Jumanji (1995): adapted from the Chris Van Allsburg book by Chris Van Allsburg, Greg Taylor, Jim Strain, and Jonathan Hensleigh; directed by Joe Johnston; starring Robin Williams (Adult Alan Parrish), Jonathan Hyde (Van Pelt/ Alan's Dad), Kirsten Dunst (Judy Shepherd), Bradley Pierce (Peter Shepherd), Bonnie Hunt (Adult Sarah Whittle), Bebe Neuwirth Nora Shepherd), David Hyde Pierce (Carl), Adam Hann Byrd (Young Alan), and Laura Bell Bundy (Young Sarah):
Jumanji imagines its tale of a magical board game along the lines of any number of 'Forbidden Tome' horror stories over the decades. The movie may be seriocomic and star Robin Williams, but Jumanji the game is pretty horrifying for much of the movie's narrative.
Jumanji's ground-breaking CGI looks terrible now, far worse than most stop-motion animation of decades past. The monkeys are especially terrible. But the movie, riffing on the Necronomicon and It's a Wonderful Life in equal measure, remains something of a curious hybrid of comedy and horror. Robin Williams is given almost nothing to work with comically; his desperate, traumatized character is one of his finest non-comic performances, delivered here in the midst of what should be comedy.
Director Joe Johnston (The Rocketeer, Captain America: The First Avenger, and a lot of work on Spielberg movies) works some shocks into the material, though it really feels like this should have been set in the 1930's to play to his (period) strengths. A young Kirsten Dunst and Bradley Pierce are mostly non-annoying children; Bonnie Hunt doesn't have a lot to do. Recommended.
Jumanji: Welcome To the Jungle (2017): adapted from the Chris Van Allsburg book and the 1995 film by Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers, Scott Rosenberg, and Jeff Pinkner; directed by Jake Kasdan; starring Dwayne Johnson/ Alex Wolff (Spencer), Kevin Hart/ Ser'Darius Blain (Fridge), Jack Black/ Madison Iseman (Bethany), Karen Gillan/ Morgan Turner (Martha), Bobby Cannavale (Van Pelt), Rhys Darby (Nigel), and Nick Jonas/ Colin Hanks (Alex):
Genial, light action-comedy sequel of sorts to the 1995 movie about a reality-altering board game. Now the board game is a retro videogame cassette that pulls players into the world of Jumanji rather than vomiting up portions of the game world into the real world depending on the result of a roll of a dice.
Four high-school kids get dumped into the world of Jumanji and transformed into avatars from the game. This allows Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, Karen Gillan, and Kevin Hart to play at teen-aged personalities in adult (and in Black's case, gender-swapped) bodies.
The Rock seems like he's auditioning for that Doc Savage movie that will never come. Things stay light, occasionally clever, and very CGI-heavy throughout. Rhys Darby (Murray on The Flight of the Conchords) appears as an NPC guide; would that there were more of him. Recommended.
Get Hard: written by Adam McKay, Jay Martel, Ian Roberts, and Etan Cohen; directed by Etan Cohen; starring Will Ferrell (James King), Kevin Hart (Darnell), Craig T. Nelson (Martin), and Alison Brie (Alissa) (2015): Jolly farce gets a lot of laughs from a Trading Places-type plot thanks to the fact that leads Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart are genuinely funny. It's not a great movie comedy, but this pairing suggests that a better screenplay could yield something amazing from these two comic actors. Though some thoughtfully written female characters would be nice -- how about adding Melissa McCarthy to the mix? Recommended.
61*: written by Hank Steinberg; directed by Billy Crystal; starring Barry Pepper (Roger Maris), Thomas Jane (Mickey Mantle), Anthony Michael Hall (Whitey Ford), Richard Masur (Milt Kahn), Bruce McGill (Ralph Houk), Jennifer Crystal Foley (Pat Maris), Peter Jacobson (Artie Green), and Donald Moffat (Ford Frick) (2001): Excellent HBO movie about the pursuit of Babe Ruth's single-season home-run record of 60 by Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle of the 1961 New York Yankees. Thomas Jane and Barry Pepper have never been better, while there's a pungent feel to those reporters who are supporting characters -- and who are, with the exception of Richard Masur as Milt Kahn, hostile towards Maris.
