The Butler review

               Lee Daniels’ “The Butler” is a well-intentioned historical drama, infused with the fervor of activism and the heart of American longing. It’s a film that highlights a large cast of interesting black actors—in a time when many mainstream films don’t—and it actually gives them something substantial to do. It’s an ambitious picture, told with an epic scope but it tries to be too many things for too many people, and it’s because its ambition that the story doesn’t totally hang together.

                Lee Daniels, who previously directed the 2009, Oscar nominated film “Precious”, is one of Oprah’s many victorious endorsements, along with Barack Obama’s presidential win the year before. With “Precious”, Daniels made a very stylish Sundance hit, with some very moving performances—albeit in the service of a senselessly dark, emotionally manipulative and overwritten screenplay. It’s no surprise then that his newest film “The Butler”—another film dealing with a loaded ‘message’—echoes a lot of the same highs and lows.

                This story chronicles the life of Cecil Gains (Forrest Whitaker), an African America, white house butler who worked under several different administrations, during key the decades of the civil rights movement.  Though his early life started badly, when his father was murdered in a southern plantation, he eventually landed a few high-profile jobs as the domestic help, where he was taught to stay quiet and respectful for his white employers.

                After Cecil began his long career at the white house, his life began to complicate. His wife (Oprah Winfrey) delved deeper into alcoholism and his two sons took on different paths as well. His youngest son Charlie (Elijah Kelley) served his country in Vietnam and his first son Louis (David Oyelow) became an activist and a freedom rider in the dangerously racist South.

                The film works hard to tie together it’s two objectives; an emotional story about a strained relationship between a father and son whose ideologies don’t see eye to eye and a thematic arc about civil rights and how far we have come as a racially diverse country. This dramatic effort is commendable but the screenplay by Danny Strong doesn’t know how to weave these two threads together very well, often digressing into nostalgia as a lazy way to transition back and forth.  Lee Daniels, though he is very good at lighting and framing his scenes and coaxing great performances from his actors, he isn’t as good at avoiding eye-rolling sensationalism or cringe-worthy sentimentality.

                Like a non-ironic “Forrest Gump”, “The Butler” progresses through the 40s’ up to the 00s’, and along the way it feels the need to make ridiculous stops to observe the changing fashion trends, as well as the high-school-social-studies political news-bites of each decade, as a short-hand way to remind us when and where we are.

                Also problematic, each president that Cecil worked for are all distractingly portrayed by well-known actors—Robin Williams as Eisenhower, James Marsden as JFK, John Cusack as Nixon, and Alan Rickman as Regan. Each actor gives it their best shot but it becomes increasingly difficult to peel them away from their other onscreen personas.

                But despite the fact that the film doesn’t exactly become the instant classic it’s begging to be, it’s not unwatchable either.  In fact, chunks of it are very nice. Winfrey and Whitaker are both terrific in their parts, as well as Oyelow as their embittered, disenfranchised son. Side performances from Cuba Gooding Jr. and rock star Lenny Kravits, as Cecil’s white house companions, also stand out.

                 Many scenes and dialogue set-pieces are individually moving and well-conceived, even if the movie as a whole feels like a saccharine over-played NBC, TV mini-series.  The editing is occasionally clever and about every other scene in the film is surprising. The scenes in between, however, are too simple, too corny, or too melodramatic for this movie to be taken as seriously it presents itself.

Grade: C+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Aug-2013

Elysium review

                Plenty of genres, such as science fiction, use classic storytelling tropes as a platform for sharing universal ideas, such as politics, religion and racism. Director Neill Blomkamp likes this. In fact, he seems to love this, perhaps, even too much. With his first film, the Oscar nominated, Peter Jackson produced, surprise-hit “District 9”, he came out with his metaphor guns ablaze and subtly turned the well-worn alien-invasion genre into a story about class war and poverty. With his follow up “Elysium”, Blomkamp furthers his exploration of District 9’s themes with a much bigger budget. However, though the genre stuff is kicked into bigger, bloodier, intensified gears, the subtext breaks through the veil of subtlety and bluntly becomes the text.

                It’s the year 2154 and Matt Damon plays Max, an underpaid, underprivileged factory worker living in the worst conditions of an earth-bound slum.  He has a prior prison record that keeps him from advancing in his day job and he’s desperately trying to reconnect with his childhood friend, a nurse named Frey (Alice Braga). Unbeknownst to Max, Frey has her own financial problems to worry about, as her only child is suffering through the final stages of cancer, with no hopes of ever affording treatment.

