Of all the directors to work for Marvel Studios, Shane Black, director of Iron Man 3, had quite arguably the least enviable job of all: he had to helm the studio's first follow-up to their mega smash-hit The Avengers, and to breathe some life back into the standalone Iron Man franchise after the second installment proved to be a creative and commercial disappointment. The good news, if any of the early reviews are to be believed, is that he has hurdled both challenges with flying colors. For my part, I wholeheartedly agree with the glowing praises.
The film starts with a brief prologue set on New Year's Eve of 1999 in Bern, Switzerland, in which a decidedly unheroic Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) wines and dines one scientist, his then-girlfriend Maya Hansen (Rebecca Hall) who is working on a formula to "reprogram" the human genome and makes an empty promise to another, the somewhat deformed looking Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) regarding the possibility of working together in his proposed think-tank. He leaves Maya in a hotel room after a one night stand, and Killian waiting for him on the roof of the same hotel. Both of these little sins will eventually come back to bite him on the butt...hard.
Back in the present, Tony should be happy. After all, he's a billionaire with a house in Malibu, a fleet of cars, a hot-CEO girlfriend, Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), and a personal suit of flying armor. In the wake of the alien invasion that hit New York in The Avengers, though, he has been suffering from what appear to be anxiety attacks. To deal with them, he has been been immersing himself in his "hobby" of building more versions of the Iron Man armor, of which, by the beginning of the film, there are already 42 iterations.
However, Tony is put on a collision course with trouble when a murderous terrorist calling himself "The Mandarin" disrupts television broadcasts around the world, virtually boasting of the destruction he has wrought and will continue to inflict. He seems like just the kind of threat that the world needs Iron Man to fight. The plot thickens when Killian, now running his previously hypothetical think-tank and looking rather dashing, resurfaces at Stark Industries, an attempts to seduce its CEO, Pepper, with the promise of a technology that can "upgrade" the human body, called "Extremis." However, it all gets personal for Tony when his former bodyguard, Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau, also director of the previous two installments) follows Killian's shady-looking henchman Savin (James Badge Dale) to what appears to be a drug drop-off at Grumman's Chinese Theater and ends up nearly getting blown to pieces by what appears to be an exploding man. Several other people are not so lucky. The Mandarin interrupts television broadcasts again to take responsibility for the explosion.
Outside the hospital where Happy is confined, Tony vows to take down the Mandarin, not realizing that the worst is yet to come. Soon, he'll need the help of his staunch friend Col. James "Rhodey" Rhodes (Don Cheadle), a spunky 10-year-old boy named Harley (Ty Simpkin) and his ever loyal roving artificial intelligence J.A.R.V.I.S. (Paul Bettany) to get back in the fight and stop the Mandarin, who intends to kill the President of the United States (William Sadler).
Truth be told, I was not looking forward to this film. I was hard-pressed to imagine how a solo Iron Man film could be satisfying after the superhero buffet that was The Avengers, and the trailer did very little for me.
Fortunately, however, Black got me hooked on this film with a surprisingly fresh approach to the character. Without giving too much away, in this film Tony finds himself without his high-tech toys or even his considerably small support network. Here, it's basically just him and his smarts going up against an enemy with a seemingly infinite reach and bunch of superhuman soldiers juiced up on Extremis. It almost feels as if, when conceiving this film, Black and his cohorts used as their starting point Captain America's line addressed to Iron Man in The Avengers that went, "Big man in a suit of armor; take that away and what are you?" They basically took all of that away.
What they didn't take away was the wicked sense of humor that made the first Iron Man film and The Avengers so eminently watchable. In fact, if anything Black and Pearce added their own flavor of humor to the brand, which was infinitely funnier than Justin Theroux's juvenile idiocy in part 2.
Speaking of part 2, this film shows that the filmmakers have apparently learned quite a bit from the mistakes made back then; there is nary a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent in sight, and apart from recalling Tony's experience in New York and a couple of quips by supporting characters, there is no significant reference made to the Avengers, or any ham-handed attempt to set up another "Avengers" movie. Even Samuel L. Jackson takes a break from his nigh-obligatory cameo for once. Cheadle's Rhodes gives a bit of a throwaway explanation as to why the Avengers can't get involved in the situation, but even thought it wasn't the best possible explanation I was grateful that the filmmakers punctuated the fact that we didn't have to worry about multiple references to Marvel's flagship team film. Also, it's worth pointing out that Tony doesn't fight guys in their own suits of armor.
More important than just steering clear of the flaws of part 2, here Black manages to extract from Downey, Jr. an even better performance than Favreau ever did. More than in any of the other films, Downey, Jr. really gets to flex his acting chops because here Tony spends a lot more time out of the armor than he has since he was first introduced to audiences, but it is certainly time well-spent. Qualities like his ingenuity, tenacity and ability to overcome the odds come to the fore, and he even gets a pretty intense action sequence sans the armor, going up against a much more powerful foe with nothing more than his quick wits to save his behind. Electrifying stuff. Critically though, Stark's humanity is more evident here than it ever has been; his adventures in New York have left Tony with quite a bit of post-traumatic stress, and it's to the filmmakers credit that they actually chose to depict this in a superhero. Supporting players Cheadle, Paltrow and Favreau give Downey, Jr. some solid back-up, but really, it is not as if he needs it here.
The new kids on the block, Pearce, Hall and especially Kingsley, are all extremely talented thespians in their own right but Black plays to all their strengths, even if Pearce overcooks the "nerdy" Killian early in the film a little bit. The young Simpkin was a revelation in his small but fairly meaty role. I'm not always a huge fan of the concept of the pint-sized sidekick but it worked quite well in this movie, and I love the way Simpkin and Downey, Jr. played off each other.
