Skizzerflake's Movie Ramblings - Reviews of the Stuff I See
 

Jurassic World

It's hard to resolve the conflict between the part of me that rolls my eyes sarcastically at summer blockbusters, against the part that wanted to see the latest in the Jurassic series. Looks like the 9 year old won out this time. What do I need to say? You already know what happened. After all of the disaster, death and chaos that came from previous dino reboots…will somebody actually do it again? Is there somebody out there with enough scientific knowledge to re-create dinosaurs but who is also stupid enough to think that THEY can make a big enough fence? Stupid enough to think that the dinosaurs won’t escape and wish to feed upon thousands of also dumb-ass tourists who are naive enough to go there after the previous movies? Above all, are they stupid enough to make a bigger, badder version of T Rex through some sort of evil genetic engineering? As you have probably guessed from the trailers, the answer is to all of these questions is a resounding YES; there are dumb enough scientists to do this and dumb enough tourists to pay thousands to go to the Disneyworld of reptiles.

Not only that, but in one of those classic Spielberg conceits (families with complex issues), there’s also a mom with a troubled marriage who sends her kids to the island to be squired around by an estranged family member Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) who works as an exec in the park, and is way to busy working to really spend any “quality time” with her nephews. Meantime, in another plot line, there’s an evil defense contractor Hoskins (a very rotund Vincent D’Onofrio) who wants to develop an assault squad of,,,guess what,,,trained dinosaurs, to clean out hot spots in the Middle East. Save American lives, he says, send velociraptors into Fallujah and they will just eat all the radicals and there will be no American body bags or weeping widows. And just WHO will be the likable character in this movie? Have you not guessed? None other than Owen, played by everybody’s favorite goofy, courageous, likable actor, Chris Pratt. Owen has trained some raptors (a little bit anyway) a he's a desirable property for the weapons guy.

You have probably guessed that the dinos get out, people are on the dinner menu, there’s lots or running, screaming and crashing (one of the staples of summer movies), some of the main characters will make it, some won’t. There will be a small (very small) amount of romantic spark between two of the characters (guess who…one is NOT D’Onofrio). There will also be some sort of reassuring ending, possibly with a hint of a sequel, lots of butts in theater seats and big $$$$ figures coming up on the box office. Nothing in the movie is a surprise. I don’t have to worry about spoilers because everybody already knows what happens.

Did I like it? The movie was directed by Colin Trevorrow, who was last seen in the very likable, small film Safety Not Guaranteed. He obviously watched a lot of Stephen Spielberg movies before taking on JW, Spielberg is one of the producers, and Trevarrow does a decent job carrying on the tradition. The movie moves quickly, not wasting much time on plot or character development, and goes right into what we all came to see, which is dino rampages. As for acting, does it really matter? As long as they can run and scream, they are good enough and this cast does that well.

I find Chris Pratt interesting. He’s sort of an old school Hollywood actor, not unlike John Wayne in the respect that he’s always the same character in all of his roles. Like it was with The Duke at the Alamo, Dodge City and the Chisum Trail, so it is with Chris Pratt in Parks and Rec, Zero Dark Thirty and now Jurassic World. When it was all over I did enjoy it, sort of. The FX are good, sounds are loud, there’s lots of dino carnage and when it’s over, it’s over and everything is OK for another day. I didn’t expect any more or less and I got what I thought it would be, so I walked out happy enough.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFinNxS5KN4

The Conspirator
 

The Conspirator

Every now and again, I like seeing a movie that isn’t full of Hollywood BS, special effects and made up history. We saw The Conspirator a few years back (2010) in the movies and I liked it’s no BS approach to a very dramatic story in American history. I saw that is is available on Netflix and had to re-watch it. The story is set after the end of the Civil War, when President Lincoln was assassinated in Ford’s Theater in Washington DC. As any history fan knows, an intense manhunt resulted in the killing of the assassin, John Wilkes Booth, some days later, and the roundup of the band of misfit co-conspirators he assembled for other roles in his deed. In addition, the woman who owned the DC home that was used as a meeting place by the conspirators, Mary Surratt, was also arrested on capital conspiracy charges and a warrant issued for her son John, who had fled to Canada. This movie re-enacts the arrest, trial and execution of Mary and the three other men who were hung with her. This has always been a dubious chapter in American history, with different opinions on whether she was guilty, whether she deliberately sacrificed herself to save her son or whether she was just swept up in the need to hang a bunch of people, especially after Booth was killed and could not be put on trial. The trial of the 4 defendants was unique in American history, as it was a military court martial of civilians, not a jury trial. The trial would have stood no chance of standing up to any sort of legal appeal in any other time period.

The Conspirator was directed by Robert Redford, who, keeps a calm and somber atmosphere right from the beginning up to the end as Mary’s guilt and inevitable execution approaches. Surratt is played by a very somber, dour and calm Robin Wright who seems to keep all of her emotions to herself, revealing very little to either her jailers, her lawyer or the military tribunal charged with determining her fate. Her arranged lawyer Frederick Aiken, played by James McAvoy, is young, somewhat naive and eventually horrified at the kangaroo court proceeding that will hang his client, apparently for the sake of publicly enacted revenge. Other luminaries of the era, including Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (Kevin Kline), Maryland Congressman Reverdy Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) and tribunal judge David Hunter (Colm Meaney) are portrayed quite well, at least as I understand the characters from history. Among the other conspirators, the Lewis Payne (AKA Powell), the man who nearly gutted Secretary of State Seward, is the most menacing. Played by Walking Dead’s Norman Reedus, his role is small but his menace is big.

There’s not much sense in talking about spoilers since anybody who took American history in school knows how this story comes out; little dramatic license is taken. The movie is quite graphic about portraying the hangings of the conspirators, based on the numerous period photos that documented the event. The entire movie has an air of authenticity; it’s a carefully staged re-creation of those events. The acting, by all of the cast, is quite good, reminding me much more of a stage play than a movie. Redford’s role as director is completely invisible; there’s no style there at all except a straightforward telling of a story that is extremely dramatic itself. This chapter of history IS drama, if ANYTHING in the real world can be. Of course, it goes without saying that it’s highly recommended for Civil War buffs, but also for anybody that wants to spend a couple hours with a real story, done well. By the way, Mary’s actual house still sits on 604 H Street in DC, in a part of town that’s now a withering Chinatown, surrounded by encroaching offices and condos. It’s a restaurant called the Wok and Roll.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...ratt_House.JPG



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XhOq5zp6j4

Infinitely Polar Bear

Our latest viewing, well outside the usual summer blockbuster fare, was Infinitely Polar Bear. This Sundance/Indie movie was written and directed by Maya Forbes, who also worked on Monsters and Aliens and The Rocker. I found myself in a quandary, having thought that the movie was well directed and excellently acted, but also not liking it very much, mainly because of the characters. The stars of the movie are Mark Ruffalo (Cameron) and Zoe Suldana (Maggie) and Imogene Wolodarsky and Ashley Alderheide (their young daughters).

It’s the late 70’s and Cameron is the offspring of a well connected and rich family in Boston. He’s a guy who devolved from a charismatic and mercurial hippie years before into a serious mani-depressive, complete with chemical habits. In 1978, he’s out of the hospital, after having spent some time as a near zombie due to over-medication. He has now been moved to lithium carbonate and is somewhat able to function in the world. Maggie is also a former part of his world, his ex-wife, who fell in love and married him when he was an impulsive hippie, but subsequently split from him as he became more dysfunctional. He wants to re-connect with her and their two energetic daughters. Maggie wants to go to grad school in the gnarly, scary New York of 1978 and thinks that a tiny apartment there would not be a good place for her daughters. The “obvious” solution to this (or at least it would be in a “feel good” movie) is for Cameron to take care of the kids while Maggie is in school; she will come home on weekends. Cameron has some very minimal support from his rich family and nothing else to do, so he sees this as a way to get back with Maggie. So…the kids move in and Maggie goes off to school.

Suffice to say, life with Cameron is a roller coaster. He’s not real good at sticking with his psych meds so he goes on marathon ups and downs. He might clean up and redecorate his entire apartment in a morning or he might stare at the walls for days. He loves his daughters, but his idea of parenthood is to get them all wound up or cuss at the top of his lungs at them and the world or god-only-knows what else. He begs his family for more money but they return icy indifference and disapproval. He correctly suspects that his patrician relatives disapprove of his mixed-race marriage and kids; he’s probably right; they have little interest. If you can get past all this drama, he’s a decent guy with good intentions, but he’s also like a big 5 year old with too much caffeine and sugar AND a driver’s license.

OK, you say, what did I NOT like? What I didn’t like and found not believable as a plot line, is that Maggie, who seems like a smart and good person, would EVER leave her daughters in the hands of this crazy, irresponsible guy. Cameron’s fossilized relatives are not far off when they remark, “is this about feminism?” Not only does she do it once for 18 months in grad school, but after that, this careerist woman, expecting bigotry in hide-bound Boston, wants to take a well paying job in New York that will leave her with not enough time for her daughters, so she does it again, even after being called by police and welfare officials about his behavior. She needs meds as much as he does. That very major plot element made the story not work very well for me; it’s hard to imagine her leaving her kids in that situation. A small gripe…about two years pass in the movie and the kids don’t grow. Elementary school kids grow and change on a monthly basis, these kids seem to have some sort of a growth hormone lock.

As for my ratings, it’s a solid 3, but not more. The acting by Mark Ruffalo and Zoe Suldana is excellent, rising way above what I have seen either of them do before. The kids were also excellent, full of cheerful energy, giving you some hope that their characters will rise above their parents’ dysfunction. Production was zero-FX minimal, but excellent for the story that is being filmed. Direction is spot-on, believable and seemingly real. Sound quality is nasty, but OK for a low budget movie that’s mainly dialog; no surround FX needed. My big reservation, as I said, is that I could not give credibility to the plot. It’s a seemingly realistic movie but not a realistic plot.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1pCQS1H2Z0

I am happy when a history-based film (well, let's be honest - Civil War and/or Lincoln) comes out. I was looking forward to this one. I thought it was good. Very well-acted. Just not as good as I'd hoped. I don't know what I was expecting. I really don't. I wasn't overly fond of some of the casting choices (I thought Jonathan Groff as Weichmann was completely off - and do NOT get me started with the choice of Toby Kebbell as Booth - I know it was a minor role in here, but still.....). And I maybe interpreted it the wrong way, but the story leaned too much in favor of Surratt. I would've preferred something that would've allowed the viewer to make their own decision as to whether or not she really did it. I didn't really get that from this movie. It focused too much on what is thought of as the injustice that Surratt experienced rather than whether or not she was really guilty of something. And what I thought was odd was that it was based on the book The Assassin's Accomplice, which tends to do the opposite and lean more towards the possibility of Surratt being guilty of much more than people realize.

Now, I am not going to get into what I believe and don't believe. I just think Redford should have been a little less biased with the film. And if they used that book as inspiration, then they could have used any book - or basic history - out there and created the same thing.

Having said all of this, it is a good movie. Robin Wright is very, very good in the role of Mary Surratt. But she is one that is never even average, in my opinion. And I agree. It is a good movie for Civil War buffs, but it is also good for people just interested in general American history.

I passed by the boarding house on April 14th this year. I was driving out to the theater that night and I didn't even realize that I was in the neighborhood until I passed it. I never even gave it a thought to stop by there when I was there. Too bad when I think about it now. I was doing everything for the 150th this year.

I was OK with the way Mary was portrayed. The fact that she's so inscrutable for most of the movie worked. You could interpret it as guilt or that she was deflecting attention from her son or that she was a single mother hoping her kids would not get in trouble, but, in any event, the central drama is how pre-ordained the verdict was, in the spirit of "give them a fair trial and then hang them". Without John Surratt available to hang and with Booth dead, Mary had no chance, even though a woman had never before been hung on federal charges. I usually start rolling my eyes when a movie starts with "based on actual events", but this one was closer to real than most that make that claim. This story has a local resonance for me; most of the Booth family is buried close to where I live in Baltimore and I went to school with a Mudd who spent years in a quixotic quest to expunge the conviction of ancestor Samuel Mudd. You're right about the actor who played John Wilkes Booth; he didn't capture how charismatic Booth was, but that's another story. The story of the Booth family would make a great mini-series.

I see what you are saying with how they portrayed Mary, but what I really want to see is a film showing how everyone was treated. I understand why people may get more worked up over her situation (for lack of a better word), but an awful lot of people weren't treated fairly either (I could even argue as to why, at least, two others shouldn't have been hanged that day). And then I would also like to see the creators of such a movie question why some were treated so unfairly while others were completely ignored. And I never have a problem with Stanton and/or Johnson being portrayed as men who use their "power" to their advantage. Again, though, I won't go into how I feel. :)

I was going to go to the cemetery when I was there in April (I've yet to visit Baltimore, anyway). I was also planning on going to Bel Air. But things just didn't work out as planned and it never happened. Oh, well. What can you do about it?

Well, not to go too much more into it (as this is your movie review thread :) ), but I, too, would love to see a miniseries of the Booth family. I would LOVE it. But do you really think it would ever happen? First of all, there were others to that family whose stories could be told. Second, they all had lives before that moment in history. Third, I would like to see the post-assassination lives of the family members. Fourth, I want to see the youth of JWB. I want to see how they would portray his life. I want to see if it would be honest and, yes, (dare I use the word?) fair. We all know he didn't end up completely "right" in his mind, but what triggered this? But I think any series about this family would be unlikely to happen. I know there was the film "Prince of Players", but that is, essentially, just about Edwin. Do you know if there ever was anything else filmed?

Re: Skizzerflake's Movie Ramblings - Reviews of the Stuff I See
 

IMO, the early history is more interesting. JWB came from a very eccentric family background back to 18th century England. His father was quite a dose; one of the most celebrated actors of his era and an outrageous alcoholic. JWB was one of 10 kids, raised near Bel Air and in Baltimore in what's now Little Italy. 4 of his brothers and sisters died in childhood, and he had an intense rivalry with his more celebrated brother Edwin who used his influence to keep John out of northern theaters, hence his southern orientation. There is an excellent book on the family and John, My Thoughts Be Bloody, by Nora Titone. Most of the family (aside from Edwin) is buried in Greenmount Cemetery in Baltimore, John's grave is unmarked but next to the others. It's frequently decorated with Lincoln pennies, head side up, a local tradition.

Terminator Genisys

Well, we broke down and did it…saw the latest installation of the Terminator franchise. At this point, it’s managed a 7.0 on IMDB but a miserable 27% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes. In this installment, in 2029 John Connor (the savior/kid from the original movie) is still around. His mission in life is to prevent the launch of Skynet, a hugely massive iCloud on steroids and meth that actually possesses artificial intelligence which has decided that organic humans are no longer needed. Skynet is using a time machine to send back an Arnold Schwarzenegger clone to kill Sarah Connor before she bears Connor. Meanwhile future-Connor has sent back a friend and soldier, Kyle Reese, to protect Sarah. This is easy enough, however, until the time-travel demons intervene. Time has been altered, so now it turns out that Sarah has been protected since childhood by another Arnold, presumably the actual Arnold (who is showing his age), who has become rather paternal to Sarah. The overarching goal here is to eliminate Skynet, so the world can be safe until another sequel.

In case you have not guessed, who else would play the Terminator but Arnold. He is his usual Austrian accented monotone self (yes, he does say “I’ll be back” a few times), coming back from all sorts of dangerous situations, rescuing Sarah and Klye more times than you can count. Meanwhile we have those nasty T1000’s that are made out of something that looks like self-organizing mercury. Not matter how many bullets you shoot, how much you blow them up, burn them or reduce them to fragments, they always turn back into what they want to be. Now for the tough part. Sarah Connor is played by Emilia Clarke (Game of Thrones), an actress who looks NOTHING like the Sarah Connor of previous movies. I know that the prequel time line is supposed to be before the old movies and she’s younger, and yes, I know that Linda Hamilton doesn’t wear her age well and could not play the role, but really. Clarke isn’t the lean, buff Hamilton of 1984, she doesn’t bear any resemblance, doesn’t do anything that makes me think she’s the new/old Sarah…it just doesn’t work.

As you expect for a summer action movie, Genisys is dominated by running, shooting, stuff blowing up, and in this case, lots of careful animations of T1000 melting back into shape after being shot, eviscerated, decapitated or whatever. When it’s over, the past version of Sarah is safe for the moment, free to bear John, presumably with Kyle, so Skynet can be stopped in humanity pulled from the trash bin. The FX are great, action is continuous, you won’t be bored. That part is clear, but what is not clear, is anything else. This movie combines the Frankenstein theme of out-of-control technology with the logical absurdities of time travel. The writers laid it on really thick, trying to make clarity out of this mashup, trying to explain how the two timelines mesh, how all this makes sense, but they do not do that well. The plot and its machinations are a mess. Unless you are smarter than I am on time travel, you will have to get through the movie on the action and the resolution alone.

I did sort enjoy it, so it’s not a complete waste, but damn, what a mess. The acting isn’t any better or worse than you might expect but nobody there will be in contention for an Oscar. Arnold is Arnold, no more needs to be said. Jason Clarke is mostly pretty flat as John Connor; I don’t know why anybody would follow him as a leader. Jai Courtney is OK as Kyle Reese, but also a flat role. Emilia Clarke is OK, but nothing more as Sarah. I can think of a lot better reasons to be in a theater, but I’m guessing that reviving the Terminator once more for old time’s sake makes for a good box office.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNU_jrPxs-0

Mission Impossible - Rogue Nation
 

Mission Impossible - Rogue Nation

I guess I should give up now. I looked at IMDB reviews for Rogue Nation and see these “10” reviews - “Best Cinema Ever Anywhere”, etc, and I know that I’m outvoted. We saw it last night, and while I enjoyed it and was on the edge of the seat for 2 hours, I have to admit that “best movie ever” isn’t exactly how I would describe it. My quotable would be more like, “A little confusing, but not a bad roller coaster ride” or something like that. The damnation of being in the middle of the pack.

In case you’ve been hiding under a log, the IM force has been disbanded by a snarling crew of politicians who meet in a dark room with desk lamps shining on their faces, due to some minor blow back from previous missions, one of which left the Kremlin on fire. The CIA, led by nefarious Alec Baldwin (Alan Hunley) is going to subsume the IM force, including its superhero, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his wise-cracking crew William Brandt (Jeremy Renner), Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) and Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames). When the flick begins, the IM force is about to become goons in a room full of goons staring at computer screens.

Fortunately, just in time we have a new super-villain - Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), who is compiling some sort of massive amount of cash, assassinating world leaders and who is the leader of The Syndicate, a shadowy group consisting of a number of spooks from around the world, all of whom are thought to be dead….but they’re in The Syndicate now. We also have a British agent, the ravishing and deadly Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), who works for the Brits… or does she work for evil Solomon… or does she have her own agenda? We will find out. Most of the action centers around a super-advanced server farm in Morocco which plays host to critical information needed by the Syndicate, or whoever is about to defeat them. Needless to say, it will take a superhuman effort to stop this evil plot, but, even though the IM force is disbanded, you can’t keep a good bunch of pals from doing what’s right to save the world as we know it. You also can't keep Ethan from being superhuman.

I won’t tell much about how this works out but because it would be a spoiler and, because there are so many twists, double crosses, triple crosses, quadruple and quintuple crosses, that I’d need to fill many pages. I will say that, even if you don’t get all of the twists and turns, you always know that you should root for Ethan…he’s always the good guy, so forget all the rest. Will there be some romantic friction between Ethan and Ilsa? Maybe, but I could not get past either how robotic Ethan is and how deadly Ilsa is…that would make a strange bed scene. As for acting - really, what do you expect…no better or worse than it has to be to deliver the short lines. Not much acting goes on here, especially the Android known as Tom Cruise…just the usual clipped lines in an action movie. As for action - quite excellent, edge of the seat stuff, not as digital as it might have been, a lot of it looking like more traditional and dangerous FX and, quite good. As for plot, as I said, confusing, but really, all you need to know is that Ethan is good and Lane is bad. The rest is just there to confuse you. If you’re in the mood for a summer action movie, this will probably make you happy. I’m not one of the fan boys who will pronounce it to be the new Citizen Kane, but you could do worse, in fact, many summer movies have been much worse. I’ll give this one a solid 3.5. To be a 4, it would have to have some content, but the hyperkinetic relentless action keeps reminding you that you’re not in the theater for content. It does have at least one rubber mask scene, and it still has the great 10/8 beat Lalo Schrifin musical theme (recite to yourself quickly, over and over, 1-2-3 1-2-3 1-2 1-2 1-2). Writing and direction is by Christopher McQuarrie, who must have been a very busy man making this movie. Go and enjoy it.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmC6rZyByzk

Mr. Holmes
 

Mr. Holmes

Feeling overdone on “Summer Blockbusters”, this was the week to take in something different. Our local art house was showing Mr. Holmes, a new sequel to the old Holmes movies, featuring Sherlock at an advanced age, tying up the loose ends of his life and suffering from progressive memory loss. It’s 1947 and the 93 year old Holmes (Ian McKellen) has been retired for a while, is living a quiet, rural life, is trying to sum up his last case, but has memory lapses. He is living with a housekeeper, Ms Munro (Laura Linney) and her son Roger (Milo Parker).

This is a complex story, taking place in several different times; the movie cuts back and forth between them. When the movie begins, Holmes has returned from Japan where he was in search of a special prickly ash concoction that might help his memory and vitality, after previous potions have failed. That trip had complex origins, based on events that happened years ago, before WWII between Holmes and a Japanese man. His quest takes him to what remains of Hiroshima, where Holmes is horrified at what he sees.

Holmes is also very concerned about wanting to set the facts straight about his last case, which had been written up by Dr Watson (now deceased) with incorrect facts. Holmes also spends much of his time beekeeping, a pursuit that creates a bond between him and Roger.

In his last case, Holmes was contacted by a concerned husband who suspects something that is strange about his wife’s behavior. When Holmes shadows her, sees her buying poison, forging checks that allow her access to her husband’s money and generally appearing to be in preparation for murdering her husband. Seeing what she seems to be up to, Holmes urges the woman to patch things up with her husband, but this is not to be.

Back in the present, Ms Munro, seeing the approach of Holmes death, is planning to move to another situation, leaving Holmes and ending her son’s grandfatherly relationship with him. An accident intervenes, however, when Roger is found collapsed, having been stung many times and being near death. Holmes’ is also in obvious decline too, putting Ms Munro in a difficult situation. How do all of these plot elements resolve? Suffice to say, they do, in the style of a meticulous Sherlock Holmes mystery.

Mr. Holmes really is the antithesis of the summer FX blockbuster. It’s a quiet, methodical story that is just SO English. The English countryside where Holmes lives is beautiful in a quiet way that befits the style of the story and the movie. The director is American, however, Bill Condon. The only other film of his I have seen was the equally interesting and very English Gods and Monsters, the story of the last days of Frankenstein director James Whale. Cinematography (Tobias Schliessler) is also terrific in a low-key way. It’s beautifully lush but never distracts from the focus of the movie, which is the story. The same goes for the music (Carter Burwell), which fits so seamlessly into the film that you hardly notice it (meant as a compliment). There’s a lot to like in this film, if you ever liked anything about Sherlock Holmes. It’s a fine end to his sort of deductive detective work; a case where Holmes is the detective for the events of his own life. If you’re not quite ready to dive into Ant Man, if you’ve had enough of Mission Impossible and Tom Cruise, and are not optimistic about the Fantastic Four, if you need a break from all of that FX and fast-cut action, this could be the movie to give you a break. Based on my observation and the credits, it appears that Mr. Holmes had NO (repeat NO) digital rendering anywhere. Ian McKellen is terrific as the ancient Sherlock, made up to look even older and more wrinkly than he is in real life. Laura Linney, as usual, is excellent in an invisible sort of way; she’s an actor that you see but often can’t recall who she is; she disappears into a role. Milo Parker (Roger) is also amazing, a kid actor who really a seems to have absorbed a rather complex and subtle role. Mr. Holmes is a film based on a complex script, well acted, simple props, and basic theatrical make-up, as I said, the antithesis of a summer movie. I enjoyed it.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0G1lIBgk4PA

The Man From U.N.C.L.E
 

The Man From U.N.C.L.E

The latest chapter of the 60’s revival - summer movies - The Man From U.N.C.L.E is now showing in a theater near you. Hold on to your patooties, it’s time for another trip to the time of mod clothes, no personal electronics, cold war spies and big conspiracies. In this one, we have a prequel to the TV series of the same name, the setup of the two main characters, Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) and Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer) and the introduction of a third, Gabby Teller (Alicia Vikander), presumably for some gender balance. Written and directed by Guy Ritchie, TMU holds to the tradition of that time, having larger-than-life villains with world-threatening schemes.

In this case, the latest threat to the world is some post-Nazi bad guys who have a lot of smuggled Nazi gold and a scientist (Gabby’s father in fact) who have cooked up a recipe to make quick, cheap nuclear weapons. The CIA and the KGB are not on speaking terms, but both are scared sh*tless about this. They have arranged to have a link-up between the CIA’s soldier-turned-superart-thief Napoleon Solo and the KGB’s super-soldier Illya Kuryakin. Both want plausible deniability so the plan to have them work together is an even bigger secret. Gabby (from British Intelligence) is the link between the two of them.

The villain, in this case is, Victoria (Elizabeth Debicki), a slinky, well dressed viper of a woman, who is using everybody else to get her evil clutches on the plan for the bomb. As you probably expect, there is a big chase scene, people are knocked on the head or drugged and the most high tech gadget is a device with an antenna that makes funny noises. Oh, and by the way, in a major blooper, the cast keeps referring to the plans for the bomb as being on a “computer disk”, while it’s plainly visible that the object being referred to is a tape reel, but, I’m guessing that the writers assumed that younger viewers would not know what a tape reel is….right? It’s a strange blooper…I’m not old enough to have direct experience, but I know what a horse and buggy is so I’m guessing that a 16 year old would know what a tape reel is, especially in a movie that’s so full of retro-references. Another curiosity is the choice of a Nazi named Teller (father of Victoria) as the inventor of this bomb. As we know, one of the most well known defected scientists on the American bomb project was Hungarian Edward Teller, who definitely was NOT a post Nazi criminal. Why they chose this name when they could have picked something suitably German and neutral like Schmidt baffled me.

As you probably expect in a summer movie, characters are of the sort that can be fleshed out in a MacDonald’s commercial, dialog is minimal and clipped and the plot is predictable. The world has to continue at the end, otherwise how could there ever have been the TV series that this movie sets up? That’s always the problem with a prequel…you know right up front how it will end, in this case with a partnership between Solo and Kuryakin AND, the organization known as U.N.C.L.E.

Nevertheless, the movie is fairly entertaining. It drags sometimes, but it keeps moving fast enough to remind you that it’s summer. The amount of digital rendering is relatively small, since all of the cloak and dagger stuff is 60’s stye…no technology more advanced that a walkie-talkie and a tape reel (not a disk); no spacecraft or resurrected dinosaurs, but with plenty of car chases, even a slow-motion one with with the dreaded East German Trabants. My favorite part was the 60’s clothing and decor re-creation, women wearing those mod dresses with plastic mushroom shaped hats with little visors and guys with perfect “Mad Men” suits and hair. My other favorite re-creation is a race track scene with 60’s formula one cars. One car that passes by (not a formula one) is the current most expensive car in the world, a Ferrari GTO from the mid-sixties, which makes a cameo. These things are worth more than the budget of this movie, about 150 million. Nobody is going to take home any acting Oscars for this and the direction is pretty much by-the-numbers, but it’s not too bad for what it is, a retro exercise, well populated with period elements and a plot that makes you nostalgic for the good old days of the Cold War.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-x08iNZ8Mfc

The Gift
 

The Gift - Suspense, Old Style

Last night’s flick was The Gift, written and directed by co-star Joel Edgerton. The Gift is on old-style Hitchcock meets Film Noir sort of story, the kind where, within a couple minutes, you know that this story is not going to end well for someone. Just who it won’t end well for, and why, makes for an interesting, edge of the seat, low tech film that revels itself in tiny clues, suspicion and half revealed facts. If it were not set in contemporary Los Angeles, it would seem almost retro.

The story begins innocently enough, with cute couple Simon (Jason Bateman) and his wife Robyn (Rebecca Hall) relocating from Chicago to LA to advance Simon’s ambitious climb up the career ladder. Simon grew up in LA, so it’s a return to his old turf. They also seem to be leaving Chicago to get to a new environment and get a fresh start. Simon and Robyn’s recent past includes a lost pregnancy, a sensitive fact that is not mentioned at length, but which is important for her. While on a shopping trip to outfit the new house, the couple runs into Gordo (Joel Edgerton), an old friend from Simon’s high school who seems to appear out of nowhere. Simon seems reluctant to meet the ingratiating Gordo and seems to be covering up something about the past. Gordo, however, is bringing gifts, showing up at their house, being evasive about his life, impressing Robyn but generally making both Simon and the audience feel like there’ s a rising creep factor. Simon relates to Robyn that Gordo was referred to as the Weirdo in school and that it would probably be better if they kept some distance. Things get tense again when Gordo invites Simon and Robyn to a dinner party at his large, expensively decorated home. The other guests do not show up and subsequent events reveal that the home does not even belong to Gordo.

Months pass, Robyn is pregnant again, Simon has been promoted and Gordo is mainly out of the scene, apologizing in letters about the dinner party deception, but…he’s back again. Fish for an outdoor pond, given to Robyn and Simon by Gordo, die and their dog disappears. This is where it gets complicated. Gordon does seem to be very high on the creep scale, but then Simon is also evasive about what happened years ago. The more Gordo cranks up the tension, the more it’s clear that Simon has secrets. I won’t go any further than what’s in the trailer.

