Transcendence review

                Wally Pfister, the talented cinematographer behind modern classics such as “The Dark Knight”, “Inception” and “Moneyball” brings us his directorial debut in “Transcendence”, a sci-fi drama starring Johnny Depp as a mad scientist who becomes a highly sentient computer with ambiguous goals towards the human race.  Tonally and visually, considering his recent work with director Christopher Nolan, the movie is presented in a way we might expect; cold, stark, and sterile, mirroring the dehumanizing technologies that the plot warns the audience against.

                Though Pfister hands over the photography work to Jess Hill his fingerprints are all over the film, but unfortunately when it comes to storytelling, pacing, and drama this curiously drab blockbuster lacks the same sense of meticulous identity.  Many scenes drag their feet when the movie is begging for acceleration and the themes of loneliness, the gradual loss of individuality, and progress by any means are somehow bluntly beat into the ground without ever really committing to any of them.

                Depp stars as Will Caster, a Ted-Talking computer genius who’s figured out the process of creating fully formed artificial intelligence. His wife Evelyn, played by Rebecca Hall, is working in union to create medical nano-bots.  When her husband is fatally injured by a gunshot from a technophobic revolutionary, Evelyn does what she can to keep him alive and uploads his consciousness into the mainframe of his super-computer. There, he’s not only able to access all of his memories and knowledge but he's able to think exponentially faster and more efficiently, using Evelyn’s nano-technologies to heal the sick and injured and to build fields of solar panels, expanding his ever-growing digital network. 

                This cyberpunk Frankenstein plot should have provided a simple but useful framework for the actors and the screenplay to really go in a myriad of different, and hopefully interesting directions. Unfortunately, Phister never really gives us a clear sense of the key players in the narrative when it comes to why we should care about anything that’s going on. Depp and Hall’s tragic romance is underwhelming and almost nondescript, leaving all the pulp-genre elements of the film feeling derivatively old-hat.  We're never as sad as we should be about the Evelyn’s straining marriage to her computer husband as he becomes less human and we're never as worried as we are supposed to be about Will’s descent into cold calculation over compassion due to Depp’s flat-line performance through each point of his character’s arc. 

                Cillian Murphy and Morgan Freeman step over from Nolan’s stable of repertory actors and are given almost nothing to do here as concerned investigators. Them, along with Kate Mara as the leader of the human rebellion against Castor’s digital army, are strangely disconnected from the more interesting—though ultimately flailing--emotional story. Paul Bettany, as a former colleague of Depp’s character, who is then recruited by the militaristic insurgence, probably gives the best performance in the entire film, picking up the slack dropped by everyone else. Rebecca Hall is clearly trying her hardest but has absolutely nothing to work with or against, rendering her best scenes into an ineffectual, one-women juggling act.

                Despite the fact that “Transcendence” has the right budget, the right actors, and a promising director--given the pedigree of films he’s worked on as crew--the final result is a depressing slog, not worth your time or consideration.  It’s competently framed and lit but the screenplay lacks any kind of specificity or vitality, and the simple joys of the movie’s sci-fi conceits are almost instantly drowned in its bland austerity.

Grade: D+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/April-2014

Oculus review

                It’s no exaggeration to say that haunted-house movies are in vogue right now.  Why, probably because they are cheap to produce and boo-scares are easy to manufacture. Unlike a slasher flick or a gore-fest, ghost thrillers can remain relatively bloodless, thus allowing for that coveted PG-13 rating that can bring in as many young mall-dwellers as possible.  “Oculus”, however, was bought at this year’s SXSW festival and later released by the same producers who brought us “Sinister”, “Insidious” and “The Conjuring”—three reasonably scary movies in a currently overplayed horror sub-genre.

                Unlike most of it's contemporaries, “Oculus” boasts an ambitious screen-play full of brilliant shocks, and tricky sequences of psychological editing. Within every scene the movie is working on multiple levels. It’s a satisfying gotchya shrieker, a wildly structured procedural thriller, and thoughtful allegory about domestic abuse and childhood trauma.

