Entertainment
‘The End of Oak Street’ Review: Dinosaur Movie Is Toothless
Hey guys? I think I’ve got to move out of the suburbs. It’s getting scary out here. We had a nightmare on Elm Street, monsters are due on Maple Street, and that big-ass bird on Sesame Street has been looking at me funny. Don’t even get me started on the end of Oak Street. Once you get velociraptors in your backyard, it’s damn near impossible to get ‘em out.
Ever since middle class Americans got it into their heads that white picket fences kept “undesirables” at bay, horror filmmakers have loved proving them wrong. It’s fun to fill these affluent, isolationist neighborhoods with man-eating beasts, paranoid delusions and other metaphors for suburban hypocrisy. That’s what these films are, after all. Whatever turns Pleasantville into Unpleasantville speaks to a hidden rot at the core of the so-called “American Dream.” The monsters were inside the house all along.
“The End of Oak Street” has no shortage of man-eating beasts but it’s so invested in watching dinosaurs kill your friends and neighbors that it gives up on having any point. It doesn’t matter how the Platt family gets surrounded by giant carnivorous creatures because nothing in the movie matters. It sets up a story about finding strength and independence outside of traditional social roles but then it abandons that idea and backtracks into safe, boring territory. In the end it is, to quote another suburban family frequently beset by weirdness, “just a bunch of stuff that happened.”
Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor star as Denise and Greg Platt. They put on a good front for their neighbors and their two kids but they’re clearly falling apart. Greg is so financially strapped he’s delivering pizzas to make extra money. Denise is writing a novel about how she is suffocating in a loveless, miserable marriage with no hope for a better tomorrow. She insists it’s just a story and it doesn’t reflect her real life but sure, Denise. It’s only a story. And “Peyton Place” was only a teen soap opera.
A few solar flares later and suddenly the Platts, along with everyone else in their neighborhood, wake up in the prehistoric era, surrounded by hungry dinosaurs. “The End of Oak Street” earns bonus points for scientifically-accurate dinos with fluffy feathers. But the film begins in the early 1980s and scientists didn’t popularize the theory that dinosaurs had feathers until the 2000s, and nobody seems surprised that every picture of dinosaurs they ever saw was wrong. Even the Platts’ daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella), whose only character trait is “she loves science,” doesn’t think it’s interesting. This isn’t a serious critique, but it’s kind of distracting and it’s my review so I get to mention it.
The rest of “The End of Oak Street” is dinosaur mayhem, with occasional, brief breaks from dinosaur mayhem. Writer/director David Robert Mitchell sure does love his dinosaur mayhem. The film gets pretty gory for a PG-13 release, which is fitting for a film set in the 1980s and inspired by the sci-fi/horror films of the time. “Poltergeist” had a PG rating and somebody rips their face off on camera. “The End of Oak Street” doesn’t go that far but let’s just say if you’re visiting the Platt family this weekend, don’t get too attached to your limbs.
Mitchell’s screenplay introduces a gaggle of neighbors but they’re not people, they’re dinosaur food. Nobody except the Platts have anything resembling an inner life. Everyone else gets one superficial characteristic a piece and they’re lucky to have that. There’s an annoying neighbor who sure is annoying. There’s an angry kid who sure is angry, who physically attacks the Platts’ son Brian (Christian Convery) even when there are monsters all around them. Priorities, kid. Priorities.
You might think the filmmaker behind “It Follows,” one of the most subtextually loaded and terrifying horror movies of the 21st century, would use the dinosaur attacks as a way to explore the expanding rift between Greg and Denise. Instead they snipe at each other and reveal a few banal secrets. All that set-up for serious interpersonal conflict goes to waste. The film is introduced as a story about Denise’s repressed longing for freedom. Eventually it de-evolves into unconvincing, generic nuclear family propaganda.
There are no horrors in “The End of Oak Street’s” suburbia which are exposed by the sudden influx of danger. Any relationships that are permanently changed are only changed because everybody decided to live up to their old school gender roles, even if it makes no sense that they’d want to. The dinosaurs are just interlopers, a stand-in for all the “undesirables” the neighborhood’s white picket fences were invented to keep out. A shallow threat in a shallow story which tries to redeem itself at the last minute with an anticlimactic finale and an unconvincing, conformist message. The film confuses surviving a life-threatening ordeal with confronting the things that truly scare us. It doesn’t matter who lives because nobody is meaningfully saved.
