The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Pt.1 review

         Truth be told, I have never been as sold on this Hunger Games stuff as much as the general zeitgeist demands.  I don’t really have any interest in reading the books and though I don’t specifically hate anything about the films, they've never grabbed my attention, mostly because I can’t see anything past their base influences and trope-y plot conceits. But what I do appreciate about this franchise, and more specifically this last film, Mockingjay Pt. 1 (of two, because Hollywood), is that they try to discuss ideas of governmental power, class divisions, ideologies, and political revolution with a younger, impressionable Gen-y audience that frankly needs to hear about this stuff, as it’s more relevant right now than they probably even know.
Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), having broken the tradition of the annual Hunger Game battles, has now been chosen by the rebel army to be the stern face of the growing revolution against the Capital, known as the Mocking Jay. Meanwhile, her old fighting partner Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) is being held within the custody of her enemies, releasing distressing interview footage exclaiming that Katniss has been brain-washed by the rebels. This then prompts the leaders of the revolution (Philip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore) to hire Katniss to star in their own propaganda news-reels as they fight in the rubble of their former districts, recently leveled to nothing by the merciless President Snow (Donald Sutherland).
What makes this installment more substantial and engaging is that they have finally done away with the worst element of the past films, those stupid Hunger Games.  Now that they don’t have to build the plot around a series of hokey Home Alone traps and thematic violence they never really had the guts to show in any meaningful way, this movie feels freed from the pressures of fan service, focusing more on directly with the political allegories. It’s gestures towards ideological battles and the complicated role that propaganda plays during war is far more sophisticated and tense than the series has been known to provide thus far.
          Katniss is sure that Peeta is being puppeted or mislead to say the things he says against her and he believes the same of her, and in the real world, where the political right and left are split 50/50, that’s exactly how each party frames the other’s point of view.  In the movie, while bombs are being hurled and bodies are being stepped over, the battle for truth is the most important one being fought because both sides don’t seem to be all that concerned with moving the line of objectivity wherever they need to make a convincing argument.
        Sometimes, however, the message is a little muddled. After a previous scene where Katniss speaks furiously into a camera about mistreatment of her people by the Capital, her leaders re-cut the speech into a propaganda video that recalls the look and style of a "Hunger Games" movie trailer. It’s a meta moment that while clever on the surface and grin inducing, maybe doesn't mean quite as much we are supposed think it does. (Is this about the compromising nature of celebrity? Are Hollywood films propaganda pieces? What are you getting at movie?)
Director Francis Lawrence revels in the story’s bleakness and designs many unnerving action moments that work quite well, including a visually striking break-in sequence at the end of the film, anxiously cross cut with footage of Katniss speaking directly with Sutherland who's eating the scenery up as beard twirling Snow. But, with all that said, I still don’t care about Katniss’ lingering feelings for her childhood friend Gale (Liam Hemsworth), the dialogue is painfully bogged down with exposition and superfluous explanation—remember, these movies are made for teenyboppers—and the Oscar winning Jennifer Laurence does some of the worst fake crying she’s ever done on camera. It’s not a perfect film and while it does some things very well, it’s not the first, second or even 100th film to ever do them, but, in my estimation, after spinning its tires in the dirt with the two previous installments, “Mocking Jay pt.1” is at least finally going somewhere.

