These days, it's hard to find a mainstream movie that isn't presented in "3-D." It's a sensible proposition, after all; motion pictures are expensive affairs, and throwing in a few extra million dollars for a 3-D conversion for which one can charge twice the normal price for tickets sounds like a good way to hedge one's bets. Rare, however, is the movie that actually makes full use of the format for a mind-blowing cinematic experience. Alfonso Cuaron achieved it earlier this year with his 90-minute thrill-ride Gravity, and a little over two months later, Oscar-winning director Peter Jackson has raised the bar for visual splendor yet again with the astonishing presentation of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.
I actually missed The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, the first installment of the trilogy of films based on J.R.R. Tolkien's novel The Hobbit, when it came out in theaters last year. Due to limited funds and a bit of disenchantment with the decision to split a relatively slim book into three movies I decided to pass, but when I caught the movie on DVD I was beguiled by the visuals; in the nine years since the last Lord of the Rings movie, Jackson had learned a whole lot of new tricks, and even though I didn't see the film in 3-D, or the vaunted "High Frame Rate" format of 48 frames per second, it was a real treat to watch, and my whole family agreed to catch the second movie in the premium format.
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug begins with a flashback, in which Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellen) approaches exiled dwarf prince Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) at the Prancing Pony in Bree and offers to help him reclaim the dwarf kingdom of Erebor, which was forcibly taken from them by the dragon Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch). It then returns to the present, with the company of dwarves led by Thorin and accompanied by Gandalf and the burglar they recruited, the eponymous hobbit Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) fleeing from the orcs chasing them at the end of the last movie. First they take refuge with a "skin changer" or a shape-changing man named Beorn (Mikael Persbrandt), and later, they are able to flee into Mirkwood, where they encounter new terrors and perils. The band of adventurers face danger from all sorts of colorful and terrifying characters, like angry elves (including Orlando Bloom's Legolas from the Lord of the Rings trilogy, herein joined by his dad Thranduil, played by Lee Pace, and a fierce she-elf created just for the movies named Tauriel, played by Evangeline Lilly), murderous orcs, and treacherous humans, but all of these threats will pale next to the terrifying, fire-breathing shroud of death that is Smaug.
Like this first film in the series, this, too was presented in the "HFR" format, and while it was jarring in several instances, it really was an extraordinary experience.
Also, in terms of both story and pure balls-to-the-wall action, this film easily has the first one beat. The staging of the action is nothing less than extraordinary, and Jackson's sleight of hand is now such that it's considerably harder to tell Orlando Bloom apart from his digitally-generated counterpart in the incredibly-staged action sequences. I basically just worked on the assumption that the most dangerous or difficult stunts were done digitally, but really, it's hard to tell where Bloom or Lilly (whose Tauriel also does considerable feats of derring-do) end and their Weta-Digital generated doubles begin. Fans thirsting for orc blood will certainly have their fill here; plenty of orcs are skewered, slashed and decapitated over the film's mammoth running time for our viewing pleasure.
Of course, given the title of the film, the dragon Smaug himself, as the film's primary antagonist (although there is a familiar face lurking in the shadows) has to be a highlight of this film, and thanks to the wizards at Weta Digital, he absolutely is. I regret to report, however, that Cumberbatch's voice seems to have been slightly filtered to make him sound more menacing, though that could have just been as a result of the terrible audio at the theater where I watched this movie, which was in the non-IMAX portion of SM North EDSA. My cousin had the same problem, so at least I know it wasn't just me. The audio was so bad, in fact, that I missed whole chunks of Smaug's rather extensive dialogue, which was really disappointing considering I have been a fan of Cumberbatch's since I watched him on Sherlock back in 2012. If the experience for people in other theaters was similar, then Jackson and his crew have done the audience quite a disservice, but there's no way for me to know.
In any case, this film has much more going for it than just incredible action sequences and CG-characters. As we have come to expect from Jackson's Tolkien films, the production value is really a cut above most other Hollywood fare. The production design of sets like the interior of Erebor and the seemingly abandoned fort of Dol Guldur are absolutely jaw-dropping and in many instances they are as integral to the story as the characters who set foot there, almost as if they are characters unto themselves. Of course, the majestic New Zealand backdrops Jackson and his crew picked add to the splendor.
The story does tend to plod along at some points, and I couldn't help but wonder where Jackson and his screenwriters got all the material for this filler, but overall the pacing was good, and the action was right where it needed to be. All told, I can definitely say I liked this movie better than its predecessor.
Without spoiling anything it's fair for me to say that the film sets the audience up for the epic finale next year, especially considering that it will feature the famous Battle of Five Armies which fans of the book and of Tolkien lore in general are no doubt eagerly anticipating, but standing on its own, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug was a pretty fun film in its own right.
4/5
Thursday, December 26, 2013
Wednesday, December 25, 2013
Revisiting an Old Favorite: Sideways
There's a little thing going around Facebook asking people to post "10 movies they saw in the last few years that stayed with them." Funny thing is, of all the movies I've seen, and I like to consider myself a fan of movies in general, there's only one that's really, resonated with me over the last decade and a half or so, and that's Alexander Payne's 2004 film Sideways. Sure, I've enjoyed lots of other films in my lifetime and even in the last ten years alone, and I even have many of them on DVD, but as I understand the phrase "stay with you" there's something a lot more than just enjoyment and/or entertainment at work. And so by that standard Sideways, and only Sideways, has truly left a burr in my consciousness.
At its heart, Sideways is basically a midlife crisis movie. I connected to this film because I watched it the year I turned 30, and while the big Four-Oh is two years away for me (a year and a half, to be precise), that film still connects with me in a way that few other films ever have, before or since, and because I cannot seem to find my actual review of the movie (which I wrote right here on blogger) I'll give a little summary.
Middle school teacher Miles Raymond (Paul Giamatti), is frustrated in many aspects his life. He's divorced, stuck in a dreary job, living in a drab apartment, and anxiously hoping for his novel to be published. The one thing that seems to give him any joy is wine, in particular pinot noir. As the film begins,he looks forward to is taking his friend, washed-up former actor Jack Cole (Thomas Haden Church), who is about to get married, on a tour of Santa Ynez Valley, one of the great wine hubs of California, as one last getaway before Jack gets hitched. Jack and Miles drink wine and meet people on the way, including winery employee Stephanie (Sandra Oh) and waitress/master's degree candidate Maya (Virginia Madsen). As their acquaintance with the ladies progresses Jack seems intent on getting his rocks off with Stephanie, while Miles grapples with being at a crossroads his life. Will he love again? Will his novel ever get published? Will he ever open his prized bottle of 1961 pinot?
It's just as well that I'm re-reviewing this film, because I find myself laughing at a story trope I wasn't really aware of when I first watched it. I find myself amused, for example, by the well-worn cliche that Miles' novel is basically about him. Watching this, and Woody Allen's 2011 film Midnight in Paris, one would imagine that in Hollywood movies, the only people novelists, especially struggling ones, ever know how to write about are themselves.
What I loved about this movie was how brutally honest and how utterly down-to-earth it felt and still feels. Giamatti was really the perfect choice for the role of Miles Raymond; he invested the character with a heartbreaking vulnerability that made him utterly sympathetic, even at his most pathetic moments in the film. Everyone in the cast was at the top of their game, but this was, for me, Giamatti's show through-and-through. Not being the most dashing actor, he never really snagged a lot of lead roles after that, but he has been working steadily ever since, both in awards-bait, art-house fare and in blockbusters. In fact, like his Sideways alumnus Haden Church, who played Sandman in Spider-Man 3, Giamatti will also play one of Spider-Man's bad guys in next year's The Amazing Spider-Man 2.
I'm actually older now than Giamatti was when Sideways came out, and if nothing else I consider myself fortunate that unlike the character he played in that movie, I am not nearly as down and out as he was throughout most of it. Still, so much of his anguish at feeling he had achieved too little in his life considering his age really speaks to me. I like to think I've had a good life so far, but I cannot escape the thought that I could have done things better.
Still, like Sideways, which ends on a cliffhanger of sorts, life doesn't really end when one particular story does. My story will go on, and even though I suffer from insecurity and feelings of inadequacy like Miles did, I still have time to try my best and make things better.
I also really enjoyed Life of Pi, incidentally, but I'll have to wait for several years to see if it really stays with me the way Sideways has.
At its heart, Sideways is basically a midlife crisis movie. I connected to this film because I watched it the year I turned 30, and while the big Four-Oh is two years away for me (a year and a half, to be precise), that film still connects with me in a way that few other films ever have, before or since, and because I cannot seem to find my actual review of the movie (which I wrote right here on blogger) I'll give a little summary.
Middle school teacher Miles Raymond (Paul Giamatti), is frustrated in many aspects his life. He's divorced, stuck in a dreary job, living in a drab apartment, and anxiously hoping for his novel to be published. The one thing that seems to give him any joy is wine, in particular pinot noir. As the film begins,he looks forward to is taking his friend, washed-up former actor Jack Cole (Thomas Haden Church), who is about to get married, on a tour of Santa Ynez Valley, one of the great wine hubs of California, as one last getaway before Jack gets hitched. Jack and Miles drink wine and meet people on the way, including winery employee Stephanie (Sandra Oh) and waitress/master's degree candidate Maya (Virginia Madsen). As their acquaintance with the ladies progresses Jack seems intent on getting his rocks off with Stephanie, while Miles grapples with being at a crossroads his life. Will he love again? Will his novel ever get published? Will he ever open his prized bottle of 1961 pinot?
It's just as well that I'm re-reviewing this film, because I find myself laughing at a story trope I wasn't really aware of when I first watched it. I find myself amused, for example, by the well-worn cliche that Miles' novel is basically about him. Watching this, and Woody Allen's 2011 film Midnight in Paris, one would imagine that in Hollywood movies, the only people novelists, especially struggling ones, ever know how to write about are themselves.
What I loved about this movie was how brutally honest and how utterly down-to-earth it felt and still feels. Giamatti was really the perfect choice for the role of Miles Raymond; he invested the character with a heartbreaking vulnerability that made him utterly sympathetic, even at his most pathetic moments in the film. Everyone in the cast was at the top of their game, but this was, for me, Giamatti's show through-and-through. Not being the most dashing actor, he never really snagged a lot of lead roles after that, but he has been working steadily ever since, both in awards-bait, art-house fare and in blockbusters. In fact, like his Sideways alumnus Haden Church, who played Sandman in Spider-Man 3, Giamatti will also play one of Spider-Man's bad guys in next year's The Amazing Spider-Man 2.
I'm actually older now than Giamatti was when Sideways came out, and if nothing else I consider myself fortunate that unlike the character he played in that movie, I am not nearly as down and out as he was throughout most of it. Still, so much of his anguish at feeling he had achieved too little in his life considering his age really speaks to me. I like to think I've had a good life so far, but I cannot escape the thought that I could have done things better.
Still, like Sideways, which ends on a cliffhanger of sorts, life doesn't really end when one particular story does. My story will go on, and even though I suffer from insecurity and feelings of inadequacy like Miles did, I still have time to try my best and make things better.
I also really enjoyed Life of Pi, incidentally, but I'll have to wait for several years to see if it really stays with me the way Sideways has.
Thursday, December 5, 2013
The Disney Animated Musical is BACK! (A Review of "Frozen")
As someone who grew up with Disney's animated musicals (and who even cried a little at the end of Beauty and the Beast) I was genuinely saddened when it appeared that that the Disney musical, at around the beginning of this millennium, was slowly dying out as a medium, having been increasingly upstaged by the newer, slicker computer-generated product being produced by Disney stablemate Pixar. Soon, even Walt Disney Animation's "homegrown" (i.e. not Pixar) product felt either utterly generic (Chicken Little, Meet the Robinsons, The Wild) or loosely inspired by plot points from Pixar hits (e.g. Bolt, which borrowed its deluded-hero conceit from Toy Story). Songs were basically taboo, unless they were popular songs that didn't come out of the mouths of the characters. It got to a point where Disney was basically parodying itself in 2007's live-action animation hybrid Enchanted. In 2009, they tried to sell a "princess" musical with The Princess and the Frog, only to be met with cold indifference at the box office. Although 2010's Tangled was still, strictly speaking, a musical, it felt oddly parsimonious with its actual musical numbers. Then, quite conspicuously, the next year brought a distinctly non-musical offering, Wreck-It-Ralph. Now, I'm a huge fan of WIR, and truth be told the fast-talking speed demon Vanellope Von Schweetz from that film is one of my favorite Disney characters EVER, right next to Finding Nemo's Dory and the sous chef voiced by Will Arnett in Ratatouille, but the thought of Disney abandoning the musical altogether left a distinctly bad taste in my mouth.
Fortunately, with Frozen, co-directed by Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, Disney has put that particular fear to rest.
Loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale The Snow Queen, Frozen tells the story of two sisters Elsa (Idina Menzel) and Anna (Kristen Bell), whose parents, the King and Queen of Arendelle, a fictional, vaguely Norwegian kingdom, separate them at a very young age because Elsa has fantastical but dangerous ice powers which actually hurt Anna when both of them are very young. In fact, Elsa's powers are so dangerous that the castle's gates are closed to the entire kingdom for years. When the two princesses are a bit older, they are orphaned by a tragic incident at sea, and as a result, when Elsa, the elder, comes of age, the gates of the kingdom are opened for her coronation. Anna, now a blossoming young woman, cannot be happier, as she yearns to meet people, and in particular hopes to catch the fancy of a young man, while Elsa is nearly paralyzed with fear at what could happen if people find out about her secret. Suffice it to say, although Anna meets her dashing prince Hans (Santino Fontana), things go awry, and Anna, together with traveling ice salesman Kristoff (Jonathan Groff), his reindeer Sven, and the magically-animated snowman Olaf (Josh Gad) embarks on a journey to save her sister and her kingdom. In the process, she will learn a thing or two about the bonds of sisterhood, and the power of true love.
The Snow Queen was always going to be a tough story to adapt, as it really doesn't follow a whole lot of the usual Disney cartoon story beats. The protagonists are children not lovelorn adolescents or young adults. The villain is, well, not much of a character, being neither particularly cruel or comical, and in fact, at the time the story is resolved, she isn't even around. It's a small wonder, therefore, that the movie is only an adaptation in the loosest sense of the word. Disney kept the Scandinavian setting, the queen with the fantastical ice/snow powers, and the importance of true love, but it all other respects they've come up with something altogether different, not only from the story they adapted, but from their usual fare. This movie is something quite special.
It's hard to talk about the storytelling virtues of this movie without spoiling it, but I will say that anyone wanting to keep their little girls from getting too preoccupied with finding Prince Charming at such a young age will have next to nothing to fear from this film, and that parents who have at least two young daughters may delight at the message this movie delivers about sisterhood. I have two little girls who fight like cats and dogs so this resonated with me something fierce.
The film does have some flaws; apart from three or four central characters, everyone else in it was given short shrift in terms of characterization. The actual villain of the film, if I may be honest, didn't leave much of an impact at all, and felt more like a story device than an actual character. Still, the patented Disney humor was there in generous doses.
Also, call me old-fashioned, but I miss the Alan Menken tunes from Beauty and the Beast, and which were featured as recently as 2010 in Tangled. Still, that's more a matter of taste than anything, and while not all the songs here, written by the husband-and-wife team of Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, were necessarily my cup of tea, I appreciated the craft behind them, especially the ones that involved powerful vocals like the centerpiece, "Let It Go" as sung by Menzel's Elsa midway through the film. It was gratifying to see Disney finally make up for casting Menzel, a Broadway veteran and one of the stars of the beloved musical Rent, in their 2007 musical Enchanted and yet failing to give her a single musical number. I was also a fan of Kristen Bell going into this movie, and came out of it an even bigger fan after hearing her sing.
Another quibble I had with this movie was how in some ways it felt like a wasted opportunity; Disney was basically rewriting the form book on a lot of their storytelling conventions here, and yet from a visual perspective, Anna and Elsa look, in many respects, like sooooo many other Disney princesses that have come before them. Considering that they had two uniquely attractive actresses playing these characters, it would have been nice had they at least tried to imbue them with some of their performers' features. As it is, both lead characters seem to have been designed primarily to sell dolls (now available at a Toys 'R' Us near you!), just going to show that while some things may have changed, others remain woefully the same.
Nitpicking notwithstanding, I can't really find that much fault with such an expertly-staged production. As it is with every new film, Disney just keep managing to top themselves on a technical level, and are now pretty much at level with Pixar in terms of pure production value, due in no small part, I imagine, to John Lasseter's creative guidance. And with something like eight new songs, this is easily their most ambitious musical effort since the 1990s.
I seem to be detecting a trend here in Disney Animations release pattern: 2010 had the princess-themed Tangled, while 2012 had the video game action fantasy Wreck-It-Ralph, clearly geared more towards male audiences. Next year, Disney's trading princesses for a team of C-list Marvel superheroes as they adapt the little-known Marvel Comic Big Hero 6. It seems, then, that they're alternating between movies "for girls" and movies "for boys."
If they're all as good as Frozen, though, I'll be back no matter who their principal audience is.
4/5
Fortunately, with Frozen, co-directed by Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, Disney has put that particular fear to rest.
Loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale The Snow Queen, Frozen tells the story of two sisters Elsa (Idina Menzel) and Anna (Kristen Bell), whose parents, the King and Queen of Arendelle, a fictional, vaguely Norwegian kingdom, separate them at a very young age because Elsa has fantastical but dangerous ice powers which actually hurt Anna when both of them are very young. In fact, Elsa's powers are so dangerous that the castle's gates are closed to the entire kingdom for years. When the two princesses are a bit older, they are orphaned by a tragic incident at sea, and as a result, when Elsa, the elder, comes of age, the gates of the kingdom are opened for her coronation. Anna, now a blossoming young woman, cannot be happier, as she yearns to meet people, and in particular hopes to catch the fancy of a young man, while Elsa is nearly paralyzed with fear at what could happen if people find out about her secret. Suffice it to say, although Anna meets her dashing prince Hans (Santino Fontana), things go awry, and Anna, together with traveling ice salesman Kristoff (Jonathan Groff), his reindeer Sven, and the magically-animated snowman Olaf (Josh Gad) embarks on a journey to save her sister and her kingdom. In the process, she will learn a thing or two about the bonds of sisterhood, and the power of true love.