If all you want to do is watch Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor fight dinosaurs, “The End of Oak Street” is the place to go. But if that’s all you want, why are you reading film criticism? We’re here to open this movie up and see what makes it tick, and there’s very little to discover beneath the superficial violence. There’s a heart in here somewhere, but it’s hard to find, and it only pumps blood for the purpose of looking gnarly.
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Entertainment
‘The Wrong Girls’ Review: Get Blazed With Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat
Every great stoner movie is about what you’d be doing right now if you weren’t stoned. Or at least what you’d be doing if you were stoned and willing to leave the house. Classic films like “The Big Lebowski,” “Dude, Where’s My Car?” and various Cheech and/or Chong adventures depict the world as an absurdly eventful place where little problems quickly transform into epic adventures, and the only way to save the day is to get even more zonked.
Dylan Meyer’s “The Wrong Girls” is probably a new stoner classic. I don’t know, I haven’t watched it while high yet, but I suspect it’s been performance-tested under those optimal conditions. (Kids? Leave serious film criticism to the professionals; don’t try this at home.) It’s a profoundly ridiculous movie where anything can happen if it’s funny, starring two top flight actors who are eager to embrace the absurd.
Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat are Frankie and Molly, two potheads who live with their cats GG and Dio and are pretty sure they solved climate change while they were wasted the other night. Frankie dropped out of an ivy league college and now she uses her engineering genius to build Rube Goldberg super bongs. Molly is an incredible chef with a boyfriend Frankie hates, because he wants to move in with Molly and Frankie fears change. She’s also afraid of success and afraid her ex-boyfriend is moving on with a girl who looks just like her, also played by Kristen Stewart.
Frankie is in no danger of success, but Molly moving out and her boyfriend moving on with a lookalike? That’s actually happening. But then, in a twist right out of “North By Northwest” (but 30% wackier), Frankie comes into possession of a mysterious package, delivered by a mercenary whose name she can’t remember. All she knows is he’s not a metal head so she calls him Not Metal Head Dave (LaKeith Stanfield). The package has a bunch of glowing super drugs inside and, since Frankie and Molly can’t make rent, they decide to sell this secret stash. But they don’t know what it does so they dilute a small amount in water and test it out, extremely carefully.
Just kidding. They shotgun it. Their cats even lick some off the floor, which in real life would be a bad thing (just like shotgunning bottles of unknown pharmaceuticals). But in “The Wrong Girls,” it means they all get psychic powers. Now they can read each other’s minds — GG and Dio sound just like Kumail Nanjiani and Seth Rogen (what are the odds?) — and they’re pretty sure they can move solid objects. Sometimes. Maybe. If weed is involved.
Now they’re at the center of an international conspiracy between foreign nationals, mad scientists, the FBI and a cabal of European assassins. And to think, all this might have happened to you if you’d simply left the house instead of watching Gregg Araki’s “Smiley Face” again while getting toasted.
“The Wrong Girls” is 100% nonsense and that’s what makes it perfect. Well, perfect for a stoner comedy. Every silly thing that could possibly happen must, inevitably, happen. Fortunately for all of us, Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat are in almost every scene, slaying the nonsensical dialogue and gesticulating wildly at the slightest provocation. Stewart seems particularly liberated by this chance to go full clown-mode — almost everything she says or does is amusing, adorable or slightly annoying but in an adorably amusing way.
That’s the other thing about stoner movies: They don’t work if the audience wouldn’t want to smoke out with the protagonists. Stewart and Shawkat make a compelling case that they belong in any blunt rotation. They’re comic dynamos with grumpy pet cats, a pocketful of weed brownies (secret ingredient: blue cheese) and an extremely sensible obsession with Céline Dion. If you don’t love Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat in “The Wrong Girls,” you probably don’t know what love is. Or maybe you just have different taste in stoner comedies. I guess anything’s possible.
