The Croods review

              Though the creators of “Ice Age” (and its subsequent lousy sequels) have already tapped into this kind of prehistoric buffoonery before, they are back with a new CGI look at our primitive world. This time, instead of mammoths and saber-tooth tigers, we have a nuclear family of cave dwelling pre-humans and their relationship with the world around them and the world they are trying hard to avoid. However, unlike the increasingly banal “Ice Age” series, “The Croods” has a heart and a brain, and it celebrates its thoughtful ideas. But unfortunately it also feels like it has to pad those ideas carefully with eye straining camera movement and a preoccupation with obnoxious physical comedy.  What we are left with is smart movie that’s acting dumber than we know it is. Like a child underplaying his or her potential, we have to wade through its pedestrian posturing to get to its true purpose and its emotional core.

                Nicholas Cage voices Grug, the patriarch of the Croods. He takes on the full responsibility to keep his loved ones safe by sheltering them from everything.  He ineffectually hunts to keep them barely eating, he almost never lets them leave their cave and he tells horror stories of life beyond their front yard to keep them afraid to leave. These stories however, don’t work on his teenage daughter Eep (Emma Stone), who eventually leaves the protection of her family and finds another traveling cave-boy named Guy (Ryan Reynolds), who doesn’t seem to be as afraid of everything as her family. When seismic earthquakes destroys their cave it’s up to Guy  to help them find a new home and embrace the beauty and wonder of the world—much to chagrin of the pathologically protective Grug.

                The voice talent by the cast is surprisingly heartfelt and this stands as one of Nick Cage’s best performances in a while.  Alongside Cage, Stone, and Reynolds, we also have Catherine Keener, Cloris Leachman and Clark Duke filling out the rest of family. Given the star power of the cast, their chemistry is natural and their celebrity doesn’t overshadow their voice work, but the script doesn’t do these secondary characters any favors. Beside the central trifecta, the rest of the Croods are severely underdeveloped—particularly Keener as the Mother—and oftentimes the movie could function just as well without them.

                I find the look of these human characters to be a bit too angular for this type of animation and the art direction, while eye catching, is baffling at times. The prehistoric vision of this production design is downright absurd and strange. To separate itself from the familiarity of the animalia seen in those “Ice Age” movies, this film is filled with bizarre critters and monsters never seen any science books; including rainbow colored giant cats and four winged birds with turtle shells. I’m not sure what hallucinogenic pollen is floating in the air in this movie’s world but I guess it’s pretty potent.  Nevertheless all of this strangeness is weirdly appealing and it makes for a visually original experience.

                All in all “The Croods” is a mix bag of animation jellybeans: most of the time it’s pretty tasty but every once and a while you get one of those pesky, black-licorice flavored scenes.  Often, to the detriment of the story, director Chris Sanders is trying to push the filmic boundaries. When his ‘camera’ is needlessly swinging around and the characters are in twenty minute stints of Three Stooges routines, I was bored and annoyed, but when the story starts to kick into gear and the their journey begins, I found myself moved by the tender character revelations and it’s progressive, pro-science message.  

                                  

Grace C+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/March-2013

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone review

              I am well aware that comedy is subjective. What makes one person laugh may have no effect on someone else. There are some basic human truths that comedy can access and appropriate, and if the majority of the audience laughs then, regardless of those left alienated, it can be rest assured that the joke wasn’t made in vain. However, sometimes things just aren’t that funny. “The Incredible Burt Wonderstone”, despite its high-concept conceit, despite its comedically gifted cast, just isn’t very funny.

            Steve Carell stars as Burt Wonderstone, a smug, aging magician who has decided to break his partnership with Anton Marvelton (Steve Buscemi), whom he has known since childhood, when they learned to use magic as a way of evading their grade-school bullies. When a masochistic street magician known as Steve Gray(Jim Carrey) moves onto their Vegas turf, Burt is forced to either change up his traditional stage act or move on with the rest of the mystical hasbeens of sin city.

            Not only is this movie not funny the entire endeavor is noticeably tired and lazy. The defining characteristic of Wonderstone as a screen personality is that he was a once humble and enthusiastic artiste, who has since become disenfranchised with the world of entertainment, after years of doing the “same-ol’-thing”. If I hadn’t have known better, I would have thought that this was written in to be the underlying theses of the entire film, as well as Carell and Buscemi’s underwhelming and uninspired performances.

