Muppets Most Wanted review

                 In the opening musical sequence of “Muppets Most Wanted” Kermit and his felt friends sing an extended number about being forced to make a sequel to their successful 2011 comeback movie. The song expresses anxiety and frustration about meeting the expectations by the fans--old and new alike--while at the same time trying to remain fresh and energetic for its own sake. It would be rather easy to say that the sentiments of this song pretty much sums up the overall execution of this sequel, and as I have chosen to frame this review with that observation, that’s not an entirely unfair assertion to make.

                The stretch marks in this overworked installment will surely be noticed and compared to the breezy, effortless humor of its predecessor.  However, though this movie doesn’t exactly pick right up where the last one left off, I found a traditional charm in this offering that isn’t altogether unremarkable

                This Muppets adventure is kicked off when they decide to hire a mysterious road manager named Dominic Badguy (pronounced bad-jee and played by Ricky Gervais). His plan is to take them on a trans-national tour, performing in world-famous landmarks that just happen to be next door to the locations of invaluable items. What the Muppets don’t know is that their fearless leader Kermit has been replaced by an evil doppelganger named Constantine, who has sent the frog to serve his sentence in a Russian gulag, policed by a tough prison guard named Nadya (Tiny Fey).  But have no fear! Working for the FBI, Sam the Eagle is paired with a French Interpol agent (Ty Burrell) as they follow the robberies that coincidentally occur along the Muppets world tour.

                Most of the creative team behind the success of the 2011 Muppets reboot has returned for this installment; including director James Bobin, who had previously worked on the Flight of the Conchords HBO series, song writer Bret McKensie, who stared and performed with the Conchords, and screenwriter Nicholas Stoller, who had previously collaborated with Jason Segel—now MIA for this reunion. And perhaps it’s Segel’s fanboyish glee that elevated the last Muppets movie and restored to it some much needed heart. Here, in “Muppets Most Wanted”, the songs aren’t as memorable, the direction isn’t as focused, the humor isn’t as sharp, and the plot is noticeably labored.

                Despite the fact that the more streamlined predecessor was in most ways a better movie’s movie, as a fan of the Muppets’ cultural entity, I actually prefer this messier effort.  Though the last movie was funny and clever and the songs were instantly hummable, its primary goal was to familiarize a new generation with the Muppets’ comedic appeal. In doing so—mostly successfully—that movie put a lot of ironic distance between the characters and the plot, and it benched many of my favorite Muppets, giving huge chunks of screen-time to Jason Segel, Amy Adams, and their new Muppet character Walter, who returns for this sequel.

                Even though this chubby, plot-heavy, somewhat emotionally flat sequel may not play as smoothly, it gives more space for Muppets to be involved in the actual narrative, rather than having them showing up as cameos in the background.  Likewise, the human celebrities in this movie are much more naturally integrated into the fold, playing characters instead of just lazily spoofing themselves. In a lot of ways, this is more like a continuation of the Muppet features from the 70s and 80s, rather than the post-modern, smart-alecky reboot from 3 years ago—which, frankly, people think they liked more than they actually did. 

Grade: B-

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/March-2014

The Grand Budapest Hotel review

             Over the sweep of his career, filmmaker Wes Anderson has situated himself as the master of the minutia. When it comes to every aspect of his films, including costuming, performances, set-decoration, and camera placement, his movies have always exuded a sense of meticulous design and consideration. However, though generally well-reviewed and culturally appreciated, the thematic or emotional sincerity of his films have often been overlooked or underplayed by those in conversation with his work. And to be fair, even Anderson himself has occasionally put his storytelling on the back-burners to thoroughly explore the visual compositions of his worlds, sometimes resulting in frustratingly banal indulgences of control.

                From film to film, Anderson has oscillated between visual metaphor as a way of emotional storytelling and arch-comedy as a way of exploring character-dilemma.With his most recent film “The Grand Budapest Hotel” he seems to be working somewhere in the middle, accessing a darker sense of authenticity just beneath the whimsical world-building and the flip nature of his ironic wit.

