The Conjuring review

               It’s so rare that I go to a new horror movie and come out of it scared. Hell, it’s rare that I come out of new horror movie merely satisfied.  I will admit that as one of my pet genres, I do tend to cut a mediocre schlocker more slack than it might deserve, even if after only two weeks I completely forget about it. “The Conjuring” however, cannot be as easily dismissed. This is a memorable offering that earns an inclusion within the lineage of great haunted house thrillers, while at the same time managing to create a new set of thrills, all its own. Most of all, and more importantly, it’s really damn scary.

                This film claims to be based on true accounts and as per usual you can take that as seriously as you like. Supporting this claim, the central characters, paranormal researchers Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), are based on two true-life ghost hunters—both of which have spoken at ISU some time ago. Whereas most of these horror movie ‘expert’ archetypes are usually only included for expository reasons, here they are written with care and consideration and have just as much at stake in the plot as the victims of their discoveries.

                The story follows a 1971 family that moves into a rural house, bought on auction. Unfortunately for these parents (Ron Livingston and Lili Taylor) and their five young daughters, this property comes with a dark history and a lot of unexplainable activity. After enduring cold spells, weird smells and dead pets, they call the Warren’s to come in and take a look. The prognosis is bad. Really bad in fact and due to some recent trauma involving their line of work, Ed and Lorraine decide, despite their trepidations, to put off their long awaited vacation to help this poor family.

                On paper several aspects of this script strike as generic, common traditions of the ‘bad place’, haunted house paradigm. And admittedly much about this set-up brings to mind many films from the past and such as “The Amityville Horror”, “The Exorcist” and “The Poltergeist” as well as recent copycats like “Sinister” and the “Paranormal Activity” series, in which this movie shares some production credits.  But where most of the recent chillers seem to fail in comparison to their influences, this film uses those preceding tropes as a framework to build tension and subvert the audience’s expectations.

                Director James Wan (“Saw”, “Insidious”) carefully constructs an air of mounting dread with this film and builds a solid foundation for the major scares early on by letting you get involved personally with the characters and getting you intimately familiar with the geography of the main sets. When the horror shifts into darker,  more terrifying gears the audience knows exactly where what doors shouldn’t be opened, what rooms shouldn’t be entered and what sounds mean bad business.

                Reportedly this movie avoided gore, nudity, or any explicit language to dodge an R rating, but the MPAA still turned it down for a PG-13 because they found it simply too scary as it was. I don’t know if this news was perpetrated by the filmmakers as a form of marketing buzz or if it’s actually true, but having seen this film I could believe it. 

                In a time when ‘this’ kind of horror has been beaten into the ground “The Conjuring” manages to wipe the slate clean and remind you how it should be done. Despite a crowded ending climax that lays a few too many cards down at once and diffuses some of the tension, this movie is a thoughtfully written, sympathetically acted, and masterfully directed exception to the rule. Horror movies like this don’t come too often, so go and see it while you can and don’t expect to get a good night’s sleep for a while after.

Grade: A-

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/July-2013

Pacific Rim review

              Director Guillermo Del Toro is one of the good guys. He’s also one of the only living filmmakers who manages to pull together a wide appreciation from the farthest reaches of movie fandom; from Criterion collecting art snobs who love his Spanish language, gothic fantasies (“Pan’s Labyrinth” , “The Devil’s Backbone), to teenage comic book nerds(“Blade II” , “Hellboy”), all the way down to the basement dwelling, gore-geeks (“Mimic”, “Cronos”).  Whether he’s working for a studio or bringing to life his own ideas, he is an undisputed visionary and master of realizing cinematic environments all his own.   

                 After a long break of working on scripts in development hell--starting early production on last year’s “The Hobbit", only to quit and hand the reigns back to Peter Jackson—and producing other director’s films such as“Mama” and “The Orphanage”, Del Toro is finally back in the saddle with “Pacific Rim”.

                In the near future a portal opens up at various points along the ocean’s Pacific Rim, unearthing giant, city demolishing monsters, known as the Kaiju. After years of losing government armory trying to take down these creatures, the military develops a new specialized weapon called Jaegers—giant mech robots, manned by two soldiers who are psychically linked with both the machine and each other. 

