Night School (2018)

NIGHT SCHOOL (2018) One star

I know that I am probably not the target audience for director Malcolm D. Lee’s comedy starring Kevin Hart, who also served as one of the six writers and producers on NIGHT SCHOOL.

I know that, but I am still hard pressed to come up with a single (even fleeting) moment I laughed at during a movie listed at 111 minutes.

I struggled through NIGHT SCHOOL, but I must report there were those around me who laughed their heads off at regular intervals. They made up the difference for my stone face. (Previously, I had this experience at THE HANGOVER, STEP BROTHERS, and TED, though far more pronounced for those comedies since I watched them in a crowded multiplex.)

Perusing through Hart’s credits, I found one movie over the last 18 years that I watched before experiencing NIGHT SCHOOL, just one movie and not exactly a good one at that, SCARY MOVIE 3. I might have watched SUPERHERO MOVIE, but it’s not exactly coming back to me now with any clarity. I am glad that I have missed just about every one of his movies.

In NIGHT SCHOOL, Hart plays a high school dropout named Teddy who’s forced to attend night school at his alma mater to pursue a GED. It is far more complicated than that, of course, especially since he’s not been honest with his far more successful fiance about a single thing. Yes, he’s a hustler. I know, I know, it’s a shocker.

I especially found any of the restaurant scenes in NIGHT SCHOOL difficult to watch, because they involve a pubic hair custody battle, incessant mugging and melodrama especially by Hart, racism accusations that will remind one of bad scenes from BEVERLY HILLS COP and RUSH HOUR 2 involving Eddie Murphy and Chris Tucker, and I just can’t take that sentence and paragraph any longer though I will be leaving behind crucial plot points.

The classroom scenes are really not any better, since the night school students and authority figures combine to form a modern-day comedic variation on a platoon in a World War II movie. There are would-be identification figures for everybody in NIGHT SCHOOL.

We have the harpy teacher with an inspirational heart of gold (Tiffany Haddish), the high school principal (Taran Killam) whom our protagonist embarrassed back in high school who’s prone to fits of mugging for the camera more pronounced than the rest of the cast, the working class laborer (Rob Riggle) who has literally broken his back and wants to get into management, the harried housewife (Mary Lynn Rajskub) with a great big lummox for a husband, the former waiter (Al Madrigal) who dreams of being like Justin Bieber or Justin Timberlake, the woke conspiracy theorist (Romany Malco), the young woman (Anne Winters) from a wealthy family, and the convict (Fat Joe) beamed into a standard plot through Skype.

Hart, Haddish, and Killam in particular are guilty of overplaying everything, bludgeoning us with every single joke until the film gets all gooey and sentimental in the final reel and takes its plot oh so seriously. This cast acts like each audience member suffers from a learning disability (or hearing loss).

I absolutely hate it when comedies go for cheap gag after cheap gag for most of their running time and then get all serious and borderline preachy at the end, like they want both their NATIONAL LAMPOON’S ANIMAL HOUSE and their ABC Afterschool Special. I wanted to gag when Teddy began his meandering feel good speech at graduation.

Austin Chronicle reviewer Marc Savlov incorporated both the Hindenburg and John Hughes’ THE BREAKFAST CLUB into his opening sentence. That’s good and true, because NIGHT SCHOOL indeed leaves me saying “Oh, the Humanity!”

The Predator (2018)

THE PREDATOR

THE PREDATOR (2018) Two stars

One of these days, they’ll get a PREDATOR sequel right and make a film with only Predator characters.

Yeah, that’s right, no human characters.

THE PREDATOR — the fourth or sixth entry (depending on whether or not you want to count two ALIEN VS. PREDATOR movies that combine two 20th Century Fox cash cows) in a series that began only decades ago — gives us a tasty hint of a Predator-only film with a Mega Predator vs. Predator fight scene. It’s the highlight of the film, then it’s back to our more generic human characters.

Seeing that the Walt Disney Company recently acquired 20th Century Fox, we can bet our sweet hard-earned that Disney will be pumping out PREDATOR productions once a year or every two years.

I doubt they’ll get it right.

Anyway, we especially have too many anonymous scientist and military characters in THE PREDATOR, and they’re exhibits for why I stump for the systematic eradication of human characters in PREDATOR movies.

