Florida, Man: BARB & STAR GO TO VISTA DEL MAR

Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar is silly. Just plain silly. They don’t make them this loopy and loony and freewheeling good vibes nonsensical every day. It stars Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, co-writers, too, reuniting ten years after their hilarious Bridesmaids. That movie was a hilarious escalation of comedic scenarios in a conventional character-based way, a look at women’s friendships in a pressure-cooker of milestones. This one is more like an all-human Muppet movie with Austin Powers energy seeping in around the edges. It’s flat-out absurd in every second. Yet, it’s still about women, about best friends navigating aging and life changes. Barb and Star are melodiously accented Nebraskans fired from their jobs at a chain furniture store who decide to shake things up with a trip to a middle-aged paradise resort on the Florida coast. There they both fall in lust with a strapping secret agent (Jamie Dornan) who happens to be working for an underwater supervillain (Wiig in pasty pale makeup and a tragic hairdo) plotting to attack the local shrimp-based beauty pageant with killer mosquitos. So that’s going on, but really it’s just as much about: getting blackout drunk and dancing to a club remix of “My Heart Will Go On,” buying tacky seashell bracelets that are a little too sharp, sneaking out a window onto a pool raft and drifting past your friend practicing her calligraphy on the porch. Wacky developments, goofy voices, random asides, and daffy design abounds, with time for both funny background signs (a dumpy motel advertises “Some TVs”) and colorful dance sequences. (Dornan, freed from Fifty Shades, cuts loose with a ballad he addresses to some random seagulls, the highlight of the picture.) This jumble of nonsense is carried along simply by the strength of the fun the performers themselves seem to be having, a sense of wanting to keep the good times rolling just because everyone involved can effectively communicate just how enjoyable they find their own nonsense. It plays like one of those sui generis oddities — a Hot Rod, or Cabin Boy, or Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion — where comedic voices are given free reign to just do whatever. If you can get even a little bit on the wavelength it’s mostly a blast, even as it starts to wear a little thin in the back half. Wiig and Mumolo are confident enough in their own sense of humor to pull it off.

Down to Earth: WONDER WOMAN 1984

If Wonder Woman 1984 was the first Wonder Woman, I doubt we would’ve gotten a second. I sat stupefied as it got worse by the scene, so fundamentally misunderstanding the appeal of the first movie it made me wonder if that one was actually as good as I thought at the time. I’m sure it is, but, still: imagine everything you enjoyed about the first movie. Now imagine a movie with none of that. It does have Gal Gadot as Diana Prince, the Amazon in exile sworn to save humanity from itself. But this time, instead of a clear line to a distinct villain, she’s fussing around in the margins of an obvious parable. There’s a con man (Pedro Pascal) pretending to be a tycoon with slicked-back blonde hair and garish suits. He wants to steal a magic rock on which he can make wishes. Before he can go full Midas, Diana, in her day job as an anthropologist at the Smithsonian, and a mousy co-worker (Kristen Wiig) make wishes on the rock, not knowing they’d actually come true. For Diana, it means a reunion with her long-dead pilot love (Chris Pine). For the other woman, it means becoming an accidental supervillain. (Isn’t that a Brad Paisley song with LL Cool J? Ha.) So the movie involves Wonder Woman investigating a magic rock. Look, that’s not in and of itself the problem, and anyone who says it is better look long and hard inside themselves about the Infinity Stones. The main issue is mild action sequences which generate no suspense, little energy, and, worse still, no wonder. It loses Diana’s character to a curiously passive and simple plot, which somehow takes the stupidest thin ideas and makes them endlessly confused. Why not just grab hold of the magic for yourself and wish the whole movie's worth of problems reversed, or the movie itself over and done with? We’re ahead of her the whole time. It's not every day you see a fantasy arguing we should all dream a little smaller.

After working so well with epic earnestness of the kind you could find in Richard Donner’s Superman, writer-director Patty Jenkins is here going for a Richard Lester vibe, but she overshoots Superman II and ends up closer to Superman III. It has comedy that falls flat, romance that remains unconvincing (the hoops it jumps to get Pine back never satisfy), and a plot that just never sparks to life. WW84 has enormous events — a huge wall popping up in the middle of Egypt (an unusual tone-deaf sequence), nuclear arsenals accumulating, and improbable global catastrophes in the making — that don’t seem to matter much. It stages a confrontation in the White House, but doesn't have any real interest in 80's politics like it did World War I last time. It has a winking tone that at first is a colorful comic book cartoon — I enjoyed the opening action beats: an Amazonian Warrior Challenge and an 80s mall rescue — but grates quickly. So brightly lit and simply staged, it veers away from playing up the secretive God qualities of its star, and instead leans on her rudimentary action figure qualities. She’s posed and weightless, and so is the story which clunks and clatters along. The villains are introduced as comic relief and never work themselves up to real threats, even when the world is ostensibly on the line. Part of the problem is their plot grows both predictable and takes forever to get anywhere. Jenkins and her team want to try something different, and I can admire the attempt to swing away from a temptation to follow the standard bigger, louder, darker, and more overstuffed superhero sequel template and harken instead back to something more contained, and vaugely Silver Age DC. For how expensive it is, it feels cheap and, though it does some globetrotting, it feels so small. It’s almost literally the version we would’ve gotten in 1984, when the sadly underwhelming likes of Supergirl or Red Sonja were all you had for strong women in capes, and studios weren’t betting an extended universe of interconnected spinoffs on them.

