Cinderella review

                The live-action “Cinderella” is further evidence of the lengths major studios are willing to go to avoid coming up with new ideas and to see how much they can recycle their past before completely losing the good will of the audience. Director Kenneth Branagh, who was once known for his dynamic Shakespeare film adaptions, first collaborated with Disney with their successful adaptation of Marvel’s “Thor,” and when you think about it, Disney’s fairytale princesses relate closely to the iconicism and comfortable familiarity of the comic book superhero genre. With that in mind, and with the relative success of this functional remake, we can expect more of these to come.

               The story here follows most of the beats laid out in the 1950 animated classic. Ella (Lily James) is the warm and forgiving daughter of a wealthy aristocrat and who then is tragically left without a mother and father and forced to live as the servant of her evil stepmother (Cate Blanchett) and her obnoxious and self-absorbed stepsisters (Sophie McShera and Holliday Grainger). What comes after? You guessed it; a prince, a ball, a fairy godmother, glass slippers and a pumpkin-shaped stagecoach.

             Chris Weitz’s screenplay front-loads the original fairytale with the backstory of Cinderella’s biological mother and father, their tragic passing and the deteriorating relationship between her and her lawful step-family. Some of this is mildly interesting—one might wonder why Cinderella’s father would ever end up with an evil stepmother in the first place, and Blanchett is given a great screen entrance as the bloodless vamp—but much of this narrative padding is tedious, plot-stalling and treated with too much gauzy romanticism to register as effective tragedy.

                Branagh’s strengths as a storyteller are compromised by the prime objective of this adaptation, as it only exists to conjure the nostalgia of Disney’s once-relevant legacy in animation, and, ironically enough, this film expounds the very reasons why animation is given tonal allowances that simply don’t work in live action. The first problem here is that Cinderella is inherently a boring character and Lily James doesn't do much with the paper-thin persona as written to bring her to life. With catchy songs, talking mice and an exaggerated environment an animated feature can skate by on iconography alone, but once you throw in real actors and close-ups and throw out the musical sequences, the film is forced to create a believable emotional space, and this version of “Cinderella” does not.

                Blanchett eats up the scenery around her and leans into the film’s camp value like a professional, but the romantic scenes between Cinderella and the Prince (Richard Madden) are painfully unsupported and the inclusion of CGI birds and mice distract more than they endear. Occasionally, when Branagh is allowed focus in on a scene without pandering to fan-service and gives his actors some intimacy to express themselves, a hint of depth appears, but these rare moments are squandered on obtrusive special effects and an aesthetic slickness that makes the majority of the film look like an overproduced Tide commercial.
               Young girls are going to enjoy this and no review will stop the monolithic cynicism of these kinds of uninspired remakes.  Unlike Tim Burton’s misbegotten “Alice in Wonderland” or the mish-mash mythology of “Snow White and the Huntsman,” this fairytale retelling refuses to risk alienating audiences with a lofty post-modern interpretation. It’s not a particularly memorable or creative venture but it isn't offensive or challenging either, but what is frustrating is its defiant dedication to triviality. 

Grade: D+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/March-2015

Chappie review

                 Neill Blomkamp flew out the gates with a distinct style and voice, mixing familiar sci-fi tropes with his brand of south-African cultural specificity.  His 2009 alien Apartheid allegory “District 9” earned him an Oscar nomination for best picture, but after his 2013 follow up “Elysium” failed to live up to the hype, people began to wonder if he was the real-dea or just a lucky one-hit-wonder. Now, with luke-warm response to his latest robo-Pinocchio story “Chappie,” Blomkamp’s reputation continues to diminish, but while this film might not reach the levels of intrigue and thoughtfulness as his politically taught first feature, “Chappie” is still made with a tangible sense of energy and cinematic curiosity.

