Played Out: A MINECRAFT MOVIE

I was in elementary school when Pokémon: The First Movie was released. It was greeted like Moses returning from the mountaintop on the playground. It was the must-see event of the fall if you were between the ages of 6 and 11. Here was the totemic video game craze of the age at long last on the big screen. That used to be an important sign that your corner of pop cultural awareness had gotten the upgrade in importance. Now it’s just another link in the chain. I remember being a little perplexed by the adults’ reaction to the movie. Why didn’t they agree we needed to be there opening night? And how could the critics syndicated in our local newspaper and on television review programs be so baffled by its premise. The children have to go out into the wilderness to collect the pocket monsters in little laser balls and then have the creatures fight each other to gain points toward evolving them into other iterations of those same critters. What’s not to get? Ah, but of course, I thought as a child then. Now I go into something like A Minecraft Movie and feel a million years old. I get why adults wouldn’t get Pokémon then, because seeing Minecraft threatens to turn me into a humorless scold.

I was a full adult when that video game first booted up and I’ve gained only a passing understanding of its mechanics and lore in the decade-plus since. I thought it was some building game where everything is out of blocks. I’ve been told it’s about creativity or something? Don’t you have to mine for materials and then craft them into buildings or stuff? And there are weird blocky creepers and villagers? Now here’s the movie. It’s a painfully formulaic green-screened fantasy picture with a motley crew of live-action misfits tumbling through a portal and forced to save the animated Minecraft world from an evil pig sorceress who is plotting to shoot a purple beam into the sky. Jack Black stars in a fit of wild-eyed derangement, accompanied by Jason Momoa in a bad Billy “King of Kong” Mitchell wig, Danielle Brooks in a track suit, and a couple kids. They proceed through ostensibly wacky comedy and action in sequences that are basically just levels and puzzles punctuated by exposition. It’s all brightly, flatly lit, totally phony as the characters pose and joke in groaning—or cringe as the kids might say—one-liners.

It’s directed by Jared Hess, he of Napoleon Dynamite, and the whole thing feels like that film’s flat affect, simple blocking, and boundless insincerity yanked into a dull copy of a video game fantasyland. Hess is also surely responsible for its most absurdist touches, like Jennifer Coolidge falling in love with an animated character in an uncomfortable, but brief, couple scenes. The resulting mix is hectic and vulgar and violent—dismembered cartoony zombies lit afire and portly pig henchmen skewered—in a way that’s just barely not PG-13. It oozes irony and innuendo. (A joke about “yearning” to work in “the mines” doesn’t go over as well this week, does it?) And it refuses to do anything seriously other than flatter fans who, in my screening, reacted in cheers to every reference to the games. It’s so empty and awkward and flat, coasting on combative tropes and empty peons to creativity. I felt ancient as I grew discomfited that so many children would be putting this annoyance in their minds.

The Lost World: PRINCESS MONONOKE

Animation master Hayao Miyazaki’s 1997 fantasy epic Princess Mononoke is back in theaters with a beautiful new 4K restoration showing exclusively in IMAX. It’s always a pleasure to be transported into its world of squabbling mortal factions made small in the face of the gods of nature. There’s the noble prince Ashitaka, cursed by a demonic infection, sent into exile to find the root of the disruption to the natural order. There he finds the wild girl San, who lives with the wolves, and is in battle with Lady Eboshi of Irontown for control of the forest. The forces of nature are besieged by the incursion of a burgeoning technological revolution—exemplified by the massive bellows forging iron that’ll make rifles and bullets. What are the wolves and apes and boars to do in the midst of this impending destruction? Conflict draws nearer. There’s also a beatific god of the forest, an elk with the face of a man, who walks on water and wordlessly wanders the woods leaving fresh growth in his wake. He’s endangered by poachers sent from the greedy emperor who has asked for the god’s head. The various factions of man do battle as the needs of industry and the free flow of nature reach a crisis point. In true Miyazaki fashion, all villainy and heroism is brought out in the fullness of complicated humanity, and all gripping action flows with fluid motion and a sense of scale and consequence.

Here is a complicated fantasy vision, effortlessly involving world-building and vividly imagined creatures and places, that unfurls with folkloric earnestness, spiritually engaged and classically structured. It feels like it’s a story that’s always existed. And its every frame reminds us it’s been crafted with human touch. Its hand-drawn spectacle, full of the deep breaths and luxurious pauses, the extra attention to details of wind and ripples and sighs and flinches that bring such richness to Miyazaki’s animation, is an illusion of movement and life given shape and form through the dedicated focus and attention of skilled artists with pen and brush. The characters are memorable, complicated, and lovable. The action is quick and exciting. The tension is gripping, and the detail of the environments are enveloping. And it’s all done in the patient, lovingly drafted images of Miyazaki and his team. This re-release is a good excuse to sit in the dark in front of an enormous screen, surrounded by booming sound, and be reminded of the primal magic of moving drawings. More than even the best CG animation, and certainly more than the pernicious anti-art prompted by technologists who think algorithmic computer programs can entirely replace the minds and efforts of artists, hand-drawn animation is a direct access to our shared humanity, and the wonders of which the human mind is capable. A film like Princess Mononoke will last; dishonest images spat out by a server copying its style won’t.

