Review: 'Marcel the Shell With Shoes On' delivers humor, wisdom and tears — all from an adorable one-inch mollusk

For a shell who’s only an inch tall, Marcel — the title character of the charming and deceptively light comedy “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On” — contains a whole lot of emotion, as he carries the weight of his tiny world.

In this cleverly conceived mix of live-action and stop-motion animation, we meet Marcel — voiced by Jenny Slate, who created the character with her now-ex-husband, Dean Fleischer Camp, the film’s director. Marcel is a shell with one googly eye on the right side of what, for lack of a better word, is his face. Marcel is mostly face, except for his shoes. 

Marcel lives in a usually empty house, an Airbnb, with his Nana Connie, who is voiced by Isabella Rossellini — it’s explained that “her people came over from the garage,” which is why she has an accent. They make do with what the house provides, augmented by Marcel’s many contraptions, such as the tennis ball he uses to roll quickly from room to room.

The current human occupant of the house, Dean (played by Fleischer Camp), is a soon-to-be-divorced filmmaker who decides to interview Marcel and post videos of the shell’s life on YouTube. It’s in these interviews that we see Marcel and Connie’s favorite TV show is “60 Minutes” — Connie just calls it “the show,” and can make the stopwatch sound really well — and learn bits of wisdom, like when Marcel says, “My cousin fell asleep in a pocket, and that’s why I don’t like the saying ‘everything comes out in the wash,’ because sometimes it doesn’t.”

The videos get only a handful of viewers at first — but then they become a viral sensation, with millions of views, instant memes, and mentions on TV. Internet fame has its pitfalls, Marcel learns, particularly when his fans find the house and show up at all hours to take selfies and wreak havoc on the lawn.

Marcel worries that his life will change with his new fame — and he’s already suffered through one horrible change in life, when his entire family disappeared on the same night that the house’s original occupants, referred to as “the man” and “the woman,” moved out. But Dean convinces Marcel that maybe he can help find his missing family.

It’s a small squad that makes “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On” go. Slate, Fleischer Camp and Nick Paley wrote the screenplay, and share story credit with Elisabeth Holm, who’s one of the producers. Fleischer Camp and Paley edited the film. The legendary Chiodo Bros. studio handled the animation, which is both whimsical and profound.

Fleischer Camp, in his feature directing debut, handles both the technical challenges and the emotional ups and downs of Marcel’s story with appropriate tenderness. It’s weird to be chuckling at a one-inch mollusk, then being moved to tears by that same shell a few minutes later. But when a movie tackles fame, loneliness, family dynamics and grief — and can pause for a Philip Larkin poem — and does it as serenely and humorously as this movie does, you give in to the weirdness and let this perfect little movie work its wonders.

——

‘Marcel the Shell With Shoes On’

★★★★

Opens Friday, July 15, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City) and Century 16 (South Salt Lake). Rated PG for some suggestive material and thematic elements. Running time: 90 minutes.

Review: 'Where the Crawdads Sing' is a Southern Gothic train wreck, but Daisy Edgar-Jones' performance is captivating

I have never read Delia Owens’ best-selling novel “Where the Crawdads Sing” — I’m not a book-club person — so I can’t tell you if the many problems of the movie version are engrained in the source material or in the adaptation. But it’s a Southern-fried mess.

The movie starts in fall 1969, and a young man is dead at the base of a fire tower overlooking a marsh in coastal North Carolina. The deceased is Chase Andrews (Harris Dickinson), the golden boy of the nearby town, Barkley Cove. The sheriff (Bill Kelly) only has one suspect in mind: Kya Clark (Daisy Edgar-Jones), called “the marsh girl” by the folks in town, who know only folk tales about how she lives alone in a rundown home at the edge of the marsh.