Bad Guy Gone Good: DESPICABLE ME 3

Despicable Me 3 is a bright cartoony machine, the best one in the series since its first installment way back in 2010. For over seven years now, the little yellow slapstick pill Minions (voiced by co-director Pierre Coffin) have been everywhere, helping boss Gru in a sequel and themselves in their spin-off prequel. In the process, the folks at Illumination animation have proved to be pretty good at making these movies (and only these movies, as their grating Secret Life of Pets and Sing show). This new one makes good use of its threadbare Saturday morning adventure comedy appeal, concocting B-plots for supporting characters and giving the lead a couple big problems to sort out in sitcom fashion that allows the colorful slapstick and neat invention to take center stage. There’s nothing groundbreaking or deep about the series, but need there be? It’s goofy, energetic, colorful, and full of funny little touches: ever-expanding bubblegum as a weapon of mass destruction, a secret hideout in a blimp accessible only by a sofa in a fake retirement home, a pig farm mansion concealing a supervillain armory, and a drone fleet of remaindered dolls from a forgotten 80’s oddity. These silly charms are enough to keep the story of a pathetic cartoon villain hanging up his evil ways for fatherly duties coasting on and on.

The plot is so simple. In a fun opening action sequence, new villain Balthazar Bratt (a purple-jumpsuit-wearing, keytar-playing, dance-battle-enjoying doofus voiced by Trey Parker) escapes a flying hijacked freighter before Anti-Villain League operatives Gru (Steve Carell) and Lucy (Kristen Wiig) can stop him. For this failure, they’re fired. Before they can fight to get their jobs back, there is the movie’s other development: Gru’s long lost twin brother, Dru. Apparently, there was a secret Parent-Trap-backstory situation happening here, with Gru’s mother (Julie Andrews) admitting that she got the bad end of the bargain. Gru is invited to take his family to the island nation of Freedonia (a neat reference to the Marx brothers’ fictitious Duck Soup setting) and meet this long-lost bro. No surprise, the guy turns out to be Gru’s opposite: happy-go-lucky, overeager to please, and with a full head of hair. The series’ usual directors and writers here provide Carell an opportunity to continue his pleasant, mushy-mouthed, vaguely-Slavic voice performance’s Peter Sellers’ tendencies in a double role distinguished mostly by how frowny or bubbly he makes any given line reading. Freedonia becomes a silly playground for Gru’s daughters (Miranda Cosgrove, Dana Gaier, and Nev Scharrel) and their small scenes – cute, flimsy stuff involving cheese rituals and unicorn hunts – while the grown-ups run around. You see, Dru is jealous of his brother’s infamy, and Gru hopes to use this to partner up and take down Bratt. Simple as that.

Bouncy 3D cartoon commotion in a slick wide frame moves things along, with heists and chases and all sorts of mad scrambling and shouting (the voice work is energetic and giggly), explosions and engines, and elaborate gadgetry nonsense. Gru and Dru grow closer and further apart depending on the needs of a scene, though it makes a prickly brotherly sense. Bratt is a fun new villain, bopping to 80’s tunes and plotting with his chintzy robot sidekick from his lair: a deep-sea tower surrounded by poisonous spikes and guarded by rockets stored in a giant Rubik’s cube. Lucy gets short shrift most of the time, but she has a pleasant motivation to gain her new adopted daughters’ trust. Best, of course, are the Minions, babbling away in their own plotline most of the way through, having resigned to find a more despicable boss. (They remain as preposterously hilarious as ever, waddling and squabbling and getting the brunt of the wackiest violence.) In the end, the variety of subplots converge in a fast-paced action climax where lessons are learned, loyalties confirmed, trust earned, and everything is in its place for a sentimental finale with a door wide open for more. It’s all hectic set-pieces and quick gags, one after the other, lined up for minimum downtime and maximum zany distraction. There’s nothing to it but skillfully empty colorful entertainment. That’s good enough, the series approaching exactly the sort of comforting rhythms and agreeable form of any other reasonably diverting Saturday morning cartoon. Forget the popcorn. I bet it pairs best with a huge bowl of Frosted Flakes.

