STRAYS

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B
Special Effects: B-

Strays falls prey to its marketing campaign in a very conventional, almost traditional way: it burns through a lot of its funniest bits in the trailer. I have to wonder how much more fun I might have found this movie if I didn’t already know what was coming several times—gags I did laugh pretty hard at, the first of the half dozen times or so I already saw them.

But, what are you going to do? You have to share some of it in order to market a movie as something with the tone it has—which is to say, an “animal adventure” film crossed with a raunchy comedy. These are talking dogs, which also say “fuck” and “shit” a lot.

This supposed tonal dissonance is hardly new in itself, considering movies like Paul (2011) and Ted (2012), respectively about a stoner alien and a foul-mouthed Teddy bear, came out more than ten years ago. The biggest surprise with Strays is that it didn’t get made sooner.

But, here’s the thing. How much you enjoy Strays is absolutely going to depend on how much of an animal lover you are. If you have any appreciation whatsoever and also love dogs, you are going to have a blast watching this movie, which is about a small dog (voiced by Will Ferrell) making his way back from the city to a suburban human (Will Forte) he doesn’t realize doesn’t actually care about him. He befriends three other strays along the way, voiced by Jamie Foxx, Isla Fisher and Randall Park, who form a sort of “chosen family” pack with him and assist on his quest.

Much hijinks ensues, as you can easily predict. A lot of it is very entertaining, a good portion of it very funny. A movie like this really needs more “laughs per minute” than it actually has, which essentially means it would be far more effective as a film short. But, who the hell watches film shorts, outside of film festivals? It’s a bit of a catch-22, having to spread an otherwise great premise thin just so it can have some hope of an actual audience.

Still, I’m trying not to spoil too much here, so that if you should decide to check this movie out, you’ll have a better experience with it. The less you know going in, the better. All you really need to know is that it takes what is traditionally a kids’ genre and runs it through the prism of R-rated comedies. You can just imagine all the foul language they use and all the inanimate and/or inappropriate things they hump.

The voice work is decent. The CGI moving mouths, barely rendered better than they were in the Babe movies from the nineties, indicate adequate visual effects work. I’m probably the only person in the audience thinking about this, but a small dog’s body visibly rising and lowering from the effects of panting doesn’t quite fit with calm delivery of dialogue, no indication of it being out of breath. I realize it’s a little extra to be nitpicking the “realism” of a movie about talking dogs. It would have been a note I would have given during production nonetheless.

Strays does have an undercurrent of genuine sweetness to it, and Will Ferrell’s Reggie, the main protagonist, has a charming naiveté about him. Bug is the streetwise stray who befriends him, another small but high strung dog, and Jamie Foxx clearly had a good time voicing him. And I’ll give it this much credit: Strays goes for broke in its climactic sequence in a way that is never even hinted at in the trailer, and borders on shocking. These are dogs that would be flipping their middle finger to the establishment, if they had any fingers. Let’s say they’re shitting on the face of the establishment—with mixed results. I had a good enough time with it, anyway.

It’s all fun and games and then you come across some mushrooms.

Overall: B

THE UNKNOWN COUNTRY

Directing: B+
Acting: B
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

There’s a shot in the middle of The Unknown Country of a ticker sign standing high above a gas station, and it reads WELCOME TO MID AMERICA.

If The Unknown Country were more on the nose—and thankfully, it isn’t—that could have served as an alternate title. At a run time of 85 minutes, this movie is unusually short, and yet also unusually expansive, a unique sort of road movie, following its protagonist, Tana (Lily Gladstone, who also cowrote the script with Morrisa MaltzLainey and Bearkiller Shangreaux), from Minneapolis to South Dakota to West Texas.

If you were to go in cold with The Unknown Country, knowing nothing about it, you might wonder what the hell you’re watching. Director Morrisa Maltz really takes her time in revealing what Tana’s story is. At first, all we know is that she’s leaving her snowy home by herself, and on the road. We get constant snippets of talk radio, which last throughout the film.

Soon enough, though, we learn that she’s been invited to a cousin’s wedding in South Dakota, she’s coming from Minneapolis after the death of a family member, and she’s coming back to a town full of relatives she hasn’t seen since she was eight years old.

At this point, I began to think maybe the whole movie was just about Tana reconnecting with her family, who we learn are Native American. I found myself wondering, did the existence of the excellent FX series Reservation Dogs help open the door for the production of a movie like this? I later learned that Lily Gladstone, here in very much an indie film, will costar later this year in the highly anticipated Martin Scorsese film Killers of the Flower Moon.

The Unknown Country is a sort of portrait of Middle America, not just of an Indigenous person and her family—but from their perspective, and particularly from Tana’s, as she navigates the grief over the loss of her grandmother, while navigating the literal middle of the country. Bit by bit, those talk radio snippets reveal a time setting, sometime not long after the 2016 election.

I was a bit annoyed by Andrew Hajek’s cinematography, so shaky was it with handheld camera, following Tana right into her freezing car. As the film goes on, though, the cinematography really augments the tone, which stops just short of dreamlike, with many quick cuts that paint a portrait rather than indicate a short attention span.

