Review: In 'Joe Bell,' a sympathetic depiction of a bullied teen's suffering are undercut by star Mark Wahlberg's too-tough performance

The “based-on-a-true-story” tearjerker “Joe Bell” is a movie with its heart in the right place, but wrong in so many particulars — most notably the straining-for-Oscar casting of Mark Wahlberg in the title role.

Joe Bell, as played by Wahlberg, is a regular working-class guy from La Grande, Ore., who wants nothing more than to drink a beer and watch the game on TV. So when he’s confronted by his wife, Lola (Connie Britton), to deal with the problems of their 15-year-old son, Jadin (Reid Miller, in a breakout role) — who is being bullied at school because he’s gay. Saying that out loud to his dad is a painful experience, and isn’t helped by Joe’s stock response: Stand up for yourself, and throw a punch if necessary.

Subsequent scenes set at Jadin’s school demonstrate why Joe’s advice is impossible. Most of the football team is involved in this daily harassment, intimidation and physical violence. When they’re not assaulting him, physically and verbally, in the halls of the school, they’re doing it online with a steady stream of comments urging Jadin to kill himself.

And Joe’s attitude at other moments is no help, either. Jadin is one of the few boys on the cheerleading squad. This is an embarrassment to Joe, who sees Jadin practicing cheers with his friend Marcie (Morgan Lily) in the front yard and orders them to move to the backyard.

All that I’ve discussed so far is seen in flashbacks. The “action” of the story is Joe, pushing a cart down a lonely highway. Joe tells people that he’s walking across the country, from La Grande to New York City, stopping where he can to talk to school assemblies about the consequences of bullying and the need for tolerance.

In the film’s first act, writers Diana Ossana and the late Larry McMurtry (who won an Oscar for their adaptation of “Brokeback Mountain”) show Joe on the road with Jadin, telling jokes and singing Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” on the highway. As playful as these scenes are, a viewer suspects a vital bit of information has been omitted — and it doesn’t take too long to learn what that information is.

Director Reinaldo Marcus Green, whose debut feature “Monsters and Men” impressed critics at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, shows a necessary sensitivity to Jadin’s suffering, his yearning to be himself in a school and a town whose intolerance makes that painfully difficult. He also isn’t afraid to dig into the less-heroic parts of Joe’s story, including his short temper and his apparent lack of preparation to become a spokesman for tolerance and understanding. 

Alas, Green is saddled with a star, Wahlberg, who seems unable or unwilling to drop his tough-guy facade for even a moment. Green does everything to make us feel for Joe, as he goes through this physical and psychological endurance test on the byways of the west (all filmed in Utah). Even when Joe’s protective wall of masculinity crumbles, and he confronts his own guilt over how he treated Jaden (talking to a Colorado sheriff played by Gary Sinise), Wahlberg’s hamfisted performance can’t give the moment ring the sincerity it needs.

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‘Joe Bell’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, July 23, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language including offensive slurs, some disturbing material, and teen partying. Running time: 93 minutes.

Review: 'Once I Was Engaged' finds the universal humor in pre-wedding craziness, with a hint of Latter-day Saint culture

The 2015 movie “Once I Was a Beehive” holds the distinction of being one of the few Latter-day Saint-themed movies that was as much about telling a good story as it was about promoting the faith — and it’s a credit to writer-director Maclain Nelson that he can maintain a similar balance in the new sequel, “Once I Was Engaged.”

The first film, for those who don’t remember, was a fond and funny look at the goofy traditions and sisterly bonding at a Latter-day Saint girls’ summer camp. The sequel follows one of those teen campers, Bree Carrington (Clare Niederpruem), and her mother, Carrie (Lisa Valentine Clark) — the camp’s hyper-organized activities coordinator — as Bree moves to the next chapter of her life.

Bree’s plan is to finish college at Brigham Young University-Hawaii — where she has discovered a love for and possible career in marine biology — and go on a mission for her church. The same day she files her papers for her mission, something surprising happens: Her boyfriend, Thys (Tanner Gillman), proposes to her in an embarrassingly public way, and Bree answers “of course.”

This sudden engagement leaves Bree feeling stressed, but it really freaks out Carrie — who learns of the proposal when a video of the event goes viral. Carrie, with husband Curt (Bart Johnson) in tow, flies to Hawaii to set her daughter straight. Eventually, though, Carrie is charmed by Thys and impressed by his rich parents, so she approves of the engagement. When Carrie learns that Thys’ family wants to have the wedding in two months, the freaking out starts anew back home in Utah.

Nelson treads familiar territory here as he concocts a light-hearted variation of “Father of the Bride” or “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” with a dusting of Latter-day Saint culture. 

