'Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot'

While watching Gus Van Sant’s “Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot,” I wondered what John Callahan, the iconoclastic cartoonist whose life is depicted in it, would think of the whole thing. I sensed, from Callahan’s irascible personality as encapsulated by Joaquin Phoenix’s performance, that he would have had some problems.

Much of the humor in Callahan’s abrasive cartoons, as the movie shows, was aimed at deflating tired stereotypes. So I wonder if Callahan would be irritated the depiction of Callahan’s struggles with alcoholism and quadriplegia are, for all of Phoenix’s acting skill, turned into tepid and familiar movie tropes.  

But, then again, Van Sant and Callahan, both longtime residents of Portland, Ore., were friends, and Van Sant has had the idea of adapting Callahan’s memoir for decades — with, at one point, Robin Williams in the lead. So what do I know?

Van Sant introduces Callahan at three stages in his life. He’s giving similar confessional speeches in two venues: One, before a cheering audience in a lecture hall; the other, to a handful of friends in an Alcoholics Anonymous support group. The third stage is Callahan as a hard-drinking 20-year-old living in southern California, which is where the story really starts.

Van Sant shows the young Callahan bouncing from party to party, drinking constantly. One night, at the age of 21, he goes on a massive bar-hopping bender with a guy named Dexter (Jack Black), which ends in a car crash that severs Callahan’s spinal cord. He wakes up in a hospital, unable to walk and barely able to move his arms. His only solace is Annu (Rooney Mara), a cheery and beautiful hospital volunteer from Sweden.

Still, he finds ways to keep drinking, until he finally enters an AA meeting. He befriends the charismatic Donnie (Jonah Hill), a rich gay man who becomes Callahan’s sponsor. Donnie welcomes Callahan into his collection of “piglets,” a support group with a wide variety of personalities — played by such familiar faces as rockers Kim Gordon and Beth Ditto, and the German actor Udo Kier.

It’s in Callahan’s interactions with Donnie, who quotes Lao-Tzu and calls his higher power “Chucky,” that Van Sant transcends the regular addiction drama to create something truly intriguing. Where so many movies about addiction show the first AA meeting as the end of the story, this movie depicts the 12 steps as a process rather than an epiphany.

Phoenix gives a solid performance, capturing the rage of Callahan’s alcoholism and self-loathing along with the mechanics of quadriplegic life. But the surprise here is Hill, whose portrayal of Callahan’s recovery guide is soulful, funny and touching.

Van Sant shows a bit of Callahan’s creative process, and some of his best-known cartoons (though he misses my favorite, the sign hanging on the door of a mental ward that reads “Do not disturb any further”). Callahan’s work was politically incorrect before that idea had a name — if he were still alive, one could imagine some Twitter trolls mounting a smear campaign against him — but it was also cathartic, for him and for readers. If only there was more of that in the movie about him.

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‘Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot’

★★1/2

Opened July 13 in select cities; opens July 27 in at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City) and Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy). Rated R for language throughout, sexual content, some nudity, and alcohol abuse. Running time: 114 minutes.

'Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again'

As bright as the Greek sun that shines over it and as bouncy as the ABBA soundtrack that fills it, “Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again” is that rare and wonderful thing: A sequel that surpasses its predecessor in every way.

Of course, the first “Mamma Mia!” came with a lot of baggage — namely, the expectations of fans who loved the Broadway jukebox musical, and the hopes that our finest living woman actor, Meryl Streep, would bring it to life. Streep did just that, depicting the free-spirited Donna Sheridan, confronted with the three great lovers of her past, with all the joy and world-wise attitude necessary. Alas, the movie still felt confined to the stage.

Not this time. With theater director Phyllida Lloyd giving up the directing chair to Ol Parker (best known for writing the adaptations of “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”), the sequel feels liberated from its stage roots. There are musical numbers on boats, on piers, and in the ramshackle Greek farmhouse that Donna dreams of turning into a luxury hotel.

That farmhouse-turned-hotel is where the story starts, with Donna’s daughter Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) trying to fulfill her late mother’s dream. The Hotel Bella Donna is about to open, thanks to Sophie’s hard work and an assist from her miracle worker of a manager, Señor Cienfuegos (Andy Garcia).

