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."

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."

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice review

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Many were worried that Warner Bros’ rush to compete with Disney/Marvel’s brand of interconnected comic-book movie franchises would lead to something too ambitious and too concerned with setting up future projects to really stand on its own. “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” suffers from all of that and it’s so much worse than we could have expected. 

Spawned as semi-sequel to 2013’s “Man of Steel,” director Zack Snyder was given the directive by the studio to create a movie-universe that could churn out many of its own sequels and spinoffs. Therefore, it needed to continue Snyder’s Superman narrative, introduce a new conceptual take on Batman--now played by “Daredevil” star Ben Affleck--establish a foundation for the forthcoming Justice League film and somehow wrangle all of these ideas in one succinct way. “Batman v Superman” is anything but succinct, in fact, it’s an incomprehensible Frankenstein of a movie. 

The film begins with a montage recapping Batman’s origin story, in case you somehow forgot it from the previous six Batman flicks. It ends with Bruce watching a skyscraper he owns in Metropolis destroyed during Superman’s battle with General Zod; the same orgiastic destruction sequence that concluded “Man of Steel” and put off a lot of viewers with its clumsy 9/11 evocations. Henry Cavill’s Superman/Clark Kent is now seen as hero by some and a danger by others, which has further developed his Christ complex that eventually leads him into problems by the third act. Said danger comes in the form of Lex Luther (Jesse Eisenberg) who’s discovered Superman’s only weakness, Kryptonite, as well as functioning Kryptonian technology at the bottom of the ocean. Through a convoluted and frustrating plot involving Russian gangsters, encrypted spy decoding, classified bullets, crippled Zod survivors and Lois Lane always managing to be at the wrong place at the right time, Lex manages to get Batman and Superman to fight. Oh yeah, and for some indiscernible reason, Gal Gadot makes an appearance as Wonder Woman, complete with her own corny heavy metal theme. 

This movie barely makes any sense. Plot threads are started and then later abandoned and the character’s motivations are solely dictated by which set-piece they need to get to next, but those who’ve followed Snyder’s past work (“300,” “Watchmen,” “Sucker Punch”) should know that story has never been the director’s strong suit. Generally speaking, suits seem to be his strong suit – costume and production design is where his interests have always gravitated and the more narrative or emotional heavy lifting he is asked to do the harder he fails as a storyteller. 

Certainly “Man of Steel” had its problems but at least the movie held together and Cavill really fit the part as Superman. Here both he and Affleck look visibly bored on screen, as does Amy Adams, whose Lois Lane has been relegated to a paging device to make Superman appear whenever she needs to be rescued. Eisenberg is devouring the scenery and embracing the unintended camp of it all, but even he comes off as overly manic compared to the stone-faced zombies he’s trying (usually, too hard) to play against.  

With all of the different studio notes and competing plots shoved into this two and half hour edit, the movie's been patched into a messy collage of incongruent scenes and story elements that shift back and forth like an extended recap that plays before the next season of a television show. Snyder likes to highlight his epic comic-book-y tableaus and there’s enough ‘cool’ imagery to cut together an exciting trailer but even the fanboys will be hard-pressed to defend this labored clunker, as it fails to anchor enough emotional grounding to make any fight worth investing in.   

Grade: D -

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/March-2016

Listen to more discussion about "Batman v Superman" on this week's Jabber and the Drone Podcast.

Her review

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grade: A

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/ Jan-2014