I thought this was an excellent, edge-of-the-seat thriller, well rooted in the tradition of Alfred Hitchcock. Your suspicion starts early, builds as the plot thickens and doesn’t relent until the credits roll. It’s Edgerton’s first try at full length directing and a fine one. Jason Bateman, as Simon, seems to share a lot of mannerisms and attitudes with his great TV character, Michael Bluth (Arrested Development), except that he’s not funny and his dark side is much more in evidence. Rebecca Hall, as the initially happy and progressively terrified Robyn, brings a lot of believability into both parts of her role…the happy wife and the scared, pregnant mother-to-be. Egerton really dives into Gordo the Weirdo, being at different moments, innocent, pathetic, scary and calculating. Having grown up as a fan of the Hitchcock brand of suspense as well as being a Noir film lover, this movie was really right up my alley. The action is slow, calculating and relentless, full of clues and false leads, violence and FX is minimal and the Hitchcockean end leaves you with questions that may or may not be answered. One of my tactics in watching a movie like that is to think that, in that situation, I would have behaved better than the characters and hence avoided all of this turmoil. I don’t know if that’s true, but I kept telling myself that until the guys came by to sweep up the popcorn.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3IiZU9JBuE

I'm really looking forward to The Gift; it looks like something right up my alley.

On the other hand, I have no interest in a PG-13 movie from Guy Ritchie so I'll skip The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

Nice reviews!

I like seeing that you've given "The Gift" such a high rating. I was afraid that it might be one of those movies that look really good, but then all the good scenes are in the trailer/commercials and the movie is actually very mediocre. So this makes me look forward to seeing it even more now.

Trainwreck
 

Trainwreck - A Judd Apatow Comedy

A distinct change from summer action and superhero fare, our last cinematic voyage was Trainwreck, starring and written by Amy Schumer with co-star Bill Hader. It was produced and directed by Judd Apatow, so if you are guessing that the raunch coefficient was fairly high, you’d be right. It’s sort of a Romantic Comedy/Horror movie, at least in my opinion. Anyway, “Amy” (played by Amy) has been convinced from an early age by her father’s philandering behavior, that monogamy sucks and has been out to bed-hop her way through life, being sure that monogamy will never entrap her. Her behavior is getting old, as you would suspect in a Rom-Com. She’s a journalist, writing for a fairly trashy but high-profile magazine, run by an insane bitch Dianna (Tilda Swinton), and her latest sink or swim project is to interview a prominent surgeon Aaron (Bill Hader), a celebrity with a scalpel who fixes the knees of half of the NBA and NFL.

As it turns out, Aaron is really a nice guy in addition to being a good surgeon. He’s the favorite of LeBron James (playing himself) and other sports stars. He doesn’t have a celebrity personality and genuinely wants to do a good job, a big surprise to Amy. Some sparks start to fly, and before long Amy is adding Aaron to her long list of bed partners….but this one’s sorta different. Unlike most of her partners, Aaron likes her as a person and doesn’t seem to be just exploiting her for utilitarian, impersonal sex. Amy doesn’t understand that very well, since she’s used to sex being quick and dirty, with nothing additional to complicate her cynicism. As you probably expect in a Rom-Com, the relationship has to get complicated before anything can be resolved; this Rom-Com doesn’t change that convention. Amy’s conventional sister is encouraging her to settle down and Aaron wants more commitment. Amy doesn’t know how to deal with that. You probably already know that these sort of formulaic movies have one of several predictable outcomes, but in the name of not spoiling, I won’t say which one it is.

Did I like it? Well, sorta yes, sorta no. When I said that it’s a Rom-Com/Horror movie, what I meant is that, if you did date or like Amy, your life would become a horror. She’s such a destructive and self destructive character that, all through the movie, I wanted to run up on screen, grab Aaron by the elbow, and drag him off screen, away from Amy…send him back to fixing sports knees. I don’t know much about Amy Schumer personally, don’t know if she’s doing the time-honored thing of writing a character who’s like her, but damn….if she is, I wouldn’t put it out in public. She’s not a serial killer or anything like that, but she IS about the last person I would want to date. Life would be a perpetual drama. Characters like that populate the world of Judd Apatow, who seems to run a University of Dysfunction, but Amy IS quite a dose. I enjoyed the laughs in the film, Amy plays “herself” quite well, and, as usual, Bill Hader does an excellent job of creating a character, although I do miss him as Stefon and Vincent Price on SNL. The rest of the cast is OK and I can forgive the wooden acting of the sports guys playing themselves. I would not rush to the theater to see this, but it’s amusing enough if your expectations are not too high. It’s a solid 2.5 on my scale, if that ambivalence makes any sense at all. Rotten Tomatoes has it as an 85 for critics and 74 for users but that seems like quite a stretch to me. I’d be somewhere in the 50’s.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MxnhBPoIx4

The Visit
 

The Visit - Is M. Night Shyamalan really back?

It’s been a while since the auteur sometimes known as “Midnight Shyamalan” has been present and accounted for. Way back in the early 2000’s, he scored several big hits, especially with The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs, all movies laden with strangeness, clues, foreshadowing and twisty endings. After those hits, things started to turn sour and subsequent movies didn’t do so well. His latest, The Visit, gets off to a strange start when a single mom, abandoned suddenly by her “loving husband” several years ago, sends her kids packing, with cameras computers and Amtrak tickets, to spend a week with her parents while she parties on a cruise ship. They are to spend a week with her parents in Nowhere, Pennsylvania, way out on the farm in an old house, in the winter and fog. “Mom” (Kathlyn Hahn) has not spoken to her parents in 15 years after some sort of mysterious, acrimonious break, but thinks that her kids need to get to know them. Hmmmmm. Her kids are amateur videographers, making a movie about their trip, somewhat like what Shyamalan did when he was a kid. The grand parents are well regarded people who do volunteer counseling in a local hospital.

Being a “Midnight” film, you probably already know that things are not going to go well. The old folks are welcoming, cookie baking, wood chopping retirees, with a nice old historic house in the woods, no TV, no cable, no cell phone reception, but somehow there is internet in the house so the kids can Skype their partying mom. Well….things just go downhill from there. There’s nothing to do and the house rules are lights out at 9:30, doors locked, no going outside your room. It quickly becomes apparent to the kids (who are documenting all this in their movie) that the old folks are really strange. “Nana” creeps around on all fours, runs naked around the house after dark and Pop-Pop saves his poopy diapers in a pile in the barn. It only gets worse from there as the fiction that they are well adjusted retirees evaporates while the kids still have 6 days to go. Some discussions between the kids and the grandparents reveal that Grandma is in early dementia, suffering from “sundowning”, which causes her to get weird at night (hence the 9:30 lights out rule). Pop-Pop is incontinent, and somewhat obsessive. Yeah, but….that’s only the beginning. Crazy grandparents, out in the country, nobody knows you’re there, Mom’s on the party cruise…the kid’s movie is not going to be fun. As you might expect from a Shyamalan movie, there will be a twisty ending that resolves all of the strange clues that you’ve been trying to figure out.

Is Shymalan back? Did you ever like his old movies? Well, I did like Sixth Sense for one viewing (once I knew the end, there was no need to see the movie again) and enjoyed Signs. Those and The Village were filmed partially around Doylestown, PA and Delaware Valley College, a place that’s familiar to me, so I had some interest there. Today’s question, however, is whether I liked The Visit. No that much really. It’s sorta tense, but the thrills are mainly of the cheap bump-in-the-night sort. The plot had very little credibility, like what mom would really send her kids off like that after a 15 year break, to parents she hasn’t even spoken to? The grandmom’s problem, sundowning, is a real problem for people with dementia, but it begins at sundown, which comes about 6:00 in southern PA in the dead of winter, not at 9:30. The house is completely off the grid, but the kids are Skyping their mom. When it does become clear what’s going on, that’s just a cheap horror movie device too. I expected better, but didn’t get it. The horror component just isn’t that scary and the plot is full of holes. Acting by the kids (Olivia DeJonge and Ed Oxenbould) is the best part of the movie; they are good at being terrified. The old folks, Nana and Pop-Pop are competent in their creepy decay and Mom is adequate at being a jerk. I found a lot of the super close-up, first person, shaky-cam cinematography (presumably the kid’s video footage) to be really annoying, without any benefit to the story. A more solid, conventional approach to the story, with conventional cinematography would have made a better movie. The movie got many more audience laughs than it did screams. Oh well, not this time for Midnight. I’m giving this one a 1.5. I’ve seen worse, but not this year.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_j1eFy0zp4

Black Mass - Is Johnny Depp back?
 

Black Mass - Is Johnny Depp back?

In recent times, I have seen several of those web sites that draw you in from Facebook, and a couple of them have had lists of Hollywood actors who have become box office poison. Johnny Depp had entered those lists, so he needs a movie that can be a comeback. If I’m right, Black Mass might be the beginning of a comeback…probably not the whole thing, but a good start. In Black Mass, Depp plays real-life South Boston Irish gangster Whitey Bulger, a guy who challenged the Italian mob for control of various vices in Boston several decades ago. Bulger not only challenged them on the street, but also became an FBI informer, feeding them information they could use to bring down the Mafia. In addition, Bulger’s brother was a leading Massachusetts politician, a respectable, Kennedy-esque guy who shares meals with Whitey on holidays but does not share any of his behaviors or “friends”. At this point in real life, Bulger is serving multiple life sentences, having been convicted on several of his many murders.

Johnny Depp plays a cold-eyed Whitey, Benedict Cumberback is his respectable brother Billy, Joel Edgerton is John Connolly, a fellow “Southie” and FBI agent who recruits Whitey as an informer. Kevin Bacon also appears as supervising FBI agent Charles McGuire. The film was directed by Scott Cooper. My other experience with his films was Crazy Heart, from 2009 which I really liked. As gangster movies go, Black Mass avoids the whole Godfather thing, which placed these guys as operatic characters in an epic drama and tends toward something more like Goodfellas, namely gangsters as sociopaths. Way back, when I was studying clinical psychology, I recall that there was a distinction made between ordinary sociopaths, who are simply malignantly narcissistic, and have no normal human relations and gangsters. Murderous gangsters sometimes are a variation on “regular” sociopathy in that they have loyalty to family, the people they see as friends and often to a social group, in the case of Bulger, the Irish-descended people of South Boston. Bulger mostly confines his murders mainly to outsiders, gang opponents or associates that he sees as having betrayed him.

Black Mass is a fairly slow, tense, personal movie, with some brutal violence, but not an action film. The film focuses on Bulger’s relationships with family, his brutal business dealings, the slow and methodical investigation that brought down some of the organized crime that plagued Boston in the 1970s and 1980s and the very slippery slope that connected Bulger, and the FBI investigation that used him as an asset and that wanted to slam him too. Throughout the investigation, the FBI thought that Italian mob was a higher priority, but ultimately, they wanted to bring down the Irish once they were finished with the Italians. Bulger cooperated in order to rub out his opponents, while hoping to use the shady investigation to protect himself. The tension this breeds in the film is relentless, as is the malignant coldness of Bulger himself…violence is always just an instant away. That said, as gangster movies go, it’s not excessive on action or violence; most of the tension comes from the constant threat.

Because Bulger is an actual person who is still alive, it’s hard to judge Depp’s portrayal without knowing more about Bulger than I do. As a character in a movie, Depp’s version of him is cold, calculating, manipulative and scary. He’s not physically impressive but Depp’s Bulger has that fearless, unblinking and uninhibited attitude that can often intimidate people much larger and conventionally threatening. Every time he walks into a scene, you fear that something is about to happen, you don’t take your eyes off him and you breathe easier when he’s gone. As for co-stars, Cumberbatch and Edgerton tried to shed their British accents and act like Southies, with some success. In the authenticity department, none of the main characters seemed to have the right accent and all of them were somewhat different. Fortunately, I didn’t see the movie for the authentic accents. The narrative timeline is confusing sometimes as the film spans a number of years and includes flashbacks. At 2 hours and 2 minutes, the movie feels longer than it is, mainly because I was anticipating being out of the presence of Whitey…such a creepy character. I give this one a solid 4, and excellent crime story that avoids excessive reliance on action and car chases. It’s mainly an actors’ film, done quite well. I don’t know that I exactly enjoyed it as much as I thought it was excellently done. I was somewhat surprised to find see that our local cineplex had it on two screens simultaneously, that one screen was sold out and the one we got into was nearly full. I’m guessing that this movie will be a big hit and a relief to fans of Johnny Depp. Don’t miss if if you like these sort of stories.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CE3e3hGF2jc

The Intern
 

The Intern - Not too bad for comedic fluff

We have been seeing the trailer for this for several weeks and thought, maybe…time for a silly comedy. The Intern seemed to fit the bill. In this flick, Ben (Robert De Niro) is a retired guy who used to be VP of a New York company that printed telephone books. He retired well off, seems healthy and fit, but his wife died a few years ago, his kids grew up and moved and his carefully structured life just doesn’t work that well for him, so he looks for something else to do. Surprisingly, a new, hip company in Brooklyn that sells women’s fashions on the web is looking for some interns, with an eye to older applicants who can make them look less “agist”. Ben gets the job, finds himself in a rapid paced, web based environment, working for Jules (Anne Hathaway), the founder and owner of the company. Ben sticks out in this environment like a sore thumb. Circumstances intervene, however, and he ends up being not only an intern, but the driver for Jules. She is stretched to the limit, trying to keep the company going, and trying to somehow fit in time for her house-husband Matt (Anders Holm) and their young daughter Paige (JoJo Kushner).

In spite of her initial reservations, she finds Ben’s fatherly suggestions to be helpful. After all, the guy does have a lot of experience in life, is a really nice guy who supports her aspirations and his attitude helps her. The situation comes to a crisis, however, when Jules is pressured by her partners to hire a CEO who can run the nuts and bolts of the business. She really doesn’t want to share the running of the company, burned out or not. Increasingly, the surprising friendship of Ben and Jules helps her to keep her balance. When things get more stressful for Jules due to a family situation, Ben is there to help. In a side plot, the office masseuse also finds Ben and there are some sparks going on there.

A movie like this is somewhat like an old Chinese restaurant menu…pick one item from column A, one from the column B and select an ending….nothing very surprising in the plot, so it depends a lot on the characters and whether you like or identify with them. In this case, it works pretty well. Basically, Ben and Jules are both really nice people with good intentions. A lot of jokes center around just how culturally antiquated Ben is in this environment, but he’s also smart, likable and guileless so none of it seems mean spirited. The supporting characters are also good natured, so the whole story is fairly light, no big moral quandaries, imminent threats, death or destruction.

It works as well as it does due to the good chemistry between Hathaway and De Niro. Both seem like they are made for their characters and the fact that the acting doesn’t seem like much of a stretch doesn’t diminish the fact that it works. The supporting cast are as good as they need to be…no gravitas needed or given. The movie was written and directed by Nancy Meyers, also known for Something’s Got To Give, It’s Complicated, Father of the Bride and other similar light comedies. The writing and direction are both crisp, economical, to the point and work well in this genre. In spite of the fact that it’s not my genre of movie, once I decided to just sit back and relax, I liked it. It’s simple fluff, nothing very challenging, most of the plot is completely predictable, but it’s likable fluff. Being a movie with light aspirations and little originality but that completely hits its mark, I will give it a solid 3. I’d give it a 3.5 but for the sudden and (to me) not well fleshed out ending. I’ve seen other movies that attempted this sort of story and completely flopped…this one works. It ain’t D Day or Citizen Caine, but it is an enjoyable, light comedy.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZU3Xban0Y6A

The Martian
 

The Martian - It has the look of a big hit

We saw The Martian last night, and, as popcorn movies, go, I thought it was really quite good. The theater was busy and the audience even applauded a couple times, so I’d say that it’s going to be a big hit. The story is fictional, taken from the novel of the same name (by Andy Weir) and directed by one of my favorite makers of blockbusters, Ridley Scott. While I have not liked all of Scott’s movies, some of them, notably Blade Runner, Alien, Kingdom of Heaven and Prometheus, are all time favorites of mine, so I went with high hopes that Scott, as old as he is, still had the stuff to make another big one.

In case you have been hiding under the proverbial rock and have not seen a trailer, the story is about a Mars expedition in the not-too-distant future that goes bad. Matt Damon, the James Stewart of our era, plays Mark Watney, part of a team of astronauts on a Mars expedition. Unfortunately, he is blasted out of sight when a major malfunction happens on part of the installation during a storm, causing a large explosion. Thinking that Watney is dead and gone, the rest of the crew flees back to their ship and prepares for an emergency return to Earth. Only after they have left does Watney return to consciousness, dig himself out of the Martian sand, make his way back to the installation and realize that he’s really in a bad situation. He has no communication with Earth, not enough food and water to survive until the next expedition arrives four years in the future, and nobody even knows that he’s alive. His funeral has been broadcast on the media and the returning spacecraft can’t be turned around. Even if NASA knew that he was alive and got right on top of a rescue, it would still take too long. It’s obvious to Watney that he has to “science the sh*t out of this”. The first task is to communicate and let the world know that he is still alive, then to find a way to stretch a month’s worth of food into years.

This movie is a sort of Apollo13 on steroids….the situation is worse, the distance home is much greater and nobody knows that you are alive. Like Apollo 13, it’s also a movie that lends it self to that theme of all those eccentric technical experts in NASA pitching in, setting aside their differences, and finding a way to make the sort of innovation that turns copper wire and dried beans into lemonade…the great American talent for improvising in a crisis. NASA seems very dry and bureaucratic until they shift into this mindset. Then everybody is on their side. The story plays out, like most NASA missions, in the public forum. Everybody in the world soon knows about this and is rooting for Watney. If Watney gets back, everybody is a hero; if he doesn’t, NASA looks callous and inept. The Chinese government wants to get in on the rescue.

This is one of those movies that’s just made for Matt Damon. As I mentioned, as an actor, he is like the James Stewart of our era. When he plays an everyman, a nice guy who tries hard and just wants the simple things, he’s hard to beat in that role. Watney was made for Damon. The rest of the cast, notably Jessica Chasten, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kristen Wiig, Jeff Daniels, Michael Pena, Sean Bean and Kate Mara, are as good as they need to be, but this isn’t that much of an actor’s film. What it IS, is a gadget and effects film. The Martian landscape seems believable, the sets and props all have that crystal-clear spacecraft look and the big scenes of lift-offs, passing space vehicles, etc, are all really done well. It is a visually excellent movie and since it’s those outer space visuals that make the story work, that spells success in my book. Dialog is dense, full of techie jargon, orbital mechanics, and space craft system talk…. a lot of that “the camiflex has to interface with the blubloggon cortex” sort of talk. I don’t know whether any of it was technically correct or just made up, but it goes past you so quick that it won’t really matter whether the math is right. Both I and the audience seemed to enjoy the movie, suspense takes you right up to the end, and the FX are excellent. If you’re looking for a right-stuff sort of adventure, this is just fine.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ej3ioOneTy8

The Fog - The old one was much better
 

The Fog - The old 1980 version, not the 2005 do-over

One of my old favorite horror movies is The Fog (1980). Written and directed by John Carpenter in his early days, it featured scream two scream queens, Adrienne Barbeau and a newcomer (then) Jamie Lee Curtis. In addition Jamie’s mother, Janet Leigh is in there, as is Hal Holbrook as a haunted minister and John Houseman as an old sailer telling scary stories to kids in the dark. Carpenter wrote the excellent, minimalist, creepy piano music (the entire soundtrack) himself and only used about 10 notes and a couple chords. It’s a fine ghost story about a small town in northern California, that’s being haunted by ghosts of a ship crew from a century before. The story is loosely (very loosely) based on a true event when town people in Salinas lured a fog bound ship onto rocks so they could steal the gold it was carrying. The movie version of the story was filmed around Point Reyes and its terrific lighthouse, a “dark and stormy” place that lends itself to a spooky story. It draws inspiration from Poe and Lovecraft and features mainly unseen evil.

Lacking anything particularly interesting to watch tonight, I noticed that SyFy was showing the 2005 remake of The Fog. I’m generally wary of remakes, which often add characters, change plot lines, but try to cash in on the fame of an old movie. In this case, the crew of the remake stayed quite close to the original, being a nearly shot by shot do-over, using similar dialog and better special effects. It’s amazing, however, how someone can do that and still make such a worse movie.

The old one is low budget, simple FX (mainly fog machines and old-timey “trick photography”), dicey production values….a home-made movie that succeeds because, generally a ghost movie is better when you never see the ghost. The camera work is delightfully simple and to the point but it uses a wide screen to dwarf the characters and create this windy, foggy place that’s just right for ghosts. The newer one has better effects, more production values, more creeps and a larger cast but it's just awful in spite of that. It also wasn’t filmed at the Point Reyes Lighthouse, which is practically a character in the old version.

My hat’s off to John Carpenter, who didn’t know he was competing with a later version of his own movie, but still beat it by a long margin. We don’t generally think of horror movie directors as auteurs, but, in this case it works.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pG8KEGxEASU

Bridge of Spies
 

Bridge of Spies - Spielberg directing and Tom Hanks in top form.

If you are ignorant of these events, some spoilers follow here, so read up on the Cold War. This stuff is history and you should know the story already and most of the story is in the trailer anyway. This movie isn’t about not knowing what happened; it’s about just how intense these events really were. If you’re the least bit familiar with the late 50’s and early 60’s, you know about the darkest days of the Cold War and the various incidents that almost set civilization back to a radioactive version of the stone age. One of the most publicized of the events was the shooting down of an American U2 spy plane. For those that don’t know, at the time the US was ahead of the Soviet Union in technological spying, but the USSR usually bested the US in ground-level human spying. The U2 spy plane was a slow, ungainly, long winged aircraft that was designed to have near invulnerability by virtue of being able to fly higher than anything the Soviets could use to shoot it down. It took high resolution photographs from the near stratosphere, until, however, one WAS shot down, in 1960. The pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was supposed to detonate the plane and use a suicide device hidden in a coin to kill himself, so as to not be taken prisoner. Unfortunately for the US, Powers didn’t or couldn’t kill himself, was captured and put on trial for spying. Meantime, a Soviet spy, Rudolph Abel, captured in the US several years before, was rotting in jail.

Abel had escaped the death penalty in part due to his lawyer James Donovan and in part to put him “on ice” in case of the need to have someone to swap with the USSR in the future. Abel’s lawyer, Donovan, is the focus of Bridge of Spies. An insurance lawyer, Donovan was convinced to defend Abel back in 1957, in spite of venomous antipathy from many Americans who would have preferred that Abel be eaten by rabid jackals in a public square. In 1962, Donovan was called on again to negotiate a swap between the US and the USSR….Abel for Powers. This film tells the story of those two time spans, the Abel trial and the prisoner swap. Politicians on both sides wanted “their guy” back in order to lessen peripheral damage but could not be seen negotiating with each other, so unknown back channels were used, hence Donovan, being handled by the CIA. As we all know (or maybe not?), the swap was completed in 1962 and the prisoners were exchanged at the border between West and East Berlin. This was only a matter of months before the even more horrifying Cuban Missile Crisis, while the Berlin Wall was being constructed and while people from East Germany were routinely being shot dead in the streets, trying to escape the country.

One of the great skills of Spielberg as a director is his ability to have a movie that calmly tells a story, in a way that’s easy to understand and that brings things down to a personal level. That skill is quite evident in this story. Being told in several time periods, involving Cold War intrigue, the story could have been very complex, but ends up being quite easy, intended for an audience that might not know the horror of these events. None of the existential drama is lost. The grimness of that post WW II period of time in Germany is made visually and emotionally clear. By the time the movie is over, you feel relieved to just walk out of the theater without an imminent nuclear threat hanging over your head or uniformed goons waiting to cart you off to a prison camp.

Tom Hanks is really in his element in this story. He’s a lawyer, not a politician, has no real interest in dabbling in Cold War machinations, but he’s also a guy who considers it his duty to do the job when he’s called upon. Just why HIM, is no clearer in the movie than it is in real history, it’s like being hit on the head by a meteor, one of the breaks in life. Throughout the second half of the movie, Hanks portrays Donovan as a guy who is scared to death, having to cross into East Germany as people are being shot or sent to the Gulag, but also as a guy who never loses his wits and manages to bring off the swap.

This is a fairly straightforward history movie, done really well. The direction is good at every point and Tom Hanks excels. It’s mostly a one character movie, although Mark Rylance, who portrays Abel, is excellent in this supporting role. Other cast members are as good as they need to be but their roles don’t stand out like Hanks and Rylance. Visible effects are at a minimum; it’s mainly a dramatic movie, but the cold, gray awful-ness of the Berlin Wall and East Berlin in 1962 is really palpable. Bridge of Spies is well worth seeing, both as history and to see Hanks and Spielberg really pull out the stops. Don’t miss it.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBBuzHrZBro

Steve Jobs
 

Steve Jobs - What a story!

So…I’m sitting here writing this movie review on a sleek, shiny, light-speed Mac Pro laptop, using Apple’s Pages software, and occasionally looking up fact items on IMDB with my iPhone, using the “World Wide Web”. Why does that matter? It’s a disclosure. I admire the products produced by Apple, although I know enough to realize that behind the scenes of all those staged product rollouts, the media ads with their 5 word sentences like “It just makes things easier” and the print ads with lots of white space and a simple picture, there’s a wealth of angst, stress and contention behind the scenes. The author of a lot of that stress and contention, as well as the innovator, visionary, behind the scenes despot, promoter and media celebrity was Steve Jobs. In addition to co-inventing the Apple I and II, the first boxed-up desktop computers, the early Mac was the first graphical computer, the overpriced Lisa gave us the first graphical powerhouse, the Next computer gave us adaptable web pages like this web site, the iPod gave us “thousands of songs” and the iPhone gave us a library full of information in our pocket. Jobs’ popular persona evolved from the hippie entrepreneur to the manic corporate schemer and, before his death, to something approaching an information technology saint.

The new movie, “Steve Jobs”, isn’t really a conventional biopic narrative at all, but several capsule views of Jobs, mostly taking place in the moments leading up to three of those epic, staged product rollouts, in this case, the original Macintosh, the Next computer (during Jobs’s exile from Apple) and the iMac, the one piece Macintosh that brought the company back from life support, after Jobs’ return to the company he co-founded. It also fleshes out those three moments with flashbacks and flash forwards that add context to the intense dialog of the movie. It shows his reprehensible inability to acknowledge his out-of-wedlock daughter and his lack of financial support for her mother, in spite of his huge wealth. It also shows Jobs driving his employees, partners and original co-founder, Steve Wozniak, nearly crazy or reducing then to tears as he gets ready to go on stage, where he will appear relaxed and calm. We see Jobs hiring and eventually replacing John Sculley as Apple CEO, confronting his ex and daughter, verbally abusing his product developers but somehow managing to inspire enough loyalty that they stick with him and the company for a long time. It helps that they all became extremely rich too.

The screenplay for this movie was written by Aaron Sorkin, an interesting and inspired choice. Sorkin was also the writer behind The Social Network, but he is not a guy who revels in technology. In an interview I heard some months back, he admitted that he mainly writes on paper, only recently bought a computer and really has little interest in the IT world. In a way, that makes him a good choice as a writer. If he can understand the machinations of the IT world enough to write about it, the audience will probably understand too. The script for Steve Jobs is extremely rapid fire and intense, being wordy in the extreme, from beginning to end, with few lingering gazes, musical interludes or non-verbal scenes. There’s nothing in the way of action or noteworthy FX; it’s a dialog movie to its core.

Direction by Danny Boyle is just as intense as it was in films like Trainspotting and 28 Days Later. Scenes are fast moving, camera work is so close up that you see moisture in characters’ eyes and pores in their skin. The film doesn’t let up for a minute. It’s dramatic from the first moment until the credits roll. At that point, you’re exhausted. I don’t really know how much of this verbal conflict took in place in real life before a Jobs rollout, but as a dramatic device it really works. It brings you right into the conflicts that made Jobs what he was and illustrates the stress of making things look cool and easy, like an Apple ad.

The acting was excellent, high-voltage and intense. Michael Fassbender is amazing as Jobs. The portrayal doesn’t try too hard to make him physically look like Jobs, but that works and you get dragged into the drama in spite of it. Kate Winslet as Joanna Hoffman, his product development executive, and, in the movie, his pre-rollout “handler”, is also excellent as one of the few people who could live with Jobs’ intensity without withering. Seth Rogan is Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder, who bailed out early in Apple history, making an easier life for himself with his wealth, but who remained as part of Jobs’s behind the scenes life, at least in the movie script. Jeff Daniels also rises way above “Dumb and Dumber” as John Sculley, alternately challenging and being bullied by Jobs until he was also fired when Jobs returned to the company. This is really a fast moving 2 hours that encapsulates a lot of Job’s biography and computer history. You don’t get a more concise, dramatic, rapid fire story like this very often. If you like either computers or Jobs, this will be fascinating. If you hate computers but like intense, face to face drama, this film is also excellent. I hate to use such cliches but, I can sense some Oscars on the way.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufMgQNCXy_M

Loved your review of Jurassic World...maybe not necessarily the review, but I love the way you write. Made me want to read your entire review thread.

Thanks!

Spectre
 

Spectre - The latest in the never-ending James Bond series

Having lived with this franchise for a long time through various portrayals of James Bond, I have to admit that my favorite of the actors who has played him is Daniel Craig. He seems to have the right combination…he’s not excessively good looking, he carries his athleticism well and he seems psychologically edgy enough to be believable in his characterization of a guy who, basically, is a sociopathic killer who has found employment in the British spy agency.