What I found particularly remarkable about the film was that all things considered, it didn't exactly reinvent the wheel, there were some well-known story tropes at work, including those which were used in relatively recent films, but even when handling the familiar, Black makes it all work. It's all in the telling. I know comics purists may have issues with a number of the liberties taken (including what may feel like a couple of big ones) but to my mind they serviced a generally well-done story, and therefore the greater good.
I confess I missed the work of visual effects house Industrial Light and Magic, but their successors, including Weta Digital and Digital Domain certainly did an admirable job filling in their iron boots. I hadn't planned on seeing this film in 3-D as I am not the biggest fan of post-production conversion in general, but the 3-D screening was the most convenient and I'll give Marvel points for pulling off a smoother conversion job here than they did with The Avengers last year. It's still no Avatar, though, at least as far as 3-D is concerned. Still, if you're not the type to cough up the premium for this kind of thing, then I don't think your experience of the film will be significantly diminished.
This is an excellent way to kick off the "summer movie season," and it certainly isn't a bad way to get out of the Metro Manila heat for two hours and fifteen minutes.
4/5
Thursday, April 25, 2013
Thursday, April 18, 2013
Hanging Out with Tom Cruise After the End of the World: A Review of Oblivion
Three years ago, fledgling feature film director Joseph Kosinksi impressed Hollywood when his debut feature film, Tron: Legacy, a sequel to Walt Disney Pictures' nearly thirty-year-old science fiction film, Tron, managed to gross a pretty healthy $400 million at the global box-office. The original Tron was a genuine box-office disappointment back in 1982, but which had found popularity on home video and had generated a cult following. Kosinski's sequel far outperformed the box-office returns of the original, even adjusting prices for inflation and 3-D surcharges. Personally, I liked the film, though it could have been done better.
Even though Tron: Legacy didn't quite live up to my hopes, I found myself interested in Kosinski's next project, another science fiction film called Oblivion starring Tom Cruise, which was based on an unpublished graphic novel co-written by Kosinksi himself. Surprisingly little was said about this film, though I was able to catch at least one trailer, and I found myself intrigued. It was clear enough that the film was set in some sort of post-apocalyptic wasteland, and by itself, that was a selling point for me.
The film takes place in 2077, approximately 60 years after a cataclysmic war between the people of Earth and an alien race has ravaged the planet's surface. The Earth's moon has been destroyed, throwing the planet's weather and tectonic movement into chaos, and in the aftermath humanity has abandoned the Earth in order to resettle on Titan, one of the moon's of Saturn. There remains work to be done on earth, however; massive generators are placed in the oceans of the Earth to gather up energy needed by the new colony on Titan. Drones protect the massive generators from attack by the stragglers of the alien race known only as the Scavengers, who have actually remained on the planet. All of this is more or less explained by Jack Harper (Cruise), a human whose job it is to maintain and, when necessary, repair the aforementioned drones. He works in tandem with a communications officer named Vika (Andrea Riseborough), and it is their understanding that when the energy has been harnessed from the Earth's oceans, they will rendezvous with the human settlers on the space station Tet and leave for their new home on Titan.
Jack, however, is haunted by strange dreams of New York City before the world ended, in which he meets a mysterious woman (Olga Kurylenko) on top of the Empire State Buidling. He knows this is impossible, as this could only have taken place years before he was even born. He has had his memory wiped several times, a requirement for his missions, but he cannot remove this dream from his subconscious. When one routine patrol to retrieve a stricken drone leads to an extremely close encounter between Jack and the Scavengers, he starts wondering about more than just his dreams, and what he finds could spell the end of the world as he knows it.
Tom Cruise spent most of his younger years trying out all kinds of different roles, and it was only when he was knocking on the door of his 40s that he first ventured into science fiction; collaborating with Steven Spielberg on one of my favorite Spielberg films: 2002's Minority Report. This is his second "pure" sci-fi film (I don't count War of the Worlds, which played more like a disaster film) and though I remain partial to the Spielberg film, I have to give Cruise credit for a pretty earnest performance here. With a very small cast, it basically fell upon him to carry this film, and he rises to the occasion. Most of the film's first act is him acting opposite Riseborough, who also acquits herself well as Vika, whose relationship with Jack, while obviously involving some form of intimacy, seems oddly cold and clinical for reasons that become clear as the narrative unfolds.
The visuals are impeccable; I am a huge fan of Harper's dragonfly-like patrol craft, which was reportedly inspired by a helicopter, and the overall aesthetic of their monitoring tower, with its glass walls and Zen-like simplicity serving as a welcome stylistic departure from the militaristic aesthetic that usually pervades these science fiction movies. I was also fond of the music score composed by Anthony Gonzalez and Joseph Trapanese, although at times it sounded like an odd blend of Hans Zimmer music and '80s pop music, and an overbearing one at that.
One problem I had with the film, however, was its pacing. Even though the timing of some of the action sequences was strategic enough, to my mind Kosinski failed to build the requisite tension. The first half of the movie should be about establishing the threat of the "Scavs" and yet the clean, antiseptic environment that Jack and Vika live and work in, as well as the supposedly intimate but oddly arm's length relationship between the two, tends to neutralize the overtones of menace; it removes the sense of urgency. The second half of the film, where most of the action takes place, feels like it comes from a completely different movie. The shift in tone was a little jarring for me, though I can admit that when the action picked up I paid a bit more attention.
