Mike Schulz wants Dave Levora and Darren Pitra — and, by extension, everyone in the known universe — to know that he understands the appeal of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3: “It’s pushin’ buttons like crazy.” Understanding, however, is not the same thing as enjoying, and Schulz is one of the outliers who wasn’t responsible for Guardians overtaking Super Mario Bros as the N° 1 film. “[Guardians] was so aggressively pushy,” decrees Schulz, “[with] too much button-pushing.” He enjoyed the comedic touches, many of them furnished by Chris Pratt, “who is better than he has been for a while,” while Zoe Saldaña is “terrific,” Karen Gillan “really good,” and Dave Bautista “always fun.” The problem for Schulz is that the film plays as the heart-tugging, tear-wrenching, grandparent-on-an-IV-drip, cancer-children-cavorting, footage-of-Holocaust-camp-survivors-recently-liberated, Titanic-type entry of the series — so much so that “if [director/screenwriter James Gunn] played a Celene Dion song, I would not have been surprised.” Whither the subtlety of those bygone days of yore? Moreover, the villain manages to “eliminate all chances of scary” by calling one of his minions a “twit.” Well, the use of the word “twit” is certainly a holdover from those bygone days. Schulz also repeats his objection from last week that, with all the characters being used seemingly interchangeably in every other Marvel release coming out on a near-weekly basis, one’s understanding of a given film’s continuity is shot to hell; and Gunn (heh) doesn’t want to waste precious seconds catching everyone up to script. Schulz, moreover, was surprised to hear that the film has so far underperformed at the box office: He guesses just — “just” — $110 million, and one of the Deez proffers $118 million; but, to date, it has earned $344 million on a $250 million budget — that’s a $94 million profit, folks. Profits like that could finance a decade’s worth of independent features, but the suits at Marvel Studios must be pulling out their hair-plugs over such a piddling amount, and sweating through their Armani in anticipation as their secretaries hit “refresh” on the next round of figures. Then there’s Love Again, directed by James C Strouse and starring Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Sam Heughan, and (not kidding) Celene Dion as herself. Love Again was a film with which our trio of skeptics enjoyed much sport when discussing next week’s previews, and Schulz, having seen it at last, declares it “my favorite thing ever,” as “it’s the worst thing I’ve seen in at least a couple years. It’s so very bad — but hilariously bad!” Basically, it’s Hallmark film material, with Dion treated by Heughan as an oracle bestowing the wisdom of the ages to bestow befitting a mere journalist looking for an angle for his profile of Celene Dion, middle-aged ballad-blaster. As a romantic comedy that takes itself much too seriously, the intended laff-getters in Love Again are lame — but the unintended yucks provoked by the proceedings (not to mention so much Celene Dion — fifteen scenes’ worth, and eleven songs on the soundtrack) provide camp kicks that more than justify the time thrown away on it. Love Again is the sort of thing that, as one of the Deez puts it, you want to drink a lot of wine with your friends before you attend a screening so that y’all can participate in Mystery Science Theatre 3000’ing the hell out of it. Compared to the compromised enjoyment of a Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3, the straight-up so-bad-it-hurts-from-laughing train-wreck of Love Again holds more appeal. As for flicks this weekend, there’s the forty-fifth anniversary of Grease and Book Club: The Next Chapter, featuring Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen and Mary Steenburgen reprising their roles from the first 2018 Book Club, which, if you remember Book Club, then you’re one up on one of the Deez as to your awareness of its existence. There’s also the cartoon Rally Road Racers, with racers competing in a high-stakes race along the historic Silk Road trade route; and Robert Rodriguez’s Hypnotic, an Inception-y SF action thriller featuring Ben Affleck — which could be either outstanding or incoherently awful. Happy viewing!

“Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3” and “Love Again”