Nocturnal Animals review

With his second feature “Nocturnal Animals, fashion designer Tom Ford tackles the very things that inspires great art and how the different people in our lives leave impressions that help form our creative responses. This is a lofty theme and with his adaptation of Austin Wright’s novel “Tony and Susan” Ford compares and contrasts two different genres and two different styles of visual filmmaking to comment on the formation the art and storytelling itself.

Amy Adams plays Susan Marrow, an icy and disconnected art curator who’s married to a traveling trophy husband named Hutton (Armie Hammer).  While Hutton is away on a clumsily obvious secret trip with his mistress, Susan receives a manuscript for a novel written by her ex-husband Tony Hastings (Jake Gyllenhaal). The book comes with a note about how the how the story was inspired by their turbulent history. The film then visualizes the contents of Tony’s book, in where Gyllenhaal also plays the main character of Tony’s Novel Edward Scheffeild. Edward is an easily frightened man who loses his wife and daughter to a gang of drunk rednecks after being forced off a West-Texas road after a car chase in the middle of the night. He seeks to punish these men with a rogue desert detective named Bobby Andels (Michael Shannon), a man of few words who no longer fears losing his job or his life to do the right thing.

 The film opens on an audience-testing slow-motion sequence where morbidly obese elderly women are shown dancing seductively to the movie’s melodramatic stringed score. This title sequence lingers on close-ups of sagging body parts before revealing these women are part of art exhibition curated by Adam’s dispossessed character. The mix between the grotesque the gorgeous permeates Ford’s every narrative and aesthetic choice here. The framing device about Susan rediscovering her young and complicated passion with the struggling writer of her post-college years is couched in the story to represent the ‘real-world.’ Yet the painfully stilted dialogue, the intentionally cold and bloodless performances within these scenes and the careful framing of Ford’s modern-art Los Angeles set-design presents a less relatable world than what is represented in the scenes depicting Tony’s pulpy and hyper-violent western/thriller manuscript.

With this strange juxtaposition, Ford tries to make the argument that success and wealth stifles creative expression by cutting the artists away from humanity, and in doing so, he proves his own point by constructing a film that is stifled by battling creative agendas. The two stories are supposed to be symbiotic and analogous but the movie lacks the necessary connective tissue to develop either story past their highly-stylized surfaces. Though pulpy and overly-treaded genre territory, the Coen Brothers-esq manuscript segments are far more engaging and impactful than the sterile soap-opera framing plot, which resembles the high-art sleaze of the 60s and 70s Italian filmmakers, as filtered through the steely cynicism of “Dead Ringers” era David Cronenberg. The two styles constantly trip over each other as the film cuts between them and their intended symbolic relationship reveals a disappointingly shallow connection.

“Nocturnal Animals” is filled with a lot of style and the structure of the story attacks character-motivations and themes in a challenging and indirect way. This is a laudable storytelling approach, but it fails to meet those challenges in a way that doesn’t seem overly self-conscious and ill-considered by the director. Gyllenhaal gives two great performances and Michael Shannon does what he’s made a career of doing and gives the best performance in a problematic movie.  Adams is almost denied an emotional reality so that she can act as a vessel by which the movie’s (unintentional?) misogyny is accounted for.  What makes the film all the more frustrating is that its ambitions are the cause of its own failure.

Grade: C

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Dec-2016

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "Nocturnal Animals."

Moana review

Disney’s tradition with the Princess protagonist motif has been a staple of the company’s long-term success.  They’ve returned to that particular wishing-well so many times, in fact, they now have to think of ways to consciously subvert the trope, lest they run the risk appearing out-of-touch or out of ideas—their live-action remakes notwithstanding. “Moana,” the mouse house’s latest animated adventure, tries its best to arrive at a new spin on their girl-with-a-destiny story, using its Pacific Island mythological setting to embellish and disguise many reworked Disney tropes.

This oceanic fairy-tale tells features a young island daughter of a Chief named Moana (Auli’li Cravalho) who is sent on a journey to return a magic stone back to heart of a neighboring island after a darkness creeps onto their land, making it impossible to fish or grow crops. On her way, she finds a Hawaiian demi-god named Maui (Dwayne-The Rock-Johnson) who wants to retrieve his magic hook weapon that allows him to shape-shift into any animal he chooses.  Johnson’s Maui must learn to curb his hubris as he helps the determined ruler to be, and Moana must learn how to believe in herself.

Truth be told, the motivations of the characters are noticeably surface-oriented and most of the movie is driven plot rather than story. Moana is sent on her journey to prove she can be a capable ruler of her people and because her grandmother encourages her from beyond the grave, informing her that she has been chosen by the ocean itself to restore the magic heart of the sea back to its rightful place. What ensues is an episodic odyssey where Moana and Maui encounter multiple challenges on their way to defeat a giant lava creature. Moana herself is somewhat undefined as a protagonist outside of her immediate goals and circumstances, and the film’s aesthetic focus never allows for her to develop past her function in the plot.

On a screenplay level, the story isn’t terribly interesting or dynamic once you strip away the beautifully rendered animation and the catchy musical sequences written by Opetaia Foa’I, Mark Mancina and Lin-Manuel Miranda of Broadway’s hit play “Hamilton.” Like many classic Disney films the soundtrack becomes another character. The musical numbers are placed strategically and each track has a bounce and melodic structure that rings in your head days after your viewing experience. In some regards, this outing seems a little desperate out-Frozen “Frozen,” as far as the catchy radio-ready music is concerned, but these songs will likely be the film’s largest takeaway.

“Moana” is well crafted and enjoyable but it doesn’t reinvent wheel or step too far out of what’s been comfortable and successful for Disney’s animation studio. The film leans of the studio’s greatest hits, including familiar character types and beats from “Aladdin,” “Little Mermaid,” “Mulan,” “Hercules” and others. But while the story doesn’t offer much substance, it’s hard to totally dismiss the movie’s visual flare and infectious positive energy.

Grade: B

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Dec-2016

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "Moana.

Fantastic Beasts review

JK Rowling’s has returned to the wizarding world of her successful Harry Potter franchise with her first screenplay for David Yate’s new film “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.” Part Potter prequel and part expanded-universe filler, the origins of this film come from a fictional bio written for a series of magician’s textbooks mentioned off-hand in Rowling’s original novels. While it’s not uncommon for filmmakers such as George Lucas and Peter Jackson to go back to the well for creative inspiration—and/or more money--“Fantastic Beasts” avoids the stench of calculated, corporate cash-grabbing by finding a new way to enter this well-established world.

Recent Oscar-winner Eddie Redmayne plays Newt Scamander, a British magician who’s travelled to early 20^th-century New York to find suitable homes for the magical creatures he keeps in his wizard suitcase/terrarium. After a few of these animals escape into the city, he and a local muggle factory worker named Kowalski (Dan Fogler) must find and capture them before Newt blows his cover and breaches important magician’s secrecy laws. Kathrine Waterson plays MACUSA agent Tina, who tries to help Newt navigate his search without exposing himself.

In the background of this light set-up, Rowling gives us a much darker story element involving Samantha Morton as a wizard-phobic street-corner kook named Mary Lou who’s secretly running a witch’s conversion center, where she abuses and shames young children who come from magical parents. One such teen is played by the always intriguing Ezra Miller, who’s living a double life as a secret agent trading information with a nefarious rogue member of the MACUSA (Colin Ferrell).

