About Time review

                Richard Curtis has the ability to spin high-concept romantic comedy conceits into something that’s casual, breezy, and most of the time funny. A large part of this comes from the fact that he has  spent much of his earlier career working on British television. Films like “Four Weddings and a Funeral”, “Notting Hill” and “Love Actually” are modest and friendly enough to keep us from faulting their middling intentions. However, what’s remarkable about these pictures is that they contain ideas that would be cringe-worthy eye-rollers had they been produced in the states. But with Curtis’ charm and whit these films manage to float by suitably as long as everything stays light and breezy. Where things fall apart for Curtis is when he feels the need to sink into dreary, melancholic waters, as is the case with his most recent fantasy rom-com “About Time”.

                Domhnall Gleeson plays Tim, a young timid Brit who rarely has the guts to make bold choices when it comes to his love life. This all changes the day his father (Bill Nighy) lets him in on an old family secret: all of the men in his bloodline are able to time travel, no machine required. Tim then decides to go back and make all the right choices he should have made the first time around, using his newly found talent to engineer a relationship with an American dream girl named Mary (Rachel McAdams). Years after, Tim realizes that this rewriting of his life has unintentionally created some dangerous and heartbreaking outcomes.

                This movie knows what it’s doing when it’s more concerned with how to use its ridiculous premise in the service making you laugh. The matter-of-fact father-son exchanges between Gleeson and Nighy are giggle-worthy, in that dry Richard Curtis-y way, and side characters like Tom Hollander as the grouchy, foul-mouthed playwright and Joshua McGuier as Tim’s nerdy co-worker often steal the scenes they are in. Likewise, McAdams and Gleeson have decent screen chemistry, and as a couple their love is easy to root for.

                What’s not as easy to swallow is when this film switches its tracks and tries to become a tear-jerker. In taking huge leaps with its characters and the time-line, the movie asks us to drift along well past the logical climax of the story, from a clipped second act into the an extended third and an unnecessary fourth act that feels like it’s making itself up as it goes. During this stretch the screenplay stacks up tragedy after tragedy, gradually dimming the bright tone previously established in the much funnier opening half.

                “About Time” managed to make me laugh and care enough about the characters to ignore the fact the plot doesn’t make any sense and that a lot of it is very stupid. In turn, it’s because of it’s pleasant stupidity that I felt somewhat betrayed by the film when it transformed from an amiable British farce, into a soppy, weepy mess, mining the Lifetime Channel’s worst kind of emotional manipulation tactics.

Grade: C-

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Feb-2013

Thor: The Dark World review

              I think it’s fair to say that Marvel’s “Thor”, released in 2011, was nobody’s favorite predecessor to Joss Whedon’s “The Avengers”. This isn’t to say that nobody loved it at all. In fact, despite the overall silliness and camp that comes with rainbow roads, frost giants, and Natalie Portman playing an astrophysicist, the first “Thor” is a totally digestible, zero-calorie, superhero meal. Also, if nothing else, we got Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston out it.

                With that said, I wish I could I share the same kind of tepid enthusiasm for the recently released sequel. “Thor: The Dark World” is a decidedly slower, longer, and darker follow-up, that mistakenly shrouds the first film’s bright-eyed simplicity within a cocoon of narrative padding.

                After the cataclysmic events of “The Avengers”, Thor’s deceitful brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) is captured and imprisoned back from wince he came on Asgard. While there, a fleet of dark space elves—just go with me—come to attack Odin’s throne to reclaim the power of a mystical red goo called The Ether, that has recently taken shelter in the body of Dr. Jane Foster (Natalie Portman). In order to keep the nine realms of the universe from being overtaken by darkness, Thor (Chris Hemsworth) must break his mischievous brother out of jail, and learn to trust him long enough fight together, side by side.