                Sons of Anarchy star Charlie Hunnam plays Raliegh Becket, a young soldier who loses his brother in a vicious battle with a newer breed of larger, stronger Kaiju. After years of working construction, his commanding officer (Idris Elba) brings him back, in a last ditch effort to save the world, using the steadily failing Jaegar program. There he meets Mako Mori (Rinco Kikuchi) a revenge driven Japanese officer who is trying to work her way up the ranks. Between the battles, we also meet two Kaiju research scientists (Charlie Day and Burn Gorman) who are working toward mind-melding with the creatures to better understand their weaknesses and their origins.

                While this might not be Guillermo’s most heavy hearted or thoughtful genre picture, it is certainly one that is significantly more amiable and light on its feet.  The robots are big, the monsters are big, and the action is huge—as was the smile left on my face.

                Unlike the shrill and mean-spirited “Transformers” trilogy, this film knows how to do massive, toy-room-meets-war-room action scenes without stabbing your eyes out or lobotomizing you with hour long, incomprehensible set-pieces. Del Toro backs the camera far enough away from the fights to let you get an idea of how the opponents physically relate to each other and wisely he spaces those scenes between moments of well-earned humor. What lacks in “Pacific Rim” is a sense of depth or meaning in all of its dorky fun, and the screenplay sports some stiff dialogue that makes “Avatar” look like Shakespeare. 

                Traditionally, Del Toro loves his monsters as much as he loves his human characters and the relationships that he creates between them are always at the core of his storytelling. Though Charlie Hunnam never really inspires much interest as a lead, in just one flashback scene with Rinco Kikuchi, the movie reminds us how well this director understands the fear and vulnerability of children—a good scene that unfortunately stands out a bit too much amidst all of the silliness around it.

                 With the Chinese/Japanese setting and the creative design of both the mechs and monsters, this is clearly supposed to be a love letter to Asian creature features like “Gozilla” and “Gamara”, as well as, cyberpunk anime such as “Gundam” and “Neon Genesis Evangelion”. However, in all of this excited genre mash-up, most of human characters are underwritten and/or underacted. But if you accept this movie for what it is—a well-made, well-paced, big budget drive-in movie—then it will reward the child in your heart.

               

  Grade: B -

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/July-2013

The Lone Ranger review

             In a desperate attempt to remain relevant, director Gore Verbinski and actor Johnny Depp, the creative team responsible for the first three “Pirates of the Caribbean” films, have reteamed for this summer’s “The Lone Ranger”.  With the financial assistance of Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer, they have managed again to cobble together a scattershot script and pile enough money towards the special effects to create another bloated, high budget, overlong Looney Tunes episode, masquerading as a period piece.

                Based on an old radio serial, turned television show, “The Lone Ranger” tells the story of a young lawyer in the 1860s’ named John Reid (Armie Hammer) who comes back to his Texas hometown, where his sheriff brother is trying to hunt down and imprison a deranged cannibal outlaw by the name of Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner).

                While joining their search to prove his masculinity, Reid is gunned down and left for dead as his brother and the rest of his deputies get sniped from the canyons by Cavendish and his band of cross-dressing companions. Later he awakes to find himself bootless, under the supervision of a rogue Apache mystic named Tonto (Johnny Depp). Together they try to find Cavendish, as Reid, still believed to be dead, takes on the identity of a phantom enforcer called The Lone Ranger.

                Stuffed between the seams of this fairly straight forward revenge-western, the writers have decided to include a swell of half-thoughts, side-plots and other narrative digressions. These include; Helena Bonham Carter as a one-legged prostitute, a corrupt politician with plans to incite a war with the Apache by redirecting the newly built railway, for the purpose of covertly stealing their un-mined Silver, as well as a bunch of nonsense about evil spirits, lucky bullets and a magic horse.

                Verbinski isn’t an altogether untalented director but he is oftentimes an undisciplined one.  When it comes to how to direct and design an action scene he has a specific talent for creating exuberant, complicated, Rube-Goldberg like set-pieces that are creative and fun to watch—even when they go on and on and on. When it comes to narrative, at least with this film and his other Disney associated projects, he treats plot like a hungry kid at a family buffet, who keeps piling things on his plate without realizing that there‘s no way to eat everything without getting sick.

