Movie Review The Little Mermaid

The Little Mermaid (2023) 

Directed by Rob Marshall 

Written by David Magee 

Starring Halle Bailey, Jonah Hauer King, Javier Bardem, Melissa McCarthy, Daveed Diggs 

Release Date May 26th, 2023 

Published May 26th, 2023 

I can't sit here and tell you I was a big of The Little Mermaid. I am not a fan of director Rob Marshall's bombastic, somewhat chaotic, and often wonky vision of this Disney classic. I was all set to write a mostly negative review of The Little Mermaid. Then, when the movie ended, I stood outside of the theater and watched the crowd making their way out of the theater and I was struck by the reaction of others. Specifically, I saw a uniformly joyous response from young girls leaving the theater. More than one said they wanted to be Ariel for Halloween. They were singing the songs, the choruses anyway. 

It was the best possible review anyone could give to The Little Mermaid. The young girls from 4 years old to 12 years were in universal praise of The Little Mermaid. And listening to that broke through my cynicism. Their joy reframed my context of The Little Mermaid. This movie is not to my taste at all, but it's not meant to be. If a movie can inspire this much joy in the audience intended to enjoy it, who am I as a middle aged dude to say that's bad. 

Halle Bailey stars in The Little Mermaid as Ariel, the youngest daughter of King Triton (Javier Bardem). Ariel is an endlessly curious young woman, her eyes filled with wonder, she explores the seas searching for human treasures that fall into the ocean. With her pal Flounder (Jacob Tremblay), she also finds trouble. While searching for treasure in one of the many sunken ships at the bottom of the ocean, she and Flounder narrowly and daringly escape a very hungry and determined shark. For Ariel, this is just another day of adventure. 

However, this is not just another day in her kingdom. This is the day that her sisters from around the world are visiting to meet with the King and when Ariel fails to show up on time, the rift between Father and Daughter is further exposed. King Triton wants his youngest daughter to be more careful. He especially wants Ariel to shake off her fascination with humans. According to Triton, it was human who murdered his wife, Ariel's mother and his grief has curdled into anger and suspicion of all humans. 

This does not curb Ariel's curiosity however, and when she spots a ship caught in a storm and dashed on some rocks, she leaps in to help the ship's captain, Prince Eric (Jonah Hauer King). Saving his life, Ariel doesn't fully reveal herself to him but her voice is burned into his memory. He vows to search for the mysterious young woman who saved his life. Meanwhile, the scheming Ursula (Melissa McCarthy), has witnessed all of this and sees Ariel's desire to be a human as her chance to upend her brother, King Triton, as the ruler of the seas. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media

Movie Review: Can You Ever Forgive Me

Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018) 

Directed by Marielle Heller

Written by Nicole Holofcener, Jeff Whitty

Starring Melissa McCarthy, Richard E. Grant

Release Date October 19th, 2018

Published October 17th, 2018 

Can You Ever Forgive Me stars Melissa McCarthy as writer Lee Israel. Lee had modest success in the 80’s as a writer of biographies of famous women. Unfortunately, this modest success was not enough to sustain her and she fell on some very hard times in the early 1990’s. While she was working on a book about famed Vaudeville comedian Fanny Brice, Lee was also battling poverty, alcoholism, a sick cat and eviction from her New York City apartment. 

Lee’s infamy fell in her lap, rather literally. While doing research for her book, Lee found personal letters written by Fanny Brice. The letters aren’t special but they have her signature and to the right collector, they are worth something. When Lee goes to sell them to a local bookseller, she has a fortuitous moment. The bookseller tells Lee that had the letters been of a slightly more personal nature, they might have been worth more. 

Having studied Brice’s unique wit and way of writing and speaking, Lee was in a rare position to know how Brice might just write a personal letter to a friend. So, Lee sets off on her criminal venture into fraud by buying a period specific typewriter and typing a letter in Fanny Brice’s voice. She then copies Brice’s signature from one of the less valuable letters she didn’t sell and sets out to pass it off as the real thing. When that works, Lee finds herself with what she believes could be a sustainable enterprise. 

Joining her on her new journey into criminality is her best friend, a gay, homeless, dilettante, named Jack Hock. Jack is the proverbial devil on her shoulder, the perfect confessor and foil whose own minor criminal enterprises creates an understanding and bond among the two, even as Lee remains uneasy having an actual friend, she still prefers her cat. Just how good of a friend is Jack or Lee, for that matter, we will come to find out. It’s a true story but being unfamiliar with the story, I was very intrigued by the many unexpected turns of this story. 