Of course, Carrie has to figure out how to make her ward’s “cultural hall” into an elegant reception room, hiding the basketball hoops in the process. And there’s the culture shock when Bree’s bachelorette party, thrown by her former campmates, moves from bowling and frozen yogurt to getting hit on in a dance club. “Who goes to a club for their bachelorette party?” Bree asks her one non-LDS friend, Lane (Paris Warner), who replies, “Literally everyone.”

There are several unforced moments of humor, and most of them — like the scene where mother and daughter romp through a Target with scanner guns for Bree’s bridal registry — capitalize on Clark’s sharp comedic skills and Niederpruem’s bubbly charm. (Niederpruem, who’s married to Nelson in real life, is a gifted filmmaker in her own right, with a slew of Hallmark Channel rom-coms and the 2018 modern-dress “Little Women” on her directing resumé).

“Once I Was Engaged” doesn’t have the same sense of discovery — of lifting the curtain on a secret cultural rite — that “Beehive” did. Except for the temple ceremony (which outsiders are barred from  experiencing, and this movie doesn’t touch), there’s not a lot of difference between a Latter-day Saint bride’s wedding prep and what brides of other faiths go through, which may be why this movie’s humor and heart feel so relatable.

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‘Once I Was Engaged’

★★★

Opening Wednesday, July 21, in theaters across Utah; opens in Idaho, Arizona and beyond in the weeks to come. Not rated, but probably PG for mild thematic elements. Running time: 107 minutes.

Review: 'I Carry You With Me' is a tenderly realized romance that beautifully blends documentary and fiction techniques

Director Heidi Ewing’s narrative debut, “I Carry You With Me,” tells a powerful story of love and heartache, and tells it beautifully — crossing the line between narrative and documentary without ever blurring it.

Iván (Armando Espitia) is a young man living, in 1994 when this story starts, in Puebla, Mexico. He works as a prep cook in a local restaurant, but the boss won’t promote him to line cook — where he might display the skills he learned in cooking school. Iván is also gay, a fact known only to his childhood friend Sandra (Michelle Rodríguez, but not the one from the “Fast and the Furious” universe). He hides his true nature from his stern mother (Ángeles Cruz) and from his ex-wife, Paola (Michelle González), for fear she will not let him see their son.

One night, Iván meets Gerardo (Christian Vazquez), a nice guy from a rich family, and everything changes. The romance is tentative at first, as they overcome their reticence at revealing their feelings, then turns passionate and heartfelt.  

Soon, though, Iván’s drive to become a chef leads him to one choice: He aims to cross the border into the United States, and find work in a restaurant in New York. The bulk of the film depicts Iván’s journey, and Gerardo’s efforts to follow him so they can be together without the judgment of their families back in Mexico.

Ewing — who with her filmmaking partner Rachel Grady has directed such documentaries as “Jesus Camp” (2006), “Detropia” (2012) and “Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You” (2016) — depicts this romance with sumptuous images and a minimum of dialogue. Ewing and co-writer Alan Page (who wrote four episodes of “Fear the Walking Dead”) also craft several moving flashback scenes that show both men as boys, each confronted by angry fathers who think harsh discipline will keep them from being gay.

Ewing’s strongest stylistic move — which earned the film both prizes in the Next category at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, impressing both audiences and juror Gregg Araki — is in the last half hour, when Espitia’s and Vazquez’s performances give way to documentary footage of the two men today.

The sight of Iván and Gerardo today proves out something the fictionalized Iván says early in the film: “The American dream moves in slow motion.” That may be true, but this movie doesn’t go so slowly. The audacity and generous spirit of “I Carry You With Me” will make viewers’ hearts beat in time with the story’s romantic leads.

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‘I Carry You With Me’

★★★★

Opens Friday, July 16, in select theaters. (The list of Utah theaters showing the movie is pending.) Rated R for language and brief nudity. Running time: 111 minutes; in Spanish, with subtitles.

Review: 'Roadrunner' lets Anthony Bourdain talk about life, love and food — while reminding us how his death silenced that voice

Watching director Morgan Neville’s energetic and fascinating documentary, “Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain,” is a jarring reminder of what we lost when Bourdain — chef turned author, TV host and world traveler — took his life in France three summers ago.

By 2001, which is where Neville (“20 Feet from Stardom,” “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”) starts the story, Bourdain was already famous. His book “Kitchen Confidential” was a best-seller that put him on every talk show from Letterman to Oprah. The heroin and cocaine abuse he wrote about in his book, which was as much confessional memoir as it was restaurant tell-all, was in his rearview. So, for the most part, was professional cooking — as he was transforming himself into a TV host, first for the Food Network (“A Cook’s Tour”), then on the Travel Channel (“No Reservations” and “The Layover”) and finally on CNN’s “Parts Unknown.”