The Snow Queen was always going to be a tough story to adapt, as it really doesn't follow a whole lot of the usual Disney cartoon story beats. The protagonists are children not lovelorn adolescents or young adults. The villain is, well, not much of a character, being neither particularly cruel or comical, and in fact, at the time the story is resolved, she isn't even around. It's a small wonder, therefore, that the movie is only an adaptation in the loosest sense of the word. Disney kept the Scandinavian setting, the queen with the fantastical ice/snow powers, and the importance of true love, but it all other respects they've come up with something altogether different, not only from the story they adapted, but from their usual fare. This movie is something quite special.
It's hard to talk about the storytelling virtues of this movie without spoiling it, but I will say that anyone wanting to keep their little girls from getting too preoccupied with finding Prince Charming at such a young age will have next to nothing to fear from this film, and that parents who have at least two young daughters may delight at the message this movie delivers about sisterhood. I have two little girls who fight like cats and dogs so this resonated with me something fierce.
The film does have some flaws; apart from three or four central characters, everyone else in it was given short shrift in terms of characterization. The actual villain of the film, if I may be honest, didn't leave much of an impact at all, and felt more like a story device than an actual character. Still, the patented Disney humor was there in generous doses.
Also, call me old-fashioned, but I miss the Alan Menken tunes from Beauty and the Beast, and which were featured as recently as 2010 in Tangled. Still, that's more a matter of taste than anything, and while not all the songs here, written by the husband-and-wife team of Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, were necessarily my cup of tea, I appreciated the craft behind them, especially the ones that involved powerful vocals like the centerpiece, "Let It Go" as sung by Menzel's Elsa midway through the film. It was gratifying to see Disney finally make up for casting Menzel, a Broadway veteran and one of the stars of the beloved musical Rent, in their 2007 musical Enchanted and yet failing to give her a single musical number. I was also a fan of Kristen Bell going into this movie, and came out of it an even bigger fan after hearing her sing.
Another quibble I had with this movie was how in some ways it felt like a wasted opportunity; Disney was basically rewriting the form book on a lot of their storytelling conventions here, and yet from a visual perspective, Anna and Elsa look, in many respects, like sooooo many other Disney princesses that have come before them. Considering that they had two uniquely attractive actresses playing these characters, it would have been nice had they at least tried to imbue them with some of their performers' features. As it is, both lead characters seem to have been designed primarily to sell dolls (now available at a Toys 'R' Us near you!), just going to show that while some things may have changed, others remain woefully the same.
Nitpicking notwithstanding, I can't really find that much fault with such an expertly-staged production. As it is with every new film, Disney just keep managing to top themselves on a technical level, and are now pretty much at level with Pixar in terms of pure production value, due in no small part, I imagine, to John Lasseter's creative guidance. And with something like eight new songs, this is easily their most ambitious musical effort since the 1990s.
I seem to be detecting a trend here in Disney Animations release pattern: 2010 had the princess-themed Tangled, while 2012 had the video game action fantasy Wreck-It-Ralph, clearly geared more towards male audiences. Next year, Disney's trading princesses for a team of C-list Marvel superheroes as they adapt the little-known Marvel Comic Big Hero 6. It seems, then, that they're alternating between movies "for girls" and movies "for boys."
If they're all as good as Frozen, though, I'll be back no matter who their principal audience is.
4/5
Friday, November 29, 2013
Night Turns to Day: A Review of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
I didn't catch last year's The Hunger Games in movie theaters. I suppose I was just too busy, though later that year I caught it on DVD and was reasonably entertained. I've always been a fan of dystopian, post apocalyptic fiction and this movie put a bit of new, if slightly disturbing, twist on the concept. It wasn't among my favorites of last year, but I was definitely entertained, so much so that I was more than willing to see the sequel in the movie theater. As much as I enjoyed the first one, the follow-up was head and shoulders the superior film.
The events of the story directly follow those of the first film, so knowledge of what came before is a must. Having won the 74th Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) and Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) have moved into the "Victor's Village" of District 12, and into relatively opulent houses. They're celebrities for life now, thanks not only to their victory but their sham "love story," something which irks Katniss' close friend Gale (Liam Hemsworth) who is not entirely convinced it was a sham. Katniss has bigger problems, though, as her and Peeta's unique victory, as well as her widely televised act of sympathy for fallen tribute Rue, has sparked uprisings all throughout Panem, to the extent that the despotic President Snow (Donald Sutherland) pays her a visit and basically threatens to kill her family and everyone she loves if she doesn't play ball and use her newly-won influence to tell everyone how wonderful the Capitol is. Key to selling this fiction is also selling her fake love story with Peeta...for the rest of her life. The uprisings, however, prove extremely difficult to suppress, and eventually Snow decides to recruit Katniss and Peeta into a "special edition" Hunger Games known as the "Quarter Quell" which only takes place once every 25 years. This time, every one of their opponents is a past winner of the games, and with a ruthless new game master Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman), frightening times lie ahead for Katniss and Peeta.
I have not read any of Suzanne Collins' bestselling Hunger Games books, and at this point that's deliberate; I want whatever surprises the films have to throw at me to remain surprises. What I appreciate most about the movies is how they serve as a graphic metaphor for class inequality, and considering that this was intended for American readers, many if not most of whom probably can't find any country other than their own a world map, the message these films convey remains quite relevant, if a little heavy-handed at times. I have no idea how the books read but for the most part the script by Michael Arndt (Toy Story 3) and Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire) exudes an intelligence which does justice to the book's underlying themes even as it keeps things easy to understand for younger viewers.
Of course, the material would still feel a little schlocky in some places were it not for the utter conviction of the performers, particularly Jennifer Lawrence in her role as Katniss, who does an amazing job at conveying her character's range of emotions from fear to inner conflict. Most of the key supporting players from the first film, including Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks and Lenny Kravitz are back, and this time they are joined by several welcome new additions like Hoffman, Jeffrey Wright, Amanda Plummer and Sam Claflin as former HG winners Beetee, Wiress and Finnick, to name a few. Of course, the problem with a cast this big is that not everyone will get the character development they arguably deserve, even with a two-and-a-half hour running time.
To director Francis Lawrence's credit, though, he manages to balance the most crucial of the characters and story elements while at the same time elevating the production value of this sequel well past its predecessor. Granted, the budget from the last film was basically doubled, but every last penny of that $140 million was well spent, from the computer-generated threats the tributes faced in the arena to the sets, to the hovercraft that actually showed up on screen this time. The first film told a good story, but the penny-pinching was quite evident, especially in the last few scenes in which laughably fake computer-generated wolves showed up. This time the producers went all-out. One thing that really struck me was the imposing architecture of the Capitol, which was embarrassingly minimalist in the first film. This film is bigger and better in every way than its predecessor, and from the look of things, audiences around the world think so too.
It wasn't flawless storytelling, though. I can point to one scene that really made me cringe: Katniss and Peeta are attending a party in the Capitol, when one of the guests invites Peeta to try some French macaroons. Peeta declares that he's too full to eat anymore, and the guest offers him a drink which is meant to make him vomit so that he can eat some more. This scene is considerably powerful given that, at this point in the story, the audience knows that people all over Panem are starving. Peeta blunts the impact of this obscenity by actually saying that people in the Districts are starving while people in the Capitol are throwing up their food. The writers either forgot the "show, don't tell rule" or figured the audience would be too slow to get the message without spelling it out in neon lights as bright as the wigs worn by Elizabeth Banks' Effie.
This little quibble notwithstanding this was easily one of the most engaging movies I've seen all year, and I find myself looking forward to the next installment in the saga of Panem.
4/5
The events of the story directly follow those of the first film, so knowledge of what came before is a must. Having won the 74th Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) and Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) have moved into the "Victor's Village" of District 12, and into relatively opulent houses. They're celebrities for life now, thanks not only to their victory but their sham "love story," something which irks Katniss' close friend Gale (Liam Hemsworth) who is not entirely convinced it was a sham. Katniss has bigger problems, though, as her and Peeta's unique victory, as well as her widely televised act of sympathy for fallen tribute Rue, has sparked uprisings all throughout Panem, to the extent that the despotic President Snow (Donald Sutherland) pays her a visit and basically threatens to kill her family and everyone she loves if she doesn't play ball and use her newly-won influence to tell everyone how wonderful the Capitol is. Key to selling this fiction is also selling her fake love story with Peeta...for the rest of her life. The uprisings, however, prove extremely difficult to suppress, and eventually Snow decides to recruit Katniss and Peeta into a "special edition" Hunger Games known as the "Quarter Quell" which only takes place once every 25 years. This time, every one of their opponents is a past winner of the games, and with a ruthless new game master Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman), frightening times lie ahead for Katniss and Peeta.
I have not read any of Suzanne Collins' bestselling Hunger Games books, and at this point that's deliberate; I want whatever surprises the films have to throw at me to remain surprises. What I appreciate most about the movies is how they serve as a graphic metaphor for class inequality, and considering that this was intended for American readers, many if not most of whom probably can't find any country other than their own a world map, the message these films convey remains quite relevant, if a little heavy-handed at times. I have no idea how the books read but for the most part the script by Michael Arndt (Toy Story 3) and Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire) exudes an intelligence which does justice to the book's underlying themes even as it keeps things easy to understand for younger viewers.
Of course, the material would still feel a little schlocky in some places were it not for the utter conviction of the performers, particularly Jennifer Lawrence in her role as Katniss, who does an amazing job at conveying her character's range of emotions from fear to inner conflict. Most of the key supporting players from the first film, including Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks and Lenny Kravitz are back, and this time they are joined by several welcome new additions like Hoffman, Jeffrey Wright, Amanda Plummer and Sam Claflin as former HG winners Beetee, Wiress and Finnick, to name a few. Of course, the problem with a cast this big is that not everyone will get the character development they arguably deserve, even with a two-and-a-half hour running time.
To director Francis Lawrence's credit, though, he manages to balance the most crucial of the characters and story elements while at the same time elevating the production value of this sequel well past its predecessor. Granted, the budget from the last film was basically doubled, but every last penny of that $140 million was well spent, from the computer-generated threats the tributes faced in the arena to the sets, to the hovercraft that actually showed up on screen this time. The first film told a good story, but the penny-pinching was quite evident, especially in the last few scenes in which laughably fake computer-generated wolves showed up. This time the producers went all-out. One thing that really struck me was the imposing architecture of the Capitol, which was embarrassingly minimalist in the first film. This film is bigger and better in every way than its predecessor, and from the look of things, audiences around the world think so too.
It wasn't flawless storytelling, though. I can point to one scene that really made me cringe: Katniss and Peeta are attending a party in the Capitol, when one of the guests invites Peeta to try some French macaroons. Peeta declares that he's too full to eat anymore, and the guest offers him a drink which is meant to make him vomit so that he can eat some more. This scene is considerably powerful given that, at this point in the story, the audience knows that people all over Panem are starving. Peeta blunts the impact of this obscenity by actually saying that people in the Districts are starving while people in the Capitol are throwing up their food. The writers either forgot the "show, don't tell rule" or figured the audience would be too slow to get the message without spelling it out in neon lights as bright as the wigs worn by Elizabeth Banks' Effie.
This little quibble notwithstanding this was easily one of the most engaging movies I've seen all year, and I find myself looking forward to the next installment in the saga of Panem.
4/5
Saturday, November 2, 2013
"Dark" but No Less Fun: A Review of Thor: The Dark World
While I enjoyed 2011's Thor, there was something that felt somehow off about it to me. The fact that so much of an action fantasy was set in the relatively mundane New Mexico, the fact that the titular superhero spent most of the movie out of costume and without any superpowers, and finally, the fact that this was Marvel Studios' first action/fantasy hybrid after three straight sci-fi flavored movies (two Iron Man films and one Hulk film) gave the first movie a strangely half-baked feel for me.
Not so, however the sequel, titled Thor: The Dark World.
Like the first film, this film begins with a prologue set in ancient times, so ancient that they actually predate Odin Allfather (Anthony Hopkins) himself. In fact, it falls upon Odin's father Bor (Tony Curran) to stop the menace of the Dark Elves of Svartalfheim, led by Malekith (Christopher Eccleston) and his loyal lieutenant Algrim (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje). The Dark Elves lived in the darkness that thrived before the universe was born, and through their indestructible energy weapon, the Aether, they seek to destroy the universe and restore the darkness that once reigned, but Bor defeats them and hides the Aether. Malekith sacrifices the bulk of his armies and in the chaos flees, going into hiding, and apparently suspended animation, for thousands of years.
The film then shifts to the present, which happens to be two years after the first Thor film, and one year after Marvel's The Avengers. Loki (Tom Hiddleston) is imprisoned for his crimes on earth, and Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and his companions, the Warriors Three (Volstagg - Ray Stevenson, Fandrall - Zachary Levi, Hogun - Tadanobu Asane) and Sif (Jamie Alexander), are dispatched across the nine realms to bring peace to these troubled worlds. Meanwhile, on Earth, astrophysicist Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) the object of Thor's affection, is trying to move on from Thor. She has moved to London and is actually on a date with an amiable local (Chris O' Dowd), when her assistant, Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings) interrupts her date and calls her attention to an anomaly in the space-time continuum. Jane follows Darcy to the site of the disturbance, which turns out to be several portals between worlds, one brought about by a celestial event called the convergence, which only occurs once in several thousand years, and in which all nine realms align perfectly. Quite by accident, Jane stumbles on the place where the Asgardians hid the Aether, and the energy actually enters her body, with sometimes explosive consequences for those who try to touch her after that.
Eventually, Thor finds his way to Jane, and whisks her off to Asgard on the now-repaired Bifrost, thinking it would be the best place to keep her safe from the deadly energy inside her. Unfortunately, the Aether awakens Malekith and the remainder of his Dark Elves, and they attack an unsuspecting Asgard with catastrophic consequences.
Thor realizes the magnitude of the threat faced not only by Asgard but by all the Nine Realms, one that will require more than just the power of Mjolnir to vanquish. In fact, he comes to realize that he may require help from one of the most unexpected of places.
Like the first film, this one takes place both on Earth and on other, fantastical realms, but this time around it's the other worlds that get the lion's share of screen time, with Asgard and Svartalfheim proving pivotal to the plot, and another world, Vanaheim, serving as the staging point for the film's first kick-ass action sequence. In this respect, the second film definitely steps things up several notches from its predecessor; not only are there more action set pieces here in comparison to the first film, but they are noticeably better choreographed and more elaborate. They are also abetted by much better computer-generated imagery than the first film had to offer.
Not only that, but there's also a bit more urgency in the battles here; the death of a pivotal supporting character midway through the film tells the audience that this time, the menace is real. In that sense, the film does live up to its title in a way, though the titular "dark world" refers to the home of the Dark Elves and not really to a significant shift in tone from the first film to this one.
That's actually a good thing; Marvel has, for the most part, kept what worked very well for the first film, and for most of Marvel's films in general: the humor. This time, they don't get by on fish-out-of-the-water jokes, but instead pepper the script with more witty exchanges in general between the characters. Hiddleston's Loki, of course, gets the best lines. It was, to me, impressive that Marvel was able to keep this crucial element in despite a nastier set of bad guys than the last film had. Also, director Alan Taylor (who takes over the director's chair from Kenneth Branagh) and his screenwriters make it a point to preserve the other things that worked about the first movie as well, such as the chemistry between lead actor Hemsworth and the various other actors in the film, like Portman, Hopkins, and Hiddleston. Of the performers here, Hopkins feels a little less enthusiastic than he was the first time around, but it doesn't hurt the storytelling that much. A bit of bonus is the fact that for the first time, Portman's Foster gets to interact with the Asgardians, including Odin, Frigga (Rene Russo) and of course Loki.
Of the new elements in the film, Ecclestone's Malekith feels like the least impressive, though really, buried under all that makeup and without particularly memorable dialogue, I'm hard-pressed to think of what more he could have done. Also, personally I felt a little strange seeing swords and battle axes mixing it up with laser cannons on the screen, though considering that George Lucas created a whole genre out of such strange marriages with his Star Wars films I suppose this isn't the first time two seemingly disparate narrative styles have melded on the big screen. In any case, it was only in the first few fight scenes that I thought it looked particularly strange. This little quibble notwithstanding, the major battles were still quite impressive on the whole.
Speaking of climactic battles, this film has one of the most imaginative ones I've seen in a while, one that effectively mixes humor and thrills. It's the sort of thing that has to be seen to be best appreciated.
As with all Marvel films, there were treats to be had after the film, with mid-credits AND post-credits Easter Eggs. I'm pretty sure it's not really spoiling anything to say that at least one of them is clearly setting up a future Marvel Studios blockbuster. Personally, I wasn't particularly enthused about it, even though I'm sure comic-book nerds everywhere were ecstatic about its implications.
But really, my unhappiness with future teasers and some niggles in the script notwithstanding, Thor: The Dark World was definitely worth the trip to the movie theater, though this time, I didn't bother with the 3-D premium considering I wasn't particularly impressed with the 3-D conversions of The Avengers or Iron Man 3.
3.5/5
Not so, however the sequel, titled Thor: The Dark World.
