. This one will probably leave most Disney fans hungry and waiting for the next one, when Mary Poppins sweeps down in December to remind everyone what the good ol’ Disney magic is all about—and how it’s done.

In theaters Nov. 2, 2018

Jonah Hill Moves Behind the Camera for Coming-of-Age Skateboard Drama

Mid90s
Starring Sunny Suljic, Lucas Hedges & Katherine Waterston
Directed by Jonah Hill
R

Jonah Hill has made us laugh in raunchy comedies including Superbad, 21 Jump Street and its sequel, This is the End and Forgetting Sarah Marshall. He played Moneyball with Brad Pitt, howled with Leonardo Di Caprio in The Wolf of Wall Street and voiced dragon trainer Snotlout Jorgenson in two animated How to Train Your Dragon flicks.

Now he’s taking us skateboarding.

Mid90s, which marks his first feature as a director and screenwriter, is a poignant, grittily realistic depiction of kids growing up in working-class Los Angeles circa 1994.

Sunny Suljic

Sunny Suljic (recently in The House with a Clock in Its Walls) stars as 13-year-old Stevie, who admires his older brother Ian (Lucas Hedges, Oscar-nominated for Manchester by the Sea), even though Ian is an abusive, loutish bully. Ian slams back orange juice by the gallon, works out obsessively, collects sports apparel, plays videogames—and pummels Stevie whenever he finds out he’s been poking around in his bedroom, which is often.

Their single mother (Katherine Waterston) is too distracted, self-absorbed and caught up in her own life to notice them, or whatever they’re doing.

With no anchor at home, Stevie drifts—and is drawn into a group of high school slackers he sees on a street corner, razzing a local shop owner, talking smack and showing off with their skateboards.

Stevie “trades up” his kiddie board for a real skateboard and is gradually assimilated into the group, given the affectionate nickname “Sunburn” (because of a comment he makes that amuses everyone). Almost everyone in the group has a nickname—except Ray (Na-Kel Smith), the oldest, and wisest, of the bunch, who dreams of “going pro” with his formidable skilz; and Ruben (Gio Galicia), closest to Stevie’s age, who initially takes the youngster under his wing and schools him on what’s cool…and what’s not.

“Listen to me,” Ruben tells him. “Never say ‘Thank-you.’ People will think you’re gay.”

The camera loves “F—ks—t” (Olan Prenatt), a shaggy-blonde screw-up whose profane nickname comes from his favorite expression. The group gave “Fourth Grade” (Ryder McLaughlin) his moniker as a knock at his limited vocabulary; but he’s an aspiring filmmaker who documents everything with a handheld camcorder.

Hill grew up in upper-class L.A., and this isn’t his autobiography, by any means. But he clearly has an affectionate feel for these dead-end kids. Rich with textures and details of its era and its place, Mid90s is a confident coming-of-age slice of characters and situations that will resonate with anyone who was around during the time—even if you never set foot on a skateboard, or weren’t anywhere near Southern California.

The soundtrack—a mixture of tunes from a diverse slate of artists, from the Mamas and the Papas to A Tribe Called Quest and Cypress Hill, mixed with original sonic-scapes from Oscar-winning Trent Reznor and fellow former Nine Inch Nails member Atticus Ross—sets a tasteful, moody, meandering backdrop, especially for scenes of young ‘boarders drifting breezily down the middle of a freeway at sunset, or teeming like lemmings all over a local park, then scattering and skittering away from “Five-O,” the cops.

It might shock some viewers when young Stevie and his friends talk scatological trash, or do things that push the film toward the far edges of its R rating. They smoke. They drink. And they have sex…sort of. (That scene actually quite accurately presents teenage “sex,” its prelude and its aftermath, as an awkward spectrum of emotions, from both sides of its young gender gap.)

Alexa Demie & Sunny Suljic

The slightly older teenage girl (actress-singer Alexa Demie) who takes Stevie into a bedroom at a party is one of only two female characters in the whole film (the other is Stevie and Ian’s mom). This movie is about the boyz in the ’hood, and they’re mostly played by unknown actors; sometimes it feels like a documentary—maybe the one Fourth Grade is shooting throughout the actual movie itself.

These youngsters flirt with injury and danger; it’s part of the “lifestyle.” Stevie throws himself into it, partly to show he’s a scrapper who’s got what it takes, but also because he’s been tempered by the beatings of his older brother. Learning to master his skateboard, he repeatedly falls off. Later, he accidentally skates off the roof of a building. And later still, he’s involved in a much more serious incident.

