Boxtrolls review

                “Boxtrolls,” the most recent film by Laika Films (creators of “Coraline,” “9,” and “ParaNorman”) is a wonderfully detailed political parable, keeping the faith in painstaking stop-motion animation and model-work. It’s an ambitious effort both in practical execution and narrative scope, as it tries to connect many different levels of satire, storytelling and complicated subtext. However, while never failing to keep you dazzled visually, it loses some connection with the audience as it moves around quickly to keep all its plates spinning in the air.

                The story seems to take place in an alternate turn of the century Britain, where the currency is cheese and the economic classes are denoted by the colors of each individual’s hat—the poor wear red top hats, while the rich wear white. The ruler of the town of Cheesebridge, Lord Portley-Rind (Jarred Harris), is out of touch with the working class, concerned only for his cheese fortune, leaving his daughter Winnie (Elle Fanning) emotionally uncared for as well.  Unbeknownst to him, a treacherous worker named Archibald Snatcher (Ben Kingsly) plans to leverage his way up to the white-hat level by faking the disappearance of an inventor’s child, throwing him to the mysterious under-dwellers of the city known as the Boxtrolls. They’re peaceful enough, only wanting to take human trash to build neat-looking, gear-oriented devices out of it, but in order for Snatcher to lead a culture war, he needs a social boogieman to keep the town’s people afraid. He then makes a deal with the village leadership to capture and destroy all of the monstrous Boxtrolls, in exchange for his promotion. Twelve years later, the human boy (Isaac Hempstead Wright), affectionately renamed Eggs, has been raised to live as a Boxtroll, where he occasionally takes trips to the surface to steal garbage for the survival. After Snatcher arrests a member of his adopted family, with the help of the Lord’s precocious daughter, he ventures above-ground to uncover the grand conspiracy. 

                There’s a lot to admire in the details of this complicated world-building. The design of every individual character, as well as the city and environments they inhabit, is meticulously conceived; not only because of the difficult nature of stop-motion animation, but in the graphic consideration of every shot and every prop and every piece of clothing and how it all culminates to occupy every frame of the motion picture.  With its dynamic camera set-ups, moody lighting and fluid action set-pieces, this film constantly reminds you how far this art form has come since the days of Gumby. Technically speaking, Laika is miles ahead of their competition, providing a warm humanity and tactility that modern CGI animation just can’t replicate. 

                Unfortunately, the story isn’t as methodically executed. Though things move along fine enough and the allegories concerning class warfare, political deception, and the ‘othering’ of stigmatized minorities are dealt with in intelligent and entertaining ways, the emotional component lacks, largely because Eggs, our hero, is undefined and underwritten. He’s a boy raised as a monster and learns halfway through the film that he was adopted by a different species, and that’s a lot for any character to go through in 90 minutes, but in this film revelations are treated only as motivators to make him pass from one set piece to another. He’s too vague to root for, and though his partnership with the slightly more entertaining Winnie character is occasionally heartfelt, his role is primarily only fulfilling as the audience’s cypher through this world. Lucky for us, this world is pretty damn neat to look at—filled with creatures, drag-queens, and steam-punk, humanoid mech-tanks—and though the subtext should never drive the story, at least it keeps things interesting, even if we feel a little distant from (and occasionally bored with) our protagonist’s personal journey.

Grade: B-

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Sep-2014

The Drop review

                Though displaying nothing new or especially unique, Michael Roskam’s street-crime potboiler “The Drop” is a totally well-oiled entertainment mechanism that uses its deliberate run-time to reinforce story and shape character relationships in a way that’s refreshingly confident.  In an early-fall season that's excruciatingly barren of acceptable mainstream releases, the fact that I can muster-up a bar-level positive review for this flick feels like a heavy-load lifted from my shoulders, but, with that said, I don’t want to undersell just how exciting and occasionally inspired this little bit of gangster-grit can be.  Roskam’s command of performances and ability to properly stimulate story beats shouldn’t to be overlooked just because so much of what we see here is so familiar, and the way the plot, little by little, pieces itself together, reversing our assumptions about the characters and the meaning of their interactions, is certainly worthy of more than consolation praise.  

                Tom Hardy and the late James Gandolfini star as Bob and Marv, two cousins who run a Brooklyn dive-bar that’s used by the Czech mafia as a front illegal transactions and occasional money drops.  Older cousin Marv, who used to own the bar officially, is bitter about his property becoming a babysitting gig for a dangerous outside force. Younger cousin Bob is trying to live his complicated life one day at a time when he finds an abused puppy outside of the house of a formerly abused girl named Nadia (Noomi Repace), leading the two strangers to nurse the animal back to health, splitting visitation days between their increasingly romantic outings. All seems well until Bob and Marv are robbed by petty thieves, prompting upper management to put the pressure on, and a sleazy ex-boyfriend of Nadia claims ownership of the battered puppy/girl, putting pressure on Bob to go into hoodlum white-knight mode. 

