mother! review

Much has already been written about the commercial and critical failure of Darren Aronofsky’s latest release “Mother!” The film received an F rating from cinemascore, which polls snap responses from audience members as they exit the theaters. Nevertheless, Paramount Pictures, Aronofsky and his star Jennifer Lawrence have been trying their damnedest to defend this difficult experience, even as it’s been left hanging in the public square. But “Mother!” does have its fervent defenders. Some see it as a rich creation myth, while others enjoy it as a visceral display of blackly comic camp. I can see how these interpretations exist within the material but not necessarily how they redeem this messy passion project as a whole.  

Lawrence stars as the new wife of a much older poet played by Javier Bardem. They live secluded in the country where Bardem is trying hard to break his writers block, while Lawrence is rebuilding their home after a destructive fire. Their solitude is disrupted when a sick man played by Ed Harris and his wife played by Michelle Pfeifer wander into their lives and makes themselves comfortable. Just as things get awkward and their welcome becomes worn, more uninvited guests arrive and Lawrence’s character gradually begins to realizes that she has no control over the situation. Her sanity is further put to the test when the house itself seems like it's bleeding and responding physically to the emotional stress brought upon by these menacing guests and Bardem’s inability to recognize the problem at all.

That’s the simplest way to describe these events as they occur, but even this bare synopsis doesn’t do justice to the script’s wild arrangement. None of the characters have names and it becomes clear after twenty minutes or so that whatever we’re seeing is not to be taken literally. The movie itself is a poem, structured in stanzas instead of acts and with symbolic imagery standing in the place of plot points. Perhaps if audiences were warned of this before going in to see what was marketed as a psychological horror film, with a poster designed to evoke Polanski’s classic “Rosemary’s Baby,” they may have been more forgiving of Aronofsky’s indulgent storytelling. Then again, it’s also not hard to see how and why someone would lose patience with everything that's going on here.

When a film begs this hard to be asked what it’s actually about, the mind grasps for the nearest allegory. Is it a feminist story about the fears of domesticity? Is it about how celebrities are treated in the ever-present eye of the media? Is it about the complicated and sometimes exploitative relationship between an artist and his inspiration? Aronofsky himself has suggested that it’s an ecological allegory about man destroying mother-earth.  “Mother!” is about all of these things and nothing at the same time. As chaos mounts and tension builds within the contained interior setting of this country home, the movie’s meaning shifts and intensifies, sometimes focusing more on Lawrence’s fragile performance and other times on the broader big-picture stuff happening around her. The more broad and otherworldly things get the less of a handle the film has on its symbolism and more unintentionally funny it becomes.

While “Mother!” may go down as a “Heaven’s Gate” or “Ishtar” sized failure, there are reasons to see it and reasons to believe that, like those films, it may find an audience in the future.  Lawrence’s protagonist is put through almost Lars Von Trier levels of humiliation and abuse and it’s difficult to follow her journey, but her commitment to the picture, which is almost entirely from her perspective, is thoroughly grounded in textured emotion. Pfeifer’s comic timing and vampy presence also helps to alleviate some of the picture's heavy-handed self-importance. On a technical level, Aronofsky’s subjective camera work and the film’s many shocks certainly deliver, even if the end result is naval gazing, self-serving and aggravating to watch.

Grade: C-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Sep-2017

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

X-Men: Apocalypse review

20^th Century Fox’s X-Men series has a been one of the longest running and most volatile of Hollywood’s plentiful superhero franchises. When director Bryan Singer helmed the first two entries around the turn of the century his objective was to naturalize the pulp materials his movies were based on and to internalize the comic book’s over-the-top sci-fi premise into a relatable political allegory about governmental oppression and systemic bigotry. Since then, the X-Films have been passed along to many directors and many writers and the sincerity of its themes have been gradually muddied by competing aesthetic choices, bad screenplays and a timeline that’s tangled itself into more knots than a pocketed pair of earbuds.  