The Heist Guys: MASTERMINDS

Inevitably, the best part of any Jared Hess movie is whatever The New Yorker’s Richard Brody writes about it. Brody is the film critic most on Hess’s wavelength, able to enjoy his films’ fussy eccentricity, aloof absurdism, and reliance on characters who are stumbling stupid dopes. I look forward to reading Brody’s takes because, aside from the fact he’s a terrific writer worth reading even if you disagree with his position, I wish these movies worked on me like they do him. From the outside, they seem fun, with goofy premises and promising casts of talented performers. There’s his 2004 Napoleon Dynamite, the surprise hit about a gawky high school nerd, and Nacho Libre, with Jack Black as a monk moonlighting as a luchador. His best, though still uneven and hard to hang with for their entirety, are Gentlemen Broncos, in which Jemaine Clement plays a pompous sci-fi author, and Don Verdean, starring Sam Rockwell as a fraud Christian archeologist. These all sound like fun movies, but I always watch them slightly perplexed, delighting anytime a rare laugh surfaces. In Hess’s style the humor is often hermetically sealed in a signal my brain can only intermittently pick up.

Hess’s latest is Masterminds, a movie about a group of dim schemers who attempt to pull off a massive heist and then flail around in its aftermath. It’s based on a true story, loosely I hope. If you ever in your life find yourself in a situation so bad you look around and think to yourself, “this could be a Jared Hess movie,” something has gone terribly wrong for you. The characters here are all sad members of the working poor, and the movie’s perspective is aggressively condescending and dismissive. They work minimum wage jobs, live in trailers, and shop at big box discount chains, and Hess shoots every scene to emphasize the grotesque, the tacky, the pitiable. There’s not an ounce of empathy or sympathy in the film’s mocking construction or approach, desperate people willing to do dire things for dumb reasons squirming under pressure for our amusement. Of course a movie could theoretically get away with being cruel or mercilessly satirical, but not one so purposeless as this. It’s only out to deride and denigrate, looking down its nose in heartless smirking scorn.

At least the talented performers are bright enough to sneak in some endearing, even amusing, touches now and then. They try, anyway. Zach Galifianakis is an awkward armored car driver head over heels for his shift partner (Kristen Wiig). When her dumb friend (Owen Wilson) asks her to seduce the sap into stealing $17 million in cash from the warehouse after hours, she’s willing to go along with it. The driver doesn’t know he’s being duped, and that the woman he thinks he’s colluding with in heist and in love is never going to go on the run with him. He’d be better off staying home, following the law, and marrying his creepy fiancé (Kate McKinnon). Alas, the heist goes off and goes wrong, drawing the dogged pursuit of a weary FBI agent (Leslie Jones) and a wacky hit man (Jason Sudeikis). The plot is rigged against them all – and there’s something extra squirm-worthy to consider the real people in the real story seeing themselves presented in such a funhouse-mirror farce – but the actors involved scrape out enough eccentric line readings to make it seem like a comedy.

Remarkably low-energy and scattershot, the movie slowly grinds to its conclusion through increasingly broad and mind-numbingly exaggerated silliness involving kidnappings, death threats, disguises, stupid mistakes, lazy coincidences, and strained stakes. Hess doesn’t take advantage of the inherent comedy of his cast or concept. Instead it drains into gross out gags – a gooey bit about biting into a tarantula is so puss-filled it made me gag – and preposterous developments – like a hit man easily tricked into thinking a man with his stolen birth certificate is, in fact, a long-lost crib mate. It’s not heightened so much as artificial, with shallow, static framing always straining for oddball intent with claustrophobic fussiness and flat affect instead of coming by its weirdness naturally. Maybe there’s some way to understand the movie’s creative spark or unusual perspective, but I can’t find it. Aside from a few promising flickers here and there, the whole thing plays out like dead air to me. I left scratching my head, completely unaffected, a little repulsed, more than a little annoyed, and eager to see what Richard Brody had to say about all this.

Food Poisoning: SAUSAGE PARTY

The sheer number of CG animated movies about anthropomorphized animals and objects, from Pixar on down to their lowliest imitators, leaves an opening ripe for parody. Enter Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (co-writers on the likes of Pineapple Express and This is the End) with the idea to go hard-R on the Pixar formula. In Sausage Party they imagine the world of a grocery store from a food’s-eye view. The cartoon products sing an Alan Menken song about how much they wish to get purchased and live forever with their gods (us) in the Great Beyond. Little do they know certain death and digestion await. It’s a funny idea, and mostly follows through to its logical conclusions. But in pitching the humor they go too high and too low, reveling in an allegorical approach that’s a cockeyed consideration of religion and mortality, and in a nonstop barrage of four-letter words and innuendoes. The manic pace hammers away nuance with glee, and the execution grows thin, repetitive, and one-note awfully quickly.

