Movie Review No Hard Feelings

No Hard Feelings (2023) 

Directed by Gene Stupnitsky

Written by Gene Stupnitsky 

Starring Jennifer Lawrence, Andrew Barth Feldman, Natalie Morales, Matthew Broderick 

Release Date June 23rd, 2023 

Published June 23rd, 2023 

No Hard Feelings is absolutely hysterical. Starring Jennifer Lawrence as a struggling Uber driver trying to save her home after losing her car to an asset seizure, the film takes raunchy comedy on a ride that never stops being hilariously funny. As Maddie Barker, Lawrence finds herself in danger of losing her home unless she can find a way to get a new car fast. That's when serendipity strikes. A bizarre post online offers hope in a very unexpected way. A rich family is offering an older but still good looking mid-sized Sedan for a strange but reasonable price. 

What makes it strange? The price is dating the family's teenage son, Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman). And by date, Percy's parents, Laird (Matthew Broderick) and Allison (Laura Benanti), mean having sex with him. Helicopter parents to the extreme. As Laird explains, he had an experience when he was Percy's age that changed his life, brought him out of his shell, and led him to become rich, successful, and now happily married. He hopes that his son having a similar experience, even if it is paid for, will have the same effect on him. 

If this premise is a problem for you, then this movie is not for you. No Hard Feelings is uncompromising in the opinion that there is absolutely nothing wrong with Maddie trading sex for a vehicle. She's a grown woman who is in charge of her body and her decisions and she has no problem doing what she needs to do to save her childhood home. We live in a deeply screwed up version of capitalism that leads to this type of situation, one in which the poor have to fight for the scraps of the very, very rich by any means necessary, but this movie isn't about that, at least not directly. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review: The Tale of Despereaux

The Tale of Despereaux (2009) 

Directed by Sam Fell, Rob Stevenhagen

Written by Gary Ross

Starring Matthew Broderick, Emma Watson, Dustin Hoffman, Robbie Coltrane

Release Date December 19th, 2008

Published December 22nd, 2008

The Tale of Despereuax is a Newberry award winning children's book now transported to the big screen. You know how they say the book is always better than the movie? I've never read The Tale of Despereaux but I am willing to bet it's better than the snoozefest movie version.

Matthew Broderick gives voice to Despereaux a mouse who is very different than the rest. Mice are supposed to cower in fear and run from... everything. Not Despereaux. His days are spent reading books about knights and bravery and being a gentleman and saving princesses and this has given him the courage to be more than just another mouse.

Searching the castle where his family and friends live under the stairs, Despereaux meets Princess Pea (Emma Watson). The sad young princess takes a shine to the brave little mouse who makes it his quest to turn things around in the sad kingdom.

A dark cloud has hung over the country since the Queen died. She died during the annual soup festival when a rat dropped into her soup and scared her to death. That rat was Roscuro (Dustin Hoffman) who now lives in the sub basement with a group of disgusting scavenging rats lead by  Botticelli (Ciaran Hinds). Roscuro lives everyday hoping he could someday apologize to the princess.

If that sounds like a pretty big downer well, it plays like one. Despereaux the character is fun but the sadness around him and the gloom topped off with some serious weirdness; that includes a character made entirely of vegetables, makes The Tale of Despereaux depressing and off putting.

This is one exceptional voice cast from Broderick to Hoffman to Sigourney Weaver as the soft toned narrator. But the best voicework in the world cannot rescue a story that is as unpleasant as the vermin who make up the cartoon cast.

Movie Review: Wonder Park

Wonder Park (2019) 

Directed by Uncredited

Written by Josh Applebaum, Andrew Nemec

Starring Brianna Denski, Matthew Broderick, Ken Jeong 

Release Date March 15th, 2019 

Published March 16th, 2019 

In January of 2018 Paramount Pictures fired director Dylan Brown from the animated movie Amusement Park over allegations of inappropriate behavior. Exactly what that behavior was we do not know. What we do know is that, more than one year later, Amusement Park, now titled Wonder Park, has arrived in theaters and it plays like a movie that was lacking a director. Now, that’s easy to say under the circumstances, but I genuinely feel that the movie lacks a rudder, a steady hand guiding the ship. Wonder Park is a sloppy amalgam of cartoon tropes without a strong through-line.

Wonder Park stars the voice of Brianna Denski as June, an imaginative young girl who spends her time dreaming up elaborate theme park rides that her mother, voiced by Jennifer Garner, whispers into the ear of her stuffed monkey named Peanut, voiced by Norbert Leo Butz, who creates them with his magic marker. Hours and days are dedicated to the elaborate design of Wonder Park which mom and dad, voiced by Matthew Broderick, allow to take over the entire home.