When Singer returned to the property for 2014’s “X-Men: Days of Future Past” he had of lot of narrative housecleaning to get back to his original vision, but was still able to carefully land his albatross of a time-travel plot with all toes touching the ground.  The promise of “Days of Future Past” was that the slate was now clean and the films going forward no longer had to answer for the mistakes of the past, that’s why the latest entry, “X-Men: Apocalypse,” is all the more disappointing, as it relapses into many of the same inconsistencies found within its weaker predecessors.

Moving ten years forward from the events of the last film, this installment sees our heroes faced by an ancient mutant named Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac) brought back from the dead from the depths of the pyramids of Egypt. Once this god-like entity is restored he is put on a path to destroy the earth of human dominion by recruiting four powerful soldiers who are sympathetic to his cause. After Magneto (Michael Fassbender) is ripped away from his newly established anonymous life in eastern Europe he joins Apocalypse alongside a young Storm (Alexandra Shipp), Angel (Ben Hardy), and Psylocke (Olivia Munn).  When Professor Xavier (James McAvoy) catches wind of this new force he assembles a new team to keep his school safe, as well as the future of the world as we know it.  

This film somehow manages to suffer simultaneous from being too much and not enough. There are too many characters and too many subplots to keep track of and yet none of them are really explored with enough depth or purpose to justify their inclusion. The heroes such as Beast (Nicholas Hoult), Cyclops (Tye Sheridan), Quicksilver (Evan Peters) and Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) are explore to some capacity and have some stakes in the plot but the script lacks a sense of focus and drive by its constant shifting of the story’s center of consciousness. Is this supposed to about Mystique trying to save the soul of her mentor and friend Magneto? Is it about Cyclops’ journey to find belonging and responsibility within the group as a new student? Is it a political allegory about the arms race of the 80s? None of these plot ideas are fully flushed out and much of the film feels like a poorly paced build up to a non-climax.  

Secondly this movie suffers from a style that is far campier than we’ve been treated to from this series thus far, with flashier set-pieces, hokier dialogue—courtesy of hack screenwriter Simon Kinberg—and ridiculous costuming.  The film’s 3D minded cinematography heightens every battle scene into cartoony weightlessness. Because of this, the action sequences are less vital and less tactile and the visuals appear flattened and cheap when projected in two dimensions.

Still, McAvoy and Fassbender are great actors and there are moments of candy-coated pop filmmaking to be found in this mess, along with the DNA of the comic book’s higher minded ideas as well as Singers’ passion for minority social justice. “X-Men: Apocalypse” isn’t the worst film in the franchise—“X-Men Origins: Wolverine” still has that distinction—but this material has clearly become tired and strained from being worked and reworked over the last 15 years and as a result th movie never settles into a comfortable mode of its own.   

Grade: C-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/May-2016

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "X-Men: Apocalypse."

Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 review

Susanne Collins’ book series and its subsequent film adaptations “The Hunger Games” has lead the pack of young-adult dystopian fiction. As an outside observer and a non-reader of the source-material, my familiarity of the films' well-worn pulp and science-fiction tropes combined with the overall seriousness in which they are presented has often left me cold. As the series has progressed both in budget and quality and as the story shifted from the hokey set-up of booby trapped game shows—hokey in execution, not necessarily concept—to the devastation of a revolutionary war scenario, my patience has increased in terms of the films’ undeniable tween demo targeting.

“The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2” concludes this franchise with an emotional and visceral payoff for those who have been invested since the first page of the first novel. It’s by far the darkest of the four movies and challenges “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows Part 2” with its mounting body count. But unlike many of the films in this series that awkwardly juxtaposed its themes of violence with its interest in filling the multiplex with 13 year old girls, this installment is fully committed to the trauma and complex psychological torture involved with oppression and war.

Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) has decided to break out on her own, away from the safety net of the other rebels and away from the propaganda war perpetrated by the rebel leader Alma Coin (Julianne Moore). With a little help getting out of her city district, Katniss and a group of other young soldier attempt to travel across the war-torn Capital to assassinate President Snow (Donald Sutherland).  On their journey they must avoid a series of dangerous booby-traps—less hokey this time around—while staying under the radar of the Capitals extensive surveillance.