                Both Max and Frey dream of one-day living on a utopian, cancer-free, space station called Elysium; a home for earth’s richest elite. Their desire is put into action when Max is exposed to lethal amounts of radiation from a work-related accident. At which point, he and his would-be lover put a plan into motion to hijack a shuttle to the orbiting satellite resort to find adequate medical attention. 

                In the process of locating a usable ship, he attracts the attention of Delecourt (Jody Foster), an evil, scheming, multi-accented, over-starched pant-suit, who is trying her hardest to keep illegal earthlings from coming into her home. She hires a government mercenary named Krugar (District 9’s Sharlto Copley), to hunt and kill both Max and Frey before they break into Elysium.

                So, if you are keeping count, this film tries to tackle, all at once, health-care reform, immigration, and the problems with the prison system, all in wrapped up in the attitudes and attentions of the occupy movement.  All of this, while thematically rich and relevant, overwhelms the story, especially as it hops from one issue to the other without really exploring them with anything more than a headline’s  level of depth.

                However, while the screenplay may bludgeon you with its broad political gesturing, luckily, this is still a completely entertaining science fiction movie. Blomkamp does dirty, cybernetic slum-punk like nobody else, and the over-the-top action displayed in this film shows that he knows how and where to use his expanded budget. With much creativity, he mixes his visual reference points—everything from “Road Warrior” to the “Halo” videogames—and his worlds feel real, tangible and lived in.

                Damon is a convincing leading man here, dialing his performance to a balder version of his Bourn-like frequencies.  South-African actor, Sharlto Copley turns out another terrific character under this director, showing a completely new, more menacing side of his range. Jodie Foster is unfortunately the weakest link, doing an embarrassing, muddy assemblage of Martha Stuart, Hilary Clinton and…that British chick from “The Weakest Link”.

                “Elysium” doesn’t exactly live up to Neill Blomkamp’s promise with “District 9” but it does distinctly resemble his personality as a director. Perhaps tackling science fiction again was not the best move he could have made for a second feature, but I sure do like the way he does it. The violence is ultra and the movie moves along quite well. Even though Blomkamp is using genre to talk about his political ideals, it’s actually the well-shot, well-designed sci-fi tomfoolery that saves the picture from becoming obvious lecturing. In all, “Elysuim” gets the job done, even if it doesn’t cure cancer.

Grade: B-

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Aug-2013

2 Guns review

              Summer’s entering its third act and we are now starting to wade into the blockbuster backwash. Why is it that “2 Guns”, a buddy crime-caper featuring leading performances from Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg, considered a risk? Probably because it's not a sequel and nobody in it can fly. Also, it’s aimed for an older, R-rated audience and it simmers a little slower than the usual action flick.
              Genre-wise this movie oscillates between the buddy-cop thing, the buddy-robber thing, and the con-man, identity switcheroo game. There's a lot of characters to follow and many of them are hiding things about themselves, as well as the truth behind their objectives. The plot zigs and zags around these mounting twists with some amount skill the movie improves with a great cast who give great performances. But all of that can’t distract from the fact that the screenplay is over plotted, and over-loaded with characters.