Princess Protection Program: SNOW WHITE

Disney’s live action Snow White arrives with a blizzard of phony controversy drummed up by the usual bad buzz mongerers. (Those angry influencers who make money off of algorithmically goosed phony fanboy outrage are bad enough. Those harping on the looks or race or progressivism of the lead are extra suspect.) Add that to the understandable doubts about another of its particular kind, as we’re now fifteen spotty years into the company’s project of remaking their animated classics. Look past all that and you’ll see a perfectly okay movie. It certainly doesn’t come close to matching the magic of the 1937 original. What possibly could measure up to one of the early milestones of cinematic history? That film is so stolidly in the canon that it’s practically a museum piece, it’s every note and design a part of the cultural firmament. It’s also still hypnotically magical in its breathing life into drawings, in a robust, fluid way for the first time at a feature length. It pioneered a whole new form of moviemaking. This new one is just a backlot musical with a fine star turn. The cramped sets and CG embellishments are almost quaint in a matte-painting-behind-three-fake-trees way; I wish they’d gone fully there, especially for the dwarfs, who are ghastly digital creations caught uncannily between the classic designs and photo-real monstrosities. That the reworked plot has Snow White also meet a band of seven bandits—played by actual humans—makes the fake guys all the odder a fit. Still, for all the padding with new complications that fall apart like tissue paper if you try to make it lore, it’s been nicely tinkered with to avoid the worst impulses of the other Disney live action remakes.

Under the anonymously proficient direction of Marc Webb, it’s at least not a thoughtless photocopy of the original—in which case, why’d you even see it, a la the 2019 The Lion King. Nor is it a pointless shedding of the original’s iconic charms—in which case, why take out the only reasons to remake it, like the 2020 Mulan. These usually fall in between those two extremes, and White’s just on the right side of the balance. Here she’s given a few new songs from The Greatest Showman’s Pasek and Paul and performed with fresh star power from Rachel Zegler. Her ballad “Waiting on a Wish” is a better “I Want” song than any in recent flop original Disney princess musical Wish. Here her White is a fine blend of sweet naivety and dawning G-rated political consciousness. She’s one of the only performers of her generation who could pull off such sweetly guileless innocence. (The movie also gives her another of what’s becoming a standard Zegler hero shot, like in her Hunger Games, with her leaning into a closeup so her big eyes look bigger and the determination behind her crooked smile gives off a sense of impending catharsis.) The plot gives her more of a confrontation with the Evil Queen (Gal Gadot, whose frictionless shallow villainy is put to smooth use). And there’s some nice ideas about cross-class solidarity against fascism, even if its hashtag-Girl-Boss logic leads to a tacit royalism. Isn’t it always thus with princess problems? Here’s a passable matinee diversion. Disney’s done way worse.

Stylish Substance: PRESENCE and BLACK BAG

The usual haunted house movie is all about how scary it would be to live with a ghost. Here’s one that goes a step further: it’d also be scary to be a ghost. The formal conceit of Steven Soderbergh’s Presence puts us in the ghost’s skittish perspective. The camera is the specter’s point of view. It lurks. It glides. It peers around corners. It eavesdrops on the family drama of the home’s new inhabitants. The mother (Lucy Liu) has looming legal trouble related to her job, the son (Eddy Maday) is a grumpy high school swimmer who is clearly a bit of a bully, the daughter (Callina Liang) is mourning the recent death of a friend, and the father (Chris Sullivan) is just tired of all this stress. Even without a ghost in the house, they’d be a troubled bunch. David Koepp’s screenplay tensely suggests these dilemmas as glimpsed from the haunted perspective. Joining the melodrama to an elliptical telling gives the story an extra eerie frisson. These are convincing, concisely drawn characterizations with a casualness that’s powerfully expressive in the performances. And the style lends all of that extra power as the camera floats and darts and stares and hides. It compounds the tension in interesting ways. It makes the audience lean in to fill in the gaps. And then there’s the additional electricity in seeing a typical ghost story scene in which a sleeping character awakens with a start and stares into a room’s dark corner, clearly sensing the supernatural presence, and seeing the character’s fearful eyes looking directly at us. Have we been spotted? The short movie (not quite 90 minutes) never outstays its welcome as it draws to a fine genre close—a kind of percolating teen drama slowly descending into horror—and takes a few gut-twisting swerves. The final shots pay off both the style and the story simultaneously with a shivering gasp. This is a fine example of playful style matching sturdy function.

