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      No Lion, the Skipper Is the Real King of the Jungle Cruise

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      Bad jokes and puns are part of a Disneyland job that has been immortalized in a new film. Those who’ve held the role at the theme park never really leave it behind.In 1916 Brazil, Skipper Frank Wolff runs the cheapest jungle cruise on the Amazon. And undoubtedly the cheesiest, as he introduces tourists to the river’s wondrous sights with a spiel overflowing with doozies.“If you look to the left of the boat, you’ll see some very playful toucans. They’re playing their favorite game of beak-wrestling. The only drawback is, only two can play.”“The rocks you see here in the river are sandstone. But some people just take them for granite. It’s one of my boulder attractions.”And the highlight of the tour: “Ladies and gentlemen, get ready for the eighth wonder of the world,” he says, building toward the climax, as his rickety steamboat passes behind a makeshift waterfall. “Wait for it … the backside of water!”Frank’s guests may groan and roll their eyes at his droll banter in Disney’s “Jungle Cruise,” starring Dwayne Johnson as the swaggering skipper and arriving July 30 on Disney+ and in theaters. But the skippers and their spiels — corny jokes and bad puns, the cringier the better — have been the real stars of the Jungle Cruise attraction since the first one opened at Disneyland in 1955. Take them away and the seven-minute fantasy boat trip along rivers in South America, Asia and Africa, inspired in part by “The African Queen,” might be just another ride down a fake waterway with fake scenery.It’s also one of the rare performing jobs at a Disney theme park where the skippers can weave their own personalities into the script — from dry and geeky to animated and flamboyant — and get guests in on the action. “It’s this alchemy that happens” that few attractions can replicate, said Alex Williams, a former skipper who now works for the Disney fan club D23.With the new movie as well as the ride’s freshly reimagined story line, the Jungle Cruise is in the spotlight now, and no one is feeling it more than the skippers themselves.“We’re all just really excited about being able to share this experience with everyone and being the inspiration for the movie,” said Flor Torres, a “lead” on the attraction.“Once a skip, always a skip.” That’s the motto of skippers who’ve held a job requiring them to maneuver a boat while performing a stand-up routine dozens of times across an eight-hour day.Puns and jokes about the “backside of water” abound on the ride at Disneyland.Don Kelsen/Los Angeles Times, via Getty Images“People really take that to heart,” Torres added of the motto. “I know skippers that have worked here maybe 20, 30 years ago, and they still come by and talk to us like they were just here yesterday.”A handful have wisecracked their way to bigger stages, like Ron Ziegler, the White House press secretary for President Richard M. Nixon; the filmmaker John Lasseter; Steve Franks, a screenwriter and the creator of the TV series “Psych”; and, it’s said, the actor Kevin Costner. (Alas, stories that Robin Williams and Steve Martin honed their humor at the helm are apparently only myths.)Other former skippers have recounted their experiences on podcasts like “Tales From the Jungle Crews” and “The Backside of Water,” or provided pandemic uplift in Freddy Martin’s “World Famous Jungle Cruise” video and its sequel.And a bold few have revealed some not-Disney-approved antics in books like “Skipper Stories: True Tales From Disneyland’s Jungle Cruise,” a compilation of six decades of anecdotes from former skippers, including the author, David John Marley.To wit: The ritual of becoming a “real skipper” by peeing in the river at night. The Jungle Justice inflicted on skippers who abused their break time (they found themselves suddenly scheduled for upward of 90 minutes of nonstop cruises without water or a bathroom stop). The off-hours party where $2,000 was spent on alcohol and condoms.A good skipper is an extrovert, a nut and somewhat of a rogue. At least that’s how Bill Sullivan, who joined the Jungle Cruise in 1955, once put it. His own skipper colleagues included a man who arrived one morning with chameleons around his neck.They didn’t have much of a script in the beginning so the men wrote their own, Sullivan, who eventually became vice president of the Magic Kingdom, recalled in 2008. (Women didn’t become skippers until the mid-1990s.)Johnson with Emily Blunt in the film, which now incorporates a bit of the ride patter.DisneyThe spiel had been repeatedly fine-tuned by the time Franks landed his gig in the late 1980s. And venturing from it was ill-advised.“You would hear these stories about supervisors hiding in the jungle, listening for people going off-book, but if that was true, they would have canned me on Day 2,” he said. “I knew I wanted to make movies, and I was doing stand-up at the time. And as soon as we got around the first corner, I was working in material.”Franks stayed at Disneyland for eight and a half years, writing the script for Adam Sandler’s “Big Daddy” while monitoring the Enchanted Tiki Room.Crews may have been rowdier back in the day, but “today we’re much more conservative, a little less the Wild West,” said Kevin Lively, one of two skippers chosen to represent Disneyland at Tokyo Disney Resort’s 25th anniversary celebration in 2009. (There’s also a Jungle Cruise at Walt Disney World and Hong Kong Disneyland.)Lively now works as a Disney Imagineer, developing skipper spiels and contributing “gnu” magic to the attraction, which has replaced racist elements like spear-throwing African “headhunters” with a story about Felix Pechman XIII, “the unluckiest skipper on the dock.”And when the “Jungle Cruise” movie needed an injection of humor, Lively was on it.“I shotgun-blast puns and references and Easter eggs to them, and let them kind of just run amok,” he said. “There’s stuff in there that I think all these skippers will get, which just makes me over-the-moon happy. They really showed their love of the attraction in that film.”Skipper Frank’s ersatz Amazon tour wasn’t in the original script, said Jaume Collet-Serra, the movie’s director. But once the filmmaker had ridden the actual Jungle Cruise and witnessed reactions to that “backside of water” joke, he knew what he had to do.Treat the audience to a mini-Jungle Cruise experience.“I was like, let me give them what they want for two minutes and then I’ll give them more, but at least they’ll be happy early,” he said. “You know, ‘Here is what you came for — now let the movie begin.’” More