                Even stickier is this film’s clumsy attempts at progressive racial inclusiveness. It’s no surprise that Johnny Depp’s Tonto eventually hijacks the spotlight.  To clarify his motivations, many threads in the story have to do with the violation of the Native Americans due to westward expansion. I don’t fault the film for trying to add some purpose to the pulp, but this gesture lost its thematic legs as soon as a famous white actor was cast to play an American Indian. Though probably not on purpose, Depp’s performance as is so broad that it starts to edge squeamishly close to “Peter Pan” levels of offensive stereotypes.

                Armie Hammer on the other hand, proves himself to be a worthy leading man, despite the fact that his character gets sidelined for much of the film.

                This is an unabashedly commercial piece of fluff that was only produced because everyone involved wanted to keep making their Pirates money.  But because audiences have been sequeled to death by that franchise, they gave it a dusty, de-saturated, western makeover and tied it in with a wildly outdated brand from a time well before their target demographic was born. Sometimes it’s fun, sometimes it’s alarmingly dark and too violent (did I mention this movie features cannibalism?), and sometimes it’s far too campy for its own good. But it’s definitely way too long.

                So if you can wade through all of its needless asides, awkward tonal shifts, and an embarrassing, misguided performance from Depp, then I guess you could do worse than the “The Lone Ranger”; a well-meaning but ultimately meaningless summer distraction.

Grade: C

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/July-2013

Behind the Candelabra review

              Famously, Steven Soderbergh has said that his latest film “Behind the Candelabra”—a love story about an aged Liberace and his much younger ward—was not distributed theatrically because it was seen as too un-commercially gay for mainstream audiences. As a result, he settled to have his pop-culture biopic debut on HBO last May. However, just before it aired on American television it premiered at the Cannes film festival in France, where it was met with glowing reviews and early Emmy talk. I guess the question is if it had a normal theatrical release would there have been Oscar talk instead?

                Liberace isn’t exactly a well-known pop-culture icon these days so it might be hard to appreciate the fact that at one time he was the highest paid Vegas performer up to that point.  It might be even harder to appreciate that through his long lasting career, spanning several decades, though he was gilded, bejeweled, glittery and feather adorned, his sexuality was never really in contention until he publicly died of AIDS in mid-80’s—alongside many other closeted celebrities at that time.

                “Behind the Candelabra” stars Michael Douglas as Lee Liberace and it celebrates the last ten years of his mostly secret life. Though he became older and his style of classical piano meets old-time boogie-woogie wasn’t in vogue anymore, he was still living an extravagant lifestyle in his fancy palace-like, Las Vegas mansion.

                Through a friend he meets Scott Thorson (played by Matt Damon), a young dog trainer living with foster parents in LA. After initially hitting it off, the two move in together and start living their lives like a married couple. They grow older together, they grow fat together, the lose weight together—using the dangerous “Hollywood diet”— and they even get matching plastic surgery together. 

                While mixing traditional biopic forms with something like a relationship dramedy, this movie tries to strike a difficult balance between a lot of things. It wants to be campy and heartfelt, it wants to be funny and sad, and it wants to portray Scott and Lee’s romance as typical by the standards of any heterosexual marriage, while being completely bonkers at the same time. Surprisingly, it actually achieves all of this and under the studied hand of Steven Soderbergh, it not only manages to round out all of the screenplays complicated contradictions , but it does so while looking really stylish and cinematic as well.

                Despite the fact that this film does deal with explicit gay themes and some depressing issues like AIDS and infidelity, it was made with a wide audience in mind. Much of the movies retro-70s’ milieu and the glamorous camp that comes with it, lends to a warm sense of self-deprecating, dry humor that keeps things light and fast moving as we sprint through the characters’ tumultuous relationship. 

                Conversely, underlying the all of the glitz and romance, there is also a darker edge to this story. While Liberace had aged in hiding about his sexuality he had become something of a lonely recluse into his later years. After bringing Scott into his life, Lee begins to control and manipulate Scott into sealing himself tightly into the lavish, gold plated closet that he built for his own protection. Soderbergh paints Liberace as a tragic, King Midas like character that hides openly in his self-made world of opulence and it's within this Sunset Blvd-esq, Gothic character study that supplies the movie's emotional heft.