This is necessary as when June tried to bring Wonder Park to life outside the house, she nearly destroyed the neighborhood. June created a monstrous loop de loop roller coaster out of any pieces of free wood she and her friends could muster together. Naturally, things fly off the rails quickly and June and her friend Banky, voiced by Oev Michael Urbas, are nearly run down by a truck before crashing through every fence in the neighborhood.

Mom is upset but not too much and the two set about making Wonderland into their in-home project. This goes on until mom contracts plot cancer. Mom has to go away for a while to undergo treatment and without mom around, June doesn’t feel right continuing Wonderland without her. June takes down all of the dozens upon dozens of models she’d built and takes the many stuffed animals that featured in her fantasy and puts them all in a box in a closet.

So distraught is June that she begins to slavishly dedicate herself to her father’s health and well being. She fawns over him and questions his ability to care for himself until he finally decides that she should get out of the house. June is to be whisked off to math camp for the summer but believing that dad cannot possibly get by without her, June ditches the math camp bus and ventures into the forest intent on getting back home.

June is soon distracted when she finds a small piece of her Wonderland blueprint moving magically through the air. She chases after the scrap of paper and it leads her deep into the woods where she stumbles over the entrance to Wonderland. It turns out, her imagination had manifested in a real form and was thriving until recently. Suddenly, a black cloud appears to be sucking up all of Wonderland and appears ready to consume the last of her stuffed animal friends when June arrives.

Manning the park are Greta (Mila Kunis), a wild boar and de facto leader, Steve (John Oliver), a cowardly porcupine, Boomer (Ken Hudson Campbell), a narcoleptic bear, and Gus and Cooper (Kenan Thompson and Ken Jeong), a pair of woodchuck brothers always bounding into trouble teeth first. Together, they have been battling zombie stuffed monkeys in a war to keep what little of the park is left.

Where is Peanut? That’s a little touch of mystery that the film wastes little time giving away. I won’t spoil it here but the little weight given to Peanut’s apparent disappearance is pretty weak. It should mean something that the biggest avatar for June’s mom in this story is missing but instead, the movie trips over itself getting Peanut back into the story and undermines what I would assume would be the deeper meaning of his absence.

Wonder Park wants to be something on par with Inside Out, Pixar’s ingenious and emotional trip into the emotional and intellectual world of a young girl. Unfortunately, Wonder Park lacks any of that film's substance and nuance. The characters aren’t nearly as memorable and Wonder Park is not nearly as funny as Inside Out. Indeed, Wonder Park pales in every comparison to Inside Out, even the animation which is arguably the best thing about Wonder Park, can’t hold a candle to anything Pixar has ever created, let alone the masterpiece that is Inside Out.

Weak narrative structure, meaningless metaphors and a shambling pace are the kinds of things that a good director might be able to work out. Unfortunately, Wonder Park didn’t have a director to help iron out those problems or to even patch them over well. Without that guiding hand you can sense just how much not having a director affected the failed final product that is Wonder Park. This lack of a guiding hand even extends to something as simple as the title. Despite the fact that everyone in the movie refers to Wonder Park as Wonderland, no one bothered to change the title. The words Wonder Park never appear in the movie and stand out as a symbol of the lack of focus that plagues the entirety of this animated adventure.

Movie Review: The Stepford Wives

The Stepford Wives (2004) 

Directed by Frank Oz 

Written by Paul Rudnick 

Starring Nicole Kidman, Matthew Broderick, Bette Midler, Roger Bart, Glenn Close, Christopher Walken

Release Date June 11th, 2004

Published June 12th, 2004 

The troubles of a troubled movie project tend to go public long before the movie itself. Such is the case with the remake of the 1975 domestic horror movie The Stepford Wives. The signs of trouble began with gossip about onset bickering between the stars and director Frank Oz. Then, when the film ballooned from a three-month shoot to a six-month shoot, the gossip turned to outright fact. Finally, there was the kiss of death, the announcement of reshoots to change the ending.

Whatever chance the film had of reaching blockbuster status went out the window when the reshoots were announced. Now the best that the producers can hope for is that the editing, which when added to the time spent shooting brought the project to more than a year's worth of work, could salvage something salable, or even moderately watchable. That they did a little better than that is a miracle.

Nicole Kidman and Matthew Broderick star as Joanna and Walter, a married couple who also work together at a television network. Well, Joanna works, she's the head of the network, Walter works for her. However after an incident with a crazed reality show contestant, Joanna is fired and Walter quits out of sympathy. After Joanna recovers from a minor nervous breakdown, the couple take their kids and move to a gated community in Connecticut called Stepford.

Right off the bat, the place is weird. It's too neat, too orderly, too...clean. Not just clean but frighteningly clean. There is more weirdness as the family meets the Stepford welcoming committee in the form of Mrs. Claire Wellington (Glenn Close). Picture Martha Stewart on a serious caffeine bender. While Walter is shuttled off to the Stepford men's club, Joanna joins Claire at the Stepford day spa where the women of Stepford work out, though not in a way any normal woman works out.