I mean, I get it, they’re around to amplify the body count, but their perfunctory dialogue scenes are dead weight that drag the movie down until the characters are (thankfully) eliminated.

PREDATOR ’87 does not have perfunctory dialogue and dead weight, and it does not drag. It plays like “a lean, mean fighting machine” (in the great words from STRIPES) and it’s a streamlined entertainment that moves faster than this, er, last year’s model (an Elvis Costello reference following STRIPES).

The cast of the original PREDATOR amounted to 16 actors.

By comparison, THE PREDATOR features approximately 50 credited and 20 uncredited performers.

Favorite character: “Sobbing veterinarian.” Second favorite: “Cantina bartender.” Show: “Halloween mom.”

Shane Black co-wrote and directed THE PREDATOR.

You might remember Black, and we definitely remember his movies.

Black’s screenwriting credits: LETHAL WEAPON, LETHAL WEAPON 2, THE LAST BOY SCOUT, LAST ACTION HERO, and THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT, for which he received a $4 million payday.

You might remember Black from the first PREDATOR.

He played Rick Hawkins, a bespectacled, foul-mouthed mercenary. He’s a foul mouth on an epic scale.

Hawkins tells jokes like “The other day, I was going down on my girlfriend. I said to her, ‘Jeez, you’ve got a big pussy. Jeez, you’ve got a big pussy.’ She said, ‘Why did you say that twice?’ I said, ‘I didn’t.’ See, it was ‘cause of the echo.”

Black did not receive a writing credit on PREDATOR, but we can almost bet that he wrote Hawkins’ dialogue.

Especially since THE PREDATOR features a scene where a soldier with Tourette’s blurts out “Eat your pussy!”

This character, named Baxley and played by Thomas Jane, later spouts more dialogue from the Planet X, “Fuck me in the face with an aardvark.”

At the end of the day, THE PREDATOR is not a bad movie, nor a good one, and I doubt that I’ll be able to remember it for too much longer. I’ll say that I’ve killed two hours of my life in worse fashion many times before and hopefully not as many times after.

Halloween (2018)

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HALLOWEEN (2018) Two stars
Our word for today is “retcon” or “retroactive continuity,” which means to “revise (an aspect of a fictional work) retrospectively, typically by introducing a piece of new information that imposes a different interpretation on previously described events.”

This word often gets filed alongside “Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome.”

Anyway, retconning happens frequently not only in soap operas but also manga, serial dramas, movie sequels, cartoons, professional wrestling, video games, and radio series.

Retconning helps explain HALLOWEEN 2018 — the 11th HALLOWEEN movie, the 10th to feature serial slasher Michael Myers, and the third in the series to use that very same title.

HALLOWEEN 2018 pretends the eight other HALLOWEEN movies featuring Michael Myers before it never existed. As tempting as that might sound, though, especially given the appalling quality of several of those movies, HALLOWEEN 2018 complicates that by recycling plot elements from, let’s see here, HALLOWEEN II (1981) and HALLOWEEN 4, for example.

If you recall HALLOWEEN 4: THE RETURN OF MICHAEL MYERS, idiots make the mistake of transferring Michael Myers from one hospital to another. Convenient, yes. Stupid, yes. Guess it never happened, though, and so I guess we should not have recalled it.

At the end of HALLOWEEN II, Michael Myers burns up real good. For that matter, so does Dr. Loomis. Of course, they both return in HALLOWEEN 4, even if the title only made room for one. Yeah, I know, right, never happened, so let’s move past it. We shall overcome.

HALLOWEEN 2018, why it’s the third occasion for bringing back Michael Myers to multiplexes in a year that ends with ‘8,’ a magic number since John Carpenter’s classic original came out in 1978.

We had first HALLOWEEN 4 (1988) and then HALLOWEEN H20: 20 YEARS LATER, Jamie Lee Curtis’ big return highlighted by a final showdown between cinematic siblings. Well, you guessed it, in HALLOWEEN 2018, that never happened, Laurie Strode did not take on an assumed name or become the dean of a private school in Northern California or have a biological son played by Josh Hartnett. No, instead, HALLOWEEN 2018 Laurie’s a lot like what happened to Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Conner in TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY.

I strangely remember seeing H20: 20 YEARS LATER in theaters when it came out. Apparently that never happened. That’s it, I want a refund, but wait, how can I get a refund for a movie I never saw? I feel like a relative of George Orwell should be writing this review.

