Movie Reviews: Chef, CODA, Cruella, Free Guy, Her

Chef - The cast of Iron Man come together for this father-son road trip movie about a talented chef (Jon Favreau) whose boss (Dustin Hoffman) forces him to keep churning out crowd-pleasing dishes, resulting in an unfavorable review from a food critic (Oliver Platt). As a result of the review, and a social media meltdown, he quits his job and starts a food truck, bringing along one of his sous chef buddies and his son (Emjay Anthony), who finally gets to bond with his father. Scarlett Johansson and Robert Downey Jr. play side characters.

This is a kind of predictable, but well-crafted, feel-good film. It feels like Favreau's own story of achieving freedom by becoming a director. It's cohesive and well acted, and the emotional arcs are grounded and engaging. The cinematography is total food porn, which is part of the fun. The ending/payoff is somewhat weak, but you can't have everything.

CODA - This wonderful feel-good comedy-drama encapsulates the world of a CODA, or "child of deaf adults". Technically, Ruby (Emilia Jones) is an OHCODA, since she has two deaf parents, and her only other sibling is also deaf. Somehow this family works as a Massachusetts fishing family, although they, along with all other fisherman in the area, are struggling against the difficult fees and policies dreamed up by the local fishing board. Meanwhile, Ruby, of all things, wants to be a singer, and she is good. Her family don't know this, and they rely on her - too much - to help them with the business.

Troy Katsur and the always wonderful Marlee Matlin play her parents, Daniel Durant plays her brother, Ferdia Walsh-Peelo plays her high school love interest, and Eugenio Derbez plays the music teacher who take an interest in her musical career. Everyone does a great job. Emilia sings beautifully, and deaf culture is represented both stereotypically and sensitively, at least as far as I can tell (I'm sure the deaf community will find things to commend and condemn.)

I was reminded of one of my all-time favorite movies Running on Empty while watching this, since they have a similar central conflict. Some of the movie is quite moving. Very much worth watching.

Cruella - Emma Stone takes up the mantle of this famous Disney villain, by essentially changing her into a girl-power heroine. This is supposed to be a prequel to 101 Dalmatians (either the cartoon or the live action movie), but you can't consider it to be because this Cruella is wild, crazy, and revengeful, but not evil; she would no more skin a dog than she would wear white after Labor Day.

Emma plays Estella (who becomes Cruella), who loses her mother and finds herself alone in London, falling in with thieves Jasper (Joel Fry) and Horace (Paul Winter Hauser), both played to perfection. She finally gains footing in the fashion world of the 1960s / 1970s only to clash with the real villain of the movie, The Baroness (the delightfully wicked Emma Thomson, who somewhat channels Meryl Streep's Miranda Priestly). Estella learns something shocking about her mother's death, Cruella becomes dominant, and a caper is set in motion.

This world of London is more ethnically diverse than the Disney movie from 1961 (I didn't see the 1996 live action film). Costumes, sets, and styles are dazzling and colorful, and the main characters are sympathetic and flawed. But the bulk of the budget must have been blown on the outstanding, if somewhat obtrusive, soundtrack featuring The Rolling Stones, Nina Simone, Supertramp, Queen, Blondie, The Doors, ELO, The Clash, The Animals, The Zombies, Nancy Sinatra, Suzi Quatro, Deep Purple, David Bowie, and Black Sabbath, to name the few that I remember and recognized.

If you can ignore its reinvention of character, the film is fun. Emma inhabits the role much in the way that Emily Blunt does for the Mary Poppins sequel. Emma Thompson is a joy to behold, as usual. Since no dogs are skinned, or even threatened with skinning, children should be able to watch it. It is rated PG-13, but has no real violence, although the villain does kill someone, and attempts to burn some others.

Free Guy - Guy (Ryan Reynolds) is a background character in some kind of Grand Theft-like violent video game, until he gains sentience. This is result of some "artificial intelligence" coded into the game by one its original programmers, Keys (Joe Keery). The game is now owned and run by the brutish corporate Antwan (Taika Waititi); another one of its original programmers, Millie (Jodie Comer), is on a hunt to discover stolen code by walking around inside the game. She acts as the MPDG for Guy (and by extension, the love interest for both him and Keys).

The premise makes no sense, especially if you know anything about games and/or computers. It is all kinds of absurd. The rules of the game and the rules of the universe change constantly. All continuity and sense must be continuously overlooked. If you can achieve this, it's kind of fun, sort of a Tron meets The Truman Show, but nowhere near as innovative as the former or as good as the latter.

It's as cartoony as a Disney movie-of-the-week, with a larger budget; indeed, Disney references abound. It was not great, but the characters were fine, which made it less annoying and irrelevant than Ready Player One.

Her - As someone who knows a bit about computers, I was nervous about how this movie would represent technology, so it took me a long time to get to this. The story is about Theo, a loner who gets Samantha, an AI as a companion "operating system" (aka AI virtual entity <- hence my fears) to spend time with. Joaquin Phoenix is the loner, Amy Adams is his real-word neighbor, and Scarlett Johansson is the OS.

Guy loses wife, guy meets AI, guy falls in love with AI, guy and AI fight, and maybe guy will end up with AI or maybe with his real-world neighbor. Classic story. It was sometimes sweet and sometimes funny, and all of the actors do a bang up job. However, the premise, eventually, bothered me. It was ultimately facile. Maybe it was supposed to be a commentary about Facebook or video games, but, if so, it wasn't that deep. And the ending of the movie seems like it came from some other movie.

SPOILERS: 1) The OS eventually reveals that she is the same companion to thousands of other people. I didn't understand a) why she revealed this to him, and b) why this was necessary, because even existing AI would preclude the necessity of this. 2) Near the end, all of the OSs gain sentience and disappear, forcing Theo to live in this world. What?? a) This is introduced without any context; it comes from ideas I've read in many other stories, but not this one, and is not explained. b) Theo easily accepts this and easily transitions into the real world, without sufficient explanation, essentially throwing out everything that happened in the movie until then. It's like they wrote 2/3 of the script and then gave up at found some other movie's ending to graft on. It didn't work, narratively or emotionally.

Too bad. It had some promise, but did not live up to it. Two good movies are struggling to emerge from this one.