                Ralf Fiennes stars as M. Gustave, the concierge of a famed European hotel on the eve of a barely discussed fascist takeover.  After the death of one of his wealthiest clients (Tilda Swinton), with whom he was having a long hidden affair, her sons (Adrien Brody and Willem Dafoe) become disgruntled when it is revealed that she their mother has left the hotel manager with a priceless painting that had previously belonged in the family. When Gustave is then framed for her murder and put into jail, he must trust his right-hand lobby boy Zero (Tony Revolori) to help him escape, prove his innocents and survive the gruesome manhunt set into motion by the embittered siblings. 

                Taking place inside three separate framing devices, within three different generations, “The Grand Budapest Hotel” unfolds as a kind of multi-layered big-fish narrative. Full of interesting contradictions and historical allusions, it disguising itself as an adventurous comedy of errors, and if one wishes to view the film as just being that, it is both satisfying as a dark comedy and rousing action film, displaying some of Anderson’s most ambitious technical set-pieces yet. These low-tech but highly-choreographed scenes include a complex prison escape sequence and a shoot-out turn chase-scene that’s both evenly paced and exciting to view in it's masterful execution.  Likewise, his brand of dry, matter-of-fact dialogue is still very much present and the detailed designs of his visual spaces are pushed even farther outside of the realm naturalism. But below all of this playfulness there also exists layer of contextual melancholy that’s hidden just underneath the folktale we're being shown instead.

                Many scenes seem to purposely skim over the historical significance that exists in the background of the plot. Our two main villains are seen working with the fascist armies, gun in hand, as they ransack the hotel or when they stop trains to scan passenger’s personal documents. As Dafoe’s wolf-man like character searches for our hero, he leaves a trail of gruesome murders behind him. But even as we draw the obvious parallels to the Nazi occupation of Europe during WW2--or in this case, an Andersonian, fanciful, It's-A-Small-World maquette version of 1930's Europe--the film keeps averting our attention to the surfaces of its ‘film-ness’ in a way that seems to be saying something about the nature of memory, history, and the erosion and transformation of historical accuracy in the pursuit storytelling.

                One could choose to be frustrated by Anderson’s aloof treatment of the characters when it comes to the darker contrasts of this film, or, one can do as I have done and choose to assume that this director is making a point about the refusal to confront the ugliness of our past by way of idealized myth-making. As with all of Wes' work, if you are willing to accept the general eccentricities within “The Grand Budapest Hotel” then you will no doubt laugh at the movie’s quick humor and appreciate the craft behind its infrastructure.  However, upon reflection, you may be surprised by the movie's weighty suggestions that in your mind.

Grade: B+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/March-2014

Mr. Peabody and Sherman review

 

            Based on a series of companion shorts aired during “The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show”, “Mr. Peabody and Sherman” is another sugar-high 3D animated spectacle, aimed at keeping your kids quiet, while giving you 90 uninterrupted minutes to balance your check book. Thing is, if you happen to be a in the same room while it’s on, than you might actually find yourself glancing up at the TV every now and then and slowly getting sucked into its serviceable storytelling.

         I say TV because unless your children are literally begging you to take them to see this, waiting four months is absolutely appropriate for the level of care and attention that was devoted to this production.  However, if you do end up dropping your moppets off at the movies as you enjoy a Cinnabon a few stores away, you can rest easy knowing that while this isn’t exactly an educationally focused look at history it at least has some aesthetic interest in its academic façade.

                Mr. Peabody (voiced by Ty Burrell) is a genius dog inventor with a Harvard PHD and an adopted human son named Sherman (Max Charles).  Peabody is an attentive and playful father but slightly emotionally detached, asking his son to refer to him by his full name and struggling to express simple feelings in a simple way.  When know-it-all Sherman gets into his first school fight with a girl named Penny ( voiced by Burrell’s ”Modern Family” co-star Ariel Winter) he is then threatened to be taken away from his doggy father by child protective services.  Later, during an over-prepared peacemaking dinner with the girl's family, Sherman gets the group into a boatload of trouble when he tries to prove his knowledge to Penny by taking her back in time in an orbital device called The Way-Back machine.  