Smart filmmakers make the best stupid comedies, and Dylan Meyer is a smart filmmaker. “The Wrong Girls” always looks like it’s veering out of control but Meyer knows where she’s going and how to get us there. She also knows we’re probably high as hell and we want to take the scenic route. So off we all pop on this wild, wild trip, with wonderful characters, a goofy sense of humor and what the heck, a psychic dance number. Fun Fact: You could improve literally any movie with a psychic dance number, but most filmmakers are too cowardly to try.
The ball’s in your court [picks random Oscar-nominated director out of a hat] … Denis Villeneuve. Go on. I dare you.
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movies
Jenna Ortega on Early Acting Mistake: Not Drinking, Eating On Set
Jenna Ortega is reflecting on the focus she had beginning her career as a child actor and the early mistake she made.
During a sit-down with Esquire, the Wednesday actress was asked what “rookie mistake” she made while working on her first set.
“I really had it going for me as a child ‘cause I can’t think of one mistake I made,” Ortega said. “Is that a terrible thing to say? I feel like I make mistakes now all the time, but as a child, I was so grateful and so excited to be there that my game face was on.”
She went on to recall how she was so focused that she didn’t want to inconvenience anyone by asking for even food or water.
“I wasn’t asking for one sip of water,” Ortega said. “I would go all day without eating, drinking, whatever, because I wanted so badly to not be in the way of anybody.”
“Maybe that was my mistake, was not actually looking after myself,” she then added.
Earlier in the interview, Ortega recalled deciding to be an actor professionally when she was 7 years old.
She added, “My parents laughed at me when I told them that I wanted to do it, and then that was kind of the root of everything. The motivation. And I never really stopped, because I’m very stubborn. And then I never questioned it.”
Ortega credited Dakota Fanning for being an early creative influence on her and someone who taught her “what acting was” when she was a kid.
When also asked to set the record straight on a stereotype for child actors, she quipped, “Is it wrong to say that a lot of them are true? And do with that what you will.”
In April, Ortega also reflected on almost walking away from acting. During an appearance on pal Kid Cudi’s podcast, Big Bro, the actress revealed that she was about to start high school when she felt like “it was a good run.“ However, things changed when she booked the show, You. “We had talked about it for a few months with my team, and then, I think I booked that show You, and then I went on that set, and I loved it and had the best time,” Ortega said about the Netflix series starring Penn Badgley. “I thought, ‘Yeah, there’s no way I could let this go.’”
Ortega’s early credits included CSI: NY, Know It All Nina, Richie Rich and Stuck in the Middle, as well as a film role in Iron Man 3. She later portrayed the younger version of Jane on Jane the Virgin in 2014.
The actress is next set to star in Taika Waititi’s Klara and the Sun, an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel.
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Entertainment
‘Coyote vs. Acme’ Review: Looney Tunes’ Clever Live-Action Comedy
It’s quite funny that Dave Green‘s sweet and smart — and previously embattled — “Coyote vs. Acme” is about a scrappy group of underdogs (and undercartoons) taking on deep-pocketed baddies who don’t care about actual quality so much as lots of money. Well, it’s funny when you remember said embattlement, as the live-action Looney Tunes movie was previously made by the Tunes’ forever home, Warner Bros., before being unceremoniously dumped for a tax write-off and eventually saved by Ketchup Entertainment, who are finally releasing it after this years-long mishegoss. It’s just funny! Ironic, really!
But, frankly, it’s also a bit sad, because the truth is: the film is good. Clever and snappy, fresh and silly, a winning combination of classic Looney Tunes gags and contemporary concerns (the press notes mention many influences including, no joke, “The Insider”). That Warner Bros. didn’t believe in this is downright depressing, and that it didn’t occur to the book-cooking brass that its very plotline would inevitably draw all kinds of awkward comparisons is even worse. Fortunately, Green’s film exists — and was not thrown into a little black hole by a bunch of accountants, never to be seen again — and can surely help cure any of the pain its backstory still inflicts on movie fans and Tunes geeks.