And, yes, Michael’s not Laurie’s brother, since that plot twist and great big revelation late in a movie never happened in the brave new world created by HALLOWEEN 2018.

Of course, you might also remember or at least you think you remember that Michael killed Laurie early on during HALLOWEEN: RESURRECTION (2002). Well, you guessed it, that’s been retconned and never happened, even though investigators can find the infamous scene on YouTube. Might want to delete that evidence.

See, it’s real knee-slapping funny, Laurie (and we in the audience) thought she beheaded Michael in H20: 20 YEARS LATER, but we’re told in RESURRECTION that she killed a paramedic with whom her brother swapped out clothes. Oops, hate when that happens.

H20: 20 YEARS LATER, you see, it’s a retcon itself that pretended only the first two HALLOWEEN movies existed. Well, hell, guess you can just retcon a retcon if you so desire another sequel in a long assembly line of sequels.

Rob Zombie directed two HALLOWEEN movies, titled HALLOWEEN and HALLOWEEN II. Yes, all that never happened, so Zombie’s reboots are retconned.

Man, I am so confused.

In a 1984 interview, Carpenter touched on HALLOWEEN II and HALLOWEEN III. (Has this interview been retconned?)

“There are two sides to when you work in the movie business,” he said. “One is as an artist. You think of yourself as a creative person, and the other side is the business person. I let my producer’s side come out when they offered me the sequels to HALLOWEEN. They offered a nice sum of money. I also had a lot of hope for giving new directors a chance to make films as I had been given a chance with low-budget films. The directors who did 2 and 3 — Rick Rosenthal and Tommy Wallace — what they were given was a budget and in some cases a script. ‘OK, here are the rules of the game, make your movie, nobody’s going to bother you.’ It doesn’t always work.

“I thought HALLOWEEN III was excellent. I really like that film because it’s different. It has a real nice feel to it. I think he’s a talented director (Wallace). On the other hand, I think HALLOWEEN II is an abomination and a horrible movie. I was really disappointed in it. The director (Rosenthal) has gone on and done some other films and I think his career is launched now. But I don’t think he had a feel for the material. I think that’s the problem, he didn’t have a feeling for what was going on.”

Carpenter took on a role as composer, executive producer, and creative consultant for HALLOWEEN 2018.

HALLOWEEN 2018 director David Gordon Green’s career, especially his first two films, suggests that he would not exactly have a feeling for the material. It’s a long way in nearly two decades from a feature debut like GEORGE WASHINGTON to HALLOWEEN 2018, from an independent release made for $42,000 to a major release for $10-15 million.

HALLOWEEN 2018 became a huge hit, especially for a horror movie, so that must already mean a sequel’s in the works. Will they dare call it HALLOWEEN II?

That brings us kicking and screaming back to the HALLOWEEN muddle. Let’s see, HALLOWEEN 2018 pretends none of the other sequels ever happened and that would make it the second HALLOWEEN movie. Not so fast. Where oh where does HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH fit in, since it ventured away from Michael, Laurie, and Loomis and exists separately other than using HALLOWEEN as part of its title? That would make HALLOWEEN III really HALLOWEEN II and HALLOWEEN 2018 really HALLOWEEN III. I’ve not been this confused since right before I threw away my Rubik’s Cube.

On a basic level, retconning means that one can just do whatever they want. It seems to reflect a fundamental contempt for the audience: We can get away with murder.

That’s basically what they do in HALLOWEEN 2018.

Just remember that you cannot spell retcon or confusion without “con.”

Bumblebee (2018)

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BUMBLEBEE (2018) Three-and-a-half stars

To be honest, BUMBLEBEE was a pleasant surprise.

Granted, I knew coming in that it received better reviews than each of the five previous live-action TRANSFORMERS movies directed by the beloved Michael Bay. (TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE paid Bay and his general oeuvre tribute with “Pearl Harbor Sucks.”)

In those reviews, I believe BUMBLEBEE was even recommended many times as being a TRANSFORMERS movie for people who did not like the Bay entries. For the record, I liked the first entry from 2007 and they quickly dropped in quality. (REVENGE OF THE FALLEN, though, gave Roger Ebert a zinger first sentence and book title, “A Horrible Experience of Unbearable Length.”)