The movie was directed by the fabulous Marielle Heller who directed the woefully underseen gem The Diary of a Teenage Girl and will next be on the big screen with a Mr. Rogers biopic starring Tom Hanks. Heller is a director with a strong authorial voice. Her style has a lived in and gritty quality which helps capture the period setting, even if that period is merely the early 90’s in the case of this movie. The story looks and feels authentic. 

The script was written by another phenomenally talented female filmmaker, Nicole Holofcener, who’s perceptive and hilarious efforts include Enough Said with James Gandolfini and Julia Louis Dreyfus, Friends with Money and the brilliant Catherine Keener vehicle, Lovely & Amazing. Holofcener has a knack for prickly pear female characters and Lee Israel is right in her witty wheelhouse. 

There is talk that Melissa McCarthy could contend for an Academy Award for her performance in Can You Ever Forgive Me and I hope she gets the chance. This is a fantastic performance and not merely on the sliding scale of a comic actress going for serious actress cred. McCarthy brings Lee Israel to devastating life. It’s a complicated part as Israel is notably dyspeptic, she hates people and leaving her apartment and yet, McCarthy makes you care about her. 

Lee is a pitiable figure, an immense unrealized talent who will forever be remembered as a faker. And yet, she fooled the known world of art and literature collectors with her remarkably perceptive impersonation letters. She captured the voices of Noel Coward, Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman in ways that fooled even people who knew them when they were alive. It takes a pretty great writer to pull off that level of impersonation across such a cross section of wit and intellect. 

Reading reviews of Lee’s own book, which was the inspiration for this movie, you find critics begrudgingly forced to admit that Lee Israel had a scalding wit of her own, a self-lacerating nastiness that could have been a hallmark of her own writing had she ever found the confidence to write in her own voice rather than as the people she wrote biographies for. Can You Ever Forgive Me doesn’t paint the kindest portrait of Lee but it is honest in the same way she was and for that it’s brave, bold and fascinating.

Movie Review The Happytime Murders

The Happytime Murders (2018) 

Directed by Brian Henson 

Written by Todd Berger 

Starring Melissa McCarthy, Joel McHale, Maya Rudolph, Elizabeth Banks 

Release Date April 24th, 2018 

Published April 23rd, 2018 

A number of critics have called The Happytime Murders the ‘worst movie of 2018.’ These critics apparently forgot about 15:17 to Paris or The Maze Runner Death Cure. The Happytime Murders is undoubtedly bad, I completely agree with that sentiment; but not worst of the year level bad. Mostly, the film is a failure of a central idea, that idea being that puppets acting like raunchy, obnoxious humans is funny just because they are puppets.

Melissa McCarthy stars in The Happytime Murders as Detective Connie Edwards, the former partner of the first ever puppet police detective, Phil Phillips (voiced by Bill Barretta). Edwards and Phillips, now a private detective, are thrown back together when a series of murders involving the cast of a popular puppet television show comes to center on Phil as a possible suspect, one of the victims was Phil’s own brother.

Phil somehow winds up at the scene of each murder and though we know he’s not the killer, it’s no surprise that he becomes a wanted man. The plot then turns on whether he and his former partner can put aside their past and work to clear his name and solve the horrific series of murders. It’s a rather straight-forward plot and if it starred human actors instead of puppets you might have a hard time seeing Happytime Murders as a comedy.

Director Brian Henson, the son of Muppets creator Jim Henson, hasn’t had much experience directing feature films and his inexperience shows in how clumsy the approach to tone is in The Happytime Murders. Dark comedy is tricky and if you can’t get the tone just right your film will fail and Henson never finds the right vibe for this movie. Everything is far too serious and straightforward and the plot relies far too heavily on the idea that puppets are inherently funny.

Henson appears to believe that seeing a puppet act in a human fashion, especially an obnoxious or raunchy fashion, is funny regardless of the context and for me that was not the case. I found parts of The Happytime Murders downright bleak with one dark comic gag falling short after another. The film relies heavily on cop movie clichés but doesn’t do anything to deconstruct those clichés other than embody them with puppets.

Melissa McCarthy has the only good moments in The Happytime Murders. McCarthy’s Connie has a very funny Jerry Maguire moment when she thinks she's been fired from her job and delivers an unhinged monologue on her way out the door. Beyond that however, and an occasional funny line late in the movie, even McCarthy appears to take the material of The Happytime murders a little too seriously, or, at least, serious enough that the comedy fails to land.