The story — with Lucy Alibar, co-writer of “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” adapting Owens’ novel — goes off on two divergent paths. The less interesting one is a courtroom procedural, with Kya on trial for Chase’s murder, represented by the folksy lawyer Tom Milton, played by David Straithairn, who deserves better. These scenes aim for “To Kill a Mockingbird” resonance, but land closer to “Matlock” territory.

The better parts of the movie are the flashbacks, showing how Kya got to this point. Kya (played as a little girl by Jojo Regina) was taunted by the kids in school, while struggling to survive at home with an abusive, alcoholic father (Garret Dillahunt) after her mother (Ahna O’Reilly) and siblings abandoned her. She often retreated to the marsh, finding in nature a refuge that family couldn’t provide — along with lessons about how creatures in nature do what they must to survive.

It’s an older Kya, now played by Edgar-Jones (who portrayed the doomed Brenda Lafferty in the “Under the Banner of Heaven” miniseries), who meets Tate Walker (Taylor John Smith), a nice boy who offers to teach Kya to read and write — and encourages her to collect her nature drawings into a book. They also share a romance, though Kya’s heart is broken when Tate leaves for college and doesn’t return. This is when Chase enters the picture.

The thinly realized characters in this love triangle are one problem with the film. Another is the bizarrely ahistorical way the story dances around race in the South in the ‘50s and ‘60s; the only Black characters the movie shows us are the saintly store operators, Jumpin’ (Sterling Macer Jr.) and Mabel (Michael Hyatt), who assist the young Kya when she’s left alone in the marsh. 

Is there anything that can salvage this movie? No, but Edgar-Jones’ exploration of Kya, facing loneliness and longing on one side and holding on to her fierce independence on the other, captures an emotional resonance deeper than what’s on the page. Director Olivia Newman assembles a solid creative team, including cinematographer Polly Morgan and production designer Sue Chan, that gives the marsh setting an ethereal glow.

The most telling sign of the movie’s problems comes at the end, and the much-publicized Taylor Swift song, “Carolina,” that plays over the final credits. Swift understands the assignment, and channels more dark currents in five minutes than “Where the Crawdads Sing” does in two hours.

——

‘Where the Crawdads Sing’

★★

Opens Friday, July 15, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sexual content and some violence including a sexual assault. Running time: 125 minutes.

Review: 'Gabby Giffords Won't Back Down' is a warm-hearted portrait of a political fighter and a survivor of gun violence

The documentary directing team of Julie Cohen and Betsy West have created a strong niche for themselves, profiling strong, smart, determined women — Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (“RBG”), legal thinker Pauli Murray (“My Name Is Pauli Murray”), celebrity chef Julia Child (“Julia”), and now former congresswoman and advocate Gabby Giffords, the subject of the inspiring “Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down.”

In the latter half of the aughts, Giffords was known in her home state of Arizona, and maybe a few policy wonks and Democratic Party leaders (such as President Barack Obama, who’s interviewed here) as an up-and-coming young member of Congress. If she had a national profile, it was because she married an astronaut, Mark Kelly.

Giffords was considered a moderate in her conservative Tucson district; she even touted that she owned firearms and knew how to use them for hunting and target-shooting. Only the most wingnut of Republicans really loathed her, or thought she was dangerous.

Everything changed on Jan. 8, 2011, when Giffords was appearing at a “meet your congressperson” event outside a supermarket in her district. A gunman with a 9mm semiautomatic pistol, equipped with a 33-round magazine, started shooting. Nineteen people were hit, and six died — including a federal judge, a 9-year-old girl, and one of Giffords’ senior staffers. Giffords was shot, at close range, in the forehead; the bullet went through the left side of her brain, and exited through the back of her skull.

Much of what Cohen and West employ to tell the story of Giffords’ recovery stems from a decision her husband, Kelly, made in the hospital: To document the long, painful therapy and rehabilitation process, so Giffords could watch it when she was better. 

