Buzz Blog

The Beanie Bubble **
Anyone who has spent the past 15-plus years enjoying the wildly imaginative music videos for the band OK Go might reasonably be tingly with anticipation over the feature-filmmaking debut by the band's frontman/frequent video director Damian Kulash, Jr. And that makes it even more of a bummer that it continues this year’s weirdest cinematic trend—consumer product origin stories—with far too little unique spark. Kulash and his co-director/spouse/ex-SNL writer Kristin Gore tell the story behind the 1990s Beanie Baby phenomenon and company founder Ty Warner (Zach Galifianakis), told through the eyes of (fictionalized versions of) three key women in his life: initial business partner Robbie (Elizabeth Banks); intern-turned-website guru Maya (Geraldine Viswanathan); and Ty’s fiancée Sheila (Sarah Snook). There’s the germ of an interesting character study in Warner (well-played by Galifianakis, nigh-unrecognizable without his trademark beard), whose narcissistic need for credit and attention sabotages all the relationships in his life, and a few fun pokes at ’90s pop-culture. But with few exceptions—like a montage capturing the volatility of Warner and Robbie’s relationship, set to INXS’s “New Sensation”—there’s hardly anything here to break it out of the conventional visual rhythms of a standard-issue biopic. It’s not funny enough, or insightful enough, or really anything enough to make it feel like there’s anything new to say about flying too close to the capitalist sun. To quote a song whose video has a lot more style than this: Here it goes again. Available July 28 in theaters and via AppleTV+. (R)

Earth Mama ***
There’s a tricky, thin line between honest observation and miserabilism, and writer/director Savannah Leaf negotiates it fairly effectively in this low-key drama. Gia Wilson (Tia Nomore), a 24-year-old pregnant single mother whose two children have been placed in foster care by Child Protective Services, faces financial and personal challenges as she tries to regain custody, leading her to consider whether she should enter into an open adoption for her baby. Leaf doesn’t spend much time exploring the specific circumstances that led to Gia having her children taken away, which puts a thumb on the scale a bit in terms of exploring the fairness of The System. She’s more concerned with Gia as a character dealing with the options in front of her, and Nomore—a first-time screen actor—does terrific work capturing Gia’s prickliness and world-weary realism; she tells a complete story in the way she responds to a question about whether she might go to college with, “I’ve got different dreams now.” And Leaf shows terrific filmmaking instincts in the times she chooses to take Gia’s perspective visions in a fantastical direction, as well as a great early sequence built on Gia’s part-time job at a mall photo studio. Even when some supporting characters and relationships feel a bit thinly fleshed-out, Earth Mama finds a compassionate center in one woman’s struggle to figure out what it looks like to be the best mother she can be. Available July 28 at Broadway Centre Cinemas. (R)

Haunted Mansion **1/2
Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl looks more and more like a unicorn with every other attempt to reverse-engineer theme-park ideas into movies. This second attempt at a Haunted Mansion feature—following, but not in any way related to, the 2003 Eddie Murphy comedy—follows a grieving New Orleans-based physicist named Ben (LaKeith Stanfield) who helps a single mom (Rosario Dawson) and her 9-year-old son (Chase W. Dillon) with the spooks inhabiting their creepy new house. They’re joined in their efforts by a priest (Owen Wilson), a spiritualist (Tiffany Haddish) and a local historian (Danny DeVito), and the cast helps provide some laughs. But while director Justin Simien’s 2020 feature Bad Hair showed his facility for mixing horror with humor, that mix just doesn’t quite work here, especially with Katie Dippold’s script also trying to wrangle genuine human emotion out of the characters’ reaction to loss. And all of that is on top of the obligatory (even if often creative) nods to the Disneyland attraction, including Madame Leota (Jamie Lee Curtis), The Hatbox Ghost (Jared Leto), the stretching room, etc. The Haunted Mansion ride itself went through years of re-imagining to find the right balance between spooky and fun, between a full-fledged narrative and a collection of individually appealing elements. This movie shows just how hard it is to catch that lighting in a bottle, or a head in a crystal ball. Available July 28 in theaters. (PG-13)

