Jumanji: The Next Level — Droll derring-do

Jumanji: The Next Level (2019) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for fantasy peril, mild suggestive content, and fleeting profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.13.19

This sequel definitely fulfills its mandate: It’s fun, fast-paced and exciting.

Not exactly suspenseful — it’s hard to imagine anything really bad happening to these characters — but nonetheless laden with plenty of Perils of Pauline-style danger.

Having (mostly) survived an attack by a herd of killer ostriches, our heroes — from left,
Mouse Finbar (Kevin Hart), Dr. Smolder Bravestone (Dwayne Johnson), Dr. Shelly
Oberon (Jack Black) and Ruby Roundhouse (Karen Gillan) — contemplate how best to
proceed to their dangerous game's next level.

Jumanji: The Next Level isn’t as fresh as its 2017 predecessor, although writer/director Jake Kasdan — with co-scripter Jeff Pinkner — have made some clever refinements. At just north of two hours, the pacing flags a bit; Kasdan should have let editors Steve Edwards, Mark Helfrich and Tara Timpone tighten things up a bit. (Why else have three editors?)

A few years have passed since small-town New Hampshire teens Spencer (Alex Wolff), Martha (Morgan Turner), Fridge (Ser’Darius Blain) and Bethany (Madison Iseman) “became” fictitious video game avatars in a dangerously haunted old console edition of Jumanji. They survived that adventure — as depicted in the previous film — and have moved on to separate college lives.

Spencer, alas, feels unfulfilled. Juggling classes and a part-time job have worn him down; his long-distance relationship with Martha also has crumbled. Returning to Brantford for a reunion with his three friends leaves him uneasy: a feeling intensified when he discovers that his Grandpa Eddie (Danny DeVito) has become a semi-permanent houseguest, while recovering from hip surgery.

The fact is, Spencer suffers from a syndrome all too familiar to those who’ve survived harrowing, life-or-death experiences; he misses the opportunity to be heroic. He misses the rush.

When Spencer fails to show up for the long-awaited get-together, his friends go looking for him. By coincidence, they find Grandpa Eddie reluctantly hosting a long-estranged friend: Milo (Danny Glover), with whom he once shared a thriving local restaurant business. Martha, Fridge and Bethany are barely inside the door when they hear the characteristic rumbling drums that signal Jumanji-style peril.

Tracing the sound to the basement, they’re shocked to find the malevolent game console … which they all assumed had been destroyed. Worse yet, there’s every indication that it has been re-activated. With Spencer nowhere to be found, the conclusion is inescapable.

The Last Black Man in San Francisco: Heartfelt and compelling

The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated R, for profanity, drug use and brief nudity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.28.19

Identity and serenity are shaped, in great part, by the stability of place.

Somewhere to call home, where one can shelter from life’s trials and tribulations. Where one can relax, and be at peace.

Mont (Jonathan Majors, left), ubiquitous notebook in hand, worries that Jimmie
(Jimmie Fails) has set his expectations too high, when it comes to his desire to care for a
Victorian house that holds a strong personal attachment.

Indie filmmaker Joe Talbot’s impressive feature debut couldn’t be better timed, arriving amid the rising tsunami of national homelessness: particularly acute in California, and at crisis levels in metropolitan regions such as Los Angeles and San Francisco. It seems exceptionally tragic in Baghdad by the Bay, where tent communities and sidewalk derelicts clash so tragically with the romantic atmosphere and storied neighborhoods of a city that has fueled dreams for generations.

The Last Black Man in San Francisco is a deeply moving saga of friendship, fractured families, and the devastating hunger to belong — to stillbelong — in a city that seems to have turned its back on native sons and daughters. Talbot, a fifth-generation San Franciscan, co-wrote the story with best friend Jimmie Fails, drawing heavily on the latter’s actual childhood experiences; the script received an assist from Rob Richert, who teaches filmmaking at San Quentin Prison.

The resulting narrative has a firm sense of atmosphere and “street” that feels absolutely — often painfully — authentic. Talbot also grants his characters an aura of grace and nobility, as they pursue an impossible dream with the stubborn persistence of Don Quixote tilting at windmills. The goal is pure, and eminently righteous; this justifies their struggle to a degree that touches us deeply.

And we sense, almost immediately, that the quest — and its outcome — will be heartbreaking. This is no Hollywood fairy tale.

Jimmie Fails (essentially playing himself) has long been obsessed by the ramshackle, elegant old Victorian home — complete with a distinctive, cone-shaped rooftop known as a “Witch’s Hat” — that his grandfather built long ago, in the heart of San Francisco’s Fillmore District. It was home to Jimmie’s extended family, during the vibrant post-WWII years, when the region was alive with joyously boisterous jazz clubs.

Then Jimmie’s father lost it somehow — details don’t matter — and the family fractured, pushed to various parts of the city’s outskirts. Jimmie remains haunted by the house’s hold on his soul. With best friend Mont (Jonathan Majors) acting as reluctant lookout, Jimmie frequently sneaks onto the property, to touch up some paint trim, or attempt to control the overgrown garden.

Despite the fact that the current owners — white, of course — have repeatedly chased him away.

The Old Man and the Gun: Quite a pistol!

The Old Man and the Gun (2018) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, and too harshly, for fleeting profanity
By Derrick Bang

Right from the start, we’re obviously in the hands of a savvy filmmaker.