Yates and Rowling’s previous collaborations resulted in some of the darker and more menacing Potter sequels that came later in the series, and that tone is returned to here, sometimes appropriately, sometimes not.  The whimsical monster-catching stuff is treated with childlike awe and magical wonder, while other scenes are treated as light-horror or mystery and intrigue. The other films in this franchise could mitigate these same tonal-shifts within the framework of a rather standard Campellian hero’ journey. There’re multiple competing plot threads running simultaneously through the feature and without a central hero such as Harry Potter to follow—Redmayne’s performance as Newt is treated more as a cypher or conduit rather than a fully-fledged character—it’s sometimes difficult to find a narrative track to travel through this installment. After forty minutes of setting up everyone’s individual situations and establishing the illusive stakes of the plot, the movie then condenses into something relatively streamlined and tangible.

Despite a wobbly narrative foundation and an over-stuffed screenplay, Yates still captures the period scenery and production values that are both completely immersive and fully realized. Newt’s computer imagery creatures are always imaginative and memorable and Yates proves again that he can handle special-effects moments in a way that serves rather than overwhelming the story.

“Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” is peripheral and marginal compared to the previous nine films that built towards an epic story over a decade, but the choice to avoid the high-school dramas and the overused good versus evil myth that defined the original Harry Potter films makes for a different and sometimes idiosyncratic blockbuster experience. The film’s ensemble is spread too thin along peaks and valleys of the plot and because of this none of them get a lot to do, but they’re still able inform their characters with enough physicality to ground and realize their performances. Certainly, as a kick off to a somewhat unnecessary prequel expansion, so far this is more enjoyable and substantial than either Lucas’ Star Wars episodes I-III or Jackson’s bloated Hobbit trilogy.

Grade: B-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Dec-2016

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them"

Arrival review

Amy Adams stars as a grieving mother who embarks on a personal journey to connect with her past by ensuring the safety of our future, as she helps our government make first contact with an intelligent alien species. Over the last few years the awards season has spawned a new genre, and this high-brow science fiction release echoes the emotional timbres of Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” as well as Alfonso Cuaron’s “Gravity,” along with the pro-science message of Ridley Scott’s “The Martian.” Space exploration and a thirst to better understand our place in the universe has been reflected in these high-budget, philosophically-minded genre films, and in that regard, Denis Villeneuve’s “Arrival” reaches for headier themes, heavier emotions and leaves a larger gap for the audience to meet its challenging narrative structure.

After twelve massive, bean-shaped vessels arrive at seemingly random locations on our globe, Adams’ Dr. Louise Banks, a scholar of linguistics, is recruited by Colonel Weber (Forrest Whitaker) to make sense of the aliens’ vocalizations. After joining the effort, she meets mathematician Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), who notices patterns in the otherworldly scribe they photograph while trying to talk with the beings through a translucent barrier deep within their ship. While the American team is making slow progress, other world governments are less cautious about enacting a preemptive strike against their new visitors, making it all the more imperative for Dr. Banks and her staff to decipher the aliens’ exact purpose for landing.

It’s hard not admire Villeneuve’s ambition here, as this picture aims to weave structure with emotional storytelling, with the intentions of being a broad science-fiction and a character piece at the same time. The movie also wishes to work as a social allegory about the state of our international relations and how an event such as a global alien arrival could easily activate simmering political tensions around the globe.

 Under the visual and tonal guidance of Villeneuve, the screenplay’s tricky flashback/flash-forward mechanics doesn’t overwhelm the themes or the emotional core of the film, though Adam’s portrayal as the multi-layered and complicated lead is at times coldly beholden to mystery of her character.

The film’s many storytelling goals prevents Adams from revealing too much about her interior state through her performance, which creates an impressionistic take on the character that doesn’t always gel with the film’s pulpier leanings. After we are given the character’s backstory and we with her in real-time as she’s interpreting an intergalactic coffee ring alphabet, we want to be closer to the character when the script keeps pulling her away for the sake of a clever third-act reveal. Renner works to provide a lighter and more immediate foil for Adams to exist on screen with, but even he is sometimes obscured by film’s impressionism.  

Villeneuve’s recent crime-thrillers “Prisoners” and last year’s “Sicario” shared bleak and hopeless views of humanity, while “Arrival” aims to give us clarity and hope for our future. While the production design and key set-pieces recall the scale and awe of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Bradford Young’s tender cinematography evokes the warmth and spiritual montage of Terrance Malick’s later work, marrying the cerebral and instinctual cinema of both directors. The script’s gotchya revelations eventually pay off and once the film’s many flashbacks are informed by the twist, the movie’s complex structure blends quite nicely into a much-needed message of optimism and enlightenment.

Grade: B+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Nov-2016

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "Arrival."

Doctor Strange review

Marvel Studios is an anomaly of modern populist filmmaking. Based partly on the rules of comic book publications, serialized television and the producer-driven classical studio system, Kevin Feige and the other Marvel executives designed a fruitful model that spawns and nurtures multiple, converging franchises that can share and swap characters. They’ve also successfully introduced general, non-geek audiences to super-dorky pulp characters like Thor, Ant-Man, The Vision, the whole Guardians of the Galaxy team and now, their nerdiest character of all, Doctor Strange. The reason audiences continually eat this up is because of the studio’s steady oversight and a strict style-guide that keeps their films uniformed and consistent. In the case of Scott Derrickson’s “Doctor Strange” this same-ness, delivers an amiable blockbuster but stifles the possibilities for creative experimentation.

Benedict Cumberbatch plays our hero Doctor Steven Strange, a smug celebrity neurosurgeon who’s looking to execute a complicated procedure that will further elevate his status. Amid this pursuit, Strange is seriously injured in a car-accident that leaves his hands unable to perform with precision. As he travels the world looking for a miracle surgery that will allow him to work again, he discovers a house of mystics in Katmandu that promise to show him ways to heal himself through the use of magic and sorcery. Strange is then caught up in a secret war between the temple’s Sorcerer Supreme (Tilda Swinton) and a band of rogue magicians, led by a disgruntled student of the dark-arts named Kaecilius (Mads Mikkelsen) who’s hell-bent on bringing an evil entity upon the earth.

Derrickson’s history in horror filmmaking (“Sinister,” “The Exorcism of Emily Rose,” “Deliver Us From Evil”) could have easily gone hand in hand with the occult-leanings of the Marvel’s magician hero. Instead of punching his way to victory or blowing up his opponents with wrist-rockets, Doctor Strange uses his intellect and skills as a sorcerer to defeat other-worldly foes. Yet, what we are given in this movie is another standard superhero origin story about a reluctant hero who must overcome his own hubris for the good of man-kind. Many beats of the plot repeat what we’ve recently seen in “Iron Man,” “Thor” and “Ant-Man,” and the shiny, non-threatening tone of Marvel’s happy-meal presentation disguises every genre cliché with lavish sets and complicated special effects.

