Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit review

                  At one time you could have called the superhero movie a niche or facet of the action genre, but as time has gone it has become the premier trend, whereas once, the spy thriller might have been a more profitable action trope. Films like “Goldeneye”, “Mission Impossible”, and of course the Tom Clancy Jack Ryan espionage features like “Clear and Present Danger” and “Patriot Games” were considered a kind of thinking man’s blockbuster that showcased a masculine hero who, while resourceful and highly skilled, wasn’t endowed with extra-human abilities. Instead, these films exploited the political and social paranoia’s of their time and blew them up to dramatically satisfying heights. But since then the world has changed and so has the demographics.

                Jack Ryan, once played by an aging Harrison Ford, is now embodied by Chris Pine, also known as the younger, sexier Captain Kirk in the recent “Star Trek” reboots. In the new origin story “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit”, Pine and his director Kenneth Branagh, the actor/director known primarily for his on-screen Shakespeare adaptations, come together to dig up the grave of the spy-game potboiler for a younger, perhaps less-patient audience. Their attempt, while hardly groundbreaking or innovative in any way, is more or less successful, though not without a few uneven results.

               While getting his PHD at Cambridge University in England, Jack Ryan witnesses the terrorism of 911 and enlists as a Marine, where he’s later injured in Afghanistan.  He works tirelessly to get back on his feet with his physical therapist turned fiancé, played by Keira Knightley, and it’s at this time that he is approached and recruited by a vetted member of the CIA (Kevin Costner). His special mission is to work undercover as a wall-street banker, where he can keep an eye on shadowy trading between countries that could lead to another attack on American soil.

                Branagh steps out from behind the camera as Viktor Cherevin, a Russian oil tycoon who plans on building a pipeline to Turkey, where he can sell vast amounts of company stock, which, when triggered by another American bombing, will destroy our crippled economy…or something like that.

                The plot of this movie is silly and so socially aware and stuffed with recent news-bites that Jack Ryan practically becomes a CIA Forrest Gump; conveniently connected to 911, the middle-eastern wars, sleeper cell terrorism, Wall Street, and the global economy.  Most of the tension is built by scenes where characters are looking at computer screens waiting for stock to sell or jump-drives to load, and, for the most part, none of it makes much sense. But this isn’t supposed to be believable, it’s supposed to be fun, and for the most part it is, just not when it thinks it is.

                Branagh works through the scripts lazy plotting and decides to direct this in the style of campy, Roger Moor era James Bond film. His acting work as the villain is so delightfully over-the-top he might as well be stroking a white cat with every scene he’s in. The conversations the dubious Branagh and Pine as our likable rooky hero are attention grabbing and well-rehearsed, as well as the dialogue driven scenes shared by Pine and Kevin Costner as his CIA confidant and Knightley as his worried, out-of-the-loop lover.  The action set-pieces however are handled with only enough skill to keep the movie afloat, but are mostly minor and unmemorable.

                As a classically trained actor and director Branagh wisely turns this by-the-numbers actioner into a character-centric B-movie. It isn’t a remarkable or note-worthy film, but it basically works as a light and agreeable attempt at a pre-Bourn espionage throwback. The screenplay ultimately prevents it from hitting the franchise-generating bull’s-eye it’s aiming for, but the film will likely entertain just fine as a stay-at-home Netflix time-waster.

Grade: C+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Jan-2013

Her review

               Director Spike Jonze is an immensely talented dude but through his body of work his talent has always been obscured by his collaborations. Once known as a music video guy, he helped Weezer and The Beastie Boys (among others) rise to prominence in the Mtv 90’s. His filmography is just as eclectic, directing “Being John Malkovich” and “Adaptation” for the avant-surrealist writer Charlie Kaufman, and on the other end of the cultural spectrum, he has produced and been closely involved with Mtv’s ”Jackass”, as well as its feature-length fratsploitation mondo-comedies. Before his most recently released film “Her”, he also adapted Maurice Sendak’s children’s book “Where the Wild’s Things Are”.

                  What I mean to point out in all of this is that Spike Jonze, as a filmmaking auteur, despite the overall quality of his work, has rarely been given the credit he deserves as a singular talent unto himself because of the power of his industry associations. However, with “Her”, Jonze captures his own ideas about love, technology and the future and what comes out is not only a spectacularly realized, wholly original sci-fi milieu, but also a tender story about human relationships.