Neville interviews several of the producers and directors of those shows, who serve up some juicy tidbits of gossip — the first being the revelation that Bourdain, who talked a good game, had not traveled much before he started as a TV host. He was also green to the tricks of making good TV, though he was a fast study, a sharp writer with an eye toward the cinematic.

The movie also features emotional interviews with some of Neville’s famous friends, including chefs Eric Ripert and David Chang, rockers Josh Homme (from Queens of the Stone Age) and Alison Mosshart (from The Kills), and artist David Choe. One of the most heartfelt interviews is with Bourdain’s second wife, Ottavia Busia, who is also the mother to Bourdain’s daughter, Ariane.

Two people are notable for not being interviewed here: Bourdain’s first wife, Nancy (they married in 1985, before he became famous, and divorced in 2005), and the Italian actress/filmmaker Asia Argento, with whom Bourdain shared a relationship for just over a year before his death.

But Neville has plenty of footage of Argento, who accompanied Bourdain on several trips for “Parts Unknown” in his last year, and infamously took over directing the Hong Kong episode. His longtime crew members dissect that incident with obvious exasperation, and there’s plenty of behind-the-scenes footage (since CNN Films is one of the film’s production companies). 

The discussions regarding Argento, in the movie’s final half-hour, are the most problematic. Bourdain’s old colleagues say they saw Bourdain’s personality change when he started dating Argento — and that his overbearing eagerness to please her led him to alienate his crew members, and may have prompted some of Bourdain’s strong #MeToo advocacy, which began when Argento went public with allegations of rape against disgraced mogul Harvey Weinstein.

The movie ends, as it must, with talk about Bourdain’s suicide — a sad coda that every viewer knew was coming. Neville handles it as well as one could expect, dwelling not on the act but on how his friends and colleagues have tried to make sense of it.

What makes “Roadrunner” so fascinating is the bounty of footage Neville compiles of Bourdain in motion, his mouth keeping up with his itinerary and his enthusiasm. What makes the movie infuriating is the reminder that we don’t get to hear that voice moving forward.

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‘Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, July 16, at the Century 16 (South Salt Lake), Megaplex at The District (South Jordan), Megaplex Legacy Crossing (Centerville), Megaplex Thanksgiving Point (Lehi) and Megaplex at the Junction (Ogden). Rated R for language throughout. Running time: 118 minutes.`

Review: 'Space Jam: A New Legacy' is a cynical cash grab, putting brand awareness ahead of doing anything funny

It’s when LeBron James, basketball icon, becomes a cartoon and hits the ground like Wile E. Coyote that “Space Jam: A New Legacy” reveals what kind of movie it intends to be.

Up to that point — in this re-imagining of the 1996 animated/live-action hybrid that paired that era’s NBA superstar, Michael Jordan, with Bugs Bunny — the movie sets us up for a fast-moving, visually chaotic but narratively predictable story about LeBron and his son, Dom (Cedric Joe), getting sucked into the “ServerVerse” at the Warner Bros. studios. This computer world is run by the villain, a program called Al G. Rhythm (Don Cheadle, giving his all in a thankless part), who tells LeBron he can get his son back if he can recruit a basketball team from all the Warner Bros. intellectual property at hand, and defeat Al G.’s team in a match.

So Al G. sends LeBron to Tune World — passing the Harry Potter world, the “Game of Thrones” world and “The Matrix” world on the way — and is transformed, briefly, into a 2-D cartoon. He lands on Tune World with a familiar Looney Tunes thud, and when the dust clears, LeBron is climbing out of the hole he created with his impact.

OK, here’s where the movie reveals itself: The hole is shaped like the Nike swoosh.

With that humorless, corporate-driven attempt at a visual gag, “Space Jam: A New Legacy” shows itself not as entertainment, but as a cash grab — and Warner Bros., when it’s not hyping its own trademarks, lets the sneaker company LeBron represents have a turn at the money spigot.

Director Malcolm D. Lee (“Girls Trip,” “Night School”) and the film’s six credited screenwriters try to muster up the bare bones of a plot, involving LeBron’s tough-love efforts to get Dom to practice his basketball skills — while Dom tries to convince his dad that his real passion is designing video games. The main drama centers on the Big Game between the Tune Squad and the Goon Squad, coached by Al G., who works overtime to spoil Dom and make the kid turn against his dad.