Like the first film, this film begins with a prologue set in ancient times, so ancient that they actually predate Odin Allfather (Anthony Hopkins) himself. In fact, it falls upon Odin's father Bor (Tony Curran) to stop the menace of the Dark Elves of Svartalfheim, led by Malekith (Christopher Eccleston) and his loyal lieutenant Algrim (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje). The Dark Elves lived in the darkness that thrived before the universe was born, and through their indestructible energy weapon, the Aether, they seek to destroy the universe and restore the darkness that once reigned, but Bor defeats them and hides the Aether. Malekith sacrifices the bulk of his armies and in the chaos flees, going into hiding, and apparently suspended animation, for thousands of years.
The film then shifts to the present, which happens to be two years after the first Thor film, and one year after Marvel's The Avengers. Loki (Tom Hiddleston) is imprisoned for his crimes on earth, and Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and his companions, the Warriors Three (Volstagg - Ray Stevenson, Fandrall - Zachary Levi, Hogun - Tadanobu Asane) and Sif (Jamie Alexander), are dispatched across the nine realms to bring peace to these troubled worlds. Meanwhile, on Earth, astrophysicist Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) the object of Thor's affection, is trying to move on from Thor. She has moved to London and is actually on a date with an amiable local (Chris O' Dowd), when her assistant, Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings) interrupts her date and calls her attention to an anomaly in the space-time continuum. Jane follows Darcy to the site of the disturbance, which turns out to be several portals between worlds, one brought about by a celestial event called the convergence, which only occurs once in several thousand years, and in which all nine realms align perfectly. Quite by accident, Jane stumbles on the place where the Asgardians hid the Aether, and the energy actually enters her body, with sometimes explosive consequences for those who try to touch her after that.
Eventually, Thor finds his way to Jane, and whisks her off to Asgard on the now-repaired Bifrost, thinking it would be the best place to keep her safe from the deadly energy inside her. Unfortunately, the Aether awakens Malekith and the remainder of his Dark Elves, and they attack an unsuspecting Asgard with catastrophic consequences.
Thor realizes the magnitude of the threat faced not only by Asgard but by all the Nine Realms, one that will require more than just the power of Mjolnir to vanquish. In fact, he comes to realize that he may require help from one of the most unexpected of places.
Like the first film, this one takes place both on Earth and on other, fantastical realms, but this time around it's the other worlds that get the lion's share of screen time, with Asgard and Svartalfheim proving pivotal to the plot, and another world, Vanaheim, serving as the staging point for the film's first kick-ass action sequence. In this respect, the second film definitely steps things up several notches from its predecessor; not only are there more action set pieces here in comparison to the first film, but they are noticeably better choreographed and more elaborate. They are also abetted by much better computer-generated imagery than the first film had to offer.
Not only that, but there's also a bit more urgency in the battles here; the death of a pivotal supporting character midway through the film tells the audience that this time, the menace is real. In that sense, the film does live up to its title in a way, though the titular "dark world" refers to the home of the Dark Elves and not really to a significant shift in tone from the first film to this one.
That's actually a good thing; Marvel has, for the most part, kept what worked very well for the first film, and for most of Marvel's films in general: the humor. This time, they don't get by on fish-out-of-the-water jokes, but instead pepper the script with more witty exchanges in general between the characters. Hiddleston's Loki, of course, gets the best lines. It was, to me, impressive that Marvel was able to keep this crucial element in despite a nastier set of bad guys than the last film had. Also, director Alan Taylor (who takes over the director's chair from Kenneth Branagh) and his screenwriters make it a point to preserve the other things that worked about the first movie as well, such as the chemistry between lead actor Hemsworth and the various other actors in the film, like Portman, Hopkins, and Hiddleston. Of the performers here, Hopkins feels a little less enthusiastic than he was the first time around, but it doesn't hurt the storytelling that much. A bit of bonus is the fact that for the first time, Portman's Foster gets to interact with the Asgardians, including Odin, Frigga (Rene Russo) and of course Loki.
Of the new elements in the film, Ecclestone's Malekith feels like the least impressive, though really, buried under all that makeup and without particularly memorable dialogue, I'm hard-pressed to think of what more he could have done. Also, personally I felt a little strange seeing swords and battle axes mixing it up with laser cannons on the screen, though considering that George Lucas created a whole genre out of such strange marriages with his Star Wars films I suppose this isn't the first time two seemingly disparate narrative styles have melded on the big screen. In any case, it was only in the first few fight scenes that I thought it looked particularly strange. This little quibble notwithstanding, the major battles were still quite impressive on the whole.
Speaking of climactic battles, this film has one of the most imaginative ones I've seen in a while, one that effectively mixes humor and thrills. It's the sort of thing that has to be seen to be best appreciated.
As with all Marvel films, there were treats to be had after the film, with mid-credits AND post-credits Easter Eggs. I'm pretty sure it's not really spoiling anything to say that at least one of them is clearly setting up a future Marvel Studios blockbuster. Personally, I wasn't particularly enthused about it, even though I'm sure comic-book nerds everywhere were ecstatic about its implications.
But really, my unhappiness with future teasers and some niggles in the script notwithstanding, Thor: The Dark World was definitely worth the trip to the movie theater, though this time, I didn't bother with the 3-D premium considering I wasn't particularly impressed with the 3-D conversions of The Avengers or Iron Man 3.
3.5/5
Friday, November 1, 2013
Piracy on the High Seas, Sans Flamboyance: A Review of Captain Phillips
While the depredations of Somali pirates plying the waters just off the coast of the African continent have, in the last few years, grabbed headlines every now and then for raiding ships hauling valuable cargo to and from the area, they rarely seemed as urgent as car-bombs in urban centers or disenfranchised Arabs trying to tear down their governments, with massive carnage ensuring. Personally, as someone living in a country living with massive poverty, violence in the countrysides, and a whole host of problems, I confess I did not find these incidents particularly relevant to my daily life. Basically, and to be more crass about it, poor people with high-powered firearms hijacking cargo ships thousands of miles away felt more like a rich man's problem than anything else.
Director Paul Greengrass, whose gripping Bourne films basically sent a new standard in action-thriller filmmaking, gave viewers a much more personal perspective of a Somali pirate attack with his new film Captain Phillips, in which Tom Hanks stars as the title character, an actual mariner whose cargo ship was attacked by four Somali pirates in 2009.
There's not much more to tell by way of the plot than to say that Hanks' character, Richard Phillips, is the Captain of a cargo vessel MV Maersk Alabama, that gets hijacked in the high seas, just off the Somalian coast, by a quartet of armed Somali pirates headed by a hardened pirate named Muse (newcomer Barkhad Abdi), but as with many truly compelling films, it is all in the telling, as with the Bourne movies, Greengrass does a terrific job of building up tension, even though the ultimate outcome of the story is but a Google search away.
Hanks, acclaimed and award-winning actor that he is, excels, as expected, in the role of Phillips; he is key to drawing us into this world. More than the editing and the music and the gunfire, it is Hanks' performance that is instrumental to drawing the audience into Phillips' world, to convincing us just how terrifying his experience actually was. Sure, they could have stuck a competent actor in the role and the audience could still have recognized the peril the character was in, but Hanks really puts us in the moment, and even though he's still one of the most recognizable actors in the English speaking world, he difficult Richard Phillips' experience must have been.
Abdi, however, and his Somalian costars, are the revelation here. I suppose it was better to cast actual Somalians than to get African-American actors to go all "method" and lose what would probably have been the equivalent weight of two or three adults to play these characters; none of the pirates in the movie looks like he eats more than once every other day. A detail like this, and the opening scene in which the goons of a Somalian warlord storm into the village where Muse and his cohorts live and remind them rather forcefully that they need to make money, make it hard to hate the pirates the way one would hate a traditional Hollywood villain, which these guys are anything but. If anything, the fact that these men are basically destitute and desperate makes them even more dangerous, which is why staying away from that Google search is a particularly good idea.
This film is not exactly a thrill-ride in the vein of Gravity, but it's a highly engaging peek into recent historical events that is definitely worth a look.
5/5
Director Paul Greengrass, whose gripping Bourne films basically sent a new standard in action-thriller filmmaking, gave viewers a much more personal perspective of a Somali pirate attack with his new film Captain Phillips, in which Tom Hanks stars as the title character, an actual mariner whose cargo ship was attacked by four Somali pirates in 2009.
There's not much more to tell by way of the plot than to say that Hanks' character, Richard Phillips, is the Captain of a cargo vessel MV Maersk Alabama, that gets hijacked in the high seas, just off the Somalian coast, by a quartet of armed Somali pirates headed by a hardened pirate named Muse (newcomer Barkhad Abdi), but as with many truly compelling films, it is all in the telling, as with the Bourne movies, Greengrass does a terrific job of building up tension, even though the ultimate outcome of the story is but a Google search away.
Hanks, acclaimed and award-winning actor that he is, excels, as expected, in the role of Phillips; he is key to drawing us into this world. More than the editing and the music and the gunfire, it is Hanks' performance that is instrumental to drawing the audience into Phillips' world, to convincing us just how terrifying his experience actually was. Sure, they could have stuck a competent actor in the role and the audience could still have recognized the peril the character was in, but Hanks really puts us in the moment, and even though he's still one of the most recognizable actors in the English speaking world, he difficult Richard Phillips' experience must have been.
Abdi, however, and his Somalian costars, are the revelation here. I suppose it was better to cast actual Somalians than to get African-American actors to go all "method" and lose what would probably have been the equivalent weight of two or three adults to play these characters; none of the pirates in the movie looks like he eats more than once every other day. A detail like this, and the opening scene in which the goons of a Somalian warlord storm into the village where Muse and his cohorts live and remind them rather forcefully that they need to make money, make it hard to hate the pirates the way one would hate a traditional Hollywood villain, which these guys are anything but. If anything, the fact that these men are basically destitute and desperate makes them even more dangerous, which is why staying away from that Google search is a particularly good idea.
This film is not exactly a thrill-ride in the vein of Gravity, but it's a highly engaging peek into recent historical events that is definitely worth a look.
5/5
Saturday, October 26, 2013
Warmed-Up But Not Quite as Good: A Review of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2
I wrote a review of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs when it came out here in January 2010, four months after its release in the United States, on my now-defunct Multiply page. I felt it was fun, visually exciting, but ultimately disposable. I have enjoyed re-watching it on DVD with my kids since then, and as a result we were all looking forward to watching the sequel. We were willing to forgo watching it in 3-D to save some money, but unfortunately it was the only available format where we watched it.
The story of the sequel picks up from where the first film left off, although it retroactively negated the after-credits sequence of the first film which suggested events that followed the destruction of Swallow Falls. This film immediately begins in the aftermath of the destruction of the town, which was caused by a food hurricane generated by a machine invented by Flint Lockwood (Bill Hader) which turns water into food.
Here, Flint, his weather-reporter girlfriend Sam (Anna Faris), his dad (James Caan) and various friends are relocated from their island by a think tank known as Live Corp., run by Flint's childhood hero, super-inventor Chester V (Will Forte). Chester hires Flint to work at Live Corp., where Flint has the time of his life, not realizing that the real plan of Chester and his assistant, a talking orangutan named Barb (Kristen Schaal) is to recover his food generating machine, the Flint Lockwood Diatonic Super Mutating Dynamic Food Replicator (FLDSMDFR) while Flint is distracted. When Chester's extraction teams disappear during their attempts to find the machine, Chester decides to send the expendable Flint over to the island and find his machine. Flint brings along his dad and his friends, and what they find is not at all what they expected.
I love cartoons, whether they are hand-drawn, stop motion or computer-generated. I love their sense of whimsy, and how they basically make me feel like a kid again, especially the silly ones.
The first film had the benefit of being based on a kids' book that my children and I enjoyed, as well as the novelty of giant food falling from the sky. This novelty was always going to wear off, but to the filmmakers' credit they've expanded on an idea that was briefly explored in the first film (e.g. the flying pizzas, fighting chickens and killer gummi bears) and have introduced an entire ecosystem of creatures made of food, including a giant cheeseburger spider, shrimpanzees, tacodiles, and a whole host of outrageous looking concoctions that have come to life. Considering that so many animals are made into food it was visually engaging to see that turned around this movie. Also, as a 3-D experience this film was pretty striking. Chester V's nose poked at us every time he looked into the screen.
In terms of writing, though, the film left quite a bit to be desired. The first film was hardly a masterclass in scripting, but the second film, with its thoroughly forgettable villain who vaguely feels like a cheap shot at the late Steve Jobs (though probably more because of how he looks than anything else) and a hero who seems every bit the idiot he was in the first film, really skimps on the story and characterization here. The writing feels like it developed just enough to justify the various visual gags that punctuate the humor, and that's about it.
It was still a lot of fun for the kids, but the adults should prepare to be patient while sitting through this.
3/5
The story of the sequel picks up from where the first film left off, although it retroactively negated the after-credits sequence of the first film which suggested events that followed the destruction of Swallow Falls. This film immediately begins in the aftermath of the destruction of the town, which was caused by a food hurricane generated by a machine invented by Flint Lockwood (Bill Hader) which turns water into food.
Here, Flint, his weather-reporter girlfriend Sam (Anna Faris), his dad (James Caan) and various friends are relocated from their island by a think tank known as Live Corp., run by Flint's childhood hero, super-inventor Chester V (Will Forte). Chester hires Flint to work at Live Corp., where Flint has the time of his life, not realizing that the real plan of Chester and his assistant, a talking orangutan named Barb (Kristen Schaal) is to recover his food generating machine, the Flint Lockwood Diatonic Super Mutating Dynamic Food Replicator (FLDSMDFR) while Flint is distracted. When Chester's extraction teams disappear during their attempts to find the machine, Chester decides to send the expendable Flint over to the island and find his machine. Flint brings along his dad and his friends, and what they find is not at all what they expected.
I love cartoons, whether they are hand-drawn, stop motion or computer-generated. I love their sense of whimsy, and how they basically make me feel like a kid again, especially the silly ones.
The first film had the benefit of being based on a kids' book that my children and I enjoyed, as well as the novelty of giant food falling from the sky. This novelty was always going to wear off, but to the filmmakers' credit they've expanded on an idea that was briefly explored in the first film (e.g. the flying pizzas, fighting chickens and killer gummi bears) and have introduced an entire ecosystem of creatures made of food, including a giant cheeseburger spider, shrimpanzees, tacodiles, and a whole host of outrageous looking concoctions that have come to life. Considering that so many animals are made into food it was visually engaging to see that turned around this movie. Also, as a 3-D experience this film was pretty striking. Chester V's nose poked at us every time he looked into the screen.
In terms of writing, though, the film left quite a bit to be desired. The first film was hardly a masterclass in scripting, but the second film, with its thoroughly forgettable villain who vaguely feels like a cheap shot at the late Steve Jobs (though probably more because of how he looks than anything else) and a hero who seems every bit the idiot he was in the first film, really skimps on the story and characterization here. The writing feels like it developed just enough to justify the various visual gags that punctuate the humor, and that's about it.
It was still a lot of fun for the kids, but the adults should prepare to be patient while sitting through this.
3/5
Tuesday, October 22, 2013
Plummeting to One's Death...In 3-D! A Review of Gravity
In the three weeks since its release, critics and audiences the world over have apparently embraced director Alfonso Cuaron's 90-minute thriller Gravity, starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney as astronauts in extreme peril. I saw the film myself over two weekends ago but have had little time to churn out a review.
The story is simple; a group of astronauts including Dr. Ryan Stone (Bullock) and Lt. Matt Kowalski (Clooney), and a number of actors who basically just lend their voices, are on a mission in space installing new hardware on a satellite when they are struck by the falling debris of a Russian satellite that has been destroyed as part of Russia's efforts to clean the skies of its derelict satellites. Chaos and death ensue, and before they know it Stone and Clooney find themselves falling to earth and basically scrambling around for other satellites to board in order to ensure that they can survive their return to earth. They have the benefit of Kowalski's jet pack but not for very long.
I admit that I was not altogether impressed by the trailer. It appeared to be a cast of two people in peril, and I asked myself, right off the bat, how long the filmmakers could possibly sustain such a thin premise?
I will also readily admit that the answer I got to that question was: for 90 nail-biting minutes.
Full credit goes to Cuaron, Bullock, Clooney, the amazing team of visual effects artists, and composer Steven Price for managing to squeeze so much action and tension out of what was basically a reed-thin plot.
It's been a full twenty years and one Academy Award since Bullock played Sylvester Stallone's sidekick in Demolition Man, and apart from looking great for someone pushing fifty, she has really shown some serious acting chops in this film, especially considering that she and Clooney are the only actors who actually appear onscreen. I think it's fair to say that she basically carries this film (with all due respect to Clooney). Consider this Sandra Bullock's Cast Away (the 2000 Robert Zemeckis movie which, for the most part, starred Tom Hanks and a volleyball).
To my mind, the crew, especially the visual effects people and the aforementioned composer, deserve special mention, for creating an utterly believable space environment, no mean feat considering that most of the film's 90 minutes takes place in space, thus creating the very real possibility of the seams in the digital effects showing at one point or another. They never do, at least no as far as I can see. Also, unlike most blockbusters in which the visual effects are needed mainly to prop up the massive action set pieces, this film relies on sterling effects to carry the story, and the crew are up to the task.
It may seem strange that the composer gets such special mention, but there's a reason for it; this is one of the rare Hollywood films (and off the top of my head, I cannot think of any other) in which the filmmakers actually depicted the fact in space, there's no sound. There's no crashing sound as the debris hammers the space shuttle, no exploding sound as one satellite or another disintegrates upon impact with hurtling satellite fragments. Basically, it's all up to composer Price to replace all of the tension that explosions and crashes usually creates, and he does a sterling job.
It's also worth mentioning that this is the best IMAX 3-D experience I've had since Avatar. Granted, it's only the third IMAX 3-D movie I've seen since then (the other two being The Amazing Spider-Man and The Adventures of Tintin), but unlike either of those two, it made the absolute most of the format, just like James Cameron's visual feast.