 

The post-Matrix/post-Inception visuals and the film's art-direction is spectacular and eye-popping—particularly the set-pieces and fight-sequences that take place among the shifting and folding Escher-esq cityscapes—but they are placed almost randomly and with very little stakes within the story. Most of the screenplay consists of long sequences where Swinton’s Ancient One and Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Mordo explain to Cumberbatch all the ins and outs of mirror realms and astral projection and forbidden libraries and magic imbued weapons and so on and so on. To the credit of the screenwriters and the performances from the actors, this exposition-heavy dialogue is peppered with enough humor and whit to distract from its utilitarian function.

Aside from a slightly rushed plot and another stale Marvel-Studios villain with a weird face, “Doctor Strange” is perfectly entertaining and keeps true to the company brand, but it’s the very nature of this idiosyncratic character that begs for a less calculated approach. Given Derrickson’s past work and given the prestigious background of the cast, the movie’s familiar superhero trappings are more nakedly obvious and its getting increasingly harder to overlook Marvel’s unwillingness to challenge their formula.

Grade: B-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Nov-2016

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "Doctor Strange."

Moonlight review

Now that awards season is in full swing, attention has been turned to Barry Jenkin’s second feature “Moonlight,” an archetypically American tale about the cross sections between poverty and identity. While embracing an exciting and vivid style of its own, the film is stripped bare, minimal and noticeably low-budget. Even still, Jenkins carefully puts every dollar on the screen, directing with his feelers fully extended to capture every meaningful moment with his actor’s vulnerable and honest performances.

This story focuses on three time periods in the life of a struggling African American boy named Chiron (Alex R. Hibbert) who has to constantly dodge the neighborhood bullies for being too quiet and sensitive. Making things even more difficult, he discovers his mother (Naomi Harris) is using crack and bringing home strange men to access it. He then finds refuge in the unlikely parental figures of a local Florida drug dealer named Juan and his right-hand-woman Teresa (Mahershala Ali and Janelle Monae).

We meet our protagonist again as a teenager (Ashton Sanders) when he’s forced to confront his inner conflicts with his only friend and confidante Kevin (Jharrel Jerome) after their school-yard relationship reaches a new level of emotional possibilities. Towards the last third of the film we drop in one last time with Kevin and Chiron as adults (Trevante Rhodes and Andre Holland), reconnecting after years have passed and their lives have taken them down widely diverging roads.

Through these stories are connected by a single timeline, each third works well on its own as an individual short, which makes a lot of sense given Jenkins many years working in the short-film format. What he accomplishes in this structure is something like Richard Linklater’s growing-up opus “Boyhood.” The audience is forced to look at these three moments in the changing life of Chiron and fill in the blanks between the juxtaposing segments. This successfully creates a larger world than the movie has the budget or time to accomplish on its own, giving the film both an overarching timelessness and the individual spirit of cultural specificity.

What makes the film live and breathe is the cast who works hard to be as natural and as delicate as possible. Because the movie is exploring themes of repression and the defensive masculinity that queer people in tough urban environments must front in order to survive, the actors play their parts very close to their chests, avoiding melodramatic Oscar-clipping as much as possible. The whole cast puts their trust in Jenkins sensitive direction to use their every hesitated breath and every raised eyebrow to inform the emotional realities that’s often deliberately left out of the dialogue. Naomi Harris as the dysfunctional mother is probably the broadest character and most literal performance given. Compared to the quiet intensity expressed by the rest of the cast, her portrayal is much less nuanced and the lines she delivers often mirrors her emotions exactly. Harris is faithfully playing the role as written, but it looks rather reductive compared to the subtly sublime work by the three actors who play her son.

This might not be your personal growing-up story but the raw emotions expressed in “Moonlight” are universal. While the ending comes to a disappointing halt just as the movie’s momentum is peaking and there’s nothing particularly new in the storytelling-- the plot touches on many tropes in both the coming-of-age and coming-out genres—the finely tuned performances and Jenkin’s filmic execution feels personal and authentic, even as he employs familiar narrative techniques.

Grade: B+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Nov-2016

13th review

Ava DuVernay’s new documentary “13^th” should be required viewing for every high school civics course across the country. The film focuses on how the American justice system has been systematically rigged against people of color since the passing of the 13^th amendment ended slavery in the 1800s, conveniently leaving in the clause that strips humans of their rights as soon as they enter the prison system and often long after they have served their sentences. This documentary creates a comprehensive examination of how these laws have specifically targeted the black communities through the segregation era and into the ever-expanding war on drugs, dramatically spiking our incarceration numbers over time.

Released in a particularly salty election year in which minority issues such as Black Lives Matter and immigration have been front and center in the political discussion, the film’s decision to release on Netflix streaming, rather than only engaging in a limited theatrical run, allows for the possibility of a wider reach and deeper cultural impact.

The movie gives us many damning statistics, including the fact that America accounts for 25% percent of the worlds prisoners, despite only representing 5% percent of the global population, or how African American’s make up 40% of those incarcerated, even though they only account for 6.5% of the total U.S. population. These stats are then supported by showing us how both republican and democrat lawmakers have continually stacked the legal deck against minorities to keep prison filled and profits high.

DuVernay makes the argument that slavery didn’t end with the passing of the 13^th amendment, rather it was merely shifted to the prison systems. When seeing footage of minority inmates performing free labor for many successful American manufacturers, it’s hard to argue against this position. One of the stronger points made in the film—also brought to light a while back by comedian John Oliver on his HBO program—is the governmental part played by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) who guides the passing of many restrictive policing and incarceration policies, based on the whims of the powerful corporate lobbyists who fund their initiatives. These initiatives include California’s damaging three strikes policy and mandatory minimum sentencing that took judicial power away from judges and gave it to prosecutors. No matter your race or political persuasion, one ought to be disturbed by how big of a role corporations have played into the withering of freedoms, the expansion of militant policing and growth of America’s prison industrial complex.  

Formally. the documentary shifts between archival footage and talking-head interviews by the likes of activists such as Angela Davis and Bryan Stevenson, educators like Jelani Cobb and commentators and lawmakers such as Newt Gingrich. Graphics and popular music is implemented for the purposes of style and pacing but never distracts from or overwhelms the film’s content.

Here DuVernay brings the activist spirit and polemic energy that she sheathed with “Selma” in order to graciously portray the life and reputation of Martin Luther King Jr. Whereas 2014’s “Selma” aimed to bridge differing political points of view under the reverence of a classy, performance-oriented prestige picture, “13^th” takes off those silk gloves and bares its anger and outrage with a meticulously researched take-down of the white supremacy that’s built into our government’s interpretation of law and order. This documentary is not a casual watch and it was made with the purpose to complicate the hotly divided conversations created by our culture of stagnant left-right squabbling, and for that alone it’s one of the most important and essential films to come out this year.

Grade: A

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Oct-2016

Mascots review

With films such as “A Mighty Wind” and “Best in Show,” actor/director Christopher Guest perfected the mockumentary genre. Since then, television programs like “The Office” and “Modern Family” have utilized this format as a style rather than a conceit, and what used to be a novel presentation for comedy is now a utilitarian way of handling exposition and plot. With Guest’s latest, a direct-to-Netflix project called “Mascots,” he returns to his blissfully ignorant weirdo character archetypes and the niche lifestyles that defined his earlier work. In fact, the film is so firmly designed for this director that it lacks of sense of purpose or comedic drive, occasionally drifting into the waters of self-parody. 