The movie introduces LeBron to the Looney Tunes characters by re-enacting classic bits from the old cartoons, such as the classic “Rabbit season!”/“Duck season!” posters that summon Bugs — putting nostalgic familiarity in the place of something genuinely clever. Other characters are found among other WB properties, with Yosemite Sam playing the piano in “Casablanca,” Speedy Gonzales performing the bullet-time moves from “The Matrix,” and so on. The only one of these that actually pays off is a smartly animated sequence in which Lola Bunny (voiced by Zendaya) completes her Amazon training in a “Wonder Woman” comic book.

The attempts at humor are either labored sight gags referencing movies, rap lyrics, and random memes. It’s one thing that six writers couldn’t come up with something funny for humans, even funny humans like Sarah Silverman and Lil Rey Howery, is sad. To put the Looney Tunes characters on the screen without anything funny to say is downright criminal.

In the end, “Space Jam: A New Legacy” isn’t here to reboot the Looney Tunes franchise; those characters are old hat in the current entertainment-industrial complex. This is an audiovisual presentation at the Warner Bros. shareholders’ meeting, a big-screen catalog of corporate-owned brands — both family friendly and, like “The Matrix” and “Game of Thrones,” definitely not — to remind the suits what titles could be making them money.

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‘Space Jam: A New Legacy’

★1/2

Opens Friday, July 16, in theaters and on HBO Max. Rated PG for some cartoon violence and some language. Running time: 115 minutes.

Review: 'The Loneliest Whale' is a heartfelt, if narratively thin, pursuit for answers to an oceanic mystery

There must be no feeling worse to a documentary filmmaker than getting your footage together, after years of filming, and realizing there’s not enough story there — which makes director Joshua Zeman’s accomplishment in “The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52” kind of remarkable, because he squeezes out a good yarn in spite of a thin story line.

Zeman’s search begins with a decades-long mystery in the field of oceanography. It involves the songs of whales, and one particular whale who emits a specific frequency — 52 hertz — that’s higher than the sounds made by blue whales or fin whales. (It’s far lower than the whale songs most familiar to humans, those of humpback whales.) 

It was theorized, based on recordings made by a secret U.S. Navy underwater program, that there was only one whale who made this 52-hertz sound, which presumably meant no other whale could understand the song. Thus the so-called “52-hertz whale,” or 52 for short, was referred to in reports as “the world’s loneliest whale.”

Zeman starts by talking to the resident experts in oceanography, particularly those who have studied whale songs and the mystery of 52. He then goes one better, taking his meager production budget — raised through a Kickstarter campaign, and such benefactors as actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Adrian Grenier (who are among the producers) — for a one-week expedition off the California coast, where many of these same experts combine their talents to try to figure out where 52 might be, if he/she is still alive at all.

Through the expedition, Zeman explores the many challenges faced by whales in the open ocean. One of the biggest is commercial shipping, because the giant freighters that carry goods here and there produce tons of noise that drown out the whales’ sounds, thus cutting them off from communicating with each other.

The adventure of the expedition isn’t as exciting as one might think, since much of it involves pleasant young scientists and grizzled old scientists staring intently at computer monitors. It also doesn’t fill a lot of screen time — leaving Zeman to fill with narrative side trips into the history of whaling and how a recording of humpback whales became a best-selling album that jumpstarted the environmental movement. He even lets comedian/musician Kate Micucci (from Garfunkel & Oates) perform a funny little ditty about the loneliest whale, which she names “Doreen” mostly because it’s an easy name to rhyme.

Zeman is an engaging enough narrator, and his earnest pursuit of answers to this longstanding aquatic mystery allows the viewer to forgive the occasional dull patch. Like any fishing trip, “The Loneliest Whale” is more about the pleasant company of one’s companions than on whether you catch anything.

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‘The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52’

★★★

Opens Friday, July 9, at Megaplex Theaters at The District (South Jordan); available on demand starting July 16. Rated PG for some unsettling whaling images, language and brief smoking. Running time: 97 minutes.

Review: 'Summer of Soul' presents the concert event, and historical document, we need now — more than 50 years after it happened.

With a historian’s eye, a musician’s ear and an activist’s heart, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson has fashioned an important document of a vital era with “Summer of Soul (… Or When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised).”

It’s also a great music to dance in the aisles on the way to demanding social change that’s been denied long before 1969, when this amazing story takes place.

Here’s the scene: It’s Harlem, in the summer of 1969, in the weeks before the music festival known as Woodstock made headlines upstate a hundred miles. The Harlem Culture Festival took place over six weekends, with concerts in Mt. Morris Park in Harlem — with a line-up of some of the best talent Black America had to offer.