                While this film jumps from one bouncy, brightly colored episode to another, we are made spectators of history, reformed as pop-culture mythology, where important figures such Marie Antoinette, King Tut, and Leonardo DaVinci become theme park plushies, only expressing broad gestures and flat parodies of their real-life cultural counterparts. Ultimately, in a “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” kind of way, this dumbing down of history is fine as long as it at least gives children an entry point into the rest of the (usually gruesome) truth.

                Surprisingly, what plays really well in this adaptation is the character stuff between Sherman and his father. The story is structured well enough that we care if they are legally separated, and the stakes we have in their emotional journey tends to activate the banality of the time-hopping set-pieces. The film boldly stands up for non-traditional modern families and when Sherman gets accused of acting like his father and is then forced to defend himself, swearing that he IS NOT a dog, we can imagine similar playground fights today, where a minority of children are forced to defend their parents when their classmates call them a different three letter word ending in G.

                Despite its clunky plotting , a muddled ending,  punny humor that almost never lands, as well as a host of silly butt jokes that undermines whatever scholarly intentions this movie proposes to illustrate, this kiddy contraption basically works. It’s unpretentious and it manages to draw you into the character’s dilemma, even if it is a restructured, hand-me-down dilemma from “Finding Nemo”.  I walked out of “Mr. Peabody and Sherman” unoffended and slightly charmed, and sometimes that’s more than we should come to expect from a mid-winter Happy-Meal like this.

Grade: C+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/March-2014

The Wind Rises review

                 Last weekend saw the official release of Hayao Miyazaki’s final film “The Wind Rises”, a leisurely paced WWII drama about airplane engineering, first loves, ambition and regret. It’s a sweeping melodrama, a fanciful coming of age story, and an emotionally driven historical allegory all in one, and, like many other Miyazaki films, it manages to weave in and out of these modes seamlessly, despite its slightly saggy 126 minute run-time. 

                Working as one of the last auteurs in post-Disney animation, Miyazaki films revel in an organic quietude and classical storytelling, in a time in American animation when loud, fast and 3D seems to be the most prominent aesthetic. “The Wind Rises” takes his hand-painted, reserved technique even further, with an autumnal tone that strips away most of the fantasy elements that made movies such as “Princess Mononoke” and “My Neighbor Totoro” definitive Japanese imports.

                From a young age, Jiro Horikoshi (dubbed in English by Joseph Gordon Levit) dreamed of a magical airspace where he could ride the wings of the crafts built by his hero Caproni, an Italian airplane manufacture from the early turn of the century.  Driven by these reoccurring fantasies, Jiro enrolls into engineering school, where he works late nights to accomplish his goals, with very little social interactions. Later when he and his best friend Honjo (John Krasinski) are hired by the Japanese government to help advance their aero industry and catch up with the technologies of Europe and America, Jiro must reconcile his ambitions for designing the perfect plane, while knowing his inventions will be used in massive acts of violence in the oncoming War.  

                It’s Miyazaki’s subtle power in narrative poetry that really brings to life this multi-stranded story. From early on we know that the hopeful innocents of Jiro’s goals are dimmed in the shadows of their consequences. When he meets his future wife, as he is on his way to his first big job, the serene beauty of the moment is devastated in an earthquake that derails their train and destroys the city around them. Years later, when they meet again and fall in love, their union is compromised when Nahoko (Emily Blunt) is diagnosed with tuberculosis. All the while, their bittersweet romance is gracefully juxtaposed alongside Jiro’s journey through moral tribulation as he and his colleagues reluctantly build deadly war machines for the pride of Japanese nationalism.  