“You literally take the hardest hits of anyone I’ve ever seen,” Ray tells him.

Bumps, bruises and broken bones aside, the movie is kinda sweet, often dreamy, and ultimately a tribute to a type of camaraderie among young, outlier, outsider friends of any stripe, anywhere, anytime. These kids have found each other, even if they haven’t found—and aren’t interested in—a place where they fit in the larger, grownup world.

Mid90s has an edgy, indie feel, and it probably won’t make a big splash with a big audience. It’s a small movie about a small group of friends, a scrappy “family” of wayward L.A. kids who live to “push on a piece of wood” on wheels. But it’s a formidable debut from a first-time director that announces his official arrival into a new filmmaking circle.

And its big accomplishment is heralding that Jonah Hill has found a place, another place, where he fits—and that’s behind the camera.

In wide distribution Oct. 26, 2018

Lady Gaga Shines in Bradley Cooper’s Sensational Directorial Debut 

A Star is Born
Starring Bradley Cooper & Lady Gaga
Directed by Bradley Cooper
R

In theaters Oct. 5, 2018

What’s that sound?

It might be the early Oscar buzz for this film, which has already wowed audiences and critics at key film festivals that often point the way to the Academy Awards.

With A Star is Born, Bradley Cooper makes the leap to directing, as well as starring in the soaring, song-filled saga about a ragged superstar musician (Cooper) who falls for a younger, much greener singer-songwriter, played by Lady Gaga.

That “sound” might also be the tinnitus, the ringing in the ears of Jackson Maine, Cooper’s character. Combined with raging alcoholism and drug use, it’s put a serious drag on his once-thriving career—at the very moment he happens to meet Ally (Gaga), performing in an East Village drag bar, where Jackson has ducked in to get even more sloshed after a show.

Their eyes meet, their hearts sync and pretty soon they’re making music together, in more ways than one.

The sound you’re hearing could also be the songs—elemental, essential building blocks of the movie. But Cooper’s A Star is Born isn’t a musical; it’s a character-driven drama about two people who live and breathe music. The songs—almost all of them written originally for the film, and some by Gaga herself—become passionate, purposeful swaths of the story.

And Gaga, in her knockout debut leading movie role, sings the heck out of them. Cooper gives much of the spotlight to her, and she shines in a spectacular, rags-to-riches performance. We watch Ally emerge (we see her in the opening scene, literally, strolling past trash dumpsters in an alley) from her lowly street life to a become a dazzling, media-sensation pop princess.

Gaga built a real-life entertainment career out of being a popster chameleon, and part of the bedazzlement of her portrayal of Ally here is seeing her “bare,” with all that artifice and masquerade stripped away—down to her talent, her voice.

In one early scene, Jackson, fascinated by her fake eyebrows, wants to peel them off to reveal the real her. She tells him she’s always been self-conscious of her looks, in particular her big nose. “Your nose is beautiful,” he says, delicately caressing it with his finger.

In the movie’s many gorgeous, sweeping close-ups of Jackson and Ally’s faces, you see plenty of that beautiful nose—plus their lovely eyes, and their tears, when it comes to that.

Because, of course, what good is any love story that doesn’t give a good ol’ yank to the heartstrings? And this one has at least one major yank some folks might know is coming, especially if they’re familiar with how it’s been told before. A Star is Born was originally a movie in 1937 (with Janet Gaynor and Fredric March), 1955 (Judy Garland and James Mason) and 1976 (Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson).

As Ally’s star rises and burns brighter and hotter, Jackson’s flickers and falters. Will her success eclipse his? Can their love survive? Is there a way she can save Jackson on his road of self-destruction?

The movie gets so many of the modern musical details right, from backstage scenes, limo rides and private airplanes to songwriting and recording sessions and live performances. It drills down into the business of music without ever losing the human touch around which the story evolves and revolves.

As an actor-director, Cooper shows particularly strong promise, with an eye for solid craftsmanship and visual detail and a willingness to let his co-stars shine. A scene at an awards show is a particular standout, when a drunken Jackson stumbles onto the stage to join Ally, accepting her trophy, in front of a giant, pixelated screen image of themselves.