Though her husband takes quickly to Stepford's ‘50s country club feel, Joanna is not completely alone in her alienation. Also new to the neighborhood are another pair of transplanted New Yorkers, Bobbie (Bette Midler) a cynical, slovenly, Jewish writer and Roger (Roger Bart) an outré fashion conscious gay man and well-known architect. Bobbie came to Stepford with her schlubby househusband Dave (Jon Lovitz) and Roger with his barely out of the closet lawyer Jerry (David Marshall Grant).

Being the only three normal people in all of Stepford, they commiserate over the oddity of the woman in Stepford. They all dress like housewives from 50's TV ads. They bake like it were their only job in the world. And strangest of all, these gorgeous woman are all having amazing sex with their doughy, dopey husbands, as the three accidentally witness on an uninvited visit.

Things only grow weirder though when both Roger and Bobbie disappear and then reappear in the Stepford mold with all of their personality sucked out. All of this oddness has something to do with the Stepford men's club and especially it's founder Mike Wellington (Christopher Walken), also Claire's husband. Though most of you know the film’s secret, I don't want to ruin it for the uninitiated. Needless to say, the film comes down to a battle between Joanna, the men's club, and indeed her own husband.

The biggest surprise about this film is not it's twist ending but rather how good the film is until that twist. There are a number of funny moments in Stepford Wives and most come from Kidman, Midler and Roger Bart whose biting comments about the woman of Stepford are very funny. The best scene in the film is when the three attend the Stepford woman's book club where the book of the week is all about Christmas ornaments.

Glenn Close turns in a performance that rivals her turn in Fatal Attraction for it's over the top lunacy. It almost goes without saying that Christopher Walken is good. Yet again, Walken has another of those speeches that only he could deliver. It's not as good as his tooth fairy bit in The Rundown or his masterpiece of death speech in Man on Fire, but for sheer Walken inspired lunacy it's a real highlight.

So what went wrong? Up until maybe the last 15 to 20 minutes Stepford Wives was a pretty funny comedy and then it flew completely off the rails. In his effort to distance this film from the original director Frank Oz makes a decision that is such a complete departure from the original film it's mind-blowing. The twist ending of the original film was what made it so memorable, it's why the film existed, for that one moment of shock. Obviously, that shock isn't going to be as good a second time, but the change made is so radical and so obviously tacked on that it ruins the entire picture.

Nothing of the first 50 or so minutes of the film’s run time makes any sense at all once the twist is introduced. This is a horribly misconceived change that I can't tell you how bad it is, you really have to see it for yourself to see what a garish and obvious mistake it is. So bad you wonder how a major studio and a professional director could make such a mistake.

The original Stepford Wives is a pretty good horror film. It's also very of its time. It's a social satire that drew from the burgeoning women's rights movement and the societal changes that were happening so quickly in the 1970's. When you look back on it this is not a film that should inspire a remake. The new Stepford Wives is not just filled with mistakes in its creation and final product. The idea to make it was probably the biggest mistake of them all.

Movie Review The Lion King

The Lion King (1994)

Directed by Roger Allers, Rob Minkoff

Written by Irene Mecchi, Jonathan Roberts, Linda Woolverton 

Starring Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Matthew Broderick, James Earl Jones, Jeremy Irons 

Release Date June 15th 1994

Published August 11th, 2003 

It is a quirk of timing that the same week our poll question asked whether traditional animation was dead, the animated classic The Lion King would open in the IMAX theater in my hometown of Davenport Iowa.

I am of the belief that traditional hand drawn animation is finished as far as its box office appeal. As an artform, however, it is as strong as ever. While my evidence for that is nearly 10 years old, it's not as if it's gotten worse since The Lion King debuted in the summer of 1994. Traditional animation was merely surpassed in both quality and entertainment value by computer animation that allows for more visual flourish, picture clarity and surprise.

It is an interesting question to ask, just how appealing would The Lion King be if it had competed against the likes of Shrek, Toy Story or Finding Nemo? Would it have become the highest grossing animated feature of all time? (A title that now belongs to Finding Nemo) Would opening after the computer animated films I named previously diminish Lion King's legacy as an animated classic?

That question can never be answered, and regardless of whether The Lion King is the all time animated box office champion, it's legacy is in place. The reformatting of the film for the IMAX screen is a reassurance of Lion King's classic status.

In the wilds of Africa, the king of the jungle is a Lion named Mufasa (the resonant voice of James Earl Jones) who has had a son. The heir to Mufasa's throne is Simba (voiced by Jonathan Taylor Thomas), a playful adventurous kid eager to learn the family business. Standing in his way is his evil uncle Scar (Jeremy Irons) and his army of hyenas. The only way Scar can become the king is if both Mufasa and Simba are dead, so using his hyena army he orchestrates a stampede that forces Mufasa to trade his own life for Simba's. Scar then convinces Simba that it was his fault that his father died, leading Simba to flee the kingdom and allow Scar to become king.