                Tim Russell (Brenton Thwaites) has recently been released from a mental institution and on high-alert by his care-takers and therapists. After years of convincing himself that the brutality he experiences in his past is explainable in natural terms, his older sister Kaylie (Karen Gillen) decides to bring him to the house where they grew up to take on their past-demons face to face. Over the night, the two argue about what’s real, what’s memory and what’s impossible.  With many cameras and safeguards in place, Kaylie is determined to convince his brother that he isn’t crazy and that they can destroy the evil that savaged their family 11 years prior.

                “Oculus” is an efficient little horror movie that cleverly keeps the audience fighting between hiding behind their palms and leaning into their chairs to keep up with its complex, puzzle box plot.  Shifting back and forth from past to present, this duel narrative builds in a psychological spring-loaded trap, where, without even realizing it, by trying to figure it out you end up within its grasp. Actors Brenton Thwaites and Karen Gillen look and behave like television actors and much of the first third is spent trying to get the audience to forego their obnoxiously milk-toast appearance. But as the movie dives deeper into the abyss, the scares are delivered in a way that both offsets the goofy Twilight Zone set-up and televisual appeal of its younger cast.

                In the flashback sequences, the main players, led by Battlestar Galactica’s Katee Sackhoff and Argo’s Rory Cochrane, are much stronger. The pain of the family’s deterioration is palpable and even if you can’t buy into the plot’s mystical conceit the tragic subtext is wrought with emotional truth. The movie ties together fuzzy dream-like memory with supernatural terror expertly and ends in a somewhat depressing but thematically satisfying way.

                Written with consideration and shot with economic skill, “Oculus” is a tight little genre treat that nobody asked for but will ultimately please those who take a chance on it.  It tries something new and mostly gets away with it. Even as some of the cast are annoyingly nondescript the material doesn’t allow them to be boring.

               

Grade: B+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/April-2014

Captain America: The Winter Soldier review

                  Captain America is a tricky Marvel character to sell to global movie market, despite his recognizable brand and the backing of a powerhouse film production conglomerate. These days people are a little jaded when it comes to national pride and a character that fights for truth, justice and the American way is an increasingly harder pill to swallow, especially when party divisions have dramatically split the country on the specific interpretation of what the “American Way” is even supposed to be. Even when conflict is injected into the character to please those on the homeland, the blatantly patriotic imagery of Cap-Am risks appearing like propaganda to those abroad.

                Though Disney/Marvel Studio’s first attempt to introduce this character in 2011 wasn’t an altogether failure, it really only managed to work as a placeholder for the anticipated Avengers movie being hyped at time.  Now, with the overwhelming success of “The Avengers” in 2012, “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” is afforded the benefit of doubt by those who may have been skeptical before. Surprisingly, in changing time-period, style, tone and directors, this movie cleverly takes advantage of its second chance and manages to exceed expectations by simultaneously defying and celebrating its genre-conventions.

                Having grown up in the ‘30s and ‘40s, only to be preserved in ice and unfrozen to become a superhero soldier, fighting alongside sci-fi anomalies like Bruce Banner’s Hulk and Tony Stark’s Iron-Man, Steve Rodgers (Chris Evans) is now suffering from state of mild temporal dysphoria, with only his work as a SHIELD super-spy to keep him focused and grounded. However, when his boss and mentor, SHIELD’s leader Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) is targeted and hunted by his colleagues, Captain America is then forced to go rogue and figure out how high the governmental corruption infiltrates. Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and military veteran Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) help Rodgers with his impossible mission, while keeping guard from a mysteriously lethal mercenary known as the Winter Soldier.

                It’s actually difficult to be prepared for just how exceptional this pop-corn thriller is. Not since Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” has a sequel so magnificently improved upon its predecessor in a way that actually fixes some of the problems of the previous film. Rather than the cartoony, gee-golly pulp aesthetic of Joe Johnston’s “Captain America: The First Avenger”, Joe and Anthony Russo’s steely, post-Bourn, politically-minded sequel resembles the kind of cool immediacy of Michael Mann’s “Heat”, as well as ‘70s paranoid dramas like “The French Connection" and "All the President's Men."  The tensely-blocked, handheld bursts of action-violence is impactful, the performances are confident--particularly Evans who'd previously appeared a little stiff within the do-gooder limitations of his characters--and unlike even the best films from Marvel’s amoeba-vers, this world feels lived-in and dangerous with a semi-realistic sense of scale and threat. 