We all knew Lady Gaga could sing; she’s sold more than 27 million albums, recorded and toured with Tony Bennett, performed at a Super Bowl halftime show and won six Grammys. She’s got some serious pipes. And if you saw her in her role as the Countess on the FX series American Horror Story: Hotel, you won’t be surprised to find out she can act. But A Star is Born is aptly titled—she has arrived. A movie star is born.

Sam Elliott plays Billy, the brother of Cooper’s character, Jackson.

There are some outstanding supporting performances as well, including Andrew Dice Clay (as Ally’s father), Dave Chappelle (as Jackson’s buddy) and Sam Elliott, who provides a meaty layer of backstory family drama as Jackson’s older brother, Bobby, a former musician.

There are only 12 notes on the musical scale, Bobby says. Every song ever written uses those same tones, just arranged a different way. “It’s the same story told over and over, forever,” he tells Ally.

Watch A Star is Born and you’ll see a dynamic, dramatic spin on an old, forever love story, a sensational, stupendous, star-making performance by Lady Gaga, and a super-impressive directorial debut by Bradley Cooper—and you’ll hear what everyone else has been buzzing about.

In theaters Oct. 5, 2018

‘Gossip Girl,’ ‘Pitch Perfect’ Stars Plunge into Fun, Twisty Tale

A Simple Favor
Starring Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively
Directed by Paul Feig
R

Something small and seemingly insignificant turns into something huge, tangled and terrifically complicated in this tale of a missing person…who may not be so missing at all.

Oh, sure, that sounds familiar. But you’ve never seen it played out quite like this—with a former Gossip Girl (Blake Lively) and the perky Pitch Perfect darling (Anna Kendrick) plunging deep into the murky, steamy noir.

Kendrick plays Stephanie, an over-achieving, work-from-home mommy blogger who develops an unlikely friendship with Emily (Lively), a glamorous, mysterious PR exec for a Manhattan designer.

Their young sons go to the same school, but they’re on totally opposite sides of the mommy spectrum; Emily wears stilettos to the playground, Stephanie shops for bargain socks by the bundle at Target. But they bond nonetheless over stiff martinis, French songs swirling on the stereo, saucy girl talk and spilled secrets in Emily’s bedazzling mansion.

When Emily calls Stephanie one day and asks her for a “simple favor,” to pick up her son after school and keep him for the afternoon, it’s no big deal. But when Emily doesn’t come home that day, or the next, or even the next, Stephanie starts to worry that something may be wrong…

And boy, is she right!

Henry Golding

Emily and Stephanie’s hunky writer-turned-professor husband, Sean (Henry Golding, hot off his other hit movie, Crazy Rich Asians), bond in their search for answers. But can she trust him—or resist his charms—especially after she catches him cozying up with one of his female students?

“Are you trying to Diabolique me?” Stephanie asks Sean at one point, a reference to the classic 1955 French film about a wife, a mistress and a murder—and a perfect alibi.

Stephanie puts on her Nancy Drew sleuthing hat and goes on the hunt, and one clue leads to another—a $4 million insurance policy, a crazy woman (Jean Smart), a wrist tattoo, a dead body in a lake, a massive nude painting, a struggling artist (Linda Cardellini), an old T-shirt, an heirloom ring, a burning house, a fatal car crash.

And especially in a movie like this, things aren’t always as they seem and the truth can be a slippery subject. There are certainly shadings of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train and other films where a woman has “disappeared” and the story is presented to the audience by an “unreliable narrator” who doesn’t have all the information. Like those movies, this one is also based on a best-selling novel, in this case by Darcey Bell.

Those kind of movies are typically pretty heavy and dark, but this one is definitely not—thanks to the spark, sizzle and snap of Kendrick and Lively, and to director Paul Feig, who brushes everything with brisk, confident comedic stokes honed from his previous work on Bridesmaids, Ghostbusters, The Heat and Spy. There are numerous laugh-out-loud moments, particularly when Kendrick is given room to romp—like scenes when she encounters a robotic office receptionist, gets “stuck” in one of Emily’s slinky dresses, or rocks out to a rap song in her car. She’s the feisty firecracker that makes this film pop with wit as well as wile.

Lively has appeared in several movies (The Deep, The Age of Adeline, All I See is You, Café Society) after Gossip Girl went off the air in 2012, but this role is her juiciest yet. Emily is beguiling, manipulative, dangerous, damaged, sexy, sad and seductive—and Lively seems to relish every moment she gets to explore each luscious, plum angle of her character’s personality.