Sympathy for the Devil ***
Sometimes you just have to admit to yourself, “It doesn’t entirely matter that this movie isn’t particularly good, because it’s giving me Nicolas Cage at his quintessentially Nicolas Cage-iest.” This mostly-two-hander thriller casts Joel Kinnaman as David Chamberlain, who is on his way to a Las Vegas hospital where his wife is giving birth when he’s carjacked by an unnamed man (Cage). And it soon becomes clear that—at least as far as Cage’s character is concerned—his choice of targets was far from random. What follows from a plot standpoint is fairly familiar, including the various ways David tries to get help from his predicament, like instigating a roadside police stop. But the bottom line is that from the moment Cage appears on screen, in a cardinal-red jacket with hair dyed to match, it’s clear that director Yuval Adler was most likely giving him exactly one direction: “You do you, Nic.” And thus we get Cage strutting in a diner to the jukebox playing Alicia Bridges’ “I Love the Nightlife,” or laying into a story about childhood visits from the Mucus Man where even Kinnaman’s reaction takes suggest “what in the actual fuck is happening right now.” The gunfire and head-butting and Molotov cocktails amp up the gritty vibe, but nothing is more engrossing than the turned-to-11 dynamics of Peak Cage. Available July 28 in theaters and via VOD. (NR)

Talk to Me **1/2
Creating a clear, understandable set of “rules” may not be the most important thing when you’re creating a supernatural horror story, but you can certainly feel the loss of impact when those rules aren’t clear. The Australian filmmaking team of brothers Danny and Michael Philippou introduce us to Mia (Sophie Wilde), one of a group of teenage friends who become fascinated with an embalmed hand that appears to have the ability to invite the spirits of dead souls into a host—with, not surprisingly, potentially terrible consequences. The early scenes are perhaps the most effective, emphasizing the flippancy with which these kids treat their occult dabblings, right up until the point where things go dreadfully wrong. It’s also clear that the Philippous want to connect their premise with—say it all together with me now, horror fans—trauma, more specifically Mia’s ongoing grief over the loss of her mother, possibly to suicide. The problem with Talk to Me as the creepy scenes unfold is that, rather than revealing more about the nature of these possessions, the film actually gets murkier about them. What exactly are these spirits trying to accomplish? Are they deliberately deceiving Mia in the messages they deliver to her, and if so, to what end? There are some fun, unsettling scares throughout the running time, but the notion that it’s heading towards some particular payoff from a character standpoint remains much harder to grab on to than that embalmed hand. Available July 28 in theaters. (R)

Theater Camp ***
The spirit of Christopher Guest’s semi-improvisational faux-documentaries lives again in this expanded version of a short film from the same creative team—including co-directors Nick Lieberman and Molly Gordon, and their co-writers Noah Galvin and Ben Platt—with plenty of enthusiasm but not so many big laughs. At the upstate summer youth-theater camp AdirondACTS, the regular gang of kid campers and their teachers (including Gordon, Platt and Galvin) gather in the shadow of the camp’s founder (Amy Sedaris) being in a coma, with her wannabe-social-media guru son Troy (Jimmy Tatro) trying to fend off foreclosure. When you build a premise that allows for plenty of episodic material, it’s a great blank canvas for jokes, and there are certainly plenty of solid ones built on the unique environment and the sense of both faculty and students feeling like outcasts; one of the best running gags involves a first-time camper boy whose obvious heterosexuality makes him a bit of an outsider. While the cast are all fully committed to the bit, though—particularly Gordon and Platt, playing best friends whose respective artistic goals come into conflict—the result is more often smiles than outright guffaws, and some set-ups that just don’t feel like they fully pay off. The big finale of the camp’s original musical production sends things out on a high note, leaving a pleasantly entertaining lark that wants just a touch more polish. Available July 14 in theaters. (R)