Here Guest takes a winking jab at the world of sports mascots who annually compete for an award called the Fluffy at a convention center in Anaheim. Zach Woods and Sarah Baker play an over-counseled married couple on the verge of collapse, also doubling as a Squid and Turtle mascot duo. Tom Bennet plays the nice-but-clueless Owen Golly Jr, who’s taken on the family mantel as a Soccer playing Hedgehog. Parker Posey plays the head-in-clouds Cindy Babineaux, competing as a modern-dancing Armadillo. Christopher Moynihan plays perfectionist Phil Mayhew (aka Jack the Plummer) and Chris O’Dowd plays Irish bad-boy Tommy Zucarello, a Hockey mascot called ‘The Fist’ who’s been banned from many sports venues for his edgy entertainment style. As one would expect, egos clash and misunderstandings are had at the SoCal convention.

Because Guest’s style encourages and depends on seamless improvisation from his actors, scenes live and die on their performances. The cast is committed to the challenge and they’re all appropriately on the same page, but they’re also too similarly pitched to really distinguish themselves amongst each other in any given scenario. The jokes and one-liners often fall flat or feel forced and the improvised dialogue usually leans on the easiest laugh. The film spends too much of its run-time establishing the characters and their motivations, and once the plot foundation is finally set into place the whole narrative is already winding down to a no-surprises conclusion.

There’s an infectious warmth for this dorky profession and the peripheral performances from Fred Willard, Jane Lynch and Christopher Guest himself—reprising his role as acting-coach Corky St. Clair from 1996’s “Waiting for Guffmam”—infuses this lazy comedy with some genuinely off-beat moments, but the movie’s best sequences come from the well-staged competition routines by the mascots themselves. There’s something oddly cinematic about watching a well-rehearsed physical act and these scenes are competently shot and dramatically informed.

“Mascots” isn’t entirely painful to watch but considering the talent involved in its making, it is painfully ordinary. Perhaps the glut of mockumentary alt-sitcoms such as “Parks and Recreation” have familiarized us with this genre to the point of making it obsolete, and perhaps in our current economic reality the concept of making fun of clueless, low-earning middle Americans who have aspirations for something bigger now registers as tone-deaf. Whatever the problem, something here never here gels comedically and the movie radiates with a sense of Guest and his crew coasting on their reputation.

Grade: C+. 

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Oct-2016 

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "Mascots."

The Girl on the Train review

Tate Taylor’s adaptation of Paula Hawkins best-selling crime novel “The Girl on the Train” owes much of its intended style and tone to David Fincher’s much more interesting take on Airport pulp “Gone Girl,” but unlike that film, which took many risks and was able to carefully balance icy sensuality with pitch-black cynicism, this sleepy thriller never quite marries its objectives between the narrative, the themes and its genre conventions.  Given all of these obvious shortcomings, lead actress Emily Blunt still manages ride the bumbling vehicle in a way that, at the very least, allows her to showcase her dramatic range.

The story focuses on the broken life and the fractured memories of Blunt’s character Rachel. Erin Cressenda Wilson’s adaptation of Hawkins’ novel decides to tells the story in a similarly non-linear way, emulating Rachel’s foggy recollection of the past events within the plot. The screenplay purposely withholds information or gives us false memories to obscure the later reveals. What we know early on is that Rachel is a hard-drinking alcoholic still reeling from a divorce with a man named Tom (Justin Theroux), who’s recently remarried and had a child with his younger mistress Anna (Rebecca Ferguson). Unable to get over their failed marriage and her inability to bear a child for her former husband, Rachel rides a train past their old home every day to see the progression of Tom and Anna’s new life. One day while pining for her past she witnesses her former neighbor Megan (Haley Bennett) kissing a strange man on an outdoor balcony, only a few days before Megan herself goes missing. This makes a Rachel a lead suspect because of her history with being seen around her ex’s property uninvited. In getting closer to Megan’s worried and cuckholded husband (Luke Evans) this event also invigorates Rachel into solving the case to both exonerate her and to bring closure to her messy past.

This movie has some very interesting things to say about women’s relationship with their domestic lives, in terms of what they’re ‘supposed’ to be as a wife, a lover, a fantasy, a mother and modern careerist. The film posits that most of these identities are unfairly defined by the expectations of men and that a woman’s fully formed identity and a true sense of absolution can only be achieved by realizing their life outside of the confines of a traditional marital paradigm. Blunt and the other leads in the cast do well to underline these themes with their performances and they help to carry the feature through its many weighty scenes, but the slowly accumulating structure of the plot never truly satisfies as the brooding whodunit mystery it wants (and needs) to be.

This unconventional take on the neurotic detective, the unreliable narrator and the Hitchcockian wrong-(wo)man protagonist should have crackled more than Taylor’s lilting direction allows for. Taylor borrows style from many sources but never synthesizes them in a way that supports the narrative elements or its boiler-plate genre surprises. What could have been a dark satire about the American domestic fairytale—the angle Fincher’s “Gone Girl” already mastered—or what could have been a suburban “Silence of the Lambs” feminist mystery ends up being a suffocated character study that sacrificing its pop sensibilities for an air of safe and unearned prestige.

For a Lifetime movie writ large “The Girl on the Train” has moments and individual scenes that highlights nuances performances, as well as some thoughtful set design, but the film is so concerned with its rainy tone and its structural juggling that it’s never in conversation with the audience. The result is a somewhat flat and edgeless piece of fast-food filmmaking that can’t sell the shocking reveals it depends on.

Grade: C-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Oct-2016

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "The Girl on the Train."

Magnificent Seven (2016) review

Antione Fuqua’s reworking of the classic 1960 western “The Magnificent Seven” neither challenges or ruins the original’s winning formula. Of course by original we have to speak in general terms, as the initial version of this story was first told as Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 Japanese action film “Seven Samurai,” and that epic's plot, about a rag-tag group of rogue mercenaries who help a small village/town of farmers defend their property from a murderous group of thieves, has been an oft-utilized source of cinematic inspiration over the following decades. The first American version spawned a few sequels of its own, was remade as a TV mini-series in 1998 and Pixar’s “A Bug’s Life” even took a stab at the same story structure.

 Denzel Washington plays the grizzled hit-man Chisolm. On his way through the west to find a bounty he's hired by a grief-stricken young girl named Emma Cullen (Haley Bennett) after she watched her brother get shot down by an evil thief named Bartholomew Brogue and his group of well-armed cronies. Knowing how outnumbered and outgunned they will be, Chisolm collects the best gun-men and criminals he knows to help the town prepare for an all-out war. This group includes Chris Pratt as the mouthy trickster Josh Faraday, Ethan Hawke the ex-confederate sniper Goodnight Robicheaux, South Korean superstar Byung-hun Lee as Robicheaux’s knife-wielding bodyguard Billy Rocks, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as the wanted-man Vasquez, Martin Sensmeier as the deadly Native American warrior Red Harvest and Vincent D’Onofrio as the jittery, mountain man spiritualist Jack Horne.

The movie does a good job at distinguishing all of these different characters and allowing for enough breath and space between the shoot-outs to get to know the ensemble and understand their contrasting dynamics as a team. Denzel is commanding as their sturdy leader and helps to support the more idiosyncratic players in the cast. While Pratt, Hawke and Washington get the most to chew on the others do well with their limited screen time, even if much of the cast barely develops past their archetypes, but with such an archetypal story, these broad choices function well within the limitations of the mechanics of the plot.