Soderbergh is a rare modern Hollywood craftsman whose prolific and consistent sense of play with style only adds to the fine-tuned pleasures of his films. He clearly loves moviemaking, and it enlivens the genres to which he brings his touch. Whether a cheap experiment like Presence or his bigger studio productions, his movies reliably have slick surfaces and crisp editing, an intelligent precision to where he looks and what he sees, expertly calibrated with forward momentum and clever thoughtfulness. They are sensational entertainments serious about class and process and the ways our relationships get tangled up in ambitions and betrayals and systems. So of course Black Bag proves the spy movie works well for his style. He does it with an approach reminiscent of his Ocean’s trilogy. This is similarly a story that’s a nesting doll of intricate, intersecting secret plots done with warm colorful cinematography, a jazzy David Holmes score, clever multi-layered dialogue, and sexy stars outwitting one another. The movie, another scripted by Koepp, has a familiar cat-and-mouse game—a digital-age Le Carré mole hunt—enlivened by a cool, clinical, procedural logic. Husband and wife spies (Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett) host a dinner party for colleagues (Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, and Regé-Jean Page) that’s a cover for rooting out a suspicious character. Turns out each of them could be a suspect, too. Much sneaking and spying and setting traps ensues. Their boss (Pierce Brosnan) swoops in for a handful of scenes that keep the plates spinning, too. It has that pleasing confusion of the best spy stories, and the psychological gamesmanship you’d expect from wrapping it around a marriage. Soderbergh keeps this one short and sweet, too, playing out the setup to a crisp conclusion with a propulsive editing and clinical eye that suitably straightens out the complications with a satisfying snap.

Wild Child: NE ZHA 2

The bright and bouncy animated adventure sequel Ne Zha 2 is far and away the biggest movie of the year so far at the worldwide box office. It’s gotten nearly $2 billion to date, and shows little sign of slowing down. It’s a global crowd-pleaser, with a likable lead character and epic cartoony action that nonetheless knows how to pause to bring down the hammer of emotion. By the time you get to an emotional peak of the climax and find the title character, a little demon boy with a heart of gold, embracing his mother tightly, both of them weeping as they face certain doom in the fiery pit of the villain’s evil plot, it’d be tough to be unmoved. Yet you probably wouldn’t know much about this movie if you relied on the usual American mass media. Aside from some nods from showbiz reporters tallying up the grosses, this hit has gone largely unreviewed. Metacritic logs just two reviews, and Rotten Tomatoes has only aggregated six. That the movie’s nonetheless accumulated nearly $20 million thus far from American multiplexes is a sign that the word is getting out. And yet that it has done so to near silence from the usual sources of English-language criticism is an astonishing example of the provincial timidity of our media as it consolidates its coverage, contracts its scope, and nervously narrows its aims. It’s what Jonathan Rosenbaum was complaining about thirty years ago, the synergistic, parasitic demands of thoroughly corporate studios, media, and exhibitors artificially putting limits on the audience’s interests.

So here’s Ne Zha 2, a delight from beginning to end despite its 144-minute run time. It continues the story of the first picture, which introduced audiences to little Ne Zha, a scamp who looks like the British Dennis the Menace and acts like an anime hero filtered through Moana’s rounded sentimentality and Dreamworks' spiky silliness. He’s fighting his fate, trying desperately to battle the bad and uplift the good. It’s a story settled firmly in a loosely retold cinematic universe of Chinese mythology, and to a typical Western audience it’ll be occasionally baffling. (Try imagining getting dropped into a dense Hercules riff with no prior knowledge of Greek myth.) But writer-director Yang Yu has crafted a movie that moves like Hollywood blockbuster, even as it is so deeply informed by its cultural perspective. There are wars between immortal gods and trickster figures, jade palaces in the clouds, villages endangered by supernatural forces, gurus training students, martial arts, dragons, comic relief, and massive armies preparing for showdowns. It has the peaks and valleys, and twists and catharsis, a movie on this scale should deliver to its popcorn matinee audiences.