Another problem I had was not with the film itself but with the boneheads responsible for marketing it, because the film's trailers basically gave away a huge plot point. The irony here is that Universal Pictures was actually quite secretive about this movie in the months up to its release; one wonders why they gave the people who cut the trailers free rein to blow the lid off one of the film's most important secrets. This actually went a long way towards defusing any sense of tension I might have felt at the narrative. The good news is that there is at least one major plot twist that has not been spoiled by the trailers. One could argue that even without the "spoilerific" trailers, the plot twists are hackneyed and can be seen from a mile away, but to my mind it's all in the telling, and while I will concede that there were a number of cliches at work, I think Kosinski's approach was fresh enough to justify whatever Universal spent on this movie.
Overall, I'd say this was a reasonably good movie with very impressive visuals that could have been a lot better with a tighter script, and which would have benefited quite a bit from a more discreet marketing campaign.
3/5
Even though Tron: Legacy didn't quite live up to my hopes, I found myself interested in Kosinski's next project, another science fiction film called Oblivion starring Tom Cruise, which was based on an unpublished graphic novel co-written by Kosinksi himself. Surprisingly little was said about this film, though I was able to catch at least one trailer, and I found myself intrigued. It was clear enough that the film was set in some sort of post-apocalyptic wasteland, and by itself, that was a selling point for me.
The film takes place in 2077, approximately 60 years after a cataclysmic war between the people of Earth and an alien race has ravaged the planet's surface. The Earth's moon has been destroyed, throwing the planet's weather and tectonic movement into chaos, and in the aftermath humanity has abandoned the Earth in order to resettle on Titan, one of the moon's of Saturn. There remains work to be done on earth, however; massive generators are placed in the oceans of the Earth to gather up energy needed by the new colony on Titan. Drones protect the massive generators from attack by the stragglers of the alien race known only as the Scavengers, who have actually remained on the planet. All of this is more or less explained by Jack Harper (Cruise), a human whose job it is to maintain and, when necessary, repair the aforementioned drones. He works in tandem with a communications officer named Vika (Andrea Riseborough), and it is their understanding that when the energy has been harnessed from the Earth's oceans, they will rendezvous with the human settlers on the space station Tet and leave for their new home on Titan.
Jack, however, is haunted by strange dreams of New York City before the world ended, in which he meets a mysterious woman (Olga Kurylenko) on top of the Empire State Buidling. He knows this is impossible, as this could only have taken place years before he was even born. He has had his memory wiped several times, a requirement for his missions, but he cannot remove this dream from his subconscious. When one routine patrol to retrieve a stricken drone leads to an extremely close encounter between Jack and the Scavengers, he starts wondering about more than just his dreams, and what he finds could spell the end of the world as he knows it.
Tom Cruise spent most of his younger years trying out all kinds of different roles, and it was only when he was knocking on the door of his 40s that he first ventured into science fiction; collaborating with Steven Spielberg on one of my favorite Spielberg films: 2002's Minority Report. This is his second "pure" sci-fi film (I don't count War of the Worlds, which played more like a disaster film) and though I remain partial to the Spielberg film, I have to give Cruise credit for a pretty earnest performance here. With a very small cast, it basically fell upon him to carry this film, and he rises to the occasion. Most of the film's first act is him acting opposite Riseborough, who also acquits herself well as Vika, whose relationship with Jack, while obviously involving some form of intimacy, seems oddly cold and clinical for reasons that become clear as the narrative unfolds.
The visuals are impeccable; I am a huge fan of Harper's dragonfly-like patrol craft, which was reportedly inspired by a helicopter, and the overall aesthetic of their monitoring tower, with its glass walls and Zen-like simplicity serving as a welcome stylistic departure from the militaristic aesthetic that usually pervades these science fiction movies. I was also fond of the music score composed by Anthony Gonzalez and Joseph Trapanese, although at times it sounded like an odd blend of Hans Zimmer music and '80s pop music, and an overbearing one at that.
One problem I had with the film, however, was its pacing. Even though the timing of some of the action sequences was strategic enough, to my mind Kosinski failed to build the requisite tension. The first half of the movie should be about establishing the threat of the "Scavs" and yet the clean, antiseptic environment that Jack and Vika live and work in, as well as the supposedly intimate but oddly arm's length relationship between the two, tends to neutralize the overtones of menace; it removes the sense of urgency. The second half of the film, where most of the action takes place, feels like it comes from a completely different movie. The shift in tone was a little jarring for me, though I can admit that when the action picked up I paid a bit more attention.
Another problem I had was not with the film itself but with the boneheads responsible for marketing it, because the film's trailers basically gave away a huge plot point. The irony here is that Universal Pictures was actually quite secretive about this movie in the months up to its release; one wonders why they gave the people who cut the trailers free rein to blow the lid off one of the film's most important secrets. This actually went a long way towards defusing any sense of tension I might have felt at the narrative. The good news is that there is at least one major plot twist that has not been spoiled by the trailers. One could argue that even without the "spoilerific" trailers, the plot twists are hackneyed and can be seen from a mile away, but to my mind it's all in the telling, and while I will concede that there were a number of cliches at work, I think Kosinski's approach was fresh enough to justify whatever Universal spent on this movie.
Overall, I'd say this was a reasonably good movie with very impressive visuals that could have been a lot better with a tighter script, and which would have benefited quite a bit from a more discreet marketing campaign.
3/5
Sunday, April 7, 2013
Chasing Tomorrow: A Review of The Croods
While I enjoyed the first two Shrek movies, it was with the films Kung Fu Panda (2008) and How to Train Your Dragon (2010) that Dreamworks Animation convinced me that when it came to heart and narrative heft, they were fully capable of matching the product of rival Pixar, especially when the latter stumbled with creative disappointments like Cars 2 or even last year's Brave.