Giffords suffered partial paralysis from the brain damage, and still walks with a cane. She also was unable to speak — a condition called aphasia, caused when the bullet damaged the language centers of her brain. Even today, as the movie shows, she has difficulty expressing some words and concepts, and often will prepare days in advance for interviews (including the ones in the film).

The shooting may have slowed Giffords, but it didn’t stop her. The movie captures her on the move today, advocating for gun safety, campaigning against the National Rifle Association (remember to hiss when Wayne LaPierre appears on the screen), and hitting the trail in support of Kelly, who ran for the U.S. Senate in 2020.

It’s unlikely that “Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down” will win over any Republicans who stereotype her as another lefty Democrat. But for people on the Democratic side of the political tug-of-war, Giffords is a hero and a survivor, and the movie gives that audience plenty of reasons to cheer.

——

‘Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, July 15, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City); will air later this year on CNN. Rated PG-13 for thematic material involving gun violence and some disturbing images. Running time: 95 minutes.

Review: 'Paws of Fury' is a fast and furry comedy about cats and dogs — and old-timers won't believe the source material

Mel Brooks’ 1974 Western send-up “Blazing Saddles” is one of the funniest movies ever made — so a movie that borrows from that one, it stands to reason, can’t help but be funny, right? 

The animated “Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank” — which takes from the plot of “Blazing Saddles” enough that the original screenwriters (Brooks, Norman Steinberg, Andrew Bergman, Richard Pryor and Alan User) get credit here — manages to be quite funny, and only old movie lovers who remember a 48-year-old movie will notice what’s missing.

Instead of the Old West, the story is transferred to feudal Japan, though a Japan where everyone is a cat. The greedy warlord Ika Chu (voiced by Ricky Gervais) is fulfilling his plans of an opulent castle where he can wield power snd impress the Shogun (voiced by Brooks, of course). Ika Chu has one last step in his plan: Getting rid of the podunk town of Kakamucho. He’s been sending in bandits to terrorize the townsfolk and scare off the town’s samurai protector.

The Shogun tells Ika Chu that the town must have a samurai, so Ika Chu sends one he knows the town will never accept: A dog, Hank, voiced by Michael Cera. Sure enough, the townsfolk hate Hank, who has to retreat to the town jail — which is where Hank meets Jimbo (voiced by Samuel L. Jackson), a washed-up former samurai who’s been hitting the catnip a little too hard. 

Can Hank learn from Jimbo about how to be a samurai? Can he win over the people of Kakamucho by defeating the giant-sized cat Sumo (voiced by Djimon Hounsou)? Anyone who saw “Blazing Saddles,” or understands how movies generally work, can answer those questions.

For old-timers like me, it’s fun to see how some jokes — like when the bad guys eat beans — still provoke laughs. It’s also fun to watch how directors Rob Minkoff, Chris Bailey and Mark Koetsier can take some of the ideas from the old movie, such as the breaking-the-fourth-wall references to how this is all a movie, and spruce them up for a new audience, who won’t know “Blazing Saddles” but might confuse this with a “Kung Fu Panda” entry.

Of course, since this is a kid-friendly movie, some of the saltier parts of “Blazing Saddles” don’t make the cut — such as any character to approximate the double entendres Madeline Kahn brought to Lilly von Schtupp. But the ragged, laugh-seeking spirit of the original is alive and well, and gives “Paws of Fury” more than enough laughs to make the effort worth it.

——

‘Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank’

★★★

Opens Friday, July 15, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for action, violence, rude and suggestive humor, and some language. Running time: 97 minutes.

Review: 'Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris' is a sweet, light French bonbon, and a showcase for the great Lesley Manville

A working-class Englishwoman has a French adventure in “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris,” a whimsical confection of cross-cultural disagreements that would fly off into a hundred directions if not for the justly acclaimed actor Lesley Manville keeping it all together.