I've already kind of hopped on the bandwagon of people impressed by this movie, but I will stop short of calling it a masterpiece, as technically impressive as it is. There's something oddly perfunctory about the writing; Stone's back story, which she discusses during the film, feels like an afterthought, which matters, considering that the audience is supposed to care whether these characters live or die. Kowalski's story, apart from one humorous anecdote he repeats throughout the film, is just about nonexistent. It is fortunate that the actors make up for the script's shortcomings with utter conviction in their performances, especially considering that they were probably acting against green screens most of the time.
My favorite astronauts-in-peril movie remains Ron Howard's Apollo 13, but for sheer urgency and visual effects splendor, Gravity has set a new standard. Kudos to everyone involved.
4.5/5
The story is simple; a group of astronauts including Dr. Ryan Stone (Bullock) and Lt. Matt Kowalski (Clooney), and a number of actors who basically just lend their voices, are on a mission in space installing new hardware on a satellite when they are struck by the falling debris of a Russian satellite that has been destroyed as part of Russia's efforts to clean the skies of its derelict satellites. Chaos and death ensue, and before they know it Stone and Clooney find themselves falling to earth and basically scrambling around for other satellites to board in order to ensure that they can survive their return to earth. They have the benefit of Kowalski's jet pack but not for very long.
I admit that I was not altogether impressed by the trailer. It appeared to be a cast of two people in peril, and I asked myself, right off the bat, how long the filmmakers could possibly sustain such a thin premise?
I will also readily admit that the answer I got to that question was: for 90 nail-biting minutes.
Full credit goes to Cuaron, Bullock, Clooney, the amazing team of visual effects artists, and composer Steven Price for managing to squeeze so much action and tension out of what was basically a reed-thin plot.
It's been a full twenty years and one Academy Award since Bullock played Sylvester Stallone's sidekick in Demolition Man, and apart from looking great for someone pushing fifty, she has really shown some serious acting chops in this film, especially considering that she and Clooney are the only actors who actually appear onscreen. I think it's fair to say that she basically carries this film (with all due respect to Clooney). Consider this Sandra Bullock's Cast Away (the 2000 Robert Zemeckis movie which, for the most part, starred Tom Hanks and a volleyball).
To my mind, the crew, especially the visual effects people and the aforementioned composer, deserve special mention, for creating an utterly believable space environment, no mean feat considering that most of the film's 90 minutes takes place in space, thus creating the very real possibility of the seams in the digital effects showing at one point or another. They never do, at least no as far as I can see. Also, unlike most blockbusters in which the visual effects are needed mainly to prop up the massive action set pieces, this film relies on sterling effects to carry the story, and the crew are up to the task.
It may seem strange that the composer gets such special mention, but there's a reason for it; this is one of the rare Hollywood films (and off the top of my head, I cannot think of any other) in which the filmmakers actually depicted the fact in space, there's no sound. There's no crashing sound as the debris hammers the space shuttle, no exploding sound as one satellite or another disintegrates upon impact with hurtling satellite fragments. Basically, it's all up to composer Price to replace all of the tension that explosions and crashes usually creates, and he does a sterling job.
It's also worth mentioning that this is the best IMAX 3-D experience I've had since Avatar. Granted, it's only the third IMAX 3-D movie I've seen since then (the other two being The Amazing Spider-Man and The Adventures of Tintin), but unlike either of those two, it made the absolute most of the format, just like James Cameron's visual feast.
I've already kind of hopped on the bandwagon of people impressed by this movie, but I will stop short of calling it a masterpiece, as technically impressive as it is. There's something oddly perfunctory about the writing; Stone's back story, which she discusses during the film, feels like an afterthought, which matters, considering that the audience is supposed to care whether these characters live or die. Kowalski's story, apart from one humorous anecdote he repeats throughout the film, is just about nonexistent. It is fortunate that the actors make up for the script's shortcomings with utter conviction in their performances, especially considering that they were probably acting against green screens most of the time.
My favorite astronauts-in-peril movie remains Ron Howard's Apollo 13, but for sheer urgency and visual effects splendor, Gravity has set a new standard. Kudos to everyone involved.
4.5/5
Sunday, September 22, 2013
Self-Discovery at 170mph: A Review of Rush
The 70s have been good to Ron Howard. His starring role in George Lucas' 1974 film American Graffiti turned heads, and his lead role in the popular television series Happy Days, that ran throughout the 70s, made him a household name. One of his most successful and acclaimed films to date, Apollo 13, was based on events that took place in 1970.
It seems fitting, then, that he should revisit the era of bellbottom pants and shaggy haircuts, which also happened to be the setting for one of the most fascinating rivalries in the history of Formula One racing: the 1976 World Driver's Championship, which was contested by Englishman James Hunt of McLaren Racing and Austrian Niki Lauda of Scuderia Ferrari. Howard and screenwriter Peter Morgan, in dramatizing this rivalry, have created one of the best movies this year, and one of the best movies involving motor racing in, well, ever.
The story begins at one of the most pivotal points of the '76 season, the beginning of the 1976 German Grand Prix, with Lauda (played brilliantly by German actor Daniel Bruhl) sitting in his Ferrari race car and observing his championship rival Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) across the racing grid, making his preparations. Lauda does a brief voiceover narration, and the story flashes back to six years earlier. Hunt and Lauda meet while racing in Formula 2, in a "feeder series" to Formula One, where their rivalry is instant, and intense. As the story unfolds, it emerges that they have a lot in common, more than just their passion and skills for racing cars. Both of them come from affluent families that do not support their racing dreams, and both of them are colossal egomaniacs. Of the two of them, however, Lauda is somewhat more proactive; he buys his way into the top tier of racing, Formula One, by taking out a loan and buying heavily into a team that is on its last legs. His ability to set up the car and make it go faster endears him to Swiss teammate Clay Regazzoni (Pierfrancesco Favino), a former driver for the world famous Scuderia Ferrari who, when invited to return to the Italian team, takes Lauda along with him. Hunt, meanwhile is able to get into F1 when his friend and backer, Lord Alexander Hesketh (Christian McKay) decides to enter his own team, albeit without corporate sponsorship. It is also at this point that Lauda and Hunt meet women who will prove pivotal to their lives, with Lauda meeting his future wife Marlene Knaus (Alexandra Maria Lara) and Hunt meeting his wife, model Suzy Miller (Olivia Wilde) just before the 1975 season. Their fortunes vary from this point; Lauda wins the F1 championship, while Hunt's team, unable to secure sponsorship, has to pull out, leaving Hunt without a drive for the next year. However, at the last minute Hunt is able to secure a drive with the McLaren team, which has the only car fast enough to beat Lauda's Ferrari, thus setting the stage for one of the most memorable season-long rivalries in the history of motorsport.
Prior to this film, the last full-length feature film that Hollywood had made about Formula One was John Frankenheimer's 1966 film Grand Prix, which I have on DVD. Sylvester Stallone attempted to secure the rights to make an F1-themed film but was turned down by F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone, as a result of which, the 2001 film Driven was set against the now-defunct Champ Car series. It was just as well, too; that movie was so bad that it would not have done F1 any favors as a marketing tool. Three years ago, Working Title, the company responsible for producing this film, came up with the documentary Senna. Rush is the first feature film that has been produced about F1 in nearly 50 years, and therefore something of a milestone.
Director Howard, who confessed to not knowing anything about Formula One prior to making this film, may have seemed an odd choice to direct it, but watching the painstaking recreation of the era and the races I would hardly have guessed he was an F1 novice. The racing scenes, are extremely well-presented using a skillful blend of stunt driving and computer-generated imagery, although they do not quite have the balls-to-the-wall verisimilitude that makes Grand Prix a classic among racing fans. I suppose, though, that this is inevitable considering that in 1966 safety concerns, either in the world of racing or film-making, were not as paramount as they are today. What I found remarkable about this film was how incredibly rich it was in terms of character development, something on which Grand Prix basically skimped, with the paper thin plot and characters basically serving as an excuse to string together the bravura racing sequences.
When I heard this movie was getting made I felt a touch of apprehension; how, I wondered, does one capture the drama of an entire F1 season (the 1976 season had 16 races) in a two-hour feature film? I was also a little worried that, with a British writer crafting the screenplay and a Hollywood up-and-comer (Hemsworth) playing Englishman Hunt, that Lauda's character, an Austrian with a funny accent, would be reduced to playing a generic Euro-nasty "villain" next to Hunt's "hero." After all, Senna, a documentary, had been criticized by many for its somewhat one-sided portrayal of rivalry between the late Brazilian firebrand Ayrton Senna and Frenchman Alain Prost in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A feature film, with a script and actors, would be much more vulnerable to slanted storytelling than a documentary.
Upon watching the film, I was happy to learn that my fears were unfounded; Working Title may have used Hemsworth's face on the posters but this movie belonged in equal measure to Hunt and Lauda. In fact, the Lauda role gets meatier as the story progresses, and he even has the distinction of opening and closing the film with a bit of voice-over narration.
It's worth pointing out the difference between Hemsworth's and Bruhl's performances, which feel as different as the approaches to racing of their characters. Hemsworth, whose Hunt is really not all that different from the character for which he is most famous, the superhero Thor, didn't have to alter his acting too much, and about the only major adjustment he had to make in terms of his performance was to drop a few f-bombs and take off his shirt a lot (and sometimes, a bit more than that). Still, he milked his movie-star charisma for everything it was worth in this role; if Thor was a mythological god, Hunt was, in those days, a god of sorts in his own right, and Hemsworth portrayed that to near perfection. He also captured a great deal of Hunt's insecurity and vulnerability as well.
Bruhl's performance, however was simply in a different league from Hemsworth's. I remember him as the genteel, French-speaking Nazi sniper from Inglourious Basterds, which made his transformation into the abrasive Austrian racing legend, even when aided by some pretty convincing prosthetics, all the more striking. Even more striking was how he managed to uncover the humanity in a character who seemed so determined to shed it. Neither Hunt nor Lauda was a particularly likable character in this film, but while Hunt's roguish charm made him the sort of person whom people tend to like even when they shouldn't, Lauda, at least as depicted in the film, was basically the person most people would love to hate in real life. Bruhl, in short, had a taller mountain to climb than Hemsworth in terms of getting the audience to connect with his character, but if I'm any judge, he most certainly managed to reach the very top. I've always sucked at predicting awards or even awards nominations but I seriously hope this guy at least finds himself in contention for some gold later this year and early next year.
Still, as much as this film belongs to the lead actors, this is still Ron Howard's show, and it marks a welcome return to form for him after a few creative missteps over the years. To my mind, this is his best film since Apollo 13. The energy with which he infuses this film, which could so easily have gone wrong in the hands of a lesser filmmaker, is infectious; everyone single one of his collaborators here, from cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle to film editors Mike Hill and Dan Hanley to composer Hans Zimmer, is firing on all cylinders. The grainy, 70s-style cinematography puts the viewer right in the moment, as do the incredible, if slightly clipped racing scenes, and the swelling, cello-heavy score is some of the most stirring music that Zimmer has written in years.
Yes, like all historical dramas, the film takes certain liberties with what really happened, but there is nothing here as egregious as the wholly contrived airport chase in last year's Argo (a film I also enjoyed thoroughly), and as far as I can tell, in no instance was the truth completely butchered just to drive along the story. I could be wrong, but considering that a lot of people from the F1 community, including no less than F1 head Ecclestone and even Lauda himself, have given this movie the thumbs-up, I don't think I am.
I'll admit that I wanted to like this movie walking into the theater, but it's quite rare that a movie I have wanted to see as much as I wanted to see this film managed to be everything I was hoping for and more. The best part is that my wife, who could not really give a damn about Formula One but for my personal addiction to it, thoroughly enjoyed this film, as I think many non-F1 fans will.
People may have had to wait nearly five decades for a proper film about Formula One, but Ron Howard and his cast and crew have definitely made Rush worth that wait.
5/5
It seems fitting, then, that he should revisit the era of bellbottom pants and shaggy haircuts, which also happened to be the setting for one of the most fascinating rivalries in the history of Formula One racing: the 1976 World Driver's Championship, which was contested by Englishman James Hunt of McLaren Racing and Austrian Niki Lauda of Scuderia Ferrari. Howard and screenwriter Peter Morgan, in dramatizing this rivalry, have created one of the best movies this year, and one of the best movies involving motor racing in, well, ever.
The story begins at one of the most pivotal points of the '76 season, the beginning of the 1976 German Grand Prix, with Lauda (played brilliantly by German actor Daniel Bruhl) sitting in his Ferrari race car and observing his championship rival Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) across the racing grid, making his preparations. Lauda does a brief voiceover narration, and the story flashes back to six years earlier. Hunt and Lauda meet while racing in Formula 2, in a "feeder series" to Formula One, where their rivalry is instant, and intense. As the story unfolds, it emerges that they have a lot in common, more than just their passion and skills for racing cars. Both of them come from affluent families that do not support their racing dreams, and both of them are colossal egomaniacs. Of the two of them, however, Lauda is somewhat more proactive; he buys his way into the top tier of racing, Formula One, by taking out a loan and buying heavily into a team that is on its last legs. His ability to set up the car and make it go faster endears him to Swiss teammate Clay Regazzoni (Pierfrancesco Favino), a former driver for the world famous Scuderia Ferrari who, when invited to return to the Italian team, takes Lauda along with him. Hunt, meanwhile is able to get into F1 when his friend and backer, Lord Alexander Hesketh (Christian McKay) decides to enter his own team, albeit without corporate sponsorship. It is also at this point that Lauda and Hunt meet women who will prove pivotal to their lives, with Lauda meeting his future wife Marlene Knaus (Alexandra Maria Lara) and Hunt meeting his wife, model Suzy Miller (Olivia Wilde) just before the 1975 season. Their fortunes vary from this point; Lauda wins the F1 championship, while Hunt's team, unable to secure sponsorship, has to pull out, leaving Hunt without a drive for the next year. However, at the last minute Hunt is able to secure a drive with the McLaren team, which has the only car fast enough to beat Lauda's Ferrari, thus setting the stage for one of the most memorable season-long rivalries in the history of motorsport.
Prior to this film, the last full-length feature film that Hollywood had made about Formula One was John Frankenheimer's 1966 film Grand Prix, which I have on DVD. Sylvester Stallone attempted to secure the rights to make an F1-themed film but was turned down by F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone, as a result of which, the 2001 film Driven was set against the now-defunct Champ Car series. It was just as well, too; that movie was so bad that it would not have done F1 any favors as a marketing tool. Three years ago, Working Title, the company responsible for producing this film, came up with the documentary Senna. Rush is the first feature film that has been produced about F1 in nearly 50 years, and therefore something of a milestone.
Director Howard, who confessed to not knowing anything about Formula One prior to making this film, may have seemed an odd choice to direct it, but watching the painstaking recreation of the era and the races I would hardly have guessed he was an F1 novice. The racing scenes, are extremely well-presented using a skillful blend of stunt driving and computer-generated imagery, although they do not quite have the balls-to-the-wall verisimilitude that makes Grand Prix a classic among racing fans. I suppose, though, that this is inevitable considering that in 1966 safety concerns, either in the world of racing or film-making, were not as paramount as they are today. What I found remarkable about this film was how incredibly rich it was in terms of character development, something on which Grand Prix basically skimped, with the paper thin plot and characters basically serving as an excuse to string together the bravura racing sequences.
When I heard this movie was getting made I felt a touch of apprehension; how, I wondered, does one capture the drama of an entire F1 season (the 1976 season had 16 races) in a two-hour feature film? I was also a little worried that, with a British writer crafting the screenplay and a Hollywood up-and-comer (Hemsworth) playing Englishman Hunt, that Lauda's character, an Austrian with a funny accent, would be reduced to playing a generic Euro-nasty "villain" next to Hunt's "hero." After all, Senna, a documentary, had been criticized by many for its somewhat one-sided portrayal of rivalry between the late Brazilian firebrand Ayrton Senna and Frenchman Alain Prost in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A feature film, with a script and actors, would be much more vulnerable to slanted storytelling than a documentary.
Upon watching the film, I was happy to learn that my fears were unfounded; Working Title may have used Hemsworth's face on the posters but this movie belonged in equal measure to Hunt and Lauda. In fact, the Lauda role gets meatier as the story progresses, and he even has the distinction of opening and closing the film with a bit of voice-over narration.
It's worth pointing out the difference between Hemsworth's and Bruhl's performances, which feel as different as the approaches to racing of their characters. Hemsworth, whose Hunt is really not all that different from the character for which he is most famous, the superhero Thor, didn't have to alter his acting too much, and about the only major adjustment he had to make in terms of his performance was to drop a few f-bombs and take off his shirt a lot (and sometimes, a bit more than that). Still, he milked his movie-star charisma for everything it was worth in this role; if Thor was a mythological god, Hunt was, in those days, a god of sorts in his own right, and Hemsworth portrayed that to near perfection. He also captured a great deal of Hunt's insecurity and vulnerability as well.
Bruhl's performance, however was simply in a different league from Hemsworth's. I remember him as the genteel, French-speaking Nazi sniper from Inglourious Basterds, which made his transformation into the abrasive Austrian racing legend, even when aided by some pretty convincing prosthetics, all the more striking. Even more striking was how he managed to uncover the humanity in a character who seemed so determined to shed it. Neither Hunt nor Lauda was a particularly likable character in this film, but while Hunt's roguish charm made him the sort of person whom people tend to like even when they shouldn't, Lauda, at least as depicted in the film, was basically the person most people would love to hate in real life. Bruhl, in short, had a taller mountain to climb than Hemsworth in terms of getting the audience to connect with his character, but if I'm any judge, he most certainly managed to reach the very top. I've always sucked at predicting awards or even awards nominations but I seriously hope this guy at least finds himself in contention for some gold later this year and early next year.