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      ‘The Evening Hour’ Review: Heart of the Country

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      In this drama, a wholesome young man in an Appalachian town tries to do right by friends and family but gets caught up in a side hustle dealing pills.A colleague of mine once floated a memorable thought experiment: if you could visit the picturesque fictional towns portrayed in 1940s Hollywood dramas in the present day, they might be ravaged by the opioid epidemic. The idea traces a thread of continuity in American life, which I believe is partly what “The Evening Hour” is trying to do.Set in a small Appalachian town, Braden King’s luminous second feature centers on a wholesome nursing aide, Cole (Philip Ettinger), who moonlights as a drug dealer. His daily rounds of checking on seniors — including his grandmother — also entail picking up and dropping off pills. He’s a peacemaker with a casual girlfriend (Stacy Martin), a clingy old friend (Cosmo Jarvis), another pal (Michael Trotter), who’s also a client, and an absent mother (Lili Taylor), who suddenly shows up when his grandfather dies.King works to portray a tight mesh of relationships around Cole, directing Elizabeth Palmore’s valiant adaptation of the sensitively rendered Carter Sickels novel. But lacking a strong central performance from Ettinger — who gets stuck on a half-pained, half-exasperated setting — much of the movie feels like a series of comings and goings, entrances and exits. And from the moment that a ruthless dealer in town gives Cole a hard look, there’s no question where his side hustle will lead.In flashbacks, Cole longs for time spent with his grandfather and at religious gatherings. The movie opens and closes with appreciative pans of the verdant hills that suggest the heartland will live on. But what comes in the middle doesn’t quite hold together.The Evening HourNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Stillwater’ Review: Another American Tragedy