It starts with the idea that the store is split up into its own little countries, each aisle organized around racial and cultural stereotypes of their respective cuisines. The only thing that brings them all together is worship of the shoppers. But when a hot dog (Seth Rogen) gets a hint about the truth of what sits beyond the sliding doors, he’s desperate to get proof and bring a nihilistic, hedonistic brand of atheism back to his brethren. He and his hot dog bun lover (Kristen Wiig) get lost in a tragic shopping cart accident shot like the opening of Saving Private Ryan, with a ripped open ramen cup trying to stuff his noodles back in, a jar of peanut butter weeping over spilled jam, and a banana with its face slowly peeling off. That’s a fun bit of inspiration, but the movie grows repetitively insulting as it winds its way through nonstop ethnic jokes. The hot dog and his bun-to-be, who are waiting until after purchase to get together (there’s no buns- or sausage-related innuendo that goes unspoken), wander through the store looking to get back to their aisle. Each stop on the way brings them into contact with an endlessly condescending parade of stereotypes and racial humor.

The Mexican foods (including a lesbian taco voiced by Salma Hayek) drink all day and follow secret tunnels to better lives. The Chinese foods speak in exaggerated rolling Ls and Rs. The German food wants to eliminate all the juice. The Middle Eastern lavash (David Krumholtz) feuds with a bagel (Edward Norton doing a Woody Allen impression) he thinks is unfairly settling in his aisle. The fruits are lilting lispers. The grits (Craig Robinson) is a blaxploitation gangster. The firewater (Bill Hader) is a Native American whose every appearance is signaled with an eagle’s cry. It’s a pileup of the worst kinds of tiring wink-wink racism and prejudice in pursuit of anti-racism and cross-demographic understanding. It’s so wearing, asked to laugh again and again at this sort of thing as the movie demands to feel like it’s okay because it reaches the right conclusions. Rogen and Goldberg (writing with The Night Before’s Kyle Hunter and Ariel Shaffir) want to make a filthy adult comedy that parodies the style of the CG kids’ movie while still having a clear moral message. In other words, it’s an adults-only kids’ movie, and every bit as juvenile, wrongheaded, and infantilizing as that sounds.

The movie remains on a fairly obvious level, relying on the shock value of hearing cartoon characters swear, get violent, and express sexual urges. (Anyone who thinks that’s a new idea should talk to Ralph Bakshi.) The thing is, the writers have imagined a funny world and have an interesting perspective. They have plenty of smile-worthy puns that go down easy. Why insist on such a barrage of cynical cheap shots? Other distasteful ingredients include swipes at the disabled (consider the plight of a deformed sausage (Michael Cera) whose only soul mate can be a smushed bun) and a scene in which a feminine hygiene product (Nick Kroll) sexually assaults a juice box. (You read that correctly. That happens.) Sausage Party crosses the line, not because it wants to make an R-rated animated movie, but because it allows itself license to push further than it should with such touchy material. That it’s sometimes funny, and tethered to a surreal premise, doesn’t alleviate its uglier impulses.

Directing this perverse sledgehammer to propriety are veterans of CG family films Conrad Vernon (of a variety of DreamWorks features like Madagascar 3) and Greg Tiernan (of Thomas the Tank Engine products). They clearly relish cooking up the movie’s crass and disgusting surprises, but it’s also clearly done on the cheap. The character designs are all slightly off, not just the ugly food, but the stiff and wobbly humans lumbering over them as well. The sets and locations appear Saturday-morning simple and crude. It’s just not quite right every step of the way, in every way. It has a fine setup and some truly jaw-dropping final moments staggeringly inappropriate and in many ways inexplicable, but at least relatively non-toxic – a massive pansexual free-for-all followed by a surprising smashing of the fourth wall – compared to what comes before. But by that point the movie’s been such an obvious, overdetermined, obnoxious slog, it’s hard to cook up much interest.

Feels Like Taking Crazy Pills: ZOOLANDER 2

You have to be a smart filmmaker to make something so gloriously dumb. Fifteen years after directing, co-writing, and starring in Zoolander, a featherlight and endearingly silly cult comedy about a dim male model caught up in an assassination plot, Ben Stiller has revived his character for a sequel that’s bigger, louder, and dumber. It’s uneven and unnecessary, and takes some time to really get going. But it’s also an admirable sustained effort of Hollywood money and craftsmanship put towards utter nonsense. Absurd and unusual, Stiller strains the limits of the studio comedy for completely unsubstantial goofing around with a ridiculously good-looking and totally preposterous premise. Is it a good movie? That’s hard to say. It barely hangs together at times, overstuffed with story and unconcerned with anything but a wobbly weirdness. But who says it has to be any more than that?