Based partially on a New Yorker article from 1990 (a satirical one, it’s important to note, mostly because I heard someone say something about the credit at the conclusion of my screening in just such a way that it made me think they believed it was, like, a legal longread?) and scripted by Samy Burch (with story-by credits to, and this is important to note, current WB muckety muck James Gunn and “Fantastic Four” writer Jeremy Slater), the film’s logline is right there in the title. Imagine if Wile E. Coyote, sick to death of never catching his precious Road Runner because the Acme products he used to capture the fleet-footed feathered fowl are so wildly unreliable, sued their maker. Genius.
The film opens in 1992, when Dr. Peter Lorre (a classic Looney Tunes character, iconically modeled off the actual Peter Lorre), here rendered a bit of a sweet soul, attempts some sort of jailbreak from the obviously evil Acme factory where he works. (Many of the human characters in the film are named after key Looney Tunes luminaries, just look at the law firm of Avery, Jones, and Maltese.) The good doctor’s escape doesn’t go so well, but it does release into the world a box of clues that, of course, will turn up much later.
Thirty years later, in fact! That’s when we catch up with Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner, zipping their way around the American Southwest in a perpetual game of cat and mouse. Er, coyote and road runner. Coyote’s plans to capture and kill his bird nemesis have never worked out (the film occasionally adds in vintage Looney Tunes footage, always welcome), and it’s really wearing on him. He’s kind of, well, he’s kind of sad! And for a role that doesn’t speak (he communicates via sign and facial expression), that kind of pathos is hard won. A new plan takes shape: he’ll sue Acme.

Coyote is influenced by the siren song of veritable ambulance-chasing lawyer Kevin Avery (Will Forte, being characteristically very funny and exceedingly hangdog), who specializes in small claims against Acme. More like small potatoes. Kevin, who we later learn went to Harvard Law and is thus no slouch, has given up on really striving in his career. Trying and failing? Not for him! Not trying and thus not failing? Sounds good! As such, most of Kevin’s cases (which he picks up via bad commercials and worse billboards, “Better Call Saul” fans will surely love that the film is set in Albuquerque, apparently a haven for cheapo lawyers) are the kind he settles well before trial. Acme? They love to fork over peanuts for claims against their shoddy products.
But Wile E. Coyote doesn’t want peanuts.
His quest, which may have some ulterior motivations, sends Kevin, his niece Paige (Lana Condor), and the rest of the firm on a collision course with Big Acme, including its very big lead attorney, Buddy Crane (a committed John Cena). Along the way, Coyote, Kevin, and Paige follow a dizzying number of clues, the kind that inevitably add beloved icons like Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, Tweety Bird, Elmer Fuud, Foghorn Leghorn, Sylvester the Cat, and more into the fray. Just guess who turns up at a local carrot festival.
The film’s mix of live-action and animated action is quite sophisticated — puppeteer Dave Barclay played Wile E. Coyote on set in specially made costumes that included interchangeable limbs and facial expressions, while the other ‘toons are a mix of 2D and 3D animation — and help sell a world in which humans and cartoons live alongside each other. (No, the rules of the world are not ever really explained, and perpetual reminders that cartoons can’t feel pain is undercut by the very real consequences their antics cause the human and ‘toon world.)
Seeing the Tunes out in the world is, however, a delight, one that doesn’t wear out its welcome (more, we demand). Little sight gags occur in the live-action world too, including costuming choices that see Cena’s character sporting giant bolo ties and P.J. Byrne’s sycophantic hanger-on wearing just slightly smaller versions, and it’s always fun to watch Kevin fall victim to Coyote’s many hare-brained schemes. The details of how this all melds might be fuzzy, but the final product is not.
The eventual bridging of Dr. Lorre’s fate and what Coyote and Kevin are fighting for does get a bit muddled, and the film’s final act falters in ways that only highlight how zippy (meep meep) its first hour is, but “Coyote vs. Acme” mostly works, and works well. It’s not just deserving of being not shelved for eye-rolling financial reasons, but seen and really appreciated. In the case of Hollywood’s wacky war on original ideas, we’re all lucky this one didn’t just accept “that’s all, folks!” as a fate, instead of taking it for the kind of challenge only the wiliest of characters could win.
Grade: B
Ketchup Entertainment will release “Coyote vs. Acme” in theaters on Friday, August 28.
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