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      Matt Damon plays a father determined to free his daughter from prison in the latest from Tom McCarthy, the director of “Spotlight.”A truism about American movies is that when they want to say something about the United States — something grand or profound or meaningful — they typically pull their punches. There are different reasons for this timidity, the most obvious being a fear of the audience’s tricky sensitivities. And so ostensibly political stories rarely take partisan stands, and movies like the ponderously earnest “Stillwater” sink under the weight of their good intentions.The latest from the director Tom McCarthy (“Spotlight”), “Stillwater” stars Matt Damon as Bill Baker. He’s a familiar narrative type with the usual late-capitalism woes, including the dead-end gigs, the family agonies, the wounded masculinity. He also has a touch of Hollywood-style exoticism: He’s from Oklahoma. A recovering addict, Bill now toggles between swinging a hammer and taking a knee for Jesus. Proud, hard, alone, with a cord of violence quaking below his impassivity, he lives in a small bleak house and lives a small bleak life. He doesn’t say much, but he’s got a real case of the white-man blues.He also has a burden in the form of a daughter, Allison (a miscast Abigail Breslin), who’s serving time in a Marseille prison, having been convicted of savagely killing her girlfriend. The story, which McCarthy conceived of (he shares script credit with several others), takes its inspiration from that of Amanda Knox, an American studying in Italy, who was convicted of a 2007 murder, a case that became an international scandal. Knox’s conviction was later overturned and she moved back to the United States, immortalized by lurid headlines, books, documentaries and a risible 2015 potboiler with Kate Beckinsale.Like that movie, which focuses on the sins of a vampiric, sensation-hungry media, “Stillwater” isn’t interested in the specifics of the Knox case but in its usefulness for moral instruction. Soon after it opens, and following a tour of Bill’s native habitat — with its industrial gothic backdrop and lonely junk-food dinners — he visits Allison, a trip he’s taken repeatedly. This time he stays. Allison thinks that she has a lead that will prove her innocence, which sends her father down an investigative rabbit hole and, for a time, quickens the movie’s pulse.McCarthy isn’t an intuitive or innovative filmmaker and, like a lot of actors turned directors, he’s more adept at working with performers than telling a story visually. Shot by Masanobu Takayanagi, “Stillwater” looks and moves just fine — it’s solid, professional — and Marseille, with its sunshine and noir, pulls its atmospheric weight as Bill maps the city, trying to chase clues and villains. Also earning his pay is the underutilized French Algerian actor Moussa Maaskri, playing one of those sly, world-weary private detectives who, like the viewer, figures things out long before Bill does.Much happens, including an abrupt, unpersuasive relationship with a French theater actress, Virginie (the electric Camille Cottin, from the Netflix show “Call My Agent!”). The character is a fantasy, a ministering angel with a hot bod and a cute tyke (Lilou Siauvaud); among her many implausible attributes, she isn’t ticked off by Bill’s inability to speak French. But Cottin, a charismatic performer whose febrile intensity is its own gravitational force, easily keeps you engaged and curious. She gives her character juice and her scenes a palpable charge, a relief given Bill’s leaden reserve.There’s little joy in Bill’s life; the problem is, there isn’t much personality, either. It’s clear that Damon and McCarthy have thought through this man in considered detail, from Bill’s plaid shirts to his tightly clenched walk. The character looks as if he hasn’t moved his bowels in weeks; if anything, he feels overworked, a product of too much conceptualizing and not enough feeling, identifiable humanity or sharp ideas. And because Bill doesn’t talk much, he has to emerge largely through his actions and tamped-down physicality, his lowered eyes and head partly obscured by a baseball hat that hangs over them like a visor.It is, as show people like to say, a committed performance, but it’s also a frustratingly flat one. Less character than conceit, Bill isn’t a specific father and uneasy American abroad; he’s a symbol. McCarthy tips his hand early in the first scene in Oklahoma with the image of Bill precisely framed in the center of a window of a house he’s helping demolish. A tornado has ripped through the region, leveling everything. When Bill pauses to look around, surveying the damage, the camera takes in the weeping survivors, the rubble and ruin. It’s a good setup, brimming with potential, but as the story develops, it becomes evident this isn’t simply a disaster, natural or otherwise. It’s an omen.Like “Nomadland” and any number of Sundance movies, “Stillwater” seizes on the classic figure of the American stoic, the rugged individualist whose self-reliance has become a trap, a dead end and — if all the narrative parts cohere — a tragedy. And like “Nomadland,” “Stillwater” tries to say something about the United States (“Ya Got Trouble,” as the Music Man sings) without turning the audience off by calling out specific names or advancing an ideological position. Times are tough, Americans are too (at least in movies). They keep quiet, soldier on, squint into the sun and the void. Bad things happen and it’s somebody’s fault, but it’s all so very vague.StillwaterRated R for violence and language. Running time: 2 hour 20 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Resort to Love’ Review: A Struggling Singer in Paradise

