Fury review

               While still retaining the base entertainments of the war genre, David Ayer’s WW2 flick “Fury” tackles topics of humanity, masculinity, ideology and national loyalty in a dense and deliberate way. It’s an ensemble buddy war drama in the tradition of “The Dirty Dozen”—or maybe even more testosterone-driven westerns such as “Rio Bravo” and especially “The Wild Bunch”—but with a leftist post-Vietnam, post-9/11 introspective sensibility that questions the overall effectiveness of war as a means to an end and ponders the long-lasting impact on the individual soldiers caught up in its hell. Sometimes wallowing in its moral greys and other times manipulating the audience with the visceral simplicities of black and white, the mix of these two ideological outlooks, and the way Ayre attempts to balance them within the narrative, is a subtextual war of its own.

               This story of a team of tank fighters, who, at the tail end of the Second World War, are moving through the devastated villages of Germany, begins when one member is brutally killed and a new soldier is brought in to replace him; a 19 year old typist named Norman (Logan Lerman), who’s ripped from his cozy job and thrown into the rainy, blood stained fields of battle. There he meets the steadfast leader Don Collier (Brad Pitt), the teams’ bible thumping gunman Boyd Swan (Shia LaBeouf ), Grady Travis (Jon Bernthal), a troubled southerner who probably takes too much glee in his murderous duties, and a Mexican-American soldier named Trini Garcia (Michael Pena) who’s already showing early signs of PTSD. It’s clear from the first few missions that Norman is in way over his head, and, having just lost one of their own, rolling into some of the most dangerous tank battles against the Nazi’s near-impervious Panzers, the rest of team doesn’t have the patience for him to get comfortable with the idea of taking a human life.

               Ayer’s follow-up to his 2012 found-footage cop-drama “End of Watch” builds on the themes of brotherhood and masculinity in a more cohesive and more pessimistic way. The extremely tense and explicitly violent war scenes are spaced appropriately by character building moments of reflexivity, letting the audience get to know and sympathize with this group of men who’re trying their hardest to keep their emotional vulnerability bottled in.  However, though the performances are sensitively portrayed and the battle scenes are competently staged and shot, when their tank rolls over the dead bodies of their enemies and they poke their heads out of their mobile shelter to shoot down the newly appointed Nazi youth, some of whom are younger than our movie’s hero, the nobility of nationalistic bravery becomes difficult to identify or enjoy. And sometimes--if I’m giving the movie the full benefit of the doubt--that’s the point.

               In one key scene, after a village battle has ended, Lerman and Pitt’s characters enter the home of two German sisters, and after Pitt’s Collier pulls them out of hiding, visibly frightened and shaking with fear, he offers them both eggs and breakfast as a peace offering.  Though this moment breathes with steady directorial observation, as the story progresses, what follows on their path is a series of increasingly depressing and devastating act of violence until the movie’s final showdown between the out-manned, out-gunned Fury and a sizable SS militia.

               Does “Fury” want to be a think piece about the lowest depths of depravity world governments have forced on the innocent minds of naïve recruits looking to serve their country, who then have to numb their souls in order to toe the line, or does it want to be a rousing coming of age story about having your blinders removed and being forced to see what evil looks like by figuring out your place in opposition against it?   It’s difficult to tell sometimes, resulting in a technically accomplished action-drama that tests your moral barometer as you’re often unsure if you want to cheer along or wince in disgust.

Grade: B -
Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Oct-2014

Dracula Untold review

                The story of the Dracula, famed vampire count of Transylvania, has been told innumerably though the last century, first appearing in the ‘20s silent-film version “Nosferatu”, then in ‘30s played by Bela Lugosi, then in the ‘60s by Christopher Lee, later Gary Oldman, Gerard Butler…and so on and so on. At this point the character’s been cinematically portrayed almost as much as Santa Claus and finding original ways to approach Bram Stoker’s original text has become all the more difficult to pull off without drifting into camp or self-parody.

                Like Francis Ford Coppala’s take in 1992, this year’s “Dracula Untold” goes back to the original legend of Vlad the impaler, the eastern-European prince that inspired Stoker’s novel. However, unlike Coppala’s overtly gothic and melodramatic version, this Dracula prequel aims for dour instead of dark and rustic instead of romantic, envisioning the character as a hero of his people, set with a difficult decision.

                Having been raised as a Turkish slave, Vlad Tepes (Luke Evans), the prince of 

Transylvania, tries to protect his son and the other young males of his 13^th century kingdom by becoming something more than human; a monster. One day, on the way to enemy headquarters, he wanders into a mountainous cave where he finds an old haggish vampire (Charles Dance) who grants him the power to destroy the invaders. Vlad then opts to temporarily become a vampire, under the condition that, if he can resist drinking human blood for three days, his humanity will return. It is then up to him and his swarms of bats to defeat the Turkish armies single-handedly without eating his wife Mirena (Sara Gadon).