The movie finds Zoolander retired, living, as he puts it, “as a hermit crab” in the remote wintry wilderness of northernmost New Jersey. We’re told in a blitz of fake news footage that shortly after the first movie his wife was killed and his son was taken away by child services. That’s awfully heavy backstory to ladle on such a frivolous film, especially paired with a strange sideways 9/11 reference. But then Billy Zane (playing himself) treks out to convince Zoolander to start modeling again and win back his son from the orphanage. This kicks off an overflowing movie that’s in addition concerned with Zoolander’s equally dim old rival Hansel (Owen Wilson), who has also been retired for over a decade, nursing anxiety over a facial scar and a complicated polyamorous romance with a dozen people, including surprising celebrities and a handful of random people (my favorite: a chimney sweep who lingers in the background of shots). He agrees to join Zoolander on the quest to be relevant in the modeling world once again.

Together they encounter a whole mess of plot. There are professional frustrations with a hotshot hipster designer (Kyle Mooney, hilariously affecting dopey mispronunciations and fumbling confidence), a conniving Italian fashion mogul (Kristen Wiig, wearing Lady Gaga gowns and adding three extra syllables to every word), a suspicious orphanage manager (Justin Theroux, with a powdered George Washington wig slapped on top of dreadlocks), and the looming threat of old villain Mugatu (Will Ferrell, deliriously and wildly campy). There’s also an Interpol agent (Penélope Cruz) investigating the mysterious murders of several pop stars (including Justin Bieber, in a cameo that’s 90% stunt double which serves as the film’s violent cold open) and a search for the Fountain of Youth. There’s a lot going on. The movie feeds exaggerated excesses of the fashion industry into a glossy spy movie’s extremes, inane ornate designs mixed with thundering score, concussive transitions, and a hurtling tangle of conspiracies.

A key early mistake is assuming we care about Zoolander and Hansel as characters, but by the time the plot’s spinning on its crazy way, the movie itself has forgotten that it ever even feinted towards taking any emotional underpinning at anything close to face value. Even as the subplot involving the long-lost son becomes the best part, Stiller knows this is all totally unserious, an elaborate goof. He, with co-writers Theroux, Nicholas Stoller, and John Hamburg, create a reason to stuff the film chockablock with innuendos, misunderstandings, malapropisms, sight gags, cameos, baroquely offbeat production design, wackadoodle characterizations, and more than a few baffling decisions (like making Fred Armisen play a freakish, mostly CGI 11-year-old for one scene). Cinematographer Dan Mindel (of The Force Awakens and other fantastical action films) gives it all a shiny thriller gloss and bright comedy sheen, playing up every absurd detail with a grainy poker face.

Stiller simply lets the unexpected striking nonsense flow. There’s a scene late in the picture where a boy is locked in a clown-themed dungeon with a giant plastic pig face on the wall drizzling lard out of its snout. Elsewhere a car flips over a dozen more times than you’d expect. A former swimsuit model explains she became a secret agent because her large breasts prevented her from graduating to runway work. A ghost serenely explains that she doesn’t care about anything anymore, because she’s dead. A long-secret connection between male models and rock stars is revealed by a music legend who patiently says they’re only separated by two genes (talent and intelligence). Not every joke lands. (An extended bit with Benedict Cumberbatch as a gender fluid model is cringe-worthy.) But with a movie this densely dizzy with oddball ideas loosely held together by a flimsy plot, it’s a pleasure just to be along for the ride. I had a big dumb grin while waiting to see what insubstantial surprise silliness was around the next corner.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars: THE MARTIAN

Remember the great scene in Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 where, desperate to find a way to save stranded astronauts in a failing spaceship, NASA engineers are presented with a box of spare parts and told to figure out how those fit together as a makeshift solution? The Martian is that scene for over two hours. In its opening sequence the first astronauts on Mars evacuate the planet during a sandstorm that knocks one of their crewmates off the medical signals and into the deadly dusty darkness. They think he’s dead and leave him behind, where he wakes up alone and afraid with a desolate lifeless planet all to himself. He has to find a way to make 60 days worth of supplies last up to four years, the time it could take to get someone back to pick him up. And that’s only if he can make contact with Earth sooner rather than later.

It’s a surprisingly absorbing experience to watch one man think his way through complicated story problems. Sure, it’s the sort of mystery that’s impossible to think through faster than the characters on screen. But there’s a certain convincing popcorn logic to the whole string of science thought experiments presented for our Robinson Crusoe on Mars in a relatively hard sci-fi premise. No alien twists or sudden water-filled oasis on the horizon, he can only stay in the pressurized makeshift lab or wander out with his spacesuit to scavenge whatever mechanical bits he can to make his unexpected extended stay survivable. Though it wouldn’t be hard to root for anyone’s survival in that situation, it helps that he’s played by Matt Damon, a likable enough presence on screen, equivalent to stranding peak James Stewart or Tom Hanks. He’s corn-fed Americana aw-shucks smart, putting one foot in front of the other.