Their new film The Croods, their first to be distributed by former rival Twentieth Century Fox (which produced animated films like the Ice Age series), is not quite in the league of Dreamworks' best, but it does have quite a few of the ingredients that made their best as special as they were, starting with a lot of heart.
The Croods are a family of neanderthals whose patriarch, Grug (voiced by Nicolas Cage), lives in constant fear of the extremely hostile world they inhabit. In a brief prologue, after all, it is explained that every other caveman family living around them has been eaten, stomped, or otherwise killed by one wild animal or another, and as a result Grug is cautious to a fault if only to ensure his family's survival. He lives in constant fear, and encourages his family to adopt the same attitude.
Unfortunately for Grug, his eldest daughter, Eep (voiced by Emma Stone) is as curious as Grug is paranoid, and she longs to see the outside world and all its perils, even if it means leaving the safety of her family's cave, where Grug seals them up at night with a huge rock to keep out predators. One night Eep sees a strange light just outside the cave and follows it, only to find, at the trail's end, that it actually came from a torch which was lit by another human, a member of a more advanced species of man, named Guy (Ryan Reynolds). Guy tells Eep that the end of the world is coming, and he is on his way to the sun.
After Guy saves the Croods from a flock of ravenous birds using fire, Grug decides they need him and keeps him around as they make their way from their home to safety. When Guy's clever and useful inventions and inexhaustible optimism, which stand in stark contrast to Grug's utter lack of imagination and eternal pessimism, start winning the family over, the Croods start looking more and more to him as a leader, at the expense of Grug, who is not pleased. Not only that, but the growing affection between Eep, his firstborn, and Guy, grates on him constantly. Whereas Grug's bedtime stories for the families are about death and promoting fear of the unknown, Guy enchants them with stories of "tomorrow."
Of course, if the Croods and Guy are going to live to see "tomorrow," they have got to work together, considering the number of things around that could kill them, like the piranha-like birds, the giant saber-toothed tiger, and the collapsing landscape itself.
Apart from some really delightful visuals, which are sort of a cross between Ice Age and Avatar, the movie benefits from some really engaging performances from the voice actors, especially Cage, whose backwards-thinking Grug was good for quite a lot of belly laughs throughout the film. The father-daughter dynamic between Grug and Eep, which is one of the central tenets of the movie, was as appropriately awkward as relationships often are between fathers and their teenage daughters, but not as well-written as I feel it should have been, even though the people involved were neanderthals. Stone's and Cage's definitely invested in their performances, but neither the script nor chemistry was up to the task. Even less so was the romantic chemistry between Stone's Eep and Reynold's Guy, but this is a family film, so I suppose it's easy to forgive the lackluster scripting in this instance. Also, this film is called "The Croods" and not "Eep and Guy."
Chris Sanders, who co-created Lilo and Stitch before defecting to Dreamworks and creating the sensational How to Train Your Dragon, doesn't quite reach the heights of those former films in terms of heart, but the unconventional choice of characters is something that's still a lot of fun to watch. It just doesn't quite have the crossover appeal that both of his previous two films had. I imagine most adults will be happy to sit through this film, as I was, but I doubt it will engage them the way Dreamworks' better films have been able to do.
One collaborator whose work really stood out for me was composer Alan Silvestri, whose score for this movie was a cut above most of the scores I hear in Dreamworks animated films and even in a number of Pixar films; at times Silvestri even channeled the vibe of industry legend John Williams, who to my knowledge has never scored an animated film.
This isn't my favorite film from Dreamworks Animation, but it is certainly a welcome recovery in form after they disappointed somewhat with the tepid Rise of the Guardians a few months back. No need to catch it in 3-D.
4/5
Their new film The Croods, their first to be distributed by former rival Twentieth Century Fox (which produced animated films like the Ice Age series), is not quite in the league of Dreamworks' best, but it does have quite a few of the ingredients that made their best as special as they were, starting with a lot of heart.
The Croods are a family of neanderthals whose patriarch, Grug (voiced by Nicolas Cage), lives in constant fear of the extremely hostile world they inhabit. In a brief prologue, after all, it is explained that every other caveman family living around them has been eaten, stomped, or otherwise killed by one wild animal or another, and as a result Grug is cautious to a fault if only to ensure his family's survival. He lives in constant fear, and encourages his family to adopt the same attitude.
Unfortunately for Grug, his eldest daughter, Eep (voiced by Emma Stone) is as curious as Grug is paranoid, and she longs to see the outside world and all its perils, even if it means leaving the safety of her family's cave, where Grug seals them up at night with a huge rock to keep out predators. One night Eep sees a strange light just outside the cave and follows it, only to find, at the trail's end, that it actually came from a torch which was lit by another human, a member of a more advanced species of man, named Guy (Ryan Reynolds). Guy tells Eep that the end of the world is coming, and he is on his way to the sun.
After Guy saves the Croods from a flock of ravenous birds using fire, Grug decides they need him and keeps him around as they make their way from their home to safety. When Guy's clever and useful inventions and inexhaustible optimism, which stand in stark contrast to Grug's utter lack of imagination and eternal pessimism, start winning the family over, the Croods start looking more and more to him as a leader, at the expense of Grug, who is not pleased. Not only that, but the growing affection between Eep, his firstborn, and Guy, grates on him constantly. Whereas Grug's bedtime stories for the families are about death and promoting fear of the unknown, Guy enchants them with stories of "tomorrow."