Indeed, Maris faced hostility from pretty much everyone. Yankees fans didn't like him because he wasn't a "true" Yankee, as he'd come over in a trade with Kansas City a couple of years earlier. And Yankees fans and reporters loved Mantle. And Maris was a quiet and reserved fellow who didn't like the limelight. Most of the events in the movie are true, though not all occurred in 1961. Bily Crystal's direction seems to get the most out of his actors -- only the occasionally too-bombastic music score is a problem at times. Highly recommended.
Dial 'M' for Murder: adapted by Frederick Knott from his own stage play; directed by Alfred Hitchcock; starring Ray Milland (Tony Wendice); Grace Kelly (Margot Wendice), Robert Cummings (Mark Halliday), John Williams (Chief Inspector Hubbard), and Anthony Dawson (Swann) (1954): Mostly minor Hitchcock has the cast but lacks a top-rate script: if you didn't know it was based on a play, you'd figure it out by the second act. Ray Milland's cunning plan to kill wife Grace Kelly by proxy turns out to have too many moving parts -- or perhaps too few. It's a nice time waster, and all of the leads are fine, including John Williams as an increasingly Columbo-esque English policeman. Originally shown in 3-D, only the repeated establishment of an extreme foreground in most shots overtly acknowledges the process. Lightly recommended.
The Wedding Ringer: written by Jeremy Garelick and Jay Lavender; directed by Jeremy Garelick; starring Kevin Hart (Jimmy Callahan), Josh Gad (Doug Harris), Kaley Cuoco (Gretchen Palmer), and Jorge Garcia (Lurch) (2015): Sloppy but engaging buddy comedy manages to graft the narrative apparatus of a Heist movie onto a wedding scenario. Josh Gad plays a lovable, insanely wealthy tax attorney who has no friends -- not even one to be the Best Man at his wedding. Enter Kevin Hart as a man who sells his services as a Best Man to the friendless. And the services of whatever people he can round up to fill the roles of Gad's imaginary groomsmen, Gad having invented and named those groomsmen and the imaginary Best Man to his fiancee and the wedding planner prior to engaging Hart's services. There are rough spots and sections that fall flat, but overall this is a decent, lightweight comedy buoyed by the charms of both Hart and Gad. Recommended.
The Terminal Beach (1964) by J.G. Ballard, containing the following stories: A Question of Re-Entry (1963); The Drowned Giant (1964); End-Game (1963); The Illuminated Man (1964); The Reptile Enclosure (1963); The Delta at Sunset (1964); The Terminal Beach (1964); Deep End (1961); The Volcano Dances (1964); Billennium (1961); The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon (1964); and The Lost Leonardo (1964).
Icy, engaging collection of early 1960's short stories from J.G. Ballard. Many of the stories are at least nominally science fiction. All of them are Weird, though in several cases this Weirdness is entirely a question of tone: nothing overtly fantastic or science-fictional occurs in five of the twelve stories. Nonetheless, even those stories disturb one enough that they straddle the line between the strange and the horrific.
Ballard was only a couple of years away from his avant-garde, experimental period. None of the stories included here are challenging in a structural sense. Several challenge the reader's perceptions of genre, however, along with one's ability to navigate subjective narration and altered states of consciousness. Ballard's concern with the fragility of the human psyche manifests itself again and again in various ways. So, too, the apocalypse, always observed in a cool and somewhat detached manner by either his narrators or the third-person narrative voice.
But as dry and cool a voice as Ballard can be, behind all those narrative masks exists the mind of an aesthete. The end of the world (if that's what it is) is a hauntingly beautiful place in "The Illuminated Man." Thoughts on art, and the art of Leonardo da Vinci, dominate the quietly horrifying "The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon" and the jolly fantasy "The Lost Leonardo." And a description of the decay of the body of a mysterious giant takes up the bulk of "The Drowned Giant," a description that haunts and troubles even as the story questions the very nature of the fantastic and people's reactions to unusual events.
One could call "The Drowned Giant" a horror story about familiarization and the ever-encroaching Un-fantastic. So too "The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon" and "The Delta at Sunset" with their mentally disturbed narrators seeking an escape into a fantastically distorted hallucination that surpasses the 'real' world in scope and beauty, the same 'real' world that reduces the drowned giant to a debased and dismantled normativity. In all, a fine collection. Highly recommended.