As Spectre starts, Bond has gone semi-rogue, attempting to kill a guy from his past, causing a big ruckus in Mexico City during a Day of the Dead parade. Bond’s pursuit of the character leads him to a clandestine group, known as Spectre and the predicable encounter with the gussied-up widow of another villain. The shadowy head of Spectre, Oberhauser, has old ties to Bond that are revealed as the plot unfolds. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, in London, Bond’s MI6 handlers are trying to reel him back into the organization, just at a time when traditional spying is under threat from a new head of Intelligence, who wants to replace “feet on the ground” spying with a pervasive, real time surveillance regime that can see anybody, anywhere.

It’s about this time in the story, when Bond usually meets up with the “Bond Girl”, in this case, Madelaine Swann (Lea Seydoux). She’s the daughter of a former associate of Bond, younger and better looking than the widow. He meets her when he delivers the news of her father’s death. Questions about her father follow, as do furtive glances, romantic sparks and eventual high adventure.

What would a Bond flick be, however, without some sort of sneering, criminal super genius? In this case, it’s Oberhauser, creator of the electronic spy system that’s about to be sold to and implemented by the British government. Oberhauser has been conspiring with a bunch of mysterious guys with fast cars and expensive suits and arranging for strategic terrorist attacks that would convince the world that a global surveillance network is needed. He and his criminal buddies can manipulate it to their own nefarious ends, tightening the noose, threatening global control and obviously collecting the profits. Oberhauser is played by Christopher Waltz, one of filmdom’s more recent, soft-talking, creepy Germanic guys, a guy who reminds you of some combination of Dr. Strangelove and a sadistic Nazi.

Well…it is worth the hype? If you like these sort of movies, I’d definitely say yes. We all know, going in, that there’s going to be lots of action, shooting, blowing up stuff, car chases with super fast, expensive sports cars, as well as the inevitable romance with the Bond Girl. As I mentioned, I do like Daniel Craig as Bond and he does nothing to ruin his reputation here. Craig has said, in real life, that this is his last Bond movie. Is that true, or is this story out there to boost ticket sales? I don’t know. I guess time will tell. As for Lea Seydoux as the new Bond Girl, she does fine, isn’t bad on the eyes and brings something to the action aside from just set decoration. Christopher Waltz seems like a variation on the other characters I’ve seen him play and does nicely as a depraved villain. Ralph Fiennes plays M, Bond’s boss as well as the minor character needs to be played, as does Ben Wishaw as Q, Bond’s geeky friend in the agency, who sticks with Bond when he’s out of the loop on his rogue missions. The rest of the cast is fairly minor, consisting of bad guys, fall guys, scary assassins and other Bond associates.

Direction by Sam Mendes, who also directed Skyfall and The Road to Perdition, is on target. Action never lags, the pace is fast, but not frantic and the suspense continues to build, right up to the end. The cinematography is quite good, even with the large amount of digital FX that was need to juice up the conventional movie stunts. I never had the feeling that I was watching a pixellated version of reality…it all fits together quite well. If you’re looking for action, noise and lots of it, and don’t care much for subtlety, this is a fun movie. There are enough nods to the past to keep continuity. The only thing I didn’t like was the usual song, performed by Sam Smith. His voice is “fingernails on the chalkboard” to me, but at least it was over at the beginning. All told, the audience was quite engaged, as was I. There's nothing profound here, but it's enjoyable entertainment, in great form.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GqClqvlObY

Room
 

Room - A truly remarkable “little” movie, worth seeing.

Our latest cinematic excursion was to see Room, currently showing in some theaters, probably art houses. This movie is completely unlike anything else showing during the holiday movie season. It’s small, creepy and cringy, but not a horror movie. It’s dramatically intense, completely lacking in special effects, it has no big stars, only a small cast and it’s not for kids, even though one of the main characters is a young kid.

The movie stars Brie Larson as a young mother, “Ma” and Jacob Tremblay as her 5 year old son Jack. Ma was kidnapped at 17 and has been imprisoned in a small room for 7 years by the extraordinarily creepy “Old Nick” (Sean Bridgers). Her 5 year old son, apparently the son of Old Nick through rape, has never been outside that room. In those years Ma has done everything she can to give Jack some sort of life inside that 10 foot room, while dealing with Old Nick, who is both her captor and the person that supplies Ma and Jack with the necessities of some sort of life. Jack only knows Nick as a voice, who opens the door while Jack hides in the closet and Ma does what’s needed to keep Nick at bay.

The first half of the movie centers on Ma and Jake’s life inside Room, which for Jake is the entire world, with Room as its name. In mid-movie, Ma enlists Jake in a scheme to escape from Room and they succeed. Police swarm in on Nick’s house, arresting him, removing his threat and releasing Ma and Jake into a huge, confusing, scary world, like nothing Jack has ever seen. Ma, released from the need to be the entire world to Jack, 24 X 7, has to re-adjust to life outside and figure out how to go on. The world has changed over 7 years, the media jackals are hounding her for the “inside story” and she has to find a way to explain to Jack how Room has now been replaced by World. Her parents have moved on too and need to find away to bring Ma and Jack back into the family, after having given up hope. Jack, however, has had his universe suddenly expand and seems to be ready to move on, eager to see World.

It’s hard to know exactly what to say about this film. The basic plot is extremely creepy and sometimes it seems downright voyeuristic to be watching it. The story is SO personal and you get so engaged in the characters, that it’s hard to turn away, even though it seems like you should not be watching it as Friday night, movie and popcorn entertainment. Room is based on the book of the same name by Emma Donohughue, who also wrote the screenplay. It is fiction, not apparently based on anything true, although the story does have a distinct plausibility that adds to the creep factor. It was directed by Lenny Abrahamson, an Irish director not familiar to me. The acting performances by the main characters, Ma, Jack and her parents, are remarkable. I know that the Oscar committee doesn’t usually consider a best actor award for actors who don’t already have a track record, but Brie Larson definitely should be on a short list and the kid, Jacob Tremblay deserves something, because his ability to make a movie so dark and dramatic seems downright uncanny for a kid of his age.

Do you want to see this? It’s not an easy movie, not a lite-night out, but you will only rarely ever seen dramatic acting performances this good or intense. I recommend seeing it, prepared for what it is. When it was over, after I de-compressed and re-entered World, I remarked that, in a way, it reminded by of The Road, the only other similarly intense single parent and child story that I can recall. Unlike The Road, Room doesn’t bring us to the brink of extinction and does have a benign ending, but it is as close-up and personal as The Road. I have to give Room both a high and a qualified rating, an excellent movie, but not one to be taken lightly. My qualification doesn’t diminish it as a film, but does require a warning… “Not movie for easy entertainment”



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_Ci-pAL4eE

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2
 

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 - Also Known as “How to Stretch a 3 Book Franchise into 4 Movies”.

Most revolutions are started by idealists but are finished by despots - quote from My History of the World.

We knew, going in, that we’d be running the gauntlet through a horde of caffeinated 15 year old girls on opening weekend, but what the heck. At least it got the series over for me, unless the usual rumors of a sequel, prequel, Mockingjay on Mars, or whatever, comes true. It’s time for the 4th movie in a 3 book series to come to its conclusion. The Hunger Games series, in case you were hiding under a rock, left us at the point where the the revolution against the rule of the wicked President Snow was getting serious. Our hero, Katniss Everdeen, was chafing at being used as a media icon by the dubious and creepy Alma Coin, president of one of the districts, a leader who emerged with a hidden subterranean complex full of rebels and weapons in the last half-book of the series. The ever cute Peeta Melark had been retrieved from Snow, brainwashed to kill Katniss; he nearly finished the job.

As the new chapter begins, Katniss is nursing choke bruises, a damaged voice, and general trauma, but wants to get back in the fight. Things have gone really bad in the districts (bombings) but the revolution is starting to make people in the capitol nervous. Snow has a defensive plan to allow the revolutionaries into the outer part of the city, withdraw his supporters into the center and mine everything at the periphery, destroying the invading army. The mines are like a computer game on steroids, every sort of flamey, choppy, crushy, blow-upy thing that can be thought up will be used against the rebels who will try to run, shoot and jump past all this.

There’s a lot of latin in this story so, I’ll use one expression - “deus ex machina” to describe the fact that there’s also a set of creepy subterranean passageways that lead right to the capitol and Snow’s palace (why in the world would they build that?). Katniss’s plan is to take a small unit in there and get to the palace. Early in the movie she states quite clearly that her main goal is to kill Snow…plain out dead. She wants to avenge her dead family and friends and wants to end this thing here and now. Once all of these forces are set in motion, the rest of the movie is the playing of the game. If you notice, my quote from History is that MOST revolutions are finished by despots. Will that happen here? You know if you read the books but I’m not telling. You might also notice that the whole series is specked with references to ancient Rome, like a lot of names…Castor, Pollux, Cressida, Messala, Antonius, Caesar, Pugnax and Arelius. This story seems to have its parallels in the rise of the Empire and the end of the Roman Republic, but I think we’re hoping that it will go the other way in this movie

Well…all that aside, did I like it? Well…sorta. I enjoyed the endless action, which is well staged. The FX are well integrated into the story and the whole thing looks really good. You don’t get the feeling of a lot of animation stuck on top of green screen human action. The visuals are really good. It’s really a visually fun movie, that should look good in any format, well worth all the money spent on it. The film will certainly return boat-loads of tickets to the company. My admiration ends there, however. The script is padded and inflated. Making two movies out of one book seems like mainly a way to get all those legions of fans to cough up two ticket charges…not in service of the story. As for the acting, the main characters, Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence), Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), Snow (Donald Sutherland), Coin (Julianna Moore), Gale (Liam Hemsworth) and Haymitch (Woody Harrelson) are is about the same as in the other films, not doing themselves any disservice. It’s definitely a movie that’s about action, not acting. Most of the acting is about someone making a preachy speech or running and screaming, all the stuff of a TV series…professional craft, but nothing exceptional. My biggest question is about Plutarch (another Roman name), played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. Was this shot before his death or virtualized on film? I don’t know, but if he WAS virtual, real actors should be very nervous. Direction was by Francis Lawrence, who keeps the pace about right, knows how to construct a movie like this and who did no harm to his career. There was one sequence which really make me chuckle. In the tunnels, the group ran into some sort of mutants and had a big fight. It all seemed very familiar to me and then I realized that it looked like a zombie fight on the Walking Dead. Seeing that HG was shot in Georgia, I could not avoid wondering whether a Walking Dead crew did the mutant fight too. There was a lot of grabbing, biting and head stabbing…the usual components of a zombie attack.

So, this was my week’s piece of pop entertainment. I don’t think it was bad, but I wasn’t crazy about it, and I am glad that it’s over now and I really hope that it won’t spawn sequels. For better or worse, let the series stand. Judging by the noise in the theater, the Hunger Games fans were quite pleased, so I guess the producers did their jobs right. I give it a solid 3. Everybody did their jobs, the look was good, the fans were pleased, but it would not rise above that.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-7K_OjsDCQ

Trumbo
 

Trumbo - Trouble in Hollywood

Our latest outing was to see Trumbo, an excellently witty film about the eccentric writer Dalton Trumbo, a prolific movie writer who was driven out of Hollywood and blacklisted during the McCarthy era for communist associations. It follows his years “ghosting” movies and his eventual return to being credited under his own name. Trumbo, like many idealistic people in the 1930’s, had dallied with communist sympathy at a time when many in the US were in sympathy with the communists during the horrific Spanish Civil War in their losing fight against the Facists, who were a proxy for the Nazis. Some years later, Trumbo joined the Communist Party USA when the US had an alliance with the Soviet Union during WW II, but he was never really very interested in global politics.

A few years later, however, when the Red Scare hit, Trumbo found himself being written out of Hollywood by the likes of Hedda Hopper, John Wayne and other actors who “gave up names” and wrapped themselves in flags in order to save themselves. In a moment, Trumbo found himself unemployable, disgraced and in federal prison. Ultimately, the purge netted exactly zero people convicted of any crimes like espionage or sabotage, but many people’s lives were ruined by the blacklisting and publicity. During his ban, however, Trumbo and a number of other writers made a modest living by writing movies that were credited with fake names, often low-budget cheapies. This film re-enacts that period, up to when Trumbo got his name back with visible support from Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger. Trumbo went on to write some of the classics of that era, including Spartacus, Exodus, Roman Holiday and Hawaii.

Trumbo is portrayed quite accurately, doing most of his writing in the bathtub with an IBM typewriter on a platform, accompanied by cigarettes, a 5th of whiskey and a bottle of amphetamine. He was a six pack per day smoker. He wrote in marathon, sleepless binges and could crank out a film in several days. To call him eccentric would be an understatement.

Portraying a character like this would be an interesting challenge. The job went to Bryan Cranston, a guy who’s been around in a lot of movies and TV shows over the years, but is best known for his troubled father roles, where he’s a smaller than life/larger than life kind of guy. We’ve seen him change from the hen-pecked dad in Malcolm in the Middle to the cancer-ridden business failure Walter White and then seen him morph into the uber-badass Heisenberg, king of the New Mexico meth market in Breaking Bad. In Trumbo, once again, he’s trying to keep his family supported while he indulges his eccentricity, seemingly a perfect role for Cranston who jumps in and chews the scenery. I do hope he gets an Oscar nomination. The supporting cast includes Diana Lane as his long-suffering, but loyal wife Cleo, Helen Mirren as the disgusting harpy Hedda Hopper and Louis C. K. as a fellow blacklisted writer Arlen Hird. Real characters portrayed include Edward G. Robinson, John Wayne, Otto Preminger, Louis B Mayer and Kirk Douglas, often interspersed between actual cuts from their movies. Jay Roach was the director, who’s known for producing and directing comedies like the “Fockers” movies, Austin Powers, Borat and others.

I really enjoyed this movie. It could have been a preachy morality tale, but I can’t imagine how you would do that with such an irreverent character as Dalton Trumbo. He seemed to think of life as a bad movie script, maybe a comedy or tragedy but also maybe trashy junk, best taken without too much high drama but a lot of booze and tobacco. It would kill his spirit to make him into a heavy character or a victim. Roach and Cranston really make that work. The film keeps the tone light, while not missing the inherent horror of those times, keeps up the pace and is quite enjoyable. It had the feel of a story that needed to be told; you want to applaud at the end; some people in the theater did. Most of the blacklisted characters in the movie are largely forgotten now, and mainly were writers. Most of the actors of that time managed to do what they needed to do to stay in the business, often at the cost of betraying friends in sworn testimony. It was not a good time, but it makes for an excellent movie that never loses its light touch.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0dZ_2ICpJE

Re: Skizzerflake's Movie Ramblings - Reviews of the Stuff I See
 

Good write ups. have you thought about starting your own blog?

Re: The Conspirator
 

Never even heard of this movie, but your review has piqued my interest and the subject matter sounds really interesting I may have to add it to my watchlist.

Thanks. I just started doing this and it took me by surprise, don't have a plan.

Spotlight
 

Spotlight - A movie in the tradition of newspaper expose movies

Spotlight is the latest in a series of one-word-title, excellent, late year movie releases that have included Trumbo and Room. Newspaper and broadcast expose movies have a long history in film. If the expose is about a real story, as in this case, they have inherent drama and often are a gift to a script writer who can take a dramatic story that’s pretty much already written and “rip it from the headlines”. These movies can be fact based like All The President’s Men, Good Night and Good Luck, or can be somewhat inspired by a version of truth like Network, Citizen Caine, Front Page and The China Syndrome. The latest offering is Spotlight, sadly, a true story about reporters at the Boston Globe who uncovered the pervasive scandal of child sex abuse by Catholic clergymen that was covered up by higher officials in the church. Spotlight was an investigative reporting unit at the Globe that had the luxury to spend a lot of time and effort on a big story, in this case the 2001 story of an individual Catholic priest who abused a minor and the subsequent cover-up of the incident by Cardinal Law (names are named in this movie). As the investigation progresses, Spotlight finds that this story is just tip of a huge iceberg, a pattern of abuse by priests in different places, as far back as the information goes.

Hints and small stories about abusive priests had surfaced for many decades, but had been treated as isolated events to be dealt with internally by the church, which made a practice of transferring the priests to different cities and parishes, covering the story in layers of church hierarchy and doing nothing else. It didn’t help that citizens and police didn’t intervene, having spent their lives being told about how virtuous the church was. There were a lot of people with dirty hands. Settlements were made with individual victims, documents were sealed and gag orders were signed. Lawyers, victims and people who knew victims were kept in the dark, thinking that their case was unique.

In this movie, a new boss at the Globe, Marty Baron (Liev Shreiber), assigns the four reporter Spotlight unit to investigate the story. The unit consists of reporters Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), Robby Robinson (Micheal Keaton), Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams) and Steve Kurkjian (Gene Amoroso). Resistance starts immediately. Baron is from New York, is Jewish, and doesn’t appreciate just how essential deference to the church is in heavily Catholic and Irish Boston; he’s seen as an outsider with a grudge. The unit, however, is a known factor in Boston and their work commands respect. Once the facts, denials and innuendoes begin to pile up, the story, which is not public yet, starts to acquire momentum among Globe management, including publisher Ben Bradley Jr (John Slattery) who realize that they are on to something really big that goes way beyond a few abusive priests in Boston, as if that were not bad enough. Eventually, a number of newspaper staff realize that they had hints and small stories about this for many years, but the pieces had not been assembled and the practice continued unreported.

A movie like Spotlight has built-in drama. Any of us who were not hiding under a rock in 2002 recall what a shocking story this was, so a film like this doesn’t have to do much other than stay on course and tell the story. Spotlight does that very well. It has many of the long-used elements of newspaper movies like reporters telling their bosses, “this is a big story”, reporters running for cabs and stacks of newspapers running through printing presses. It is missing boys in nickers shouting out headlines on the street corner, but other than that, it could be a news movie in almost any era. The fact that the story is told so conventionally works well since you don’t have to figure out where the movie is going and can focus on the numerous details, names and events of the conspiracy.

Director Tom McCarthy has a short list of films to his name. The only other one I have seen was The Visitor (2007), an excellent small movie about a New York college professor who gets involved in the lives of 2 illegal immigrants. Direction and dialog is concise and well paced, and the development of this complex story is kept simple enough to not overwhelm a viewing audience. Acting is not excessively dramatic, but, like the rest of the movie, develops as the characters begin to realize just what they have uncovered. The performances are not virtuoso, but everybody is as good as they need to be. They don’t distract from the story with high levels of acting dramatics. There’s no action or FX in the movie. Most of it is dialog, close up cinematography and basic well done drama. I’m not seeing Oscars among the actors, but nobody needs to be ashamed. Spotlight is currently sitting at an exalted 98 on Rotten Tomatoes and 8.6 on IMDB. I have to admit that I would not put it that high, but I do think it’s an excellent movie of a sort that can be very dreary or preachy. If you’re tired of predictable holiday fare or overdone action movies, (or is that predictable action movies and overdone holiday fare), Spotlight is an excellent alternative.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwdCIpbTN5g

In The Heart of the Sea
 

In The Heart of the Sea - The Latest Ron Howard Film

Spoiler Alert - In case you never heard of this story…

When I was in school, I remember being twice assigned to read Moby Dick, one of the great American novels. It’s one of those books that stuck with me, but I don’t recall being taught that the quest for the great white whale was based on a true incident. The source this film was Nathaniel Philbrick’s book, In The Heart of the Sea, published in 2000. This story (well known at the time) was also adapted by Melville in Moby Dick. Back in 1820, whaling was a very profitable enterprise that could make ship owners, captains and crewmen a lot of money by supplying bright burning, smokeless whale oil to the lamps of Americans. It was also breathtakingly dangerous and difficult. Captains and crew members could retire at a young age, but only if they survived. The whaleship Essex was a small, fairly old ship, commanded by Captain George Pollard, an inexperienced scion of a family that had gotten rich from whaling, and his more experienced first mate Owen Chase. In the Heart of the Sea is the story of their voyage on the Essex, the sinking of the ship by an enraged sperm whale and the horrifying tale of the survival of some of the crew who resorted to cannibalism to stay alive for 3 months in small, open boats. Back in those times, cannibalism on the part of shipwrecked sailors (the “Custom of the Sea”) was a something that was well known in the trade, but NEVER discussed. The Essex crew survivors carried this with them for the rest of their lives.

For this movie, the story of the Essex is wrapped in a fictional narrative in which Herman Melville pays a visit to the cabin boy of the Essex, Thomas Nickerson, decades later. Nickerson has been traumatized all these years, has never told his entire story in public and seems to be ready to give it to Melville.

Like Moby Dick, much of this film is spent giving the audience a quick orientation to the work of a whaleship 200 years ago. Voyages lasting as long as two years consisted of long periods of boredom and bad food, punctuated by hours of horror killing whales, a “Nantucket Sleighride” that you survived if lucky and then days of fighting sharks for the carcass, which was boiled down for oil. It’s in one these hunts that a huge sperm whale attacks the ship, smashing the hull and forcing the crew to take refuge in the small rowboats, 2000 miles from South America. Fearful of cannibals on Pacific Islands, the crew tries to get to South America, with disastrous results. The rest is a tale of survival.

Ron Howard, who has done a lot of movies I liked over the years, took on the task of filming this and I think his success was mixed at best. This is a movie that seemed like it needed a prerequisite, like in college when you had to take History I before you took History II. In this case, a viewing of the old 1956 Moby Dick would have sufficed, so this movie would not have spend half of its run-time instructing a contemporary audience in just what an awful way whaling was to make a living. The real story in Heart of the Sea is not about killing and cooking whales, but just how bad it was for the crew when that all went wrong and in the dreadful story of how 8 of the 20 crew members survived. I guess that would have been just too grim for the audience to watch, hence the added plot element of Melville’s visit and the time spent on Whaling 101.

Another reservation I had about this film was the decision to make it in 3D. There really isn’t much in the movie that benefits from 3D and the usual image degradation imposed by the 3D process seemed like a detriment to film. The extensive digital processing used to recreate the stormy ocean and the whale attack also degraded the visuals. In my recollection of having seen it several times, the 1956 Moby Dick movie looked better with no technology. The acting in the movie is pretty standard action movie stuff, punctuated by a lot of inscrutable sailing ship slang like “lower the shivers”, “raise the spar laps”, “chock the booms”, or whatever. A glossary (presented in Whaling 101?) would have helped. Chris Hemsworth (first mate Owen Chase), Benjamin Walker (Captain Pollard) and Brendan Gleeson (the old Thomas Nickerson) are decent. Cillian Murphy (one of the crewmen) is nearly invisible under grime, blood and whale fat, and has a minor role. The rest of the cast is functional but unremarkable.

In the end, the most dramatic part of the story, the survival of the 8 crew members, and their fates after their rescue, is a relatively small part of the movie. I don’t think that an audience would have reacted well to a focus on what they had to do to survive, but the fictional elements that were added obscure the real story, what was that they survived and HOW they did it. The rest is Whaling 101 and elements added to the story in order to make the writing of Moby Dick seem pre-ordained. Some of that was not in the original book at all. I enjoyed the movie but often found myself confused about what was history and what was fiction added to make the history more palatable. There’s no Ahab-like character to give focus to the plot and a factual re-telling of the crew’s tale would have left little popcorn in the stomachs of the audience. The story of the Essex might have done better as a History Channel hour than a popular movie. I can give this one a 3 star rating, but no more.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lN2-6SQv2E

Re: Skizzerflake's Movie Ramblings - Reviews of the Stuff I See
 

some very solid reviews for both dramatic and action faire.
A few of these films I'm looking forward to seeing; such as Mr. Holmes, Trumbo, Bridge of Spies, Skyfall and Man from UNCLE.

Thank you so much for some excellent reading.

Thanks for your comment. I hope you enjoy some of those movies!

pretty sure I will, keep the reviews coming - they really are some great reads!!

Forgot to mention seeing your review on The Conspirator and growing very curious about it.

Also, loved your review of In The Heart of the Sea, very keen to see that one as well.

on a funny note, the crew of Essex's terrible survival seems to bring this lil monty python skit to mind

https://youtu.be/deoNAOfkXxc

I'm mental that way ;)

Love it!

Macbeth
 

Macbeth - A New Film Adaptation

There’s a long history of film versions of Shakespeare plays, including 8 versions of Macbeth, another coming next year and even a Japanese version by Kurosawa, Throne of Blood. This year’s adaptation was directed by Justin Kurzel, a director that I’m not familiar with, stars Micheal Fassbender as Macbeth, Marion Cotillard as Lady Macbeth and Paddy Considine as Banquo. I refer to it as an adaptation because, like most film versions of plays by The Bard, it’s been pared down from the original. The difficulty of filming Shakespeare is that his plays are too wordy for a cinematic world where we expect movies to use minimal dialog and 5 word sentences. Macbeth, as a play, has about as many words as a brick has atoms. Shakespeare had an outrageous verbal facility; he must have added 75 pages to the English dictionary all by himself. He coined so many common expressions that entire web sites are dedicated to all of the contemporary expressions first found in Shakespeare. In the case of Macbeth, you might recognize the crack of doom, one fell swoop, a sorry sight, sound and fury, what’s done is done and many others. It’s hard to imagine Game of Thrones or The Lord of The Rings without Macbeth and Shakespeare.

In case you were asleep in English Literature, Macbeth is a dark, semi-historical play about a medieval warlord. He’s fierce, but not all that bright and is urged on by his ambitious wife to advance his career by murdering the King of a grim, dark, violent corner of the Scottish Highlands. Murder begets murder, however and it doesn’t end there. The end result of ruthless ambition is tragedy for most of the characters. The king is dead, long live the king, and so it goes, on and on. The stage is littered with bodies by the end of the story. There are witches, vague prophecies, betrayals, armies, stabbings and swords.

In my life I have seen Macbeth several times on stage, and I have seen a couple of the movie adaptations as well as many other staged plays by The Bard, so I’m used to the language, but it’s a challenge for many people who don’t have that experience. The task of the filmmaker is to manage to convey the verbose 400 year old language but not overwhelm the audience. Modern “translations” are a travesty in my opinion since half of the enjoyment of Shakespeare IS the language. In this case, the producers decided to stick with the original language and setting without serious historic revisions. Their condensed version keeps the movie within the usual 2 hour time limit for movies that don’t expect huge ticket sales but eliminates a lot of dialog, including all of the comic relief segments and snide remarks by servants. The result is a fairly unremitting tension and grimness that’s not over ‘till it’s over. The setting is minimal, mainly the cold, dreary, snowy, rainy highlands, and the interior of a cold, stony, hard castle and leaky wooden buildings.

Macbeth is currently sitting at 80% on Rotten Tomatoes and 7.4 on IMDB. In my opinion, it’s pretty good but somewhat aggravating. The cinematography is really close up and detailed, with actors spraying each other when they expound. Scenery is minimal and dreary, costumes are tattered and war-worn and nobody seems to have the likelihood of an enjoyable life, just a struggle until their inevitable violent death. I would have liked the movie a whole lot more but for the speech of the actors. Most of the movie is done in what I call “whisper-talk”, like Alec Baldwin in 30 Rock, except with a huge dose of pro-wrestler steroid voice. Much of the male dialog is very difficult to comprehend, being composed grunts and whispers. Like it or not, one of the features of Shakespeare is just how articulate and profound these brutes are, not how they grunt and spit at each other. Because I am familiar with the story (it could have been done in mime for me), I didn’t lose the plot, but for the uninitiated, it would be a difficult movie and the glory of The Bard’s poetry would be lost. This brought it down by a star. The acting is visceral, strong, and physically excellent and the visuals really transport you to this place; you wonder why ANYBODY would fight for this.

I wish that Kurzel had made different choices for the speech. For centuries, actors have spent their careers working on perfect diction in order to perform Shakespeare. One of the first ever voice recordings was done by Thomas Edison, a recording of my avatar, Edwin Booth, performing a couple minutes of Othello in 1890. In spite of the miserable sound of this recording, you can get an idea how musical this actor’s voice must have sounded in person -

https://archive.org/details/OthelloByEdwinBooth1890

All that is lost with these voice characterizations. Sometimes, all’s well that ends well (Shakespeare) and to most people in the working day world (Shakespeare again), the long and the short of it (The Bard), is that anything that gets butts in the seats, will help to keep these stories alive. My recommendation is to see it. Be sure to read the wiki version of the plot over a couple times before you go (if you’re not familiar already), enjoy the visceral acting and the amazing visuals and ignore the dialog.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyFAn5IaFS0

Re: Skizzerflake's Movie Ramblings - Reviews of the Stuff I See
 

Loved to hear about the dialogue aspect of this movie. When I get the opportunity, I'll be seeing this one. And I DEFINITELY rent it so that I can use subtitles lol

I did you feel about the little run they did with placing shakespeare plays in modern times? Some have hit, many haven't.
I thoroughly enjoyed Richard III set during the beginning of the 20th century but then that also had a lot to do with the amazing actors; especially Ian McKellen as a brilliantly deliciously evil Richard. When I first saw the opening speech at the cinema, I was utterly hooked.

I'm not a purist on Shakespeare at all. I've seen adaptations that put the stories in a bunch of time frames, some better, some worse, but I am disappointed when an adaptation loses the language. So much of Shakespeare IS the language that losing the language is like seeing Avatar in grainy black and white. As much as I enjoyed the visuals and physical acting of this Macbeth, I really did miss about half of the dialog due to the lack of clarity in the actor's speech.