Donna’s old singing partners, Tanya (Christine Baranski) and Rosie (Julie Walters) come for the opening. Sam (Pierce Brosnan), one of Sophie’s three fathers and Donna’s husband in her final years, is already living there, while co-fathers Bill (Stellan Skarsgård) and Harry (Colin Firth) will miss the opening. Also missing the opening is Sophie’s husband Sky (Dominic Cooper), in New York and being offered a job that could take him away from Sophie and the hotel. Foremost on everyone’s mind is Donna, whom everyone agrees is there in spirit.

The story of Sophie’s preparations, and her pining for Sky (which cues up a nicely edited duet between Seyfried and Cooper of “One of Us”), is intercut with the story of how Donna got to Greece. Lily James (“Cinderella”) plays the young Donna to sun-kissed perfection, with an unbridled joy and the chutzpah to take on Streep’s role and make it her own.

Starting with Donna’s Oxford valedictory speech (singing “When I Kissed the Teacher,” a deep cut in the ABBA canon), the movie shows us how Donna met the three important men in her life within a month of each other. In Paris, she has a one-night fling with Harry (Hugh Skinner), a virginal banker’s son. In Greece, she catches a ride from Bill (Josh Dylan) on the sailboat he’s about to race. Also in Greece, she meets Sam (Jeremy Irvine), an architect taking a break from his pre-ordained life. Also popping up are Rosie (Alexa Davies) and Tanya (Jessica Keenan Wynn), ready to commiserate with Donna through song.

The soundtrack repurposes six chestnuts from the first movie — young Harry wooing Donna in a Paris restaurant to “Waterloo” is one of the film’s highlights — and digs deeper into the ABBA playlist for 11 more numbers. It’s a sin that the first “Mamma Mia!” skipped over “Knowing Me, Knowing You,” which is worked here into a touching break-up scene.

The showstopper comes when Cher, playing Donna’s pop-diva mother, literally helicopters into the story. When she lends her throaty voice to one of the ABBA classics, “Fernando,” the only thing better than her performance is the way the song is set up in the script (written by Parker, who shares story credit with “Four Weddings and a Funeral” writer Richard Curtis and Catherine Johnson, who wrote the book for the stage version of the original “Mamma Mia!”).

Parker gives everyone in the sprawling ensemble — even Streep — a moment to shine, and makes a few discoveries along the way. The best new faces are Davies, so charming as the lovelorn Rosie, and Wynn, who does a note-perfect Baranski impersonation. (Fun fact: Wynn’s grandfather was the character actor Keenan Wynn, and her great-grandfather was the comic legend Ed Wynn.)

“Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again” is one of those films that looks like it was as fun to make as it is to watch. It’s a glitter-bomb of happiness and music, delivered to a world that could use a lot of both.

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‘Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again”

★★★ 1/2 (out of four)

Opens nationwide on Friday, July 20, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for some suggestive material. Running time: 114 minutes.

'Three Identical Strangers'

Sometimes a documentary filmmaker gets hold of a story so perfect — rich details, fascinating characters, and more twists than a thriller — that the smartest decision is to not get in the way.

British director Tim Wardle has such a story in “Three Identical Strangers,” which — like the story of its title trio —begins as a fun human-interest story but then unravels into something sinister, tragic and engrossing.

Wardle tells the story the way the participants lived it, starting with the moment in 1980 when Bobby Shafran, newly arrived at college, is surprised when people call him “Eddy.” Shafran, in the studio speaking directly to the camera, tells of this weird incident in 1980, when he learned that another student entering the same college looked and behaved just like him. Shafran, who was adopted as a kid, soon realized that this other student, Eddy Galland, was also adopted — and that they were long-lost twins, both adopted by the same prestigious Jewish agency, Louise Wise Services.

When one of the New York newspapers does a story about Bobby and Eddy, something else amazing happens: David Kellman, who looks just like Bobby and Eddy, speaks up. David, too, was adopted as a baby, also from Louise Wise Services. Soon the long-list twins are long-lost triplets. (Bobby and David are interviewed, Eddy is not, for reasons that ultimately reveal themselves.)

The national media machine, always searching for an interesting story, goes into overdrive. Soon the triplets are on TV all the time, and Wardle amasses a bouncy montage with such well-known ‘80s icons as Jane Pauley and Phil Donahue. 