Still, as much as this film belongs to the lead actors, this is still Ron Howard's show, and it marks a welcome return to form for him after a few creative missteps over the years. To my mind, this is his best film since Apollo 13. The energy with which he infuses this film, which could so easily have gone wrong in the hands of a lesser filmmaker, is infectious; everyone single one of his collaborators here, from cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle to film editors Mike Hill and Dan Hanley to composer Hans Zimmer, is firing on all cylinders. The grainy, 70s-style cinematography puts the viewer right in the moment, as do the incredible, if slightly clipped racing scenes, and the swelling, cello-heavy score is some of the most stirring music that Zimmer has written in years.
Yes, like all historical dramas, the film takes certain liberties with what really happened, but there is nothing here as egregious as the wholly contrived airport chase in last year's Argo (a film I also enjoyed thoroughly), and as far as I can tell, in no instance was the truth completely butchered just to drive along the story. I could be wrong, but considering that a lot of people from the F1 community, including no less than F1 head Ecclestone and even Lauda himself, have given this movie the thumbs-up, I don't think I am.
I'll admit that I wanted to like this movie walking into the theater, but it's quite rare that a movie I have wanted to see as much as I wanted to see this film managed to be everything I was hoping for and more. The best part is that my wife, who could not really give a damn about Formula One but for my personal addiction to it, thoroughly enjoyed this film, as I think many non-F1 fans will.
People may have had to wait nearly five decades for a proper film about Formula One, but Ron Howard and his cast and crew have definitely made Rush worth that wait.
5/5
Friday, September 20, 2013
Surviving "Deep Throat:" A Review of Lovelace
I found myself stuck in Manila last week, with a bit of time to kill to wait out traffic, so I caught a film that I would not normally watch, the biopic Lovelace, directed by Jeffrey Friedman and Rob Epstein and starring Amanda Seyfried, about the young woman who made the legendary pornographic film Deep Throat.
I'm just going to be frank here; given that I had about two hours to kill, a movie about people who made a porno seemed like a good idea, for obvious reasons. What I got was basically a bit of a diatribe on exploitation and domestic abuse, and, unfortunately, not a very good one.
Linda Boreman (Seyfried) is a 21-year-old Catholic girl living with her parents John and Dorothy (Robert Patrick and Sharon Stone) in Florida. While somewhat conservative herself, she is friends with a somewhat more adventurous young woman, Patsy (Juno Temple) who, one night at a roller skating rink, convinces Linda to be a go-go dancer for the band playing at the rink. This gets the attention of Chuck Traynor (Peter Sarsgaard) with whom Linda eventually gets involved and whom she eventually marries. Chuck is apparently into some shady business, and eventually gets himself and Linda into a spot of financial trouble. Thus begins the series of events that leads Linda to starring in Deep Throat, which, overall turns out to be an extremely unpleasant experience for Linda, who reveals everything in her scathing autobiography years after she has left that life behind.
I get that this movie was not in any way meant to titillate (and just to make absolutely sure, the producers chopped out one or two scenes involving oral sex in order to secure an "R-16" rating from our local classification board), and it certainly doesn't, but as a narrative tapestry it falls short on multiple levels.
The first half of the movie is meant to depict Linda and Chuck as a loving couple, fighting the odds, and even managing to have a good time amid trying times, even when Linda is sucking another guy's cock in front of a camera just to make ends meet for the two of them. The second half is the "grim" portion in which Linda tells the truth behind what happened, replete with Chuck's abuse and Linda's suffering until it all comes to a head.
However, this transition in contrasts is not done nearly as well as it should have been, and I for one could not help but wonder if it was a good idea to attempt it in the first place.
The problem with the narrative flow is that the filmmakers show their hand very early on in the film and make it hard to feel "shock" at what follows. I had no idea what kind of life Goreman lived, but the movie telegraphed its beats very early on.
Probably the worst part of the film was Sarsgaard, who, from the moment his Chuck Traynor appeared onscreen, was never able to convince me that he was anything other than a complete sleazebag, and this failure basically taints the entire film, which supposedly spends its first half depicting a young couple in love, only to peel the veneer of seeming happiness away and reveal the ugly truth just underneath the surface. Thanks to Sarsgaard's projection of Traynor's inner wife-beater early on in the film, it was basically easy to see where things were going, even though I hadn't had the faintest idea of what had really happened to her going into the theater. To be fair to Sarsgaard, the muddled script and direction had a lot to do with the narrative basically going all over the place. It's a pity, because Seyfried turns in a really earnest performance, and for anyone even vaguely interested in seeing her "bits," she goes topless once or twice in the film, though I guarantee that only a genuine sicko could be aroused at one or two of the scenes in which it happens.
Another wasted performance is that of Sharon Stone, who was virtually unrecognizable as Dorothy Boreman and who I didn't even realize was in the movie until I saw the end credits. I loved what she did here, and if she turns in more performances like this could give her career a bit of a second wind. This movie will most likely be forgotten, though.
The film's advocacy, which is basically to condemn exploitation of women and domestic violence, is certainly admirable, but the telling of the story, unfortunately, is not.
1.5/5
I'm just going to be frank here; given that I had about two hours to kill, a movie about people who made a porno seemed like a good idea, for obvious reasons. What I got was basically a bit of a diatribe on exploitation and domestic abuse, and, unfortunately, not a very good one.
Linda Boreman (Seyfried) is a 21-year-old Catholic girl living with her parents John and Dorothy (Robert Patrick and Sharon Stone) in Florida. While somewhat conservative herself, she is friends with a somewhat more adventurous young woman, Patsy (Juno Temple) who, one night at a roller skating rink, convinces Linda to be a go-go dancer for the band playing at the rink. This gets the attention of Chuck Traynor (Peter Sarsgaard) with whom Linda eventually gets involved and whom she eventually marries. Chuck is apparently into some shady business, and eventually gets himself and Linda into a spot of financial trouble. Thus begins the series of events that leads Linda to starring in Deep Throat, which, overall turns out to be an extremely unpleasant experience for Linda, who reveals everything in her scathing autobiography years after she has left that life behind.
I get that this movie was not in any way meant to titillate (and just to make absolutely sure, the producers chopped out one or two scenes involving oral sex in order to secure an "R-16" rating from our local classification board), and it certainly doesn't, but as a narrative tapestry it falls short on multiple levels.
The first half of the movie is meant to depict Linda and Chuck as a loving couple, fighting the odds, and even managing to have a good time amid trying times, even when Linda is sucking another guy's cock in front of a camera just to make ends meet for the two of them. The second half is the "grim" portion in which Linda tells the truth behind what happened, replete with Chuck's abuse and Linda's suffering until it all comes to a head.
However, this transition in contrasts is not done nearly as well as it should have been, and I for one could not help but wonder if it was a good idea to attempt it in the first place.
The problem with the narrative flow is that the filmmakers show their hand very early on in the film and make it hard to feel "shock" at what follows. I had no idea what kind of life Goreman lived, but the movie telegraphed its beats very early on.
Probably the worst part of the film was Sarsgaard, who, from the moment his Chuck Traynor appeared onscreen, was never able to convince me that he was anything other than a complete sleazebag, and this failure basically taints the entire film, which supposedly spends its first half depicting a young couple in love, only to peel the veneer of seeming happiness away and reveal the ugly truth just underneath the surface. Thanks to Sarsgaard's projection of Traynor's inner wife-beater early on in the film, it was basically easy to see where things were going, even though I hadn't had the faintest idea of what had really happened to her going into the theater. To be fair to Sarsgaard, the muddled script and direction had a lot to do with the narrative basically going all over the place. It's a pity, because Seyfried turns in a really earnest performance, and for anyone even vaguely interested in seeing her "bits," she goes topless once or twice in the film, though I guarantee that only a genuine sicko could be aroused at one or two of the scenes in which it happens.
Another wasted performance is that of Sharon Stone, who was virtually unrecognizable as Dorothy Boreman and who I didn't even realize was in the movie until I saw the end credits. I loved what she did here, and if she turns in more performances like this could give her career a bit of a second wind. This movie will most likely be forgotten, though.
The film's advocacy, which is basically to condemn exploitation of women and domestic violence, is certainly admirable, but the telling of the story, unfortunately, is not.
1.5/5
Saturday, August 24, 2013
Fan Fiction
"I just got off the phone with Bale's agent. For the last time, he says, he won't do it."
"Problem? What problem?"
"Not even for $50 million?"
"Nope."
"What about back-end?"
"Sir, even without Bale this movie will cost us at least half a billion to make and market. I've been crunching the numbers and I can assure you were are not in a position to offer him back-end."
"Well, why the hell won't he do it for $50 mill up front? That's a shitload of money."
"I dunno, something about wanting to move on to new artistic heights or some B.S. like that."
"New artistic heights? Does he think he would have gotten to make his awards bait if it hadn't been for the exposure the Dark Knight movies gave him?"
"Well, that's what he said."
"Screw him, then. There are a whole truckload of buff twenty and thirty-something actors banging on our door who can put on fiberglass muscles and a cookie monster voice. We don't need that pretentious British shit. So let's look at that list of unknowns then."
"Well, that's what he said."
"Screw him, then. There are a whole truckload of buff twenty and thirty-something actors banging on our door who can put on fiberglass muscles and a cookie monster voice. We don't need that pretentious British shit. So let's look at that list of unknowns then."
"I don't think you understand the magnitude of the problem we have here."
"Problem? What problem?"
"Nobody on our list wanted to be the Batman that came after Christian Bale. The guy's basically a god to Batman fanboys. It's like...replacing Connery as Bond!"
"What? Isn't there anyone on our list who wants the job?"
"Umm...basically...nnno."
"Not even the D-listers?"
"The D-listers least of all, sir. No one wants to be the Batman equivalent of Brandon Routh. It wasn't like when we cast Bale, sir. After Batman and Robin killed the franchise nobody gave a shit who we put in the costume; we had carte blanche!"
"Shut up! I'm thinking here..."
"Sir?"
"Okay, here's what we do; we look up the actors who are fanboys, the guys that would basically beg us for the job. You know, people like Reynolds, Snipes, Cage...Cage! What's he doing lately? Doesn't he need money to bail him out of his tax problems?"
"We started getting on the phone with Cage the first time Bale said no, sir. We wanted to hedge our bets."
"And?"
"He's busy sir. Same with Reynolds and Snipes. Cage was actually willing to drop his project to work on this but the people he was working with threatened to sue."
"Shit! Wait...what about that kid who did Argo for us last year?"
"Ben...Affleck, sir?"
"That's the one! The kid from Good Will Hunting! What?"
"I'm sorry, sir. I just...threw up in my mouth a little."
"What are you talking about? He won an Oscar, didn't he?"
"Sir, he won an Oscar for PRODUCING Argo (though people say he should have won one for directing it too), and before that he won an Oscar for co-writing Good Will Hunting with Matt Damon, but he...isn't widely regarded as a particularly good actor..."
"Doesn't matter, we can still put 'two-time Academy Award winner' on all the marketing materials. And besides, didn't he play a superhero already?"
"Yes, sir, he was the title character in Daredevil."
"See? So what's the problem?"
"THAT'S the problem, sir. Daredevil was a quantifiably terrible movie. The only reason it even made any money was that it played like a low-rent Spider-Man and people basically just needed their superhero fix. In fact, if I may venture to say so, the fact that Affleck played the character like a poor man's Batman is probably one of the biggest reasons why he'd be a horrible choice for the role."
"Stop talking like a nerd. It'll be fine. Anyway, fanboys are morons; we can tell them Affleck's an award-winning actor and they won't know the difference. Anyway, even if they don't like it, they'll line up to see the movie no matter how much they bitch online, especially if we can sneak in some writing or producing credit for Christopher Nolan. Get him to fart on this treatment I had some of the boys write so we can give him some 'story by' billing. But that can come later. Get Affleck's agent on the phone first."
"Right away, sir."
"Oh, and after that, get on the phone with whoever has the video rights to Daredevil; let's see if we can get them to pull it off Netflix for a couple of years. And start buying up all the Daredevil DVDs you can find, online or in the stores. And do the same thing for Gigli. No sense in taking unnecessary risks here."
"S-sir?"
"Don't worry about the costs; we can write it off to marketing expenses."
"All, right, sir. Right away."
"Excellent. Now let's make a movie!"
"The D-listers least of all, sir. No one wants to be the Batman equivalent of Brandon Routh. It wasn't like when we cast Bale, sir. After Batman and Robin killed the franchise nobody gave a shit who we put in the costume; we had carte blanche!"
"Shut up! I'm thinking here..."
"Sir?"
"Okay, here's what we do; we look up the actors who are fanboys, the guys that would basically beg us for the job. You know, people like Reynolds, Snipes, Cage...Cage! What's he doing lately? Doesn't he need money to bail him out of his tax problems?"
"We started getting on the phone with Cage the first time Bale said no, sir. We wanted to hedge our bets."
"And?"
"He's busy sir. Same with Reynolds and Snipes. Cage was actually willing to drop his project to work on this but the people he was working with threatened to sue."
"Shit! Wait...what about that kid who did Argo for us last year?"
"Ben...Affleck, sir?"
"That's the one! The kid from Good Will Hunting! What?"
"I'm sorry, sir. I just...threw up in my mouth a little."
"What are you talking about? He won an Oscar, didn't he?"
"Sir, he won an Oscar for PRODUCING Argo (though people say he should have won one for directing it too), and before that he won an Oscar for co-writing Good Will Hunting with Matt Damon, but he...isn't widely regarded as a particularly good actor..."
"Doesn't matter, we can still put 'two-time Academy Award winner' on all the marketing materials. And besides, didn't he play a superhero already?"
"Yes, sir, he was the title character in Daredevil."
"See? So what's the problem?"
"THAT'S the problem, sir. Daredevil was a quantifiably terrible movie. The only reason it even made any money was that it played like a low-rent Spider-Man and people basically just needed their superhero fix. In fact, if I may venture to say so, the fact that Affleck played the character like a poor man's Batman is probably one of the biggest reasons why he'd be a horrible choice for the role."
"Stop talking like a nerd. It'll be fine. Anyway, fanboys are morons; we can tell them Affleck's an award-winning actor and they won't know the difference. Anyway, even if they don't like it, they'll line up to see the movie no matter how much they bitch online, especially if we can sneak in some writing or producing credit for Christopher Nolan. Get him to fart on this treatment I had some of the boys write so we can give him some 'story by' billing. But that can come later. Get Affleck's agent on the phone first."
"Right away, sir."
"Oh, and after that, get on the phone with whoever has the video rights to Daredevil; let's see if we can get them to pull it off Netflix for a couple of years. And start buying up all the Daredevil DVDs you can find, online or in the stores. And do the same thing for Gigli. No sense in taking unnecessary risks here."
"S-sir?"
"Don't worry about the costs; we can write it off to marketing expenses."
"All, right, sir. Right away."
"Excellent. Now let's make a movie!"
Friday, August 16, 2013
2014: The Battle of the Non-Marvel Produced Movies Based on Marvel Characters
Since Marvel Studios decided to start making their own movies some years back without the help of studio backers, things have gone pretty well for them. Every single movie they have made has managed to earn over $250 million at the global box-office, and it was arguably their early success that spurred the Walt Disney Company to buy out Marvel three years back. The gambit paid off in spectacular fashion last year when The Avengers became a box-office phenomenon, grossing $1.5 billion at the global box-office.
This year, they're following though on that success in pretty convincing fashion, with Iron Man 3 being the year's top-grossing film so far (and the top grossing in the Iron Man series) with a $1.2 billion global gross, and Thor: The Dark World arguably poised to exceed the performance of its predecessor.
Next year, though, seems to be a relatively low-key year for the Disney-owned Marvel studios in the run-up the 2015 sequel to The Avengers; in April 2014 they'll be releasing the sequel Captain America: The Winter Soldier, before the U.S. summer movie season where they probably hope to make Fast and Furious money, and in August 2014 or basically the "winding down" month of the summer season they'll be releasing The Guardians of the Galaxy, or their first non-sequel in several years.
In short, for the first time since 2009, when they didn't release any films, Marvel will be stepping off the scorching summer battlefield and leave two different protagonists to slug it out with movies made from their characters: Sony Pictures, who will release The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Twentieth Century Fox, who will be releasing X-Men: Days of Future Past, which marks original X-Men director Bryan Singer's return to the mutants that made him a household name. Both films will be released in May of next year, within three weeks of each other, and this will mark the first time since both franchises were launched, X-Men in 2000 and Spider-Man in 2002, that they will have movies in the same year.
I'm genuinely interested to see how this showdown will play out. Personally I'm more partial to Spidey and am quite fond of the first two films in the series. I also welcomed last year's series reboot, which brought mechanical webshooters and a better lead actor to the screen. I am also a fan, however, of Michael Fassender's and James McAvoy's take on the younger Magneto and Professor X, and of the whole period feel of X-Men: First Class. I am also quite fond of Ellen Page, who starred in the often-reviled X-Men: Last Stand before her breakout role in Juno, and am anxious to see her play X-Men mainstay Kitty Pryde in a decent X-Men film for a change.
What's more interesting, though, is the fact that Fox and Sony are the only two studios left holding rights to Marvel characters outside of Disney. Their contracts allow them to continue to hold the rights to these characters for as long as they keep making movies based on them. To be able to continue making these movies, the movies they make have to make money. By effectively going head-to-head by releasing their movies within weeks of each other, they are jeopardizing that proposition because each of the films may well cannibalize off the other's grosses given the proximity, though to be fair Sony had staked its first weekend of May slot long before Fox decided to bump their X-Men flick up to the Memorial Day weekend.
Spider-Man will probably come out on top, considering that the first weekend of May is prime box-office real estate these days, and considering that last year's reboot, which "everyone" supposedly hated, still grossed $750 million at the global box-office, which is something like $250 million more than any X-Men movie since the beginning has made at the global box-office, but for my part, I want both movies to do well, and I sincerely hope they do.