My most recent favorite adaptation was Joss Whedon's version of As You Like It. It's a fun piece of Shakespeare Lite, done in a shortened contemporary version, filmed inside his own house, but with The Bard's language.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUWlPjXvFZU

Star Wars: The Force Awakens
 

Star Wars: The Force Awakens - Also the franchise awakens

We’ve had the Star Wars universe around for 38 years now, longer than we’ve had a significant part of our population. More than any other film franchise, it’s spawned games, t-shirts, costumes, books, global brand recognition and sold an uncountable number of theater seats. And, yet, the creator of this wild west-samurai-roman empire-nazi-sci-fi epic came close to killing it himself by directing the flat, middle-whelming prequel series that was episodes I, II and III. It’s said sometimes that George Lucas can only direct robots, not humans. After all, anybody who turn Sam Jackson as Mace Windu, into a flat character, and leave us unimpressed with actors like Natalie Portman, Ewan McGregor and Liam Neeson must be only adept at directing robots. I give great credit to Lucas for starting the series, creating the universe and introducing so much of the pre-digital FX that made the first trilogy work, but he really should stay away from direction. Thankfully, this time, direction was turned over to J J Abrams. If he hadn’t done anything else, keeping the whole story arc of Lost together indicates that Abrams respects the need to have story telling and human characters as the core of a series, even if it is a techie, epic monster such as Star Wars.

I don’t want to spoil anything for anybody who manages to isolate themselves from all of the hoo-raw that’s going around, but just to put things in context, in The Force Awakens, we see the plot of the original trilogy continuing, only 30 years later, as though the prequel trilogy had never happened. The Empire is gone, but the First Order has taken their place. The Death Star blew up a long time ago, but there’ s a newer, more powerful one now. The Emperor is gone, but now we have Supreme Leader Snoke, seemingly bigger and stranger. Darth Vader is gone, but he’s been replaced by Kylo Ren a younger and seemingly more merciless adept of Vader. It’s a generational turnover. Some of our old characters are still there and the rebellion, as usual, is hanging on by a thread, trying to strike and run against an empire that has overwhelming resources, technology and ruthlessness. Given that there are two more episodes in the epic and that the title tells us that The Force has only just awakened, you can probably guess that this episode will leave us with plenty more story to tell before it’s all really over. Spoiler-Phobia is rampant for this movie, so I'm not going to say much about the actors. Even telling you who their characters are could be interpreted as a spoiler, so, if you're interested, check out IMDB. The new characters are a good addition to the series.

I have to admit that I was unenthusiastic about seeing this on the opening day. I correctly expected long lines, a jammed theater, people in costumes, geeks carrying on fervent debates about the average springtime temperature of Hoth of the number of equivalent watts commanded by Darth Vader’s hands. People cheered when the movie started, cheered when familiar faces appeared and cheered when the rebellion did something good. Apparently, the magic has not been lost. I also felt disenchanted by the previous series and would have almost preferred to have no new series if they didn’t do it right. I’m happy to say that The Force Awakens has brought the franchise back from the brink (kinda like the rebellion). There’s a bunch of new characters (including a new cute robot). It’s full of links to the first trilogy, carries on the plot themes, AND…J J Abrams CAN direct human actors.

Unlike some recent films I have seen, the visuals in Force are not sketchy. Thankfully, it looked as though, as much as was possible, the movie was filmed on real sets, with props and costumed actors. Obviously it was also a great opportunity for the animators who added the space vehicle dogfights and giant explosions, but the animation that was done was done really well and integrated into the movie seamlessly. The acting and human drama was also done well. It was the focus of the movie. There’s not a whole lot of subtle drama here, mainly action acting, moralisms by the rebellion and evil from the Empire characters, but it was far better than the flat recitations in the prequel series. Focus on the characters is back and, thankfully there’s no new Jar Jar Binks to revile. There is a new cute robot, but that’s fine. We would have been disappointed if we didn’t have a new robot. The new characters you see in the trailer are fleshed out well, connected to the larger plot and have their own story lines. The old characters have predictably aged, but are well integrated into a story that had to contain a generational turn-over.

All things considered, I have to say that The Force Awakens is a roaring success. I was glad to have my diminished expectations exceeded. This film is an excellent continuation of the saga that’s been going on for nearly 4 decades now. The audience in the theater I attended was really happy, more people were lining up for the late showing. I can’t imagine that this will not be a huge success and hopefully the rest of the series (currently in production) will keep the momentum going. This is a really fun movie…don’t miss it.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGbxmsDFVnE

Re: Skizzerflake's Movie Ramblings - Reviews of the Stuff I See
 

I actually have seen Whedon's version of Much Ado About Nothing and enjoyed it.

And glad to see another VERY promising review of the new star wars. Looks like I need to get my but into a theater seat some time soon.

Concussion
 

Concussion - Will The NFL Take a Big Hit to the Pocket?

Concussion hit our area theaters recently and seemed like a change from the usual holiday fare, so we tried it. The story revolves around an actual Nigerian doctor, Dr. Bennet Omalu, played by Will Smith. Omalu has multiple medical degrees and was working as a forensic pathologist, doing post-mortem exams in the Pittsburgh area in 2002. We (the audience, that is), see the last days of the life of former Steelers center Mike Webster, living in his pickup truck, seriously troubled and apparently suffering from dementia. When Webster is found dead of an apparent heart attack, Omalu is the pathologist who does the autopsy on him. Having some knowledge of Webster’s story, Omalu examines Webster’s brain but is surprised that he doesn’t see anything abnormal. It isn’t until Omalu becomes intrigued by the case that he takes on (at his own expense), a costly microscopic examination of Webster’s brain and finds that it’s riddled with abnormal proteins. Apparently, Webster isn’t alone and similar examinations of brains of other players who subsequently die from suicide, homelessness, etc yield similar abnormalities. Omalu begins an initially quiet campaign among co-workers, colleagues and supervisors to find out just how football and this abnormality are linked. This problem is almost certain to be difficult to discuss, since the damage is subtle, can only be confirmed post-mortem and because football, in Pittsburgh and elsewhere, is a near-religion. As one character puts it, the NFL took Sunday away from God; it’s the only sport with it’s own day of the week.

Omalu gets the dubious privilege of naming the disorder, calling it Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE). It’s very similar to the more familiar Dementia Pugilistica, also known among boxers as being Punch Drunk. It’s been subsequently associated with blast injuries, ice hockey, professional wrestling and accidents in cheerleading. None of those activities, however, have the level of cultural “importance” attached to football and the NFL. Omalu’s findings, if made public, threaten to damage the sport and probably, more importantly, threaten the NFL with liability problems that might slow the profit machine, so the NFL doesn’t want to hear or see anything about this. For Omalu, however, this is about getting out the truth. He has nothing to gain and a lot to lose, but he’s a fundamentally decent and moral guy who thinks that this story is more important than his fate. The rest of the story is about how the NFL and Omalu are both forced to come to grips with this problem.

The movie was written and directed by Peter Landesman, who has not done any other films I have seen. In addition to Smith, Concussion features Alec Baldwin as a medical colleague and a number of lesser known “character actors”, who are not marquis names. It’s a fairly minimal production, without any action scenes or big FX, and includes some of what may be actual or virtual archival footage of football action, but not much in the way of big scenes. It’s NOT a football epic, but a medical story. If you’re looking for sports glory, this is not your movie; nobody in the story cares about completions, interceptions, fumbles or pass blocks. It’s really a mostly medical story about how many hits a person’s head can take from childhood through the completion of an NFL career, with the added element of Omalu taking on the NFL, wanting them to acknowledge the problem.

For Will Smith, he’s not playing one of his usual flamboyant characters. Omalu is a polite, sincere, soft-spoken character who did not start out with the intention of “ruining” football. Smith’s portrayal and his fake accent mostly work. According to the credits, the actual Omalu was a consultant to the movie, so I guess it’s mainly correct. In general, it’s a decent film, a good example of the “ripped from the headlines” sort of expose. Everything about the movie seems to exude sincerity, including the plot, dialog and the actor’s performances. It’s also somewhat pedestrian, occasionally slow-moving and full of medical dialog. I had the impression that some of the audience, expecting an over-the-top Will Smith extravaganza or a sports movie, were somewhat disappointed that the character was not any of that. I liked the movie and Smith’s performance, but didn’t think it was much more than a decent historical flick. I already knew most of the story from media reports when it was actually happening, so the movie mainly served to flesh out Omalu as a character. It’s enjoyable enough and well crafted, but it won’t be the centerpoint for the best of 2015.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Io6hPdC41RM

Re: Skizzerflake's Movie Ramblings - Reviews of the Stuff I See
 

I don't know if you've seen it or are aware of it, but League of Denial: The NFL's Concussion Crisis is a documentary well worth looking at if you've an interest in this.

Interesting; I'll have to look for it. What's especially creepy about this story is that, in spite of the somewhat misleading "Concussion" title of the movie, it's not about diagnosable concussions where there's bruising of the brain and symptoms, but it's the sub-concussive blows that don't cause any symptoms but that do lead to cumulative damage. Someone calculated that a guy who starts playing football as a kid, plays in high school and college, then goes on to an NFL career, has about 50,000 blows to the head. Everybody gets these sort of blows, but a career football player gets an order of magnitude more of them. It's not just the helmet crackers, but every time player's heads get lurched from side to side or back and forth that causes the increments of damage when the brain sloshes around inside the skull. I don't know just what can be done about it, but in the case of this story, it's about just owning up to what's happening.

The Revenant
 

The Revenant - Everything and Everybody out there in the wilderness WANTS to kill YOU.

The Revenant is the latest film from Alejandro Inarritu, following up on his Oscar winning Birdman and other similarly intense movies like 21 Grams and Babel. It’s also a word meaning “one who returns after death or a long absence”. The story is based on a novelization of a real story, that of Hugh Glass. Glass’s story was widely known in the 19th century and has been the subject of books, TV and movies before, notably Man in the Wilderness, Apache Blood, an episode of Death Valley Days and several books, the most recent of which was The Revenant, written by Michael Punke in 2002.

This most recent adaptation is a partially fictionalized version of the actual story of Glass. In the movie, Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) is an explorer and guide for a fur “trapping” expedition in the general vicinity of North Dakota and Montana in 1823. Glass had a Native American wife (killed in a raid) and their son Hawk accompanies the gnarly group of hunters on an expedition they are not prepared for. Previous hunters in this area have over-harvested the animal population and alienated the local population so badly that one tribe stages a deadly raid on the party, killing a large number of its members. The remainder of the party wants to retreat, splits up, takes the hides they have and want to get out as the brutal winter sets in. That’s when things get really bad. Their guide Glass encounters a mother bear and her cubs. The bear attacks Glass, badly mauling him before Glass manages to kill the bear with his one-shot rifle and Bowie knife. A small group of the hunters stays with Glass, who is essential to the party but the angry redneck villain among them, John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), wants to let Glass die, kills his son and urges the party to return to “civilization” (an army outpost). The rest of the story is one of an almost unbelievable (if it were not true) survival and the desire for revenge.

I’ll begin my comments by saying that his is a brutal, tense and difficult story, not for the queasy of stomach. Vivid human and animal violence is never more than minutes away. Happy endings are rare in this time and place. The destruction of Native American tribes, as well as the spoiling of the wilderness, are constantly foreshadowed and well underway. Just how much of this mythologized story (aside from Glass's survival) is literally true is beside the point. The context is a big part of the story.

Direction in this movie is similar to last year’s amazing Birdman. It’s relentless, up close, and unflinching, except that this time, it’s an epic struggle rather than the ravings of a Broadway producer. I can’t imagine that Inarritu will get the Best Direction Oscar two years in a row, but this movie is just as taut as Birdman. The cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki (Birdman, Gravity) is amazing, ranging from scenic long shots of mountains, snow and wilderness to extreme close-ups of blood, violence and evisceration. The color of almost everything in this frigid winter horror is white or dull brown, but the splotches of color here and there become the visual accents that really drive in the story.

The acting is dominated by Leonardo DiCaprio’s mostly wordless body language. Much of his “dialog” consists of grunts and screams as he tries to survive alone in this landscape. There’s a lot of the “Oscar Buzz” that usually surrounds a highly promoted movie like this, and it’s well deserved. Most of the movie appears to have been filmed on location, in a real wintery wilderness, soaking wet, buried alive and nearly frozen. It’s not a role for the physically timid. Tom Hardy, as the scary Fitzgerald, is clearly a supporting role, but it’s the sort of role that Hardy does best, a guy who’s nearly as grizzly as the bears he fears, is always walking around with an attitude that scares everybody else, and a man of few words that you probably wish he would keep to himself.

This movie is well worth seeing as long as you’re not in the mood for something light. Like the other current survival move, The Heart Of the Sea, there’s barely a smile or light moment in the entire 2 1/2 hours, only brief moments when nobody is near death or killing someone else. There’s nothing about this that romanticizes the frontier in 1823. It’s all there, the danger, conquest and exploitation that we don’t like to think about. It’s not a story with epic sweep, but a small, personal story that’s a metaphor for the bigger events. The movie was first shown before the new year, so I can’t imagine that it will not show up prominently in the upcoming Oscars. It's far better than Heart of the Sea, so, if you want to see one survival movie this winter, this one is it.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoebZZ8K5N0

The Finest Hours
 

The Finest Hours - Heroism in Action

It was movie time, but due to the antics of the recent nor’easter Jonas, several of our regular theaters were still snowed in, so out we go to the recently plowed cineplex, which is mainly showing films we have already seen. What we had not seen was The Finest Hours, which received middling reviews (7.2 on IMDB, 59% critics, 72% viewers, on Rotten Tomatoes) in the movie press. The Finest Hours is the fictionalized true story of 4 Coast Guard guys who went out in a small boat to rescue the crew of a large tanker that was one of two that were being pounded by a huge coastal storm in 1952. For those of you who have never been in the teeth of a storm like this, the coastal storms (nor’easters) that occasionally strike the mid-Atlantic and Northeast coast approach and sometimes reach the intensity of hurricanes, but are generally much larger, geographically speaking. They raise enormous waves (sometimes as high as 90 feet), flood coastal communities, wreck buildings, can include blizzards, and can literally rip a 500 foot long steel ship in half. I’ve sat through a couple of them on the coast in my life, fortunately in a safe building on the land. I can’t imagine being out there in a small boat, or even a large ship. It looks like a fundamental force of nature has aroused and wants to drown you.

(Spoiler Alert, in case you don’t watch the trailer) The Finest Hours tells the true story of one specific rescue, that of the USS Pendleton, a WW II tanker that had been sold as a bulk carrier after the end of the war. The ship went into distress during a huge storm off the Massachusetts coast, broke in half with 32 crew members left in the rapidly sinking stern. The 9 members in the bow were all lost. A small Coast Guard boat with a crew of 4 was launched into huge seas and managed a daring rescue, saving all but one of the 32 crewmen in the stern section of the ship. The rescue was a milestone in Coast Guard history and led to the Coast Guard getting bigger ships.

The film was directed by Craig Gillespie (Fright Night and the likeably silly Lars and the Real Girl). It was a Disney project, complete with castle and Tinkerbell logo, so it had to be morally clear and family-friendly. Stars included Chris Pine, Casey Affleck, Eric Bana and Holliday Grainger. The movie was packed with digitally created storms and ships and was filmed in 3D.

My first observation about this movie is that it is much like a World War II story. Instead of human enemies, however, it’s the storm. A mismatched group of unlikely heroes is dispatched to perform a dangerous mission, goes way beyond the call of duty against a ruthless enemy and saves the day, while the crew leader (Chris Pine) has a girlfriend waiting at home, not knowing whether she will ever seem him again. The base commander is sincere, but in over his head, never having seen a nor’easter up close, and the crew goes beyond their orders to undertake what seems like a suicidal rescue attempt. It’s a simple story of hometown grit against amazing odds.

The Finest Hours is not a movie with a lot of subtlety and doesn’t require much cognitive analysis. Like those old WW II movies, the story is simple and morally clear, the acting mostly consists of being sincere and purposeful for the CG members, desperate for the crew of the sinking ship and, for the characters on land, worried. It’s very physical acting and they spend a lot of time cold and wet. If this crew had not been rescuing a ship’s crew, it might have been storming the beach on Okinawa or holding back the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge. Over the years, a number of movies have been made with “Finest Hour” in the title, the title implies this sort of moral urgency and heroism, so there’s nothing especially new about the theme. This film doesn’t add anything to the genre, but also doesn’t do anything bad. Chris Pine is OK as the crew leader, as is Holliday Grainger as his waiting girlfriend, but neither their romance nor the watery drama point toward any Oscars. It’s not surprising that the film is laden with FX, between the sinking ship and the horrifying sea. Dialog is sometimes unclear, both because of the tremendous roar of the storm and because of the sometimes dense New England seafaring accents. Most of the effects are pretty good. I did not see it in 3D (thankfully) but I don’t think it would have really added much. I can give this film a middling recommendation. It doesn’t do anything that has not been in many movies, but it’s still a story well worth telling. The first third of the film that establishes the characters drags and doesn’t have the quick pace of that segment of old “right stuff” movies, but once the action kicks in, the pace is quick. Fortunately the storm does not growl or act evil; it’s just a huge, indifferent force of nature. The Finest Hours is not my favorite film of the season, but I enjoyed it. If you need something to let you know that winter can really be much worse, this will do it.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQmllwTKtqU

Hail Caesar!
 

Hail Caesar! - The Myth of Hollywood

I have to preface that by admitting that I have enjoyed nearly all of the Coen Brothers’ movies, and their loose grip on some combination of truth, fiction and outright fantasy, combined with sarcasm and wit. They are a metaphor for Hollywood, which never saw a truth it could not twist or enhance. Why stick to truth when you can take the same event and write a better story? Hail Caesar centers around fictionalized events in the dubious career of Eddie Mannix. Mannix, played by Josh Brolin, was a notorious Hollywood “fixer”, a guy who watched over actors and directors who had a contract with “The Studio”. He ended sleazy affairs, quietly bailed misbehaving actors out of jail, arranged temporary marriages for pregnant stars, dragged directors out of bars and back onto the set, etc. Mannix himself was no paragon of virtue, being a devout catholic who could not divorce, he had numerous affairs, encouraged his wife to do the same and may have been involved in the death of Superman George Reeves, who had enraged Mannix by jilting Mannix’s wife, ending one of her affairs. Mannix has been a movie character before, in Hollywoodland, portrayed by Bob Hoskins, who has a cameo in this film.

The movie also centers on Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), a fictional actor who has a lead role in one of early “sword and sandal” epics, Hail Caesar, in 1951. A send up of Quo Vadis and Ben Hur, Caesar is one of those sanctimonious epics that explains Jesus to the movie world after titillating us with a couple hours of Roman decadence. Whitlock was to deliver an important line as a converted Roman legionnaire until he (the actor, that is) is drugged, kidnapped and held for ransom by “The Future”. The whole production is being held up because of this important scene. Whitlock’s kidnapping requires a “fixer”, the notorious Eddie Mannix, with a suitcase full of money. Along the way, we are brought along on other fixes by Mannix that takes us on a journey through the back lots of the studio. We encounter a pregnant Esther Williams-like starlet, a singing cowboy who channels Eddie “Cattle Call” Arnold or Roy Rogers, a scene involving the pre-Lucy version of Lucille Ball (the Queen of B Movies in her first career), temperamental directors, a Gene Kelly-like character doing a dance centered musical, a Hedda Hopper-like harpy-reporter, a group of writers who really ARE soviet-style communists, unlike Dalton Trumbo…a whole list of the movie fixtures of that time. They are all related in this incestuous, scandalous version of 1951 Hollywood.

Josh Brolin stars as Mannix and does an excellent job of fleshing out that film-noir-like detective/strong arm character. George Clooney also excels as a clueless, but sincere, Whitlock who stumbles his way to Hollywood immortality. Ralph Fiennes, Scarlet Johansson, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum all are really enjoyable in their own twisted characters. Tatum gets to do some solid dancing too. The Coen Brothers do their usual job of keeping things light. Like their other movies, it’s not a movie that gets big laughs, but it’s a constant stream of witty, strange moments where you try to figure out whether this moment portrays something real, whether it’s complete fantasy or just who is being sent-up. I will have to see the movie again in order to catch all the references to old-timey Hollywood. I love the movies of that period. My only regret is that the Coen’s didn’t find a place to satirize Bogart too, but I guess they were out of time.

I’m giving this film a 4 star rating. Some other reviews have not been so kind, but, I enjoy that 40’s - 50’s period of movies, grew up on re-runs of sanctimonious Roman Empire/religion movies (I own the Blue Ray version of Ben Hur), enjoy the noir-detective thing and love the myth of Hollywood. It’s a fun way to enjoy a couple hours of the movie fantasy world.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMqeoW3XRa0

Re: Skizzerflake's Movie Ramblings - Reviews of the Stuff I See
 

very solid reviews. Revenant is one i REALLY need to see on the big screen and I've been a bit curious about Finest Hours and now I'm more curious - thank you.
I've heard both ends of love and disappointment for Hail Caeser but then the Coen's bring that out of everyone and being a fan, I'll be checking this one out at some point as well

Thanks for the reviews!

The Big Short
 

The Big Short - A Horror Movie About Money

For anybody that was aware in 2008, The Crash was a scary event. It seemed as though the bottom was dropping out of the US economy, taking the world with it. You might recall that the media talked a lot about things like credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligation and shorting. It described the investment climate that preceded the crash as being not unlike Las Vegas gambling but with billions of dollars. Regulatory officials seemed blind-sided by the complex gambles with mortgage bonds that were being made. All that madness came crashing down when a hiccup in the “real” economy (risky mortgage loans) brought all those gambles to ruin.

The Big Short is what you may consider docu-fiction. It follows three separate groups of investors as they climb the ladder of success for a while and then become the focus of the disintegration. It’s also the story of a government effort to understand and stop this, but it’s too little and too late. It’s the sort of story that might be the topic of a Micheal Moore expose, except that all of this has been out for years and most people still don’t understand it, so something similar is probably happening now. It’s really not unlike a horror movie, except that the monster is not a big reptile or a vampire. In this case, the horror is greed, the kind of stupidity that often afflicts really smart people and the fact that nobody in power could or would be the punitive parent that tells these people to stop what they were doing. A recent estimate put the cost of the bailout at 7 trillion dollars (!!!) and few of the people in this story were ever prosecuted; many are back in the game.

The director of The Big Short is Adam McKay, a guy whose history includes a bunch of comedies, including The Step Brothers and the Anchorman series, nothing that really suggests an inclination to take on a project that involved finding a way to explain and fictionalize such complex financial machinations. Stars include Christian Bale as Micheal Burry, a badly socialized but brilliant manipulator, Steve Carell as Mark Baum, a guy who is perpetually worried about the implications of what he is still doing, Ryan Gosling as Jared Vennett, another of the investors and Brad Pitt as Ben Rickert, an older but not terribly wise investment geek and advisor to some of the young guns.

This is a difficult movie to review. There are 3 separate sets of characters following a converging course and the subject matter (the complex, convoluted investments) is very difficult to explain to someone without an MBA in investment. The drama consists of the fact that the audience already knows the outcome of the movie (The Crash) and has to unscramble how all of these characters will be contributing to it. Detailed attention to the dialog is needed and many people will still come out befuddled. Because we all know the end before the movie begins, even if we don’t understand the money, we do understand that this is going to end very badly and all of these “smartest guy in the room” characters will be a part of this bad ending. Putting all of this into a 2 hour movie makes it verbally dense. Many of the usual aspects of movies (sets, FX, action, cinematography) are mostly irrelevant. Most of the camera work is up-close, with a “you are there”, video quality. The dense dialog and the impending outcome, however, makes Big Short a tense movie and one where you want to stand up and shout to the characters to stop this RIGHT NOW. Fact intrudes on fiction here and makes you realize just how crazy all this really was. You probably need to see it twice to understand it.

My choice for the best performance is Steve Carell. As Mark Baum, he merges a sort of evangelizing moralism with the quality of not being able to stop himself. If his tool was a knife instead of a portfolio, he’d be like a serial killer who feels guilty. Christian Bale also excels as the geeky, uncommunicative guy who speaks in riddles, has bad hygiene, but understands everything. Brad Pitt’s character, is the older guy who should know better, keeps himself somewhat removed from the action, but gives the youngest group of investors enough rope to hang us all and then walks away telling himself that he didn’t do it.

I’m giving this a 4. I think I would have actually preferred it as a mini-series, but it’s a dense 2 hours as it is. The financial manipulations are so complex that more explanation would have helped, in spite of occasional on-screen text messages that defined terms. All of that financial insanity took a while to happen; we would have benefitted from more exposition. Nevertheless, I recommend the movie. It’s the best 2 hour history of these events you will find and, in spite of its complexity, it is suspenseful and keeps you engaged. You are close enough to the actors to catch their sweat as the end approaches so it’s tense in a personal way. I recommend reading something like a Wikipedia article on The Crash before you see it, but don’t miss it.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDlYm15ztK4

The Witch
 

The Witch - Is it a horror movie or a horrifying movie?

The Witch is the mainstream directorial debut of Robert Eggers, and, what a start! This film is being categorized as horror movie, but I don’t think that is exactly right. It certainly is scary, creepy and full of suspense, but the usual cheesy devices of horror moves are not present. Instead, the horror is that of the human mind, pressed to the extremes of physical and emotional stress. The Witch is set around 1630, in early New England, decades before the famous Salem Witch Trials. The story begins when the family of William (Ralph Ineson) is exiled from a puritan compound for theological crimes that are not specifically described. Like much of the puritan community of that time, the family includes William, a bible-quoting patriarch, with a wife, Katherine (Kate Dickie) and 5 children, the oldest of which is teen-aged Thomasin (Anna Taylor-Joy). William is terrified of an outer darkness, the scary forest beyond the village, possibly inhabited by unseen hostile Native Americans, wild animals, witches, demons and everything else that the mind can imagine. The family is completely alone, with no help from the village. It is also cold, gray, winter is coming, food and firewood are needed and they have to build their own house with nothing to protect them except their prayers and a cumbersome matchlock musket. The evil begins when Thomasin, their adolescent daughter, is taking care of her youngest sister, the new baby, and, all of a sudden, the baby disappears. There are brief hints of witches in the woods, evil women who can change from seductresses to naked crones, possibly eating babies. A frantic search begins and things only get worse from there. The kids are terrified, Katherine is grief stricken over the loss of the baby and William is overwhelmed with the realization that he can not protect his wife and children, a sacred duty he takes very seriously as a patriarch. It seems like the powers of hell are intent on bringing them down.

This is really an interesting film in several ways. As I said, it’s not really a horror movie. Nothing in the movie is entirely clear, including the reality of the horror. The forest does seem to harbor evil, but it’s never seen for more than an instant. Even in the context of these terrified, superstitious puritans, there’s no clear, objective reality to the horror. As the viewers, we don’t know whether the “monster” is really there, or whether it’s the mental projection of these traumatized people. The Witch is entirely fictional, but the events in the story are basically what was reported as “fact” by the people who suffered from the events in Massachusetts in the period that culminated in the infamous witch trials. Baby stealing, people waking up with bite marks, barnyard animals being possessed by evil spirits, spoiled grain, people having convulsions that caused them to levitate are all events that were accepted in court as evidence during the trials. The “culprits” in those trials, as well as many of the accusers, were mostly women, labelled as witches, communing with Satan, holding evil ceremonies in the forest, being able to fly, all mortal terrors for those early colonists. We look back on that period, not understanding how any rational person could believe in such things, but the simple fact is that they DID. They were people just like us, but their beliefs made all this madness seem like fact. In this paranoid environment, accusations seemed like truth and denials insured guilt.

I thought that The Witch was a terrific movie, far more unsettling than the usual horror fare of monsters, vampires and mutant teenagers. I can walk away from most horror movies, realizing that I probably won’t encounter anything that happened in that movie. In the case of The Witch, however, I walk away thinking that, put in that situation, I don’t know that I would react any differently than William. That’s far scarier than dinosaurs trashing Tokyo or mutant worms. Nothing in this film is certain; we don’t really KNOW whether there is or is not a witch. People’s minds can contort reality in truly amazing ways and spirits were real to them. The uncertainty of anything in this story really makes the film work. Acting is excellent by all of the cast. I don’t know any of the actors. The production is very minimal, with little in the way of effects, nothing but the forest and fear. The sparse ancient Swedish string music is used excellently. Cinematography is excellent in its minimalism, full of close-up fear, and cold grayness. I see that The Witch was a Sundance pick, from the production company A24, who also produced the equally disturbing Room last year. Don’t miss it.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQXmlf3Sefg

Eddie The Eagle
 

Eddie The Eagle - Your Feel-Good movie of the week.

If you’ve been around long enough and pay attention to all of the Olympic hoo-raw, you would probably recall an unusual event in the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics, like big rounds of applause for a guy on the British ski jumping team who came in dead last, by a large margin. That guy was Micheal Edwards (Taron Egerton), an awkward, less than thin guy with coke-bottle glasses and a cheerful, upbeat attitude that made him a crowd favorite. Nicknamed Eddie The Eagle, this guy provides the main character in this upbeat, saccharine film. At the time, Britain had not even had a ski jumping team since the 1920’s when the sport was decidedly more primitive. Edwards was a miserable jumper who, with some coaching, managed to qualify for the team using the 1920’s standards. He only had to jump 60 meters (the 1920’s standard), in spite of the fact that contemporary jumpers were jumping 90 meters. Edwards lacked the physique, training or experience to be a good jumper, but he did have relentless determination and an extroverted, self promoting attitude that won millions of fans for a while. Eddie the Eagle, the movie, is a fictionalization of that event.

