The Sequel To A QUIET PLACE Is All Over The Place

 A QUIET PLACE PART II

(Dir. John Krasinski, 2021)

This was the first film I’ve seen on the big screen since March 2020, which is when it was originally scheduled to be released. Of course, you know why it was delayed, and why I went so long avoiding movie theaters. Now that things are getting somewhat back to normal, I caught up with John Krazinski’s sequel to his 2018 sleeper hit, A QUIET PLACE. I had enjoyed the first film, which depicts a family headed by the real life married couple Krasinski and Emily Blunt as Lee and Evelyn Abott trying to survive in a post apocalyptic world where tall, lanky blind aliens with multiple rows of sharp teeth will kill them if they make even the slightest sounds.

Although Krasinski’s character, Lee Abbott, was killed in the original, he appears here in a flashback opening which goes back to the first day of the alien attack. The scary creatures violently interrupt a little league game in an unspecified small town (somewhere in upstate New York), and it’s a thrilling sequence that I wish the movie stayed with longer. 

Instead we flash forward to Day 474, 385 days since the events of Part I, and we find Blunt’s Evelyn and her kids, Regan (Millicent Simmonds), who’s deaf, and Marcus (Noah Jupe), who’s main trait is that he’s very nervous, living on the same farm, but not for long as the Halpert, sorry, Abbott family sets on a supply run across dangerous, devastated terrain. Oh, yeah, there’s the baby that Evelyn had in the previous installment, but he mostly naps in a soundproof wooden crate, or sucks on an oxygen canister.

Presumably because writer/director Krasinski thought they needed a moody male presence since the Dad is gone, Cillian Murphy pops up as Emmett an old friend of the family. Murphy’s character is a little reminiscent of his role in DUNKIRK, as he’s also a traumatized solider.

Much of the movie is set at a compound, a former Steel Mill, where Emmett lives in an air-tight bunker. Some of these scenes drag, but there are enough jolts, and shocks to keep one engaged. The last third concerns Emmett and Regan finding themselves at an island colony of survivors who act as if things are getting back to normal. The colony’s leader, Djimon Hounsou credited as “Man on the Island,” brings the promise of a weighty note to the narrative, but he doesn’t last long enough for his part to have much impact.

The finale, of course, is the family/monster showdown, and there’s a clever element to how the humans attempt to take down their slimey tormenters (I won’t Spoil it). However, I liked PART II a lot less than PART I. It didn’t feel as grounded or as emotionally gripping, and a lot of its tries to mirror the beats and scares of the original I could really see coming. It’s fitting that the film skips from one location to another, as it often feels like it’s all over the place. Where is a quiet place anyway? Is it the farm from PART I and part of PART II? Is it at the top of one of those silos? Or is it somewhere inside of us all?

A QUIET PLACE PART II is a fair follow-up that will likely be most appreciated by fans of the first one. It does have the highlight of the performance by Simmonds, who could very be seen as the film’s lead protagonist. Blunt puts in a solid, intense turn too, as does Murphy, but Simmonds steals this sequel fair and square.

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BLACK WIDOW: Too Dark And Dull To Pop

Tonight, the first Marvel movie in two years hits the big screen, and Disney Plus:

BLACK WIDOW (Dir. Cate Shortland, 2021)

Since she was first introduced into the Marvelverse in IRON MAN 2 in 2010, Scarlett Johansson has portrayed the character of Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow seven times. This includes extended cameos in all of the AVENGERS films, the two CAPTAIN AMERICA movies, and an appearance in CAPTAIN MARVEL. So it seems fitting for her eighth time in the role in the 24th entry in the franchise be a feature-length showcase for Johansson’s interpretation of a killer comic character that dates back to 1964.

The movie starts off as an origin story, with the young Natasha, played by a blue-haired 13-year old Ever Anderson, living what looks like a conventional family existence in Ohio. But her sister, Yelena Belova (10-year old Violet McGraw), and their parents Alexei (Stranger Things’ David Harbour), and Melina (Rachel Weisz), have to abruptly leave their home because it turns out that they’re Russian spies, you know, like that FX show, The Americans.