Manville plays Ada Harris, a war widow who cleans other people’s homes in London, circa 1957. One day, she sees something in a wardrobe of one of her clients: A beautiful gown, designed by Christian Dior. The client tells Mrs. Harris the dress cost 500 pounds — and even though it’s a pipe dream for a woman of Mrs. Harris’ social standing, it becomes her dream to go to Paris and buy a dress at the House of Dior.

A few lucky coincidences later, and Mrs. Harris has the money to travel to Paris and buy a Dior dress. She arrives just as Monsieur Dior is about to show his newest line, for the company’s 10th anniversary. The house’s imperious director, Mme. Colbert (Isabelle Huppert), wants to throw Mrs. Harris — but she’s stopped by André Fauvel (Lucas Bravo), the studio’s accountant, who notices Mrs. Harris has something the upper-crust clients almost never have: Wads of cash, a commentary on the super-rich’s ability to get away without paying for things.

A kind nobleman, Marquis de Chassagne (Lambert Wilson, from the “Matrix” franchise), escorts Mrs. Harris into the exhibition. There, she becomes enraptured by the dozens of gorgeous gowns Monsieur Dior has designed. She picks her dream dress, then finds out that a snooty rich woman, Mme Avallon (Guilaine Londez), has snapped up exclusive rights to it. Undaunted, Mrs. Harris selects her second favorite — then is surprised to learn she can’t just buy a Dior off the rack, but must stay in Paris a week for fittings.

Extending her visit, Mrs. Harris finds that Paris is for lovers. For starters, that Marquis keeps buying her roses. To distract herself from that, Mrs. Harris works to pair up André with Natasha (Alba Baptista), Dior’s top model and, like Andre, a reader of Jean-Paul Sartre. 

Unlike Sartre, though, there’s nothing in director Anthony Fabian’s frothy confection to be taken too seriously. With three co-writers working with him on the screenplay, adapting Paul Gallico’s novel, Fabian presents a luminous fantasy version of Paris of a certain time, when a woman with enough pluck could cut through the class and national barriers that are keeping her from following her dreams.

The story has all the earmarks of a silly made-for-TV movie — and, in fact, it was that on CBS in 1992, as a vehicle for Angela Lansbury, cashing in her “Murder, She Wrote” chip with the network.

The casting is what puts this movie into more refined territory. Huppert is perfectly imperious as Mme. Colbert, the last bastion of Dior’s tradition of elegance. And Mrs. Harris has a strong supporting section back in London, led by Jason Isaacs as a kind-hearted bookie.

In the end, though, “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris” is a showcase for Manville, who has earned a shot at being a leading lady after years of great supporting performances in Mike Leigh movies, as well as Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Phantom Thread.” Manville radiates all the late-in-life hopes and dreams of this no-nonsense cleaning lady, turning an “invisible” person into someone everyone has to stop to admire.

——

‘Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris’

★★★

Opens Friday, July 15, in several theaters. Rated PG for suggestive material, language and smoking. Running time: 115 minutes.

Review: 'Thor: Love and Thunder' plays up the comedy of the Norse god — but why can't Marvel's standalone movies stand alone more?

In the fourth movie where the Norse god Thor is the title superhero, “Thor: Love and Thunder,” director Taika Waititi has found the genre most appropriate for our muscular hammer-thrower: A sitcom.

More overtly comical than Chris Hemsworth’s eight past appearances as Thor in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, this installment lets our thunder god get introspective, considering where he fits in a universe where his father Odin and brother Loki are dead, his Asgard has relocated to Earth and is ruled benevolently by his friend Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson), and he’s currently helping out beleaguered planets alongside the Guardians of the Galaxy. (The whole crew — Chris Pratt, Dave Bautista, Karen Gillan, Pom Klementieff, Sean Gunn, and the voices of Bradley Cooper and Vin Diesel — are on hand for brand maintenance more than actual story.)

