Review: Long-shelved 'The War With Grandpa' is all pratfalls and cartoonish humor, without a laugh to be had

At 77, Robert De Niro has built enough of a reputation as one of America’s greatest actors that he should be able to say “no” occasionally — and the misbegotten, slapdash kiddie comedy “The War With Grandpa” is one of those occasions.

De Niro plays Ed, a retired contractor who, after one too many incidents at his local grocery store, is convinced by his daughter, Sally (Uma Thurman), that he should come live with her family. Then she has to break the news to her family — architect husband Arthur (Rob Riggle), teen daughter Mia (former Disney Channel star Laura Marano), youngest daughter Jenny (Poppy Gagnon), and sixth-grade son Peter (Oakes Fegley, from “Wonderstruck” and “Pete’s Dragon”).

Peter takes Grandpa’s arrival particularly hard, because he’s required to give up his bedroom to the old man and move into the attic. Peter does what any reasonable 12-year-old would do: He writes a declaration of war, to drive Grandpa out of the house and reclaim the room.

Grandpa, sensing a chance for a teaching moment about the futility of war, accepts Peter’s challenge, setting up ground rules: No tattling, and no collateral damage on the rest of the family. With that, the pranks begin — small at first, but escalating in scope and property damage, though not in comedic content. Peter is egged on by his fellow sixth-graders, while Grandpa forms a posse of sprightly senior citizens: His old buddy Jerry (Christopher Walken), Jerry’s friend Danny (Cheech Marin), and the surprisingly age-appropriate Diane (Jane Seymour). 

Director Tim Hill — whose resumé includes two terrible animation/live-action hybrids, “Alvin and the Chipmunks” (2007) and “Hop” (2011) — doesn’t fare much better when all the actors are flesh-and-blood. They’re all made to act like cartoons, mugging and over-reacting to the pratfalls they must take in service to a hackneyed script by Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember.

The movie is adapted from a novel by Robert Kimmel Smith, who died in April. He may not have been lucky enough to miss this terrible movie, though — because it’s been on the shelf about as long as “The New Mutants” was. Blame production delays, and the fact that its original distributor was Dimension Films, a branch of Hollywood’s pariah corporation, The Weinstein Company. (Another distributor, 101 Studios, bought it off of Weinstein. No matter how much it cost, they paid too much.)

With a movie this ineptly handled and shamelessly predictable, a critic’s mind starts to wander into the actors’ prior connections. It’s interesting that this is the first movie to pair De Niro and Walken since “The Deer Hunter,” back in 1978. And it’s a curiosity to see De Niro playing father to Thurman, when in 1993 they were paired romantically in “Mad Dog and Glory,” when Thurman was 23 and De Niro was 50 — the age Thurman is now. 

“The War With Grandpa,” despite its nod toward nobility with its anti-war message, is a humorless mess of a movie. Skip it at the theaters, and don’t plant your kids in front of the TV when it lands on the small screen. That would be, I think, a violation of the Geneva Convention.

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‘The War With Grandpa’

★

Opening Friday, October 9, in theaters where open. Rated PG for rude humor, language, and some thematic elements. Running time: 94 minutes.

Review: Utah-made 'The Wolf of Snow Hollow' is a psychological drama wrapped in a gory werewolf mystery

Monsters come in many forms, and in the sometimes comedic filmed-in-Utah horror thriller “The Wolf of Snow Hollow,” those monsters are both external and internal.

In a small Utah ski town, a couple is enjoying a getaway in a rental cabin — until P.J. (Jimmy Tatro) leaves the hot tub to take a shower, and doesn’t hear his girlfriend, Brianne (Annie Hamilton), being brutally attacked and dismembered. The one clue left by the killer is a bloody paw print, like a wolf’s, in the snow.

Read the full review at sltrib.com.

Review: In 'The Trial of the Chicago 7,' Aaron Sorkin makes a 50-year-old court case as lively as today's headlines

The old adage — that historical drama says more about the time it was made than the time it depicts — has hardly ever been more true than with writer-director Aaron Sorkin’s “The Trial of the Chicago 7,” a riveting portrayal of events from 50 years ago that feels as vital as the latest news bulletin.

The Chicago 7, as we old people can tell you, were the leaders of the anti-war protests that arrived in Chicago for the 1968 Democratic National Convention — and ran headlong into Mayor Richard Daley’s Chicago Police, which led to beatings, tear gas and arrests. The protesters chanted “The whole world is watching!” but it didn’t seem to matter, as the establishment Democrat, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, took the nomination, and then lost the 1968 election to Richard Nixon.

Read the full review at sltrib.com.

Review: A writer reinvents herself in 'The Forty-Year-Old Version,' a comedy that introduces the world to the funny and captivating Radha Blank

Watching “The 40-Year-Old Version,” is hard not to fall a little in love with its writer-director-star Radha Blank, and to wish her debut feature worked better than it does.

Blank plays a character not unlike herself, a Brooklyn playwright trying to get her career on track. The play she’s writing is a tough-minded work about the effects of gentrification on married Harlem shipowners, but her options for producing it are a barely paying black theater or a rich white producer (Reed Birney) who will want her message watered down for rich white theater patrons.