               In the near future the American government tests a fleet robot police droids that are programmed to take down criminals within the slums of Johannesburg Africa. The lead technician Deon Wilson (Dev Patel) wants to advance this technology to the point where the robots can think, learn and feel like a developing human being, but when the corporate buzzkills (Sigourney Weaver) put the kibosh on his plans he is forced to test his theories alone in his apartment. After successfully getting a test-droid to gain consciousness with a toddler’s emotional capacity, Deon is high-jacked by a small gang of city urchins who want to train the robot to help them with a heist. All the while, a rival technician finds out about the rogue experiment and comes up with a plan to sabotage Deon to replace the police droids with mind-controlled military drones.

              Like all of Blomkamp’s grungy science-fiction, there’s a lot of ideas that he wants to investigate and most of them get sidelined by action movie commitments that overwhelm the plot. When the gangsters (played by the founding members of the South African electronic hip-hop group Die Antwoord) kick out Patel’s character and begin to train the innocent Chappie themselves, a new family structure is formed. Here it seems like the movie wants explore how morals and the complexities of value-systems are shaped by an individual’s cultural and economic circumstances. When the android figures out that his internal battery is low and wonders why his creator would give him such a limited life, the themes then begin to drift into more spiritual territories, but both of these interesting ideas are nearly squashed by a shoot-em-up third act that unfortunately rushes the film to a less than satisfying conclusion.

             The Hugh Jackman subplot only serve as an engine for the action set-pieces, and, while shot with convincing special effects and staged with effective thrills, they derail the loftier aims of the narrative. More problematic, Petal’s character is often sidelined to make room.  Jackman plays an Aussie alfa-male with an un-ironic mullet and Weaver seems to be more pant-suit than human, and both of them are critically underdeveloped and unconvincingly motivated characters. Ninja and Yolandi of Die Antwoord play heightened versions of their hip-hop personas, and while they aren’t the best actors and their line-delivery sometimes falls flat, their general eccentricity has an untrained, naive appeal that keeps their scenes alive.

         Despite a messy ending where all the stakes in the plot are raised only to conclude in a deflating dues ex machine, I’m still willing to give Blomkamp a pass for his ambition and his passion as a filmmaker. The robot Chappie, voiced by actor Sharlto Copley, has a real arch as a special-effect character, and like Andy Sirkis’ Caesar in the new “Planet of the Apes” franchise, you believe in and relate to him on an emotional level.  That goes a long way, and while I definitely see the seams of the movie tearing around edges, I appreciate Blomkamp’s earnest attempt to keep science-fiction weird and meaningful.

Grade: B-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/March-2015

A Few Thoughts on Radiohead's 'The Bends'

Everyone's been talking about how it's the 20th anniversary of Radiohead​'s sophomore album "The Bends" and it got me thinking about it. Here's a few reasons why it's one my favorite Radiohead albums and why I think, in some ways, it's the most fascinating record of their massively accomplished catalog.

1 - It's a huge step up from their first album "Pablo Honey." Pablo was ah-ight but other than the song Creep, it's kind of a take-it-or-leave-it, mid-90's alt-rock artifact. Sure, it showed some promise, but the band didn't really become Radiohead with a capital-R until "The Bends" in 1995. They dialed everything up; the production, the song-writing, the musicianship, the vocal delivery, the lyrical themes, everything. Unlike Pablo, which has one great song and a bunch of hum-drum alt-pop filler, practically every song on "The Bends" could work as a stand-alone single, and many of them were. Songs like Just, High and Dry, Fake Plastic Trees, My Iron Lung, Black Star and Street Spirits (fade out) are all significantly better than the Pixies-lite quaintness of Creep, which is the type of first-impression catchy song that would have made any lesser band become an instant one-hit-wonder.

2 – This was kind of the album that indirectly got me into Radiohead, but it wasn't the first album of theirs that I fell in love with. Let me explain. Some point as a kid I had heard the song High and Dry on the radio or in a movie or something and its verse-melody got stuck in my brain without any accreditation as to who did it. Like most non-fans, I had heard and mildly enjoyed Creep and I kind of knew Radiohead got weird (or whatever) after that, and I had really paid no greater attention to them.  In my later teens when I randomly saw the video for High and Dry on MTV2 I flipped out, immediately wanting to go out and buy the CD. However, when I made it to a record store to buy “The Bends” they didn't have it, so I settled with “OK Computer,” per recommendation of the store clerk. Of course “OK Computer” totally blew my mind, and in many ways it’s the superior album, but after a few weeks of binging on that, I bought “The Bends” and was satisfied to have that musical mystery in my life finally solved.