Andrew Rannells (Elijah on TV’s Girls) has a campy part as a dad in Emily’s school moms group, and Bashir Salahuddin (referee Keith Bang on GLOW) plays a detective who pops into a couple of scenes. “I’m just following breadcrumbs wherever they lead,” he says.

Follow these breadcrumbs to your local theater and see A Simple Favor—a deliciously, deliriously twisty tale of moms, martinis and a far-out gone girl that’s way more fun than you’d likely ever expect.

In theaters Sept. 14, 2018

Jennifer Garner Delivers Mixed Messages in Pulpy Revenge Drama

Peppermint
Starring Jennifer Garner, John Gallagher Jr. and John Ortiz
Directed by Pierre Morel
R

“What’s in your wallet?” That’s what Jennifer Garner wants to know in TV commercials for a popular credit card.

In her latest movie, she’s wants something else, and raises some much harder questions.

The title may suggest a sugar-sweet, candy-coated treat. But this flick is a violent, hardcore action revenge fantasy about a woman who takes the law into her own hands when her husband and daughter are killed in a drive-by shooting by members of a Mexican drug cartel.

Her daughter was eating a cone of peppermint ice cream when she died.

Juan Pablo Raba plays a ruthless cartel boss.

The cartel members, affiliated with a powerful drug czar (Juan Pablo Raba) with connections everywhere—including the LAPD and the courts—are rounded up and arrested, but walk free from the courtroom.

Garner plays Riley North, who is also seriously injured in the shooting, and ordered to a psychiatric hospital to recover. But she escapes and disappears, reemerging five years later to find the men who killed her family and become their judge, jury and executioner.

And while she’s taking out the trash, so to speak, she does the same to a lot of other guys, too.

“What do you want?” one of her victims-to-be asks her. “I want justice,” Riley answers.

We know when we see her, in the back of her beat-up van, closing up a gaping wound with a staple gun and duct tape, she means business. A couple of LAPD detectives (John Gallagher Jr. and John Ortiz) are always one step behind her.

This theme—of the citizen vigilante—has certainly been explored in movies before. Most famously, Charles Bronson launched the whole Death Wish franchise back in the 1970s, and the Taken series made Liam Neeson an action star. (French director Pierre Morel, who directed the first Taken, is also the director of Peppermint.)

The twist here is that it’s a woman—not Bronson, not Neeson, and not Denzel Washington, Clint Eastwood, Jamie Foxx, Keanu Reeves, or any one from a long list of other macho male Hollywood stars—doling out the deadly damage. But Garner isn’t exactly an out-of-nowhere choice. Remember she was a lethal weapon in the action-packed TV espionage series Alias from 2001 to 2006, playing double agent Sydney Bristow, a globe-trotting killing machine?

And she certainly hasn’t lost any of her, ahem, skills. I lost count of just how many guys are dispatched in Peppermint, but it’s certainly upward of 40. How many places can a guy be shot? Well, as Riley demonstrates, with an arsenal of weaponry that looks like a PSA for the NRA, there’s the face, the foot, the leg, the chest. They can also be stabbed, especially in the throat. Or crushed by a falling desk. Or blown to smithereens (with “explosive cord”).

It’s not just the body count that might make you wince. The sight of a white woman laying waste to just about every Hispanic and Latino character she encounters doesn’t exactly align with what a lot people might think of as racial sensitivity, especially at a moment in time when tensions are heightened about issues of immigration and cultural assimilation.

Early in the movie, in a flashback, Riley tells her young daughter that it’s not OK to be a bully, because “then you’re just as bad as they are.” The movie can’t keep its messages straight; when Riley goes on her wholesale slaughter spree of cartel members, and everyone associated with them, doesn’t it make her “as bad” as they are?

Director Morel doesn’t do anything terribly original here; he’s working from a paint-by-numbers script and using stock characters that look and sound like they came straight from central casting. But he doesn’t have to do much; this is a red-meat movie for people who are fed up, like Riley. She’s lost her family, but a lot of other people are just fed up, and pent up, period, about, well…whatever. And maybe this will be like a big stress valve, a relief and release, like a vicarious shooting gallery. Watch Riley mess up the bad guys—bam, bam, bang, bang, stab, stab—and maybe you’ll feel a little better.