                Joaquin Phoenix is a somewhat elusive and distant actor and has spent his latter years widening the gap between himself and the audience; first with his ill-conceived mockumentary and then to much better effect in last year’s “The Master.” Here he brings us in significantly closer as Theodore Twombly, a lonely love-letter and greeting card copywriter living in the not-so-distant, but distant-enough-to-be-relatively-advanced Los Angeles. In an attempt to get over the somewhat recent separation from his ex-wife (Rooney Mara) and the early rumblings of inevitable divorce, Theordore decides to upgrade his operating system to a new, fully functioning and autonomous artificial intelligence named Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). Unlike his command functioned OS before, Samantha not only checks his emails and organize his work papers, but she also learns his sense of humor, gives him useful guidance about his personal life and eventually she even begins to develop real and reciprocated feelings towards her owner.

                This story deals in a high-concept that is easy to scoff at or dismiss as a wispy, digital “I Dream of Genie” male fantasy. But Jonze approaches the idiosyncratic plot details and his genre conceits with heart-breaking sincerity, a complete lack of judgment to or from his characters, and within the world he builds he displays an enviable hope for the future. Skynett paranoia or the fear of robo-fascism is never even hinted at. In fact, when Theodor’s office co-worker played by Chris Pratt, or his old college buddies played by Amy Adams and Matt Letscher learn of his fully dimensional romance with Samantha, they show happiness and support for their friend.

                This foundation of warmth and humanity is thoroughly embraced as it sets the stage for an emotionally complex and thoughtful final act that expands the parameters of science fiction and satisfies its character’s arc; a feat not easily achieved by even the simplest of movie structures, let alone a wacky genre-blending narrative like this.

                  “Her” is techo-centric, visually concerned piece of metaphor that also has a recognizable beating heart. The film’s environments are beautifully portrayed with a production design and cinematography so handsome and atmospheric that it has immediately been added to my short-list of movie-worlds I wish I could live in.  But even more remarkable is that it bothers to tackle big ideas, such as the loss of humanity and conenctiveness in our modern technological era and deeper existential themes about what it is that makes a person a person, but it never does so in an intellectually pushy or posturing way. Instead, Jonze holds our hand and relays these human truths like a bittersweet bedtime story.

Grade: A

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/ Jan-2014

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty review

                 Ben Stiller, an actor most commonly associated with embarrassing-parent movies, released a remake of a somewhat forgotten 1947 movie called “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” It’s a congenial film about a timid guy who learns to take control of life instead of letting it pass him by. It’s nothing special, but actually, Ben Stiller—when he wants to be—is a pretty talented director. “The Cable Guy” is a massively underrated dark comedy, “Zoolander” is a near perfect farce of fashion culture, and “Tropic Thunder” was the high water mark in modern comedy until it was regrettably dethroned by Todd Phillips’ “The Hangover.”

                …But back to this Walter Mitty business. It’s fine. I mean, it’s sappy, and sentimental, it plays to least adventurous portion of the lowest common denominator, and the product placement is so blatant that it might as well be a feature length commercial for Match.com and Papa Johns, but it isn’t unwatchable.  What it is, unfortunately, is mundane and simple; two words I would have never attributed to Stiller’s previous directorial work.

                Walter Mitty (Ben Stiller) is a humble photo developer at Time magazine who often dreams of a better life where he can travel the world like his rock and roll photographer Sean O’ Connell (Sean Penn) and where he can muster up the gumption to ask out his workplace crush Cheryl Melhoff (Kristen Wiig). In real life, however, he can’t even get his online dating profile to work, and he hasn’t done enough with his life to complete its comprehensive questionnaire.  When his new boss—a cartoonish, condescending tool, played by “Parks and Recreation” actor Adam Scott—comes in to inform the company that they will be printing the last issue of the magazine, the pressure is put of Walter to locate a missing frame from Sean O’Connell’s negative.  Walter is then forced to track down the techno-illiterate photographer to the ends of the earth in search of the mysterious image.

                Wallter Mitty goes on a journey. But it’s not just a geographical journey, you see; it’s a journey of life, love and self-discovery, which would be fine, if we had any investment in his character at all. Ben’s performance as Mitty is thoroughly wishy-washy and one dimensional. The arc of his development through the story, even though it is being literally forced in the most absurd ways possible, is never clear or satisfying, and that’s a problem for a film about self-discovery.