To appreciate this film, you have to go in, knowing that it’s going to be an inspiration that should make you come out happy and teary. After all, the most unlikely of schlubs, with enough desire, pluck and determination can get to the Olympics..right? In this story, we see Eddie, deciding that he wants to transcend his father’s wish that he join in his multi-generational family occupation of wall plasterer. Eddie wants to fly. He gets his chance with some reluctant coaching from a burned out former jumper, Bronson Peary (Hugh Jackman and all of his muscles), who is running the machinery that grooms the ski slope. Peary is alcoholic, cynical and insulting, but Eddie is so cheerful that Peary can’t help being won over to Eddie’s side.

I find it difficult to review a movie like this. It’s like a religious movie in that it has a desired emotional outcome, it wants you to leave with a cheerful mood, thinking that Eddie is a hero. You are supposed to feel good when it’s over. It does that, as long as you can suspend your disbelief. I don’t want to rain on anybody’s parade if this sort of fare makes them feel good about life, but, as a skeptic, I usually need to do some fact checking, so when I did, I found that the movie made some fictional twists from fact, all in the name of making me come feeling like anybody can do anything with enough pluck and desire. There’s nothing wrong with that message exactly, but I did feel used.

Eddie was directed by British director Dexter Fletcher; I have not seen any of his other films. Aside from Hugh Jackman and a brief cameo from Christopher Walken, I am not familiar with any of the other actors in the film, but all of them do a creditable job in their roles. The mechanics of story telling, music (a lot of 80’s songs with glassy sounding synths) and cinematography are all done reasonably well, but nothing here is remarkable. Taron Egerton plays the role of Eddie quite likably; he spends the movie conveying an innocent and guileless determination, without a mean bone in his body. If you like this sort of movie, and think that there are not enough happy stories in the world, you will probably enjoy this. There were some people coming out of the theater, proclaiming “Greatest Movie Ever”, but I have to say that in my opinion, it was mainly a little better than made-for-TV fare. I didn’t dislike it, I wish it were all true, but I don’t think it will be much more than a footnote in movie history. Like its religious cousins, once we leave the building and dab our tears, life will go on as usual. I found Eddie to be mainly a showboat, not nearly the inspiration he would have been if he had risen from his humble beginnings to really do the work and master the sport he exploited. In spite of his likability, he WAS a sham, only a superficial hero and not a good athlete. As a movie, it was made well, but only hits a middle mark for me.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyzQjVUmIxk

Zootopia
 

Zootopia - The Social Travails of Disney Animals

Well…it was a slow week for new movies, so we decided to do something we hadn’t done for a while, like see an animated Disney movie. I was somewhat interested because it’s been sitting at 99% on Rotten Tomatoes and 8.3 on IMDB….what’s going on here? I knew what to expect, having done the rounds with Disney movies when my kids were young and having visited Disneyworld a couple times. It would be an animated movie with wisecracking animals, bright colors, a basic plot line with non-threatening plot twists, a few teary moments, a couple songs with easy hooks, jokes easy enough for a young kid to understand and a bunch of covert topical references (including a sequence with an animal version of Walter White) so the adults who take the kids would feel like the writers knew they were part of the audience. Also, as long as I can remember, Disney has always found a way to rake in huge amounts of money by being as PC, inclusive, environmentally benign as they can be without messing up their profitability. It’s not surprising that a movie with a title like Zootopia will have some sort of message about being all we can be, accepting ourselves in spite of our differences, etc.

Zootopia didn’t violate the formula. We have a future animal-only utopian city, where all of the animals live in peace together in a diverse, but respecting city. Our hero, Judy (Jennifer Goodwyn) is a rabbit that wants to join the police force. My first thought was just why utopia needs police, but apparently, they do. Anyway, like most rabbits, she scares easy but is willing to overcome her fear, has pluck and energy. She encounters resistance, however, from the police chief (Idris Elba), an intimidating, gruff, but honest cop, who is also a water buffalo. Doubting her, he assigns her to be a “meter maid”, writing parking tickets. She also finds out that enforcing the law requires not just rigid adherence, but judgement as she meets a likable fox (Jason Bateman) who is also a con man. She learns not to judge “people” too quickly; he’s more than just a con and would actually like to join up with the police. Things crank up though, when we find out that a lot of animals have gone missing. In a fit of bravado, Judy tells her doubting boss that she will crack the case in 48 hours. The plot darkens when we find out that a high ranking politician is part of a plot to use a flower known as night howlers in a way that turns animals into fierce, hostile predators, not in line with any animal utopia. The lion won’t be lying down with the lamb as long as the night howlers are around. It’s up to Judy to crack this case, and it’s the scariest thing going on in Zootopia.

I went into this movie, feeling fairly sarcastic….yeah, I know that it’s a great, big beautiful tomorrow, that wishes are fulfilled and that everybody is our friend, just like in Disney World. Knowing that I had to do an attitude adjustment, I kept my Disney mouse ears on and let the movie roll. It was really pretty good. As always, whatever Disney does will be the best animation that money can buy. The voice actors were good (I’m not familiar with most of the names). The music was fun. In spite of the somewhat moralistic tone of the movie, it was light and easy for kids. The whole moral thing was interesting and not completely simplistic. Yeah, all the animals live in peace and harmony, but not all the time. There’s a lot of knee-jerk suspicion of predators and the citizens are finding it easy to believe that they are basically bad until it’s discovered that night howlers, the crack or meth of Zootopia, are really the problem. Zootopia also has political corruption, the howlers are a drug that makes ok characters do bad things and sometimes authorities get heavy handed. The drama is all played out with cute, Disney animal characters that don’t reference anybody in particular in the real world, so it’s a play on what you might think of as basic human weakness. Somehow, however, unlike the real world, by the end of the movie, all this will be fixed, Zootopia will go back to what it should be and things will all end up with a Shakira song.

I’m not sure what a director does in an animated movie, but this one had three, Byron Howard, Rich Moore and Jared Bush, none of them known to me. Most of the cast and crew seem to be Disney corporate people, imagineeers, company performers, etc. It had a PG rating. There was also one scene, in which the fox, who had been a cute wisecracker, temporarily turns evil and scary. That metamorphosis had some little kids (real kids, that is) crying. The moral in the tale is wound all around the story, isn’t too preachy, but is definitely in line with the Disney corporate attitude.

I liked the movie. I might have liked it even more if I had a kid or two with me, but, like much of what happens in Disney World, if you drop your cynicism for a while and just go on with the ride, you can enjoy it. I don’t know that I would place it in the top 1% of all movies like Rotten Tomatoes, but, if you’re OK with a movie that makes cute animals get up and dance, you will enjoy it.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWM0ct-OLsM

10 Cloverfield Lane
 

10 Cloverfield Lane - Tense and scary but is it Cloverfield?

The name 10 Cloverfield Lane was obviously intended to suggest something, but what? This film seems like a mashup of Cloverfield suggestions, with a strong hint of Room and The Witch. Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), is driving along an unremarkable rural road in Louisiana when she’s hit by another vehicle and rendered unconscious. She wakes up in a bed, with and IV dripping fluid into her body, but she’s not in a hospital. Instead, she’s in a windowless concrete block building, being attended by a very gnarly looking Howard (John Goodman). He does his best to assure her that he has rescued her, but the fact that she’s chained to the bed isn’t exactly reassuring. She tries to escape, but is overpowered by Howard. Howard tells her that some sort of attack is underway, that the air outside is poisoned and makes allusions to a previous female resident. Michelle realizes that Howard has her in a home-made underground bunker, elaborately supplied with food, water, alcohol and air purification sufficient to last for several years. She doesn’t know whether to believe Howard, but strange, ominous, rumbling noises coming from above make her unsure.

Soon after, she meets Emmett (John Gallagher Jr), a local guy who is also in the bunker. He informs her that he’d convinced Howard to take him in. Between the two of them, however, doubts emerge while Howard tries to create the trappings of “normal” life inside the bunker, in spite of being their captor. What is Howard up to? Why can’t they leave or at least take a peek out of the bunker to see what’s happening? Should they come up with an escape plan? Howard confesses to being a strange, reclusive survivalist. In spite of how twisted Howard might be, the sounds from outside suggest that something is going on out there and it’s not good.

If you have been around long enough, or know some recent history, you might recall that in the dark days of the Cold War, there were lots of people who bought and sold bomb and fallout shelters, either facilities in their basement or even as a complete underground bunker, not unlike Howard’s. That sort of paranoia was not even considered to be paranoid at that moment, just zealous caution. In this case, the Cloverfield name of the movie suggests not Soviet attack, but something extraterrestrial. Is this true or did the movie’s producers, which include J J Abrams, just use the name as part of a franchise, a small movie in place of the big FX spectacle that Cloverfield was, or a Room II? I’m not telling.

This film was quite well crafted and very tense. Directed by Dan Trachtenberg, who has mainly done shorts and TV episodes, this movie really works. Suspense builds by the moment and what’s actually going on isn’t directly revealed until late in the film so you just don’t know what is next. The claustrophobic bunker provides most of the movie’s sets, so the cost of the film must have been low. Nevertheless, like Room and The Witch, the minimal sets require the style of the movie to scare you with things you never see, often a much better way to be scary. As you might expect in such a small world, cinematography is close up and personal. Aside from a few other minimal appearances, the cast consists of only Goodman, Winstead and Gallagher. The three of them are excellent at conveying the menace of this awful setting.

I don’t know just what the germination of this film was and why the Cloverfield reference was invoked. Unless there is some larger franchise, trilogy or series in Abrams mind, it’s not at all clear what the connection is. It’s certainly possible that Abrams just wanted to use the name to give the film a boost in name recognition. On the other hand, the style of the movie is either a follow up or a new trend, based on two previous hits, Room and The Witch, for which low budget minimalism succeeds in being much more scary than giant digital monsters or yet another digging up of overproduced vampires or shape shifters. As in Room and The Witch, I was on the edge of my seat, an accomplishment for a guy who has seen an overdose of horror movies in his life. I don’t think it was quite as good as either of those, but it’s a worthy addition to this genre, which seems to be a trend looking for a name.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saHzng8fxLs

Hello My Name is Doris
 

Hello, My Name is Doris - Time for a strange Rom-Com

So, just who is Doris? We immediately recognize her as Sally Field, veteran of many movies and TV shows, all the way back to her teen years as Gidget and one of the all time oddest TV shows, The Flying Nun. In this movie, she is Doris Miller, somewhere in her unflattering 60’s. She is doing some sort of data entry for a New York fashion company, as one of the employees left over from a corporate acquisition in that predatory industry. The movie begins with the funeral of Doris’s mother. Doris had lived with her mom up to the end, in a house on Staten Island, commuting by ferry into Manhattan each day. Oh, and, by the way, either Doris, her mother or both of them are hoarders. They live in a large house crammed with trivial junk that’s “important”. After her mom’s death, however, it is finally Doris’s moment to break free….sort of.

In addition to Doris’s change in status we also have a new fashion guru coming to work in the company. John Fremont (Max Greenfield) is a handsome, 30-something, likable, big-smile guy who meets Doris and is nice to her. Doris, a newly liberated woman, has an instant crush on John. She starts enhancing her look, which, to be true, is mainly weird, including regular wearing of two pairs of glasses at once and a strange wig, which looks pretty much like the strange, raggedy hair under it. After some relatively innocent responses by John, she starts to think he returns her attraction. Doris begins a one sided relationship with him that looks like some sort of relatively innocent stalking. Unfortunately for Doris, she also meets John’s more age-appropriate fashion model girlfriend, but she takes encouragement after a stormy in-the-office breakup. Whenever she sees John, she fantasizes what she wishes would happen to their “relationship”. Her relationship with John, as well as her position in the company get more entangled as John brings her into a promotional effort that brings Doris into his social life.

Meanwhile, the other subplot concerns Doris’s brother Todd (Stephen Root) and his harpy-wife Cynthia. They want to bring in a hoarder therapist to help Doris. Not surprisingly, we find that Todd is split in his motivations. He wants to help his sister, but also wants his part of the inheritance. Cynthia, on the other hand, doesn’t have any such family concern. She’s ALL about the inheritance. Is there a resolution to Doris’s romantic fantasies? What about her hoarding and her avaricious family? A lot of things are right on the edge for Doris.

A lot about this movie sits on an edge. It’s somewhere between funny, creepy and pathetic. Sally Field does an excellent job of conveying this. As a character, Doris is likable, eccentric and funny. As an enthusiastic, data-entering office geek and it’s hard to not like her. As a 60-something, who has a crush on a much younger, handsome, fashion guru, and as a hoarder and an innocent stalker, however, she’s pathetic. As an audience, we wish we hadn’t seen that side of her life since, after all, we all secretly want fairy tales to come true and we wish that Doris could reclaim some the years she spent single and hoarding with her mom.

My take on this film is that it’s a fairly weak plot and script, accompanied by an excellent performance by Sally Field. It’s the best I’ve seen her do since her fine portrayal of the mercurial Mary in Lincoln. As for the plot and script, that is serviceable but underwhelming. The jokes mainly work, but from about 5 minutes in, you know what’s going to happen and most of how it’s going to turn out. Most fairly tales are NOT true, including this one. About a quarter of the movie is the hoarder subplot and that part seems to be lifted verbatim from one of the episodes of the Hoarders TV show. I had the feeling that AMC should have gotten a line in the writing credits. The rest of the cast, as well as the production are adequate, John (Max Greenfield) is cute as is his girlfriend, but the rest of the film is mainly decent TV-style production. Establishing shots are in New York, but the rest of the movie could be anywhere, like probably a studio in Hollywood. 90% of the movie is Sally Field. That said, I bump it up one half star in deference to her performance. In general, however, it’s decently entertaining, but nothing else. If you’re short on cash this week, you might wait until you can stream it.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Yv8zuVWBA8

Eye in the Sky
 

Eye in the Sky - Never tell a soldier that he does not know the cost of war

Throughout the history of war, armies have striven to kill more of the enemy while taking fewer losses themselves. Catapults, Greek Fire, bowmen, guns, machine guns, long distance artillery, airborne bombers have all been ways to kill with fewer risks to your own forces. Eye in the Sky takes us to the current frontier, remote drone warfare. It is also one of those “ripped from the headlines” political movies, fictional but a plausible story. Movies like Fail Safe and it’s evil twin, Dr Strangelove, the Manchurian Candidate, All The President’s Men, etc, take believable situations, and fictionalize them. Sometimes they are good enough to reveal truths about politics that are more understandable than real news. In this case, it’s somewhere around the present, and Colonel Katherine Powell (Helen Mirren) is the commander of a military group assigned to take out high value terrorists. Her “eye in the sky” (satellite and drone surveillance) has located the hide out of a bunch of notorious players, high up on the “kill or capture list”. They have a clear drone view on a building in Kenya and have a chance at a capture. Things change, however, when surveillance reveals that two men are preparing vests for imminent suicide bombings. The story plays out in multiple locations, Powell in the UK, the crew that operates a drone that will fire the missile in Las Vegas, political leaders in Europe and the US and the target in Kenya. It looks like a clear shot with little probability of “collateral damage” until an innocent girl sets up a table, selling bread on the street, right outside the building. It it’s hit, she will likely be blown to pieces. If the shot is not taken, the two terrorists with explosive vests will be detonating in public places within minutes. Many innocent people, including other young girls, will certainly be killed in the explosions.

The other half of the drama is how the military and politicians will handle this choice. The crew has initial approval to make the shot, but, in the US, the drone operator, Steve Watts (Aaron Paul), sees the girl and is unwilling to make the shot unless the politicians acknowledge that the girl will be killed and order him to do it. Meanwhile, General Frank Benson (Alan Rickman) is trying to get a clear statement from the politicians, up to the British Prime Minister and even the US President, on how to proceed, wanting someone to take direct responsibility. Is it OK to kill the girl if her death prevents many others? Is it OK to shoot if her survival chance is 60% rather than 40%? Who wins the propaganda war? Does the US lose if it kills the girl; does Boko Haram lose if they detonate their bombs? Since some of the terrorists are British and US citizens, are those political leaders OK with killing their own citizens?

The tension in this story is so thick, you can cut it with a knife. Moral conundrums abound and constantly collide with military expediency. It’s a very uncomfortable movie because, while it’s fiction, you can’t help thinking that these sort of decisions are made in your name every day. We don’t even know about them but will still have to live in the world where these things happen. What I really liked about the film is that it is NOT preachy but it really drives home the deadly seriousness of what they have to do without making the players into villains. There’s no escaping the fact that this is a really ugly business and nobody wants responsibility. Politicians understand the controversy and the military guys have to deal with the reality. As a world weary Gen. Benson says to a group of politicians, “NEVER!!! tell a soldier that he does not know the cost of war”.

As much as you can enjoy this sort of story, I did. The script is intelligent, poses the moral quandary and the subsequent reality but doesn’t hammer in a “correct” decision. Helen Mirren is excellent as the Colonel trying to get approval to make the hit. She realizes how much is at stake and wants a resolution. Alan Rickman, in his final on-screen appearance, is also excellent as the General who has to deal with the politicians and who has a first hand, “on the ground” understanding about the consequences of both action and inaction. I also liked seeing Aaron Paul, outside Breaking Bad, as the drone operator who has personal misgivings about killing the girl and knowing that it will be he who presses the button and watches her die. Also excellent is Barked Abdi as Jama Farah, the spy on the ground, who risks his life trying to see inside the building and get the girl away. I put this up high on my list of political/military thrillers. It’s tight, smart and really brings home the ugliness of a war that seems so remote. Eye in the Sky was directed by a director I'm not familiar with, Gavin Hood; filmed in South Africa. It was written by Guy Hibbert. Both definitely have a feel for drama. It’s well worth seeing.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOqeoj669xg

Midnight Special
 

Midnight Special - Strange Happenings in the Gulf Coast

Midnight Special is the third feature I’ve seen that was written and directed by Jeff Nichols. Nichols seems to have a razor edged feel for dark side of the southern heartland. His previous films, Mud starring Matthew McConaughy (before he dedicated his life to adjusting his cufflinks inside the Lincoln) and Take Shelter (starring an intense, brooding Michael Shannon, “Knowing” that a monstrous tornado will come) were methodical but engaging films that kept you thinking that something’s about to happen…and it did.

In Midnight Special, Roy (Micheal Shannon) flees from an apocalyptic evangelical cult in Texas, with his 8 year old son Alton (Jaeden Lieberher). Alton has some sort of special power that manifests itself in glowing eyes. He also can’t stand sunlight. Otherwise, he seems like an unremarkable kid who doesn’t really understand what’s happening to him. Roy is scared, being pursued by police, having an Amber Alert issued and also being pursued by heavily armed members of the cult, who want Alton back, at any cost, probably the cost of Roy’s life. Roy has been joined by Lucas (Joel Edgerton), a State Trooper and former friend, who doesn’t really know why he is going on the run with Roy, especially since the law is after them, but trusts Roy. The three of them link up with Roy’s wife Sara (Kirsten Dunst) and now, all of them are on the run, across the Gulf Coast, into a remote part of the Florida panhandle.

Just what power Alson has is not quite clear, but the seriousness of this is revealed when Alton uses his power to pull down a satellite, which brings down a shower of hyper-speed fragments that devastate a gas station and probably kills a number of customers. Meanwhile, not only the police, but the FBI and the NSA are seeking Alton. Sevier, from the NSA (Adam Driver), seems to have some understanding that Alton is seeking a location that has been found in some sort of version of speaking in tongues and that is decoded from a bunch of dates and times. Weird conspiracy theories are running on overtime among the pursuers as well as the fugitives. There’s no doubt in anybody’s mind that something very, very real is happening, but nobody knows just what. Is it extraterrestrial, theological, magical? We’re not sure, but we are sure that it really is happening and it centers on Alton and a specific location in Florida. This isn’t just a case of ET phoning home. He needs to get there and everybody else seems determined to stop him and his helpers. What follows completely alters the world view of all of the persons involved.

Like Nichols’ other films, Midnight Special is a slowly revealed story that takes its time to let you know what is going on and, even then, doesn’t answer all of the questions. The style of story telling has a distinct Southern feel to it, not unlike To Kill a Mockingbird. Loose ends and uncertain motives abound for all of the characters, including law enforcement people, the cultists and, even the characters helping Alton. The characters are all caught with lives in progress. We don’t really know who we should trust because they all have a dark side, but we are willing to go along with Alton’s family and Lucas. Even the “Big Evil Government” people don’t understand and don’t really seem to have any sort of conspiratorial plan, but in that mythic Southern mindset, they are outsiders, probably yankees and probably merit suspicion.

I really enjoyed this film. Like Take Shelter and Mud, it really has a feeling of belonging in a time and place and it trusts that the audience will follow the story, even though it is complicated and sometimes unclear. The suspense never relents, right up to the end. Like much of life, all questions are NOT answered at the end. Only some of them are, and probably a lot of people won’t believe the answers that ARE given, in spite of the size of the events.

The acting is excellent for all of the main characters. As usual, Michael Shannon brings a brooding intensity that’s hard to match. Joel Edgerton is excellent as the friend who doesn’t know why he’s here, but trusts his friend more than any law or institution. Jaden Lieberher shows an amazing amount of depth in a confusing and complex role as the troubled 8 year old. The rest of the cast is all excellent. In spite of all of the strangeness and special effects, it’s basically a movie driven by plot and acting, not just an arms race for digital animators. Most of the sets are dark and seem to harbor danger wherever they go; the environment seems to be part of the event. If you like this sort of film and enjoyed Mud or Take Shelter, this is a must. I have to give this a high rating, because it’s unlike anything else out there, doesn’t abuse us with stupid special effects and decades-old superhero stories that just won’t freakin’ DIE long after they should have. It’s more “believable” than any of them and hits on the sort of questions we have about our place in the cosmos without giving us stupid answers. Like The Witch, which went to the heart of darkness of puritanism, this movie takes us somewhere we don’t want to be and tells us things we don’t want to hear. It isn’t fun, but you can’t look away.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UU_CC81aGM

Miles Ahead - A Maybe for Jazz Fans?
 

Miles Ahead - A Maybe For Jazz Fans?

Miles Ahead is not a conventional linear biopic. Instead, it leaps back and forth between several time periods in the life of this amazing jazz innovator. The real Miles Davis was a a seemingly inscrutable character, obviously musically brilliant but with a very disorderly personality. His damaged vocal chords reduced speech to a whisper and he suffered from a number of chemical addictions. He was hard to work with, and often was disdainful of his audience. Fortunately, he mainly let his music speak for him, being one of the great jazz innovators and an unforgettable trumpet player.

Miles Ahead focuses mainly on the silent period of the late 70’s, when he burned out and stopped performing altogether. I don’t know a lot about this period or Davis’s personal life, but from what I can find on the web, it seems as though this movie is a gathering of incidents and characters, into a fictionalized narrative. As such, it’s not as much of a biography as it is a fiction in which Miles Davis is a character. The movie was written by Don Cheadle and Steven Baigelman and directed by Cheadle. Cheadle also stars as Davis.

The movie begins when Dave Brill (Ewan McGregor) barges into Davis’s home, claiming to be a Rolling Stone reporter looking for a big story about Davis’s absence from the music world and his messy personal life. Brill seems to be slinging as much BS as Davis, who initially kicks him out of the house, but in a sort of twisted buddy-movie way the two of them end up going on a caper. Columbia records wants Davis back working, making records. A gangster-like character has acquired a tape of some preliminary work Davis did in his basement studio. Miles and Brill go on a mad quest to recover the tape, complete with a car chase, guns, a Miles imitator and some tough guys. Davis has a strange, one sided relationship with his wife in which she gives up her career as a dancer in order to live in Miles’s house, suffer physical abuse but still be loyal to him.

If all of this sounds non-linear and episodic, it is. Miles Ahead sacrifices linear plot development for a quick-cut, flash forward - flash back sort of story telling that gives us pieces of his past, suit-wearing jazz club days, intercut with his disorderly state in 1980. In between, there are brief cuts of his music, but unfortunately (for me at least), music seems almost peripheral to the story. If this were any other fictional action movie, that would not bother me, but as a guy who loves Davis’s old jazz and who knew that he was a sketchy character in some ways, I really would have preferred to see a story that focused on what he did well, which was his music. He was not good at being a husband, a gangster and nobody’s good at being a drug user, but the real Miles was amazing as a musician. That seems to be mainly lost in this film, sacrificed to the parts of Miles that I didn’t really need to know and fictionalizing them at that. We know that he could play the trumpet, but we don’t know why he was great.

All that said, the film did keep my interest, from beginning up to end. Cheadle, the actor, is excellent at channeling Miles Davis as a movie character. Nobody has been able to make a film about Davis before and this one sorta works, although in a strange way. Miles Ahead is Cheadle’s first feature length project and somehow he managed to juggle 3 balls at once, as script writer, star and director. I’m not sure just how he did that, but (ignoring my reservations about plot choices for the moment) Cheadle did manage to keep all those juggler’s balls in the air. The frantic, back and forth cutting worked well and the action never lagged.

As for the plot, I’d like to see Cheadle come back, mimic Davis again, but the next time, focus on his music. Davis was a brilliant player and innovator. He had a messy life, not unlike a lot of famous musicians, but if I had the choice of reliving Miles Davis as a musician or as a bad actor in an action movie, I’d definitely stick with the music. Somewhere, I read that several people had tried to make a Miles Davis movie in the past, but failed. This one did make it into the theaters and I don’t have any reason to think that Cheadle was not in awe of the musician, but I do wish he had made better choices for the plot line. If the movie was to be a biopic, it could have been done without all of the fictionalized plot twists in the life of a real person.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssfTNCTVT5U

The Family Fang, the dysfunctional family that is
 

The Family Fang - One of the oddest movies I’ve seen recently

It’s movie time again and the cineplexes are brimming with fans and repeated showings of the first crop of summer super hero movies. I just was NOT In the mood for more spandex, so we tried this at random. The Family Fang was based on the novel of the same name, directed by Jason Bateman who also co-stars with Nicole Kidman. It also features Christopher Walken and a musical score by Carter Burwell.

I had not read the book, so I went into this with an open mind, not knowing what to expect. The story revolves around a brother/sister pair, Baxter and Annie Fang (Bateman and Kidman) and their bizarre relationship with their parents, Caleb and Camille (Walken and Maryann Plunkett). Unfortunately for them, Baxter and Annie grew up with a father who is a weird, self-absorbed narcissist and performance artist. All through childhood they were props in his performances, sometimes including staged death and murder. Baxter is a slightly successful novelist, Annie a middling movie actress of minor fame. The story develops when they are notified by police that their parents have gone missing, on the way home at night, that blood was found in the car and that there have been other crimes committed on this road. Suspicious…just how many times has Caleb staged his own death? A blood test confirms that his blood is in the car, but so what; he’s willing to bleed for his so-called “Art”. Annie and Baxter go through the motions of being involved in the investigation and being concerned that their parents really are in trouble or perhaps dead, but suspicion remains. In the process, they begin to reconnect their lives in respect to each other. Are their parents dead, abducted, have they staged all this as a piece of performance art? Are Annie and Baxter (kids A and B in their childhood performances) finally fed up with their parents’ antics? Is their mother a willing part of Caleb’s self-aggrandizing weirdness or is she a “victim”? If they DID stage this cruel hoax, do A and B really WANT to find their parents?

If you’re guessing that this is a strange family story, you’re right. It’s also a fairly dark comedy. Much of the movie sits on the edge of comedy and just plain sadness at so much family dysfunction. Having sat at the edge of the art world in my real life for a while, I have direct personal experience with self-absorbed narcissists like Caleb (who also make frequent appearances in religion and politics) and have no need for them. In real life, you can walk away, but it’s more complicated when they are family and parents and you have been props in their hoaxes. Then it really IS sad. Caleb is that sort of character, whose idea of inspired parenting borders on abuse and manipulation. The script and Bateman’s direction keep the entire movie on the razor edge of humor and pathos. Performances by the stars are good, although I don’t see them as being noteworthy. The plot and script are the stars here. Family Fang is not suspenseful, highly dramatic and has no action or FX. It’s a simple but sometimes confusing story with a lot of flashbacks to A & B’s childhood and recent adulthood. I have to admit that I don’t see that much in Bateman’s acting, personally. Baxter is mainly a reprise of Michael Bluth from Arrested Development. Christopher Walken is a good as he needs to be, as is Nicole Kidman but it’s really not an actor’s movie.

In spite of those reservations, I do give Fang a qualified recommendation. It’s a smart plot that keeps you guessing about what’s happening right up to the end, which either is or is not obvious, depending on what you expected or preferred. It’s a novelist’s movie and an enigma of a plot. I’m more pleased with Bateman’s direction than his acting. He might have more of a career behind the camera than in front of it. My qualified recommendation is that you should be prepared for a wordy, no-action movie with no character that you want to identify with. Nevertheless, it’s better than that because it all holds together well in spite of its strangeness and is a welcome relief from FX heavy spandex movies. Production is simple but effective and the musical score by Carter Burwell is excellent in its minimalist simplicity. The most recent revision on Flixter tells us that, so far Family Fang has grossed $94,000, so I guess you don’t have to worry about not getting a ticket if it’s showing near you. In spite of my reservations, I do suggest seeing it. When it comes out on video, I will probably watch it again to pick up on the many clues and suggestions that abound in this subtle movie.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-jWH0tIrak

Love and Friendship
 

Love and Friendship - AKA, The Return of Jane Austin

Being somewhat spandex fatigued by summer superhero movies, it seemed like time for something very different, so we decided to be about as different from Captain America as the current film offerings would allow. A new movie, “Love and Friendship” was starting at our local art house. The film was directed and written by Whit Stillman, who, surprisingly, is not British but American, and stars Kate Beckinsale as the scheming Lady Susan Vernon. I have to admit that it’s been a long time since I read anything by Austin, who originated the story (Lady Susan) as that strangest of genres, an epistolary novel, and I have never seen Beckinsale dressed in lace and frills using her native British accent, and I have not seen anything this old-timey British for a long time, so it’s a bit of a culture shift. There are no Underworld vampires anywhere in this movie. Love and Friendship is a comedy-lite; the laughs are mainly polite chuckles, but only if you comprehend the antiquated English language, endless sentences and subtle nuances of this sort of conversational story.