As they make their getaway, Yelena requests that her favorite song, Don McLean’s “American Pie,” be played on the car stereo. Usually when a particular song that is significant to a character is played early in a movie, that means it will come up again in a meaningful way later.

So the unrelated family make their escape via a getaway plane with Harbour’s Alexei hanging on the wing amid gunfire. There’s some excitement here, but overall due to its strong familiarity this opening sequence is underwhelming. But just you wait because this film isn’t finished serving up underwhelming sequences!

Natasha and Yelana get sent to some scary dark facility, called the Red Room Academy where they are groomed to be assassins (I think so - like I said it was dark). 21 years later, as a title tells us, Natasha has now grown into Johansson, who we can see is a troublemaker who is again on the run, but this time it’s the FBI headed by General Thaddeus Ross (a digitally de-aged for some reason William Hurt).

Yelana, now grown up to be Florence Pugh, is a fast-acting trained killer like Natasha, who, after a fight on a bridge with an thickly-armed mystery figure named Taskmaster, tracks her sister in Budapest, and they immediately get into another of the film’s savage yet unengaging fight scenes.

Then there’s a motorcycle chase through the streets where the sisters are pursued by black-clad attackers, and Taskmaster pops up again in a tank. Following that MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE-style activity, Natasha and Yelana break their super soldier Dad (actually fake Dad), now sporting an exaggerated Russian accent, out of a Siberian Prison in one of the movie’s better sequences as involves a riot, helicopter acrobatics, and best of all, an avalanche.

Unfortunately, that’s followed by a drawn out family (actually fake family) reunion on fake mother Melina’s Russian pig farm. An attempt to explore the complex dynamic of these peoples’ relationships, this talky drama section lasts over 20 minutes long and is tediously dull. It maybe the most boring bit in the entire Marvel movie canon.

The finale concerns the faux family bonding together (or trying to) to take down the film’s real villain, Dreykov (Ray Winstone, also with a questionable accent), and destroy the Red Room program which has transformed scores of young girls into brainwashed Black Widows. This is where we get screen-filling explosions, more hand-to-hand combat, paratroopers firing machine guns in the sky, and plenty of strained superheroics.

Problem is not much of BLACK WIDOW worked for me. Perhaps I’m burned out on the whole Marvel franchise, but the formula fell flat, and while I appreciated that the filmmakers, including Director Cate Shortland, and screenwriter Eric Pearson, set out to make a gritty Marvel film, with little of the flashiness of the other entries, the way too dark picture just doesn’t pop.

I have loved many of Johansson’s performances, but there’s not much of a character here. She mainly comes off as cold and humorless, which could be said of the movie in general. Despite that Pugh, who was solid in MIDSOMMAR, has some good wisecracks, and enjoyably makes fun of Johansson’s fight pose established in her previous turns in the roles; and O-T Fagbenle (Elizabeth Moss’s husband in The Handmaid’s Tale Hulu series) has some amusing moments as a guy smitten with Johansson, there’s precious little humor here. This is the Marvel movie, I bet more than what's on the horizon, that will suffer the most from not being able to have a funny Stan Lee cameo.

Marvel fanatics will probably like BLACK WIDOW a lot more than me as it has a fair share of action (except for the extended dysfunctional fake family segment), and fills in some gaps in the franchise’s continuity. But I was largely bored with the 24th entry in the never-ending Marvel saga, and think I really need a break from these movies.

For those of you that are going to it no matter what, don’t forget to stay for the after credits bonus scene. Of course, if you’re one of those that are set on seeing this movie, you already know that drill.

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Soundtrack Of The Week: HIGH ANXIETY +

Inspired by comedy legend Mel Brooks’ 95th Birthday last week, I dug out the soundtrack to his 1977 Alfred Hitchcock parody, HIGH ANXIETY. I’ve had this record for around 40 years as I collected many soundtracks, and comedy albums as a kid. This album serves as both a soundtrack, and a comedy record, though the first side is closer to a conventional score.

Although the album is billed as the Original Soundtrack of HIGH ANXIETY, only Side A features music from the film. Side B is a Greatest Hits collection of tunes from Brooks’ previous films, which were written by either composer, John Morris, or Brooks or both.