It’s mentioned that the three grew up in different surroundings: One to working-class parents, one in the middle class, and the third in a wealthy household. Often the phrase “nature vs. nurture” is invoked, usually by mentioning the three men’s similarities — like the way they talk, or that they smoke the same brand of cigarettes — as proof that “nature” is more dominant.

Shafran, Galland and Kellman open a steakhouse, called Triplets, and are the toast of New York. But as their story unfolds, Wardle slowly reveals information that suggests the details of the trio’s separation and adoption were no mere coincidence.

The movie is sharply researched, and the mix of archival footage and current interviews captures the excitement of the triplets’ ‘80s reunion and the terrible cost they have paid for their separated existence. There is much sadness in this story, but also a wellspring of rage at medical and legal hurdles keeping the principals from knowing the whole truth.

Wardle’s careful parsing out of information makes for delicious tension, as he teases out details like a master raconteur. When this movie debuts on CNN this fall, every commercial break will be torture —so see it in a theater, where this incredible story can envelop a viewer without interruption.

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★★★ 1/2 (out of four)

‘Three Identical Strangers’

Opened in select cities on June 29; opens in Salt Lake City on Friday, July 20, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas. Rated PG-13 for some mature thematic material. 96 minutes.

'Skyscraper'

The action thriller “Skyscraper” — the latest respository of Dwayne Johnson’s unique brand of smoldering charm — follows the “‘Die Hard’ in a [blank]” formula so closely, it could be called “‘Die Hard’ in a ‘Die Hard’ movie.”

Johnson’s character, Will Sawyer, is a security analyst pitching his services to a Hong Kong billionaire, Zhao Long Ji (played by Chin Han), who has just built the world’s tallest building, the 220-story ultra-luxury high-rise The Pearl. Zhao has even let Sawyer bring his wife, Sarah (Neve Campbell), and their twin children, Georgia (McKenna Roberts) and Henry (Noah Cottrell), to stay in one of the residences.

Of course, saying “Dwayne Johnson plays a security analyst” is like saying “Elvis Presley plays a race-car driver” — it doesn’t really matter what his job is, because he’s Dwayne Johnson and his job is to kick butt and save the day. And, like most heroes in action movies, whatever job they have now is usually prefaced with a long resumé of special ops training or something. 

Here, Sawyer was a Marine, then an FBI agent specializing in hostage situations. A prologue shows Sawyer’s last hostage crisis gone wrong, leading to a bomb that left him with a prosthetic left leg. It’s also how Sawyer met Sarah, a Navy surgeon who saved his life — and it’s a nice modern flip on the cliche that she also has a military resumé, having served three tours in Afghanistan.

Nobody puts a skyscraper in their movie without also putting in a team of international terrorists bent on destroying said skyscraper, for reasons that are unimportant other than to move the plot along. This team, led by Danish actor Roland Møller, strikes the building, trapping Zhao and his team — including a stuffy insurance executive (Noah Taylor) — in the penthouse, Sarah and the kids on the 98th floor, and Will on the outside, being framed for the attack. So, naturally, Sawyer must dodge Hong Kong police, get back into the building and save everyone.

Writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber, who worked with Johnson and Kevin Hart making the action comedy “Central Intelligence,” doesn’t really have the hang of this action thing. (He’s better known for comedies, having directed “Dodgeball” and “We’re the Millers.”) He front-loads the exposition, with all the building info that we’ll need to remember later, then strings together the action set pieces for Johnson to run through like an “American Ninja Warrior” obstacle course.

Amid the computer-generated effects to create the ridiculously elaborate title character, “Skyscraper” has one charmingly clever visual: The high-tech playroom Zhao has built into the sphere atop The Pearl, with screens on every surface, including the 100-plus obelisk-like screens that pop up from the floors. Those kiosks turn the room into a hall of mirrors that resurface in the movie’s finale — and seems designed for the sole purpose of making snooty critics reference a similar scene in Orson Welles’ 1947 noir thriller “The Lady from Shanghai.” 

People who like Dwayne Johnson could care less about such things, but it’s nice that Thurber indulged his movie love and included it in an otherwise forgettable bit of formula like “Skyscraper.”