It’s not merely the grace and charismatic star wattage with which Robert Redford strolls into the opening scene, although writer/director David Lowery deserves credit for stepping back and letting the 82-year-old actor — his blue eyes still sparkling with charm — carry the moment with the on-screen magnetism that has made him a Hollywood icon for more than half a century.

Having successfully eluded police pursuit after robbing a bank, Forrest Tucker (Robert
Redford) furthers his camouflage as "just a guy" by stopping to help a stranded
motorist (Sissy Spacek).

No, it’s what happens next, when Redford’s Forrest Tucker — having just robbed a bank with the calm, congenial politeness of somebody purchasing a movie theater ticket — hops into his getaway car. Cinematographer Joe Anderson tracks the vehicle as it crisply takes a few corners. Ambient sounds are accompanied by our eavesdropping on police scanner chatter, as all officers are alerted to be on the lookout for a white sedan.

Tucker’s car heads toward the camera, then turns left (our right) and vanishes into some sort of alleyway. Anderson, positioned at the foreground of this city block, slowly pans along the cross-street, momentarily focusing on two children playing. In the background, we hear the sounds of a car stopping, the door opening and closing as somebody exits, a pause, and then another car door opening and closing, and the sound of a different engine roaring into life.

Anderson’s camera slides along and reaches the hard-packed dirt of a vacant lot — all of this having been one continuous shot — just as Tucker bursts onto the street, now driving a fresh vehicle.

Absolutely brilliant use of the cinematic medium.

I settled back, knowing we were in for a treat. Lowery doesn’t disappoint.

The Old Man and the Gun is a mildly — but only mildly — romanticized dramedy based on the audacious life of Forrest Tucker, a career criminal first arrested for car theft in Stuart, Florida, in 1936. He was 15 years old. Over a span of decades that found him in prison as often as out, he ultimately developed a method enhanced by his advancing age, and rehearsed with the care and precision of a Royal Shakespearean actor.

Frightened tellers nonetheless commented on the old guy’s almost apologetic deference, and the fact that he smiled with such equanimity. They practically wanted to help him rob their bank. It was early 1980, and the George Burns/Art Carney crime dramedy Going in Style still was playing in movie theaters. As a result, when police officers in Texas and Oklahoma compared notes regarding a series of similar bank hold-ups, the as-yet-unidentified Tucker was dubbed head of “The Over-the-Hill Gang.”

(Actually, The Over-the-Hill Gang is an occasionally charming 1969 Walter Brennan Western. But I digress.)

Clearly, Tucker’s life was made for the movies. I’m surprised it took so long.

2012: End of days

2012 (2009) • View trailer for 2012
3.5 stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for dramatic intensity, considerable carnage and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.13.09
Buy DVD: 2012 • Buy Blu-Ray: 2012 (Two-Disc Special Edition) [Blu-ray]

Goodness, it's déja vu all over again!

Its modern CGI effects aside, director/co-scripter Roland Emmerich's 2012 is a throwback to the cornball disaster flicks of the early 1970s — think Earthquake and The Towering Inferno, along with a nod to The Poseidon Adventure — and their rigid formulas: stalwart good guys, women and children in peril, grim fates for the sexually adventurous, and B-list actors introduced solely so they can perish after exchanging noble sentiments with each other. ("I've had a good run, son; don't you worry about me.")

This could be the computer-screen from a particularly difficult air-flight-
simulator game, but no: It's actually a rip-snortin' action sequence that finds
five of our central characters -- in the plane -- trying to dodge and climb above
the crumbling Los Angeles high-rises that rather peskily keep threatening to
hit them, during an early sequence in this film.

Bowing to our 21st century demand for bigger and noisier, of course, Emmerich and co-writer Harald Kloser couldn't be satisfied with demolishing a single building or even all of Los Angeles; no, they've got to take out Earth itself.

One wonders what could possibly come next. The destruction of all eight-and-a-half planets in our solar system, along with their various complements of moons?

Familiarity aside, Emmerich orchestrates this mayhem with considerable panache, and 2012 never flags during its bloated 158 minutes. That's pretty impressive, when the explosive money sequences start after a brief introductory half-hour. You'd think it unwise for a film of this nature to lead off with the sinking of California — all together now: "It's San Andreas' fault!" — but Emmerich has plenty of equally bombastic cards left up his sleeve.

Indeed, once beyond the obligatory mayhem and mass destruction, this film evolves into a strong echo of 1951's When Worlds Collide, the solid adaptation of Edwin Balmer's sci-fi novel that wonders how the people of Earth would behave, after learning of the impending arrival of a massive celestial body that will strike and destroy our planet.

Both When Worlds Collide and 2012 subscribe to the hail-fellow-well-met view of humanity: that we will (for the most part) behave virtuously and pull together for the common good, in an effort to save as many people — and as much of our way of life — as possible.

This may be naively optimistic, but it's a helluva lot more entertaining and gratifying than the bleak, every-cannibal-for-himself attitude on display in the upcoming adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

2012 takes its premise from the pseudo-scientific twaddle currently making the rounds, about how the Mayans supposedly predicted a massive celestial event — an alignment of planets and our sun that takes place only once every hundreds of thousands of years — that will destroy life as we know it on Earth.

Translations being what they are, calmer heads tend to believe (if they address this nonsense at all) that the Mayans simply recognized that, as of 2012, it would be time to flip the page and start a new calendar. But hey, that would take all the fun away from the conspiracy wingnuts who stand on street corners and carry those cardboard signs proclaiming that "The end of the world is near" ... a phenomenon that this film acknowledges with a good laugh.