The story is set somewhere in the late 1700’s, in a large ruling class country house, outside what one of the characters describes as the grime, vile odors, dust and disease of the city (London). It’s also a world where people you know or family members feel free to just have the footman drive the carriage up to the front door with a bunch of trunks, so you can stay for some weeks or months. The interior of the big house, tinkly china, polite conversation that’s loaded with barbs and subtle insults, stoic servants and “help” with lower class accents are the setting for this drawing room story. There’s NO action. At all.

The story begins when Lady Susan and her marriage-aged daughter show up at her in-laws house, as expected, with coach and trunks. Susan is recently widowed, lacking in fortune, and is the subject of rumors and gossip that she is a schemer. In addition to Susan, a variety of other hangers-on, relatives and neighbors pop in and out of the house or come to stay for a while, throughout the story. Susan wants to scheme a marriage, both for herself and her daughter. Suitable men could be young and handsome with good breeding and prospects, older and already rich or both (preferably stupid if they are old and rich), but certainly NOT none of the above. The wealthy De Coucys, the Martins, and Manwarings are all targets of her plots. Her calculations are without end, all taking place in this bucolic estate, centered around tea, good manners, meals, sitting rooms, parlors, and any other polite venue. Lady Susan is quite a character. She might seem to be a villain, being such a schemer, but when you realize that her lack of money and widowed status could easily leave her and her daughter scrubbing floors for these overprivileged characters, you can’t help thinking that she’s doing what she needs to do to keep a good life for herself. She’s playing the wealth and class game as the rules are written, an understandable anti-heroine who’s smarter than anybody else in the drawing room.

I won’t go on much further about the plot, since all the twists and turns of who is cheating on who, who is “available”, who is reaching above their status in society, etc would be longer than the movie itself and WAY above MY social status. I will clearly say that you need to be in the right mood to see the movie, but that, if you are, it’s really quite good. I probably should see it again, since a lot of the language and manners were lost on me until I got my bearings on the time and place. It’s not an easy movie for viewers who are used to the FX heavy scripts and terse language of a lot of popular fare. There’s no revealed sex, no violence, no chases (even in a carriage) and all of the characters are clearly earthlings of the old English sort.

My previous experiences with Kate Beckinsale have mainly been as a pretty face in Pearl Harbor or a leather-clad warrior on the hunt for werewolves, so her performance in Love and Friendship surprised me. The rest of the cast is very British and seemed to slip into their roles easily. Cinematography is quite florid, and the entire movie appears to be made with sets, costumes and makeup, no special effects are evident anywhere. You really have to be ready for a very talky movie. Susan’s endless plotting is the fun part of the movie, so you have to listen carefully to all of the subtle implications of her dialog. I ended up enjoying this more than I might have expected. It’s really well done. I don’t know Austin well enough to have any idea whether the movie does justice to the original, but it’s such an alien time and place to me that I’m not sure I would appreciate the difference from the source. I give this a good recommendation IF (a big IF) you’re in the right mindset. The enjoyment of the movie is in the characters, scheming, wit and dialog, so you have to pay attention, but if you do, it’s quite good. It’s currently sitting at an exalted 99% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes, 84% with audiences and 7.5 on IMDB, so not everybody is thrilled, but I did enjoy it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhvyupqNhL8

The Conjuring 2
 

The Conjuring 2 - Further Adventures of Ed and Lorraine Warren

I admit to having a skeptic’s interest in the topic of hauntings, spirits, visitations, etc, and have read some books on the subject. The motherlode of stories about things that go bump in the night are the experiences of an actual married couple, Ed and Lorraine Warren, the originals in the field of ghost hunting. Prior to Ed’s death in 2006, the Warrens had been doing this since the early 50’s and claim to have visited as many as 10,000 “haunted” houses. A number of movies have been made that fictionalize their experiences, most notably the first Conjuring movie, Annabelle, The Haunting in Connecticut and the Amityville Horror. I don’t know whether I believe in their claims, but I don’t believe that they are deliberate frauds. As in the first Conjuring movie, Ed is played by Patrick Wilson and Lorraine by Vera Farmiga. The movie was directed by James Wan, who directed the first Conjuring film as well as some other action movies.

The Conjuring 2 concerns itself with what has been referred to as the Enfield Poltergeist, a series of 1977 events in a British home that resulted in widespread media coverage and a visit from the Warrens. Recordings and photos were made, investigators, skeptics and news reporters were “baffled”. The Warrens were called (both in the movie and real life) and asked to document the events in order to get attention from the church and a possible exorcism. It’s worth noting that in real life, as well as in the movie, the Warrens have a very religious take on all this and regard it as a battle between good and evil, God and Satan. The first half of Conjuring 2 portrays the lead up to the main “battle”. Lorraine is completely exhausted from her experiences in Amityville and her protective husband thinks she needs a rest. This is when they get the call from Britain and they feel that they can not NOT go. The entire family is terrified, local people who have investigated feel over their heads and it’s all spilling out into the news.

There’s a sense of relief when the Warrens arrive, a lot like cavalry to the rescue, but things don’t get better right away. Cases like this rarely have a neat resolution and this haunting seems to be especially pernicious, with Lorraine calling it a demon infestation. It’s not just bumps in the night, but flying objects, scary voices from a possessed daughter, levitations and bite marks go along with this malevolent spirit. Tension builds and the movie delivers lots of quick scares, along with a creeping mortal dread.

I don’t want to be a spoiler, so I won’t comment on how either the real case or the movie ended and won’t compare them to each other. I’m guessing that you either are or are not a fan of these kinds of movies and you probably already know whether you are going to see it. If you’re a fan of the Warrens, you probably already know about this case. If you don’t know about it, just search for the Enfield Poltergeist. I will say, however, that I enjoyed it. The suspense stayed with me to the end, it didn’t have as many dumb non-sequiturs as most horror movies and I liked that it did stay fairly true to the Warrens as characters. Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga make a good couple, seem as sincere as the actual Warrens and make their rather odd beliefs seem to work. Direction by Wan was quite good. I was looking for “thrills and chills” and got them. The first half of the movie (except for the first few minutes at Amityville) seemed to drag, but I think it was necessary to do a lot of exposition in order that the context of the story and its claims to be based on truth can have some credibility. Special effects were fairly modest and some of them are based on “actual” events where were photographed.

Altogether, I thought it fared fairly well for a horror movie. The audience had fun, maybe a few of them will wonder about the true story, the production was not cynical or exploitive and the liberties taken in order to have a definable climax in 2 hours didn’t do any serious damage to the story. I don’t know whether Wan, Wilson and Farmiga have plans for any further episodes about the Warrens, but if they do, I will probably go. It’s pretty solid for a scary movie. It doesn’t rise to the level of The Witch, but horror movies rarely do. An actual photo from the Enfield events follows.

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2015/...9872253823.jpg



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyA9AtUOqRM

Genius
 

Genius - A Sea of Words

When I saw that this was coming, I was intrigued. On the one hand, it’s a movie that portrays my 3 favorite writers, Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald, along with their Scribner’s editor, Max Perkins. Most of the movie centered on Wolf and his relationship with Perkins. On the other hand, Flixter ratings are below 50, usually a dead zone for movies. Well, we decided to do it anyway, and I have to say that it’s intriguing.

In case you were not paying attention in American Literature class, Thomas Wolfe was a maniacal novelist in the 20’s - 30’s, a fire hydrant of amazing but completely unrestrained prose. His writing was amazing, but there was SO much of it. On one occasion, he presented his publisher with a million word novel, on another, 5000 type written pages delivered in several cartons. Wolfe was, in short, a wild man and a supernova of verbal energy. His editor, Max Perkins managed to work with Wolfe to whittle down his tomes into something that could actually be published and read. Genius is a fictionalization of that relationship.

Right from the start, Genius is odd. It’s a completely British movie, with nearly all British actors, filmed at Pinewood Studios in UK and directed by Michael Grandage. My only other experience of Grandage was with The Madness of King George, a fine but obscure film. Colin Firth costars as Max Perkins, with Jude Law as the hyperactive Wolfe. Nicole Kidman appears as Aline Bernstein, Wolfe’s married girlfriend and sometimes financier, Laura Linney as Louise Perkins (Max’s wife), Guy Pearce and Venessa Kirby as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and Dominic West as Hemingway. Accents are all over the place, with Firth generally sounding British and Law with a contrived Southern accent that doesn’t quite work. That bothered me at first, but once the verbiage starts rolling, it doesn’t really matter that much.

The story follows Wolfe and Perkins during the tempestuous writing of Wolfe’s first two novels, Look Homeward Angel and Of Time and the River. It’s hard to imagine working with a person like Wolfe on a day to day basis. His intensity and manic talking would drive almost anybody crazy, but, on the other hand, you ARE in the presence of a wild genius of a sort that would be like a drug….hard to pull away from, as Max discovers. As such, to adequately characterize a person like Wolfe, the movie has to be more verbal than any movie you have probably ever seen. It’s dense dialog, end to end, so much that, by the time it’s over, you might come out exhausted. As a script, Genius is more like a stage play than a movie, as verbally intense as Hamlet. It has no action of any sort, most of the movie consists of dialog between Wolfe and Perkins.

Genius is mostly set in New York, in the late 20’s and 1930’s, up to the time of Wolfe’s death from tuberculosis of the brain in 1938. Nothing in the movie seems to be filmed on location, but the digital guys did an excellent job of placing the action in a sepia-tinted version of depression era Midtown Manhattan. The outdoor settings are obviously animated, but in a film like this, it doesn’t matter. The characters and dialog are the focus of every minute.

Genius seems to have been a labor of love and awe. Trying to bring a guy like Wolfe to the screen poses problems that defy the usual movie logic of keeping words short and visuals long. I don’t think it’s a movie for general audiences and it might actually fare better as a stage play since theater audiences are used to wordy plays. If you’re a fan of Wolfe (I am) or that period in literature (I am that too) you will enjoy it. If you’re looking for a popcorn movie, you will probably be overwhelmed with words and turn it off. My small audience seemed to have come to see these characters and were quite pleased.

I couldn’t miss this movie. Being from Baltimore and relishing the local connections of Wolfe (who died here) and the Fitzgeralds, who drank, partied, rehabbed, sometimes wrote here, and who left carefully preserved graffiti on the men’s room wall of a speakeasy that was later converted to a bar/bookstore that I frequented in my college years, I initially wanted to see more of Fitzgerald, but was won over by the intensity of the Wolfe story. I can understand the low user ratings for this movie, but I thought that it was pretty good. I can’t imagine how anybody could portray Thomas Wolfe and NOT be excessively talky….it was the nature of the beast. He, and the movie might drive you crazy if you spend too much time, but, if you like this literature, I recommend it.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO9H75kTyVc

Our Kind of Traitor
 

Our Kind of Traitor - Intrigue in Britain

The latest film adaptation of a John le Carre novel is Our Kind of Traitor, directed by Susanna White, a British director, mainly of a number of episodes of many TV shows, some of which have appeared in the US. The cast is mainly European, with Ewan McGregor and Stellan Skarsgard being the actors most familiar in the US.

The story begins with one of my favorite plot devices for suspense or horror movies, notably that moment when an innocent, uninvolved person makes a small, seemingly inconsequential mistake that wrangles them into something that’s much larger than they are and that’s really scary. Often characters like this are given a subtle warning, not unlike when Dracula tells Harker, at the door of Castle Dracula, to “enter freely of your own will”. In this case, Peter (McGregor) and his partner Gail (Naomi Harris) meets “Dima” (Skarsgard), a Russian mafia chieftain, complete with a security entourage, and becomes acquainted. If I have rules in my personal life, one of them is to avoid too much contact with guys who have armed entourages. Another one is to find a way to bow out of an invitation to parties or tennis games from guys with entourages. Nevertheless, Peter does both. It seems that Dima is on the outs with another rising gangster (The Prince) and The Prince wants Dima and his entire family dead. Now Dima is a pretty cold sort of guy, but he does love his family and is hoping that Peter can be a go-between with the British MI-6 guys who would love to uncover entanglements between guys like Dima, The Prince and British politicians, who are on the take. Dima wants protection and escape for his family, in return for evidence on a flash drive, pointing to who the web of bad guys are.

You can probably imagine that will all these bad guys in action, things will not be simple or safe for Peter and Gail, not to mention Dima. Dima seems to like them, invites them to a very expensive party and before they know it, these innocent people are in the middle of a skirmish between very bad, violent gangsters, British Intelligence and sensitive information contained on the flash drive. It devolves into a chase, scenes in a safe house in the alps, some gunplay and death, a discovery that “British Intelligence” is not quite as smart as it should be and that not everybody the the MI 6 hierarchy is on the same page. I’m NOT saying how all that turns out beyond what’s in the trailer.

Like a lot of British movies, especially in this genre, Our Kind of Traitor probably uses more words on screen than most cineplex movie fans expect. Suspense builds steadily and methodically, but you really do need to pay attention and listen to the words; the movie is not just a sequence of images and 4 word sentences. As such, I’m not surprised that the movie currently sits at 6.3 on IMDB and 68% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes. I liked it more than that. I have long enjoyed that whole genre of movies about tangled webs of spies, saboteurs and gangsters. It’s not unlike a lot of horror movies in that, as I noted at the beginning of my review, you, as an audience member are smarter than Peter and Gail. I know that I would never go into Dracula’s castle, nor would I go to a party with the Russian Mafia. I feel sorry for Peter and Gail, but it’s their problem, not mine. Once that’s clear to me, I can enjoy the labyrinth of connections between all these shady characters.

Because of that, I enjoyed Our Kind of Traitor. I’m quite comfortable with wordy, British intrigue movies. This one worked quite well for me. The cast is quite good in those creepy roles, direction moves forward at a good pace and exposition was good enough to tell me as much as I need to understand in order to know what’s going on. Our Kind of Traitor is not like a James Bond movie (at least the recent versions), in that the action is fairly low level, without incredible technologies or over-dependance on big spectacular digital stunts. The digital renderings center on adding backgrounds, like mountain scenes and snowstorms and the action has a feel of contemporary believability. If you like this sort of movie, it’s worth a view.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5k4FBGtbMs

Ghostbusters
 

Ghostbusters - An unneeded remake

The title says it…why? There are probably very few people living in the US who have not seen the original Ghostbusters movie at some time. The logo is still familiar, kids buy costumes at halloween, they’re on lunch boxes, it comes around on TV, the video is in almost every library, on VHS, DVD and Blue Ray. So the question is, why do a remake? What can a new version of this venerable classic add to the story? For me, the answer was nothing. Yeah, the FX were amped up, but the cheesy 80’s FX were part of the charm of the original. The new ones were obviously copied from the old one, but lack the charm. They’re just, well bigger and more numerous.

The original movie had four elements that made it likable, the buddy story, the ghost hunt story, the New York setting and the understated comedy elements. The new one comes up short on all of those. The story is similar. Erin Gilbert (Kristin Wiig) is a physics professor, coming up on possible tenure, trying to keep her ghost hunting past under wraps until her tenure is finalized. Abby Yates (Melissa McCarthy) is still ghost hunting and trying to sell the book that she and Erin had written years ago. Abby has a sketchy assistant, Jillian Holtzman (Kate McKinnon). Meanwhile Patty Tolan (Leslie Jones) is a subway station attendant who has just had a paranormal experience down in the tunnel. The four of them become the unplanned team that has to fight off the biggest paranormal outbreak the Big Apple has seen in quite a while.

Slimer is there, as are a number of somewhat familiar spooks, there’s lots of green slime, and the Busters have jumpsuits with backpacks that shoot out streams of protons. There is Mayor Bradley (Andy Garcia), the guy who doesn’t want all this publicity for his city and a receptionist, the exceptionally ill-suited Kevin (Chris Hemsworth), who seems to really want to be an Australian dancer. A number of other familiar Saturday Night Live cast members make cameos and Bill Murray has a small role as an elder critic of ghostbusting who doesn’t last long. Dan Ackroyd, Ernie Hudson and Sigourney Weaver have cameos. I’m guessing that if you’ve seen the trailer, you know the rest of the story.

So, how was it? I was mildly entertained, but nothing more than that. The setup and plot were predictable, as was the ending. Nothing new was added to the old story except for the obvious gender reversal, which turned out to be as much of a disappointment as the rest of the movie. My first criticism is that the buddy story angle just didn’t work here. The four characters were just that, nothing about them jelled as a team. Much of the characters and acting looked like it was a long version of an SNL skit, put together quickly for something quick. Kate McKinnon especially, didn’t really do much except channel a couple of her SNL characters and act weird. No buddies there.

As for New York, in the old movie, it was a character, but not in this one. Having been around New York a lot I kept hoping to see some familiar places, but that was not to be. GB was actually filmed in Boston, with taller buildings and a few skyline scenes obviously digitized into the contrived backgrounds. New York didn’t get to be a character in the movie, at least not the New York I visit.

As for ghost busting, anybody has turned on a cable converter in recent years can’t help but see the many and varied versions of that, so it’s nothing new. The new version of GB uses the familiar devices from the old movie but acts as though they just invented them.

In regard to acting, the new version of the movie made me appreciate how much I enjoyed the understated performances of the characters in the old version. Bill Murray, especially, can do a lot with small gestures, something lost on the current cast. Once again, it all had the look of a much-too-long SNL skit. I have to admit that I don’t like Melissa McCarthy very much in anything, but I do enjoy the rest of the cast, just not here. The only new character I liked was Leslie Jones’s Patti. Jones can be funny doing almost anything. Completing the team’s gender reversal with Chris Hemsworth as receptionist just made no sense. I had the impression that he could have been digitized into the movie during post production when the Australian lab that was in the credits was doing all of the digital animation. Nothing about him melded into the sets, rest of the cast or the story. Direction by Paul Feig was adequate in a television sort of way. Nothing much there either.

In short, save your money unless you just need a couple hours of mild entertainment. The original Ghostbusters is much better and even the lesser Ghostbusters II works better than this. I like most of the cast and wanted this to be better, but, alas, it was not. One thing they DID do of course, was to prepare us for a sequel. In the last few seconds, one of the characters says something like “who is Zul?”, presumably preparing an “eager” audience for another round of ghost busting. I will probably skip it.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3ugHP-yZXw

Star Trek Beyond
 

Star Trek Beyond - Old and new characters, a new plot and a wild, enjoyable ride.

Whenever I see a new Star Trek episode, I have to go back and refresh myself on the chronicle. There was the original 1960’s TV show, the film series based on the original show, the later “Next Generation” shows and the movies based on the next generation. Now, we’re in the so-called reboot series that goes back to the original TV characters, at a time before the first show. Given J J Abrams’ involvement in the production, one is reminded of the often confusing chronology of Lost, but I guess the entire decades long sequence was confusing before Abrams’ involvement. It was directed by Justin Lin, who did several Fast and Furious movies, written by Simon Pegg (Scotty) and Doug Jung, with credit to Gene Roddenberry for creating the characters and the Star Trek “universe”.

Things begin innocently enough, with the Enterprise checking into Starbase Yorktown for R&R, during their “5 year mission”. That respite only lasts a few minutes, however, and the rest of the movie is end-to-end action, fast and furious so to speak. When the Enterprise is sent on a rescue mission into a chaotic nebula, it is suddenly attacked by a huge swarm of insect-like vessels that swarm it, take little bites and quickly destroy the ship, leaving remnants of its crew (especially the stars that we all know and love) stranded on the planet Altamid. Why the attack? Well, apparently the attack was initiated by a highly aggressive alien, Krall (Idris Ebla), a humanoid lizard who urgently desires a mysterious artifact retrieved by Captain Kirk on another recent voyage. Krall’s temperament makes Romulans and Klingons look like pacifists. At this point, the rest of the plot centers around re-uniting and rescuing the valiant crew so they can go back home. Based on the facts of the future that we, the omniscient viewers, already know, Kirk, Spock, Bones, Uhura, Sulu and Scotty have a future in episodes we have already seen. Even J J Abrams’s loose take on the rules of time flow make us expect that most of the main characters are going to survive. There’s a new character who seems to have a role in the main cast, Jaylah (Sophia Boutella), stranded on the planet and living in an old, crashed starship.

The cast of Beyond includes the now familiar faces of Chris Pine as the young James Kirk, Zachary Quinto as Spock, Karl Urban as the ever grouchy Bones McCoy, Zoe Suldana as Urhura, Simon Pegg as the ever cheerful Scotty, John Cho as Sulu and the late Anton Yelchin as Chekov. The movie includes RIP’s for Leonard Nimoy and Anton Yelchin and an “outing” for Sulu. None of the acting is especially noteworthy, but in the context of a movie that is nearly completely action oriented beginning at minute 5, that’s not surprising. All of the cast members do a decent job of recreating their characters and Sophia Boutella’s Jaylah looks like a character that might have a future in another movie. The characters have their familiar relationships with each other; verbal snipes between Spock and Bones and urgent attempts at mechanical repairs by Scotty punctuate the action and provide a little bit of comic relief.

The effects in the Beyond are quite remarkable. I didn’t see it in 3D, but the 2D digital projection I saw left little to be desired in regard to image quality. Things move quickly in Beyond, so you never get to focus very much on one scene, but the believability and detail of the action are truly excellent. It isn’t Shakespeare, but it’s sci-fi action that’s right at the current state of the art. Nothing drags in the two hour run time. Fast and furious definitely defines Lin’s direction.

Where does this stand in the Star Trek universe? I liked it. It’s not as philosophical and preachy as the Next Generation series. There’s plenty of action but, at the same time, the movie does continue in the long tradition of advancing a more positive future. When it all began the original TV series was notable for its early minimal attempts at cast diversity. Network executives made Roddenberry fight for every cast member that didn’t look like suburban USA as they saw it in 1965, but in the Star Trek universe of the current series none of that looks remarkable. It’s just the way things are and characters that don’t look like each other are not exceptional. There’s not a lot of depth in the story, dialog is mainly action oriented, so don’t expect to need a lot of erudite sci-fi analysis or theorizing about gravity, time lines or whatever. Let the story geeks worry about all of the character details, time lines and dubious science and just go along for the ride. It’s a fun movie that lives up to the franchise.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QYGBW4jrDE

The Wave
 

The Wave - Released in the US on Netflix - a fine disaster film from Norway

I generally avoid disaster films unless I’m in a mood that’s only slightly more elevated than when I’m watching professional wrestling. In general, these movies are contrived, stereotyped, predictable exercises in digital FX making. What it would look like if an asteroid hit the earth, or if some idiot recreated dinosaurs, the ultimate “Category 12” hurricane, or a swarm of flaming tornadoes hit Manhattan, are the usual grist of these movies.

In the case of The Wave, however, it’s a real disaster that has happened. Part of my family is Norwegian, and I grew up with folk tales about giant waves that wiped out towns in remote fjord regions. It turns out that this is true and has been happened several times in recent history. What happens is that a part of a mountain that borders a fjord cracks away, slides into the water and generates a huge splash. As the wave from the splash travels up the narrowing waterway, the height is amplified. The resulting wave can be far higher than an earthquake tsunami and wipes out anything in its path. That’s the plot of The Wave. This movie was the most popular movie in Norway back in 2015, won some awards there as well as being nominated for several American awards.

It’s a normal day in Norway (cold and gray that is) when a geologist, Kristian Eikjord, starts his day. He has gotten a better job with an oil company. He and his family will be moving so he’s finishing on his current job, which is monitoring vulnerable mountains that sit next to fjords. Being a movie of this type, you know that things are going to go downhill (in more ways than one) pretty soon. In this case, he wants to move on to his new job, but notices that changes are occurring in the mountain and, being a dedicated guy, he alerts colleagues and authorities. They are skeptical about setting off an alert system that triggers evacuations, but they look at his evidence and are convinced….something real bad is about to happen. Alerts are triggered, evacuations begin and once the mountain starts to slide, the best guess is that they have about 10 minutes before the wave hits a small tourist town and hotel that are right on the waterfront. Kristian is a good parent, gathers his kids and alerts his wife, who works in the tourist hotel. She, in turn, is responsible for alerting hotel guests and doing what is needed to get them out of the way. The wave hits the town. It’s a huge disaster, followed by a search for survivors.

If you’ve seen disaster movies before, you can probably guess at the rest of the story. There’s not much original in that. What is different about The Wave, however, is just how sincere the movie seems. It doesn’t have all of the usual contrived “Hollywood” characters that populate these movies. The characters all seem like real people, confronted with a terrible situation that threatens their lives. There’s none of the usual callous authority figures that generally play into these movies as villains. Everybody in town knows that this can happen, wished that it would not happen during their lives, but now they have to deal with it within minutes. The fact that the disaster happens so quickly means that there really isn’t much to be done except run or drive as fast as you can uphill. The movie runs a little under 2 hours, is very compact, gets right down to business and doesn’t relent until the end. By the time it is over, you might be breathless.

I won’t list out the cast, characters and director, since none of them seem to be known outside of the land of the Vikings, but they are all quite good. The Wave has none of the stupidity that generally afflicts these sort of movies, plays it straight and is very believable. The Wave is in Norwegian, has subtitles, but, for the most part, you don’t need them. Aside from some of the science at the beginning of the film, it’s mainly action oriented. Dialog is minimal, mostly being screams, pleas for help, and some surprising expletives, rendered in American English, that require no subtitles.

I didn’t set out to watch this film, but being completely overdosed on stupid convention politics that were dominating TV that night, I checked on Netflix and saw this as a recommended movie. I actually didn’t even mean to watch the whole thing, but became riveted. It’s probably the best disaster movie I’ve seen in recent years, is mostly believable, never stupid and quite worth watching if you’re in the mood.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIj4v8TfnyU

Jason Bourne
 

Jason Bourne - Latest in the series

It doesn’t seem like it, but it’s been nine years since Matt Damon last appeared as Jason Bourne in The Bourne Ultimatum. The next chapter in the story is here now. It was directed by Paul Greengrass, co-written by Greengrass and Christopher Rouse, with elements lifted from Robert Ludlum, author of the original books.

When the story begins, Bourne is recovering from the amnesia he developed in the previous movie, recovering memories, has been laying as low as he can, making some sort of living and honing his skills in illegal bare-knuckle boxing matches, in which he plays along for a while and then just decks his opponent. Meanwhile an activist for on-line privacy (Nicky Parsons) has hacked the CIA, retrieving documents that reveal the background of Bourne including information about his father and his training as super-soldier-assassin. A parallel plot to this is that a tech CEO, head of social medium Deep Dream, Aaron Kaloor (Riz Ahmed), is launching a public campaign to guarantee privacy on his site. He also has back door dealings with the CIA; his privacy campaign is at least part self promotion and grandstanding.

Meanwhile, back in the CIA HQ, a division head, Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander) has discovered the hack and revealed it to her boss, the Director, Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones). Parsons and Bourne meet in Athens, but are interdicted by a CIA goon squad that includes a character only known as “The Asset”, an expert assassin. Most of the CIA squad and Parsons are killed or otherwise neutralized by Bourne, but The Asset is now on Bourne’s trail and the trail leads to London, where further players emerge in this web. Both the Director and Lee want to get Bourne, but do they want to kill him or bring him back into the agency? Not everybody in the CIA is on the same page with this, so the big chase that makes up most of the movie is not just the fox and hound sort of chase. In fact, there are several hounds, with different agendas. Bourne, of course, doesn’t really trust any of them and, in any event, needs to evade The Asset, who continues on a relentless pursuit of Bourne, in the process doing a lot of shooting, blowing up a lot of stuff and wrecking an awful lot of cars. Also, just HOW does Deep Dream get involved in the Bourne chase and who is Kaloor dealing with in the CIA?

When you decide to see a movie that includes Jason Bourne, you know up front that there’s going to be a lot of action, many things get blown up and the contents of a small auto production plant will all be wrecked in about two hours. If you like that sort of thing, don’t miss it. JB is action pretty much from beginning to end, fairly breathless action at that. Nobody is going to win any acting Oscars for this, but I doubt that they expect to; it’s not what the movie is about. If you are looking for some sort of erudite script about the morals involved in internet security, privacy and spying, there won’t be much that you can’t read in a Twitter message…just know that it’s an issue and part of the plot.

All that said, I did enjoy it. The action is really end to end and fairly relentless. The machinations of who is betraying who, who do the hit squads really work for and what does Bourne want are complex, constantly shifting and, even if you don’t get that, you will probably enjoy the action anyway. The FX and sound are top-notch and the visuals are convincing. Having segments filmed in what looks like Greece (the Canary Islands sit in for Greece), London, Berlin, Washington and Las Vegas make the movie into a lightning tour. I assumed what it would be going in and enjoyed it. So, it seemed, did the rest of the large audience. Neither Jason Bourne as a character, nor Jason Bourne as a movie are big favorites of mine, but I was suitably breathless and entertained for the duration and that’s about as much as you can expect from an action movie franchise like this.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4gJsKZvqE4

Don’t Think Twice - A completely enjoyable indie film

Having seen most of what is currently popular and not being all that interested in Suicide Squad, we decided to take in something relatively obscure, a new movie written, directed and starred in by Michael Birbiglia, who is mainly known for acting in some TV episodes. I think you can be forgiven if you have not heard of him…I hadn’t. Don’t Think Twice was playing at our local indie/foreign film mecca and when we looked, surprisingly, it showed up as an exalted 99% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. It stars Birbiglia as Miles, Keegan-Micheal Kay as Jack and Gillian Jacobs as Samantha. Among the cast members, the only one I was familiar with was Jacobs, who was previously featured in the witty TV show Community. It’s an extremely low budget film, shot in tiny corners of New York. The rest of the cast is completely unknown to me.