Of course, if the Croods and Guy are going to live to see "tomorrow," they have got to work together, considering the number of things around that could kill them, like the piranha-like birds, the giant saber-toothed tiger, and the collapsing landscape itself.
Apart from some really delightful visuals, which are sort of a cross between Ice Age and Avatar, the movie benefits from some really engaging performances from the voice actors, especially Cage, whose backwards-thinking Grug was good for quite a lot of belly laughs throughout the film. The father-daughter dynamic between Grug and Eep, which is one of the central tenets of the movie, was as appropriately awkward as relationships often are between fathers and their teenage daughters, but not as well-written as I feel it should have been, even though the people involved were neanderthals. Stone's and Cage's definitely invested in their performances, but neither the script nor chemistry was up to the task. Even less so was the romantic chemistry between Stone's Eep and Reynold's Guy, but this is a family film, so I suppose it's easy to forgive the lackluster scripting in this instance. Also, this film is called "The Croods" and not "Eep and Guy."
Chris Sanders, who co-created Lilo and Stitch before defecting to Dreamworks and creating the sensational How to Train Your Dragon, doesn't quite reach the heights of those former films in terms of heart, but the unconventional choice of characters is something that's still a lot of fun to watch. It just doesn't quite have the crossover appeal that both of his previous two films had. I imagine most adults will be happy to sit through this film, as I was, but I doubt it will engage them the way Dreamworks' better films have been able to do.
One collaborator whose work really stood out for me was composer Alan Silvestri, whose score for this movie was a cut above most of the scores I hear in Dreamworks animated films and even in a number of Pixar films; at times Silvestri even channeled the vibe of industry legend John Williams, who to my knowledge has never scored an animated film.
This isn't my favorite film from Dreamworks Animation, but it is certainly a welcome recovery in form after they disappointed somewhat with the tepid Rise of the Guardians a few months back. No need to catch it in 3-D.
4/5
Tuesday, April 2, 2013
We're Off to See the Wizard: A Review of Oz the Great and Powerful
Oz the Great and Powerful is a milestone of sorts for director Sam Raimi, arguably best known for having directed the hugely successful Spider-Man series of films from 2002 to 2007: it is his first family-oriented film.
Oz, a prequel of sorts to the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, which in turn was based on the well-loved book by L. Frank Baum, is the story of Oscar Diggs (James Franco), a two-bit, womanizing circus magician. He starts the movie as a thoroughly unlikeable character, with a taste for gullible young women, and a nasty tendency to abuse his assistant Frank (Zach Braff). When one of his scams to bed women goes sour, Oscar finds himself running for his life, and in his desperation he jumps into a hot air balloon just as a tornado hits the sleepy Kansas town where the circus is camped. The tornado takes him to a wonderful, terrifying land he's never seen before, the land of Oz. There, he will meet three witches (Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz and Michelle Williams) as well as several strange and fascinating people and creatures like a flying monkey (voiced by Braff) a girl made of china (voiced by Joey King, who also appears earlier in the movie as a crippled girl), and will ultimately come to learn what it truly means to be great.
One of the best things to be said for this film is that it has Raimi's signature firmly across it, from the striking, imaginative visuals to the generous helpings of humor and sometimes even fright. Even some of the slightly cheesy dialogue delivery has a bit of a Raimi flourish to it.
What really delighted me was the astonishing way the land of Oz was realized. Having only recently seen the digitally remastered version of The Wizard of Oz, I was struck by its production value at a time when digital effects were not yet available, and I knew that if Raimi and his crew were going to live up to this legacy they would have to make full use of the current technology available. I'm happy to say that they have done just that. The CGI is uneven at some parts; I was not a fan of Finley, the digital flying monkey voiced by Braff, but I was utterly charmed by the China Girl. The landscapes, though, are topnotch, from the shimmering Emerald City to the small town full of Munchkins to the vast expanse of wilderness, this film showcases just how far Hollywood's visual wizardry has come in the last seventy-four years.
There was even a nicely nostalgic touch; the scenes that take place in Kansas are in black and white, with a much narrower aspect ratio, and with mono audio. All of this changes when Oscar Diggs' balloon crosses over into Oz, of course, with the screen dramatically widening and the color slowly bleeding into the picture as the awesome landscape is revealed. A soaring musical score by frequent Raimi collaborator Danny Elfman helps establish the mood, too, even though at time it sounds like he's recycling themes he's used in one Tim Burton movie or another.
Unfortunately, for me, neither the performances, nor the writing are as uniformly outstanding as most of the visuals.
I was happy with Franco's take on the wizard; he played out the character's redemptive arc pretty well. I've read criticism that it was a touch too serious, and that the role would have been better served by the originally-sought candidates Johnny Depp or Robert Downey, Jr. Now, quite frankly, I haven't been all that happy with Depp since Alice in Wonderland, in which he recycled many of the acting tics he's developed over the years, and I feel that, even with a director other than Tim Burton at the helm, we would quite likely have seen another familiar performance from him. I confess, though, that I would have loved to see Downey, Jr. take on this role, for so long as he wasn't an early 20th century Tony Stark. Franco's take on the character suits the way he was scripted, and perhaps therein lies the problem. Still, watching Oscar Diggs find his way to redemption was gratifying, though I will concede it wasn't always the most kid-friendly journey.