             Every actor serves only as a walk-on presence and each scene is so tepidly blocked and flippantly realized that instead of allowing the performances to break through the plot, most of the time they just lie there and struggle to muster up barely enough mobility to move their mouths and deliver their dialogue.  Olivia Wilde and Alan Arkin also show up to pick up a pay check. Arkin does his gruff, old-guy thing, as if he was just wheeled in between takes of “Argo”, with his attentions more finely tuned towards the craft-service table.  Although Wilde is valiantly trying to bring some believability to her part, even with all her bright-eyed sincerity and good intention, her underwritten role is effectively reduced to nothing but window dressing. 

            Jim Carrey manages to provoke some laughs with his campy portrayal as a Chris Angel/David Blaine type performer. However, this joke, in standing with the rest of this screenplay’s instincts, is long-since exhausted and it isn’t even the funniest version of it out there (check out David Tenant in the 2011 “Fright Night” remake, or Aziz Ansari and Paul Scheer’s “Illusionators” skits on Youtube). Even though Carrey is simply falling back on his usual rubber-faced, over-animated, desperate, screen-grabbing shtick, I give him credit for trying to generate some life and energy in this otherwise fruitless affair. But unfortunately he isn’t in the movie enough to save it and for the rest of the film we are saddled in with (an unusually sedated) Buscemi and Carell, as they sleepwalk their way to the third act.

            Everything that this movie is supposed to be, it isn’t. It should have been an outrageous character-based comedy, about the over-the-top nature of professional magic and frippery of Vegas showmanship. It should have been about how old magic has fallen by the wayside of gimmicky reality TV magicians and it could have used that idea as a springboard to show how shocking and extreme the rivalry between the two preening performers could get. What we are given instead is a passive plot about how Wonderstone has to learn how to battle his own ego, as he performs card tricks in a retirement home. How this script was approved before undergoing a few drastic rewrites, I will never understand.

Grade: D -

Originally printed in the Idaho State Journal/March-2013

Oz the Great and Powerful review

                One of my earliest childhood memories of movie-watching, as with many people, was my introduction to the 1939 MGM classic, “The Wizard of Oz”. It captured my imagination, it took me on an adventure, it scared the hell out of me, and it taught me a few life lessons.

                Though the original still stands as a piece of near-perfect filmmaking, through the years, the Land of Oz has been represented and reconfigured in a myriad of different iterations. In 1978 Michael Jackson and Dianna Ross stared in “The Wiz”, an achingly-70s Motown remake.  In 1985 Disney produced “The Return to Oz”, a non-musical, almost-horror, apocalyptic sequel. Not too long ago Zooey Deschenal played Dorothy in the four-part, Sci-Fi original series “Tin Man”. And of course, the Broadway play “Wicked” has simultaneously reimagined “The Wizard of Oz” in a modern and daring way, while also bringing it back to its showtune roots. So where, in all of this, does “Oz the Great and Powerful”—a  high-budget, 3D prequel, directed by Sam Raimi (“Evil Dead”, “Spiderman”, “A Simple Plan”…)—fit into the equation?

                 “Oz the Great and Powerful” tells the story of a Kansas showman, magician and huckster, played by James Franco, who is whisked away, somewhere over the rainbow, after a tornado sucks his hot air balloon out of the sky.  When he comes to, he finds himself displaced from his black and white circus location—shot in a traditional, square 1.33 aspect ratio—into a fantastically colorful, widescreen environment. Upon his arrival, he meets two magic-wielding sisters named Theodora (Mila Kunis) and Evanora (Rachel Weisz). Together they convince him to defeat an evil witch in order to prove to everyone that he is the prophesized savior of the land. With the help of a friendly monkey servant (voiced by Zach Braff) and a fragile porcelain girl (voiced by Joey King) he foolhardily decides to take on the mission and his plate starts to fill rapidly when he is forced to off center the corrupt politics Oz, as well as empower the realm’s 99%, all while concealing the fact that he isn’t a real wizard.

                Sam Raimi, like the title character of this film, is an excellent entertainer and master of misdirection and illusion. His past in no-budget horror filmmaking has proven that. He also knows how to ramp everything up and push his most cinematic moments into nutty, operatic levels. What he doesn’t know how to do is work in subtlety. Because of this, the movie both rises with his strengths and falls with his weaknesses.