Anyway, I walked into Flick Theatre in Anderson, popcorn and healthy skepticism in tow.

Leaving the Flick two hours later, I thought, “Hey, that’s the best TRANSFORMERS movie since the animated film released in 1986.”

I’ll go through a short list of reasons why.

— Length: BUMBLEBEE lasts 114 minutes, the shortest running time for TRANSFORMERS since 1986. The animated version ran 90 minutes, a good length. Bay’s five entries lasted 150 minutes, 150 minutes, 157 minutes, 165 minutes, and 149 minutes. Not only were they long but they were long and loud, very very very loud. They’re the kinds of movies heard throughout the multiplex. BUMBLEBEE, directed by Travis Knight, lacks the bloat of the Bay-directed films. By the way, Bay served as producer, just like he did for A QUIET PLACE and the FRIDAY THE 13TH, AMITYVILLE HORROR, and THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE remakes.

— Focus: BUMBLEBEE centers on the human characters far more than any previous live-action TRANSFORMERS, especially through female protagonist Charlie (Hailee Steinfeld). She’s a rock solid entry point into this world and she’s the one who finds and befriends Bumblebee in a relationship that echoes E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL and THE IRON GIANT, as well as KING KONG. I never felt that way during the Bay entries. Charlie also reminds one that had this film been made in the 1980s, her character would have been played by Molly Ringwald, maybe Ally Sheedy.

We’re swept up in the emotion of the film, just like E.T., THE IRON GIANT, and KING KONG.

— Humor: Ah, a delicate balance. Do you go too far and become camp like BATMAN & ROBIN or do you lack humor and become a rather grim affair like the Christopher Nolan BATMAN films? I laughed at several points throughout BUMBLEBEE, where I was obviously intended to laugh, like when Charlie and her possible future boyfriend / adoring sidekick Memo have Bumblebee egg and toilet paper the house and car of somebody who’s been cruel and mean to Charlie at every turn … of course, Bumblebee takes it to another level. Or Bumblebee’s priceless reaction to Rick Astley. (Maybe it’s unfortunate that Mojo Nixon’s “Debbie Gibson is Pregnant with My Two-Headed Love Child” did not come out until 1989, given its subject matter, including a Rick Astley insult. Believe Mojo called Astley “a pantywaist.”)

— Soundtrack: Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” the Simple Minds’ “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up,” Steve Winwood’s “Higher Love,” A-Ha’s “Take On Me,” Sam Cooke’s “Unchained Melody,” the Smiths’ “Girlfriend in a Coma,” Sammy Hagar’s “I Can’t Drive 55,” Stan Bush’s “The Touch,” and DJ EZ Rock and Rob Base’s “It Takes Two” are some of the nostalgic buttons pushed by this prequel.

No doubt that a teenage girl in the late 1980s would have favored such songs. Charlie’s a major Smiths fan — I seem to also remember hearing “Bigmouth Strikes Again” — and she wears T-shirts of Elvis Costello, the Damned, and the Rolling Stones, I do believe.

I found a couple anachronisms.

“Never Gonna Give You Up” was released in the UK in July 1987 and later became a hit in America in early 1988.

“It Takes Two” did not appear until August 1988. BUMBLEBEE takes place during 1987.

However, though, I grinned from ear to ear when Bumblebee cued up “The Touch,” a hard rock anthem from the 1986 TRANSFORMERS later covered by Dirk Digger (Mark Wahlberg) during his cocaine would-be rock star phase.

— Little moments like that are scattered throughout BUMBLEBEE.

First-time live-action director Knight is the 45-year-old son of Nike co-founder and Chairman Emeritus Phil Knight. The younger Knight worked in animation (namely stop-motion) before BUMBLEBEE — his works include CORALINE and his directorial debut KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS (2016) for Laika Entertainment; Travis Knight serves as Laika’s president and CEO (he’s also on Nike’s Board of Directors) and the company employs nearly 400 people in Hillsboro, Oregon.

Will future TRANSFORMERS movies follow the direction taken by Knight and British screenwriter Christina Hodson or go back to the Bay-ten path, if you will?

BUMBLEBEE does not lack action movie spectacle, of course, with shit blowing up real good especially in the opening and closing scenes, but the heart and humor displayed over the balance of the movie takes BUMBLEBEE to a higher level.