56 San Diego Reader March 30, 2017


Diapered disruption T


he first sign that The Boss Baby will be a pleasant surprise — and not simply an exercise


in sticking Alec Baldwin’s Scotch- mellowed tycoon’s rasp in the mouth of a CGI infant and chuckling at the juxtaposition — shows up right at the outset. Instead of meeting the titular baby as he makes his way through the automated celestial mechanism for delivering newborns to Earth (that bit gets saved for the opening credits), we get an extended encounter with his older brother Tim and his expectant parents. Right away, we know the Boss Baby is not the point; the point is the world he disrupts — the ordinary world of childhood. The world governed by love and animated by imagination. A word on that imagination: Tim


MOVIES


plot here concerns the Boss Baby’s mission to stop a plot to make people want puppies instead of babies, and there’s an action-movie confrontation with the bad guy set against a rocket ship’s countdown, and there’s the usual avalanche of kiddie-clever quips and gags, plus a line or two thrown in for the old folks (“Cookies are for closers!”). It’s too silly to be a slog, but it’s also too smart to be a whiz- bang, emptyhearted bore. I could have done without the kewpie-doll


faces and oversized eyes, but for the most part and where it counts, The Boss Baby gets its kids just right. — Matthew Lickona


IT’S A MOVIE THEATER, NOT A MCDONALD’S PLAYLAND


is forever building worlds for himself, using a decidedly lo-tech assortment of hats as inspiration: explorer, diver, ninja, etc. It’s no accident that the toys used throughout the film — both the regular kind and the magically functional sort the Boss Baby uses — are old-school material instead of digital. There’s no imagination required to see new worlds on your smartphone, and no real incongruity in seeing a modern-day baby with an app-laden tablet. And imagination — particularly the febrile, unfettered inventiveness of youth — provides the film with much of its visual wit, forever bouncing the viewer between the world and the world as seen by Tim. It also powers its dramatic resolution. And a further word on the love:


when the diapered disruptor does show up, he’s not just stealing the spotlight with a baby’s standard- issue selfishness; he’s importing a marketplace mindset into a culture of community, making a pie chart out of parental love and espousing the notion that the new model is always more desirable. Small wonder that he was designated as management material (as opposed to family material) when he failed to giggle after being tickled. Some human feeling has to be missing if you can cast all creation in terms of competition. And it’s love — uncommodified and invdivisible — that gives form to the film’s (spoiler alert) happy ending. All that may seem like a lot to heap


on the slender shoulders of a children’s movie. Perhaps it will help to think of it instead as terra firma: the solid reality from which the story can be launched into the silly stratosphere. Because the


It is the sworn duty of parents to instill within a child the three golden rules of moviegoing: sit down, shut up, and enjoy the picture. Apparently unsatisfied with being little more than a restaurant that shows movies, the conscienceless folks at Cinépolis are set to give bad parenting a shot in the arm by allowing children free run of the theater. Cinépolis was the first movie


outlet to introduce San Diegans to the lowbred concept of at-your-seat waiter service. The move made it clear that avoiding disruption is anything but a top priority, so it comes as no surprise that the chain plans to rig two of their multiplexes — including the one in Vista — with so-called “kid-friendly” theaters. (The kid-friendly auditorium at that Vista location features a colorful playlot situated between the screen and the front row of seats, a jungle gym, and squishy beanbag chairs.) This is not the first time exhibitors


have tried playgrounds as a form of promotion. Drive-ins across America once had swing sets and teeter-totters situated beneath the screens for kids to play on prior to showtime. When the show started, the playground closed. What’s to stop bored children from freely roaming the theater? How much faith must an exhibitor


have in their product if they need to stock an auditorium with an alternate form of entertainment? It’s like saying, “Hey, kid. We know this is the 90th go-round for Beauty and the Beast. It’s probably going to suck. In case of emergency, we got you covered!” What are you people thinking?


It’s a movie theater, not a McDonald’s Playland or Chuck E. Cheese! Show a little respect for something other


The Boss Baby: The corded toy phone and sock garters aren’t the only old-fashioned glories on display.


than a profit margin. Don’t you want to encourage kids to grow up to be well-behaved patrons instead of a pack of free-range turkeys armed with the attention span of a gnat? If kids are old enough to play on a jungle gym, then they’re old enough to make it through a feature without the added allure of a playlot. If anything, I’m all about Crybaby


Matinees. To the best of my knowledge, the concept of setting aside one screening a week for mothers with infant children was the brainchild of Reading Cinemas. The practice was imported from Australia and first implemented in 2001 at the Angelika Dallas, where the theater would designate one movie for mommy- friendly matinee. Crybaby Matinees continue to


play at all three of Reading’s San Diego locations: Grossmont Tuesdays at 11:45 a.m., Town Square Thursdays at 11 a.m., and the Angelika Film Center Wednesdays at 11 a.m.


