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Hey movie lovers!

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This week: The plastics are back once again with a new version of Mean Girls, featuring an emergent pop star. Jake Johnson directs an indie thriller for Hulu. Plus, movies as digital tourism and a true masterpiece come to Netflix. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” Adam Sandler gets a serious acting showcase on Netflix next month.

The original trailer for the new Mean Girls began with the tag line, in bold letters, “this isn’t your mom’s Mean Girls.” It’s a clear pander to the Gen Z audience it hopes to reach, and at first glance I want to roll my eyes and wonder whether we really need to be remaking something that is only 20 years old and has never really left the public consciousness. Then I look back at other 2004 hits, Lord of the Rings, Spider-Man, Ocean’s Twelve and Harry Potter, all of which have been or plan to soon reboot, and I realize that’s just the world we live in.

The new rule in Hollywood is that something that’s popular can never die. (Just ask the cast of “Suits,” a moderately successful show on the USA Network which after its Netflix boon is now in talks to reboot.)

While I’m mostly joking when I say that Tina Fey is turning out to be someone who has made a career out of having one good idea once — she was a head writer at “SNL” and created “30 Rock” and “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” — she has certainly returned to squeeze every penny out of the only feature screenplay she’s ever written. There was a B-movie sequel, Mean Girls 2, in 2011. Then in 2017, Fey debuted a Broadway musical adaptation of the same story and now, having toured that around the world, she adapted that back from the stage to the screen as a new movie musical.

Of course, you wouldn’t really know that by watching that original trailer. Much like Wonka and the new Hunger Games, the preview avoided showing any singing or dancing. It’s part of an interesting trend happening in movie marketing right now, where it seems distributors are terrified to tell audiences when its movies are musicals. Yet all three movies are turning out to be hits: Wonka over $500 million, HG over $330 million, Mean Girls opening above projections at $32 million. Musicals, it seems, are still pretty fetch.

But in contrast to those other two titles, Mean Girls is a Broadway adaptation. And in recent years, that’s been a serious red flag: there’s Dear Evan Hansen, Cyrano, and who can forget Cats (in fairness, I liked In The Heights and West Side Story, but even those were flops commercially).

It’s not just because the mediums of stage and screen are different, which they are, but because the expectations of audiences is different. The earnest, go-for-it theater kid ethos is not cool in movies these days, and humor cannot be so readily mined from obvious laugh lines. The thought that kept occurring to me while watching this movie was, “oh, I bet that would’ve worked at a live show.”

But in this format, everything felt obvious and telegraphed. The movie seems to be serving those who have already seen the original movie, preferably dozens of times, and would find a rehashing of underdeveloped, one-note characters to be charming. (We need to consider what percentage of box office success comes from people wanting to once again dress up in all-pink and support the girl power on screen, a la Barbie).

My bigger issue with the movie is that it felt like an old person’s interpretation of young people. In contrast with recent movies like Bodies Bodies Bodies or Bottoms, which authentically portray high school age girls in 2024, this movie was…to use Gen Z internet lingo, like Fey doing the “how do you do fellow kids” meme. When Fey herself appears in the movie to make a Barbie-esque speech about feminism, it felt painfully out of step with the times.

What redeeming value I found came from two obvious stars in the cast. Reneé Rapp, who reprises her role as Regina George from Broadway, is the genuine article for Gen Z. She carries herself with a combination of main character energy and shamelessness that’s akin to a superpower these days, not to mention the fact that she’s a powerhouse singer (her career as a recording artist is likely to upstage any future acting ambitions). She brings a pseudo-dangerous, live wire quality that energizes any scene she’s a part of. The other breakout star from this will be Auli'i Cravalho, best known to this point for voicing the titular Moana, who crushes her songs and provides the only character in the movie with a full and nuanced arc.

This movie is far from a disaster. It tickles anyone’s early 2000s nostalgia itch and has more than enough jazz hands to satisfy those who like musicals. The staging and production is creative, even if it looks every bit like a stage show rendered in 3D environments. I just feel like these are ornaments being hung on a bare tree. At its core this movie is reheated leftovers from 20 years ago, and I’m not here for it.