Given Fuqua’s history in action filmmaking and urban-based crime thrillers such as “Training Day,” “Bait” and “Equalizer,” less racial stereotypes than the 1960 version and brings more diversity to the cast, commenting ever so slightly on America’s moral growing pains after the civil-war. But the picture exists primarily as a piece of consequence-free, pop-western entertainment that’s generally more interested in being cool than clever.  Here Fuqua evokes not only the original “Magnificent Seven” but also the blunt ultra-violence of Sam Peckinpah’s the “The Wild Bunch,” occasional flashes of Sergio Leone’s expressive Spaghetti Western style, and the post-modern irony of Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained.”

As a pastiche the end result is successful as visceral film experience but a bit empty as a comment on the genre or the movie’s it pays homage to. Luckily that Kurosawa structure is rock solid and can support just about any interpretation, so long as the cast is interesting and the director is capable. In the case of this iteration of “The Magnificent Seven” both of those boxes have been checked the job has been fulfilled adequately even if it doesn’t go above or beyond the parameters of the assignment.

Grade: B-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Oct-2016

Sully review

Both as an actor and as a director, Clint Eastwood has explored his fascination with the conflicted hero narrative. World weary and downtrodden seems to be the resting constitution of most of his protagonists and their stories usually test their personal doubts with a greater conflict that effects the good of their environments. In this year’s “Sully” Tom Hanks takes on this position as the real life commercial airplane pilot Captain Chesley Sullenberger, who in 2009 safely landed an American Airlines jet of 155 passengers along the surface of the Hudson river with no casualties. The story caught the aged, life-long pilot in the middle of a media storm where he and his co-pilot Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart) was crowned heroes by many, while simultaneously enduring pressure and scrutiny by the organization investigating the crash.  

Using Sully’s tested psychosis as the story’s framing device, much of the story is told in flashback, as well as the occasional PTSD-induced nightmare sequence. Hanks plays Sully with a lot of insular angst and quietude and uses his eyes to convey his character’s discomfort and mounting self-doubt. It’s not a particularly showy performance and it leans further into Hanks’ transition into that of a senior performer. Eckhart is then given more room to be vocal and expressive about the nature of their character’s odd position within the media and their stressful behind-the-scenes case.  

The film is also interested in the notion of experienced intuition verses blind empiricism, as the board of investigators keep telling both pilots that every simulation demonstrates that they should have been able to safely make it back to the tarmac without risking a dangerous water-landing (as well as destroying expensive company equipment.) This argument, as presented by the film, could be read as a condemnation of expert analysis and a celebration of blue-collar, folksy instinct but the conclusion to this case wisely factors in human experience and emotional error as a variable itself, saving the picture from slipping too far into an anti-science, finger-wagging appeal to the viewer’s emotions.

 The special effects and the flight recreations are both familiar to the experience of flying and the fear that comes with its risks.  The daydreams and nightmare sequences are  realistic and spiked with harrowing 9/11 imagery, which ties in subtly with New York and America’s exaltation of Sully’s rescue landing.

“Sully” is a competent drama. Hanks is a professional, Eastwood knows exactly how to tell this story and the screenplay aims low enough for both of them to hit their intended marks. If the film does have a flaw it’s Todd Komarnicki’s successful but safe adaptation of Sullenberger’s book “Highest Duty.” Kormarnicki tries to weave in Sully’s past as a war pilot and crop duster to show his experience and his relationship with the air, but that gesture is never really paid off or integrated well enough to fully inform the character or the plot. While studied and precise, the screenplay lacks the amount of narrative ambition it needed to propel the picture from good actor’s showcase to being truly great film.

Grade: B

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal - Sep/2016

Kubo and the Two Strings review

Laika studios, the animation studio based in Portland Oregon, has built its brand recognition on a style of detail oriented and highly stylized stop-motion puppetry. Their features, “Coraline,” “ParaNorman,” and “The Boxtrolls,” have primarily catered to the same audience who followed “Coraline” director Henry Selick from Disney’s “A Nightmare Before Christmas,” which shares a similar gothy aesthetic. In contrast, Laika’s latest project “Kubo and the Two Strings” is less interested in introverted protagonists and macabre dark comedy and is more concerned with widening the scope and visual boundaries of their storytelling with an eastern-themed, mythic adventure.

The film interweaves an intricate story-within-a-story that purposely blurs the lines between depictions of imagination and actual magic. The movie follows the multi-faceted coming of age of Kubo (voiced by Art Parkinson), a young boy who lost an eye as an infant and who lives with his mother on the top of a Japanese mountain that overlooks a small village. His shut-in mother encourages him to mingle with the others during the daytime hours, but warns her son to return home before dark. While visiting, he relays the bits and pieces of his mother’s stories/memories for the townsfolk in the form of origami puppet shows, created and directed by the music of his rudimentary three-stringed guitar. One day after staying out too late, Kubo is visited by his mother’s evil sisters (voiced by Rooney Mara) who wish to claim him as their own. Their sudden arrival forces the boy into perusing an Odyssey to find three pieces of a magic armor. Once collected he hopes to destroy the evil Moon King; the mysterious and dark magician who’s most likely responsible for his mother’s sudden disappearance. In her place, Kubo is joined by an enchanted and overly-protective Monkey (Charlize Theron) and a charming Beetle samurai (Mathew McConaughey) with a lot of hard-headed courage.

Fans of Japanese entertainment will likely see in “Kubo” shades of the sensitive fantasies that Hayao Miazaki produced with Studio Gibli, as well the airy and patient pacing of Japan’s classic edo-period action cinema. Elements of the plot also recalls the structure and archetypal symbolism of “The Wizard of Oz.”

The animation exhibited here is by far the most ambitious and expansive work we’ve seen from Laika thus far, and the movie’s camera technique and its consideration of the frame allows for wider shots and wilder pans and zooms than previously implemented in their painstaking form of animation. On a technical level, It’s nearly impossible not to give into director Travis Knight’s vision, even if the ending is clumsy and screenplay’s vague mythology sometimes muddles its themes.

This story is interested in familial legacy, adopted communities, and what it’s like to grow up without a sense of personal history, while simultaneously trying to overcome an unwanted path set before you, but the film sometimes struggles in tying all of these ideas together in succinct and assured way. The team behind this project surly deserves much praise for creating a product for children that is thoughtful and contemplative while also beautifully crafted and creatively art-directed. With that said, admiration doesn’t always translate into a full immersion. “Kubo and the Two Strings” is a significant progression for this studio and it’s more than worthy of your attention but as a story it merely nudges the shoulders of greatness.

Grade: B

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal - Sep/2016

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "Kubo and the Two Strings."

Don't Breathe review

“Don’t Breathe” is exactly the kick in the neck that extreme horror needs right now. Fede Alvarez’s new thriller cleverly plays with expectations and tropes within the home-invader genre but it never loses sight of its own momentum, creating a vivid cinematic world of its own within a deliberately designed, claustrophobic setting.  The movie makes a lot of allusions to classic shockers of the past, such as Wes Craven’s “Last House on the Left” and Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs,” as well as scene elements and direct imagery from “Silence of the Lambs,” and “Cujo.” Conceptually, this film is basically a reverse version of the 1967 Audrey Hepburn, Alan Arkin thriller “Wait Until Dark.” But even as those obvious sign posts are visible for the cinefiles in the audience “Don’t Breathe” slams around with enough of its own moves and creative WTF moments to justify its many obvious appropriations.