3 – It was my go-to homework CD. Back in high school, when homework amounted to copying terms and definitions from the back of a text-book and doing short chapter review question assignments, I would play “The Bends” in the background to keep me from dying of boredom. Not much else to say about that other than this album comes with a lot of teenage nostalgia for me, as it probably does for the people who were teens at the time of its original release. Most other records by them would have been too moody or required too much attention to work as pleasing background noise, but “The Bends” is perfect for chilling out or concentrating on something else. It's kind of a “house-cleaning” record in that way.

4 – It’s just a great rock record. This was before Radiohead became so well known for their experimentation and oblique song-crafting style. "The Bends" plays with rock conventions, for sure, and it’s not a mindless, riff-based pop album, but its style is still in service to the song, as is the instrumentation and the production. It’s just 12, very well crafted rock tunes with no pretensions of being anything other than that. This isn't to say I hate Radiohead’s artsy freak-outs like “Kid-A” or the stranger, more electro-prog moments of their later records--those were directions they needed to go as artists--but this album finds the band at a comfortable place in their career when they had damn-near perfected the pop-rock formula. The guitar sound is bright and dymanic, the songwriting is excited, and Thom York’s voice never sounded better. The lyrics aren't overtly happy or uplifting per-se, but certainly not as heady or world-weary as they would become.The album does hint ever so slightly to their future though with the densely layered, melancholic, chorus-less closing track Street Spirits (fade out).

5 - This was a Radiohead we would only get for one record and we’ll never get them back, and that’s okay. The album we got just right after, "Ok Computer," advanced their whole trajectory to somewhere else new and exciting in its own way, and the band hasn't looked back since. That’s the best part of being a Radiohead fan, wondering what they’re going to try next. I might say that ever since “Hail to the Theif” they have pretty much settled into an eclectic mix of everything they have done from “OK Computer” on, but “The Bends” exists in perfection just outside of their current paradigm. It's both a time-capsule and timeless.

Kingsman: The Secret Service review

               British action director Mathew Vaughn is obviously having scandalous fun with his new spy comedy “Kingsman: The Secret Service.” A bit of bait and switch, this alternative comic book adaptation takes what could have been a fairly hokey and overused premise and turns it into a hard-R love-letter to the spy movies of the '60s and '70s. Though modernized with fast edits and shocking violence, this movie makes plenty of references to early Bond flicks and the British television series “The Avengers”—not to be confused with the Marvel superhero property.

               Newcomer Taron Egerton plays our protagonist Garry ‘Eggsy’ Unwin, whose spy father was killed in duty, and in doing so had saved the life of his gentleman colleague Harry Hart (Colin Firth.) Jump twenty years later and Eggsy has become a delinquent London youth who’s constantly in and out of jail for petty theft as he tries to support his impoverished mother. Nevertheless, Hart sees the boy’s potential to be something more and convinces him to train in a lengthy series of extreme competitions to become part of secret Kingman organization.

              On the other side of the plot we follow the rise of mad tech developer named Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson), who wants to take over the world with a free computer chip implant that psychically links people to their cell-phones. Of course this chip has other undisclosed functions and when the leaders of the free-world sell out their countries and work towards Valentine’s apocalyptic strategy, the new recruits of the Kingsmen are the only ones who can stop him.

              All of this sounds like typical action movie stuff and with the training sequences that take place in stealthy underground bunkers, a good chunk of it plays similarly to Vaughn’s successful “X-Men: First Class.” Where the movie diverts is in its subversive tone and blackly comic satire. Throughout we see limbs lopped off and heads explode with knowing post-modern dialogue, where the characters openly acknowledge the film’s obvious genre tropes.