The three witches were the perhaps the most uneven of the bunch. It's hard to discuss their performances without spoiling what are clearly intended as plot twists, but suffice it to say that of the three, Mila Kunis's character easily has the most developed arc. Michelle Williams makes the best she can out of a relatively thinly-scripted role, and as for Rachel Weisz, well, to be completely fair to her, there really was not anything else she could have done for her character, so she gets full credit for her efforts. The problem was, first and foremost, with the scripting; apart from Franco's character it's not really clear why the others are motivated to do what they do, or more appropriately to not do what they clearly hope to do. It sounds complicated, I know, but suffice it to say that it was not clear to me why three women with magic powers could not solve their own problems but had to wait for a complete stranger to come along and do it for them. More diligent screenwriters could have come up with some kind of explanation for this. Credited screenwriters Mitchell Kapner and David Lindsay-Abaire didn't bother.
Also, it irked me that no one bothered to write an origin for the ruby red slippers that Judy Garland's Dorothy Gale wore in the 1939 film; I was really waiting for that one.
All told, this was, for me, a solidly entertaining film that could have been better, and given that the inevitable sequel is on the way after this movie's success at the box-office I can only hope that they improve on the writing next time around.
3/5
Oz, a prequel of sorts to the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, which in turn was based on the well-loved book by L. Frank Baum, is the story of Oscar Diggs (James Franco), a two-bit, womanizing circus magician. He starts the movie as a thoroughly unlikeable character, with a taste for gullible young women, and a nasty tendency to abuse his assistant Frank (Zach Braff). When one of his scams to bed women goes sour, Oscar finds himself running for his life, and in his desperation he jumps into a hot air balloon just as a tornado hits the sleepy Kansas town where the circus is camped. The tornado takes him to a wonderful, terrifying land he's never seen before, the land of Oz. There, he will meet three witches (Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz and Michelle Williams) as well as several strange and fascinating people and creatures like a flying monkey (voiced by Braff) a girl made of china (voiced by Joey King, who also appears earlier in the movie as a crippled girl), and will ultimately come to learn what it truly means to be great.
One of the best things to be said for this film is that it has Raimi's signature firmly across it, from the striking, imaginative visuals to the generous helpings of humor and sometimes even fright. Even some of the slightly cheesy dialogue delivery has a bit of a Raimi flourish to it.
What really delighted me was the astonishing way the land of Oz was realized. Having only recently seen the digitally remastered version of The Wizard of Oz, I was struck by its production value at a time when digital effects were not yet available, and I knew that if Raimi and his crew were going to live up to this legacy they would have to make full use of the current technology available. I'm happy to say that they have done just that. The CGI is uneven at some parts; I was not a fan of Finley, the digital flying monkey voiced by Braff, but I was utterly charmed by the China Girl. The landscapes, though, are topnotch, from the shimmering Emerald City to the small town full of Munchkins to the vast expanse of wilderness, this film showcases just how far Hollywood's visual wizardry has come in the last seventy-four years.
There was even a nicely nostalgic touch; the scenes that take place in Kansas are in black and white, with a much narrower aspect ratio, and with mono audio. All of this changes when Oscar Diggs' balloon crosses over into Oz, of course, with the screen dramatically widening and the color slowly bleeding into the picture as the awesome landscape is revealed. A soaring musical score by frequent Raimi collaborator Danny Elfman helps establish the mood, too, even though at time it sounds like he's recycling themes he's used in one Tim Burton movie or another.
Unfortunately, for me, neither the performances, nor the writing are as uniformly outstanding as most of the visuals.
I was happy with Franco's take on the wizard; he played out the character's redemptive arc pretty well. I've read criticism that it was a touch too serious, and that the role would have been better served by the originally-sought candidates Johnny Depp or Robert Downey, Jr. Now, quite frankly, I haven't been all that happy with Depp since Alice in Wonderland, in which he recycled many of the acting tics he's developed over the years, and I feel that, even with a director other than Tim Burton at the helm, we would quite likely have seen another familiar performance from him. I confess, though, that I would have loved to see Downey, Jr. take on this role, for so long as he wasn't an early 20th century Tony Stark. Franco's take on the character suits the way he was scripted, and perhaps therein lies the problem. Still, watching Oscar Diggs find his way to redemption was gratifying, though I will concede it wasn't always the most kid-friendly journey.
The three witches were the perhaps the most uneven of the bunch. It's hard to discuss their performances without spoiling what are clearly intended as plot twists, but suffice it to say that of the three, Mila Kunis's character easily has the most developed arc. Michelle Williams makes the best she can out of a relatively thinly-scripted role, and as for Rachel Weisz, well, to be completely fair to her, there really was not anything else she could have done for her character, so she gets full credit for her efforts. The problem was, first and foremost, with the scripting; apart from Franco's character it's not really clear why the others are motivated to do what they do, or more appropriately to not do what they clearly hope to do. It sounds complicated, I know, but suffice it to say that it was not clear to me why three women with magic powers could not solve their own problems but had to wait for a complete stranger to come along and do it for them. More diligent screenwriters could have come up with some kind of explanation for this. Credited screenwriters Mitchell Kapner and David Lindsay-Abaire didn't bother.
Also, it irked me that no one bothered to write an origin for the ruby red slippers that Judy Garland's Dorothy Gale wore in the 1939 film; I was really waiting for that one.
All told, this was, for me, a solidly entertaining film that could have been better, and given that the inevitable sequel is on the way after this movie's success at the box-office I can only hope that they improve on the writing next time around.
3/5
Another Violent Fantasy: A Review of Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained
Director Quentin Tarantino lays his cards on the table pretty early in his acclaimed yet highly controversial film Django Unchained. One of the very first subtitles of the film reads "1858: two years before the Civil War" notwithstanding the fact that the American Civil War actually erupted in 1861, or THREE years after 1858 and not two. This is the first of many anachronisms that regularly pop up throughout the film, and they only serve to emphasize one thing: this film is no more an accurate representation of the deep American South in the 1850s to 1860s than Tarantino's last film Inglourious Basterds, was of the Second World War.