Meanwhile, Radha is frustrated by her work teaching theater to high-school kids, while she’s facing 40 with no significant other and avoiding the pain of dealing with her late mother’s belongings.

What to do? Why, become a rapper, of course. She puts her anger into verse, and it sounds pretty good, if she says so herself. (The wry fourth-wall-breaking look at the camera tells us that.) She finds a DJ who goes by D (played by hip-hop musician Oswin Benjamin, in his acting debut), to lay down some beats for a potential mixtape — an idea that horrifies Radha’s agent Archie (Peter Kim), who has been Radha’s best friend since they were prom dates (she was his beard).

Blank aims to stuff so much into her movie that the elements work against each other. A subplot about a surly student (Imani Lewis) never pays off, for example. And the movie’s second half extends the joke about Radha’s compromised play far longer than is necessary. Maybe another pass through editing would tighten up the slack.

But there’s a lot to admire about “The 40-Year-Old Version,” from the gorgeous black-and-white cinematography to Kim’s funny supporting performance that puts a new twist on the sassy gay best friend. Blank herself is charismatic, witty and funny, and it’s too bad her movie blurs the line between self-empowering and self-indulgent.

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‘The Forty-Year-Old Version’

★★1/2

Available, starting Friday, October 9, streaming on Netflix. Rated R for pervasive language, sexual content, some drug use and brief nudity. Running time: 129 minutes.

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This review originally appeared on this site on January 27, 2020, when the movie screened at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: Documentary 'Time' uses home footage to show the effects of incarceration on the imprisoned person's family

It’s important to understand going into “Time” that director Garrett Bradley does not deliver what one might expect from a documentary that begins with a crime and a trial.

Those elements are mentioned, but not with the just-the-facts approach that hours of true-crime reality TV has trained us to crave. Bradley has a different plan in mind: To show the effect that long-term incarceration has on a family.

When Sybil Fox married Robert Richardson, they dreamed of having children and being successful in business in Shreveport, La. What happened instead is they were involved in an attempted 1997 bank robbery, which landed both of them in prison. Fox Rich (as she’s known) took a plea deal, did a short stretch, got out to raise their sons and reinvent herself as a saleswoman and advocate against unjust incarceration.

A prime example that Rich cites in her motivational talks is her husband’s case. Robert was sentenced to 60 years at Louisiana’s notorious state penitentiary, known commonly as Angola — a former plantation that, Fox Rich argues, is the ground zero for a new system for legalized slave labor.

Bradley follows Fox Rich as she makes the case for Robert’s release to any audience who will listen. But what’s more touching is the footage — both contemporary and from video journals Fox Rich recorded for more than 20 years — that captures the couple’s six sons growing up strong and proud, without their father being around. 

Watching these kids through the years is far more compelling than the usual true-crime fare. “Time” is a reminder that the crime may be the start of the story, but it’s not the whole story.

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’Time’

★★★

Opening Friday, October 9, at Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy) and Megaplex at the District (South Jordan); begins streaming October 16 on Amazon Prime Video. Rated PG-13 for some strong language. Running time: 81 minutes. 

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This review originally appeared on this site on January 29, 2020, when the movie screened at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'Major Arcana' is a quietly moving drama of a carpenter confronting his past in a Vermont town

Made in Vermont on a budget of pennies and a wealth of soon-to-be-discovered talent, the drama “Major Arcana” is what they once called a “granola movie” — the sort of earnest, introspective regional production that used to dominate the Sundance Film Festival’s U.S. Dramatic competition.

Dink (played by Ujon Tokarski) drives into his former Vermont hometown to collect his inheritance: A beat-up double-wide and the 52 acres of woods on which it sits. These are left to him by his father, who we learn about largely through his horrible housekeeping, his casual attitude about porn, and the amount of beer and liquor Dink pours down the drain. 

No matter. Dink knows his dad also left a stash of cash, and wants to get it before someone else does. That someone else is his mom, Jean (Lane Bradbury), who pops by to cajole, wheedle and browbeat her estranged son. 

Dink sets about on a solitary project, starting by cutting down trees on his acreage. Eventually, we see that he’s building a cabin, using the carpentry skills acquired in his years on the road. (Tokarski, who has never acted before making this film, is a carpenter by trade.) Dink reveals more about his time away from Vermont, most of it fueled by drugs and alcohol, to his ex, Sierra (Tara Summers) — who’s now with a local guy, but after a few drinks isn’t averse to jumping into bed with Dink for old time’s sake. Oh, and reading Dink’s fortune with a deck of tarot cards.

First-time writer-director Josh Melrod focuses the bulk of his story on Dink’s work on the cabin, and the question of whether reuniting with Sierra is a wise move. Both threads run their course in a quiet, unforced way, allowing us to hang out with Dink and Sierra, learning their personalities by observation rather than dialogue. “Major Arcana” is a movie that shows, instead of tells.