Simba wanders off into the wild where he meets a strange tiny little animal, a meerkat named Timon and his buddy, a warthog named Pumba. Together Timon and Pumba help Simba grow into a man and soon Simba, with some inspiration by a lioness named Nala (Moira Kelly), is ready to reclaim his father’s throne.

The film’s story is about death, family, and facing your fears. It's about growing up and realizing who you are. All wonderful elements that are never overplayed. One of the marks of a good animated film or any film aimed at a younger audience is its ability to deliver a message without sacrificing entertainment value.

The animation in The Lion King was the height of Disney's animation renaissance of the late 80's- early 90's. Blown up to the IMAX six-story screen, it becomes even more impressive. The visuals in The Lion King are as impressive as anything made specifically for the IMAX. Though there is an odd shadow that pops up occasionally, it doesn't detract from the beauty of this animated classic.

When you combine the film’s visuals blown up to six stories with it's memorable soundtrack blasted through the mind-blowing IMAX sound system and you get a true masterpiece. Indeed traditional theater sound is very impressive, but it can't compare with the IMAX sound. The Lion King’s African drum score and it's numerous catchy pop tunes are absolutely mind-blowing in IMAX.

Whether traditional animation has a future is debatable but whether The Lion King on IMAX is a masterpiece is unquestionable. 

Movie Review: Bee Movie

Bee Movie (2007)

Directed by Simon J. Smith, Steve Hickner

Written by Jerry Seinfeld, Spike Feresten, Barry Marder, Andy Robin

Starring Jerry Seinfeld, Renee Zellweger, Matthew Broderick, John Goodman, Chris Rock

Release Date November 2nd, 2007

Published November 1st, 2007

I'm a big fan of Seinfeld. That talky seemingly going nowhere about nothing style is just hilarious to me. Jerry has significantly lowered his profile since his legendary TV show made him the second richest television personality in America, right behind Oprah. Now Jerry is getting back to business and not being much of an actor, he's found himself a niche in animation. Bee Movie is the brainchild of Jerry and a few friends from Seinfeld. The story of a worker bee who leaves the hive and discovers a whole new world of possibilities is really just a collection of Seinfeld-isms masked by kid friendly animation.

When Barry B. Benson (Seinfeld) discovers that he will be working the same job for the rest of his bee life he longs for an escape. He gets his chance when a squadron of pollen gathering jock bees invite him to fly outside the hive. What Barry discovers is that while most humans want to squash him, at least one human, Vanessa (Renee Zellweger), will defend his right to live.

Though bee law doesn't allow bees to speak to humans, Barry is compelled to thank Vanessa for saving his life. This leads to a friendship, and a puppy dog crush for Barry. Eventually, Vanessa leads Barry to another revelation, humans have been stealing the bee's honey. With her help, Barry decides to sue humanity for the return of the precious nectar they work so hard to create.

So, there is a semblance of a plot in Bee Movie. The whole thing about humans stealing honey from bees gives the film something to do while Seinfeld riffs opposite Renee Zellweger. The dialogue is a combination of classic Seinfeld fascinations (awkward introductions, pop culture, et al) and bee puns. Some of these meandering conversations hit with a good punchline, sometimes they thud like a bad pun. Still, everything is delivered in a good natured and pleasant fashion.

The animation of Bee Movie is in the Dreamworks style, reminiscent of both Shrek and Shark's Tale. Shiny surfaces, oddly shaped bulbous characters and bright colors. For Bee Movie yellow and black are, naturally, the dominant colors, especially in the hive. Outside, bright blue skies and gorgeous green grass standout as some remarkable, eye catching visuals.

Joining the fun of Bee Movie are a number of big name guest stars. It's like a sweeps episode of the Love Boat. Oprah Winfrey, John Goodman, Chris Rock, Matthew Broderick, Kathy Bates and Seinfeld's old TV pal Patrick Warburton each play key roles. Sting drops in for a brief, humorous cameo and Ray Liotta steals the movie in a terrifically over the top bit of self parody.

Jerry Seinfeld is so naturally funny that you will laugh while watching Bee Movie. You just won't laugh enough. Gags and one liners work well in a stand up act but in movies we long for characters with some depth and insight. We long for characters who aren't merely placeholders in search of the next setup and punchline.

Ratatouille is soon to come out on DVD and that film about a gourmet rat shows the potential of animation to create animal characters with depth, insight and more to offer than a few good zingers. Bee Movie is amiable and nice but compared to Ratatouille, it's superfluous and entirely forgettable. While some won't mind the trifle that is Bee Movie, deep down they will long for more. I know I did.