             Wahlberg and Washington play Michael Stigman and Robert Trench, two outlaws with plans to rob a small town bank for a local drug dealer (Edward James Olmos). What they don’t know is that each of them are actually undercover officers, working for different government associations—Trench with the local DEA and Stigman with an AWOL Naval squad. After a botched robbery their identities are revealed to each other, at which point several other interested parties come after them for the money, including a murderous CIA agent (Bill Paxton), Stigman’s officer in command (James Marsdan) and Trench’s own girlfriend (Paula Patton) who may or may not working for a noble purpose.
            This movie shines when Walberg and Washington are on screen together. Their chemistry is natural and enjoyable and the dialogue between them, while at times a little over-stylized, is delivered well and is often chuckle worthy. That’s why it is all the more upsetting when the film works so hard to keep these two separated for most of the extended second act.
           Amidst all the super-violence, this is a movie about friendship and trust. Trench keeps people at a cold distance and Stigman brings people in too close before he can discern their motives and of course by the end of the movie they both have to come to terms with these flaws through their interactions. It’s an easy formula but this screenplay makes good use of it and it never loses sight of the ultimate payoff, in seeing these two reconcile and work together, even if it takes too much time and plot getting there.
            Much of “2 Guns” feels refreshingly throw-back to me. The characters, the story, the setting, and especially the way it is paced and filmed by director Baltasar Kormakur reminds me a lot of the type of action movies that were released in the latter half of the 90’s. I could very easily imagine seeing this film on VHS, at the grocery store video rental section, alongside somewhat forgotten programmers of that era like “Assassins” with Antonio Banderas and Sylvester Stallone, or “Bulletproof” with Adam Sandler and Damon Wayans. And like many of the pictures of that time, “2 Guns” is definitely boys club, with some less than progressive gender politics when it comes to how Paula Patton is treated as a character. However, I will admit that she gives her performance everything she can to disguise her misogynistic plot purpose with some real feminine power.
          For an early August release, this isn’t a terrible 2 hours to spend in an air-conditioned theater. “2 Guns” isn’t a knowing genre exercise or a post-modern re-evaluation on the con-swap script-trick but it does what it wants to do pretty well without a hint of irony. I could have done with fewer twists, less MacGuffin hunting, and a more streamlined plot trajectory, but it’s a well-acted and confidently directed fluff piece that’s at least worth a trip to the Red Box in few months’ time.


Grade: C+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Aug-2013

The Wolverine review

                 In the final scene of “The Wolverine” we see Hugh Jackman as the titular character aboard an airplane, ready to get back home from Japan with his new female companion Yukio (Rila Fukushima).  As the plane takes off she asks him “where are going now?”  He reluctantly answers “Up”.  “And then where?” she asks.  For a moment he pauses and answers “We’ll see”.  This (probably horrible paraphrased) exchange basically sums up exactly what this movie aspired to and what it ultimately accomplished.

                 “The Wolverine” is a semi-sequel to “X-Men Origins: Wolverine”, a semi prequel to the first three “X-Men” movies. And as everyone should know, those movies became increasingly disappointing with each effort released.  Without Brian Singer, the first director to adapt the Marvel comic source, “X-Men: The Last Stand” and “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” lost sight of the original vision of what this series was trying to achieve or how Singer managed to do it with class and dignity. They became cheaper looking, yet bloated, over-plotted, and campy in a bad way.

                 In Mathew Vaughn’s imperfect but commendable 2011 reboot, “X-Men: First Class”, the series began to get it’s legs back, but with its attentions devoted to a younger X-team, Jackman’s  Logan/Wolverine character was temporally benched.  So, needless to say, this sequel, directed by James Mangold (“Girl Interrupted”, “3:10 to Yuma”, “Walk the Line”) comes with a lot of difficult baggage.

                In this film we catch up with Wolvie after the traumatizing events of “X-Men: Last Stand” where he was forced to kill the Dark-Phoenix-possessed Jean Grey. Essentially surviving as a bearded hobo, living in the wilderness with shoddily rendered CGI bears, he is eventually found and identified by a young, kitana wielding, Japanese women named Yukio.  Her mission is to bring Logan back with her to Japan where her grandfather Yashida (Hal Yamanouchi), with whom he was briefly acquainted during WW2, wishes to share the gift of mortality that his mutation has denied him. Logan declines the aged man’s offer just before his timely demise.

                After Yashida’s death, a political rift then sparks a dangerous street-war between his two granddaughters, the Yakuza, as well as a clan of black cloaked ninjas, led by a venomous, snake-like woman, who manages to poison Wolverine, taking away his defensive healing factor.  Logan then has to protect Mariko (Tao Okamoto), the softer and more vulnerable of Yahsida’s progeny, as they both try and find the source of these recent attacks.

                “The Wolverine” is a refreshingly smaller movie, despite its complicated, soap-opera plot. James Mangold, who has never been a fanboy director, brings a lot of subtlety to this story and approaches the material without the sense that he must eclipse or surpass its predecessors. What he provides instead is a B-movie, eastern-inflected, detective story that just happens to exist within an X-Men framework. 

                The dialogue is simplistic and the pacing is at times too slow, but it seems quite confident in its intentions and it gleefully treads new genre territory, while maintaining the character’s core milieu…That is until its final showdown where the movie quickly devolves into big robots, bad wigs and characters dangling out of windows; a sequence so deflating that it almost makes you forget how clever and well-choreographed that earlier train fight was.