As Tana meets many people on her travels, we get brief interludes with select people narrating their own, separate stories. This includes the young couple getting married, who deliberately had a child just so their disapproving parents could no longer try and keep them apart. There is something both very generic and very specific about the wedding sequence, in which none of the dialogue is profound but the weight and sweetness of the ceremony is. When the young couple is pronounced married, their little girl joins them in holding all their hands together.

Tana eventually moves on from South Dakota, though, bringing along with her an old suitcase that belonged to her grandmother, given to her by her great uncle. Tana drives great distances, we see her stop at motels and gas stations and diners, and somehow a 1,400-mile road trip gets rendered in a film clocking in at fewer than ninety minutes without feeling rushed.

It’s not until Tana makes a pit stop in Dallas, the only truly urban setting in the film, and spends an evening hanging out with a local group of young friends, that we finally learn precisely why she left Minneapolis, where she’s headed in Texas, and get a feeling for why she was away from her home in South Dakota for so long. Some things stay unsaid, such as whatever happened to Tana’s parents, who are never even mentioned. This feels okay, because that’s not the story being told here.

The Unknown Country is the kind of movie that seeps into your soul, if you give it long enough. There’s a couple of moments of moderate tension with strange, leering men on the road, but that’s the closest this gets to drama. This is a mood piece. I can see needing to be in the right mood in order for it to work. All I can say is, my mood was right for it, as I left the theater with a feeling of warmth toward it, grateful for having seen it, a lack of resolution or even a conventional story arc notwithstanding.

The road to appreciation for that which has not been much considered.

Overall: B+

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: MUTANT MAYHEM

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B
Animation: B

How many Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies have there been now, anyway? Seven, apparently—the first one having been released thirty-three years ago. The film franchise has reached the age Jesus did! I suppose one could make the argument that it’s time for a similar self-sacrifice for the greater good, except that Mutant Mayhem is actually kind of fun.

This is what I keep wondering, though: how many actual teenagers really care? In this new film, which really qualifies as a third reboot of the franchise, a pointed plot point is the fact that our four mutant turtles are fifteen years old. When these versions of the turtle-kids were born, the film franchise was already eighteen years old, and old enough to have been rebooted the first time.

This is an intellectual property based on an original comic book that was first published in 1984. As in, the characters themselves are one year shy of forty years old. I suppose I could be off base here, but I can’t imagine many actual fifteen-year-olds having much in the way of passionate interest in this. Instead, new iterations of this franchise have been trading on nostalgia for it for the past two decades.

Seth Rogen, who co-wrote the script and co-produced, is 41 years old, making him pretty squarely in the target demographic at this point. This is a fun movie for him and people like him. What I’m trying to say is, I don’t think this movie is going to take the youth by storm. It may have been one of many “bonkers-cool” concepts from our childhood, but time is a weird thing, which can turn even the weirdest things into something quaint.

On the other hand, maybe Mutant Mayhem isn’t made for a youth audience. The PG rating is pretty tame, but I found certain elements of it surprisingly dark at times. It actually kind of feels made for the middle-aged fans who have been waiting for a halfway decent film treatment after countless examples of mediocrity, and in that sense, it succeeds.

Not that it’s great. It’s better than mediocre, but not a whole lot better than good. As we watch these teenage mutant ninja turtles pining for a place in the human world outside of the sewer home in which a mutant rat (voiced by Jackie Chan) raised them, we do get a few good laughs out of a sprinkling of cleverly effective gross-out humor.

I suppose I should admit: I think I once saw the original film, in 1990. I would have been fourteen years old. I know I haven’t seen a single one of the other films. I don’t have a whole lot to compare to with authority, at least not that plenty of longtime fans will be apt to compare. The entire premise is, admittedly, pretty stupid. Amazingly, Mutant Mayhem is only the second of the seven films to be animated, and animation is a far better fit for something so over-the-top dumb.

Rogen costars as a mutant rhinoceros goon. He and his co-producers and co-directors Jeff Rowe and Kyler Spears (respectively a writer and artist on The Mitchells vs the Machines) sure managed to get a lot of big names for the rest of the voice cast: Maya Rudolph as mad scientist Cynthia Utrom; John Cena as fellow mutant rhino Rocksteady; Rose Byrne as mutant crocodile Leatherhead; Giancarlo Esposito as the mutants’ scientists father; Paul Rudd as Mondo Gecko; Hannibal Buress as Ginghis Frog; and Ice Cube as the villainous literal Superfly.

When it come to the animation style of this film, I have to say, I’m ambivalent. There’s something deliberately messy about it, falling just this side of scribbles, giving everything an off-kilter look. An unsettling number of human characters have their faces drawn with such mismatched and misshapen eyes they consistently made me think of Sloth from The Goonies (another reference most teenagers won’t give a shit about).

As you may have gathered, I’ve had to get past kind of a lot in order to enjoy Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. But you know what? I did. Taking myself to see this movie on an early Monday evening—with several other exclusively middle-aged audience members—was not a waste of time. Do I think I would have missed much had I not gone? I suppose not. But it was a fun excursion nonetheless. Even that characterization makes it far better than anyone would reasonably expect the seventh film in an aging lower-tier franchise to be.

Did I mention The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri is also in this? Oh, and the turtles: Micah Abbey, Shamon Brown Jr., Nicolas Cantu, and Brady Noon. They’re all fine.

Overall: B