This year, they're following though on that success in pretty convincing fashion, with Iron Man 3 being the year's top-grossing film so far (and the top grossing in the Iron Man series) with a $1.2 billion global gross, and Thor: The Dark World arguably poised to exceed the performance of its predecessor.
Next year, though, seems to be a relatively low-key year for the Disney-owned Marvel studios in the run-up the 2015 sequel to The Avengers; in April 2014 they'll be releasing the sequel Captain America: The Winter Soldier, before the U.S. summer movie season where they probably hope to make Fast and Furious money, and in August 2014 or basically the "winding down" month of the summer season they'll be releasing The Guardians of the Galaxy, or their first non-sequel in several years.
In short, for the first time since 2009, when they didn't release any films, Marvel will be stepping off the scorching summer battlefield and leave two different protagonists to slug it out with movies made from their characters: Sony Pictures, who will release The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Twentieth Century Fox, who will be releasing X-Men: Days of Future Past, which marks original X-Men director Bryan Singer's return to the mutants that made him a household name. Both films will be released in May of next year, within three weeks of each other, and this will mark the first time since both franchises were launched, X-Men in 2000 and Spider-Man in 2002, that they will have movies in the same year.
I'm genuinely interested to see how this showdown will play out. Personally I'm more partial to Spidey and am quite fond of the first two films in the series. I also welcomed last year's series reboot, which brought mechanical webshooters and a better lead actor to the screen. I am also a fan, however, of Michael Fassender's and James McAvoy's take on the younger Magneto and Professor X, and of the whole period feel of X-Men: First Class. I am also quite fond of Ellen Page, who starred in the often-reviled X-Men: Last Stand before her breakout role in Juno, and am anxious to see her play X-Men mainstay Kitty Pryde in a decent X-Men film for a change.
What's more interesting, though, is the fact that Fox and Sony are the only two studios left holding rights to Marvel characters outside of Disney. Their contracts allow them to continue to hold the rights to these characters for as long as they keep making movies based on them. To be able to continue making these movies, the movies they make have to make money. By effectively going head-to-head by releasing their movies within weeks of each other, they are jeopardizing that proposition because each of the films may well cannibalize off the other's grosses given the proximity, though to be fair Sony had staked its first weekend of May slot long before Fox decided to bump their X-Men flick up to the Memorial Day weekend.
Spider-Man will probably come out on top, considering that the first weekend of May is prime box-office real estate these days, and considering that last year's reboot, which "everyone" supposedly hated, still grossed $750 million at the global box-office, which is something like $250 million more than any X-Men movie since the beginning has made at the global box-office, but for my part, I want both movies to do well, and I sincerely hope they do.
Monday, August 5, 2013
Now That's More Like It: A Review of The Wolverine
My review of the 2009 film X-Men Origins: Wolverine, was obliterated when multiply.com shut down its blogging section, and perhaps it's only fitting that it's gone forever considering how awful I found that movie to be.
Four years later, Twentieth Century Fox, one of the only two studios left aside from Disney that has the rights to make movies based on characters taken from Marvel Comic books, appears to have learned its lesson and has come out with a movie that is substantially better than what came before it, this time simply titled: The Wolverine.
The film opens with a flashback in which the mutant Logan, also known as the Wolverine (played again by Hugh Jackman) is trapped in a prisoner-of-war camp in Nagasaki, moments before the atom bomb is dropped. With the bomb about to drop, Yashida (Ken Yamamura) a young Japanese officer decides to set the prisoners free. Because there is nowhere to run, the Japanese officers commit ritual suicide, but the young officer, Yashida, cannot bring himself to do it as he watches the bomb's catastrophic explosion. In that moment, Logan saves Yashida by throwing him into the hole in which he was imprisoned, which turns out to be the safest place to be, and covers him with a metal plate and his own body. While the blast basically flays Logan, his mutant healing gift restores his skin right before an astonished Yashida's eyes.
Decades later, and after the events of X-Men: The Last Stand, Logan lives as a hermit in the Yukon, his only friend apparently a large bear. When some local hunter kills the bear using an illegal poisoned arrow, Logan follows him to the bar and is about to lay waste to him and his companions when a mysterious Japanese girl named Yukio (Rila Fukushima) brandishing a katana and some serious skill intervenes, telling him that an old acquaintance of Logan wants to say goodbye to him in person. That old acquaintance turns out to be a dying Yashida (now played by Haruhiko Yamanouchi), who has, since Logan saved him back in the war, built an empire based on technology, and who basically asks Logan to give him his healing factor. Logan declines, but having set foot on Yashida's premises, with a shady doctor (Svetlana Khodchenkova) and Yashida's power-hungry son (Hiroyuki Sanada) basically just waiting for the old man to expire, Wolverine soon finds out that he is already in over his head. Before he knows it, he is on the run with Yashida's fetching granddaughter Mariko (the statuesque Tao Okamoto) from mysterious forces whose true motivation will shock him (though not necessarily the audience).
While the quality of this film is not exactly on par with other Marvel notables like the first couple of X-Men or Spider-Man movies, the first Iron Man movie or last year's global box-office phenomenon The Avengers, it is a substantial improvement over the first Wolverine movie, which was so unabashedly idiotic that it had the lead villain thinking he could erase Wolverine's memory by shooting him in the head with an adamantium bullet, and even worse, actually being right.
Loosely based on a 1982 mini-series by noted comic-book creators Chris Claremont (X-Men) and Frank Miller (The Dark Knight Returns), this film explores Wolverine's character more than any of the other films in the X-Men series, even though the majority of them were already arguably Wolvie-centric, but more importantly, actually gives him dimension this time around. Here, he grapples with regret, desire, and later, fear. Sure, he's still Marvel's resident loner, but at least here, there's more to him that growling, howling, and his adamantium claws. Full credit for this turnaround goes to director James Mangold and his screenwriters Mark Bomback and Scott Frank, and, of course, to Hugh Jackman, whose earnestness almost elevated X-Men Origins: Wolverine past the utter schlock that it was. Here, his utter commitment to this role shows again, from his straight-faced line delivery, even when the film jumps off the rails in the third act, to his ridiculously ripped physique.
Fortunately, Jackman isn't on his own here; his supporting cast, made up mostly of Japanese actors, are, as strange as this may sound, more effective in their roles than a lot of the X-Men actors were in their supposed ensemble piece. Supermodel Okamoto, obviously cast so that the 6'2 Jackman wouldn't look too much bigger than his leading lady, surprises in her role as Wolverine's love interest Mariko, especially considering this is her first-ever feature film role. Veteran Japanese actor Hiroyuki Sanada does well with limited screen time as Mariko's dad Shingen, as do Yamanouchi and Korean-American actor Will Yun Lee with their roles.
For me, though, the real standout was Fukushima as Yukio. Like Okamoto, Fukushima is a model starring in her first feature film, but as a rather plucky action heroine, she's quite a find. I hope she doesn't end up in direct-to-video limbo after this; she deserves a heck of a lot better in my opinion.
A lot of reviewers have complained about how the film collapses in the third act, and truth be told, it does, but to be honest, the overall plot really isn't the movie's strong point, as it was basically designed to end up there in the first place. I will agree with them that Khodchenkova's Viper brings the film dangerously close to some of the low points of the last solo Wolvie pic, but the good news is that the movie has too much else going for it to let some moments of stupidity drag it down. The action set pieces are pretty impressive at times, and Wolverine's battle with Yakuza thugs atop a speeding train is quite easily a highlight. It is worth pointing that not all the fight scenes are all that good, though.
Whatever the film's flaws, though, there was nothing even approaching the stupidity of the memory-erasing bullet from the first Wolverine solo picture, and in any event, I was able to forgive the movie its various flaws after watching the nigh-obligatory, but this time positively tantalizing post-credits scene.
3.5/5
Four years later, Twentieth Century Fox, one of the only two studios left aside from Disney that has the rights to make movies based on characters taken from Marvel Comic books, appears to have learned its lesson and has come out with a movie that is substantially better than what came before it, this time simply titled: The Wolverine.
The film opens with a flashback in which the mutant Logan, also known as the Wolverine (played again by Hugh Jackman) is trapped in a prisoner-of-war camp in Nagasaki, moments before the atom bomb is dropped. With the bomb about to drop, Yashida (Ken Yamamura) a young Japanese officer decides to set the prisoners free. Because there is nowhere to run, the Japanese officers commit ritual suicide, but the young officer, Yashida, cannot bring himself to do it as he watches the bomb's catastrophic explosion. In that moment, Logan saves Yashida by throwing him into the hole in which he was imprisoned, which turns out to be the safest place to be, and covers him with a metal plate and his own body. While the blast basically flays Logan, his mutant healing gift restores his skin right before an astonished Yashida's eyes.
Decades later, and after the events of X-Men: The Last Stand, Logan lives as a hermit in the Yukon, his only friend apparently a large bear. When some local hunter kills the bear using an illegal poisoned arrow, Logan follows him to the bar and is about to lay waste to him and his companions when a mysterious Japanese girl named Yukio (Rila Fukushima) brandishing a katana and some serious skill intervenes, telling him that an old acquaintance of Logan wants to say goodbye to him in person. That old acquaintance turns out to be a dying Yashida (now played by Haruhiko Yamanouchi), who has, since Logan saved him back in the war, built an empire based on technology, and who basically asks Logan to give him his healing factor. Logan declines, but having set foot on Yashida's premises, with a shady doctor (Svetlana Khodchenkova) and Yashida's power-hungry son (Hiroyuki Sanada) basically just waiting for the old man to expire, Wolverine soon finds out that he is already in over his head. Before he knows it, he is on the run with Yashida's fetching granddaughter Mariko (the statuesque Tao Okamoto) from mysterious forces whose true motivation will shock him (though not necessarily the audience).
While the quality of this film is not exactly on par with other Marvel notables like the first couple of X-Men or Spider-Man movies, the first Iron Man movie or last year's global box-office phenomenon The Avengers, it is a substantial improvement over the first Wolverine movie, which was so unabashedly idiotic that it had the lead villain thinking he could erase Wolverine's memory by shooting him in the head with an adamantium bullet, and even worse, actually being right.
Loosely based on a 1982 mini-series by noted comic-book creators Chris Claremont (X-Men) and Frank Miller (The Dark Knight Returns), this film explores Wolverine's character more than any of the other films in the X-Men series, even though the majority of them were already arguably Wolvie-centric, but more importantly, actually gives him dimension this time around. Here, he grapples with regret, desire, and later, fear. Sure, he's still Marvel's resident loner, but at least here, there's more to him that growling, howling, and his adamantium claws. Full credit for this turnaround goes to director James Mangold and his screenwriters Mark Bomback and Scott Frank, and, of course, to Hugh Jackman, whose earnestness almost elevated X-Men Origins: Wolverine past the utter schlock that it was. Here, his utter commitment to this role shows again, from his straight-faced line delivery, even when the film jumps off the rails in the third act, to his ridiculously ripped physique.
Fortunately, Jackman isn't on his own here; his supporting cast, made up mostly of Japanese actors, are, as strange as this may sound, more effective in their roles than a lot of the X-Men actors were in their supposed ensemble piece. Supermodel Okamoto, obviously cast so that the 6'2 Jackman wouldn't look too much bigger than his leading lady, surprises in her role as Wolverine's love interest Mariko, especially considering this is her first-ever feature film role. Veteran Japanese actor Hiroyuki Sanada does well with limited screen time as Mariko's dad Shingen, as do Yamanouchi and Korean-American actor Will Yun Lee with their roles.
For me, though, the real standout was Fukushima as Yukio. Like Okamoto, Fukushima is a model starring in her first feature film, but as a rather plucky action heroine, she's quite a find. I hope she doesn't end up in direct-to-video limbo after this; she deserves a heck of a lot better in my opinion.
A lot of reviewers have complained about how the film collapses in the third act, and truth be told, it does, but to be honest, the overall plot really isn't the movie's strong point, as it was basically designed to end up there in the first place. I will agree with them that Khodchenkova's Viper brings the film dangerously close to some of the low points of the last solo Wolvie pic, but the good news is that the movie has too much else going for it to let some moments of stupidity drag it down. The action set pieces are pretty impressive at times, and Wolverine's battle with Yakuza thugs atop a speeding train is quite easily a highlight. It is worth pointing that not all the fight scenes are all that good, though.
Whatever the film's flaws, though, there was nothing even approaching the stupidity of the memory-erasing bullet from the first Wolverine solo picture, and in any event, I was able to forgive the movie its various flaws after watching the nigh-obligatory, but this time positively tantalizing post-credits scene.
3.5/5
Friday, August 2, 2013
Snails For the Win: A Review of Turbo
There was nothing quite as effective in shattering my resolve to wind down my movie-watching for the next couple of months as the entreaties of my ultra-cute three-year-old daughter that she wanted to watch "snail" which was what she believed to be the title of Dreamworks' Animation's new movie Turbo, starring the voices of Ryan Reynolds, Paul Giamatti, Samuel L. Jackson and a whole slew of other Hollywood stars. This movie actually piqued my curiosity with its distinctly ironic premise of a snail becoming fast enough to race in the Indianapolis 500, but after sitting through a glut of action movies and two consecutive animated films in the last three months or so I didn't really know if I had it in me to sit through yet another cartoon.
As it turns out, pardon the pun, I had just enough in the tank to appreciate this one, which was pretty good, all things considered.
Theo, or as he likes to call himself, Turbo (Reynolds) is a garden snail living somewhere in California with his brother Chet (Paul Giamatti) and several other garden snails, but who has a very peculiar personality quirk; he is a speed fanatic. He spends his days in a greenhouse with several other snails, knocking rotten tomatoes off their vines, and his nights watching the Indy Racing League on an old television in the garage, at least until the T.V. gets broken. He wanders around town and, amidst the speeding cars, he falls from a bridge right onto a car about to start a drag race. He is sucked into the hot rod's blower, and, when the driver of the car turns on the nitrous oxide feed that is supposed to give his car a boost in speed, Turbo is flooded with it, and when he is spit out of the car's exhaust, he is a changed snail. He has been endowed with super speed.
After a disastrous incident in the garden involving his new-found speed and a sadistic little boy with a tricycle, Turbo and Chet leave the garden and end up being captured by Tito (Michael Pena), the truck driver and co-owner of a taco restaurant in a strip malls somewhere in Van Nuys. Tito enters Turbo in a snail race he regularly has with the other business operators of the strip mall, not quite realizing what he has on his hands, and when Turbo demonstrates his incredible speed, Tito realizes he has a chance to promote not only the taco stand he runs with his brother Angelo (Luis Guzman) but the whole strip mall as well. Meanwhile, Turbo befriends the "crew" of snails headed by Whiplash (Samuel L. Jackson) who admire his speed but show him that they still have a thing or two to teach him.
With his blazing speed and the encouragement of his new friends, Turbo decides to pursue his greatest dream: to win the legendary Indianapolis 500. It won't be easy, even after he convinces Tito, through a series of overt gestures, to enter him in the contest, he still has to face five-time Indy 500 winner Guy Gagne (Bill Hader), who also happens to be Turbo's idol.
The premise of this film, by itself, is a lot of fun, but not exactly the kind of conceit that, by itself, can sustain a feature-length film. To address this, the filmmakers threw in a few other plot devices, like Turbo's own feelings of inadequacy, as exemplified by a scene involving a perfect tomato, as well as parallel "brothers" stories between the two snails on one hand, and Tito and Angelo on the other, with Chet's support and approval being the one thing that Turbo apparently needs to succeed. The paper thin villain of the film is the kind who will easily be forgotten, and Turbo's "crew" of snails look designed to sell toys and to give him characters to interact with in the reported spin-off series. In short, for all of the padding the writers have thrown in to extend a half-hour cartoon into a ninety-minute film, and despite some earnest performances by the voice actors, I really felt the thinness and familiarity of the well-worn plot of pursuing one's dreams. Henry Jackman's endlessly derivative score, which seemed to have been yanked right out of Cars in a few scenes, did not help things either.
What really carried the film, however, were some stunning visuals, especially of the magnificent racing sequences. Until I see Ron Howard's Rush, due out later this year, I will have to content myself with the depiction of open-wheel racing in this film, and it was genuinely interesting to see the racing from a snail's point of view, with the "marbles" or bits of rubber flaking off the tires looking absolutely enormous. The marbles would play an important role in the race later on, as well. I was also amused by the sequence in which the racing cars metamorphosed into giant rolling tomatoes in Turbo's mind's eye as he remembered his big moment of failure from earlier in the film; to my mind it was pretty imaginative.
I am officially all cartooned-out; I have seen five animated feature films this year and I am pretty sure that, no matter how sweetly my three-year-old asks me, I do not want to see another for quite some time.
Still, if nothing else,, this film was at least more lively than the somewhat tepid, presumptuously-named Epic, and is reasonable fun for grown-ups who have an hour and a half to spare, especially the ones with kids who know how to ask very nicely if they can watch a movie.
3.5/5
As it turns out, pardon the pun, I had just enough in the tank to appreciate this one, which was pretty good, all things considered.
Theo, or as he likes to call himself, Turbo (Reynolds) is a garden snail living somewhere in California with his brother Chet (Paul Giamatti) and several other garden snails, but who has a very peculiar personality quirk; he is a speed fanatic. He spends his days in a greenhouse with several other snails, knocking rotten tomatoes off their vines, and his nights watching the Indy Racing League on an old television in the garage, at least until the T.V. gets broken. He wanders around town and, amidst the speeding cars, he falls from a bridge right onto a car about to start a drag race. He is sucked into the hot rod's blower, and, when the driver of the car turns on the nitrous oxide feed that is supposed to give his car a boost in speed, Turbo is flooded with it, and when he is spit out of the car's exhaust, he is a changed snail. He has been endowed with super speed.
