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‘A Minecraft Movie’ Review: Jason Momoa and Jack Black Bro It Up in a Genially Weightless Video-Game Quest
Jared Hess, the director of "Napoleon Dynamite," brings his indie-camp absurdist cred to this adaptation of the blockbuster sandbox video game.
He has had a few quirky indie follow-up films and has worked in television, but watching a self-consciously absurdist filmmaker like Hess take control of a blockbuster monster machine like Minecraft made me think, at moments, of Episode One of “The Studio,” in which the “hip” director Nicholas Stoller is recruited to somehow create a movie out of the Kool-Aid franchise. He plays Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison, who was a video-game champion in 1989 and now runs a corner store called Game Over World (it’s stuffed with old video screens and vintage gamer knickknacks), which is teetering toward bankruptcy. And there’s a fish-out-of-water subplot in which one of the Overworld’s blockish pacifist vegetarian monks — a silent dude with a monobrow — winds up traveling through the portal, landing on earth, and going on a date with Vice Principal Marlene, played by Jennifer Coolidge with her over-the-top diva broadness.
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