We watch as he tries to power his life support systems, grow crops, and phone home. Back on Earth his NASA colleagues (Jeff Daniels, Kristen Wiig, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Mackenzie Davis, Sean Bean, Donald Glover) quickly notice movement in satellite photos and start working on ways to get in touch, and get him back. In between are his traveling crewmates (Jessica Chastain, Michael Peña, Kate Mara, Sebastian Stan, Aksel Hennie), unaware the man they’re mourning is alive and might be calling on them to help, too. All those actors are great, believable in their competence and drive, with great timing delivering complicated dialogue. It’s one of those big Hollywood ensembles where the characters are the sum total of their job descriptions (their titles pop up on screen at each intro) and the recognizable faces are meant to fill in the unspoken rest. No one has time for backstory, personal problems, or emotional appeals. There’s not even a token villain. It’s all can-do cooperation and high-stakes business.

I’m sure the armchair rocket scientists in the crowd could still quibble with the results, but at least the filmmakers have a nuts and bolts commitment to showing their work. The characters walk through each new option or development with lots of technobabble patter and math lab/science center jargon, talking through variables, calculations, and equations, triangulating timetables and press releases while weighing the needs of the many with the needs of the few. This could be dull, especially in the relentless exposition and talky narration cutting down on potential poetry of space flight and lonely unearthly vistas of red-tinted desert. But what makes it work is the crisp tick tock editing, cutting for suspense and propulsion between people crowding around computers and white boards and the lonely plight of the one man they’re mobilizing brainpower to save.

Drew Goddard (Cabin in the Woods) has adapted Andy Weir’s book into a screenplay balancing determined problem solving, often clever and surprising, with a mild but charming wit cutting through the heavy material. It’s not glib banter. It’s the light needling and gallows humor of serious smart people who are good at their jobs, but feeling the pressure. It plays into director Ridley Scott’s interest in world building, process, data displays, and men on missions, allowing him to turn this Cast Away meets Gravity by way of Randall Munroe's What If? into something his own, an easily tense space survival story, even if the end is not once in doubt. The Martian has some visual overlap with his Alien/Prometheus world in cinematographer Dariusz Wolski’s unfussy 3D views of production designer Arthur Max’s functional worn-down tech and austere sand-swept Mars terrain. But Scott also has relaxed fun with it, making amusing tension out of, say, Damon struggling to duct tape a depressurizing suit shut, or finding room for a fun disco soundtrack. It’s an efficient and entertaining workmanlike brainteaser of a movie.

In Treatment: WELCOME TO ME

With its central recurring tragicomic setpieces taking the form of a deeply strange local access talk show, the Kristen Wiig-starring Welcome to Me recalls SNL sketches where she’d play a televised oddball attention seeker. Unlike that series’ endless iterations of the cracked talk show concept, this film deepens the emotional terrain and provides context tying the laughs to melancholy and sadness. It’s a small character study brushing up against eccentric details, but never losing a central thread of depression and pain. It’s funny, but in the cringingly awkward way an unexpected inappropriate comment punctures empty moments. The movie is appealingly uneasy.

Never let it be said Wiig plays it safe with her choice of roles. Here she’s a woman with borderline personality disorder who goes off her meds after winning millions in the lottery. Against the advice of her therapist (Tim Robbins), best friend (Linda Cardellini), and parents (Joyce Hiller Piven and Jack Wallace), she cuts a check to a tiny nearby TV station, buying airtime on which she demands to star in her own daytime program. Oprah-obsessed, she imperfectly models her show on her idol’s. Clearly enjoying the cult-of-personality aspects above all else, she creates a show with no interviews or topics. Instead, she only discusses herself. It’s a warped reflection of any social media feed you might encounter, or any string of comments below any article, where you slowly realize the person behind the messages is deeply troubled.

The results are a program that’s a stilted mess of naked neurosis and narcissism, clearly the product of a disturbed mind, and strangely compelling because of it. She uses the airwaves as her own personal therapy session, much to the confusion of the station’s managers (Wes Bentley, James Marsden, and Joan Cusack), who continue cashing her checks, the only thing keeping them out of bankruptcy. The show, also called Welcome to Me, features a woman exorcising her past amongst rudimentary graphics, mannered reenactments by confused day players, stretches of silence, crying jags, cooking demonstrations, and rides across the stage in a swan boat. It’s a close, psychologically complex, cousin of the Tim & Eric aesthetic. Of course it would generate a cult following, from baffled channel surfers and an overeager grad student (Thomas Mann) hungry for more.

