Sin City: A Dame to Kill For review

                2005’s “Sin City” was a visually ambitious effort by troublemaker director Robert Rodriguez, adapting the black and white Frank Miller comic book as accurately as possible. In employing never before seen green-screen technology, animating almost everything except the actors, he envisioned a graphically unique movie universe that romanticized and exaggerated the film noir style, digitally sculpting entire sets and moods with angular lighting concepts and isolating certain characters and props with splashes of sharply contrasting color. Sure, it was gimmicky and the style vastly outweighed the substance, but, it in a midnight-movie way, it was purely cinematic and it suggested whole new possibilities between the worlds of digital animation and adult-themed action movies.

                Then again, what we took for granted in Rodriguez’s successful experiment was the apparent tight-wire act it accomplished with tone and execution. Lesser adopters of this technique, like Zach Snyder’s “300,” “Watchmen,” and “Sucker Punch,” proved that world building and visual panache must to be balanced with sensitive direction, considerate acting , and, at the very least, functional storytelling to pull a film together, lest the entire thing becomes an overblown videogame cut-scene. While the original “Sin City” was light on story, it was effectively moody, paced exceptionally well and doled things out in such a way that it continually surprised the audience. Now, nine years later, Rodriguez’s long-planned sequel “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For,” performs like an over-confident cover-band, lazily going through the motions, believing that it doesn’t matter if it slogs through the song as long it nails the guitar solo.

                Like its 2005 predecessor, this is a triptych narrative that interweaves three short stories, all staring different protagonists. Joseph Gordon Levitt plays Johnny, an egotistical gambler who gets in over his head when he wins a game of poker against the cartoonishly evil Senator Roark—played with some conviction by Booth Powers. The second plot, in which the film takes its name, tells the backstory of private eye Dwight McCarthy (previously played by Clive Owen , now Josh Brolin) who gets tangled in the web of a spider-women named Ava (Eva Green), and who vows revenge after a brutal double-cross leaves him disfigured. The last tale tracks the mental deterioration of a stripper named Nancy (Jessica Alba), who seeks to kill the Senator responsible for death of her fatherly protector Hartigan, played in both films by Bruce Willis.

                In this triple-scoop serving of splat-tastic pulp there’s no shortage of stars hamming it up as they deliver the Miller’s tough-guy dialogue, as well as no shortage of ultra-violent black and white money-shots. However, for all its hack and slash and stylish masculine bravado, what the movie does lack is any tangible sense of mood, danger, or dramatic tension.  

                 The Joseph Gordon Levitt short is inexplicably split apart, and though the first half builds to an interesting conflict, when we pick back up 25 minutes later the story putters out in a flatulent anti-climax.  Alba was always distractingly miscast as Nancy Callahan but now that she’s expected to do more than just provide cheesecake as a damsel in distress, her failings as a dramatic actress are even more apparent in this totally unnecessary follow-up  to the last movie’s most emotionally resonant segment.  Here she broods at the bottom of a whiskey bottle, talks to Obi-Wan Bruce Willis from beyond the grave and comically takes to the streets on a motor-cycle.  The title story, based on a vintage Sin City text, narratively anchors the rest of flab around it, highlighting the movie’s best performance in Eva Green vamping it up as the archetypal femme fatale. But even with this Rodriguez manages to spoil the experience by over playing his digital color-correction tricks and over-exploiting the 3D exploitation.             

                Unfortunately, “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For” is a depressing disappointment, not only for the audience who may still remember the energy and audaciousness of the first film and have been anticipating this sequel for many summers, but for the talented cast and creators responsible for its deflating results.

Grade: D

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Aug-2014

The Giver review

                As it turns out, I was the only American in my age group who wasn’t encouraged to read Lois Lowry’s “The Giver” in middle school. For many, this young-adult utopian science-fiction novel was a significant literary moment in their lives and is regarded with the utmost reverence. I was there for The Hobbit, R.L. Stine, and, though a little too old to fully appreciate it, I was even there for the early Harry Potter buzz. Nevertheless, I completely missed this phenomenon and wasn’t even aware of “The Giver” until a few friends of mine begun complaining about the trailers for its recent movie adaptation.