Grade: B-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Nov-2014

Big Hero Six review

            “Big Hero Six” is the perfect example of a post-modern, post-comic-con style of movie that casts its net wide enough to pull in fans of Pixar's emotional whimsy, tech-heavy Japanese anime and fast-paced, Marvel-esque, action set-pieces.  This makes  a lot of sense, seeing as this film is based on a Marvel comic property, of which Disney now owns the vast majority, and produced by Pixar brain-child John Lasseter—admitted fan and enthusiast of anime legend Hayao Miyazaki. But somewhere in this rowdy pastiche there’s still a focused and poignant coming of age story that grounds the referential spectacle, even when the film seems to be at odds with its more sophisticated leanings.
           We're introduced to the future utopia of Sanfransokyo (a literal cultural melding of east and west) through the lead character Hiro (voiced by Ryan Potter), as he wins big money at underground robot battles, of which his older, more collegiate brother Tadashi (Daniel Henney) disapproves. Later, after an exciting tour of his brother’s robotics school, where he meets a like-minded team of four other young inventors, he decides that his best work shouldn’t be displayed in street-level sport. Despite his young age, he applies to join the program by demonstrating his swarm of interlocking mini-bots at a competitive conference, but just after he wins the competition and accepts his admittance at the school, his future goes up in flames when his brother and the college’s lead technician are killed in a terrible explosion. Hiro is then left to mourn his brother through his last invention; an inflatable, non-lethal nursing bot named Baymax (Scott Adsit), who’s determined to lower the child’s stress-level however he can, even if that means helping Hiro and the other students find the masked murderer, who’s now using the mini-bots for wrong-doing.
           What elevates this film past the usual 3D animated fare is the familial warmth for all of these characters injected into the script and the specificity expressed in the world-building. The central relationship between Hiro and the bouncy, Michelin-Man looking Baymax is both funny as the literal-minded robot consistently misunderstands his frustrated, revenge-driven child owner, and overcast with a cloud of melancholy as the story repeatedly draws us back to the themes of personal loss and misdirected grievance. Before the point in which this movie even begins, Hiro and his older brother are established as orphans, raised by their kooky aunt (Maya Rudolf), who runs a street-side bakery to support the two of them. Baymax, though funny in his childlike reaction to new phenomena, is ultimately acting as an emotional Band-Aid for the protagonist and seeks to heal his pain through adventure. Pretty heavy stuff for kids movie, but not unlike the depths Disney or Pixar have previously explored. Where the movie suffers, however, is in its pandering to the blockbuster aesthetic.
           Once Hiro and his friends discover the whereabouts of the movie’s villain the tone shifts dramatically into action-figure ready, comic book popcorn fodder. Whether cleverly commenting on the banality of Marvel’s third-act, superhero destruction-quota, or simply falling prey to it, when the team suddenly builds robotic super-suits that give them all different powers and a large chunk of the movie’s second half is devoted to sequences of flying in between buildings and falling debris, I wondered how much of this was to advance the un-traditional buddy movie so well established in the first act and how much of it is only to serve the dynamic 3D animation. Nevertheless, at its best, “Big Hero Six” is a wonderfully imaginative and tender science-fiction parable and even when it is driving in autopilot, it’s impressively crafted, interesting to look at, and never boring.

Grade: B+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Nov-2014

Interstellar review

               Much has already been written about Christopher Nolan’s space-time exploration epic “Interstellar.” Every aspect of the film, including its confusing scientific premise and its controversial ending has been debated and scrutinized ad nauseam.   Never mind the fact that this is science fiction, in which the movie’s complex premise and narrative follow-through are supposed be taken only as a creative thought experiment, inviting audiences to dig deeper into the metaphorical layers of the film — at least that’s usually the implied contract we enter in with when it comes to genre fare of this type.
                   What the endless articles and analysis of the supposed plot-holes and “bad-science” says to me is that the movie’s story (not the same thing as plot) apparently isn’t engaging enough to keep people from withholding their suspension of disbelief. Sci-fi deconstructs real paranoias and takes fictional premises to their logical extremes to discuss natural concerns, but this only works if we care about the world created or the character’s involved enough to ignore that everything going on is essentially ridiculous. This, unfortunately, is where “Interstellar” falls short.
                 Like most of Nolan’s movies — especially his original auteur work — this film is filled to brim with ideas. We’re fifty years into the future and the world is struck by another dust-bowl, killing most crops except corn, which, after global climate conditions have worsened to the point of devaluing science, technology and space exploration, puts the priority on basic societal agriculture. Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is an astrophysicist turned corn-farmer who, after discovering a strange message within a gravitational anomaly in his daughter’s bedroom, gets recruited into a secretly-funded NASA exploration, set to enter a wormhole near Saturn that could lead us to a planetary system environmentally specific enough to sustain human life.The downside being that he and his crew of five would enter into a space-time differential caused by relativity, where decades pass like hours and their families would age out of their lives.
               As with most films in this sci-fi tradition, once they get to their destination, things aren’t quite as they thought they would be and plans aren’t as cleanly executed as they’d initially hoped.
Within this setup, Nolan addresses the critics who had previously complained about his emotional remoteness by weaving into the plot a supposedly tender father/daughter story about sacrifice and abandonment.   Towards the middle of the movie, Anne Hathaway, who plays another astronaut, reveals an ulterior motive that contradicts the crew’s prime directive, in which she declares that love is a quantifiable scientific measurement. She’s wrong, and so is this movie.
                 Despite Nolan's best efforts, every attempt at emotional reality and observation is squashed by the movie’s intensely calculated puzzle-box construction, which, like “Inception,” leaves every character (as   tearful as they may be through this three-hour ordeal) more like a pawn in Nolan’s technical chess game than a fully realized, three-dimensional human being. Performances like McConaughey as the film’s conflicted protagonist, Hathaway as the film’s needless counter-argument, and Jessica Chastain as Cooper’s embittered adult daughter who’s waiting impatiently on earth for his return, are realized to the best of their abilities and somewhere underneath the weight of this overloaded script and the oppressively fractured cross-cut editing, they might have even made a real impact.  All of this, along with an increasingly labored third act that piles plot on top of plot and then reverses everything in on itself (the signature Chris Nolan “ta-dah”), left me completely frozen out of the picture.
                Cinematographer Hoyt Van Hoytema shoots the film in a gritty realism that remarkably contrasts with the overwhelming space vistas. Make no mistake about it; a lot of this film is breathtaking and technically accomplished, and Nolan’s ambition as a screenwriter and director is totally in reverence to the art-form of cinema. And thank god that he’s given the money and studio go-ahead to fully explore his passions, but unfortunately, with this, and much of his latter commercial work, his filmic ambitions have created a stumbling block that often defies audiences to interact with his stories on a human level.