The story centers around an improv comedy group that calls itself The Commune. They have been performing together for a long time in small venues in the City, but to their dismay, they find out that their usual gig, a small Village comedy club, is going to close. In spite of all their years of performing, the members of The Commune still live like they just graduated, came to the big city and are looking for a break. Miles, the group leader, lives in a space so small that his bed looks like a bookshelf. Sadly, for most of them, they’ve been looking for that break for a long time now and there isn’t much future for The Commune when the club closes. The “Holy Grail” for these performers is to land a job on the long-running TV show Weekend Live, a very thinly veiled version of Saturday Night Live. Ironically, they are improv comedians, striving to get on a show where improv is not done. The long-running ecosystem of The Commune is disrupted, however, when two members, Jack and Samantha are invited to audition for Weekend Live. Samantha backs out, but Jack lands a job. All of a sudden Jack is going big-time and the rest of the group is losing their venue. Relationships in The Commune (especially Jack and Samantha’s romance) get complicated as these characters try to come to grips with the fact that they are floundering while Jack is about to take the big step that they all secretly envy. Realizing that youthful aspirations are not being fulfilled and wondering how Jack’s possible success will effect the group becomes the main theme of the story. As one character, who reminds me of Woody Allen, puts it, “your 20’s are all about hope, your 30’s are all about how dumb it was to hope”.

Don’t Think Twice was shot in the second half of 2015 and opened in New York just a few weeks ago. Word has spread quickly in the indie community and the film has been well received. I went, not knowing anything except for the single paragraph in the theater’s evening schedule. My experience with movies like this is mixed. Sometimes they seem pretentious about their low-budget moral purity, but in the case of Don’t Think Twice, that never happens. I don’t know anything about Birbiglia, don’t know if there’s any autobiographical element to the story and don’t know how the movie germinated, but that doesn’t really matter because the movie becomes a believable story about approaching middle age, the realization that not all dreams come true and the difficulties of trying to deal with a friend who is now more successful than anybody else in the group, but who is still the same person they knew before.

Don’t Think Twice has already been a relatively big hit in New York, where it is set, and was referred to in Metacritic with the term “universal acclaim”. I really enjoyed it. The cast works, like The Commune, as an ensemble; acting is completely realistic, not movie-contrived. The minimal production and grainy cinematography doesn’t detract; in fact, it gives the movie a realistic look that seems almost voyeuristic. A bigger production would have detracted rather than improved the film. When I recently reviewed the new Ghostbusters movie, I recall remarking that, unlike the old one, it tried but failed at being a buddy movie or a New York Movie, in spite of trying for both. Don’t Think Twice succeeds at both. If you’re not sure about seeing something so little with nothing approaching a superhero, just lie yourself for a few minutes that this is a French movie from the 1950’s that’s a verifiable classic of the cinema. After those few minutes, you will be absorbed. I’m assuming that DTT will be circulating around the festivals and showing at big-city indie theaters for a while and that it probably won’t be showing up in suburban cineplexes, but if you get the chance and can have an open mind, don’t miss it.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RFTpObS95U

Florence Foster Jenkins
 

Florence Foster Jenkins - Meryl Streep creates another unforgettable character

So, like most people, you probably want to know just who Florence Foster Jenkins was and why there is a movie about her. Well…Jenkins was possibly the worst singer to ever perform in Carnegie Hall. A well-off socialite in Manhattan in the early 20th century, Florence came to the conclusion that recital stages needed a soprano like her. She started life as a pianist, but a hand injury convinced her to become a singer. After divorcing the husband, who gave her syphilis on their wedding night, she took up dating a British actor St. Claire Bayfield, who became her promoter, who guarded her from media attention and had affairs on the side to compensate for the chaste relationship required by Jenkins’ syphilis. Over the years, Jenkins performed operatic arias in front of carefully vetted society people, picked by Bayfield, with the understanding that they would be supportive of her so-called singing. Jenkins’ singing, can be heard in a few recordings on Youtube and is painful to endure. She teamed up with a pianist, Cosme McMoon (yes, that really WAS his name) who could manage to follow her singing, which lacked pitch, cadence, melody and tone. Her voice was worse than a cat in heat. The carefully staged recital fantasies went on until she insisted on performing at Carnegie Hall in 1944 and Bayfield could not filter or bribe the audience. What followed courted disaster. This movie takes an abbreviated look at this genuinely bizarre story, starting at the Carnegie Hall event. It’s condensed for time, but the movie narrative hits the main points in this poor, deluded woman’s “career”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6ubiUIxbWE

The movie stars a well-padded Meryl Streep as Florence, Hugh Grant as Bayfield and Simon Helberg as Cosme McMoon. In addition, Streep actually did sing her parts in the film. Apparently Streep, who is actually a decent singer, had to prepare carefully in order to sing so badly….and it really IS bad. Her portrayal of Jenkins is of a very sweet lady, completely unaware and unaffected by how she is heard by others. It’s also hard to avoid thinking that, being several decades after her syphilis infection and after unsuccessful treatment with mercury and arsenic, her brain had deteriorated to the point where she lived in a fantasy. Streep really hits all the buttons on that. Hugh Grant is also excellent as the fawning, supportive Bayfield, who manages to keep Florence from knowing how awful she is, while carrying on an affair with another woman. His upper-crust British mannerisms work perfectly in this context.

I went to this movie unsure. It looked like a light comedy, but knowing the actual story of Jenkins, it seemed almost mocking to make this unfortunate woman into a fool. I was surprised to find that it really handled the story well. Jenkins was such an effervescent character that she never really realized that, if she appeared in public without Bayfield’s protection, the audience would laugh and the critics would eviscerate her. Bayfield, in spite of his infidelity, is genuinely concerned for her “career” and well being. McMoon plays on, as though all this is high seriousness. The movie stays light and mostly implies the tragedy that underlies the story. It works much better than I expected. I will go out on a limb this early in the season and say that Streep’s performance is Oscar worthy. Once again, she creates an unforgettable character, even if it’s a light comedic character. I can’t imagine a better character coming out of a heavy drama of the sort that Oscar-pickers prefer. Doing her own execrable singing just adds to the performance.

The look of the movie is quite enjoyable. It’s a digitally re-created, sepia-tinted Midtown Manhattan of the 1930s and 40’s. It’s so much more convincing that the Boston + NY Skyscraper Manhattan that was created for the recent Ghostbusters re-boot. This New York movie works. Florence Foster Jenkins is not a heavy or consequential movie and not an epic of any sort except for Streep’s performance, but it is quite enjoyable and well done. As light movies go, it’s a gem.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HszfdNS0JSc

Cafe Society
 

Cafe Society - Woody Allen’s latest

Like him or not, Woody Allen has had one of the most remarkable careers in movie history. He’s 80 now, started out writing tens of thousands (literally) of jokes for star comedians back in the 1950’s, had a stand-up career for a while, moved into writing, performing and directing in the movies, and, as of this moment, has written 76 of them, directed 53 and acted in 50. In the mean time, he had 3 wives, several other long term lovers, a number of kids and a scandal involving Mia Farrow, one of her many adopted daughters (Soon-Yi Previn) and court cases involving accusations that have gone in until fairly recently. It’s worth noting that, in spite of the sleaze factor, none of the court judgements actually went against Woody.

Cafe Society, set in the 1930’s, is his latest project. As always, there is a central character who looks and speaks a lot like Woody. In this case it’s Bobby Dorfman, played by Jesse Eisenberg, a young guy from a New York Jewish family, who travels to Hollywood in order to make some sort of life in the movies, with help from his uncle Phil (Steve Carell), a shark-like agent to the stars. Bobby is immediately stricken with Phil’s secretary Vonnie (Kristen Stewart), develops a big crush and pursues her, in spite of the fact that she tells him that she already has a boyfriend, a journalist named Doug. Bobby continues to pursue her anyway. They become friends and near-lovers. What Bobby doesn’t know, unfortunately, is that Vonnie’s boyfriend is not “Doug”, but Uncle Phil, who wants to leave his wife of decades for a younger prize.

There’s another wild card in the family affairs, however, and that’s Bobby’s older brother Ben (Corey Stoll), a gangster in New York, who runs night clubs and makes his rivals disappear into concrete slabs. When Bobby eventually discovers who Vonnie’s real boyfriend is, and realizes that his movie career isn’t very satisfying, he goes back to New York to work managing one of Ben’s nightclubs. When Ben is finally convicted for one of his many hits and goes to The Chair, Bobby takes over the nightclub and makes it into a big celebrity destination. There, he meets Veronica (Blake Lively), gets married and has a family. He turns Ben’s night club into a legitimate business and has an ambition to open a second club in Hollywood, where he will cross paths with Phil and Vonnie.

Will Bobby’s and Vonnie’s lives ever reconnect? Will Bobby’s unrequited love for Vonnie ever be “requited”? As it usually is with a Woody Allen story, there are a lot of twists and turns. Also, is it always is, the central character Bobby, is a thinly veiled version of the Woody Allen nebbish character…similar dialog and jokes, quick banter and constant self reference. We’ve seen Woody in many different places; this time he’s running a night club.

I enjoyed Cafe Society. I’ve enjoyed a lot of Allen’s films over the years, and this is hardly his best, but if works quite well as light entertainment. When a writer is 80 years old and has written 76 movies, you can’t realistically expect him to be breaking new ground, and Cafe Society does not. It’s dominated by Allen-isms, Jewish jokes, old-time Hollywood references and quick one-liners. If you don’t like Allen’s brand of low-key, highly verbal, sarcastic humor, you won’t like Cafe Society any better than his other movies, but if you do, it’s worth seeing.

The movie is quite well done in terms of the sepia-tinted visuals. The movie and night club cultures of that era, gangster stereotypes, costumes, hair and music are all done with excellent detail. Acting by all of the cast is “by the numbers”, nothing great, but all quite professional. The production seems quite authentic, much of it being set on location in New York and Los Angeles, with modern buildings deftly removed in the digital lab. Like most of Allen’s movies, about 60% of the value of the film is whether you appreciate his brand of clearly structured, wordy dialog. There’s a lot of words in the movie, and you should listen carefully, because most of the virtue of the movie is in the writing. Cafe Society is not bound for my bookshelf, but it’s definitely worth seeing.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl4X6pFfmTI

Snowden
 

Snowden - The latest from Oliver Stone

Whenever a new movie directed and/or written by Oliver Stone emerges, I expect it to be controversial, ideological and fairly hard hitting. With that in mind, I was ambivalent about seeing Snowden, figuring that it would be a polemic of some sort. I was surprised to see that Snowden receives little propagandizing, that the story is pretty straightforward, as though taken from a Wikipedia account. The movie stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Snowden, Shailene Woodley as his girlfriend Lindsay Mills, Rhys Ifans as Snowden’s CIA handler and Melissa Leo and Zachary Quinto as reporters working with Snowden. We also see Nick Cage in a small role as a CIA non-conformist, relegated to the basement level of work due to his eccentricities.

Snowden starts out in 2013, after his much publicized release of extensive secret computer documents that detailed the scope and extent of US digital surveillance and his subsequent exile in Russia. There really isn’t much that can be a spoiler here because the beginning of the movie is the end of the story of how this happened. We know how it ends as the movie begins; the rest is a flashback. The narrative starts out with Edward Snowden as a genius high school dropout, joining the army, but receiving a service ending injury during basic training. Being zealous about his desire to serve his country, Snowden subsequently worked for the CIA, the NSA and for government contractors that work in digital surveillance. It culminates (the beginning of the movie) when Snowden comes to the conclusion that he can’t, in good conscience, continue the work he does, believing it to be a gross violation of the rights of citizens to digital privacy.

The conundrum to Snowden, both the man and the movie, is whether he was right to do what he did. On the one hand, he earnestly believes that the spying is wrong and unconstitutional, but on the other, he did swear oaths promising to NOT do exactly what he did. Nobody can claim that he did it accidentally, that he was misled or delusional. Snowden, with his 145 IQ, knows exactly what he is doing, plots it out methodically and knows that his life will be in the trash can, even if he is not killed. This is quite clear in the movie.

Snowden, the movie, is excellent at clarifying this story. It also does a fairly decent job of explaining the extent of information collection, and the scope of events that can follow from what has been called “connecting the dots”. As a person who spent a big part of my life working in the world of digital information, it’s quite obvious to me that all of us leave digital footprints everywhere. Credit cards, cell phone usage, internet usage, social media…everything we do that is not specifically calculated to be “off the grid” leaves those footprints. This has been massively publicized and shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody. Our information is all out there to be collected and correlated, and even if our government doesn’t do it, other governments will, as will service providers, advertisers, gangsters or anybody else who realizes that people put all the details of their life in Facebook, just for starters. It’s naive and unrealistic to NOT realize this.

Because of that, to me, Snowden, both the movie and the man’s revelations, is yesterday’s news. I knew how the story played out before I walked into the theater and knew about how the information is used, before the real events. Nevertheless, I thought that the movie dealt with the issues quite well. Part of the movie seems to be an ernest attempt to explain how all this works, in terms that a movie audience can comprehend, what it means to connect the dots. I thought the movie succeeded in that. It also appeared that the cast had a belief in the story. There’s a lot of sincerity in the acting and general feel of the movie. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is excellent at mimicking the real Edward Snowden and giving the film a documentary feel. Even though we know how the story ends right at the beginning, the film does a good job of keeping up the suspense. Snowden is more visually interesting than most Stone films. It uses a lot of graphical devices to illustrate the connections that are made with all of the data, from social media photographs, to government information, to drone attacks in other counties. It’s all tied together in vivid pictures and animation. It’s scary how all this connects….a digital horror movie.

I enjoyed Snowden. As I said previously, I knew how the story came out, how all this connecting the dots activity works, but I liked having the story of this man told without a lot of preaching, from either the good or evil perspective. Oliver Stone can’t entirely resist preaching, but there’s only a little bit of it at the end. Most of it is procedural, letting Snowden, the facts and the story speak for themselves. It’s a fine piece of that old tradition of “ripped from the headlines” movies. It’s not much for date night, but well worth seeing.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlSAiI3xMh4

Sully
 

Sully

Just in case - The entire story is in the trailer and was a huge story in the news, but in the event that you just arrived on planet Earth - Spoiler Alert for plot revelation.

You can generally recognize Clint Eastwood’s directorial style. You might have seen it in films like Million Dollar Baby, American Sniper or Gran Torino. Like his face and his acting, it’s wrinkly with a determined icy stare that never grins or looks away. Eastwood’s stye continues here in Sully, the story of Chelsey Sullenberger. If you were paying any attention to the news in January of 2009, you would certainly recall the photos of an airliner floating in the Hudson River in New York, surrounded by harbor vessels intended for tourists, passengers standing on the wings, being taken aboard the ships. The plane had just taken off from LaGuardia Airport when it collided with a flock of birds. Enough birds were sucked into the jet engines to stall and damage them. All of a sudden, this aircraft was only 3000 feet up, above a huge city, with no power to climb or maneuver and a full load of fuel, a huge flying bomb with full load of passengers. With no engine power a jet airliner stays aloft only a little better than a tomato can, so the question was not whether it would go down, but just where and in how many seconds. In the urgency of the moment, Sully (Sullenberger) determined that he would not make it back to LaGuardia, nor could he stay aloft long enough to reach a smaller airport in New Jersey. His only recourse was to attempt a controlled landing on the frigid Hudson River. Amazingly, all of the passengers and crew survived to be rescued by the quick acting tour ship captains. The entire incident, from take off to completed rescue took only about a half hour.

This much was in the news for weeks. The rest of the story, however, was the aftermath. The movie mainly tells that story, the media circus that surrounded Sully, the subsequent investigation and the impact on Sullenberger and his crew. Tom Hanks stars as Sully, Aaron Ekhart is Jeff Skyles, the First Officer and Laura Linney is Sullenberger’s wife Lorraine.

The action in this film is partially in the form of flash backs of Sully’s memories of his long career as a pilot and the psychological trauma that can happen in a couple of life threatening moments. It is also about his attempts to survive the predictable inquisition that occurs when the Federal Transportation Safety Board attempts to diagnose the cause of a major incident like an airline crash. In spite of the media attention that made Sully into a hero in the public perception, there were questions about whether his decision to land on the river was the right one. Some after-the-fact computer simulations indicated that he could have glided to one of the two nearby airports and avoided the danger and cost of the water landing. The investigation and aftermath are the substance of the movie.

Like a lot of Eastwood’s movies, Sully is fairly relentless. Its depiction of the stress of the incident and the subsequent investigation don’t let up. Even though we know from the beginning how the story ends, it’s tense, right up to the end of the movie. Between reliving the 200 seconds of the flight and then living through the investigation, Sully is not a light movie or a superficial celebration of a hero. There’s no real villain in this story. The birds are just birds and the FTSB is doing its mandated job of trying to determine what happened and how to prevent such incidents in the future. Sully just wants to survive the investigation, go home and take a break.

Tom Hanks, as Sully, does his usual excellent job of portraying a character. I read that he spent some time with the real Sully in order to learn his mannerisms. His character is the center of the story. The rest of the cast, especially Aaron Ekhart and Laura Linney do their usual jobs of being capable actors, but they are not the center of the story. It’s mostly Hanks’s movie and it’s a memorable performance. Cinematography is quite good. The special effects used to create the crash are extremely believable…you are right there when it all happens, in the cockpit and the passenger cabin. Like my last review, Snowden, this is another ripped-from-the-headlines factual story; there are no surprises in the end. Nevertheless, Eastwood’s unblinking look at the story makes it engaging, suspenseful and enjoyable. You end with the feeling that everybody in the movie did their damnedest to tell the story and that the story is worth telling. After my adrenaline came back to normal, I really liked the film.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjKEXxO2KNE

Demon
 

Demon - AKA, My Big Fat Demonic Polish Wedding

Let me start at the end of the review. Demon is one of the strangest and most disturbing movies I’ve seen in a while. I’ve seen ratings that are all over the place, from high to low. I think critics think more of it than viewers. It also has a tragic side. After the release of this movie, the co-writer and director Marcin Wrona, a Polish film maker, hung himself (for real). Its genre is closest to horror, but it’s also a horror movie with some comedy. Most of all, however, it’s just bat-sh*t crazy, far more than the misleading trailer suggests. For all of the reasons above, I’m going in the middle, giving it a 3 mainly because I have no idea how to review or rate something like this. Demon is partly in English and partly in subtitled Polish and Yiddish.

Demon has some foundation in an old Jewish ghost story of the dybbuk, in this movie, the spirit of a dead woman who lures in and possesses a young man. Itay Tiran plays Piotr, who is engaged to Zaneta (Agnieszka Zewelska). They are to be married in her parents old house, a rural farm house somewhere in Poland. Zaneta’s family has reservations; they don’t know him well and it’s been a short engagement. The wedding gets off to an ominous start when heavy storm rains intrude. Piotr is considering adding a pool to the home, is digging with a backhoe but runs into a buried skeleton. Things go straight downhill from there. He slips, or is sucked, into a muddy pit, seems to be drowning, but strangely turns up the next morning, clean, and sleeping in his car.

Soon after, the wedding happens. It’s a big drunken affair with massive amounts of vodka and sleazy behavior, held in the big house. The groom seems to not be able to handle his alcohol. It only gets worse, however, when he starts to have seizures. The father of the bride, not wanting to ruin the wedding, brings in even more vodka and the guests get even more drunk. Piotr is carried off to another room as his condition deteriorates and it’s apparent that whatever afflicts him is far worse than being drunk. When he claims to be Hana, a dead Jewish woman, a priest is brought in to pray but his condition worsens. Whatever is afflicting poor Piotr seems to have its roots in something far worse, like when the father of the bride exclaims that you can’t dig anywhere in Poland without hitting a grave. The big wedding turns into a horror. Awful weather, disgustingly drunk guests, a missing bride and groom and nobody knows WHAT is going on.

What is this movie about? I have read accounts of medieval events like St Anthony’s Fire, plague dancers and insanity, associated with ergotism. Ergot is a toxic grain fungus that causes vivid hallucinations, seizures, gangrene and even death. The most benevolent component of its brew of alkaloids is LSD. What’s happening here, however, is not just fungus poisoning. It seems to go far beyond that into some sort of other realm, like the ghosts of Jews in the Polish soil. While only Piotr is possessed, all of the other guests, along with the bride’s family, seem to be on the verge of madness in the rainy, muddy, wedding hell. Nothing good comes from this.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you. You may or may not like Demon. It’s not exactly scary in the conventional horror movie sense, but you really do NOT want to visit this Polish town, especially in the rain. It’s been described as a dark comedy. There are “Greek Wedding” moments in Demon, but it really is dark and that is the pervading feeling. Some elements (especially the ergotism hints) remind me of the excellent The Witch, but this is far stranger. I don’t know enough about director Wrona to hazard a guess about what he meant to say in this film, but it has a gloom and fatalism that really is not something I’d want to live with. His suicide is tragic and somehow not inconsistent with the feel of this movie. Technically, it’s well filmed, the acting is excellent and everything about the movie is convincing. It can’t be full of plot holes, because most of the plot doesn’t make conventional sense anyway. It’s not a date night movie but if you're in the mood for off-balance atmosphere, you will get it in Demon.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GafK0WuRCnk

The Accountant
 

The Accountant

I’ll go right in and state up front that I’ve never been all that fond of Ben Affleck as an actor. He’s spent a lot of recent years behind the scenes in the film industry and that seems to suit him better than being in front of the lens. His latest starring role is in The Accountant, a suspense film, directed by Gavin O’Connor and written by Bill Dubuque. Co-stars include Anna Kendrick, J. K. Simmons and John Lithgow.

In the story, Affleck plays Christian Wolff, a high-functioning, autistic, forensic accountant. He’s not much on communication, but he is a wizard at understanding “the books”, especially for some of his less reputable customers, gangsters, who are keeping tabs on who might be siphoning off money from their ill-gotten gains. Wolff has an awful childhood background, having been institutionalized for a while as a kid, then removed into the tender love of his psycho-father, a military fanatic whose idea of childhood discipline makes marine boot camp look like a Brownie Scout cookie bake. During his time in the institution, Wolff had formed a friendship with a mute girl, Justine, one of his only real connections in the world, a fact that becomes important later.

In his practice, Wolff gets hints about the activities of his clients from a mysterious voice on the phone, someone quite adept at hacking and uncovering creepy exploits with gangster money. Meanwhile, Ray King (Simmons) is a Treasury agent, on the hunt for Wolff. When he uses threats to reveal unsavory activities of another accountant, Marybeth Medina (Kendrick) to induce her to help him in his investigation, she becomes involved in Wolff’s life. In addition, the voice on the phone has uncovered King’s investigation and provides Wolff with a legitimate project to help cover his activities. Auditing the activities of a robotics company partly run by Lamar Black (John Lithgow) provides some cover for Wolff, however, the internal rivalries in that company seem to be as dangerous as the Gambino family. Some very minimal romantic sparks are flying between Wolff (he can’t do much in the way of sparking) and Medina, so she is in danger too. That’s when we find out that Wolff has yet another “unique talent” to use, that as an expert assassin, a skill he’s quite willing to use in order to clean up loose ends in all of this forensic-criminal-gangster activities. Bodies fall, heads explode and nobody who’s on the wrong side of Wolff is not in danger.

Well…what’s MY verdict? Did I like the movie? I’ll start by giving it one star for being competently produced, acted and filmed. I’ll add a star for the fact that it had continuous suspense and held my interest right up to the violent end. A rerun of a Cheers episode can also do that. I can’t do more than that, however. On the other hand, it’s dense and complicated to a fault, too labyrinthine for a movie that basically is about Wolff using a big gun to shoot lots and lots of bad guys from a long distance.

Acting wise, the high functioning autistic label for Wolff gives Affleck the cover he needs to engage in uninteresting, flat, rote acting. He’s not bad at dressing well and looking blank when he’s really mentally very active, but there’s really not much acting in that and certainly nothing interesting about the character. Anna Kendrick, on the other hand, is basically the Anna Kendrick we see all the time, cute and animated, but not much of a reach, acting wise. J. K. Simmons is pretty much as we see him in insurance ads on TV, nothing very interesting there either. A few other supporting characters do their jobs, as do dozens of gangster-goons. They are the tough guys who, after 15 out of 16 of their compatriots have been shot dead by a sniper, continue to charge straight ahead, right into the bullets. Yeah, right, that’s believable.

With not much other than well executed action to recommend it, I can’t recommend spending your movie money on The Accountant. There’s no higher conclusion to be drawn from the plot and nothing particularly artistic about how it’s played out. Wolff, as an autistic person who is also a sociopath and assassin, won’t do much for the reputation of people with that particular disability, and Affleck won’t do much for his reputation as an actor, nor for the profession of accounting. All that with no other redeeming artistic value. Anna Kendrick is still cute, however, and J. K. Simmons will probably continue to do insurance ads on TV. Whoever manufactures the assassin rifle will probably get some additional business from real assassins…whoopee. I was glad to have that two hours over with.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBfsgcswlYQ

Arrival
 

Arrival - Epically excellent science fiction

Having seen more of these sort of movies than I can count, after seeing Arrival, I was trying to recall and categorize all of the alien contact films I have ever seen, but the number was getting daunting. The simplest way to categorize them is whether the extraterrestrial beings are invading or just saying hello. The grand daddy of them all was War of the Worlds, which was released in 1897 by H. G. Wells and has been the basis for a famous radio broadcast, as well as two movies with the same name and uncountable other evil-alien movies. The movie archetype for movies with benign aliens is the still excellent The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), in which an impeccably proper English speaking alien, Klaatu (Michael Rennie), brings hope to earth and is greeted with suspicion and violence. Several cohorts of kids have now grown up with the lovable ET and a few more thoughtful adults have enjoyed the aliens in Contact. On the whole, however, most alien contacts seem to mainly be the fodder for big battle scenes, heroic speeches and determined resistance, in the spirit of Independence Day or Battle: Los Angeles. We earthlings and especially we Americans like to think that a civilization can find us, travel interstellar distances, invade earth and still somehow be undone by plucky Americans who find a secret weapon at the last, desperate moment. The less naive realize that the conflict would be more akin to naked islanders sinking an aircraft carrier with a spear.

That’s the quandary of Arrival. The film was directed by Denis Villaneuve, based on a book by Ted Chiang, with a screenplay by Chiang and Eric Heisserer. A group of smooth, huge, ellipsoidal space vessels arrive and take up static positions just above the ground in a dozen places around the earth. There’s no obvious attempt at communication, but also no hostile acts, no ray gun massacres and no scoops shoveling up the earthlings to make fertilizer. Earthlings, however, are scared and the usual first response is to bring out the army in all of the effected parts of the world. The American government, trying to figure out how to communicate before they start shooting, contacts Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams), a prominent linguist and mother to a dead daughter. She is brought, under armed guard, to one of the vessel sites where she meets physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) and army commander Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker), who is nominally in charge of the army unit that surrounds the vessel. Bank’s task is to attempt to communicate with the aliens, who allow human visitors inside a part of their vessel periodically, and, to determine their intent. Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, things are heating up. While aliens there have not done anything hostile, military trigger fingers are getting itchy and the possibility escalates that something awful is about to happen on a global basis. The outcome seems to hinge on whether Banks or any of the other similar “translators” in other countries can assure nervous governments that the aliens are not intent on planet harvesting and whether the various countries will share what they are learning. For all of their advanced technology, the alien “hexapods” seem remarkably unprepared for the contact, lacking anything comparable to Klaatu, who can put us at ease.

The outcome of this standoff, whether it is actually a standoff, and what the intent of the aliens is, takes us into a lengthy and suspenseful voyage. The nature of time, and how it effects our experience of the universe also is part of the drama. Even though the aliens are trying to communicate with us, it’s not certain whether it’s OK or whether we should look back to the classic Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man” and realize that the reference to serving could be to help or as in, serving us on a dinner plate. Language is everything and neither side understands the other.

Arrival is one of the more intelligent sci-fi movies I have seen in a while. It’s not a film about blaster action and big speeches, but about whether to make the speeches and activate the blasters. The aliens might just want our planet, or they may be bringing us something that makes our current technology and view of physical reality look like those of a squirrel. As movies of this genre go, Arrival is slow moving, sometimes almost meditative and takes its time taking us where it’s going. It owes some of its pace and inscrutability to The Tree of Life. It’s not really an easy movie and definitely will merit a second viewing. The end is an enigma. Direction by Villaneuve is spot-on. The biggest role is Amy Adams’ character Louise Banks. She’s basically the Amy Adams we have seen before, but, as a character, does an excellent job in a low-key role, trying to figure out what this all means before it’s too late. Jeremy Renner does a good job as an ordinary guy/physicist, as does Forest Whitaker as the no-nonsense army commander, trying to understand what’s going on without starting a war, but it’s mostly Adams’ movie. Other roles are mainly support characters. The special effects are quite good without resorting to the sort of War of the Worlds megalomania that these movies often have. The story is about plot and dialog, not giant robots.