                In the wake of politically-minded YA sci-fi adaptations such as “The Hunger Games” and its shameless clones “Divergent” and the upcoming “Maze Runner,” it makes perfect sense that the suits in Hollywood would choose this pop-culture moment to green-light Lowry’s 1993 novel. In toeing the line of this tween-friendly genre, this adaptation has been given a slick CW makeover, with just enough cold austerity to imply the type of thematic depth, to which these kinds of films usually can’t commit. That is why, despite its mercenary attempts at cashing-in, it is both surprising and nice to say that this film works pretty well, even if it simply functions without a whole lot of pizazz. 

                In the distant future, society has bubbled itself into a tight-knit, highly-monitored community that is able to exist without pain, suffering, war or hunger. Children are studied at a young age for specific attributes and skills and are placed into jobs on their eighteenth birthday by the Chief Elder, played with a sinister calm by Meryl Streep. Jonas (Brenton Thwaites) is a chosen last in his graduating class to work, not as a scientist or laborer, but as a special archivist called The Receiver. This work consists of intensive sessions where he shares psychic memories of the old-world with an elder called ‘The Giver’ (Jeff Bridges) behind the walls of an isolated library restricted to the outside public. With these memories comes a heightened sensitivity to both the extreme joys of music, diversity, and love, as well as the depressing realities of, sickness, prejudice and war. Jonas is then left to decide whether to share the raw truth with everyone else or work keep it concealed.

                Tellingly, the cinematography conveys Jonas’ psychological arc from a worker bee to a revolutionary through the use of color, beginning with the first item he notices, a brilliant red apple. After his first few sessions, everything else begins to fade out of the digital grayscale into muted pastels, ending in a color explosion.  This depiction of enlightenment of course brings to mind Dorothy’s journey in “The Wizard of OZ” as well the biblical story of Adam and Eve, as their knowledge of good and evil also began with fruit.  Politically, the story’s Stepford-society recalls films made during the height of post-soviet red-scare and unlike the socialist-leanings of Suzanne Collins’ “Hunger Games” adaptations, this story’s more concerned with possible threat of government controlled egalitarianism.  But, lest we get too caught up in the barely-coded ethos of the source material, the movie itself moves from point A to B with little fuss and sufficiently rewards those who’re willing to accept its middling ambitions.

                Thwaites blank-slate performance unfortunately never matures as his character is supposed to be encumbered by the painful realities of the truth, and as a hero he ultimately fails to inspire much empathy. However, veteran director Phillip Noyce, better known for adult spy-thrillers such as “Clear and Present Danger” and “Patriot Games,” paces the film deliberately and with enough care and attention to the dramatic beats of the story that the movie is occasionally able to do the actors’ work without their help.  Key scenes are skimmed over in montage, leaving the emotional component slightly underdeveloped, but as a cursory introduction to dystopian fiction, “The Giver” at least tries to infuse the YA genre with enough visual creative dynamism to keep things interesting.

Grade: C+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Aug-2014

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles review

                   Nostalgia is the engine of the post-modern dilemma that enables our inability to create new cultural or artist forms, in favor of remixing or rebooting the old standards with an updated sheen.  Studios green-light movies like the recent “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” reboot because they trust the success of the brand-name, and judging from the 65 million dollar opening and the announcement of a 2016 sequel, it would seem with good reason. Despite the public outcry against an early draft of the script that leaked online a couple years back, with the rumors of an added alien mythology and the confirmation of Megan Fox cast in lead, these kinds of pre-recognized titles make money, usually by collecting from the very same people who furiously blog against them.

                 Having been preached against on every forum and every comment section on the web as the Michael Bay molestation of our childhood to come, and gauging from the outrage against the hyper-detailed, fulgliness of the new character designs that were revealed with the preceding trailers and poster art, you would have thought this movie was destined to be a flop of “Heaven’s Gate” proportions.  But, as it turns out, you would have thought wrong, and, unfortunately, I am not surprised.  Though this most recent Ninja Turtles reboot wasn’t actually directed by the infamously successful Michael Bay—only released through Bay’s remake-centric production company, Platinum Dunes—and directed by Jonathan Liebesman who knows how to suck all on his own, responsible for matinee, empty-calorie buffet slop like “Wrath of the Titans” and “Battle LA,” this is exactly the kind of over-buttered pop-corn rubbish you might imagine it to be. Though the original iterations of the franchise were never Shakespeare, TMNT- 2014 might actually succeed in making the internet’s most angry dissenters wish Bay had been at the helm all along.