                Of course more than anything, this is a wonderful actor’s showcase. Douglas disappears in this career re-defining role and Damon plays the conflicted Thorson with absolute abandon. Walk on performances by Dan Acaroid as Liberace’s tough-as-nails manager, Rob Lowe as the hilariously flaky plastic surgeon, and Nicky Katt as the shady drug dealer helps keep even the would-be filler scenes alive.   

                If I were to find any fault with this film it is only that the storytelling is a little too linear and conventional. Even without succumbing to hackneyed flashbacks, the screenplay could have served to be more dynamic with its timeline as it progressed. But even with that minor complaint aside, I can’t help but recommend this lively and entertaining TV-Movie.

                 While some of the subject matter in “Behind the Candelabra” might be seen as challenging or niche, I found it to be perfectly digestible for those with an open mind and more than deserving to be seen projected. If this is to truly be Soderbergh’s last film, as he has stated numerously, than we have unfortunately lost one of our greatest working directors due to Hollywood’s ever increasing lack of spine.  It might have not been as big of a crowd pleaser as “Ocean’s Eleven” or “Contagion” but it surely would have found an audience somewhere in the market and with the right campaign behind it might have even garnered some major awards consideration.

Grade: B+

Originally published in The Basic Alternative/July-2013

The Heat review

                 “The Heat” marks the second collaboration between comedian and unlikely ‘it’ girl Melissa McCarthy and television producer turned director, Paul Feig. In 2011 they came together for the massively successful “Bridesmaids”, where not only did they up-end the expectations of what a comedy with a mostly female cast could do monetarily, but they even managed to get McCarthy an Oscar nomination for a broad comedic performance.

                Here, with the addition of Sandra Bullock, Feig and McCarthy reunite to put their gender spin on the well-worn buddy cop comedy. Like “Freebie and Bean”, “48 Hours”, or any of the “Lethal Weapon” movies, this story brings together two opposing personality types and revels in their clashing perspectives, as they try and work together to solve a superfluous mystery. Does the fact that they are women really challenge or subvert these genre cliché’s? Unfortunately it does not. Not only is this plot exceedingly lazy and hand-me-down, but only one of these two personalities manages to command any screen presence.

                Sandra Bullock plays FBI agent Ashburn. She’s straight-laced, by the book, and good at her job, but she doesn’t get along well with others.  So much so, that her superiors in New York tell her that that in order to get the fancy promotion she wants, she will have to prove that she can share her victories with a co-worker. To do so she is sent to Boston to investigate series of murders around a drug ring. While there, she encounters detective Mullins, a foul-mouthed, bubble breaking, bull in a china shop, played by Melissa McCarthy. Upon meeting, their chemistry is volatile and through the course of the film they have learn how to accommodate each other’s character flaws and work together.

                Even though this movie exists only to a support the comedic set-up inherent in the set-up, I can’t forgive just how factory sealed this story feels. The narrative doesn’t reward at all and it’s clear that screenwriter Katie Dippold simply bought a used plot and decorated it with her own jokes.

                There should be a vital difference between working within a tradition and simply adhering to a formula just to platform the performances. With “The Heat”, Feig not only doesn’t seem to get that but doesn’t seem to care either way.

                Speaking of those performances; Yes, McCarthy is funny here. She usually is. Her broad physicality and her comedic instincts are often spot-on and she almost manages to pull the movie, kicking and screaming, to the finish line by her damned self. Bullock, on the other hand, is saddled with a tepid straight-man role that doesn’t allow her the same freedom to improvise or to ring out the comedic fuel that McCarthy seems to be running on. 

                Then again it might be that Sandra Bullock just isn’t that funny anymore…Or maybe she was just misdirected. I don’t know.  But what I do know is that her performance is so low key that she becomes practically invisible in this film. The result ends up as an odd couple shtick, less like Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau and more like Matthau and an actual lemon.

                This, like so many theatrically released comedies, feels like it was made to show repeatedly on HBO. And when it gets there you can enjoy it in 30-45 minute chunks before you eventually get bored and flip back and forth with whatever’s on the Food Network.  McCarthy continues to prove that she has real staying power and deserves better movies to showcase her talent and Bullock continues to prove that she probably deserved that Razzie for “All About Steve” more than she deserved the Oscar for “The Blind Side”.

Grade:C-

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/July-2013