Much of it was filmed for posterity — and that footage sat untouched in a basement, until Thompson started working on this movie.

It’s an embarrassment of riches that Thompson has to work with, and like the bandleader he is (of The Roots), he starts by assembling a dream playlist. Start with Stevie Wonder, then move on to some of the old reliables, like B.B. King and Herbie Mann, and slide into some of the young hitmakers of the day, like The 5th Dimension and Gladys Knight & The Pips. Include a healthy dose of gospel, topped by the legend Mahalia Jackson handing off to a young Mavis Staples. Move into some Motown, and then Sly and the Family Stone. Don’t forget some Puerto Rican and Afro-Cuban acts, a song by South Africa’s Hugh Masekela, and then give the stage to Nina Simone. Finish with encores by Wonder and Sly.

If all Thompson did was play the hits, that would be enough. But Thompson adds interviews from participants and attendees that bring the moments alive — commenting on what it felt like to be there, and even smelled like (“chicken and Afro Sheen,” as one concertgoer put it). The interviews also set the context for the shows, just over a year after Marrtin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, as America sent a disproportionate number of Black men to Vietnam while flying two white military pilots to the moon.

There are some gems in the new interview footage — like seeing Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr. watching themselves in The 5th Dimension, or Lin-Manuel Miranda and his father, Luis, explaining the crossover of Latin and Caribbean sounds into soul and R&B. And the historical side never overwhelms the musical side, but also never feels like an afterthought.

By blending the history with the music so gracefully, Thompson has created a document of a 1969 event that feels as alive as if it happened last year. Put “Summer of Soul” on a double-bill with “Woodstock,” and see which one is the nostalgia trip and which one is relevant to what’s happening now.

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’Summer of Soul (… Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)’

★★★★

Opens Friday, July 2, in theaters, and streaming on Hulu. Rated PG-13 for some disturbing images, smoking and brief drug material. Running time: 117 minutes.

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This review originally ran on this site on January 29, 2021, when the movie premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'The Boss Baby: Family Business' is a bland sequel that will tax most children's attention spans

It would be great to say that “The Boss Baby: Family Business” is a comedy masterpiece, or that it’s a steaming pile of garbage, or something more nuanced or expressive somewhere in between — but it’s none of those things.

No, this sequel to DreamWorks’ 2017 animated tale of a baby who’s really an undercover spy for a secret organization run by babies is even less than meets the eye. It’s a lackluster Hollywood “product,” with no more flavor or excitement than a spoonful of strained peas.

If you remember the 2017 “The Boss Baby,” it was for Alec Baldwin providing the voice of Ted, newly born little brother to 7-year-old Tim, who discovers that his baby brother is a latte-sipping executive type — sent by his company, BabyCorp, to learn what an evil rival corporation is doing.

The new movie starts years after the last movie, with Tim (now voiced by James Marsden) and Ted (still voiced by Baldwin) as estranged adults. Tim is a family man, with a wife, Carol (voiced by Eva Longoria), and overachieving daughter, Tabitha (voiced by Ariana Greenblatt). Ted is single, because who has time for family when you’re a super-successful CEO with a private helicopter. Tabitha idolizes Ted, while telling her own father that she’s too grown-up for his bedtime stories and other parental perks.

Who’s going to save this fractured family? That would be Tabitha’s new baby sister, Tina (voiced by Amy Sedaris) — who, like her Uncle Ted, is a BabyCorp agent. Tina is on a mission to uncover the nefarious plans of Dr. Irwin Armstrong (voiced by Jeff Goldblum), founder of the Acorn Academy charter schools, including the one whose rigorous academic discipline could, Tina says, destroy childhood forever.

Using a BabyCorp formula that reverts Tim and Ted to their ages in the first film, the brothers go undercover in Armstrong’s school — and discover a secret that could alter the world. Meanwhile, Tim in his kid form, also learns why Tabitha has become a raging stress ball who apparently forgot the importance of having fun.

Director Tom McGrath is an old hand at DreamWorks Animation — he directed “Megamind,” the first “Boss Baby,” and three “Madagascar” movies, and he voices Skipper in “The Penguins of Madagascar” — and there’s a rote familiarity in how he tackles what could be an off-the-wall story. While McGrath does apply a few colorful touches, mostly in Tim’s Thurber-esque flights of imagination while doing family chores, the result here is too bland to be worth sampling.

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‘The Boss Baby: Family Business’

★★

Opens Friday, July 2, in theaters, and streaming on Peacock (at a premium price). Rated PG for rude humor, mild language and some action. Running time: 107 minutes.