                There’s an aesthetic choice by Stiller to blur the line between reality and fantasy. Walter’s day dreams seem to manifest into full plot by the middle of the picture, only to drift back into believability whenever the movie sees fit.  I have no problem with this sort of ambiguity in theory. Certainly, Terry Gilliam made good use of this idea in films such as “Brazil” and “The Fisher King”. But Stiller seems to use this trope not as a way of expressing the needs and hopes of Walter, but rather as a lazy device to move the story along. And in the end, because he can’t keep track of his own narrative rules, the character’s goals are empty and the romantic resolution with his crucially underdeveloped love interest feels unearned.

                Walter backpacks a snowy mountain, he’s saved from a shark in below-freezing waters and he skateboards down a winding street in Iceland, but in all of this action the movie never lifts out of its mopey, naval-gazing tone and embraces the adventure of its premise.  Photographed like a Nissan commercial, and paced like a travel channel special, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” probably aims for the life-affirming warmth of “Stranger than Fiction” or the lovelorn idiosyncrasy of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”, yet, with all the depth of a motivating office poster, at best, what it ends up being is something closer to a dude-centric, “Eat Pray Love”.

Grade: C -

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Jan-2014

The Wolf of Wall Street review

            The economy has been the underlying theme of many of the films released in the last 3 years, and this year being no exception. But whereas “The Hunger Games” and “Killing them Softly”  focused on the  struggle of the lower class and the inertia of the economic climb, moves of this topic in 2013, such as “The Bling Ring”, “Spring Breakers”,  “The Great Gatsby” and  “American Hustle”, are bleak satires of the bloated excesses of the one percent and the material obsessions of American culture.  Martin Scorsese’s latest, “The Wolf of Wall Street”—bizarrely released on Christmas weekend—is perhaps the most salty and biting of this crop; an unrelenting, tenacious carnival of queasy decadence and mind boggling affluenza.

                After losing his first fortune in the big Wall Street crash of 1987, young stockbroker Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) builds his way back up through an unregulated investment scam, tricking small start-up companies to sell stock to him for half the profits they receive. Later, when Belfort learns he can take this same business model to catch the bigger fish, his life, his friend, his wives, and his firm begins to quickly spin out of control.

                Not unlike Marty’s “Goodfellas” back in 1991, this film follows the rise and fall of an overconfident and mostly unlikable main character as he narrates the events of his life in a barely confessional, but mostly self-congratulatory, tone.  The friends and colleagues who surround Belfort, such as his sloppy yes-man Donny Azoff (played with spot-on comic sleaze by Jonah Hill), his mentor Mark Hannah (A Mathew McConaughey cameo, that almost steals the entire movie in one scene), and even his playboy-model second wife Naomi Lapaglia (played by newcomer Margot Robbie, who’s tough enough to keep up with all of the barking dogs in this movie) not only encourage his extreme behavior but they count on it to maintain their own status.  And when I say extreme behavior, sex, drugs and rock and roll is a reductive bumper-sticker in comparison to the day to day risk-taking these executives indulge in, as they engage in company-funded sex-parties on airplanes and consume fistfuls of illegal pills before and after meetings.

                Barely avoiding an NC-17 rating, Scorsese and company have been heavily scrutinized for portraying this lifestyle as all party and no hang-over and for possibly giving Belfort more money for his actions by adapting his own autobiography. While I can’t speak for Belfort’s royalties, I can say that if this had been a ninety minute blaze of orgiastic crunking, I could see the cocaine ecstasy that this film displays as being problematic. However, this is a three hour film, and after the first few hours of scandalous fun, the darkly-comedic beats begin to ramp up faster and faster until it becomes a numbing montage of capitalistic gluttony. What was once funny, dangerous, and sexy in the first half of the film becomes depressing, disgusting, and irredeemable by the second half, and I don’t consider that as a point of criticism. That, I believe, is exactly the point.

                The half-way mark is where audiences will likely take their position on the film. While some will find the epic build of this to be a monumental critique of privileged narcissism—a kind of Citizen Kane by way Gordon Gekko on bath-salts—others will not be as charmed by Scorsese’s persistent energy and may simply feel like they are sloshing in a bog of exploitation.

                 If this were a straightforward morality tale the characters would learn something valuable and karma would be the ultimate victor, but history isn’t fair and justice isn’t thorough.  Instead, you’re supposed to watch the actions of these men with conflicting sense of curious envy and outraged condemnation, and in that sense, “The Wolf of Wall Street” boldly puts its money where its mouth is.

Grade: A


Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Jan-2014