                Unchanged from the established origin, four baby turtles are mutated through genetic goo called mutagen and are released into the sewers, where they eventually become super-strong, humanoid ninja teenagers. Under the streets of New York, their master Splinter, a mutant rat, has spent their most recent years training the team to fight against a newly organized ninja terrorist gang known as the Foot Clan. Journalist April O’Neil (Megan Fox) has an inkling of the Turtles vigilantly work and is anxious to advance here career from covering ridiculous human-interest pieces to exposing hard-hitting news about reptilian superheroes.  Somewhere in the mix, an ex-colleague of April’s scientist father named Eric Sacs (William Fichtner) is protecting the Foot’s mysterious leader The Shredder, who has his own plans to repurpose the mutagen that created his foes.

                With the studio’s primary interest in updating the base aesthetics of the Turtle’s Saturday-morning appeal by changing their look, their surroundings, and their outdated surfer colloquialisms, this movie serves us back a repackaged product that breaks upon opening.  It seems what happened is while Liebesman and company got so caught-up in refurbishing all the surfaces, they forgot to put back the nuts and bolts that make the story work, leaving us with nothing to attach ourselves to except for the absurdity of the premise.  Rewrites and bad studio notes are achingly visible as April’s unneeded origin is weaved into the backstory of our heroes and the disparate parts of script are taped together with function-based characters like Fichtner’s billionaire bad-guy and comedically placed characters like April’s camera-man Vernon, awkwardly phoned-in by television’s Will Arnett.

                As was expected, this film is based entirely on set-pieces and action spectacle, and while our minimally-written heroes are flipping and kicking and sliding around in practically every scene they have together, we can only piece together their individual characteristics through snips of barely audible dialogue, buried underneath the overwhelming sound-design. Visually, Liebesman tries to ape Bay’s crooked lens and whip-pan style and even manages to ruin the fluidity of that with his usual epileptic camera-work. Surprisingly, this movie doesn’t even fail in the same screeching, headache-inducing ways found in the worst moments of the Transformer’s movies, and instead settles for pandering fan-fare and bland ineptitude.

Grade: D

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Aug-2014

Guardians of the Galaxy review

                  Marvel studios (ever heard of them?) gambled the entire summer on “Guardians of the Galaxy,” a movie based on one of their C-list comic book titles. Not only is this property obscure by fanboy standards, but the film’s two biggest stars, Bradley Cooper and Vin Diesel, are used only to voice a CGI raccoon and a talking tree, while the physically present lead characters are cast from sit-coms and televised wrestling. But it’s the against-all-odds weirdness of this concoction and the risk the studio was willing take on it that kind of gives the entire movie its anarchistic charge and underdog illusion. I say illusion of course because what the success of Guardians really proves is the apparent indestructibility of Marvel’s box-office brand and the strength of their classic studio approach.

                What writer/director James Gunn understands about this material is that the plot can be as simple and as unambitious as it is here, so long as we are on board with the characters and their journey.  Having come from the world of cult-horror and exploitation cinema, such as “Tromeo and Juliet” and “Slither,” as well as low-budget superhero parodies such as “Super” and “The Specials,” he knows exactly where to pitch the difficult tone of this idiosyncratic genre-meld.  As a fan, Gunn celebrates all of the movie’s disparate components—space-opera, buddy-comedy, superhero blockbuster—and weaves them together seamlessly, keeping everything anchored by his love for the characters and the individual comedic textures brought by the movie’s diverse cast.

                Chris Pratt plays Peter Quill/Starlord, a human abducted from earth at the age of nine and raised in space by a group of criminals. While attempting to steal a magic crystal to sell on the intergalactic black market he inadvertently gets thrown into the middle of a political war between the space military and an evil zealot named Ronan (Lee Pace), working for a purple giant called Thanos. Defiant daughter of Thanos, Gamora (Zoe Saldana), a vengeance-seeking warrior named Drax (Dave Batista) and the aforementioned tree Groot (Deisel) and his partner Rocket Raccoon (Cooper) also come along on the adventure to capture the powerful stone, with the hopes to find closure, make some money, and maybe save the galaxy from the god-like tyrant. 