Meanwhile, back on Earth, Thor’s ex-girlfriend, Dr. Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), feels the urge to visit New Asgard. The urge is coming from the shattered remnants of Thor’s hammer, Mjolnir — which rebuilds itself and imprints on Jane. When Thor returns to New Asgard, which is under attack, he’s surprised to find Jane has taken on the powers of Mjolnir, along with a new working name: Mighty Thor.

Thor doesn’t have much time to take in his ex’s new situation — or learn what the audience knows about a secret Jane is holding — because of what’s attacking New Asgard. That would be a new villain, Gorr the God-Butcher (Christian Bale), who’s on a mission to destroy all gods. Gorr kidnaps the children of New Asgard, and Thor, Jane, Valkyrie and Asgard’s resident rock creature, Korg (voiced by Waititi) go in hot pursuit.

First, though, they head to the planet where all the different gods live, a side trip for comic relief purposes that culminates in an audience with the big kahuna of godhood, Zeus (played by Russell Crowe, who deploys an accent that’s aiming for Greek and lands near Mario and Luigi. 

And therein lies the major problem with this new “Thor” adventure: It doesn’t feel like there are any real stakes — even with the kidnapped children, or major characters facing the prospect of death in different ways. But when you’ve got a director like Waititi, who finds a humorous way to depict Hitler (as he did in “Jojo Rabbit,” for which he won a screenwriting Oscar), why should you expect a serious approach to comic-book godhood?

The movie also shows the pitfalls of relying too much on the MCU canon, or trying to pull more characters from Marvel’s deep comic-book library. There’s enough in the script, by Waititi and Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, to keep us invested in Thor’s post-Thanos spirit journey, his rekindled relationship with Jane, and his recurring dilemma of being his conflicted feelings for Mjolnir and his current axe, Stormbreaker. 

Some have complained about Marvel characters crossing over without purpose before, but “Thor: Love and Thunder” is the most clearcut case of Marvel bloat. If Thor can lose the dad bod he gained in “Avengers: Endgame,” the Marvel franchise can trim down the excess from movie to movie.

——

‘Thor: Love and Thunder’

★★★

Opens Friday, July 8, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, language, some suggestive material and partial nudity. Running time: 119 minutes.

Review: 'Mr. Malcolm's List' puts pretty people into a pleasant trip through an Austen-like comedy of manners

Because Jane Austen only wrote six novels, and somebody has to feed the insatiable appetite of viewers of early 19th-century comedies of manners, we get movies like “Mr. Malcolm’s List,” a trifle of knee britches and empire-waist dresses enlivened by an engaging and ludicrously good-looking cast.

Miss Julia Thistlewaite (Zawe Ashton) is lovely, charming, and rather witty — though maybe not as smart as she thinks she is. During conversation, when someone refers to septuagenarians, she replies, “Oh, I despise foreigners.” It’s this deficit in cleverness that prompts Mr. Jeremy Malcolm (Sopé Dìrísù), the independently wealthy and most desired young bachelor in London, to pass her over after accompanying her to the opera. This slight gets noticed by the gossips around the city, and Julia feels her reputation is ruined.

Julia learns from her friend, Lord Cassidy (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), that Malcolm keeps a list of the traits he desires in a prospective wife. Julia then concocts a plot, to get her revenge on Malcolm for rejecting her: Julia will set Malcolm up with the perfect partner, and at the right moment, have her give him a list of her ideal qualities in a mate.

The key to Julia’s plot is to find someone to pretend to fall for Malcolm. Julia has a candidate in Selina Dalton (Freida Pinto), her girlhood boarding school friend, who recently has been orphaned in Kent. Julia invites Selina to stay with her in London, and enlists her in her plot, which Selina does reluctantly and out of loyalty to Julia. The wrinkle comes early, when Selina meets Malcolm before realizing who he is — and, from then on, starts falling for him for real, and he with her.