Or maybe not.

Peppermint won’t be for everybody. It’s pulpy, gritty, trashy and down-low, and its racial overtones are difficult to dismiss. But Jennifer Garner is a dead-serious “avenging angel,” action-flick fans will likely lap it up, and it’s a welcome, you-go-girl gender-twist on the format.

So…what’s in your wallet?

In theaters Sept. 7, 2018

Melissa McCarthy Stars in Raunchy Novelty Comedy 

The Happytime Murders
Starring Melissa McCarthy, Maya Rudolph, Elizabeth Banks & Bill Barretta
Directed by Brian Henson
R

Hey kids, wanna see a puppet show?

Well, stay away from this one—a crude, lewd comedy for grown-ups in which puppets smoke, drink, curse, snort drugs, visit porno shops and have sex.

Just like real people!

In The Happytime Murders, puppets and people coexist; but puppets are regarded as second-class citizens, and the “socks” are mostly segregated from the “meat bags.” The movie follows puppet P.I. Phil Phillips (voiced and animated by puppeteer Bill Barretta) as he investigates the mounting homicides among the former cast members of a 1980s puppet TV series, The Happytime Gang.

Phil’s work brings him back in contact with his former LAPD partner, Detective Connie Edwards (Melissa McCarthy). Several years ago, during their time together on the force, they were L.A.’s first human/cop team—and then an unfortunate on-the-job incident made them the last, and cost Phil his badge.

This all sounds like rather serious stuff, and it is—the movie’s basic framework follows traditional, familiar buddy-cop, film-noir formulas, and that’s its comedic setup. Then it puts puppets into it—puppets doing, and saying, the kind of raw, raunchy things “people” would say in R-rated, buddy-cop comedy-action movies.

As Phillips and Edwards weave their way into the city’s seedy puppet underbelly in search of a serial killer, they find a trail of puppet violence—puppets torn apart by dogs, or blasted into fluff by shotgun blasts—and encounter a spectrum of colorfully coarse characters. In the porno shop, Phil sees an octopus pleasuring a cow, and a dominatrix Dalmatian with a guy dressed as a fireman. Druggie puppets addicted to sugar snort pure sucrose in a “smack house.” A sexual tryst between two puppets ends in a…well, let’s just say you may never look at Silly String the same way again.

Elizabeth Banks

Joel McHale plays an uptight FBI agent. Elizabeth Banks is an exotic dancer, and the only non-puppet former member of the Happytime TV cast. Maya Rudolph is Phil’s longtime assistant. Leslie David Baker (Stanley from TV’s The Office) is continually flustered as Edwards’ police lieutenant. Watch for McCarthy’s husband, Ben Falcone, in a quick cameo.

It’s grim and grimy…but it’s also twistedly funny, full of quips, a parade of puppet oddities, crisp one-liners and some caustic comedic sight gags. (Despite the talents of its capable cast, not every joke works, and a couple land with deadening thuds.) Director Brian Henson, the son of late puppeteering pioneer Jim Henson, certainly knows his stuff; he came out of Muppet land and directed the G-rated Muppet Christmas Carol and Muppet Treasure Island flicks.

The movie comes from an “adult” offshoot of the Henson production company, Henson Alternative. The film’s production company was sued, unsuccessfully, earlier this year, by the producers of Sesame Street, to stop The Happytime Murders from using the tagline “No Sesame. All Street.”

No one should worry about anyone being confused about that; the freakish, four-letter funk of Happytime is a long way from the sunshine and smiles of Sesame Street. But the puppeteering expertise is certainly there, as you’ll see in the end-credits montage, which reveals some of the behind-the-scenes moviemaking magic. And many of the film’s richly experienced puppeteers—including the director and Barretta—have pedigrees that extend, in fact, all the way back through The Muppets and Sesame Street.

There are several words you might use to describe what you see. Shocking, tasteless and disgusting could be among them. On the other hand, you might think it’s hilarious, wickedly original and crazily quirky. Comedy is like that, especially when it dares to push toward the edges; some people are going to get pushed off.

But I’m hanging on. I dug the dirty jokes, off-kilter humor and subversive spin on a crazy world with puppets and humans trying to make their way together. It may not be for everybody now, but give it time, and I predict this nasty, naughty novelty will eventually keep adding to its crowd of dig-it devotees.

In theaters Aug. 24, 2018