Django Unchained is the story of a slave (Jamie Foxx) who longs to be reunited with his wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) from whom he has been separated. He is being transported, along with several other slaves, in the dead of the night by slave traders when he is freed by a traveling bounty hunter who used to be a dentist, Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz). As a bounty hunter, Schultz is in the business of hunting down wanted criminals all over the country, and it so happens that Django (Foxx) knows and can identify by face three of the fugitives Schultz is hunting at the moment. Schultz makes a deal with Django; if he can help him hunt down his three fugitives, Django gets a share of the bounty and his freedom. The arrangement works out well, but when Schultz finds out that Django intends to use both his new wealth and freedom to attempt to buy back his wife in the deep, deep South, he both fears for him and admires him, and decides to help him. Django reminds him Siegfried, the hero from the popular German saga of the Nibelungs, who went to great lengths to rescue his bride Brunhilde, and he now wishes to aid him in his quest. Together, they find out that Broomhilda's new owner is Calvin Candie (Leonardo di Caprio), a second or third generation plantation owner in Tennessee who has "diversified" his slave ownership; he trades them as mandingo fighters (sort of a much more brutal version of UFC) and as prostitutes. Candie fancies himself a connoisseur of many things in life; he claims to be a francophile but speaks not a word of French, and like many people of his kind he is basically a completely pretentious fool. Schultz and Django then plan an elaborate con to get Candie to sell Broomhilda to them, one which will appeal to Candie's vanity. Unfortunately, the possible fly in the ointment is Candie's longtime slave and effectively majordomo Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson), who is as sharp as Candie is dense. Things are on a knife-edge, and if it all goes south the two are looking at a very, very bloody confrontation.
As with most Tarantino films, he's managed to both garner praise and stir up controversy with the depiction of his chosen subject matter, specifically slavery and racism in the deep South. Filmmaker Spike Lee has decried the film as "disrespectful" to his ancestors, and other people have weighed in against the film's overall tone and depiction of its subject matter.
It's hard for me to have a truly informed opinion on whether or not the film trivializes or in any way disrespects the collective experience of African-Americans as I am neither African-American nor intimately familiar with the history of slavery in America. About the only claim I can make to being knowledgeable of African-American history is that I've seen Edward Zwick's Civil War epic Glory multiple times as well as several movies starring Denzel Washington or Will Smith.
What I can say, and this is something worth pointing out, is that there is no pretension on the filmmakers' part at posing historical discourse here. The anachronisms are the first clue, starting with the repeating rifle that nearly everyone and his brother uses in the film notwithstanding the fact that the device was actually invented in 1862 and only mass produced two or three years later, to Quentin Tarantino's favorite swear word: "motherfucker," which by many accounts was not popularized until the twentieth century. Again, to look for historical significance in this film is the same thing as likening Inglourious Basterds to Schindler's List, or even Saving Private Ryan.
While the film makes the usual statements about racism, what I found interesting was the slightest, almost imperceptible suggestion that the beliefs in which racism is rooted still exist among some people in today's world.
More to the point, however, Django feels valid as art because it tells a fantastical story audiences have never seen, at least not in this form. Again, to draw a parallel to Inglourious Basterds, its revisionist history is, in some ways, cathartic. The Jews never got to avenge their murdered loved ones and friends by killing Adolf Hitler. In fact, for all the people Hitler killed, nobody even got to lay their hands on him as he died by his own hands. This irrevocably annoying historical truth actually made Hitler's fictional death by machinegun at the hands of one of the Jewish commandos comprising the "Basterds" truly gratifying, and was the very embodiment of the revenge-fantasy theme. How many slaves were actually able to exact direct vengeance on the white men who oppressed them? I really don't know, but to my knowledge there weren't many, if there were any at all. Django simply transposes well-known story tropes from old Westerns involving revenge and gunfights, amplifies the violence, and that's the movie. It's a revenge fantasy, and to those harping on the use of the dreaded "n" word in the film, I have to say it's worth pointing out that just about every white person in the film who uttered it meets an extremely violent end. Tarantino scripts himself into a very brief role in the film, incidentally, and meets a predictable but nonetheless quite amusing fate. I bet he had a ball putting on a cockney accent.
In the final analysis, the film is hugely entertaining, even though I found myself wincing at some of the more extreme violence. Foxx's Django and Waltz's Schultz are certainly among the more compelling characters in Tarantino's roster, and diCaprio was outstanding as the foppish, brutally decadent aristocrat Candie. It is worth noting that Waltz's character Schultz contains echoes of his previous role, Hans Landa; apart from their German nationality, both gentlemen are murderously pragmatic sorts. This is not to say Waltz or Tarantino recycled the character, but there are parallels of sorts.
It's easy to get on board Tarantino's revenge thrill ride because he has created characters in whom it is easy to invest, and because between gunfights he peppers the scene with his now-trademark dialogue. It's nothing quite as eloquent as David Carradine's deconstruction of Superman in Kill Bill, Vol. II or Samuel L. Jackson's Biblical soliloquy in Pulp Fiction, but there are several moments worth watching again on DVD. In terms of the violence, it's fair to say that this film is not for the faint of heart (or, in the case of copycat murderers, the psychologically-impaired); while the sight of Uma Thurman's Bride slicing up 88 Yakuza members in Kill Bill Vol. I was decidedly extreme, here it's the quality, rather than the quantity of the violence that rather made me cringe. Suffice it to say, not even genitals were safe in this movie.