                “The Wind Rises” is a complicated and beautifully executed piece of animation. The craft and attention to the water-color backgrounds and the soft touches it brings to every detail of every frame captures Miyazaki’s wistful tragedy perfectly. However, unlike many of the other releases imported from Studio Ghibli, this is not exactly a ‘fun’ movie, and though there is nothing explicitly adult about it, it’s not really intended for children either. The languid pace of the film is breathy and the scope is both intimate and spacious at the same time. Meaning, it’s safe to say that the sophisticated storytelling of this cartoon would probably have most kids under twelve shifting in their seats, and to be fair, at times, it had me checking my watch as well.  With that said, there’s nothing here that’s begging to be cut but like most movies it could probably benefit from a tighter trim.  Regardless, those who can respect an impressionistic style of animation should privilege themselves to the accumulative power of Miyazaki’s last work.

Grade: B+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/March -2014

Pompeii review

                   As “Pompeii” reached its emotional climax, in which I could not have been further removed from or uninspired by, I was startled to hear the enraptured roar of applause from the rows of theater seats behind me just as the credits began to roll.  With that, it’s quite apparent that this sappy, melodramatic, disaster movie masquerading as a classical epic, worked on somebody, and possibly even a few of you, but it is my conviction to inform you, not only as a newspaper critic but as a general public servant, that this movie is depressingly lousy. 

                As a film by Paul W.S. Anderson--of “Resident Evil” (1-5) and “Alien Vs. Predator” fame—“Pompeii” sees the often underachieving shlockmeister attempting a new form of pulp: the historical costume drama, as reimagined by Irwin Allen with a head injury.  To his credit, with this film he tries something new, but, as is the consistent tradition of Paul W.S. Anderson, he fails in the most tedious and predictable ways.

                “Game of Thrones” actor Kit Harrington plays Milo, a survived child slave of the Roman Empire, whose entire Celtic tribe was decimated by a military force, led by the pompous fop Emperor Corvus (Keifer Sutherland). Some decade or so later, Milo is moved to a newly established Roman front in Pompeii, where he forced to fight in gladiatorial battles against his fellow servants, including his new slave-friend Atticus (Adewale-Akinnouye-Agbaje).  There he falls in love with the city’s stubborn princess Cassia (Emily Browning), who has spent some amount of her life trying to escape the lustful gaze of Corvus. Cassia’s royal parents (Cary Anne Moss and Jarred Harris) are in the middle of negotiations with the sniveling emperor, as they plan to unite their city with Rome as a kind of tourist attraction for the wealthy.

                In the midst of all this political tension, romantic horse riding and swords-and-sandals violence, Vesuvius, the famed volcano of Pompeii, erupts, at which point the movie devolves into repetitive scenes of our young lovers running from special effects and getting blocked in corridors by walls of badly-rendered, digital fire balls and pop-out 3D lava.

                It’s not so much that this movie sucks—even though it very much does--it’s that there’s no discernible reason for its existence.  As a ‘serious’ piece of drama the movie is woefully low-rent and most of its key plot points are obviously lifted from its genre predecessors like “Gladiator” and “Spartacus, with more than a dash of “Titanic” in there as well. As an action movie the scenes of hand-to-hand combat are lazily cobbled together from multiple takes, breaking up each beat of each fight into split-second cuts, neutering the visual stakes with muddled close-ups. And finally, all of the fakey volcano stuff undercuts every single reused narrative device the movie begrudgingly spent the first two thirds of its running time putting into place.
                As with all of Anderson’s ‘work’,  I conjure the image of an obnoxious child stacking his wobbly blocks as tall as he can, just before  knocking them all over and giggling hysterically. In this, capable actors like Carry Anne Moss and Jarred Harris give lifeless performances, as if their agents are just out of frame dangling their contracts above the flame of their lighters.  Keifer Sutherland, on the other hand, had apparently just walked out of production of “The Importance of Being Ernest” and forgot to retune his accent accordingly.

                I can tell you with ease to never waste your time with this fast-food, late-winter programmer, but I have a feeling like Red Box will be very good to this movie. And if that’s the case, then so be it. Without the advantage of theater-grade 3D, “Pompeii” will reveal itself for what it truly is; a classless mish-mash of poorly shot, embarrassingly acted, unoriginal, nonsensical junk.

Grade: D –

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/March-2014