— Scott Marks


MOVIE LISTINGS


All reviews are by Scott Marks, Matthew Lickona, and Duncan Shepherd. Priorities are indicated by one to five stars and antipathies by the black spot. Unrated movies are for now unreviewed. Thousands of past reviews are available online at SDReader.com/movies.


Beauty and the Beast — Comparisons — to Disney’s first live-action princess movie remake (2015’s Cinderella) and to the 1991 animated tale of a Beauty who wants “much more than this provincial life” (and the Beast who must win her heart if he is to recover his humanity) — may not be unavoidable, but they are useful. Cinderella strove and succeeded at expanding and deepening the core fairy tale without sacrificing the story’s “timeless classic” feel. In sharp contrast,


Beauty imports a modern YA sensibility that extends beyond star Emma Watson’s empowered-young-woman demeanor — “provincial life” is so backward that Belle’s neighbors recoil at the sight of her teaching a child to read and destroy her labor-saving clothes-washing machine as if it were the devil’s handiwork, while the Beast is presented as the victim of a Bad Dad. And it extends further still, to the language — at one point, one character says of another, “We are so not in a good place right now” — and to the presenta- tion, as a homoerotic subtext is here and there elevated to text. (Credit for all this may go to co-writer Stephen Chbosky, of The Perks of Being a Wallflower fame, as much as it does to director Bill Condon, who helmed the last two Twilight movies.) On that score, your mileage may vary; it’s when you get to the animated Beauty that things get rough: Ian McKellan makes a fine, melancholy Cogsworth the clock, but the rest of the enchanted servants come off hammy and campy, while Kevin Kline seems lost as Belle’s father and Luke Evans turns alpha male Gaston into a bigger car- toon than the original. To say nothing of the workaday new songs and the lumpen inelegance of the CGI Beast. But oh, those fantabulous sets! 2017. — M.L. ★ (IN WIDE RELEASE)


Before I Fall — Zoey Deutch stars as an entitled brat (and founding member of her school’s elite “mean girls” clique) who is inexplicably compelled to wrap up her final moments on Earth reliving the last day of her life before getting it right. Other than an unexpected air of adroitness that occasionally kicks in to boost the narrative, there’s nothing particularly original about this bald-faced lift of Groundhog Day that’s geared for teenage girls. Still, short of tipping friends and family to that day’s winning lottery numbers, the altruistic upshot of Deutch’s endeavors come off as a pleasant shock in a genre film that at any second could have veered in the direction of fanboy horror or soporific sentiment. Deutch’s naturalistic performance grounds the various layers of the story in a manner that keeps it from becoming either boring or wildly unrealistic. With Jennifer Beals as Deutch’s mother and Elena Kampouris as the school’s sheep-haired misfit. Ry Russo-Young directs. 2017. — S.M. ★★★ (AMC MISSION VALLEY; REGAL PARKWAY PLAZA)


The Belko Experiment — How’s this for a genuinely frightening premise: a face-


less corporation outfits 80 of its employees with explosive implant tracers, confines them to a Colombian office building, and obliges the staff to participate in a game of last man or woman standing. All director Greg McLean (Wolf Creek) and screenwriter James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy) had to do was play it straight and ushers would have been peeling aghast audiences members from off the ceiling. Instead, the laughs are beggarly — know- ing that at any given moment his brain could be liquefied, all John McGinley can think about is perving out on a hot co- worker — the shocks meanly inadequate, and the overall level of horror greatly diminished due to both. A resourceful windup only acts to point up how badly stitched together the rest of the quilting is. With John Gallagher, Jr., Tony Goldwyn, and Adria Arjona. 2016. — S.M. ★ (IN WIDE RELEASE)


Boss Baby — Reviewed this issue. 2017 — M.L. ★★★ (IN WIDE RELEASE)


CHiPs — Quadruple-threat Dax Shepard wrote, produced, directed, and starred in Hollywood’s latest “Based Upon the Series” adaptation. 2017. (IN WIDE RELEASE)


Get Out — Cultural appropriation shifts from “problematic” to “horrific” in writer-director Jordan Peele’s sharp take on the scary world of stuff white people like — starting with the “total privacy” of isolated country estates, like the one black photographer Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) visits with his white girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams) on a meet-the- parents weekend. (On the drive up from the city, the car hits a deer, and when Washington goes to check the body, there’s a telling shot of his foot leaving the asphalt and stepping into wilderness.) The jigsaw- tight structure is that of conventional horror done right — mercifully light on jump scares (instead opting for a number of disturbing reveals via moving camera) and mostly smart about mechanics. (Why go walking through a dark house in the middle of the night? Because you’re trying to sneak a cigarette, away from your disapproving girlfriend and her even more disapproving family.) And layered atop that structure is a squirmingly funny portrayal of tortured race relations, even among people of ostensibly good will. It’s not subtle, but it is clever, and besides, this is a horror movie — one in which the black guy is determined not to die. 2017. — M.L. ★★★ (IN WIDE RELEASE)


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