After a disastrous incident in the garden involving his new-found speed and a sadistic little boy with a tricycle, Turbo and Chet leave the garden and end up being captured by Tito (Michael Pena), the truck driver and co-owner of a taco restaurant in a strip malls somewhere in Van Nuys. Tito enters Turbo in a snail race he regularly has with the other business operators of the strip mall, not quite realizing what he has on his hands, and when Turbo demonstrates his incredible speed, Tito realizes he has a chance to promote not only the taco stand he runs with his brother Angelo (Luis Guzman) but the whole strip mall as well. Meanwhile, Turbo befriends the "crew" of snails headed by Whiplash (Samuel L. Jackson) who admire his speed but show him that they still have a thing or two to teach him.
With his blazing speed and the encouragement of his new friends, Turbo decides to pursue his greatest dream: to win the legendary Indianapolis 500. It won't be easy, even after he convinces Tito, through a series of overt gestures, to enter him in the contest, he still has to face five-time Indy 500 winner Guy Gagne (Bill Hader), who also happens to be Turbo's idol.
The premise of this film, by itself, is a lot of fun, but not exactly the kind of conceit that, by itself, can sustain a feature-length film. To address this, the filmmakers threw in a few other plot devices, like Turbo's own feelings of inadequacy, as exemplified by a scene involving a perfect tomato, as well as parallel "brothers" stories between the two snails on one hand, and Tito and Angelo on the other, with Chet's support and approval being the one thing that Turbo apparently needs to succeed. The paper thin villain of the film is the kind who will easily be forgotten, and Turbo's "crew" of snails look designed to sell toys and to give him characters to interact with in the reported spin-off series. In short, for all of the padding the writers have thrown in to extend a half-hour cartoon into a ninety-minute film, and despite some earnest performances by the voice actors, I really felt the thinness and familiarity of the well-worn plot of pursuing one's dreams. Henry Jackman's endlessly derivative score, which seemed to have been yanked right out of Cars in a few scenes, did not help things either.
What really carried the film, however, were some stunning visuals, especially of the magnificent racing sequences. Until I see Ron Howard's Rush, due out later this year, I will have to content myself with the depiction of open-wheel racing in this film, and it was genuinely interesting to see the racing from a snail's point of view, with the "marbles" or bits of rubber flaking off the tires looking absolutely enormous. The marbles would play an important role in the race later on, as well. I was also amused by the sequence in which the racing cars metamorphosed into giant rolling tomatoes in Turbo's mind's eye as he remembered his big moment of failure from earlier in the film; to my mind it was pretty imaginative.
I am officially all cartooned-out; I have seen five animated feature films this year and I am pretty sure that, no matter how sweetly my three-year-old asks me, I do not want to see another for quite some time.
Still, if nothing else,, this film was at least more lively than the somewhat tepid, presumptuously-named Epic, and is reasonable fun for grown-ups who have an hour and a half to spare, especially the ones with kids who know how to ask very nicely if they can watch a movie.
3.5/5
Wednesday, July 24, 2013
Welcome to Nerdtopia: A Review of Pacific Rim (Mild Spoilers)
Director Guillermo del Toro is a rarity; he's one of the few directors who knows how to captivate awards-giving bodies and fanboys. Like Peter Jackson, who was basically a fanboy god after the first Lord of the Rings trilogy, with multiple Oscars to boot, del Toro has won a slew of awards, including Oscars, for his 2006 masterpiece Pan's Labyrinth, and has won plenty of fanboy street cred with his Hellboy films and his work on Blade II. His latest film, Pacific Rim, panders more to his second demographic than the first, and it does so in a huge way...literally.
In the near future, the Earth is invaded by giant monsters called Kaiju, which enter our world through a dimensional portal that has opened deep beneath the Pacific Ocean. After the monsters attack and level several major cities around the world, with the usual weapons proving ineffective, humanity decides to create a new weapon: giant robots (as tall as skyscrapers) called Jaeger, which are operated by two human pilots locked in a neural link. Over time it becomes clear that not even the jaegers are enough to repel the relentless kaiju invasions, and the world's governments decide to just build giant walls to keep the threat out, which proves to be an exercise in futility. However, one of the pioneers of the jaeger program, a "marshall" named Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba) believes the massive robots are key to a plan that could end the threat once and for all, and together with his protege, Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) he approaches washed-up jaeger pilot Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam) whose last outing in a jaeger ended in tragedy, to take one last shot at taking the kaiju down. Armed with the four remaining jaeger suits from America, Australia, China and Russia, the people of the Earth make their last big push to save the planet.
If social networks are any indication, it would seem that fanboys the world over are gushing over this film, and for pretty good reason, in my opinion. The designs of both the giant monsters and the giant robots, easily the stars of the film, are the stuff of fanboy wet dreams. In particular, the jaeger robots look like they stepped out of any of a number of anime from the 80s or 90s, albeit with some pretty innovative design quirks, and with a good measure of grittiness thrown in by their designers, and the wizards at Industrial Light and Magic who brought them to life. The grotesquely cool kaiju are somewhat more varied in design than their robotic nemeses, though pretty much all of them seem inspired by monster movies of old, with some of them sporting giant crab claws or tentacles and others looking like a cross between King Kong and Godzilla. Still, the robots were the stars here. Though Gipsy Danger was the "hero" jaeger, I was a bit partial to Australia's Striker Eureka, which of all the jaeger robots on display seemed the most anime-inspired of the lot. These robots, unlike the similarly ILM-generated metal creatures of the Transformers movies, had a real weight and heft to them and really looked like they could both take and dish out a world of punishment.
Another, more crucial element that sets this movie apart from the narrative disaster of the Transformers movies, though, is the human element; there's a lot going on outside the field of battle, and much of it involves Pentecost as the head of the jaeger program, scientists Newton Geizler (Charlie Day) and Hermann Gottlieb (Burn Gorman) and sleazy black-market kaiju body parts dealer, Hannibal Chau (Ron Perlman). There are a lot of surprisingly strong performances here, led by Elba as Pentecost, who delivers a Braveheart-esque speech that makes the one during the climax of The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King seem embarrassingly inadequate and whose utter conviction basically elevates the kitschy script he is given. The bickering scientists played by Day and Gorman, the entertaining walk-on by Perlman and the mostly taciturn performance turned in by Kikuchi are pretty effective in reminding the audience that there's a bit more to this movie than just robots punching monsters and vice versa. Lead actor Charlie Hunnam is actually kind of the weak link here, but he is, at least, adequate.
(Mild Spoilers)
For all the shortcomings of any of the human actors, all is forgotten when the robots vs. monsters slugfest begins in earnest. As thrilling as the fight scenes were, I confess to being slightly disappointed that most of the jaeger vs. kaiju action took place between Gipsy Danger and its monstrous opponents, and that two of the much-hyped jaeger robots, Crimson Typhoon from China and Cherno Alpha from Russia, both of which featured prominently in the marketing materials and which were described as virtual legends in the movie itself, went down as quickly as they did without so much as taking down a single kaiju. I would have wanted to see Crimson Typhoon's unique three-arm attack do some real damage before the robot and its operating team of Chinese triplets went down for the count. At least Striker Eureka got to wallop a kaiju early in the movie, and got some good shots in later, during the film's climax.
On top of that, I found it slightly silly that Becket and Mori whipped out Gipsy Danger's sword AFTER they had basically used a freighter as a club against the kaiju, to apparently little effect, especially considering that one well-placed slash from the sword was basically able to take the kaiju down completely. In the anime of old, the sword was the principal weapon, and an effective one at that, a concept which this film echoes, which made me wonder why the heck they didn't use it sooner.
And then of course, there are questions like, how could a thousand-ton (or more) robot survive a 50,000 foot drop, how could a giant monster with wings climb 50,000 feet in a few seconds when it takes a commercial airliner at least a few minutes to climb to half that distance moving at just under the speed of sound, and so on and so forth. Train the harsh eye of science, even just one branch of it, like physics, on this film, and it will almost surely fall apart. But that's not really the point.
(End Spoilers)
Gripes and implausibility notwithstanding, there is no point in my denying how much fun I had watching this film, especially having grown up with giant robots in the 70s and 80s. Spiritually, this was a lot more effective as an anime adaptation than the Wachowskis' notorious flop Speed Racer,and considering del Toro's gift for visual panache that he prominently put on display in Pan's Labyrinth and the second Hellboy film, it was always going to be a visual feast.
The genius of del Toro, however, is that he isn't content to simply let the monsters and mech do all the talking. He also plays a lot with thematic elements as well, and the fact that he chose to set the story years after the invasion began opened up a lot of interesting narrative possibilities; the bodies of slain kaiju litter the landscape, and it's fascinating to see how humanity adapts. As mentioned, there is a bustling underground trade in kaiju body parts and even skin parasites (!) which takes place in--where else?--Hong Kong, and some people have even turned the kaiju skeletons into places of worship! Del Toro basically creates a world that's as grimy, sleazy and uncomfortably believable as the one we live in, for his fantastical creatures to inhabit, and this actually makes it easier to look past the absurdity of the larger-than-life grudge matches that play out on the screen.
While this film may not have the crossover appeal of other recent genre films like the Avengers or Dark Knight movies, I humbly submit that there is more to it than just a fanboy love fest, and because I would love to see a sequel to this movie, I am giving it a big ol' thumbs-up.
4.5/5
In the near future, the Earth is invaded by giant monsters called Kaiju, which enter our world through a dimensional portal that has opened deep beneath the Pacific Ocean. After the monsters attack and level several major cities around the world, with the usual weapons proving ineffective, humanity decides to create a new weapon: giant robots (as tall as skyscrapers) called Jaeger, which are operated by two human pilots locked in a neural link. Over time it becomes clear that not even the jaegers are enough to repel the relentless kaiju invasions, and the world's governments decide to just build giant walls to keep the threat out, which proves to be an exercise in futility. However, one of the pioneers of the jaeger program, a "marshall" named Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba) believes the massive robots are key to a plan that could end the threat once and for all, and together with his protege, Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) he approaches washed-up jaeger pilot Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam) whose last outing in a jaeger ended in tragedy, to take one last shot at taking the kaiju down. Armed with the four remaining jaeger suits from America, Australia, China and Russia, the people of the Earth make their last big push to save the planet.
If social networks are any indication, it would seem that fanboys the world over are gushing over this film, and for pretty good reason, in my opinion. The designs of both the giant monsters and the giant robots, easily the stars of the film, are the stuff of fanboy wet dreams. In particular, the jaeger robots look like they stepped out of any of a number of anime from the 80s or 90s, albeit with some pretty innovative design quirks, and with a good measure of grittiness thrown in by their designers, and the wizards at Industrial Light and Magic who brought them to life. The grotesquely cool kaiju are somewhat more varied in design than their robotic nemeses, though pretty much all of them seem inspired by monster movies of old, with some of them sporting giant crab claws or tentacles and others looking like a cross between King Kong and Godzilla. Still, the robots were the stars here. Though Gipsy Danger was the "hero" jaeger, I was a bit partial to Australia's Striker Eureka, which of all the jaeger robots on display seemed the most anime-inspired of the lot. These robots, unlike the similarly ILM-generated metal creatures of the Transformers movies, had a real weight and heft to them and really looked like they could both take and dish out a world of punishment.
Another, more crucial element that sets this movie apart from the narrative disaster of the Transformers movies, though, is the human element; there's a lot going on outside the field of battle, and much of it involves Pentecost as the head of the jaeger program, scientists Newton Geizler (Charlie Day) and Hermann Gottlieb (Burn Gorman) and sleazy black-market kaiju body parts dealer, Hannibal Chau (Ron Perlman). There are a lot of surprisingly strong performances here, led by Elba as Pentecost, who delivers a Braveheart-esque speech that makes the one during the climax of The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King seem embarrassingly inadequate and whose utter conviction basically elevates the kitschy script he is given. The bickering scientists played by Day and Gorman, the entertaining walk-on by Perlman and the mostly taciturn performance turned in by Kikuchi are pretty effective in reminding the audience that there's a bit more to this movie than just robots punching monsters and vice versa. Lead actor Charlie Hunnam is actually kind of the weak link here, but he is, at least, adequate.
(Mild Spoilers)
For all the shortcomings of any of the human actors, all is forgotten when the robots vs. monsters slugfest begins in earnest. As thrilling as the fight scenes were, I confess to being slightly disappointed that most of the jaeger vs. kaiju action took place between Gipsy Danger and its monstrous opponents, and that two of the much-hyped jaeger robots, Crimson Typhoon from China and Cherno Alpha from Russia, both of which featured prominently in the marketing materials and which were described as virtual legends in the movie itself, went down as quickly as they did without so much as taking down a single kaiju. I would have wanted to see Crimson Typhoon's unique three-arm attack do some real damage before the robot and its operating team of Chinese triplets went down for the count. At least Striker Eureka got to wallop a kaiju early in the movie, and got some good shots in later, during the film's climax.
On top of that, I found it slightly silly that Becket and Mori whipped out Gipsy Danger's sword AFTER they had basically used a freighter as a club against the kaiju, to apparently little effect, especially considering that one well-placed slash from the sword was basically able to take the kaiju down completely. In the anime of old, the sword was the principal weapon, and an effective one at that, a concept which this film echoes, which made me wonder why the heck they didn't use it sooner.
And then of course, there are questions like, how could a thousand-ton (or more) robot survive a 50,000 foot drop, how could a giant monster with wings climb 50,000 feet in a few seconds when it takes a commercial airliner at least a few minutes to climb to half that distance moving at just under the speed of sound, and so on and so forth. Train the harsh eye of science, even just one branch of it, like physics, on this film, and it will almost surely fall apart. But that's not really the point.
(End Spoilers)
Gripes and implausibility notwithstanding, there is no point in my denying how much fun I had watching this film, especially having grown up with giant robots in the 70s and 80s. Spiritually, this was a lot more effective as an anime adaptation than the Wachowskis' notorious flop Speed Racer,and considering del Toro's gift for visual panache that he prominently put on display in Pan's Labyrinth and the second Hellboy film, it was always going to be a visual feast.
The genius of del Toro, however, is that he isn't content to simply let the monsters and mech do all the talking. He also plays a lot with thematic elements as well, and the fact that he chose to set the story years after the invasion began opened up a lot of interesting narrative possibilities; the bodies of slain kaiju litter the landscape, and it's fascinating to see how humanity adapts. As mentioned, there is a bustling underground trade in kaiju body parts and even skin parasites (!) which takes place in--where else?--Hong Kong, and some people have even turned the kaiju skeletons into places of worship! Del Toro basically creates a world that's as grimy, sleazy and uncomfortably believable as the one we live in, for his fantastical creatures to inhabit, and this actually makes it easier to look past the absurdity of the larger-than-life grudge matches that play out on the screen.
While this film may not have the crossover appeal of other recent genre films like the Avengers or Dark Knight movies, I humbly submit that there is more to it than just a fanboy love fest, and because I would love to see a sequel to this movie, I am giving it a big ol' thumbs-up.
4.5/5
Tuesday, July 23, 2013
Yellow and Loving It: A Review of Despicable Me 2
Like just about everyone else who powered the 2010 animated film Despicable Me to a worldwide gross of over half a billion dollars, I was a huge fan of the film and more than ready to shell out cash for Illumination Studios' highly-anticipated sequel, Despicable Me 2, which did not disappoint, or at least not too much.
Steve Carell's now-ex-villain Gru is back with his three adopted little girls Margo (Miranda Cosgrove), Edith (Dana Gaier) and Agnes (Elsie Fisher), his mad scientist colleague Dr. Nefario (Russell Brand) and his tens of thousands of hilarious little yellow minions (Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud, speaking their patented multilingual gibberish). In this film, Gru is approached by a super spy organization called the Anti-Villain League in order to help track down a mystery villain who has stolen a powerful mutagen that can turn even the most harmless animals into murderous, indestructible monsters. The AVL boss, Silas Ramsbottom (Steve Coogan) assigns Gru to stake out a mall where the villain might be hiding, and pairs him up with AVL agent Lucy Wilde (Kristen Wiig). At the mall Gru runs into Mexican restaurant owner and proprietor Eduardo Perez (Benjamin Bratt), whom he believes is a former supervillain named El Macho who supposedly died several years before. Much to Gru's dismay, Margo then finds herself infatuated with Antonio, Eduardo's flirtatious tweener son. Worse still, a mysterious villian starts abducting Gru's beloved minions in droves. Time is clearly running out for everyone's favorite ex-villain.
Sequels to animated films, with the exception of the Toy Story films, usually tend to decline in storytelling quality relative to their predecessors, especially when the original film carries a unique premise. The first Despicable Me, for example, stood out because of the very interesting notion of having a villain adopt three little girls to further an evil scheme, only to fall in love with them later on. It even had to compete with a similar "what-if-villains-had-feelings" film, Megamind, and came out on top. Of course, with Gru's adoptive daughters now having domesticated the former bad guy, the original storytelling conceit had to give way to the question of how he would adjust to civilian life, and how the writers can introduce a woman into his life.
While I definitely enjoyed the first film more than I did this one, I'd like to credit the filmmakers with maintaining many of the elements behind the success of the first film. Even though he's already been a dad for awhile, Gru is still wonderfully awkward and Steve Carell, still sporting his faux-Eastern European accent, is still a lot of fun to watch. By introducing new elements to his character, such as a romantic interest and, at the same time, the stress of having a budding adolescent daughter (Margo) taking an interest in boys, the filmmakers are able to keep things fresh. Of course, the three orphans in the film are just as cute as they were last time, and the scene-stealing Agnes has a little bit of a subplot involving her desire for a mother. Agent Wilde is a fun character, but surprisingly bland, especially given actress Kristen Wiig's comedic resume. In terms of zaniness, she could have easily gone toe-to-toe with Carell's Gru, and a slightly wacky accent couldn't have hurt, at least in my opinion. The new potential bad guy, Eduardo Perez, is a significant stylistic departure from the first film's nerdy villain, Vector, and there's something to be said about the new approach. Part of me regrets that the filmmakers discarded the recording of Oscar winner Al Pacino, who originally did the voice-acting for the character, but Benjamin Bratt, who had previously lent his voice to a character in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, was, to my mind a suitable replacement.