Still, for fans of Tarantino and utter catharsis, this film is an absolute must-see.
4.5/5
Django Unchained is the story of a slave (Jamie Foxx) who longs to be reunited with his wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) from whom he has been separated. He is being transported, along with several other slaves, in the dead of the night by slave traders when he is freed by a traveling bounty hunter who used to be a dentist, Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz). As a bounty hunter, Schultz is in the business of hunting down wanted criminals all over the country, and it so happens that Django (Foxx) knows and can identify by face three of the fugitives Schultz is hunting at the moment. Schultz makes a deal with Django; if he can help him hunt down his three fugitives, Django gets a share of the bounty and his freedom. The arrangement works out well, but when Schultz finds out that Django intends to use both his new wealth and freedom to attempt to buy back his wife in the deep, deep South, he both fears for him and admires him, and decides to help him. Django reminds him Siegfried, the hero from the popular German saga of the Nibelungs, who went to great lengths to rescue his bride Brunhilde, and he now wishes to aid him in his quest. Together, they find out that Broomhilda's new owner is Calvin Candie (Leonardo di Caprio), a second or third generation plantation owner in Tennessee who has "diversified" his slave ownership; he trades them as mandingo fighters (sort of a much more brutal version of UFC) and as prostitutes. Candie fancies himself a connoisseur of many things in life; he claims to be a francophile but speaks not a word of French, and like many people of his kind he is basically a completely pretentious fool. Schultz and Django then plan an elaborate con to get Candie to sell Broomhilda to them, one which will appeal to Candie's vanity. Unfortunately, the possible fly in the ointment is Candie's longtime slave and effectively majordomo Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson), who is as sharp as Candie is dense. Things are on a knife-edge, and if it all goes south the two are looking at a very, very bloody confrontation.
As with most Tarantino films, he's managed to both garner praise and stir up controversy with the depiction of his chosen subject matter, specifically slavery and racism in the deep South. Filmmaker Spike Lee has decried the film as "disrespectful" to his ancestors, and other people have weighed in against the film's overall tone and depiction of its subject matter.
It's hard for me to have a truly informed opinion on whether or not the film trivializes or in any way disrespects the collective experience of African-Americans as I am neither African-American nor intimately familiar with the history of slavery in America. About the only claim I can make to being knowledgeable of African-American history is that I've seen Edward Zwick's Civil War epic Glory multiple times as well as several movies starring Denzel Washington or Will Smith.
What I can say, and this is something worth pointing out, is that there is no pretension on the filmmakers' part at posing historical discourse here. The anachronisms are the first clue, starting with the repeating rifle that nearly everyone and his brother uses in the film notwithstanding the fact that the device was actually invented in 1862 and only mass produced two or three years later, to Quentin Tarantino's favorite swear word: "motherfucker," which by many accounts was not popularized until the twentieth century. Again, to look for historical significance in this film is the same thing as likening Inglourious Basterds to Schindler's List, or even Saving Private Ryan.
While the film makes the usual statements about racism, what I found interesting was the slightest, almost imperceptible suggestion that the beliefs in which racism is rooted still exist among some people in today's world.
More to the point, however, Django feels valid as art because it tells a fantastical story audiences have never seen, at least not in this form. Again, to draw a parallel to Inglourious Basterds, its revisionist history is, in some ways, cathartic. The Jews never got to avenge their murdered loved ones and friends by killing Adolf Hitler. In fact, for all the people Hitler killed, nobody even got to lay their hands on him as he died by his own hands. This irrevocably annoying historical truth actually made Hitler's fictional death by machinegun at the hands of one of the Jewish commandos comprising the "Basterds" truly gratifying, and was the very embodiment of the revenge-fantasy theme. How many slaves were actually able to exact direct vengeance on the white men who oppressed them? I really don't know, but to my knowledge there weren't many, if there were any at all. Django simply transposes well-known story tropes from old Westerns involving revenge and gunfights, amplifies the violence, and that's the movie. It's a revenge fantasy, and to those harping on the use of the dreaded "n" word in the film, I have to say it's worth pointing out that just about every white person in the film who uttered it meets an extremely violent end. Tarantino scripts himself into a very brief role in the film, incidentally, and meets a predictable but nonetheless quite amusing fate. I bet he had a ball putting on a cockney accent.
In the final analysis, the film is hugely entertaining, even though I found myself wincing at some of the more extreme violence. Foxx's Django and Waltz's Schultz are certainly among the more compelling characters in Tarantino's roster, and diCaprio was outstanding as the foppish, brutally decadent aristocrat Candie. It is worth noting that Waltz's character Schultz contains echoes of his previous role, Hans Landa; apart from their German nationality, both gentlemen are murderously pragmatic sorts. This is not to say Waltz or Tarantino recycled the character, but there are parallels of sorts.
It's easy to get on board Tarantino's revenge thrill ride because he has created characters in whom it is easy to invest, and because between gunfights he peppers the scene with his now-trademark dialogue. It's nothing quite as eloquent as David Carradine's deconstruction of Superman in Kill Bill, Vol. II or Samuel L. Jackson's Biblical soliloquy in Pulp Fiction, but there are several moments worth watching again on DVD. In terms of the violence, it's fair to say that this film is not for the faint of heart (or, in the case of copycat murderers, the psychologically-impaired); while the sight of Uma Thurman's Bride slicing up 88 Yakuza members in Kill Bill Vol. I was decidedly extreme, here it's the quality, rather than the quantity of the violence that rather made me cringe. Suffice it to say, not even genitals were safe in this movie.
Still, for fans of Tarantino and utter catharsis, this film is an absolute must-see.
4.5/5
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)