Her show, and the performance that comes with it, is the source of the movie’s appeal, crafting a painful vision of a woman for whom personal validation is inextricably tied to a desire to be on TV. (If that’s not a comment on our current media landscape, I don’t know what is.) Beyond it, director Shira Piven and screenwriter Eliot Laurence have created a small world, but a consistently compelling one. Under bright, flat cinematography, Wiig shows off a range of hilarious and heartbreaking line readings which are always firmly rooted in a good sense of character, especially as the woman increasingly disappears up her own unmedicated ego in bizarre and elaborate episodes. Relationships beyond the studio setting are perfunctory indie dramedy fare turned slightly unsettled by the context. But they take a backseat to the show-within-the-movie. It builds in complexity and heart with each repetition, drawing difficult emotional reactions from what could’ve easily tipped over into stiff camp.

Often queasily hilarious, this story of a woman struggling with mental illness is still treated just soberly enough to not feel mean-spirited. Even when she is making self-destructive decisions, or exploited by those who should know better, her plight is treated with empathy and understanding. At best, it’s a comic character study so unusually sharp it draws tears, but retains a layer of artificiality keeping the proceedings vaguely humorous. Because we see the person behind the show, it’s both funny and painful. Like her cult following, I found myself hanging on every word while she’s on the air. The film doesn’t come to any sort of satisfying resolution and many subplots fall flat, but it’s Wiig’s memorable character, and the core of cringe comedy respectfully played, that sticks with me. The show’s warbling theme song still echoes in my brain.

High-Flying Adventure: HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON 2

Like all good fantasy sequels, Dreamworks Animation’s How to Train Your Dragon 2 takes the world its predecessor built and expands upon it. The first film introduced us to the tiny island of Berk where a village of Vikings lived to fight off dragons preying on their flocks of sheep. It followed Hiccup (Jay Baruchel), the shrimpy son of the leader (Gerard Butler), as he learned dragons aren’t so bad once you get to know them. By the end, he’d trained a fierce and adorable one he named Toothless as a pet and saved his village from destruction in the process. Now, as the sequel starts, the village lives in peace with the dragons, having realized they’re lovable, loyal, useful animals. There’s no conflict there, so the movie pushes forward, opening five years later on Hiccup and Toothless flying out over the ocean exploring new islands and finding new species. When they land on what is to them uncharted territory, he takes out his hand-drawn map and adds a new page, as fitting a symbol for the start of a new chapter as any.

Writer and director Dean DeBlois, who served as co-writer and co-director with Chris Sanders on the first film, takes the light boy’s adventure and enriches it by foregrounding the boy’s evolution into a man and bringing the cast of background characters more clearly into focus. While struggling with his status as heir, Hiccup, now taller, more toned, and with a touch of stubble on his chin, is drawn into conflict. First, he runs into dragon trappers, led by a hunky, ambiguously bad guy voiced by Game of Throne’s Kit Harington. They’re mercilessly poaching the majestic beasts. But that’s merely prelude to bigger trouble care of a distant warlord (a growling Djimon Hounsou) who threatens hostilities with his army of captive dragons. With a name like Drago Bludvist, pronounced “blood-fist,” he’s born to be bad. Riding out to help quell this new conflict are Hiccup’s father, as well as a likable ragtag band of villagers (America Ferrera, Craig Ferguson, Jonah Hill, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, T.J. Miller, and Kristen Wiig) who last time were background color, but this time come into focus as their own distinct characters with subplots and emotional throughlines. 

The first time around, the dragon training was a highlight, a boy-and-his-dog dynamic between a scrawny teen and a jet black, bat-winged, puppy-dog-eyed salamander. Never better than when in flight, the 3D animation dipped and spun with immediacy and vertiginous beauty. It was a thrill. This time, the thrill comes not just from that relationship and the dragon flying, which is as nicely and excitingly rendered as before, but also in the conflicts complicating this fantasy world. The threatened destruction is at a higher magnitude, the characters have more at stake, and the scale towers over them with subwoofer-rattling rumblings. New dragons include a skyscraper-sized alpha beastie that breathes icy breath leaving jagged icicles in its wake. The damage to dragons is also more personal. The introduction of a mysterious figure in the wild, a protector of dragons (Cate Blanchett) who unlocks further secrets of the species, finds time to highlight sliced wings and missing limbs, the result of near-misses with hunters. There’s an ecological weight to this film, a sorrow and responsibility.

The dragon protector has an important connection to Hiccup and much to teach him. The way the plot unfolds finds surprisingly rich emotions to tap into as their relationship is fully explained. The scene where this woman meets Hiccup’s father is astonishing in its tenderness and maturity. It could’ve gone in many big ways – tearful, scary, or regretful – but instead goes for a hushed whisper and a sweet folk song. The film is all about surprising with those kinds of scenes. An early moment between Hiccup and his love interest has a loose conversational quality as they flirtatiously tease each other. A late turn that deepens and darkens the relationship between boy and dragon is unsettling and a real shock, making the resolution all the more stirring. There’s seriousness to the storytelling here that respects both the fun of its colorful fantasy and the emotional lives of its characters.