                Surprisingly, the 3D is used skillfully and some of the CGI characterizations are very creative and believable—particularly Braff’s monkey and his chinaware companion. Nevertheless, a lot of the ornamental CGI is distractingly artificial and some of the art direction looks a bit too “Teletubbies” from time to time. 

                Though he never ruins the whole picture, Franco is regrettably miscast, as I never really bought him as a convincing trickster. Often his line delivery is weirdly either flat or over-mannered and sometimes both within the same scene. Mila Kunis as the love-scorned, tragic victim of circumstance also fails to sell her character’s key transition through the clunky storytelling. Both performers are capable of better, but Raimi, like always, is more interested in his visuals than his actors.

                However, even as the plot awkwardly clangs from one eccentric episode to another and the characters, who are supposed to carry dramatic tension, kind of don’t, the fast-paced campy dialogue and colorful energy of the film is undeniably contagious. While the movie might be falling apart by its narrative seams, it convinces the audience to go along with everything (and the kitchen sink), because it’s actually exciting to be there. “Oz the Great and Powerful” is an indisputable mess but it’s a fun mess.

Grade: C+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/March-2013

Jack the Giant Slayer review

             
         I respect Bryan Singer as a filmmaker. His first film “The Usual Suspects” was a clever, twisty indie thriller and it projected a lot of promise for its young writer/director team. A few years later he brought the X-men out of the comics and onto the screen, essentially kicking off the superhero, action movie genre that has practically engulfed all of summer entertainment since. His take on the material was both thoughtful and sophisticated and by connecting the subject matter with both his Jewish and gay identity, he helped people realize that comic book movies don’t have to be campy to be entertaining and that they can legitimately delve into deeper themes.
               However, since his work on the first two “X-Men” films, he has seemed to struggle with his place in mainstream filmmaking.  When he abandoned “X3: The Last Stand” to make “Superman Returns” he underwhelmed most of his fanboy fan base with a messy attempt at rebooting a dead franchise. Later, in an effort to make an adult-minded film again, he did “Valkyrie”, a troubled, but somewhat underrated World-War 2 procedural that was hobbled by bad, Tom Cruise-related publicity. Now, after a fairly long break, he has brought us “Jack the Giant Slayer”, another in a string of gritty, action-movie, fairy-tale revisions. And like “Hansel and Gretel Witch Hunters” and “Snow White and the Huntsmen”, it’s not very good.
             “Warm Bodies” star, Nicholas Hoult, stars as Jack, a poor village boy who falls in love with a princess (Eleanore Tomlinson) and who has recently sold his horse to a runaway monk for some magic beans. When he accidently drops one of the beans into the floorboards of his cabin, a mile long beanstalk sends his home into the clouds and takes the princess with it. The King (Deadwood’s Ian McShane) then employs Jack and a team of knights and noblemen to bring his daughter back. This rescue crew includes a hopeful hero (Ewan McGregor) and the secretly malevolent air to the throne (Stanley Tucci). When they reach the top of the beanstalk, they accidently incite a war with an army of man-eating giants, who plan to come down to earth and stake the land for their own.
              This is by far Singer’s worst film. The script is cobbled together by chunks of better movies and as the plot slogs from one poorly lit, awkwardly shot, pointlessly 3D, CGI action scene to the next, you can’t help but wonder how much money you might have saved had you just stayed home and watched “Aladdin”, “Lord of the Rings”, “Legend” and “Princess Bride”.  Nothing in it is original and even worse nothing in it is fun.  Things happen and the characters are propelled from one flashy event to another, but nobody seems to be enjoying themselves while they do it. The actors appear bored to be there and every performance in this movie reeks of a confused cast that’s chasing a tennis ball tied to stick, in front of a green-screen, with absolutely no idea what the visual outcome is supposed to be.
             Every now and then the movie will show some signs of latent entertainment and Stanley Tucci continues to prove—as he did in “The Lovely Bones” and “Burlesque”—that he refuses to look bad, no matter the quality what he is in. But those moments are rare and what “Jack the Giant Slayer” contributes for the rest of its running time is poor visual effects, muddy cinematography, and a paint-by-numbers screenplay, in the service of a plodding, labored action fantasy that doesn’t know what age it’s trying to appeal to or how to keep its audience involved in the motivations of its characters. This was not only another unfortunate misfire for Bryan Singer but a depressing and lethally dreary failure of storytelling.

Grade: D –

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/March-2013