                Let me first say that, technically speaking, there isn’t anything ‘wrong’ with this movie. The special effects are big and expensive looking, the London location change is welcomed, the space-fantasy production design is inventive and imposing, and the action structure of the plot pays off in exactly the way it promises to from the opening prologue. My problems with this sequel lie within its vagueness, its self-seriousness, and its overall I-can’t-believe-we’re-getting-away-with-this-again safeness.

                The ruggedly handsome Hemsworth is half asleep in this reprise and even though this is supposedly his showcase, the film seems far more interested in Hiddleston’s sneering Loki character. The interplay between these two actors is occasionally engaging when the movie is remembers to be character-centric, but unfortunately the majority of the running time is devoted to red floating liquids, space battles, and overcomplicated conceits about intergalactic, warping car-keys.  There is some genuine fun to be had in the last half hour, but the cumbersome plot is so large and looming that whatever levity and charm saved the first film has now been shoved aside, in favor of the usual epic, action money-shots.

                I will commend the new screenwriters for finding a better way to integrate the human, non-super, characters (Portman, Kat Dennings, and Stellan Skarsgard) into the story, but even though they are given more to do, it doesn’t keep them from feeling any less like a mechanical writing device.

                I don’t know, this is all starting to feel like tired roadshow act on the last leg of a lengthy tour. I guess if you walk into this film wanting to like it you probably will. It’s been carefully designed to be placeholder until the Disney/Marvel factory spits out another one of these in five months.  However, when we’re living in a time with four or more superhero movies released every year, I refuse to simply excuse a film like this for being merely ‘fine’.

Grade: C-

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Nov-2013

Enders Game review

               Science fiction writer Orson Scott Card has made it difficult to objectively review the film adaptation of his most popular novel, despite the fact that as a fan of the source material I have wanted to see this story on the big screen ever since I was a teenager. However, I would be lying if I said that Card’s vocal homophobia and public prejudices hasn’t somewhat soured my memory of “Enders Game”.  But even with my personal morals and sensitivities in the contextual air, I tried to walk into this film with an open mind. And with that loaded caveat aside, I am happy to say that this is an absolutely enjoyable science fiction adventure, in spite of the narrow mind who conceived it.

                Many of the details from this book have since left my memory, so luckily I was not burdened with the fanboy comparison complex—perhaps aiding in my overall enjoyment of this movie. What I can say is that it certainly captures the idealistic spirit and the innocent curiosity of the novel, vividly recreating the key moments of the drama that I remembered from the text.  

                In the distant future, after the earth’s population is greatly depleted by a brutal alien invasion, humanity’s finest military gears up for a second wave of attack, sending forces of jarhead teenagers to the enemy planet before they can strike again.  Ender Wiggins (Asa Butterfeild), a scarily intelligent, pre-teen loner, is drafted in to study and train at an out-of-orbit military academy, where he is told by his commanding officers (Harrison Ford and Viola Davis) that he will eventually lead the other children in earth’s victor.

                “Enders Game” has the advantage of coming out after a wave of successful adaptations of young-adult fiction. With “Harry Potter” and “Twilight” still in our rear view, and “Hunger Games”  working hard to fill the void, this classy, unassuming  heroes’ tale successfully projects its narrative ambitions onto the tried and tested formulas that precede it without it feeling like a rip-off or an off-brand.  Yes it’s another ‘chosen-one’ myth, and yes it involves a silly looking, made-up sport with complicated rules, but director Gavin Hood knows exactly how to pitch its tone and, more crucially, he and his writers understand that just because they’re making a film for a younger audience it doesn’t mean that kids aren’t smart or patient enough to understand complex characters or sophisticated themes.

                Asa Butterfeild, the young lead who viewers might remember from Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo”, has a lot working against him as an actor. Given that his character could be read as a noble know-it-all or a dull cypher, both the script and his sensitive performance allows the character to have enough inner conflict and personality to let Ender to breath and change within the story. The side performances by the other children—Hailey Steinfeld as Petra and Aramis Knight as Bean—lacks the same amount of depth or definition, but their role within the plot functions efficiently and without distraction nonetheless.