                 Though ripped and 60 pounds lighter, “Parks and Recreation” actor Chris Pratt uses his familiar loveable bone-head shtick and applies it to a type of Han Solo charisma, with very appealing results. Likewise, Batista juxtaposes his stone-faced wrestler physicality with the script’s brilliant dry humor and the kids will no doubt respond to Cooper’s loud-mouth Rocket Raccoon and his amorphous bodyguard Groot who is only able to say the words “I AM GROOT,” while Rocket translates his limited language to the rest of the misfits.  Every actor has a scene or two to steal and the movie breaths enough between the set-pieces to build on their relationships. Unfortunately, Zoe Saldana as the green-painted, super-assassin Gamora doesn’t get  as much of a chance to fool-around as the other boys, and having seen her in space more than we haven’t her inclusion feels considerably less inspired. But by no means does this slow the momentum of this wildly imaginative comedy. 

       The plot of “Guardians of the Galaxy” is elementary, the climax is too big and overly drawn-out for its own good, losing some focus in its overreaching for epic-ness, but the majority of this multi-million dollar oddity is overwhelmingly entertaining; the take away being the ensemble, their interactions and the humor that comes from their uncanny chemistry. Like any competent summer movie, the special effects do their job and most of the action is character-driven, but it’s the movie’s ‘70s soft-rock soundtrack and brightly colored look that perfectly mirrors the enthusiastic energy exhibited by the wickedly talented James Gunn and his weirdo cast.

Grade: B+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Aug-2014

Boyhood review

                 Since emerging from and headlining the indie film explosion of the early ‘90s, Austin Texas director Richard Linklater has never been content to stay in familiar territory, constantly pushing himself into unexplored and challenging storytelling avenues. While contemporaries such as Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith were defining their brand and building a devoted fanbase on genre familiarity, Linklater strove to try new things and ignore all expectations.  Later on when he would occasionally make a mainstream comedy like “School of Rock,” in the context of his wildly diverse career even that felt like formal experiment to make a movie in direct opposition to his interest in narrative stream-of-consciousness, displayed in films such as “Slacker” and “Waking Life.”

                With this in mind, it seems only fitting that Linklater would be using his off-time between the  shoots of his regular film schedules to whittle away at a 12 year passion project, documenting the growth and the age of the same cast around the malleable blueprint of a plot. “Boyhood,” in many ways, is the ultimate thesis of Linklater’s formal interests in storytelling and character examination through means of pure cinema. Of course, all of this would mean a whole lot of nothing if it weren’t also emotionally engaging, brutally honest and surprisingly funny.

                On the surface this film tells the story of Mason (Ellar Coltrane), a Texas-born child named named Mason (Ellar Coltrane) as hewho transitions from childhood to manhood, starting at age six when the production began in 2002 and ending with his move to college in 2014. Certainly, the movie’s center of consciousness is with Mason and he's our emotional conduit through the broader story of his broken family (and to a greater extent, the condition of post-911 Americana). But it is within the journey of his formative years that the lives of his parents also play out in subtle complexity.  After a rocky divorce his mother, played by Patricia Arquette, goes back to college to make a better living for Mason and his older sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater), and his father, played by Ethan Hawk, also makes his transition from deadbeat struggling musician to accepting eventual responsibility.  Each story interweaves and informs the other, creating a breathy, yet dense emotional tapestry of modern suburban angst.

                By casting a six year old unknown and hoping that he would appropriately age into the role, Linklater gambled on the entirety of the film’s artistic success on this actor, and luckily for him the experiment pays off without ever feeling like a needless gimmick or publicity stunt.  Earlier on  Coltrane's performace is interior and quietly effecting, oftentimes letting the louder characters in his scenes shape his on screen personality through contrast. As he grows the character slowly exposes a firmer identity and develops from a cypher of our own nostalgia into having his own distinct perspective and intellectual agency. Both Ethan Hawk and Patricia Arquette are better here than they may have ever been before and, impressively, they sustain their performance over the long period, infusing their characters with the natural growth they have accumulated both as actors and as people. Simply put, they ‘act’ real, and the significant trick that the movie plays on the audience is that after a while you stop thinking about production’s logistics.

                Almost a formal cousin to Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise” trilogy, this film is interested in the deep exploration of character through dialogue, social milieu, and scenic rhythms in editing that outlines the passage of time.  Because of the purposely fluid nature of the plot—oftentimes avoiding the kinds of traditional conceits and beats of more rigorously written coming of age dramas—“Boyhood” may alienate some audiences hoping for the excitement of rising tensions, the exuberance of an underlined ‘ah-ha’ moment, or the comfort of resolution.  What you get instead is a teenage life lived in all its messy and glorious intricacies.

Grade: A-

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Aug-2014