                As a modest movie with lower ambitions it manages to meet them without spreading itself too thin or diluting its appeal within a malaise of convoluted comic book references. However, it also never reaches the sublime heights of the better X-movies and it does project a begging sense of apology throughout. Despite its structural collapse in the third act, I have tenuously decided to accept The Wolverine’s apology. Most of the time the film is just engaging enough and its patient tone is actually welcomed after a glut of superhero flicks that desperately try to out-epic the ones before it.

Grade: B -

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Aug- 2013

The Bling Ring review

                With her fifth film “The Bling Ring” director Sophia Coppola has attempted to approach a story by doing both what she has always done and what she has never done before. Like her other films, she furthers her exploration of young female protagonists who live in lavish worlds of wealth and celebrity. However, unlike Scarlett Johansson in “Lost in Translation”, Kirsten Dunst in “Marie Antoinette”, or Elle Fanning in “Somewhere”, the teens that occupy this movie aren’t the sad, longing, navel-gazing loners that she usually cyphers herself though—growing up as the daughter of famed director Francis Ford Coppola.

                While her past movies tended to explore and investigate emotionally tethered characters in interior-dwelling tone-scapes, this film uses that familiar point of view and sharpens it's edges to skewer the banality of the material obsessed, American, attention seeking, Facebook generation.

                Based on a recent true-crime incident of teenage delinquency, this movie recalls the story of a small group of Beverly Hills teenagers who broke into the homes of C-list celebrities and Hollywood debutants and made off with their cash, their jewelry, and their high-end fashion. What makes this story almost too hard to believe is that millionaires like Paris Hilton, Audrina Patrige, and Orlando Bloom left their homes unlocked, unguarded, and relatively unprotected. In fact, no glass was broke and no alarms were set off. To successfully commit these violations of privacy, the only tools this group needed were the twitter accounts of their targets, to know when they would be out, and Google maps to better understand the layout of their homes. And had they not been so cocky as to brag about it with their high school friends, they might have even gotten away with it.

                Katy Chang, Israel Broussard, Emma Watson (aka Harry Potter’s Hermione Granger) and Taissa Farmiga play Rebecca, Marc, Nicki, Chloe, and Sam, the core group.  But it doesn’t matter that they are played by different people or even that they are separate characters. They are a hive mind; a collective conscious of the suburban frivolous. Together they become a strange order of pod-teenagers who are out to consume and appropriate what they see as attractive and important in the magazine-cover lifestyle and the famous-for-nothing paradigm they conform to.  Some of them are cold and calculating, some of them stupid and naïve and some of them are hilariously flakey, but none of them act like human beings. This becomes a difficult needle to thread for Coppola, as she is asking the audience to hang out with these unlikable and unsympathetic creatures for the entirety of the picture, without a single glimpse of heart or personality behind their fake, glitter lip-gloss smiles and their vacant, Dolce-sunglass stares. What’s more, she doesn’t editorialize on their lives or their morality. Instead, she simply observes their alien behaviors with the emotional distance of a nature documentary.

                Some might respond negatively to the film’s remote tone, the coded themes, and/or the actors' icy performances, but it's because of these exact qualities that I found “The Bling Ring” to be a refreshingly sharp and studied satire of a hyper-stylized version of America’s one-percent.

                Individual shots are framed and lit to look like fashion photography, in-store displays, and television advertising.  As the story progresses and the stakes get higher, the movie becomes more and more abstracted as her characters transition from eager teenagers trying on new clothes, to would-be models showcasing their goods, to finally becoming mannequins, empty of morals, feelings, or empathy. 

                With all of that said, this film is not humorless. In fact, while it explores the attitudes of these disconnected youths it reverses their absurdity back and gives the audience the opportunity to laugh at their irrationality. Watson in particular, along with Leslie Mann who plays her mother, really gets to deliver the screenplay’s best dialogue and together they embrace the love-to-hate quality of their characters.

                Around all the style, all the slow-mo, and all the bling, eventually what Sophia Coppola gets at with "The Bling Ring" is something like a feature length moving tableau or a narrative installation of images juxtaposed with ideas that relishes in the beauty of the Beverly Hills, gossip-stalking world, while at the same time repulsing at its excesses. What rises to the surface is well-acted, technically accomplished, darkly comic political statement about haves and have-lots. 

Grade: A –

Originally published in The Basic Alternative/Aug-2013