After spending much of the last film brain-washed by the leaders of the evil government, Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) has rejoined the rebels, now suffering from post-traumatic stress. The rest of the group, including Katniss’ other would-be suitor Gale (Liam Hemsworth), are skeptical of Peeta’s reintegration and Katniss’ loyalties are once again divided. By this point in the series, amongst all of the death and destruction at hand, the last thing I want to see is the further development of a love triangle. Though much of it is truncated in favor of the film’s more interesting arc about the exchange of one governmental dominion to another, whenever the movie pauses to pay lip-service to this sub-Twilight will-they-or-wont-they, the tragedy of war is momentarily trivialized.  

Besides the tonally inappropriate love-story, the majority of the movie has a shocking lack of levity. The stakes are as high as anything the series as presented thus far and director Francis Lawrence flavors the rebel’s deadly pursuit with almost horror-movie levels of tension and anxiety. In one particularly suspenseful scene, Katniss’ group are held up in a subway tunnel where they are attacked by subterranean mutant vampire-like creatures. There’s not a lot of blood-letting or gore in this sequence but the set-up and its cinematic effect adds up to some pretty scary stuff for a younger than teenage audience. It also happens to be the only moment in which Lawrence seems to be havin fun with the pulpier elements of this franchise.

“Mockingjay Part 2” makes interesting points about the way classism and war exploits those most vulnerable, doing most of the heavy lifting for the privileged outliers who only wish to propel their own ideologies. The film’s final act—minus a saccharin and pointless epilogue—includes a shocking political gesture and a bravely messy cap on the good-guys-verses-bad-guys nature of the story. It’s about 25 minutes too long, drags whenever the characters have talk to each other, and cannot be bothered to consider its existence as a piece of genre entertainment, but as the full maturation of a YA property, this final installment is smart enough and intense enough to warrant the lesser entrees that preceded it.

Grade: B-

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Nov-2015

Listen to more discussion about "Mockingjay Pt.2" and "Carol" on this week's Jabber and the Drone podcast.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Pt.1 review

         Truth be told, I have never been as sold on this Hunger Games stuff as much as the general zeitgeist demands.  I don’t really have any interest in reading the books and though I don’t specifically hate anything about the films, they've never grabbed my attention, mostly because I can’t see anything past their base influences and trope-y plot conceits. But what I do appreciate about this franchise, and more specifically this last film, Mockingjay Pt. 1 (of two, because Hollywood), is that they try to discuss ideas of governmental power, class divisions, ideologies, and political revolution with a younger, impressionable Gen-y audience that frankly needs to hear about this stuff, as it’s more relevant right now than they probably even know.
Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), having broken the tradition of the annual Hunger Game battles, has now been chosen by the rebel army to be the stern face of the growing revolution against the Capital, known as the Mocking Jay. Meanwhile, her old fighting partner Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) is being held within the custody of her enemies, releasing distressing interview footage exclaiming that Katniss has been brain-washed by the rebels. This then prompts the leaders of the revolution (Philip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore) to hire Katniss to star in their own propaganda news-reels as they fight in the rubble of their former districts, recently leveled to nothing by the merciless President Snow (Donald Sutherland).
What makes this installment more substantial and engaging is that they have finally done away with the worst element of the past films, those stupid Hunger Games.  Now that they don’t have to build the plot around a series of hokey Home Alone traps and thematic violence they never really had the guts to show in any meaningful way, this movie feels freed from the pressures of fan service, focusing more on directly with the political allegories. It’s gestures towards ideological battles and the complicated role that propaganda plays during war is far more sophisticated and tense than the series has been known to provide thus far.
          Katniss is sure that Peeta is being puppeted or mislead to say the things he says against her and he believes the same of her, and in the real world, where the political right and left are split 50/50, that’s exactly how each party frames the other’s point of view.  In the movie, while bombs are being hurled and bodies are being stepped over, the battle for truth is the most important one being fought because both sides don’t seem to be all that concerned with moving the line of objectivity wherever they need to make a convincing argument.
        Sometimes, however, the message is a little muddled. After a previous scene where Katniss speaks furiously into a camera about mistreatment of her people by the Capital, her leaders re-cut the speech into a propaganda video that recalls the look and style of a "Hunger Games" movie trailer. It’s a meta moment that while clever on the surface and grin inducing, maybe doesn't mean quite as much we are supposed think it does. (Is this about the compromising nature of celebrity? Are Hollywood films propaganda pieces? What are you getting at movie?)
Director Francis Lawrence revels in the story’s bleakness and designs many unnerving action moments that work quite well, including a visually striking break-in sequence at the end of the film, anxiously cross cut with footage of Katniss speaking directly with Sutherland who's eating the scenery up as beard twirling Snow. But, with all that said, I still don’t care about Katniss’ lingering feelings for her childhood friend Gale (Liam Hemsworth), the dialogue is painfully bogged down with exposition and superfluous explanation—remember, these movies are made for teenyboppers—and the Oscar winning Jennifer Laurence does some of the worst fake crying she’s ever done on camera. It’s not a perfect film and while it does some things very well, it’s not the first, second or even 100th film to ever do them, but, in my estimation, after spinning its tires in the dirt with the two previous installments, “Mocking Jay pt.1” is at least finally going somewhere.