The story’s set-up is pretty simple; three up-to-no-good, Detroit 20-somethings stake out the home of a blind ex-military man (Stephen Lang) who’s sitting on 300,000 dollars of settlement money after losing his only daughter in a car accident. Rocky (Jane Levy), Alex (Dylan Minnette) and their gun-toting gangster-wannabe frenemy Money (Daniel Zovatto) all hope to use this small fortune to give up their criminal lives and move out west to California, where they can escape their family problems and the general angst of Midwestern, industrial poverty.  Of course, once they break into the house of their mark things don’t go as they had planned.  As it turns out, the blind veteran and his vicious Rottweiler are much more prepared for the occasion than our delinquent protagonists had originally anticipated.

Those with a weak stomach and mild psychological constitution should be warned that this movie serves a pretty strong cup of coffee. Alvarez knows how to wait the appropriate time to strike and he patiently earns his gore, but when the rubber hits the road he doesn’t hold back when it comes to his depictions of blunt violence and seat-squirming shock sequences. In fact, half of the picture’s strength comes from its build up and anticipation towards these moments. This director also never forgets how to structure a scene and uses his wandering camera to layout the architecture of each set-piece so the audience can get a true sense of where everyone is and how hard or easy it should be for them to escape. The best cat and mouse films know that good chase scenes are most effective when they fully incorporate their setting, and in that sense, Lang’s creaky, three-level home becomes another character in the film.

As the movie’s introduces its principle players the dialogue can be stiff and some of the characterizations are at times too broad and archetypal but the actors usually are able pick up the screenplay’s slack in those departments. Things get significantly better once we get into the meat of the break-in. Alvarez revels in the mechanics of his suspense and the cinematic elements of horror as pop entertainment. He loves to pull the strings tight on his scenes and loves to pull the rug out from under the audience, and though the film’s use of sound is especially important here—given that the antagonist is blind—the movie never defaults to the overuse of cheap, quiet-quiet-loud jack in the box scares.

After a summer of misfiring popcorn fare, “Don’t Breathe” is the perfect mean-spirited antidote to start the fall season. It’s unpretentious and unencumbered, and more importantly, it understands the appeal of the genre it’s playing in and knows how to confidently execute it with practical style and craftsmanship.

Grade: B+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal-Sep/2016

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "Don't Breathe."

Sausage Party review

Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s raunchy animated feature “Sausage Party” certainly doesn’t lack audaciousness when it comes to pushing technical boundaries. While it’s not the first of its kind in terms of feature length animated films with adult humor, it is the first to utilize the size and scope of Dreamworks and Pixar’s three-dimensional style. Directors Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon both come from animation backgrounds, and that certainly helps to facilitate Rogen and Goldberg’s vision of a colorful grocery store where food items learn the harsh realities of their place in the circle of life. The ambition of this project is impossible to ignore, and with an over-saturation of talking animal cartoons released every year, a parody was ripe for the making. That is why “Sausage Party” feels like even more of a deflating as missed opportunity. This creative team could have really done something spectacular and sharp, but the film lacks both subtlety and wit and leans on lowest common denominator gags and empty vulgarity.

Rogen voices Frank, a hot dog who is looking forward to being chosen by one of the human “gods” so that he may finally copulate with a bun named Brenda (Kristin Wiig), his across-the-shelf girlfriend. When they finally make it into a shopping cart, an accident separates Frank from his package of hotdog friends voiced by Jonah Hill and Michael Cera. Frank and Brenda must then travel back through the many aisles of the store to regroup. Joining their odyssey is a neurotic Jewish bagel named Sammy (Edward Norton), and an angry, pious flat-bread wrap named Lavash (David Krumholtz). Along the way Frank discovers that their purpose in the lives of their gods may not be the heaven they had in mind.

Lavash and Sammy’s contentious relationship underlines the movie’s more shocking sources of comedy; a total surrender to outdated racial and cultural stereotypes. The food in the store is segregated into ethnicities (Mexican, German, Middle Eastern, Asian…etc), and while the film tries to justify their reductive depictions through the script’s themes of cultural unity in the face of blind faith and superstition, the glee it exudes from exploiting these stereotypes cannot be removed from its comedic premise.

For all of its bombast and expensive production values, this movie just isn’t funny enough. The dialogue is riddled with expletives and filthy innuendo from the first frame, and while South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker have made an art out of profane satire in animation, this screenplay is far lazier in its execution. The writers seemed to believe that to show a cartoon character cursing is funny enough on its own without properly set-up jokes or subversive insight to support each scene. What results is a series of unfunny conversation set-pieces that sound transcribed from preteen boy’s locker room. Case in point; Nick Kroll voices the villain of the story, a feminine product who calls himself “The Douche.”

The movie works best when it explores the violent, darker places within its premise. After escaping the clutches of death from a human, Michael Cera’s character, Barry, leads us into unpredictable and absurdly macabre situations when he ties to make it back to the store to warn his friends of certain doom. These moments are based more on vivid imagery that properly utilizing its animated context--unlike the bumbling primary plot, which relies too heavily on hard-R raunch and Rogen's obligatory pot jokes.

The film has an interesting message about how religious interpretations can divide us in this life while we worry too much about what's in the next, but as a comedy “Sausage Party” is largely a one-trick pony. While its tone-deaf racial humor is supposed to be boldly irreverent, much of it is cringe inducing, and with this much time and effort put into the animation process there is no excuse for the comedy be this tired.

Grade: C-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Aug-2016

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "Sausage Party."

Suicide Squad review

After the clunky and underachieving disaster that was “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” the stakes for David Ayer’s “Suicide Squad” were raised too high. Though Warner Brothers never planned it, because BvS failed to live up to its own hype, this quirky film, inspired by a 4th-teir DC comics property, is now expected to give Warner's fledgling movie universe enough fuel to drive fan interest to the next spin-off. Given that “Suicide Squad” is an already an odd premise—grouping imprisoned super-villains to fight for the government against their will--and features mostly unknown characters, a property this idiosyncratic and niche was hardly positioned to save an entire franchise from failing. Making things all the more difficult, Ayer’s attempts at dark satire and genre subversion are undercut by the studio’s bottom-line priorities and the narrative has been ravaged by intrusive re-shoots and bad editing.

Following the events of “Batman v Superman,” government intelligence decides to create a team of mutants and misfits of their own in case another ‘meta-human’ decides he or she above the law. Agent Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) brings together the unlikely ensemble of a hitman named Deadshot (Will Smith), a dangerous pyro-kinetic named Diablo (Jay Hernandez), the unicorn obsessed maniac Boomerang (Jai Courtney), a sewer dwelling cannibal called Killer Crock (Adewele Akinnuoye-Agbaje), a possessed mystic named Enchantress (Cara Delevingne) and an unpredictable Joker obsessive named Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie). Once the team is assembled they are set on the first mission to stop Enchantress when her vaguely defined witch spirit is reunited with an ancient Mezzo-American war-god, unleashing a horde of amorphous, blob-headed bad-guys onto the city streets.