                With that said, this is still a comic-book action movie aimed at a young teenage audience, and we're reminded of that whenever the plot makes an illogical leap or when there's an occasional tonal hiccup. This includes some high-concept sci-fi tech that feels out of place compared to the movie's more sober interpretation of the Marvel world, as well as, a sporadic line of Saturday-morning dialogue.  In the third act, as is the demand for any film that costs more than 100 million dollars, the movie eventually devolves into an extended effect-driven sequence, slowly drifting the whole thing away from the refreshing tactility and level-headed sophistication it had built up to that point.

                Flaws and nitpicks aside—though not excused—“Captain America-The Winter Soldier” is still an exciting and daring move forward for the superhero genre, and it at least hints towards a maturity that Marvel Studios hasn’t been as interested in exploring since the Iraq war metaphors of the first “Iron Man."  Here, themes of political unrest and social distrust regarding NSA monitoring and military drone technologies make this sequel not only satisfying as a genre picture, but timely and relevant as well.

Grade: B+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/April-2014

Noah review

                Everyone knows the story of Noah and the great flood of The Bible, or at least they think they do.  Stories like this one and many others that have permeated the social sphere are usually not remembered, recited or quoted with accuracy or even with any of the relevant context to the scriptures that surrounds them. Instead, these tales have become a kind of cultural meme, and in the case of “Noah” over time the myth has been whittled down to the iconography of animals, rainbows and a big wooden boat. 

                New York filmmaker Darren Aronofsky, most well-known for his bleakly-pitched, visceral indie work like “Requiem for a Dream” and “Black Swan”, cares nothing about the memetic simplicity or even the moral dichotomies within the Noah story of the original biblical text.  With his recent adaptation—working within a much bigger budget than he’s usually afforded—he transgresses the familiar narrative in search for the darker implications of the legend.

                In this alternative universe version of “Noah” , Russell Crowe plays our hero as he is shown by the creator visions of a watery apocalypse that will destroy every living person in the world. His grandfather Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins) informs him that he has been called to save his family and the animalia of the planet by building a large ark that will float along the earth’s surface during the imminent flood. (Yeah yeah yeah—we know all that.) However, this time around, what Noah isn’t telling his family is that perhaps the creator never intended for the human race to survive past their death once they have saved the other species.  This becomes even more complicated when Noah’s adopted daughter Ila (Emma Watson) is struggling to bare children with his eldest son Shem (Douglas Booth), while at the same time his younger son Ham (Logan Lerman) is begging for a wife to validate his budding manhood.

                Much has been written about the fundamentalist reaction against Aronofsky’s additions to the source material, and it’s obvious within the first ten minutes that accuracy is not his aim. Much of the movie’s second half deals with the existential angst that these characters have to endure in the face of their seemingly elusive deity. Noah is forced to ponder if he was chosen because he’s the best of mankind or simply the best man for the job. The psychological weight this brings down on him and his family when they hear the screams outside of the arch as the flood rises around them exemplifies the universal truth of moral and spiritual uncertainty that this adaptation is interested in.  The disgruntled faithful should know that, as a story, the slanting of the text to better examine these characters and to give these actors more pathos to deal with is not where the movie fails…but this does lead me to my other point: rock monsters.  

                Maybe in a grand statement of defiance, or perhaps in a broad brushstroke of creative freedom, Aronofsky includes many Tolkien fantasy elements that unfortunately overpower the first half of this otherwise dark film with misjudged silliness. But besides scene-ruining rock monsters, Hopkins’ wizard-like Methuselah seems to serve more as a writing device than as a character, telling us what we already know or could gather from the plot, handing out magic-grow tree-seeds, and going on and on about berries.   Luckily the power and paranoia of the second half just barely saves the film from the Dungeons and Dragons nonsense of the first half. 

                I see no reason why details about the rather short biblical verses shouldn’t be altered for the sake of exploring characters and situations in a more complex or subversive way, even if the film’s pot boils over with too many discordant ideas from time to time. “Noah” is, without a doubt, an audacious and deeply melancholy cinematic experience, but it may alienate fans of the book.

Grade: C+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/March-2014