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★★1/2 (out of four)

‘Skyscraper’

Opens Friday, July 13, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sequences of gun violence and action, and for brief strong language. Running time: 102 minutes.

'Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation'

The latest in Adam Sandler’s animated franchise, “Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation” isn’t a bad movie, but it might have been more fun if it was.

When an animated movie is simply awful, a viewer (or a critic) can marvel at where the whole thing broke down, and why nobody could apply the brakes when they had a chance. (Patton Oswalt has a hilarious routine about writing jokes to augment a bad animated movie.)

But this latest “Hotel Transylvania” throws together familiar characters, a lot of gags — some good, some meh — and something that one might, under duress, describe as a plot, and calls it a day. it’s not so much a movie as a movie-like product.

Sandler again voices Count Dracula, still running a luxury hotel for his monster friends. (A prologue — in which Drac and the gang dodge the clutches of the monster-hunting Abraham Van Helsing, voiced by Jim Gaffigan — shows the inspiration for the hotel.) Drac should be happy, living at the hotel with daughter Mavis (voiced by Selena Gomez) and her human husband Johnny (voiced by Andy Samburg), their son Dennis (voiced by Asher Blinkoff) and his giant-sized puppy Tinkles. But Drac, a widower, is lonely with no one to share his coffin.

Mavis mistakes Drac’s pining as stress, so she plans a vacation for the family and all their friends — on a monster-only cruise ship, the Legacy, making a run from the Bermuda Triangle to Atlantis. Drac is unimpressed, seeing a cruise ship as nothing more than a hotel on water, but that changes when he falls head-over-cape for the ship’s human captain, Ericka (voiced by Kathryn Hahn). But Drac’s hopes for romance are complicated by what Ericka is hiding below decks.

Director Genndy Tartakovsky, co-writing with Michael McCullers (“The Boss Baby”), stage some solid jokes, capped by an Indiana Jones-style obstacle course that becomes a romantic tango for Drac and Ericka. But for every sequence that works, there’s two or three that land with a thud. And a voice cast loaded with Sandler’s friends and other comics — Kevin James, David Spade, Fran Drescher, Keegan-Michael Key, Chris Parnell, and even Mel Brooks — is given not enough good lines to deliver.

The storyline, focusing on Drac and Ericka wrestling between love and family loyalty, doesn’t sustain itself to the end. Instead, we get a finale that relies on needle-drop soundtrack choices, not the talented voice cast, to produce its last laughs. It’s just one more missed opportunity in a movie that disappoints more than it entertains.

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★★ (out of four)

‘Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation’

Opens everywhere on Friday, July 13. Rated PG for some action and rude humor. Running time: 97 minutes.

'Church & State'

One of the biggest surprises people in the state of Utah ever got came on Dec. 20, 2013, when a federal judge ruled that an amendment to the state’s constitution — defining marriage as being between one man and one woman, no exceptions — violated the U.S. Constitution.

That afternoon, LGBT couples in Utah suddenly realized that they could be married legally. So dozens of them high-tailed it to the Salt Lake County Clerk’s office to get hitched while they still could.

How this moment — one that left national pundits picking their jaws off the floor (Rachel Maddow, for one, couldn’t believe it would happen “in freakin’ Utah”) — came to pass is chronicled in an absorbing new documentary, “Church & State.”

It’s difficult for me, a Salt Lake City resident, to gauge how well the documentary will play for an audience who doesn’t live in Utah — because I watched much of the story unfold in real time. (Full disclosure: I also know some of the people involved in the film. The movie’s story consultant, Jennifer Dobner, used to be a colleague at The Salt Lake Tribune, where I work. And the movie’s producer, James Huntsman, is the brother of Paul Huntsman, the Tribune’s publisher and my boss.)

But for a local, “Church & State” spins a good yarn, giving depth and correcting some misconceptions about the case — and providing context about the influence of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that infuses everything in Utah.

The movie begins with Mark Lawrence, an irascible gay activist who fought not only that Mormon influence but national LGBT organizations to mount a legal challenge to Utah’s Amendment 3. Lawrence talks about being on the sidelines during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, and how he didn’t want to let others do the fighting this time.