Grade: C+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Nov-2014

Nightcrawler review

In the wake of the media blitz surrounding the recent Ebola scares and the minute-by-minute news coverage devoted to the few cases brought over to America by health officials working in the highly affected regions of Africa, Dan Gilroy’s sleazy suspense film “Nightcrawler,” which skewers media outlets who profit on paranoia, would seem hilariously timely and ironic if it weren’t so real and unsettling.  The now-viral video segment in which Fox News’ Shepard Smith broke the journalistic fourth wall and stepped away from his network’s regular programming to reassure fear-gripped Americans that they’re okay and that the reality of the situation isn’t necessarily as bad as the news might have us believe, suggested, at least for a brief moment, a tipping point in which basic human morals outweighed the media’s weekly bottom-line.  

Though set in the microcosm of local LA reporting, “Nightcrawler,” without apology, thoroughly skewers the world of cutthroat exploitation journalism by framing its argument around tangential concerns of economic desperation and the rise of internet self-help woo-woo, wrapped in a stingy self-reflexive jab at Hollywood’s tendency to alter reality in favor of the glamour and grime of ‘reality-ness .’ In short, this is probably the smartest and most immersive thriller likely to be seen this year, despite having been released on a minimally-attended Halloween weekend.

As the uncomfortably desperate people-pleaser Louis Bloom, Jake Gyllenhaal drops a third of his usual body-mass to play the type of character we’re usually used to seeing him hunt down as a cop in films like “Zodiac” or last year’s “Prisoners.”  We follow closely as he steals, lies and manipulates his way through Los Angeles looking for low-level work, until he finally finds the job of a lifetime when he pulls over on the side of the road to investigate a car-crash and discovers a freelance video operation headed by a mustachioed Bill Paxton who’s there to capture and sell grisly footage of crime and destruction for the local nightly news. With a small amount of dishonestly earned startup capital, Bloom buys himself a digital camera and hires a criminally underpaid ‘intern’ named Rick (Riz Ahmed) and together they comb the city’s suburbs looking for valuable blood and mayhem.

Rene Russo, who, along with Gyllenhaal is nomination worthy here, plays the producer of a fledgling LA news station who strikes an exclusive deal with Bloom, so long as he keeps bringing in the gory goods, which of course only enables his troubled psychosis. Given the parable-like meta-metaphor going on here, it’s not a stretch to assume that she stands in for the sensational media as a whole; the local news, the global news, the 24 hour cable news, Hollywood, the tabloids, reality TV, and the rest of the morally neutral enterprises that bank on perpetuating negativity.  

Somewhere between the fast-talking, self-centered ice of “American Psycho’s” Patrick Bateman and Robert De Niro’s portrayal of the comically pathetic Rupert Pupkin in Scorsese’s cult masterpiece “The King of Comedy,” what makes Bloom such a fascinating and terrifying character to watch is that he’s too good at his job. While we can’t believe the depraved lengths he’s willing to go to get to the scene of the crime before his competition or the lines he’s willing cross to get the perfect shots of carnage he needs, in today’s economic circumstances, we somewhat admire his tenacity and his keen ability to rig the system, given his ability to completely disconnect from humanity.  

With Gilroy’s patient and subtly stylish direction, at times recalling the William Friedkin’s street-movies “Cruising” and “The French Connection,” we’re lulled by the darkly romantic atmosphere of the film into rooting for the character’s success, which later slaps us with our own moral convictions and creates an uneasy tension in our bellies. It’s this kind of blackly humorous, subversive cynicism that will both turn off the portion of the audience who like their movies to leave them feeling good and tickle those who appreciate razor-sharp and perversely misanthropic satire.

Grade: A

Originally published by the Idaho State Journal/Nov-2014