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      In this romantic comedy, a woman reeling from a failed engagement and a flailing career escapes to a glamorous island resort.“Resort to Love,” Christina Milian’s second rom-com with a punny title in two years (she starred in the 2019 “Falling Inn Love”) is as uninspired as its name.The movie, directed by Steven Tsuchida and streaming on Netflix, follows Erica Wilson (Milian), a struggling singer who takes an entertainment gig at a luxury resort in Mauritius after a career setback. When she arrives, she’s shocked to find that she has to sing at weddings, and it turns out that her ex-fiancé, Jason (Jay Pharoah), just so happens to be getting married there. Erica and Jason struggle with lingering feelings. At the same time, Erica is getting to know Caleb (Sinqua Walls), Jason’s dreamy older brother, who is a retired special forces operative.The charm of romantic comedies is, in part, their predictability, with characters working through personal hang ups and finding love by the end. The genre’s popularity points to a basic human need to be seen, and to have tenderness and vulnerability in our lives. But the success of a rom-com hinges on viewers rooting for the film’s relationships. In “Resort to Love,” the lack of discernible chemistry between the characters makes it hard to believe they belong together.Pharoah and Milian’s performances are stilted and emotionally barren. Erica and Jason were a couple for four and a half years, but it’s unclear why. There is no familiarity in their interactions, and the only thing over which the pair seem to bond is their would-be wedding song, “No One” by Alicia Keys.Walls is a bright spot in the film, and gets not nearly enough screen time. His Caleb is the perfect rom-com protagonist: beautiful, charming and grounded. But that can only nominally boost this film, in which the only surprise is that Caleb falls for Milian’s one-note Erica at all.Resort to LoveNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Lorelei’ Review: A Rural Melodrama, Lost at Sea

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      Pablo Schreiber and Jena Malone attempt to provide an anchor for this listless character drama.In one of the more fanciful sequences in the melodrama “Lorelei,” the film’s protagonist, Wayland (Pablo Schreiber), dreams of his lover, Dolores (Jena Malone), on the beach. She beckons like a siren, beautiful until he gets close. Then Dolores screams, becoming a monster. The image presents a ham-handed metaphor, and it’s indicative of the lack of imagination that hampers the literal-minded drama.When the movie begins, Wayland has just been released from a 15-year prison sentence. He returns home to rural Oregan, a world of dirty dive bars and motorcycle gangs. It’s also where Wayland met his first love, Dolores, who is now a single mother of three, scraping by on not enough money and not enough social support.The pair rekindle their romance, but Dolores is erratic, prone to mood swings, quick to accuse both Wayland and her kids of betrayals. Wayland is thrust into becoming the stabilizing force for an entire family, a responsibility he resents.As a first time feature filmmaker, the director Sabrina Doyle demonstrates an ability to create an environment for her rural, working class characters that feels specific and lived-in. Couches are never clear from clutter, wood-paneled homes have been stained by too many hard rains. Schreiber is hulking and tender, and Malone astutely plays her character as an overburdened adolescent, lost in the expectations of adulthood.But Doyle displays less adeptness with creating memorable images or narrative momentum. Her film plods through Wayland’s disillusionment, with conflicts that feel repetitive and dreams that are mired in self-consciousness. The film is invested in accurately depicting the details of its character’s lives, but its collection of studied impressions doesn’t coalesce into a coherent final portrait.LoreleiNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Ride the Eagle’ Review: A Nontoxic Bro Faces Midlife Lessons

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      A conga-playing, marijuana-smoking man approaches middle age — and romance — with help from a video from his mother.It’s doubtful that anyone who has enjoyed the work of the writer and actor Jake Johnson can name, offhand, an instance in which he has played a guy who works in an office. It’s just not a thing with his nontoxic, shaggy bro persona. In “Ride the Eagle,” which Johnson co-wrote with the director Trent O’Donnell, he plays a character compelled to contend with imminent middle age. But no worries — his journey in no way obliges him to button down or up. Just the opposite.Johnson’s Leif, a man of simple pleasures — yes, he fires up a joint pretty much as soon as he’s out of bed — lives on the property of the leader of a band for which he plays the conga drum. His mom, Honey (Susan Sarandon), who abandoned him as a child, has died. She has bequeathed to him a much snazzier cabin than his current one — but to get it, he has to run a gantlet of life lessons Honey lays out for him in a video she recorded before she died.When Leif arrives at her place, he finds a significant amount of dope in its cabinets, establishing a new bond between mother and son. The marijuana did not, strictly, belong to Honey, which sets up a plot point that draws in a menacing J.K. Simmons. Her instructions to Leif include a lot of carpe diem stuff that you yourself have likely heard a thousand times, even if you don’t have a hippie in your life. Fulfilling one task, Leif reconnects with an old love, the initially nonplused Audrey (D’Arcy Carden).“Where do these people get their money,” I wrote in my notes as Leif and his dog set out for a long drive at the film’s fade-out. Doesn’t matter. Nor do the multiple clichés. In “Ride the Eagle,” the laid-back vibe is all.Ride the EagleNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Jungle Cruise’ Review: Amazon Subprime