            Collin Firth, Mark Strong and Michael Caine as the higher ranking members of the Kingsmen bring a lot of class and stately professionalism to the wacky film and never let it drift too far into referential camp.  Valentine as a supper villain is pitched somewhere between a lisping, TED-talking, Mark Zuckerberg and a swag-drenched Kanye West. Jackson fully explores this contradiction and carefully crafts a sense of false bravado that sells the eccentricity of his performance. The younger cast however, including Egerton as the main character, is a little less memorable—not distractingly bad per-se, but bland in a way that makes the older cast seem all the more scene-grabbing.

              With frank sexual humor and a huge body count, there’s nothing here that suggests Vaughn or his writers care at all about political correctness or being particularly likeable.  It moves along quite nicely and the action set-pieces and fight choreography are impressively blocked and satisfying, but there’s a sneering misanthropy within all of it that pushes the movie right up to the line of satirical acceptability.  It’s downright mean sometimes and there are some sequences that are meant to play like romping cartoonish action but might alienate some audiences with its insensitivity or general disregard for humanism.  That said, it’s this type of atypical risk-taking that distinguishes “Kingsman: The Secret Service” from the glut of other teenage ‘your-the-best’ narratives that have recently exploded on the silver screen. Vaughn’s ability to nail my jaw to the ground while also keeping me thoroughly entertained is ultimately what makes me cautiously recommend this picture to anyone with a healthy love for unhinged dark-comedy.

Grade: B+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/March-2015

The Imitation Game review

              As a classically presented movie’s-movie “The Imitation Game” is sufficiently, and perhaps superficially, entertaining. The actor’s performances are strong, the direction by Mortem Tyldum is confident, and the production design and attention to period detail is convincing enough to capture an audience’s attention. That said, as a historical document and as a year-end awards contender, the film fails to sell its ethos in a sincere or graceful manner.

            Benedict Cumberbatch plays Allen Turing, the underappreciated genius who was hired by the British government to lead a secret team of code-breakers during World War II. Having grown up with few points of commonality among his peers, Turing was forced to stifle his ego and his anti-social disposition to successfully work with other scientists and math magicians as they worked tireless nights figuring out how to crack the ciphered messages delivered between the Nazi soldiers. Complicating the issue, he was also a repressed and closeted homosexual, working for a government that criminalized his natural desires and collaborating with a team of jealous Alfa-males who challenge his masculinity –the latter issue being a contrived plot device that underlines the manipulation of Graham Moore’s  ‘Oscar winning’ screenplay.

            Mathew Good does his best to justify his character’s hokey archetype as Turing’s caddish colleague and Kiera Knightly fits comfortably into the film’s Weinstein-brand austerity as Joan Clark, the only female code-breaker who finds a unique kin-ship with Cumberbatch’s effortless outsider portrayal. Peripheral performances from Mark Strong and Charles Dance as the team’s impatient military superiors are also a welcomed addition, but this admirable ensemble only masks the film’s achingly generic and narratively unambitious screenplay.

              There’s also the issue of how Turing’s hidden sexuality is sheepishly handled, the film often bumbles its way through very specific identity struggles. At different points the character’s secret is compared to Clark’s plight as an underappreciated woman and later he’s accused of being a Russian communist spy because he refuses to share certain aspects of his life with his co-workers. These comparisons, while not all together ineffective as a script device or an easy short hand for a straight audience, are somewhat misjudged when considering the deeper emotional complexities that the film doesn't even bother to approach.

              Artificiality isn't all together a bad thing in cinema and if judged as an overblown movie-of-the-week style dramatization of important war history “The Imitation Game” safely delivers as a soft-thriller. The movie’s moral questions about how and when to conceal highly sensitive war-time intelligence and the depiction of the race to break the Nazi’s Enigma machine has a filmic immediacy that lacks from the melodrama that dominates most of the screen-time. Nevertheless, the film’s rush to one-liners and lazy characterizations spoil whatever authenticity we are supposed to glean from the story’s message about intolerance and social progress.

Grade: C+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/March-2015