It’s a movie about responsibility, aging, death, abandonment, and environmental destruction. You know, for kids! It’s bright, vibrant, has a soaring score and rousing action. But there’s a melancholy beneath that’s unexpected in its gravity. I appreciated how respectful of its audience the film is, unwilling to talk down to children and not feeling the need to stretch for adult attention. It’s simply a good story told well. And that’s more than enough to captivate. The animation is gorgeous, digital-painterly tableaus of fantasy landscapes and fluid character movement. The images within stir the imagination. A swarm of dragons flutters about like a flock of birds. Rising slowly and silently out of the clouds, a lone rider wearing a horned mask and carrying a rattling staff, sits atop a massive creature. A boy flies his dragon into the wild, and returns something closer to a man. It’s a terrific, exciting, involving adventure told with great feeling and a good eye.

Dream On: THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is an ode to manufactured uplift and insta-insight. Loosely extrapolated from James Thurber’s short story of the same name by screenwriter Steve Conrad of The Weather Man and The Pursuit of Happyness, this is another of his stories about an everyman who finds his employment or lack thereof not providing enough fulfillments. It’s something of a parable about getting the courage to live your dreams, travelling the world to find you had what you needed inside you all along. Directed by and starring Ben Stiller, the film follows him as Walter, the man of the title. He’s dedicated to helping his elderly mother (Shirley MacLaine) and to his job keeping track of the original negatives of every photo for Life magazine. Unfortunately, a mixture of personality and circumstance has found his dream of travelling the world and having experiences beyond the cubicle long forgotten. He’s like George Bailey without all those wonderful life moments an angel could show him. Walter Mitty wants more, retreating into his mind for daydreams of grandeur, of saying the right thing or saving the day. Alas, they aren’t to be. Yet.

For the swooping sentimental arc of Conrad’s screenplay to fully take off, events conspire to push Walter out of his comfort zone. The magazine is in the process of shutting down, led by a jerk manager (Adam Scott) who sneers at the employees with contempt as he pushes them out the door, managing their livelihood’s transition to a web-only all-digital format that needs only a skeleton crew to manage. Their best field photographer (Sean Penn) sends a roll of film, designating a particular shot as the perfect one to grace the final print cover. When Walter looks through the photos, the one he needs is missing. Getting up the courage to ask the co-worker he has a crush on (Kristen Wiig) to help him track down the photographer's next dangerous photo shoot, Walter decides to throw himself into solving this particular mystery of the missing cover photo. Why? He just does. It’s a prefab situation ripe with symbolic import that pushes him out the door, following clues to their globetrotting destinations.

Stiller’s direction – fussily composed with impressive formal control – has faint echoes of Wes Anderson and, fainter still, Jacques Tati, as he builds a world of modern architecture and office spaces that are totally ordered and closing in. Walter’s daydreams, on the other hand, are glossy Hollywood dreams in which he becomes a quipping comedy star ready with a comeback, a rugged lover clambering down a mountain to the woman he wants to woo, or a superhero smashing down the city streets after his nemesis. More than once he’s told he has great imagination. Maybe so, but he could also just watch a lot of movies. By the time he’s out in the real world, the picture takes on a shiny widescreen postcard look, soaring over mountain ranges and ocean waves, finding Walter as a small piece of big world, small in big frames and vast vistas.

It’s all so gently sentimental as the self-help mysticism of living his dreams of adventuring helps him to become his best self. And yet it all feels so artificial and contrived, a perfect closed system of a film studded with obvious turns of the gears and pulls of the strings. I could see every payoff clearly with each setup, no matter how lovingly photographed by cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh. It’s a gorgeously composed film that’s suffocating in its surface beauty. Each step of his journey feels preordained and carefully composed in a way that doesn’t match the gathering of courage necessary to take such a journey. Here, obstacles –sharks, volcanoes, warlords, drunken helicopter pilots – aren’t so much something to overcome as Hollywood spectacle to experience.

Perhaps there isn’t enough differentiation between his daydreams and his real world, after all. Sure, he’s not really leaping out of a skyscraper with newfound super-strength, as he imagines at one point. But I’m not sure how the Walter we meet becomes a guy who can climb enormous mountains all on his own. Maybe the filmmakers sympathized so greatly they couldn’t help but want to push Walter along and see his character arc through. I can hardly blame them. Stiller brings a sympathetic nuance to the man’s personality, a kind of hunched tentativeness that’s easy enough to relate with. The perfection of his self-improvement narrative is almost how he’d dream it. But the film dare not suggest such a possibility. Where the film goes wrong is erring on the side of too much earnestness, a fuzzy and warm belief in the power of sentimental uplift to do good to the soul. It’s a comfortable erring, but one that feels a little empty all the same.