The visual design of the characters and locales, old and new, retained a lot of the flavor of the first film, which was basically a mix of the illustrations of the late artist Edward Gorey and some bright pastel colors, therefore much of its charm as well.
I would, of course, be remiss if I failed to mention the real stars of this movie, the characters who have already become the official mascots of Illumination Studios: Gru's minions. Even more than in the first film, the gibberish-jabbering, clumsy, and consistently hilarious little henchmen basically steal the film right out from under Gru's beak-like nose. They are even more prominent here than in the last film as they are actually now an integral part of the plot rather than just a constant source of laughs (though they are still that). As in the previous film, directors Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud lend their voices to these little critters, who are basically just vitamin pills with eyes, arms, legs, goggles and overalls, and to me it really is amazing how iconic these little creatures have become.
Unlike the last animated film I reviewed, Monsters University, DM2 is not about subtext or messages for adults but really is just about laughs, and this movie delivers plenty of them. While this is still basically a movie for the young and young at heart, I will go so far as to say that this a movie the whole family can enjoy.
4/5
Steve Carell's now-ex-villain Gru is back with his three adopted little girls Margo (Miranda Cosgrove), Edith (Dana Gaier) and Agnes (Elsie Fisher), his mad scientist colleague Dr. Nefario (Russell Brand) and his tens of thousands of hilarious little yellow minions (Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud, speaking their patented multilingual gibberish). In this film, Gru is approached by a super spy organization called the Anti-Villain League in order to help track down a mystery villain who has stolen a powerful mutagen that can turn even the most harmless animals into murderous, indestructible monsters. The AVL boss, Silas Ramsbottom (Steve Coogan) assigns Gru to stake out a mall where the villain might be hiding, and pairs him up with AVL agent Lucy Wilde (Kristen Wiig). At the mall Gru runs into Mexican restaurant owner and proprietor Eduardo Perez (Benjamin Bratt), whom he believes is a former supervillain named El Macho who supposedly died several years before. Much to Gru's dismay, Margo then finds herself infatuated with Antonio, Eduardo's flirtatious tweener son. Worse still, a mysterious villian starts abducting Gru's beloved minions in droves. Time is clearly running out for everyone's favorite ex-villain.
Sequels to animated films, with the exception of the Toy Story films, usually tend to decline in storytelling quality relative to their predecessors, especially when the original film carries a unique premise. The first Despicable Me, for example, stood out because of the very interesting notion of having a villain adopt three little girls to further an evil scheme, only to fall in love with them later on. It even had to compete with a similar "what-if-villains-had-feelings" film, Megamind, and came out on top. Of course, with Gru's adoptive daughters now having domesticated the former bad guy, the original storytelling conceit had to give way to the question of how he would adjust to civilian life, and how the writers can introduce a woman into his life.
While I definitely enjoyed the first film more than I did this one, I'd like to credit the filmmakers with maintaining many of the elements behind the success of the first film. Even though he's already been a dad for awhile, Gru is still wonderfully awkward and Steve Carell, still sporting his faux-Eastern European accent, is still a lot of fun to watch. By introducing new elements to his character, such as a romantic interest and, at the same time, the stress of having a budding adolescent daughter (Margo) taking an interest in boys, the filmmakers are able to keep things fresh. Of course, the three orphans in the film are just as cute as they were last time, and the scene-stealing Agnes has a little bit of a subplot involving her desire for a mother. Agent Wilde is a fun character, but surprisingly bland, especially given actress Kristen Wiig's comedic resume. In terms of zaniness, she could have easily gone toe-to-toe with Carell's Gru, and a slightly wacky accent couldn't have hurt, at least in my opinion. The new potential bad guy, Eduardo Perez, is a significant stylistic departure from the first film's nerdy villain, Vector, and there's something to be said about the new approach. Part of me regrets that the filmmakers discarded the recording of Oscar winner Al Pacino, who originally did the voice-acting for the character, but Benjamin Bratt, who had previously lent his voice to a character in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, was, to my mind a suitable replacement.
The visual design of the characters and locales, old and new, retained a lot of the flavor of the first film, which was basically a mix of the illustrations of the late artist Edward Gorey and some bright pastel colors, therefore much of its charm as well.
I would, of course, be remiss if I failed to mention the real stars of this movie, the characters who have already become the official mascots of Illumination Studios: Gru's minions. Even more than in the first film, the gibberish-jabbering, clumsy, and consistently hilarious little henchmen basically steal the film right out from under Gru's beak-like nose. They are even more prominent here than in the last film as they are actually now an integral part of the plot rather than just a constant source of laughs (though they are still that). As in the previous film, directors Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud lend their voices to these little critters, who are basically just vitamin pills with eyes, arms, legs, goggles and overalls, and to me it really is amazing how iconic these little creatures have become.
Unlike the last animated film I reviewed, Monsters University, DM2 is not about subtext or messages for adults but really is just about laughs, and this movie delivers plenty of them. While this is still basically a movie for the young and young at heart, I will go so far as to say that this a movie the whole family can enjoy.
4/5
Saturday, July 13, 2013
Pixar Takes on the Academe: A Review of Monsters University
I've been very busy lately, so unfortunately I was not able to review this movie immediately after I saw it nearly two weekends ago, but this was a solid entry in Pixar's library which definitely deserves a review, no matter how late.
Now, I love most Pixar movies, and a lot of other animated feature films from their competitors as well, because they are able to speak to my inner child, but most of the time, Pixar stands head and shoulders above its competition because it is able to address the adults in the audience as well, on a variety of themes, from mortality (Toy Story 2 and 3), to the challenges of single parenthood (Finding Nemo) to middle age (The Incredibles). Monsters Inc., was, surprisingly, one of the less "mature" Pixar hits as it posed the interesting hypothetical question -- "What if the monsters in our closet were more afraid of us than we were of them?"-- which basically captivated anyone who had ever been a kid dreading the bogeyman in the closet or under the bed. It was also one of Pixar's bigger hits over time, as it gained an enormous amount of goodwill over the years on home video and cable TV. While the decision to make a prequel was not something I, personally, welcomed as much as I would the decision to make a sequel to The Incredibles, I was reasonably enthusiastic about watching it the new installment, Monsters University, just the same.
While Monsters, Inc. was primarily about bigtime "scarer" James "Sully" Sullivan (John Goodman) and the relationship he formed with a little human girl, as well as his partnership with Michael "Mike" Wazowski (Billy Crystal) MU focuses primarily on a young Mike and how he chases down his dream of becoming a top-class scarer someday. Of course, he does what anyone aspiring to be a professional would: he goes to college, in this case, the scaring school of renowned Monsters University. He faces several challenges there, such as bullies, headed by alpha-male Johnny J. Worthington III (Nathan Fillion), head of the Roar Omega Roar, a legendary but extremely strict Dean of the School of Scaring, Abigail Hardscrabble (Helen Mirren), and, surprisingly, the scion of a renowned clan of scarers, the talented but lazy James P. Sullivan. He also finds himself befriending several misfits such as Squishy (Peter Sohn), Don (Joel Murray), Art (Charlie Day) and two headed monster Terri (Sean Hayes) and Terry (Dave Foley). Mike soon learns that, if he wants to pursue his dream of being a scarer, he will have to learn to work well with others, including those with whom he has seemingly insurmountable differences.
Even more than its predecessor, this film tackles decidedly adult subject matter as it takes a swipe at the formal education system in the United States, particularly among the so-called "Ivy League" schools. Basically the adult subtext for this particular film is that the top universities in the United States, as represented by Monsters University, do not truly recognize nor can they properly nurture certain types of genius. It's pretty daring subject matter for a Disney movie, especially one geared largely for schoolchildren, to whom Disney is undoubtedly selling cuddly stuffed versions of these characters. The delivery of the message is a little heavy-handed here, and not quite done with the panache of Pixar's earlier movies, but this movie is still a fine return to form for Pixar after the debacle of Cars 2 and the slightly wobbly narrative of lats year's Brave.
Of course, in terms of character design and visuals, Pixar is still very much at the top of its game. In addition to familiar characters like Mike, Sully, and Randall (Steve Buscemi) from the first film, director Dan Scanlon and his crew have introduced a number of interesting new character designs which effectively straddle the line between cute and creepy, though my personal favorite of the bunch, the stern Dean Hardscrabble, basically made my skin crawl while not looking altogether terrifying. The hallowed halls of academe are not quite as interesting as the ocean floor in Finding Nemo, or the exotic jungles of south America depicted in Up, but Pixar does great work here nonetheless.
All told, this was a prequel that was worth making, and worth watching.
4.5/5
Now, I love most Pixar movies, and a lot of other animated feature films from their competitors as well, because they are able to speak to my inner child, but most of the time, Pixar stands head and shoulders above its competition because it is able to address the adults in the audience as well, on a variety of themes, from mortality (Toy Story 2 and 3), to the challenges of single parenthood (Finding Nemo) to middle age (The Incredibles). Monsters Inc., was, surprisingly, one of the less "mature" Pixar hits as it posed the interesting hypothetical question -- "What if the monsters in our closet were more afraid of us than we were of them?"-- which basically captivated anyone who had ever been a kid dreading the bogeyman in the closet or under the bed. It was also one of Pixar's bigger hits over time, as it gained an enormous amount of goodwill over the years on home video and cable TV. While the decision to make a prequel was not something I, personally, welcomed as much as I would the decision to make a sequel to The Incredibles, I was reasonably enthusiastic about watching it the new installment, Monsters University, just the same.
While Monsters, Inc. was primarily about bigtime "scarer" James "Sully" Sullivan (John Goodman) and the relationship he formed with a little human girl, as well as his partnership with Michael "Mike" Wazowski (Billy Crystal) MU focuses primarily on a young Mike and how he chases down his dream of becoming a top-class scarer someday. Of course, he does what anyone aspiring to be a professional would: he goes to college, in this case, the scaring school of renowned Monsters University. He faces several challenges there, such as bullies, headed by alpha-male Johnny J. Worthington III (Nathan Fillion), head of the Roar Omega Roar, a legendary but extremely strict Dean of the School of Scaring, Abigail Hardscrabble (Helen Mirren), and, surprisingly, the scion of a renowned clan of scarers, the talented but lazy James P. Sullivan. He also finds himself befriending several misfits such as Squishy (Peter Sohn), Don (Joel Murray), Art (Charlie Day) and two headed monster Terri (Sean Hayes) and Terry (Dave Foley). Mike soon learns that, if he wants to pursue his dream of being a scarer, he will have to learn to work well with others, including those with whom he has seemingly insurmountable differences.
Even more than its predecessor, this film tackles decidedly adult subject matter as it takes a swipe at the formal education system in the United States, particularly among the so-called "Ivy League" schools. Basically the adult subtext for this particular film is that the top universities in the United States, as represented by Monsters University, do not truly recognize nor can they properly nurture certain types of genius. It's pretty daring subject matter for a Disney movie, especially one geared largely for schoolchildren, to whom Disney is undoubtedly selling cuddly stuffed versions of these characters. The delivery of the message is a little heavy-handed here, and not quite done with the panache of Pixar's earlier movies, but this movie is still a fine return to form for Pixar after the debacle of Cars 2 and the slightly wobbly narrative of lats year's Brave.
Of course, in terms of character design and visuals, Pixar is still very much at the top of its game. In addition to familiar characters like Mike, Sully, and Randall (Steve Buscemi) from the first film, director Dan Scanlon and his crew have introduced a number of interesting new character designs which effectively straddle the line between cute and creepy, though my personal favorite of the bunch, the stern Dean Hardscrabble, basically made my skin crawl while not looking altogether terrifying. The hallowed halls of academe are not quite as interesting as the ocean floor in Finding Nemo, or the exotic jungles of south America depicted in Up, but Pixar does great work here nonetheless.
All told, this was a prequel that was worth making, and worth watching.
4.5/5
Saturday, June 22, 2013
Man of Steal (MASSIVE SPOILERS)
At the outset, I'd like to declare
one simple fact: Superman is the FIRST superhero ever. Without Superman,
whether as a comic-book character or a big-screen hero, there would be no
Spider-Man, no X-Men, no Iron Man, and none of the colorful characters whose
adventures I have enjoyed reading or watching on the big screen since my
childhood days.
It amused me quite a bit, therefore,
that when I watched the latest Superman movie, Man of Steel, I
recognized a number of plot devices/scenarios that had already been used in
other superhero or superhero-inspired movies.
1) The death of a father figure
following a cruel statement by the hero, from Spider-Man -This one was
the most glaring for me. In the 1978 Superman film, Jonathan Kent died of
a heart attack, and the poignancy of that death stemmed from the fact that for
all of his powers, there was nothing Superman could have done. That was
retooled a bit for MoS, with the elder Kent basically allowing himself
to get sucked up into a tornado so that Clark's superpowers could stay a
secret, with Clark looking on helplessly. Now, scant minutes BEFORE that
happened, there was an exchange of words between Clark and Jonathan in a car
wherein Clark, knowing his extraterrestrial origin, haughtily asserted to
Jonathan (and Martha, who was in the back seat), that they weren't really his
parents. Wow. Powerful stuff. At least that's what I thought when I first saw
this scene in 2002's Spider-Man in which Uncle Ben tried to engage in a
heart-to-heart with the now super-powered Peter Parker, also in a car, and said
"I know I'm not your father" whereupon Peter shouted "then stop
pretending to be!" When I saw it in MoS, for all of its tweaks to
differentiate it, all I could think was "hey, that was a lot like Uncle
Ben's death!" This wasn't the first similarity I noticed between MoS
and other superhero movies, but for me it was hands-down the most striking
because this was clearly meant to be a pivotal character moment, and the fact
that it felt altogether lifted from another script was more than a little distracting.
2) The small town battle from Thor
- In the 1981 sequel Superman II, General Zod, then played by Terence
Stamp, and his two flunkies wreak havoc in a small town, though Superman isn't
around to battle them. In Man of Steel, though Superman and two of Zod's
minions actually throw down in a small town in Kansas this time, basically
leveling the whole place with their punches, flying bodies and the resulting
explosions (although to be fair, the United States military helps the mayhem
along quite a bit). One of the minions, a computer-generated Kyptonian, looks
like he's about nine to ten feet tall. That kind of calls to mind the
slugfest in 2011's Thor in which the roughly-ten-foot-tall Asgardian
robot called the Destroyer is sent to kill Thor and ends up wrecking a small
town in New Mexico while duking it out with Thor and his comrades-in-arms, the
Warriors Three. Again, even with tweaks (and superior visual effects for MoS),
the similarity was pretty striking.
3) The babies grown on trees
from The Matrix - the idea of genetically-engineered babies, unless I'm
mistaken, is a concept that's new to the Superman film franchise, with all
Kryptonian babies grown in pods attached to what look like trees, all immersed
in what I assume is a gigantic artificial womb known as a "genesis
chamber." Now, The Matrix films, while not about a comic-book
superhero, were no doubt inspired by Superman's exploits given that the hero,
Neo, had fantastical powers, including flight. In fact, in one scene during
which Neo was flying around the Matrix, one of the operators said "he's
doing his Superman thing." Well, the whole concept of babies being grown
in enormous fields on mechanical trees was realized quite vividly in the very
first Matrix film, so vividly in fact that the moment I saw the genesis
chamber of MoS I remembered it.The fact that two Matrix alumni, Laurence Fishburne and Harry Lennix, were part of the MoS cast only reinforced the connection for me.
4) The climactic flying
fistfight from The Matrix Revolutions - Back when he reviewed this film
in 2003, popular (and sometimes infamous) geek guru Harry Knowles gushed over
the flying fight scene between the heroic Neo and the villainous Agent Smith,
and said something to the effect of "wouldn't it be cool if a future
Superman movie had a fight that looked just like this!" Apparently Zack
Snyder, Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer, the respective director and
screenwriters of MoS, read Harry Knowles' review. Also, considering that the movie never really explained how a man who grew up on a farm in Kansas with no formal fight training managed to hold his own in hand-to-hand combat against people who had been training for combat all their lives, all of whom had the same super powers as he did, I can't help but wonder if, in the beginning, when Jor-El "downloaded" the Codex into Kal-El, he basically downloaded fighting skills as well, like the "plug and play" martial arts learning that took place in the Matrix films.
5) The cataclysmic, city-leveling
battle from The Avengers and Transformers: Dark of the Moon - Of
all the story devices which seemed to have been cribbed from other blockbusters
this one is perhaps the most understandable, considering that disaster porn is
always fashionable, but it is no less glaring considering that in past
incarnations of Superman on screen, specifically in Superman II, Supes
would have been appalled to have caused as much destruction as he did and would
have done everything to move the fight away from a populated area, something he
did not seem particularly interested in doing while smashing Zod into
buildings. To go back to the small town fight, at least he told people to get
out of harm's way and shouted "it's not safe," but when he got to the
city, he pretty much had at Zod without apparently sparing a thought for the
thousands of innocents inside the buildings they trashed. At least the Avengers
worked to get the civilians out of harm's way. If anything, Superman was more
like the Transformers, who like him didn't seem to give a shit about civilians
either when battling the bad guys. The subtext is disturbing; the Superman of
the film was more like an alien robot than an actual hero. Ironically enough, it was when he finally killed the bad guy that he actually started showing some concern for life again.
For all of this, and for all the
flaws I perceived in the script, I still enjoyed Man of Steel, but I
cannot help but chuckle thinking about how liberally the filmmakers borrowed
from movies based on characters whose existence was basically inspired by
Superman, especially the Marvel characters. Part of me wonders if the
makers of the Marvel movies recognize this, and if they feel like Pepsi did
when "New Coke" came out over twenty years ago.
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