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

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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

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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"