Julia keeps the pressure on Selina to stick to the plan, but Julia finds herself being distracted by Malcolm’s military friend, Capt. Henry Ossory (Theo James). Julia and the Captain have a bickering banter, the sort that anyone familiar with such period romances — or, for that matter, any romantic movies at all — will recognize as cover for feelings of true love.

Ashton (“Velvet Buzzsaw”) is delightful as the petulant Julia, justifying her actions in a steady stream of banter aimed at Cassidy, Selina and, at times, the audience. Pinto, Dìrísù and James are all lovely — but the scene-stealer is Ashley Park (“Emily in Paris,” “Girls5Eva”) as Selina’s bubble-headed acquaintance, giggling through every socially awkward encounter.

Director Emma Holly Jones deploys the multi-ethnic casting that fans of “Bridgerton” will recognize — though it could be said that Jones did it first, since she also directed the 2019 proof-of-concept short that got this movie greenlit, with Pinto, Dìrísù and Jackson-Cohen in the same roles, and Gemma Chan (“Crazy Rich Asians”) as Julia. 

Suzanne Allain, who wrote the screenplay based on her own novel, isn’t reinventing the Regency-era wheel here. The characters go through their paces — check all the boxes, as it were — and end up by and large where the viewer expects them to land. In this case, it’s the journey that’s important, with the script producing wry laughs and few surprises.

——

‘Mr.Malcolm’s List’

★★★

Opens Friday, July 1, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for some smoking and mild language. Running time: 115 minutes.

Review: 'Minions: The Rise of Gru' is an empty space where they didn't put in jokes

There are only so many jokes one can wring out of tiny yellow blobs who talk gibberish — and that point was reached well before the new “Minions: The Rise of Gru” was a twinkle in Illumination Entertainment’s greedy little eyes.

As the second movie in which the Minions are in the titular role (not counting the three “Despicable Me” movies), “Minions: The Rise of Gru” is the bridge movie that shows how the little yellow rascals helped the budding supervillain (again voiced by Steve Carell) in his pre-teen days.There’s probably potential for solid laughs from this idea, but the directing team of Kyle Balda, Brad Ableson and Jonathan del Val, and screenwriter Matthew Vogel, can’t find them.

Instead, the movie plops into 1976, and a whole lot of elbow-in-the-ribs references to disco and tacky fashion. It also introduces us to the Vicious 6, a squad of supervillains led by the Pam Grier-like Belle Bottom (Taraji P. Henson) and aging bad guy Wild Knuckles (voiced by Alan Arkin). The rest of the squad is quickly name-checked, though except for Nun-Chuck (a nun who uses nunchucks, get it?), they’re pretty forgettable. (They’re voiced by a gaggle of action stars — Lucy Lawless, Danny Trejo, Dolph Lundgren and Jean-Claude Van Damme — who maybe get a line each, making you wonder why they bothered.)

When the gang tosses Wild Knuckles out of the squad while heisting the rare and mystical Zodiac Stone, Gru joins the line of would-be replacements. Belle Bottom & Co. laugh at the kid Gru, but he’s determined to prove himself — which he does by stealing the just-stolen Zodiac Stone, with help and some hindrance from his Minions. 

Wild chases ensue, but hilarity does not. What the movie serves up are references to things that were funny in past installments, such as Gru’s mom (voiced by Julie Andrews) belittling him, or Dr. Nefario (voiced by Russell Brand) talking about his love of gadgets. These moments do not offer actual jokes, just placeholders and reminders of jokes from earlier movies.

The closest thing “Minions: The Rise of Gru” offers to fresh humor is a bit where three of the Minions (all voiced by Pierre Coffin) meet a retired kung-fu master (voiced by Michelle Yeoh) who is now an acupuncturist — and can manipulate her customer’s muscles just by adjusting her needles. That’s one minute out of 87 where this rehash of a movie served something new.

——

‘Minions: The Rise of Gru’

★

Opens Friday, July 1, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for some action/violence and rude humor. Running time: 87 minutes.