The movie almost never works either as a streamlined superhero peice or a darkly humorous action-comedy, but as misbegotten or as poorly executed as it might have been I can’t bring myself to dismiss Ayer’s ambitions. There are moments in this swirling, crass, adolescent and tone-deaf glorified videogame that approaches a level of hysteria and anarchy that too few mainstream comic book movies dare to embrace. Even this year’s “Deadpool,” which was celebrated for it’s hard-R raunchiness, played it safe when it came to defining who we’re supposed to root for, who we’re supposed to hate and it created a safe relatability when it came to the protagonist’s goals and desires. “Suicide Squad” muddies all of those waters and celebrates the sickest and most deranged motives within its characters, but it fails to take its punk-rock attitude beyond the surface into the thematic territory where it could have made a bigger impact.

All the actors seem committed and game to embody these larger than life sociopaths—Margot Robbie walks away with whole movie and Will Smith almost reminds us why we liked him in the first place—but the filmmakers are never as committed to the story. The generic and buffoonish cartoon plot is treated merely as an apparatus to house the ensemble and to highlight the film’s overbearing aesthetic choices. The overall production design seems to be inspired by a 13-year old’s pog collection from the mid-90s and the groan-inducing jukebox soundtrack is filled with painfully on-the-nose rock music selections. It doesn’t help that the actors, as hard as they try, never compensate for the one-note, smart-alecky dialogue.  

Somewhere in the creases and corners of this unmitigated disaster exists the seeds of a more interesting movie.  Jared Leto’s minor appearance as the Joker is occasionally exciting but like everything else is buried under the larger beats of the silly and uninteresting A-plot. I can’t help but wonder if a movie about Joker and Harley that fully explores their toxic romance might have been more satisfying (think Oliver Stone’s “Natural Born Killers” in Gotham). Perhaps if the film had been allowed to be R-rated and these supposedly dangerous criminals were forced to plow through the Joker’s hench-men or an opposing military instead of mystically powered, faceless ghouls, the movie could have retained the grit and immediacy of Ayer’s previous work (“Fury” “End of Watch”).  As it stands, “Suicide Squad” is an empty-headed and tonally frustrating missed opportunity and yet another stumbling block in DC/Warner’s desperate attempt to catch up with Marvel’s blockbuster winning streak.

Grade: C- 

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Aug-2016

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "Suicide Squad."

Star Trek Beyond

After director J.J. Abrams stepped aside to let “Fast & Furious” helmer Justin Lin take his place, many hardcore Trekkies who'er already critical of this rebooted franchise became worried that Lin's third installment would drive the series further away from Gene Roddenberry’s more intellectual vision. While “Star Trek Beyond” doesn’t slow down the momentum or the pacing of this high-octane update, old-school Trek fans may be charmed by the  film's return to a warm and familiar sense of adventurous pulp and sci-fi optimism. Unlike the 2009 reboot, which had to reestablish everything with a new cast and a new style, and unlike its 2013 sequel "Star Trek Into Darkness," which reworked the story beats of the most beloved installment of the original Star Trek films, this outing is much smaller in scope and more contained as a story.

James Kirk (Chris Pine) is feeling melancholy about his place as the ship’s Captain, upon realizing that he has just surpassed the age that his father was when he died. Spock (Zachary Quinto) too is wondering how his place in this unified multi-cultural mission when he learns that the elder version of himself from another dimension (Leonard Nimoy) has passed away. With these character dilemmas in the background, the enterprise is called upon to investigate a deep-space distress call, where they are ambushed by a swarm of small enemy attack ships, crash-landing on a foreign planet. The group  becomes separated into pairs of survivors and have to regroup to find a means for escape as well as a way to stop their new enemy from unleashing a space virus on a nearby society of peaceful workers.

The plot dynamics of this particular adventure are somewhat generic and well worn, but that allows for more impact when it comes to the character dynamics and the focus of the films action sequences. The movie quickly gets us into the head space of this group and grounds the plot in the emotional hurdles of each member. The chemistry between Pine, Quinto and Karl Urban's Doctor McCoy informs the spectacle in a way that few summer tent poles remember to do.  Jon Cho as Sulu, Simon Peg as Scotty, and the recently deceased Anton Yelchin as Chekov are also given key sequences to shine. Zoe Saldana’s Uhura is sidelined the most within the original group as Sophia Boutella becomes the key female cast member playing the stranded warrior Jaylah, who allies herself with the Enterprise to rescue the 'red-shirts' from the evil Krall (Idris Elba).

Speaking of Krall, luckily the bright eyed adventure of the movie and creative set pieces more than make up for the lack of an interesting villain—Elba is unfortunately buried under too much make-up and plot to really resonate beyond his narrative function.

Simon Pegg and Doug Jung’s screenplay almost celebrates the filler spot many mid-franchise sequels eventually occupy, but it’s this multi-million-dollar smallness that rescues the picture from being too encumbered by plot and fan-service. There isn’t anything especially remarkable to say about “Star Trek Beyond” other than it knows how to balance tone, story, action and characters in way that keeps the audience from thinking too much about its construction as a piece of consumable popcorn product.

Grade: B+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/July-2016

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "Star Trek Beyond."

Ghostbusters (2016) review

Paul Feig’s “Ghostbusters” remake has been a lightning rod for controversy since it was announced a couple of years ago that the picture would feature an all-female cast. Though the living cast members of the original 1984 film have given their blessing to this project and have even appeared in in the picture as bit parts, for some, this has been the straw that breaks the back of fan-culture when it comes to remaking their favorite nerd properties from the 80s. This internet outrage has also caught the attention of a less than savory flavor of he-man-women-haters and racists who’ve used the film as a soapbox to attack these actresses as well as feminism as a whole, which has then forced the media into siding with Feig and his project in hopes to proportionately counter the negative online buzz. What does any of this have to do with the movie, you might ask, not very much at all.

Like most classics that we now take granted now, the original “Ghostbusters” was a film that, on paper, shouldn’t have worked. It’s an absurd premise that’s actually taken semi-seriously and features a cast of television comedians playing doctors and scientists.  It also made allusions to the heroes’ interests in the occult, smack-dab in the middle of America’s satanic panic, and the screenplay’s structure is a more loosely accumulative than it is classically three-act.  This remake irons out all of those kinks and idiosyncrasies for something that is unsurprisingly more safe and centered around a series of jokes and premises rather than scenes.

Like the original, this film is also comprised of actors mined from Saturday Night Live such as Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones, Kate McKinnon, as well as Feig’s muse Melissa McCarthy. Wiig plays Erin Gilbert, an uptight physicist who's lost her tenure at the university that employed her when a video is leaked that connects her with past interests in paranormal study. She’s then reunited with her former partner in crime Abby (McCarthy) and Abby's zany lab assistant Jillian (McKinnon).  With nowhere to go but up the group moves their headquarters to the attic of a Chinese restaurant in New York where they up shop as a ghost removal service. Later they enlist the help of a hunky but flighty receptionist named Kevin (Chris Hemsworth), as well as Metro worker named Patty (Jones) who’s been witnessing strange things in the underground tunnels.