                It would be easy to tear apart this ponderous attempt at brand recognition, but I think what makes it worse than being ridiculously awful, in a way that made “I, Frankenstine” almost fun to warn people against, is that “Dracula Untold” is just painfully boring.  The majority of film is framed in medium close-ups, all the performances toggle from earnest whispers to 300-esque shouting, and the war scenes are cut so quickly and are so muddied with CGI bats that you can barely tell what’s going on. The backgrounds are darkly lit and the visual pallet is color-corrected in drippy greys and muted blues. With the exception of Dominic Cooper as the Turkish warlord, sporting a perfectly trimmed New Kids on the Block hairdo and saying things like “I will have my one-thousand boys!” everybody else looks miserable to be in this the movie and every character looks miserable to be in this world.

                Despite the attempt at reinventing Dracula as something like a DC superhero character and despite its forgiving ninety three minute run time, I found myself dozing off just about every other scene. Visually the movie is unappealing and the characterization of Dracula is so neutered—desperately excusing every inhuman or monstrous thing he may have ever been known for—that it leaves nothing left to fuel the drama. In four years, you might catch this on TNT or the USA network and by the half-way point you’ll regret having started it but will be too lazy to change the channel, and that is the ultimate fate of “Dracula Untold.”



Grade: D+

Originally published by the Idaho State Journal/Oct-2014

Gone Girl review

              With the bulk of David Fincher’s films there exists an exciting tension that comes from the dichotomy between the pulpy familiarity of the genres he plays around in and the classical, detail-oriented approach in which he presents them. Whether it’s a gimmicky serial killer thriller like “Se7en”, a paranoid chase mystery like “The Game” or police procedural like “Zodiac,” Fincher always maximizes the drama of every scene with a precise eye for camera placement and a deliberate pace that in today’s mode of mainstream filmmaking would typically be seen as a liability. Come to think of it, amongst all the comic book adaptations and the franchise blockbusters, Fincher is one of the only filmmakers working today that's allowed to make large-scale, slow-burning pop-corn flicks for grown-ups.

                “Gone Girl” is based on the best-selling airport novel and adapted by the book’s author Gillian Flynn, and like aforementioned films, this is another exploration of what would normally be seen as B-movie terrain, but crafted with an assured hand.  Every scene is meticulously blocked and designed and the sleek, steel-cool tone of this potboiler gracefully glides along, lulling you into every bear-trap that's built into the narrative. Surprisingly, even when the story changes gears halfway through and solves what seemed to be the propelling force of the drama, the characters are so conflicted with interesting contradictions that the movie quickly recovers from the jarring switch.

                On the surface, the plot seems like the type of stuff most lifetime movies are made of. Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) is a seemingly dutiful husband who, on the day of his wedding anniversary, comes home to find that his wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) has gone missing, with some evidence in the house suggesting a violent struggle. After a few days of building media attention, Nick becomes the prime suspect and his personal life, as well as the intimate details of his marriage, becomes scrutinized and analyzed by every outsider looking in, including the small town detectives working on the case (Kim Dickens and Patrick Fugit), his twin sister (Carrie Coon), and his high-profile, celebrity lawyer (Tyler Perry).

                As a performance-driven film, the success of this stylish neo-noir is totally dependent on the ability of its actors. Whether they're cast against type or because of their extratextual association with their characters, such as Ben Affleck, whose relationship with the public has always been a bit of rollercoaster, the film mines every performance for latent connotations that the audience might bring and uses them to either support the plot or to purposely mislead you. Tyler Perry’s goody-goody reputation is played against his confident lawyer role, while television’s Neil Patrick Harris plays Amy’s all-too-concerned and creepy ex-boyfriend Desi.  Rosamund Pike as the icy New York socialite-come-small-town-homemaker not only keeps the story’s problematic sexual politics from getting in her way, but, even as many of her scenes are shown in flashback, ends up stealing the entire movie.

                Despite just how high-concept and silly this thing eventually gets, building slowly from a mournful mystery to a shockingly violent fever-pitch, Fincher’s knack for storytelling pulls you into this almost three hour spectacle without a single minute wasted. In using the same technical team behind his last few movies “The Social Network” and “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” his collaborations have created a shorthand between the cinematography, editing, and sound design that hums in near-perfect harmony.  The sparse visual sense by director of photography Jeff Cronenweth and the melancholy ambiance of Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor’s score drenches every scene in tonal atmosphere, creating a heightened dream-like reality in which this movie is afforded the pleasure of straddling the line between observant social satire and sleazy, late-night cable-television camp.

                                                                                                                                         

Grade: B+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Oct -2014