Self Reliance (Hulu): You might know Jake Johnson from “New Girl,” but the sitcom star now has a long track record of small independent gems (Drinking Buddies, Win It All, Safety Not Guaranteed). This is the first time he’s directing solo, and his sensibility shines through in this comedic thriller about a loser who gets approached with a proposal to star in a reality show on the dark web: 30 days of people trying to hunt and kill him, and he wins $1 million. The catch? He cannot be harmed if he’s in close proximity to another person (the metaphor for loneliness isn’t even a metaphor, Johnson names it explicitly in the script).

If you’ve ever seen David Fincher’s The Game, you get the idea. Johnson’s already delusional mind runs wild wondering what’s real and not real, and he slowly descends into a kind of paranoid mental breakdown. (It’s no surprise to find that Johnson wrote this movie during the pandemic, when conspiracy theories and misinformation loomed around every corner and isolation drove us all a little crazy.)

Then he finds Anna Kendrick’s character, another player in the game, and the two decide to partner up in what becomes a quasi-rom-com for about 30 minutes. Their chemistry is excellent (anyone who’s seen Drinking Buddies knows this), and helps maintain the delicate balance he’s trying to strike between lighthearted laughs and the threat of violence.

I don’t know that the movie outperforms its moderate ambitions, and Johnson doesn’t have the same cinematic style as other independent filmmakers, but it’s really hard to find fault with a well-told story. Some laughs, some adrenaline, some romance…what more could you want in a 90-minute streamer?

Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil (1997): I checked out this Clint Eastwood-directed drama on the recommendation of my parents, who are taking a trip soon to Savannah, Georgia, and were told that this captures quintessential Savannah culture. It makes me reflect on how much I know about the world implicitly from watching movies, a kind of digital tourism.

This movie’s view of Savannah, at least in the mid-90s, is as a small town run by good ol’ boys who use their hospitality and charm to disguise more sinister intentions. Our protagonist, a slick-haired journalist from New York played by John Cusak, calls it “like Gone With The Wind on mescaline.” What starts as a fluff piece assignment turns into a bigger investigation after his subject, a Gatsby type played by Kevin Spacey, ends up murdering the town drunk, played by Jude Law.

Perhaps the biggest reason for this movie’s reputation is because Eastwood genuinely seems as interested in the sociology of the city as the developing courtroom drama. The whole thing works better as a tourism ad than a story. Cusak’s fish-out-of-water is dependably likable but ultimately pretty empty and toothless, overpowered by Spacey’s charisma and the over-the-top supporting characters. Elements of this movie feel very dated — the primary sources of comedy are at the expense of a trans women and a magical negro — and anyone fluent in the tropes of the courtroom genre can’t help but stay a couple steps ahead of the unfolding action. I’ll recommend for those planning trips, and that’s all.

Oldboy (Netflix): I actually recommended this movie only a couple of months ago, when I watched it in limited release at an arthouse movie theater, knowing it would be tough to recommend because it was difficult to see. Well, now this 2003 Korean masterpiece has landed on Netflix, and if you’re willing to climb “the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles,” you’ll be treated to one of the best psychological thrillers of the past 20 years by director Park Chan-wook (The Handmaiden, “Little Drummer Girl”).

It’s a difficult story to summarize because of its twisty plot, but think The Count of Monte Cristo, where a guy turns himself into a superhero while wrongly imprisoned then sets out to get his revenge. It’s a true masterpiece both in its technical construction and in its storytelling. It’s funny, violent, exciting, and emotional all at the same time. A total can’t-miss movie for any cinephile.

I’ve made this point several times before, but it bears reminding. Once every couple of years, Adam Sandler emerges from his Scrooge McDuck lair of dumb comedy money to actually “try,” and when he does, he almost always proves to us that’s he’s an incredible actor when he wants to be. This is a Castaway-style acting showcase, with Sandler stranded on a space ship in outer space losing his mind…as so many protagonists have done before (from 2001: A Space Odyssey to “Black Mirror”). Surrounding his is Carey Mulligan — who I love, but feel bad for having to play another thankless wife? — and Paul Dano, directed by the visual stylist behind “Chernobyl.” Coming to Netflix in February!

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