If you’re wondering whether this is a recommendation, it definitely is. If you’re looking for a big battle, however, stay home. If you enjoy smart science fiction that might even give you a larger view of the possibilities inherent in the universe, you will enjoy Arrival, which has more than a little in common with Contact. I definitely want to see it again. Arrival is currently sitting in an exalted 8.5 on IMDB, with critics at 93% on Flixter from critics. I’m guessing that the lower 82% from audiences comes in part from the guys who wanted lots of alien blasting and patriotic speeches, but I also admit that it’s not an easy movie. I was glad about that.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFMo3UJ4B4g

Allied
 

Allied - Derivative vintage movie stuff, but not too bad

Is it a Casablanca remake or a Casablanca sequel? Fortunately not. Fortunately it’s also not an Inglorius Basterds do-over either. What it is, is a story about star crossed lovers who meet in Casablanca. It’s the so-called Free France zone, officially still France, but infested with Nazis in 1942. The French, eager to remain “free”, have to give the Nazis a lot of latitude. Meanwhile partisans are at work. Mark Vatan (Brad Pitt) is Canadian, is in uniform sometimes and other times he’s acting with French partisans. When he’s not at work, he’s in a night club that looks an awful lot like Rick’s Cafe Americain. It’s there that he meets Marienne Beausejour (Marion Cotillard), a beguiling but deadly partisan, who barely escaped from a failed previous operation. The two of them are assigned to work together to kill some nazis and collaborators who are in Casablanca. The expected romantic sparks fly between Vatan and Beausejour and, after an operation that requires them to escape the city, they get married and have a daughter, and live in war-time England, barely evading The Blitz. Vatan is still in uniform, working with British intelligence, under the harsh supervision of two very procedurally rigid bosses, Marienne is now a sweet mom, trying to raise her daughter in this horrifying time.

This is when things get complicated. Vatan is confronted by his superiors, who claim that Marienne is a double agent. They are fairly sure that the real Marienne was killed in the failed operation and that the current one is a German infiltrator. If they prove their suspicions, Vatan must kill her or be killed himself. This much is in the trailer. I’m not going any further with the plot since, if you’ve ever seen spy movies, you can probably anticipate the possibilities and conflicts of the story. It’s about loyalty to country in conflict with loyalty to a spouse, and not knowing which part of what you think you know about a person is right.

Allied was directed by Robert Zameckis, who you might remember from the Back to the Future movies, and other pop movies like Flight, Castaway, Forest Gump and The Polar Express. Pacing and directing is spot-on. Allied is lushly filmed, with lots of WW II-appropriate sepia tinted sets, Glenn Miller songs in the soundtrack and at least a little of the moral urgency that came across so many previous-era WW II movies. Special effects are quite good at putting us in England during The Blitz, when so many people clung to life hoping to survive nightly bombing raids and trying to keep their spirits up, in spite of death and destruction all around them. Allied, however, is less of an FX movie than it is a personal story needing good characters and convincing acting. The British cast (Mark and Marienne’s handlers) are good at being stern faced Brits, but the main weight of the story is about Mark and Marienne. My problem with the movie is that I can’t get past how much of the visual set up in Casablanca looks like the old movie Casablanca, even down to the night club. They didn’t have a piano singer named Sam but otherwise it’s an updated version of Rick’s. The star-crossed lovers theme continues the comparison. Unfortunately Brad Pitt just isn’t Humphrey Bogart, no matter how many cigarettes he smokes. He’s OK, but just OK. I do think that, in a different world, Marion Cotillard could play the role of Ilsa, but that’s not in this script. Instead we have Mark and Marienne, mowing down nazis with Sten guns.

That said, Allied is not a bad movie. It’s not a great movie either. It is full of period detail, a somewhat believable plot, decent acting and a suspenseful ending. The “Pitt is no Bogie” part doesn’t ruin it, but it does remind me just how good Bogart was at creating a character in flicks like Casablanca, Passage to Marseille and To Have and Have Not, the stylistic ancestors of Allied. It was hard to avoid the comparison. The plot setup made comparison to the movie Casablanca unavoidable and made it seem like Pitt, a decent actor, was being set up to fail. They even set the first third of the movie in Casablanca. Couldn’t they have chosen another location? Why Casablanca? The movie would have fared better without that obvious comparison. If you’re not a fan of these old war time classics, Allied might play better for you but if you are, it’s decent but not entirely satisfying.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBTwUhtd3KM

Manchester By The Sea
 

Manchester by the Sea

Manchester by the Sea opened a couple weeks ago in a few theaters, hit some festivals, but is getting a wider opening this week. Starring Casey Affleck as Lee Chandler, Michelle Williams as Randi Chandler, Lucas Hedges as Patrick Chandler and Kyle Chandler as Joe Chandler, the film was directed and written by Kenneth Lonergan. The story of the production is tangled, involving several big changes. At some point Matt Damon was going to direct, John Krasinski was going to star, but due to other obligations, neither was available, so it ended up with Lonergan and Affleck in front. Manchester is currently rating extremely high, with 8.6 on IMDB, 97% on Rotten Tomatoes and 95 on Metascore, so, if you think it’s good, you have plenty of company.

The first thing you need to know is that, Manchester is really a downer that is only partially relieved by moments of gallows humor. The main character, Lee, is a marginal character, living in one room in Boston, going maintenance work, cussing out his apartment building customers and just about anybody else who crosses his very short temper. Lee drinks a lot, is monosylllabic and moody, has history with hockey, bar fights and general dysfunction. He has family in Manchester, New Hampshire. They are also a somewhat dysfunctional group, working with fishing boats. Lee has a horrible tragedy in his past (a spoiler) that caused him to leave Manchester and take up his walking-wounded life. When his brother Joe dies of heart failure, Lee goes home to Manchester and discovers that Joe has appointed him as the guardian of his 16 year old son Patrick. The movie bounces back and forth in its time frames, with a lot of flashbacks to the period before Lee’s tragedy, when things were better. When Lee finds out that he is Patrick’s guardian, he resists that, temporarily moving to Manchester, into his brother’s house, trying to find an alternate guardian for Patrick. Patrick is a branch from the same family tree, playing hockey, juggling multiple girlfriends, being moody and wanting Lee to step up and take responsibility. They seem obligated to each other, but not by choice. Lee’s ex-wife has a new life as does Joe’s, and neither seem like a good match for the disposition of the rest of the Chandler family. Just how these characters move on, what happens to Patrick and whether they remain as walking wounded, is the rest of the story, that I won’t spoil.

As I said, the first thing to know is that Manchester is NOT a popcorn movie. It’s sad, difficult to watch and slow. It takes its good old time telling this story and doesn’t let the audience off the hook for a moment. Much of the time, it feels like you’re watching a very personal story that’s none of your business. You want something to turn out right for these characters, something to drag them out of their small town, depressing malaise, but the outlook is not good. There’s too much toxic history for sudden, sweet endings where everybody ends up happy. None of the characters seems up to the task of rescuing all of the others.

Acting in Manchester is excellent. Much of the movie is Lee, and Casey Affleck deserves the attention he’s received for creating this character. Everybody else in the cast is similarly believable. Michelle Williams is excellent as Randi, as is Lucas Hedges as Patrick. In fact, everybody in the cast is excellent and completely believable. It’s definitely an actor’s movie, a low budget drama and not a visual spectacle. Effects and action are near zero since the entire film is about plot and characters. It has a lot of dialog and personal tension. It’s set in several very old towns in coastal New England and has a lot of thick accents. The genealogy of the people involved in the movie (Affleck, Damon and a minor character who may be from the Wahlberg family) suggests that this film is something very personal, being part of the world where they grew up. Sometimes the fruit does not fall too far from the tree.

Direction, by Kenneth Lonergan (also the script writer) is excellent. The movie is slow, seems longer than its 2 hour and 15 minute run time, but it seems appropriate to the story and the characters, for whom life often is a labor. My only criticism (aside from the mood) is the obviously low budget movie music. It never seemed to be mirroring the plot and much of it was cloned from classical music pieces that have no relevance to the plot. I found it to be distracting. It’s not a movie to see if you’re in the mood to be entertained, but I’m guessing that it will be reckoned as one of the best films of 2016, a credit to the cast and crew.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsVoD0pTge0

Nocturnal Animals
 

Nocturnal Animals - Neo Noir in Los Angeles

Nocturnal Animals is a suspense movie, directed by fashion designer Tom Ford, his first shot at directing a full length movie. It’s a full budget trifle, complete with A List stars. Taken from the book entitled Tony and Susan by Austin Wright, with a screenplay by Ford, Nocturnal Animals follows the characters in three different time periods, one of which is the fiction of the book.

Amy Adams plays Susan Morrow. She is an elite, high priced art gallery owner who stages events for the celebs in Los Angeles. It’s the sort of gallery that attracts money. The opening of the movie and the latest show includes a performance piece with six naked, obese women dancing on a stage, leading to a display of incomprehensible, but expensive art that I can’t imagine buying, even if I had the money. She’s not very happy with her glitzy, shallow glamor-art life and, her rather bland husband both losing money and cheating on her. It’s uncertain which is worse. Years before, she had a previous marriage to Tony Hastings (Jake Gyllenhaal), back when she aspired to be an artist and he was a budding novelist. In the past, she had belittled his attempts at writing, dumped him and aborted their baby. When the movie opens, Susan is contacted by Tony, who sends her a pre-release copy of a novel, Nocturnal Animals. The story plays out in three periods, one of which is fictional. Aside from present reality, we also get flashbacks of Susan and Tony’s past life and the dramatization of his tense, violent, disturbing book. We see that plot as Susan reads the book. We have the implied impression that Susan’s marriage is ending and that Tony wants to get back with her.

A large part of the movie is Tony’s book. He is the main character in his own book. Tony, his wife and daughter are traveling through the lonely desert in west Texas when they are attacked by a group of stereotypic, crazy, psychopathic rednecks. The wife and daughter are brutally murdered but Tony barely escapes into the desert. He is eventually found by the police and detective Bobby Andes (Michael Shannon) is on their case. He is a stereotype too, an anachronistic, wild west manhunter, the man of few words, with the steely eye and fast gun, who pretty much ignores the law when it suits him. He’s also dying of lung cancer, smoking like a chimney, spitting out pieces of his lungs and has nothing to lose. He would probably prefer to die with his boots on. A year after the murders, he has a lead on the perpetrators. He and Tony go on the hunt. Meanwhile, in the present reality, Susan reads the book and sets up a date to see Tony in an elegant LA restaurant, so they can share some memories and she can talk about the book. She seems to think she owes him that much after their troubled past. The rest of the movie (a spoiler) is the manhunt and the date.

Nocturnal Animals has had good, but not glowing reviews, the main negative being the shallow portrayals of the characters. They seem to all be cardboard characters, the decadent LA art scene and diva gallery owner, a struggling writer, crazy, murderous rednecks, and the relentless manhunter are all exactly what you expect them to be. The characters offer no surprises at all. My cynical observation is that they are literary characters created by a fashion designer for a photo shoot in Vogue, just Photoshopped images, not people. On the plus side, the purpose of the movie is not really characters but suspense and pacing, which the movie does really well. Several people walked out of the showing I attended, but if you see the nightmare through to the end, the plot twists are worth the increase in your blood pressure. It really IS that tense. It’s excellently filmed, with a minimum of special effects, and has a dark, noir-inspired look.

I thought that the movie drew a lot of inspiration from those old Alfred Hitchcock films like Vertigo, Rear Window, North by Northwest and Psycho, all films where characters were thin, but the situation and resulting fear were the real grist of the plot. A longer movie with fleshed out characters would not really be the point of the story. As it was, Animals was lean, with few wasted seconds and tense nearly from beginning to end. If you like that sort of movie, this is a high recommendation. If you think that crazy redneck violence in the desert is better not seen, then this is not your movie, although a lot of the worst violence is implied rather than seen, like in Psycho. My observation was the the people who walked out were all older women, so take that for whatever it’s worth. When I’m in a nightmare, I’d rather finish it, and not leave it hanging, so I stayed for the entire movie.

Acting performances were quite good. Amy Adams portrayed Susan as being burned out on glamor, understanding her big money world but also knowing how pointless and decadent it all seems. Jake Gyllenhaal is excellent, both as the younger, aspiring Tony and as the terrified and vengeful father and husband. As always for this great character actor, Michael Shannon is terrific at characterizing this sketchy, tense, brooding, wild west detective. Andy is the sort of character that would have been created in a previous generation by Clint Eastwood, not many words, lots of flinty-eyed scowls, a lot of spitting, violence always just a second away. Enjoy it if you can, but it’s worth seeing.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOsEU5oYpTA

Split
 

Split - Is M. Night Shyamalan back from movie exile?

If your movie recollection extends back to 1999 and thereafter, you might recall that M. Night Shyamalan was the darling of the moment, an “auteur” in the tradition of Fellini and Bergman, only with scary movies. Shyamalan wrote, produced and directed his movies and set them close to home in southern Pennsylvania and gave them a distinctly local look that seems downright familiar to people who know the area, with sets in Philadelphia and nearby places like college destination Doylestown. His first few widely released films, The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs shared a common somber mood, insidious rising tension and, one of M Night’s trademarks, a twisty ending, not unlike some of the old films of Alfred Hitchcock. After this good start, however, Shyamalan seemed to go off the tracks, releasing increasingly cringe-worth movies like The Last Airbender that went nowhere and ended up with embarrassing ratings.

If you liked his early films, you’ve probably been hoping that Shyamalan would get back on the tracks, do some decent movies and maybe even go back to southern PA. Some of that happens in Split. The plot line of Split is about a character of many names, played by James McAvoy. The character is that strangest and most controversial of psychological types, a “multiple personality”. McAvoy portrays a wide variety of strange characters, including Dennis, Patricia, Kevin, Barry and others, as well as a much darker personality, The Beast. We meet Kevin in therapy with a psychologist, Dr. Karen Fletcher (Betty Buckley), who is fascinated with multiple personality disorder, perhaps to the extent that she romanticizes them, and attributes them with special powers, such as the ability of one character to not experience physical illnesses that afflict the others or even special strength and abilities.

Meantime…three suburban teen age girls have been abducted from a parent’s car and are missing. The movie audience, of course, realizes that one of Kevin’s personalities has kidnapped them, and has them locked up in some sort of scary basement. While the kidnapper doesn’t seem to be directly threatening them, one of the other personalities definitely is. Suspense builds over what is going to happen to the girls. Frantic searches ensue. Meanwhile, the girls try whatever they can to escape. One of the girls, Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy) seems especially wary and resourceful, at least in part due to some seriously creepy parts of her childhood experience, which are related in flashbacks. At the same time, “Kevin” (or whoever he is at that moment) is still attending therapy, while his therapist is finding herself increasingly over her head in trying to keep track of all of his personality shifts. What all this leads to is a twisty, Shyamalan-patented ending. I’m not giving any hints since the twists and the end are why you are seeing this movie.

I thought that Split was partially successful. Knowing Shyamalan’s penchant for Hitchcocky endings, I knew that I needed to watch for foreshadowing, seemingly trivial elements and plot turns that would lead up to some sort of surprise or unexpected plot development. Nevertheless, there was at least a middling surprise in how things ended up. The twist wasn’t the one I expected. The movie is well crafted, as have been all of Shyamalan’s films. I thought that the middle of the movie, the part about the girls in captivity, lasted too long. It made the entire film last longer than the plot material could support. We didn’t really need that many scenes of the girls and their unsuccessful escape attempts. Nevertheless, the mood and plot twists worked pretty well.

Acting was quite good, with special plaudits to James McAvoy. He did a great job of creating a large number of characters, each with his own unique speech mannerisms and body language. The three kidnap victims were the usual horror movie victims, mainly attractive young women who look good in their undies and can scream a lot. The character of Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy) gets more on screen time than the other two and is quite good at running and screaming. Other characters are serviceable horror movie characters, nothing noteworthy but decent enough.

It’s worth noting that there is a cameo. At the end, Bruce Willis appears for a few seconds, giving hints that his character from early Shyamalan movie, Unbreakable, might be playing into some sort of sequel that combines that character with the outcome of Split. Who knows..there’s nothing about it on IMDB yet, but it’s a hard connection to miss.

Overall, I liked the film…didn’t love it, but it was certainly better than some of Shyamalan’s other recent fare. My biggest complaint was that the middle part of the movie, the girls’ captivity, seemed overlong to me. The cheap thrill of teen girls screaming in their undies was mainly a distraction and not much of a titillation. The film would have benefitted with more cuts to the running and screaming parts in the middle and a better pace leading to the enigmatic ending. Early on in the 2000’s, I had high expectations for Shyamalan’s auteur status. Split hasn’t exactly restored that, but it’s OK. It’s enjoyable (at least if you like this genre), doesn’t do anything awful and does some things I originally liked about Shyamalan. He’s back where he seems to belong, in southern PA, using local settings and culture, working them into the backdrop of the film. I’d like to see some sort of “part three” that brings Willis’s Unbreakable character into a final chapter that has Split as part two. Split is good enough to enjoy on its own, however, and hopefully may be the beginning of a return to grace by Shyamalan.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROVc_47FUD8

A Cure For Wellness
 

A Cure For Wellness - An Updated Version of German Expressionism?

A cure for Wellness was directed by Gore Verbinski. Based on Wellness, I’d expect Verbinski to be some accented guy from Middle Europa, but no, he’s an American whose background includes fare like the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. So, why do I think of Europe? To take it back to the beginning, A Cure for Wellness is a movie with long and deep roots in the horror genre. We begin with the star Dane Dehaan, playing Lockhart. He’s a young, rising Wall Street shark who is assigned the task of retrieving an upper management guy Pembrooke, who has retreated to a spa in Switzerland and is needed back in the Big Apple to hold off some sort of financial apocalypse. The assignment seems to be below Lockhart’s ambitions, but he has to do it and expects to be in and out in hours. Because this is a horror movie, of course, the audience knows that it won’t be that simple.

When Lockhart arrives at the beautiful, luxurious mountaintop castle spa, he begins to discover that leaving isn’t as easy as entering. It’s the “roach hotel” of cures. Its beautiful, orderly and good to its patients who are said to benefit from the antiquated, low tech water cure promoted by the spa. Nobody seems to leave, including the young, pretty Hannah (Mia Goth) who is getting “special” attention from the head “therapist” Volmer (Jason Issacs). When the film begins, Lockhart is not a likable character. You want to blame him for the 2008 crash, just because he’s so abrasive, but he’s too young for that to be fair. As the movie progresses, however, you start to feel sorry for the guy as he assumes the victim/hero role. This being a horror movie, you know it’s only going to get worse and, as the story progresses, we see dark doings in the old castle. Will Lockhart escape? Are things any better down in the town below with all of its sketchy, damaged looking inhabitants? What about Hannah, the seemingly underage, gloomy girl who spends her time walking on the parapets of the castle, being treated in a creepy way by the scary Volmer? Who and what IS she?

I’m not saying. It would be revealing too much. Instead, I’m going to note the interesting references and influences in the movie. If you were paying attention in European literature class, you might recall early 20th century classics like Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain or Hermann Hesse’s Magister Ludi. Wellness is not those, but it does draw on that tradition of an isolated, Germanic mountain top where elites idle away their lives, removed from the ugliness of being down in the real world. It also draws on that old Germanic idea of artificial perfectibility of humans, who can be lifted from the grime by intellectual, physical or spiritual pursuits. Mann and Hesse also dabbled in this and, at its worst, the Nazis turned it into abomination. Earlier on, the infamous German alchemist Johann Conrad Dippel, the guy who actually lived in Castle Frankenstein (for real), had attempted all sorts of ways of doing this, including the transfer of souls from one body to another, the result being a conviction for heresy. Dippel became immortalized not by soul transfer, but by Mary Shelley in her book Frankenstein. Wellness seems to be the next over-the-top version of a pursuit that has always been over-the-top.

Did I like A Cure for Wellness? Yes, I did. I liked it because it went full out into that mid-Europa weirdness and didn’t back down from gothic strangeness. Some reviewers have said that the end is impenetrable, but it’s only a little further gone than the things that the real Conrad Dippel tried to do back in the 1700’s. Visually, it’s a wonderful film, full of hauntingly composed images. The image quality is amazing and appears to be a full out use of HDR and high-resolution digital imagery. The plentiful digital effects are quite good, making it possible to actually visually realize that whole magic mountain thing.

Acting and direction are also excellent. Dane Dehaan is excellent as Lockhart, making the transition from arrogant Wall Street prick to terrified “patient” and into rebellious hero in good form. As always, Jason Isaacs creates an excellent villain in Volmer, transforming his face from OK to evil in an instant. Mia Goth (What? Me A Goth?) seems perfect in her role as the fragile waif Hannah, the enigmatic project of Volmer. The rest of the cast is serviceable, but their roles are lesser. As horror movies go, it’s unusual. It runs 2 1/2 hours, much longer than the usual 90 minutes that horror movies get. It doesn’t use the usual horror movie scares and monsters, but delves into the 19th century weirdness like the original novel of Frankenstein and Dracula, that spawned 20th century horror and the classic Universal Studios movies and all their German Expressionist imagery. Whatever you might think of it, it’s not the usual date-night slasher film. I don’t think it’s a great movie, but it’s well worth reveling in the sets, cinematography, imagery and the strangeness of the plot and interesting to speculate what those German Expressionist film makers would have done with the technology used to create this movie. I’ll choose 2 1/2 hours of meandering mid-Europa, post-Frankenstein horror any day over most other recent horror flicks. I’m sure I will seem excessive in giving it a 4, but it’s such a long stretch between interesting horror flicks, that A Cure for Wellness seems worth the rating.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JF1rLFCdewU

Get Out
 

Get Out - Horror in the Pine Tree South

Get Out is a horror movie of sorts, in particular a racial horror movie. It was written and directed by Jordan Peele and is his directorial debut. It stars Daniel Kaluuya and Allison Williams, also featuring Catherine Keener (Missy Armitage), Bradley Whitford (Dean Armitage) and Stephen Root. The film starts out reminding me of that 1960’s Sidney Poitier vehicle, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, except that it goes way past an uncomfortable meeting of generations theme (complicated by race), right into something much worse.

Get Out starts when white Rose Armitage is bringing her black boyfriend, Chris Washington, to her parents house for dinner and a weekend visit. Chris and Rose live in New York, her parents live somewhere rural, way down south in the pine tree zone, in a large plantation-like house. In spite of some of the usual foreshadowings that happen in horror movies, in this case a deer/car accident, made more ominous by the stereotypic racist cop, they manage to arrive at Rose’s parents’ house and find themselves being made surprisingly welcome. Rose’s parents seem completely at ease with her choice of a boyfriend and go out their way to make him feel comfortable. Rose and Chris are surprised to find that Rose’s parents are expecting company for dinner, a large group of similar white, older, affluent, preppy-looking southerners who also surprise the audience by being completely at ease, in spite of the obvious cultural gap. The guests seem to have an odd, special interest in Chris. Rose’s parents also have a son, Jeremy, an odd, threatening person, the sort of guy the audience immediately recognizes as the family member who probably belongs to the Klan. He’s superficially polite, but we know he’s up to no good, that he’s some sort of psychopath. What’s additionally ominous, is that Rose’s parents have two African American servants, played by Marcus Henderson (the groundskeeper - “Walter”) and Betty Gabriel (the maid - “Georgiana”), both of whom are treated well in that “Ole South” sort way and seem mentally vacant.

As the night progresses, things get weirder. Rose’s mother Missy is a psychologist who uses hypnosis. She wants to hypnotize Chris. Chris speculates that she wants to make him into a sex slave but she claims to be able to do away with his phobias. Rose agrees that they should probably leave. This is when the proverbial sh*t hits the fan. Chris’s friend back in New York finds strange things about the family on the web. The only other black guest at the party is in some sort of strange, zombie-like state. Chris gets really scared. I’ll not go any further on the plot, because you probably already have figured out that Rose’s family is up to NO GOOD.

When I saw Get Out, I haven’t heard much about it, but noticed that, at that moment, it was sitting at 100 on Rotten Tomatoes. That made me curious. I enjoyed the movie, but I also think that 100 is way too high. I’m not sure how that happened, especially given the usual lower marks that horror movies get. The basic plot idea, the black buy with the white girlfriend, in the rural south seemed like an obvious setup, playing on the audience’s expectation of the too-good-to-be-true older white southerners. The turn to horror is not what the audience probably expects but has a bizarre twist that’s much stranger than conventional racism and fits much better into the horror movie setup. I’ve seen comments that the movie is revealing some sort of truth about these racially charged family situations in American life, but really, it’s not. It can be bad, but it’s not like this. The obvious exaggeration risks moving over to comedy but it’s a long way from social commentary. Fortunately, however, the movie plays it off well, adding some deliberate humor to dilute the silliest aspect of the horror setup.

All aspects of the production and performances in the movie are way above the usual expectations of horror movie running and screaming. Chris and Rose come off as real people and Chris’s increasing danger engages the audience. The plot line might be over the top, but acting and direction keep it from ruining the movie. I enjoyed Get Out, as did the enthusiastic audience. You wanted to tell Chris to, as the title suggests, GET OUT!!, as soon as they see the parent’s house, but you know that it won’t be easy. Get Out is full of conventional horror movie devices, mostly carried off well. As a plot element, race is a factor, but not a contrived one at all and not a cheap exploitation. I’m as white as Rose’s family (though not malevolent), but I identified with Chris, and wanted him to get the heck out.…run and don’t stop ’til you’re out of the state. That made the movie work well for me. I don’t think it’s a great movie by any means (not a “100”), but I did think it was much better than these sort of teen-night-out horror flicks usually are. It's enjoyable with a sympathetic character in a horrific situation and doesn't resort to an excessive amount of obvious horror movie devices.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRfnevzM9kQ

Kong: Skull Island
 

Kong: Skull Island - The latest chapter in a long tradition

So how many times is it that we’ve seen the big ape? King Kong, the big gorilla from the mysterious island was probably the first monster in movie history to be a star and have a movie named after him in 1933. He and screaming Fay Wray were accompanied by lots of publicity, warnings to the audience, and an ambulance in attendance outside the theater (if you were in a famous venue). Kong became part of movie mythology and has been resurrected numerous times, often accompanied by other monsters, epic battles and a history of screaming actresses. Most recently, in 2005 Peter Jackson reanimated the hairy beast, with Naomi Watts doing screaming duty.

This time around, it’s Jordan Vogt-Robers doing the direction with Tom Hiddleston (James Conrad), Sam Jackson (Preston Packard), Brie Larson (not screaming that much as Mason Weaver), John Goodman (Bill Randa) and John C Reilly (Frank Marlow) in the lead roles, accompanied by a bunch of disposable soldiers, adventurers and strange natives. A mysterious island has been discovered, obscured by a perpetual hurricane. It must have some sort of strategic value, because the US wants to be sure that the USSR doesn’t get it. After all, it’s 1973 and if the Russians are interested, then so are we, but we want it first. A bunch of Viet Nam era Hueys is dispatched with soldiers and corrupt civilians to see what’s there. There’s some sort of Hollow Earth theory circulating among the crew that monsters can escape from the inside of the planet. The movie doesn’t waste a minute on niceties.

The first thing the team does is to drop a bunch of bombs on the island, thoroughly pissing off the dominant inhabitant, our favorite giant gorilla, who proceeds to make junk and mincemeat out of the copters and much of the team. The survivors are split into two groups, trying to make sense of what has happened and trying to escape with their lives. This is, of course, Kong Island, so we know that there are a lot of different monsters and Kong just might be the most reasonable of all of them. As you probably expect, encounters with mysterious natives, giant spiders and “skull crawlers” makes for a lot of noise, fighting, screaming, running and flying palm trees. The crew includes regular military guys, in full Viet Nam regalia, led by macho guy Preston Packard (Jackson), a Huey commander who doesn’t leave a soldier behind. The civilian leader is James Conrad (Hiddleston), a creepy CIA guy of some sort, also accompanied by Mason Weaver (Brie Larson), the lone “pacifist” in the group. She does not want to go in shooting. Along the way, they find Frank Marlow, an American who has been stranded on the island for a long time, half crazy and gone native. As veterans of many Kong movies, what we already know, is that Kong is just trying to protect his island, and is the least scary of the creatures. This becomes apparent to the crew.

So, how does this one rank among the many, many movies in which King Kong has appeared? I’m sure I have not seen all of them, but I’ve seen many, and one of my early childhood traumas was seeing the 1933 version of the story on TV, the one that made me mess my diaper, so it’s a long history for me. Fortunately, as amped up as the FX were, this was pretty good. The movie really doesn’t waste much time on overblown exposition, since they know what we really came to see. It’s heavy on action, light on confabulated explanations for how this island came to be. Kong is also a decent mashup. Aside from the early stop-motion black and white movies, it draws elements from the various remakes and the Japanese monster movies in which Kong was a character. It also draws heavily on Viet Nam era lore, having elements that look like outtakes from Apocalypse Now, especially Reilly’s Marlow character, who’s gone off the deep end, but becomes a likable character. It has a great early 70’s soundtrack. Almost everything in the movie is rendered digitally, and considering the content, it’s pretty good. The plot line works and acting is as good as it needs to be, considering that most of it is running and screaming. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it….fast moving, economical and having a good climax and ending. Be sure to NOT leave it before the credits are done. There seems to be a plan afoot for something to follow, and you don’t want to walk out without knowing what it is. I can’t finish without the naturalist in me remarking that the entire franchise, back to 1933, has given real Gorillas an undeserved reputation. This does a little but to fix that since Kong is only protecting his domain. It’s a fun movie, with lots of suspense and action, a good addition to a tradition that’s 84 years old now. I did not see it in 3D, but, technically, all of the action and animation was well done, settings and costumes are good and Kong is as scary as the one that traumatized me as a kid.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udy1qqFSvAo