There are plenty of nods and winks to the 1984 predecessor but the majority of the plot elements here are conceived from a much less specific place and the jokes are based more on visual gags and punch-lines than they are on character. Wiig is a passive, bland lead, McCarthy simmers her wild comedic persona to blend into the ensemble and its Jones and McKinnon who provide the films hardiest chuckles, making broader, wilder character choices.  Hemsworth isn't given a lot to do but he's game to play an empty-headed receptionist and has a few funny moments of his own. Still, the movie never really takes off like it should and the plot elements never coalesces into something I could comfortably call a story. Like Feig’s previous work (“Spy,” “Bridesmaids”) this movie is based around key comedic set-pieces and conversational dialogue, which is then restricted by many complicated special effects and a PG-13 rating that doesn't seem to suit this cast or this director.

As a story, this “Ghostbusters” doesn’t have the mythic complexity or the same sense of character history that its source material was able to weave into the narrative and as a comedy I can’t say that laughed as much as I wanted to. I enjoy the neon look of the special effects and some of the new gadgets are silly and exuberant in a Saturday morning cartoon sort-of way, but even if we are only comparing this to previous Feig comedies this would still rank pretty low. My childhood is still intact and the female cast doesn’t threaten my masculinity--nor does it subvert anything as a political gesture--but this remake's screenplay is noticeably lazy and I’d be lying if said I found this effort to be a satisfying or substantive movie going experience.   

Grade: C-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal - July/2016

The BFG review

Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of the classic Roald Dahl novel “The BFG” suggests a director and source material paring that should yield exciting work. Spielberg is the master of creating four-quadrant Hollywood product that rides the line between the joy and wonder of cinema with an undercurrent of menace and Hitchcockian thrills. Dahl’s books capture a similar sense of childhood wish fulfillment often shadowed by morose details and black humor. Unfortunately, somewhere in the production of “The BFG” the sneakier tones and shades that made the original story pop were glossed over with a slick, motion-capture focused accessibility that’s flattens its most interesting quirks.

When the movie's protagonist Sophie, played by newcomer Ruby Barnhill, stares out of the window of her orphanage bedroom and we first see the shadow of the 60-foot Big Friendly Giant, we get a glimpse of the Spielbergian power of mystery and imagination. After the clearly animated giant then snatches our protagonist through the window and brings her back to his magical home in giant land the sense of mystery is quickly replaced with focus on the special effects and Dahl’s idiosyncratic dialogue. We are also introduced to a pack of bigger, meaner, man-eating giants who live with the BFG and who pose a threat to Sophie, so long as she’s living with her capture, but that threat is never treated with enough weight or seriousness to effectively motivate the narrative.

The film tries to balance the unfamiliarity and strangeness of Sophie’s new surroundings, and like Dahl’s other novel “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” we are lead through a series of set pieces were we are introduced to a lot of silly and bizarre concepts, but the hallmark-channel tone of the film never allows for the necessary emotional peaks or valleys to ground these concepts in a way that properly thrusts the story. Even John Williams’s lilting score is always humming inoffensively in the background and never recedes or swells to punctuate scenes in a meaningful way.

The choice to iron over Dahl’s threatening world with the story’s friendlier message leaves the audience with little else to attach ourselves. The photo-realistic animation is the focus of the movie and it isn’t new enough or distinct enough to wow us into loving the characters. Mark Rylance’s voice work as the friendly giant is commendable and Barnhill’s interactions with a green-screen environment is seamless and mostly convincing but the film suffers from an amiable blandness that surprisingly lacks creative vision.

As a children’s film “The BFG” is not a grating or unbearable experience but it’s also not a memorable one either and from Spielberg this come with a harsher critical eye, given that he essentially perfected this genre with his past films such as “E.T: The Extra Terrestrial.” Hell, even the often maligned “Hook” took more risks and wasn’t afraid to build in moments of suspense and peril to underline the dramatic stakes. “The BFG” has a few transcendent moments in which it’s director seemed to be engaged with the material, but the overall execution of the film is a missed opportunity.

Grade: C

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal - July/2016

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "The BFG."

The Neon Demon review

Danish filmmaker Nicholas Winding Refn (“Drive,” “Bronson,” “Pusher”) is an exciting and daring stylist who’s equally confounding and frustrating as a visual storyteller. Like many auteurs in the post-modern era, he wears his influences on his sleeve and uses pastiche as a way of creating new meaning from old genre tropes. His latest film “The Neon Demon” combines the dreamy nature of euro-trash, exploitation horror with the camp sensibility of a  Hollywood rise and fall drama.

Because of their surface interests in shock and attitude, horror and camp have always been kissing cousins and both have often shared a lot of space on the cult-movies racks of the now-extinct video stores, but here Refn isn’t satisfied with simply achieving approval as a cult curiosity, he also wishes to be taken seriously as an artist and a visionary. Perhaps it’s the way the film vibrates between the boarders of shock, camp and art-house experimentation that prevents it/saves it from conveniently being excepted as any of the above, while also never settling on an appeal those different tones might provide.

Elle fanning plays the lead as a Jesse, a young runaway trying make it as a model in Los Angeles. Because of innocent youth and her effortless beauty, she’s quickly signed to a top agency where she catches the attention of Jenna Malone as a make-up artist named Ruby and two viciously completive models named Gigi (Bella Heathcoat) and Sarah (Abbey Lee). As Jesse begins to slowly come out of her shell and her naivety is—supernaturally? —transformed into spotlight bravado, her urban-fairytale surroundings creep in closer and closer, becoming more hostile as the movie progresses.

Though the story is quite traditional, Refn’s take on the material is anything but. The movie opens on a slow moving tableau of Jesse who appears murdered and blood soaked. This reveals itself to be stylish photoshoot in which our heroine is trying to put together a portfolio. Given the eventual trajectory of the plot, this also mirrors the staged beauty and ornate artificiality of the film itself and the genre it’s participating in. Refn challenges the notion of style over substance—a critical dart often thrown in his direction—by embracing a world and a set of characters in which style is substance. At one point a hacky fashion designer tells our protagonist “Beauty isn’t everything, it’s the ONLY thing,” and with that philosophy in mind, this movie couldn’t be more aesthetically satisfying. Every frame is meticulously designed with dramatic lighting schemes that paints the world in fluorescent reds and pinks and turquoise. Even Jesse’s seedy Pasadena hotel room is designed and arranged within an inch of its life. This, along with Cliff Martinez’s synthy score that harkens back to the work of 1980s Tangerine Dream, all helps to create a sleepy, slow-motion nightmare.

There’s a lot to soak in here and much to appreciate on an aesthetic level and as a horror movie the flick meets its splatter quota with a third act that dares to go to exceedingly disturbing and twisted places, but the pacing is sometimes a bit too deliberate and the tension it needs to maintain as a psychological thriller is intermittently relaxed for the sake of bathing in the hallucinatory scenery.

“The Neon Demon” feels like an experiment in genre that was never quite resolved before it hit the screen, but it never lacks something to look at, something the laugh at, or something that will make you genuinely wince and squirm. For all its flaws and awkward handling of the narrative, this is undeniably active cinema at work and Refn’s clarity of vision shouldn’t be ignored in favor of the comfort of conventionality.

Grade: B

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/July-2016

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "The Neon Demon."