                The subtle brilliance of this two pronged plot structure is the way screenwriter Denis Lehane (Mystic River, Shutter Island) ties the strands together in believably incidental ways.  The movie examines the meaning of relationships and the role each participant plays in keeping familial loyalty a priority, then questions just how thin and fragile the membrane between allegiance and betrayal really is. Hardy and Gandolfini are truly exceptional here as the tense arc of their partnership plays out like a back-alley Greek tragedy. Gandolfini especially—in what was probably his last gig before dying of a heart-attack—carries the weight of entire world in his face, and even when his character acts out in a seemingly cold-hearted fashion, the guilt and confliction in his mannerisms offsets the genre clichés within the scenes they occupy. Repace, on the other hand, isn’t terrible but she struggles to deliver her dialogue in a comfortable regional accent, often warbling back into her Swedish inflection. Unfortunately, though never threatening the movie's overall quality, her performance is dwarfed in the many scenes she shares with both Tom Hardy and Matthias Schoenaerts, who plays her pathetic earwig of an ex.

                “The Drop” takes its time building up and laying the path for a conclusion that really informs the rest of the film; not a twist per-se, but a crescendo that links the units together under a unifying thematic purpose. Because of this, the majority of the film feels a little disconnected, casual and sometimes aloof, but once you get to the point where you can see the culmination of events, the film's pays off is emotionally satisfying. In all, though the movie is generically easy to categorize, it’s the quality of direction, the clever scripting, and the power of the performances that stick with you.

Grade: B

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Sep-2014

As Above, So Below review

          

                 In what’s perhaps the weirdest not-sequel to “Lara-Croft: Tomb Raider,” found footage horror oddity “As Above, So Below” manages to continually up the ante of its premise while continually failing to deliver on it.  It’s a gimmicky movie obsessed with nodding to genre tropes—both from horror-films and adventure pulp—but lacks any sense of cathartic pay-off. Accidentally, the film does occasionally slip into an anarchic absurdity that keeps things moving but ultimately fumbles its B-movie aspirations.

                Scarlett (Perdita Weeks) is an academic explorer continuing her father’s life-long research of the mysterious sorcerer known as Nicolas Flemel, on the search for the Philosopher’s Stone.  After deducing the location of the stone, hundreds of feet within the catacombs under the streets Paris, she convinces her old friend and colleague George (Ben Feldman) and her nervous camera man Benji (Edwin Hodge) to aid in her discovery.  A group of street-wise Parisians show the bullheaded anthropologists the quick ways through the dark corridors and the secret passages with the hopes of splitting the ancient treasure amongst themselves, but after getting lost and scared they decide to break through a forbidden tunnel, later finding themselves circling back on their path, passing occultists and suffering strange hallucinations tied to the darkest moments of their personal hells.

                Despite a general sense of ineptitude with its material, this film does have the benefit of great natural location, ripe for horror potential. The caves and catacombs, some of which are a set, some of which are not, certainly create a building sense of claustrophobia and chaos, especially when the perspective shifts between each member of the team—all of which are recording with camera headsets.  The ‘found-footage’ conceit, now beyond over-played, actually has a dramatic purpose here, as the limited camera placement allows for effective build-up and surprise when our characters are unable to see ten feet ahead in any direction.  However, when we do finally creep around the corner to see the boogie men or the Satanists or the mysterious apparitions the accumulated dread exhales in disappointingly pedestrian horror imagery.  Never mind the internal logic of this film as the character’s run headfirst into further danger after getting picked off one by one, viewing multiple forms unexplainable terror, but somehow manage to avoid it once they need to backtrack to retrace their steps.

                The first-person perspective combined with the constant puzzle-solving to advance from one set-piece to another quickly starts to resemble the storytelling mechanics a survival-oriented videogame, to the point where I began to reach out to the screen with my hands clasped around an invisible controller, leaning in my seat and toggling left and right to avoid the spooks.  But, in this regard, I have to say that with your expectations placed appropriately low “As Above, So Below” is the kind of Sunday matinée schlock that has a base-level (though not entirely intentional) entertainment value.  It isn’t terribly committed to being scary, and you might wish that “Quarantine” director John Erick Dowell would have utilized his unique location with a better screenplay, but as a grown-up Goonies-like adventure or virtual haunted-house ride it almost, just barely, works.

Grade: C-

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Sep-2014