It’s satisfying, and easy to want more from its mythology unfurling as a backdrop to a lovable character just trying his best to be his best. The world is imagined well, with colorful complications and elaborate staging. The characters are vividly drawn and immediately appealing—from little Ne Zha to his roly-poly master, his noble parents, his ice-blue dragon-brother, and a big babyfaced deity. The writing is heart-felt and well-crafted to a sturdy family adventure formula, from escalating tension to kiddie humor asides. The action is well-choreographed, and takes advantage of the careening velocity and precision in framing that only a computer-animated sequence can pull off. Watching it, I got the feeling of being a foreigner looking in on something huge on which I’m almost missing out. This must be what international audiences feel watching blockbusters from us. It’s no more a work of Chinese propaganda than Hollywood blockbusters are visions of American hegemony. If you can believe only New York’s superheroes can stop international supervillains, or only a United States-led coalition can stop an alien invasion, you can hang with some Eastern mythology as it's rendered in vivid colors, appealing characters, and agreeable spectacle.

The Voracious Filmgoer's Top Ten Films of 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Nickel Boys

2. Challengers

3. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

4. The Beast

5. Hard Truths

6. Evil Does Not Exist

7. The Brutalist

8. A Real Pain

9. Christmas Eve in Miller's Point

10. Wicked Part 1

 

Honorable Mentions: Anora; Beetlejuice Beetlejuice; Between the Temples; The Book of Clarence; Carry-On; Civil War; Close Your Eyes; Coma; A Complete Unknown; Conclave; Dahomey; Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World; Dune Part Two; The Fall Guy; The First Omen; Ghostlight; God Save Texas: Hometown Prison; His Three Daughters; How to Have Sex; Hundreds of Beavers; I Saw the TV Glow; Janet Planet; Juror #2; Kinds of Kindness; Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes; Kneecap; Last Summer; My Old Ass; No Other Land; The Order; Problemista; Red Rooms; Sing Sing; Smile 2; Soundtrack to a Coup d'État; The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel; The Substance; Thelma; Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl; The Wild Robot; Young Woman and the Sea

 

Other 2024 Bests

Other Bests of 2024

Best Cinematography (Film):

Anora

The Brutalist

The Bikeriders

Kinds of Kindness

Maria

 

Best Cinematography (Digital):

Challengers

Dune Part Two

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Hundreds of Beavers

Nickel Boys 

Best Sound:

The Beast

Challengers

Dune Part Two

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Smile 2

Best Original Score:

The Brutalist

Challengers

Dune Part Two

Saturday Night

The Wild Robot

 

Best Original Song:

"Kiss the Sky" - The Wild Robot

"My Stranger" - Your Monster

"New Brain" - Smile 2

"Release" - Trap

"Starburned and Unkissed" - I Saw the TV Glow 

 

Best Stunts:

Bad Boys: Ride or Die

Dune Part Two

The Fall Guy

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Rebel Ridge

 

Best Costumes:

Challengers

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Smile 2

The Substance

Wicked Part 1

 

Best Hair and Makeup:

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Dune Part Two

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

The Substance

Wicked Part 1

 

Best Set/Art Direction:

The Beast

The Brutalist

Challengers

Christmas Eve in Miller's Point

Janet Planet

 

Best Effects:

Alien: Romulus

Dune Part Two

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Hundreds of Beavers

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

 

Best Editing:

The Beast

The Brutalist

Challengers

Nickel Boys

Soundtrack to a Coup d'État

 

Best Adapted Screenplay:

The Beast

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Last Summer

Nickel Boys

Wicked Part 1

 

Best Original Screenplay:

The Brutalist

Challengers

Evil Does Not Exist

Hard Truths

A Real Pain

 

Best Non-English Language Film:

Close Your Eyes

Coma

Evil Does Not Exist

Last Summer

Red Rooms

 

Best Documentary:

Dahomey

God Save Texas: Hometown Prison

No Other Land

Soundtrack to a Coup d'État

The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel

 

Best Animated Film:

Inside Out 2

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim

Orion and the Dark

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

The Wild Robot

 

Best Supporting Actor:

Yura Borisov - Anora

Kieran Culkin - A Real Pain

Chris Hemsworth - Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Samuel Kircher - Last Summer

George MacKay - The Beast

 

Best Supporting Actress:

Adria Arjona - Hit Man

Michele Austin - Hard Truths

Ariana Grande - Wicked Part 1

Carol Kane - Between the Temples

Zendaya - Dune Part Two

 

Best Actor:

Adrien Brody - The Brutalist

Colman Domingo - Sing Sing

Mike Faist - Challengers

Ralph Fiennes - Conclave

Josh O'Connor - Challengers

 

Best Actress:

Marianne Jean-Baptiste - Hard Truths

Kirsten Dunst - Civil War

Cynthia Erivo - Wicked Part 1

Lea Seydoux - The Beast

Zendaya - Challengers

 

Best Director:

Bertrand Bonello - The Beast

Luca Guadagnino - Challengers

Mike Leigh - Hard Truths

George Miller - Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

RaMell Ross - Nickel Boys