The movie, HIGH ANXIETY, involves Brooks as the newly appointed Director of the Psychoneurotic Institute for the Very Very Nervous, who finds very strange occurrences seemingly everywhere he looks at the hospital. Brooks incorporates elements from such Hitchcock classics as NORTH BY NORTHWEST, NOTORIOUS, PSYCHO, THE BYRDS, REBECCA, DIAL M FOR MURDER, but mostly VERTIGO, as you can see from the album cover at the top of this post.

Now, HIGH ANXIETY didn’t reach the comic heights of Brooks’ earlier films such as THE PRODUCERS, BLAZING SADDLES, YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, but it does have a bunch of solid gags, and a great cast including Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman, Harvey Korman, and the mighty Dick Van Patten. Also, it should be noted that Hitchcock himself loved the film, and sent Brooks a case of wine with a note: “Splendid! I wish I had done it.”

The soundtrack starts with the Main Title, which, like a lot of movies’ main titles is an overture of the various bits of the score throughout the film. Morris does a great job of providing a homage to Hichcock’s long-time composer, Bernard Herrmann’s styles. It’s funny how the orchestral music decorating the airport-set opening is similar to Elmer Bernstein’s score for AIRPLANE!, which would follow three years later. I’m not saying anyone is ripping anyone off, it just seems that this is the way airports should sound in these satires. “What a dramatic airport!” Brooks remarks at one point.

The highlight of Side 1 has got to be Brooks’ Sinatra-style crooning to impress love interest Madeline Kahn with the title song “High Anxiety.” It’s a psychiatric condition (fear of heights) that his character suffers from so it’s amusingly convenient that he has this song handy. Brooks performance of the song is very charming most likely because he wrote it himself. His character didn’t write it – in the world of the film it appears to be a standard. Watch it below:

The rest of the score regurgitates the same melodies from the Main Title, and a reprise of Brook’s “High Anxiety” caps it off, but another track really stands out. It’s a parody of ‘70s glam rock called “If You Love Me Baby, Tell Me Loud.” It appears when Dick Van Patten’s character is locked in his car, and he’s tortured by the obnoxious song which keeps getting louder until it kills him. Surprisingly, the tune was also written by Brooks, and he and Morris are credited with performing it. If you didn’t know that Brooks can write and play rock ‘n roll, you sure know it now.

So after the five short tracks (the longest one is just over three minutes) that make up the HIGH ANXIETY side fade, it’s time to get to the real heart of the matter. In chronological order, we get two tracks from THE PRODUCERS, two tracks from THE TWELVE CHAIRS, three from BLAZING SADDLES, and two each from YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, and SILENT MOVIE.

This “hits” collection is a very funny and entertaining listen. It begins with the Busby Berkeley-style musical number “Springtime For Hitler” from THE PRODUCERS which kicks off the record with a ridiculous flourish. Such a perfect example of something that nobody could get away with these days. Other highlights include trio of songs from BLAZING SADDLES, especially the theme sung by Frankie Laine, and Madeline Kahn’s hilarious Marlene Dietrich-impression on the world weary ballad, “I’m Tired.”

Another favorite is “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” which features Gene Wilder and Peter Boyle. The event surrounding the song is the unveiling of Frankenstein’s Monster, and I’ve never been able to hear the song the same way since. As it’s written by Irving Berlin, this is the only track in this set that wasn’t written by Brooks or Morris.

Sure, some of this material is dated, but HIGH ANXIETY: Original Soundtrack paired with Mel Brooks’ Greatest Hits Featuring The Fabulous Film Scores Of John Morris is a fun album that every comedy nerd should have in their collection.

I’m not sure that I’ll seek out Brooks’ later stuff on record like TO BE OR NOT TO BE or HISTORY OF THE WORLD PART I (there was actually a single of “It’s Good To Be The King” released from the film). Not sure I’d listen to that stuff much. The soundtrack to Brooks’ 1987 STAR WARS spoof SPACEBALLS is mostly other artists like The Spinners, Van Halen, and The Pointer Sisters, so that’s a pass for me.

So that’s the first entry in my new soundtrack series. I’ll be babbling about other soundtracks in the weeks to come so please check back later.

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