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      Not even Emily Blunt, doing her best Katharine Hepburn impression, can keep this leaky boat ride afloat.Like Vogon poetry, the plot of Disney’s “Jungle Cruise” is mostly unintelligible and wants to beat you into submission. Manically directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, this latest derivation of a theme-park ride shoots for the fizzy fun of bygone romantic adventures like “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981). That it misses has less to do with the heroic efforts of its female lead than with the glinting artifice of the entire enterprise.Emily Blunt plays Lily, a sassy British botanist weary of being disrespected by London’s chauvinistic scientific community. The Great War is in full swing, but Lily is obsessed with reaching the Amazon jungle to search for the Tree of Life, rumored to cure all ills. A roguish riverboat captain named Frank (Dwayne Johnson) is hired, and soon Lily and her fussy brother (Jack Whitehall) — whose discomfort with all things Amazonian is a running gag — are heading upriver into a host of digital dangers.As snakes, cannibals and maggoty supernatural beings rattle around the frame, “Jungle Cruise” exhibits a blatantly faux exoticism that feels as flat as the forced frisson between its two leads. The pace is hectic, the dialogue boilerplate (“The natives speak of this place with dread”), the general busyness a desperate dance for our attention. Jesse Plemons is briefly diverting as a nefarious German prince, and Edgar Ramírez pops up as a rotting Spanish conquistador named Aguirre. Werner Herzog must be thrilled.Buffeted by a relentless score and supported by a small town’s worth of digital artists, “Jungle Cruise” is less directed than whipped to a stiff peak before collapsing into a soggy mess.“Everything you see wants to kill you,” Frank tells his passengers. Actually, I think it just wants to take your money.Jungle CruiseRated PG-13 for chaste kissing and bloodless fighting. Running time 2 hours 7 minutes. In theaters and on Disney+. More

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      ‘Nine Days’ Review: Belief in the Beforelife

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      In this drama featuring Winston Duke and Zazie Beetz, unborn souls are given a chance at life on Earth.“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness,” wrote Vladimir Nabokov. We have been imagining and describing one of those ostensible eternities — the afterlife — for millenniums. “Nine Days,” the ambitious and often impressive debut feature from the writer-director Edson Oda, surprises by positing a prelife world, and a vetting process determining which souls are awarded a term on earth.In a small house in the middle of a desert, a stocky, quiet man named Will (Winston Duke) watches a bank of tube TVs, recording their feeds on VHS cassettes. These POVs show the lives of the people he’s “passed.”Just as he’s meeting, one by one, a new group of individuals to assess, one of his people in the world ends their life, which shakes Will to the core. He gets obsessed over why. Will this affect his ability to look at his new charges with fairness?“Nine Days” is more about questions than answers. It’s not an overtly political film, in any sense. Will’s screens don’t seem to depict any human beings who aren’t at least in the vicinity of the middle class. When Will is pitching his candidates on his process, he tells them of “the amazing opportunity of life,” and that if they pass they will be “born in a fruitful environment.” But later Will blurts out some thoughts to his friend and neighbor Kyo (Benedict Wong) suggesting Will believes himself something of a con man.The candidates are, arguably, stock characters with some sensitively added value. Alexander (Tony Hale) just wants to have beers and hang out. When he learns that Will himself once lived on earth — the film’s realm encompasses souls both “passed” and those never born — he can’t figure out why Will is reluctant. We know that Emma (Zazie Beetz) is going to be a special kind of free spirit by the insouciance she displays when showing up late for her first appointment.Oda is a very assured and sometimes inspired filmmaker, and he handles his actors beautifully. Duke and Beetz in particular deliver performances for the ages. And the movie’s inquiries, about ethics, morality, consciousness and the ability to hang on in this brief crack of light we’re sharing at the moment, are pertinent. But the narrative conceits of “Nine Days,” while exquisitely constructed, are intricate to the point of laborious. At times the movie almost sinks under their weight.Nine DaysRated R for language and themes. Running time 2 hours 4 minutes. In theaters. More