                One could complain that as an effects-driven film not every green-screen or CGI moment is well camouflaged or invisibly integrated. Yet, because of the consistent art direction and the deliberate, symmetrical cinematography the special effects never feel out of place or showy for their own sake.  With that said, there is certainly enough wow and wonder in the visual execution to keep both the kids and their parents anxiously chewing on their pop-corn.

                “Enders Game” may not be a perfect film, but it’s about as perfect of an adaptation of its novel as we could have hoped for.  And what’s more, it actually tells a story about something Mr. Card has seemed to have forgotten; sympathy, tolerance, and dangers of demonizing ‘the other’.

Grade: B+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Nov-2013

The Counselor review

             It’s a shame about Ridley Scott. He is, without a doubt, a very talented filmmaker and you can’t deny his skill as a stylist. In fact, I dare say that as far as visual aesthetics go, film for film, he is almost unparalleled.  Unfortunately, within the last 10 years or so, his work has been marred by bad screenplays and theatrical assemblies that edit his films to the point of incoherence.  “The Counselor”, another south-west noir penned by novelist Cormack McCarthy, suffers greatly from an overwritten screenplay and campy performances that overshadow the obvious talent that Scott tries to bring to the film.

                It’s hard not to watch this and compare it to Cormack’s near-perfect adaptation in the Coen Brother’s Oscar winning “No Country for Old Men”.  The set-up is similar and the pay off—though not effectively delivered in “The Counselor”—aims to please and depress the audience in the same way. But whereas the Coens were able to reduce the source novel to its essentials and tell the story in hauntingly sparse visual terms—choosing only key scenes to include McCarthy’s elusive prose—in this film, with Cormack now in charge of his first screenplay, a power imbalance muddles the storytelling, where his words and murky themes dominate the screen.

                The unnamed Counselor, played by the always watchable Michael Fassbender, is a lawyer who has recently become engaged to his dutiful girlfriend Laura (Penelope Cruz). To help fulfill her fantasies of wealth, the counselor decides to aid in an across-the-border drug deal with a flamboyant dealer (Javier Bardem) and his lethal cat-like lover (Cameron Diaz). In doing so, the lawyer gets lost  in a shadowy maze of deceit and murder and--as is usually the case--learns that crime never pays. Somewhere in all of this, Brad Pitt stops by to recite pages of uninteresting metaphors, Rosie Perez has a psychic link with her motorcycling drug-mule son and Cameron Diaz does an X-rated reenactment of Tawny Kitaen’s hood-of-the-car dance from Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” music video.

                In trying to fit a novel's worth of information in a two hour film, though not based on any of his previous work, McCarthy fills this script with endless dialogue set-pieces that weigh the movie down so much that it never seems to budge from scene to scene. The actors are all there to present their best work and it's clear in every scene that everyone is certainly trying. However, with Cameron as the vampy femme fatale—complete with pet cheetahs and silver claw-like fingernails—and with Bardem turning in another one of his crazy hair-cut performances, these pulpy elements jarringly clang against the dower moralizing of the plot and Scott's vista-laden visual design.

                I really wanted to like this film and I don’t fault it for being too weird or arty, but, in the end, this well-intentioned thriller is an insufferable snooze.  Michael Fassbender and Brad Pit, two of Hollywood’s most interesting actors, share several scenes together and yet here they couldn’t be more boring. The dialogue is stylized to the point of droning into a fuzzy static and McCarthy’s themes are somehow clumsily obvious and frustrating unclear at the same time. 

                Ridley Scott directs the hell out of this film and successfully makes a junky B-movie look and feel like a portentous A-picture. But even with a few creative decapitations and soft-core sex scenes sprinkled in, he still couldn’t save this inert, convoluted, lukewarm mess of a movie.

Grade: D+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Nov-2013