Puppets doing human things just isn’t funny on its own. Comedy requires context and structure and timing and The Happytime Murders has little context, only modest structure and the puppets make timing jokes for the human characters difficult. Melissa McCarthy is an actress whose timing is impeccable in most of her movies but she’s off throughout The Happytime Murders because she’s stuck trying to bounce off of non-human characters who can’t react to her usually effective wordplay.

If it sounds like I hated The Happytime Murders let me assure you that I don’t hate it. I just don’t think it is very good. The film is far more forgettable than it is offensive. The badness comes not from a lack of effort, there is a clear amount of effort on display from the remarkable puppeteers who make the puppet characters feel alive. Rather, it’s the kind of badness that likely only came around as the film was being cut together and the filmmakers slowly realized they hadn’t written any good jokes, just a series of dramatic, clichéd, contexts that are only funny if you think puppets are funny regardless of context or character.

An example: is it funny that Melissa McCarthy encounters a puppet junkie? The puppet is a drug addicted former TV star. The character doesn’t have much to do, doesn’t do much in the way of jokes, aside from a shot or two at McCarthy’s appearance, and then he’s dead. Is it funny that this comes from a puppet? For me, the answer is no, I need the character to actually be funny, to do or to say something funny.

That said, if you find puppets always funny regardless of the context or content, then perhaps this movie is for you.

Movie Review: The Nines

The Nines (2007) 

Directed by John August 

Written by John August 

Starring Ryan Reynolds, Hope Davis, Melissa McCarthy, Elle Fanning 

Release Date August 31st, 2007

Published November 14th, 2007 

Gary (Ryan Reynolds) is an actor on a big time cop show and he has just hit rock bottom. After his girlfriend left him he decided to burn all of her things in the back yard. He ended up burning down his house. While the house burned Gary hit the streets and bought some crack and shared it with a prostitute in a fleabag hotel. When the cops caught up to him he was on the phone with 911 operators asking why he didn't have a belly button. This being Hollywood however, Gary's criminal meltdown was more like a minor PR problem. Sentenced to 30 days of home arrest, Gary's publicist Margaret (Melissa McCarthy) has set him up in the house of a friend of hers, a writer, out of town writing a pilot.

Soon Gary strikes up a friendship with his next door neighbor, Sarah (Hope Davis), a bored housewife and fan of Gary's. She listens to his odd ramblings about the house being haunted and eventually she even seems to believe him and offers evidence of a conspiracy to confine him to the haunted house. Is she just as crazy as Gary or is there more going on? Meanwhile, there is the writer whose house Gary is borrowing. His name is Gavin, also played by Reynolds, and he has just signed on for a reality TV show that documents the behind the scenes happenings on the new show he hopes to put on the fall schedule. 

The show stars Melissa McCarthy as a mother to an oddly prescient, mute child played by Elle Fanning. Gavin's liason at the network is Susan (Hope Davis). Is this an alternate reality? It must be if Gary is Gavin and Margaret is Melissa and so on but then how is the actor aware of the writers reality as if it were happening at the same time and how does Gavin know that some actor was staying in his home while he was gone.

It gets weirder folks as one more reality emerges, that of the characters on Gavin's TV show where Gabriel is the husband of Mary, McCarthy's character. This time Sara/Susan is Sierra some force of evil who attempts to lead Gabriel away from his family. Or is the real dimension and what Sierra tells Gabriel about humans and his real self are true? Bizarre, cryptic and oddly fashioned, The Nines never plays out as you think it might and that is what makes it so fascinating. Unpredictable in the strangest ways, this film from writer-director John August, who wrote the multi-narrative feature Go for director Doug Liman, is a serious mind-fuck that will keep you guessing throughout.

Ryan Reynolds is better known as a comic actor but when he wants to he can bring it dramatically. He definitely brings it in The Nines delivering three distinct and captivating characters. Melissa McCarthy has the unique challenge of playing herself for a segment and brings the challenges of a working actress in Hollywood to light in just the briefest of roles. She is less interesting in the other two realities but effective enough to maintain the film's strange charms. As for Hope Davis, you keep waiting to get more from her and she recedes. There is no doubt that this is Ryan Reynolds' vehicle but a little more for Davis and The Nines could go from recommendable to must see.

As it is The Nines is a strangely fascinating sci fi trip. Ryan Reynolds is one of the more engaging young actors working today and he proves it with not one but three excellent performances in The Nines.