Lawrence and his group, Restore Our Humanity, tried to raise money to hire a lawyer to start a case against Amendment 3. He found Peggy Tomsic, a sharp and tenacious litigator who also is a lesbian, raising an adopted son with her partner. Tomsic and her law firm took the case, and found three couples to be plaintiffs. 

The case became known as Kitchen v. Herbert. Derek Kitchen and Moudi Sbeity, who run a Middle Eastern foods company, were two of the six plaintiffs. (Kitchen later became a city councilman in Salt Lake City, and is now running for a seat in the Utah Senate.) Herbert is Gary Herbert, then and now the governor of Utah.

One of the running themes of “Church & State” is how the Mormon influence on Utah’s government not only led to the passage of Amendment 3, but also how the arrogance of the state’s lawyers hastened the ruling that undid it. An example of the state’s overconfidence: The lawyers for the Utah Attorney General’s office neglected to write up a motion asking for a stay of the judge’s ruling in case they lost. By the time they did, 17 days later, hundreds of Utah LGBT couples were already married, further complicating the case.

Directors Holly Tuckett and Kendall Wilcox synthesize a wealth of information about the case proper and Utah culture in general, taken from interviews and on-the-scene footage, into a cohesive narrative. They do so by shining a light on Lawrence, who became a forgotten hero and a bit of a pariah as his uncompromising temperament led to a rift among the principals. “Church & State” is an engaging look at justice winning out over prejudice, and the ripples that can spread from a single act of defiance.

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★★★ (out of four)

‘Church & State’

Opens Friday, July 13, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas in Salt Lake City. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for language. Running time: 84 minutes.

'The Night Eats the World'

A psychological study in the cloak of a zombie movie, the French-made “The Night Eats the World” is an engrossing little tale of what isolation and impending doom do to the mind.

The Danish actor Anders Danielsen Lie stars as Sam, a Parisian who just wants to get his tapes back from his ex-girlfriend, Fanny (Sigrid Bouaziz). He goes to her apartment, where a party is underway, and she tells him to go into a back room to wait for her. He falls asleep there — and when he wakes up, he finds the walls splattered in blood, and hordes of zombies are in the streets and the stairwells.

Sam manages to lock up the doors and barricade himself from the living dead, who only attack when they see movement or hear loud noises. So Sam learns to be stealthy, as he forages for supplies from the other apartments in the building, and figures out how long he can hold out before having to evacuate.

Director Dominique Rocher, who adapted Pit Agarmen’s novel with co-writers Jérémie Guez and Guillaume Lemans, focuses much of the action on the different ways Sam learns to survive the boredom and isolation of his makeshift fortress. Activities include turning kitchen supplies into percussion instruments and shooting a paintball gun at zombies in the street. 

Sam also traps a zombie, formerly a professor who lived in the building, in the elevator — and he becomes the equivalent of the volleyball in “Cast Away,” something that Sam can talk to and maintain his sanity. The elevator zombie is portrayed expertly by the great French actor Denis Levant (“Holy Motors”). 

Late in the film, Sam gets an unexpected visitor (played by Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani), but by then Sam can’t necessarily trust his sanity. (Despite the French setting and director, and the international cast, the movie is in English.)

Danielsen Lie, who played a drug addict in Joachim Trier’s 2011 drama “Oslo, August 31,” has the tricky job of keeping our interest for nearly an hour by himself. His performance encapsulates the range of Sam’s emotions, from existential terror to random boredom, and holds our attention. “The Night Eats the World” isn’t above borrowing from other zombie movies — the frenzy of “28 Days Later” here, the dark humor of “Shaun of the Dead” there — but it does so in an engaging way.

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★★★ (out of four)

‘The Night Eats the World’

Opens on Friday, July 13, at selected theaters — including the Tower Theatre in Salt Lake City. Not rated, but probably R for violence and gore. Running time: 90 minutes.

'Sorry to Bother You'

Peel back the surface of a lot of great comedies and you’ll find a core of righteous anger — whether it’s the war cries behind “Duck Soup,” the racial tension within “Blazing Saddles,” the distrust of religious fervor in “Monty Python’s Life of Brian,” or the political cynicism of “Wag the Dog.”

Add to that list Boots Riley’s “Sorry to Bother You,” a screaming satirical missile aimed at the heart of American capitalism and exploitation.

Read the full review at sltrib.com.