Quick Hits: No Hard Feelings; Elemental; Extraction 2

Chris Hemsworth in Extraction 2; Leah Lewis in Elemental; Jennifer Lawrence in No Hard Feelings

No Hard Feelings. Like most movie stars, Jennifer Lawrence tends to play the hero. She’s showcased plenty of range in her leading roles—as a resourceful vagrant (Winter’s Bone), as an intrepid messiah (the Hunger Games pictures), as a striving innovator (the underrated Joy), as a frantic parent (mother!)—but she invariably lays claim to your sympathy, wielding a winning combination of innocence and resolve. So what’s intriguing about No Hard Feelings, the new comedy from Gene Stupnitsky (Good Boys), is that it finds Lawrence playing a woman who’s selfish, vengeful, and kind of mean. Her character, Maddie, isn’t exactly a villain, but the closest she gets to traditional heroism comes when she’s outracing the cops who are primed to suspend her license, all while a teenager is clinging to the hood of her car.

Maddie’s acrimony isn’t entirely without cause. She’s behind on the property taxes for her beloved Montauk home, and her primary source of income (driving for Uber) vaporizes after her ex-boyfriend, scorned from her prior ghosting, repos her car. She also resents the seasonal influx of wealthy tourists and the creep of gentrification they represent. But Maddie’s bitterness runs deeper than circumstantial irritation, and the trick of Lawrence’s performance is that she has the courage to make the character unlikable while simultaneously depicting her as a figure of nigh-mythical desirability. Read More

The Good Dinosaur: Lost Lizard, Seeking Family, Finds a Friend

A giant lizard and his boy, in Pixar's "The Good Dinosaur"

To say that The Good Dinosaur is a mediocre Pixar movie is to praise it with faint damnation. For the past 20 years, the pioneers of computer-generated animation have been churning out imaginative, provocative entertainments on a regular basis, with nary a dud in the bunch; hell, the studio released a stunning masterpiece on the human condition just five months ago. So if you find yourself grumbling that this latest entry fails to climb to the extraordinary heights of Pixar’s (now owned by Disney) greatest films, remember that we grade these movies on a curve. An easygoing charmer, The Good Dinosaur may not be as transcendent as Wall-E or Finding Nemo—in fact, it doesn’t come close. But it remains a durable and intermittently astonishing work, with typically splendorous animation and an emotionally satisfying third act. Two decades ago, Toy Story rewrote the playbook on how animated movies can be made. The Good Dinosaur is less revolutionary—it plays by the rules—but its by-the-book approach has its own gentle appeal.

The film boasts a tantalizing premise that seems novel, until you realize it’s just window-dressing for a typical lost-boy narrative. It ponders a scenario, conveyed economically during a silent prologue, where the meteorite destined to wipe out the dinosaurs actually missed the Earth, resulting in a planet where giant lizards and humans coexist. That universe is rife with possibilities—one of which, sheer disaster, formed the backbone of the biggest-grossing movie of 2015—but the primary characters are essentially dinosaurs in name only. The hero is Arlo (voiced, in an irritating whine, by Raymond Ochoa), an anthropomorphized apatosaurus (think brontosaurus, but with a longer neck) and the runt of a family of mild-mannered herbivores. They live a peaceful farming life on a sun-dappled field that’s only a shade removed from Little House on the Prairie. Arlo’s father (Jeffrey Wright) is a stoic but warmhearted patriarch, while his mother (Frances McDormand) is a cliché of maternal kindness. Arlo himself is somewhat useless, too weak to perform hard labor and too fearful to stop small pests from harming the crops. Arlo’s perpetual petrifaction prevents him from “making his mark”, which, as his father tritely explains, involves planting a muddy footprint on the side of a corn silo. Read More