What Melrod also delivers is a trio of fascinating performances. Bradbury pours a lot of acid into portraying Jean, a woman bitterly jealous of Dink’s temporary escape from this small town. Summers, a British actress best known for TV roles in “Boston Legal” and “Mercy Street,” plays the sad, soulful blue-collar Sierra with a lot of buried anger and regrets. And Tokarski is a find, bringing an inner fire to this roughhewn wanderer. Together, they give “Major Arcana” the weathered, comfortable feel of a night by the campfire, sharing stories with people you know, spilling their secrets. 

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‘Major Arcana’

★★★

Available, starting Friday, October 9, streaming on the SLFS@Home virtual cinema. Not rated, but probably R for sexuality, language, and alcohol use. Running time: 82 minutes.

Review: Documentary 'Aggie' is a loving, but bland, look into the life of an arts patron and philanthropist

Being a good person doesn’t automatically make one a good subject for a documentary, as the meandering narrative of “Aggie” unfortunately proves.

The title figure is Agnes Gund, contemporary art collector, philanthropist, president emerita of the board of the Museum of Modern Art and chairwoman of MoMA’s offshoot PS1. She has befriended a great many artists over the years, starting with Roy Lichtenstein in the ‘60s through creative minds today. And, at 82, she seems as energetic and engaged as people half her age.

The problem with “Aggie,” the movie, is that the filmmaker — her daughter, Catherine Gund, who has directed such well-received documentaries as “What’s On Your Plate?” and “Born to Fly: Elizabeth Streb vs. Gravity” — is too close to her subject, for obvious reasons, to extract much unknown information about Agnes. She tries to get around this by catching Agnes in conversation with other people, including radio reporter Maria Hinojosa, auteur John Waters, and three of Agnes’ grandchildren. But none of these “interviewers” dig deep into what makes Agnes tick.

The film’s structure is haphazard, roughly a chronological narrative of Agnes’ life, though taking some side roads into her childhood that don’t do enough to illuminate her work today. And that work — launching the Art and Justice Fund to battle mass incarceration, using the $165 million she got for selling a Lichtenstein painting in 2017 — is far too interesting to be left for the film’s last few minutes. What could have been the grist for an entire movie is treated like an infomercial tagged onto the end of a fond but forgettable portrait. 

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‘Aggie’

★★1/2

Available, starting Friday, October 9, streaming on the SLFS@Home virtual cinema. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for some language. Running time: 92 minutes.

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This review originally appeared on this site on January 24, 2020, when the movie screened at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: Horror comedy 'Spontaneous' is a sardonic take on high school life, love, and death

The teen horror-comedy “Spontaneous” is “Heathers” for a generation that didn’t need “Heathers” — because today’s high-schoolers already have enough crap going on in their lives — but they, and anyone else watching, will dig the sharply anarchic humor of this tale of sudden love and even more sudden death.

It’s a normal day at Covington High School, where Mara Carlyle (Katherine Langford) sits at her desk half-listening to her teacher. When she drops her pen, she leans over to pick it up — and misses the moment when the girl sitting in front of her, Katelyn (Mellany Barros), suddenly explodes, her blood coating the walls and her classmates.

Everyone, naturally, freaks out and runs screaming into the hallways. Soon, the class is giving depositions at the police station, and handing over their bloody clothing as evidence. How long will they stay in custody, and in unflattering police-issued sweatpants? “When they know it’s not going to happen again,” Mara tells her classmates.

Once they’re released, something else happens to Mara: She gets a text from Dylan (Charlie Plummer), a shy classmate who, inspired by Katelyn’s unexpected death, decides to live for today — which means admitting his long-standing crush on Mara.

It doesn’t take long for Mara and Dylan to go from talking to hanging out with Mara’s BFF, Tess (Hayley Law), to falling in love. It also doesn’t take long for more students to explode spontaneously, just like Katelyn.

Writer and first-time director Brian Duffield (his writing credits include “The Divergent Series: Insurgent” and the Kristen Stewart thriller “Underwater”) adapts Aaron Starmer’s young-adult novel into a fast-moving, darkly comic tale of teens trying to maintain their wits, and their gallows humor, as the world suddenly stops making sense.

Duffield turns the comically bloody moments of instant human explosions into an all-purpose metaphor — representing, by turns, general get-a-page-in-the-yearbook tragedy, then teen suicide, and, later, school shootings. He also plays up the despairing impotence of the grown-ups, whether it’s government scientists, an exasperated FBI agent (Yvonne Orji), or Mara’s worried parents (Piper Perabo and Rob Huebel).

If you’re not yet on the Katherine Langford bandwagon — I missed seeing her in “13 Reasons Why,” but loved her in supporting roles in “Love, Simon” and “Knives Out” — this movie will seal the deal. The Australian actor is a delight here, capturing Mara’s sardonic humor in the first half, then carrying some heavy drama when necessary. Langford gives “Spontaneous” both a spicy kick and a surprising warmth.

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‘Spontaneous’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 2, in select theaters; streaming on VOD starting Tuesday, October 6. Rated R for teen drug and alcohol use, language and bloody images throughout. Running time: 97 minutes.