Grade: B-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Nov-2014

X-Men: Days of Future Past review

After essentially kick-starting the cinematic superhero renaissance fifteen years ago, the X-Men movie series has undergone many drastic creative shifts, including confusing continuity tangles and some exceedingly bad press surrounding one of its directors. Following two especially disappointing sequels in “X-Men: The Last Standm” by substitute director Brett Ratner and the unforgivably dreadful spin-off “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” a few years later, the franchise was partially revitalized in 2011 with the ‘60s cold-war installment “X-Men: First Class," starring Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy. James Mangold’s “The Wolverine” was also watchable but mostly forgettable in the long run. Now, in an attempt to clean the slate, original director Bryan Singer has the unfortunate job of tying all of these films together and bridging their plot-holes with his newest entry, a time-travel thriller called “X-Men: Days of Future Past”, staring key players from both timelines.

Not only is there very high stakes for the cautiously optimistic fans who have endured and celebrated previously great and awful X-films, “Days of Future Past” has many tasks to carefully maneuver for itself. It must be reasonably faithful to the beloved comic story in which it takes its name, it has to tie together two timelines that are just different enough to makes things complicated, and it has to ret-con the mistakes of the previous sequels. Surprisingly, while not home-run success, it manages to do so with only a few notable discrepancies.

The plot immediately drops us into the near future of 2023, in a post-apocalypse where most of the X-Men have been killed by giant self-regenerating robots called the Sentinels who patrol the earth to terminate all of mutant kind. Aged Professor, Charles Xavier (Patrick Stuart) sends Wolverine’s consciousness back into his younger body during the ‘70s where he must inspire the recently jaded and crippled Professor (James McAvoy) to let out his imprisoned enemy Magneto (Michael Fassbender) to stop a misguided Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) from assassinating the engineer responsible for starting the newly-formed Sentinel program. Jumping back and forth from these two events in time, we watch the future X-Men try as hard as they can to hold their defense, while Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) has to prevent all the pawns of their eventual destruction from falling into place.

While I'm more than aware of the narrative heavy-lifting this plot has to do before we can even get into the main points of its story, unfortunately the first third of the film gets to a wobbly start with achingly stilted, tech-jabber dialogue and blunt introductions to the characters and their vague future-world, all of which are too brief and glossed over to effectively build to an appropriate emotional connection. But once Jackman gets zapped into the 70s and we get the 411 on where our "First Class" heroes have been since the last movie, the pieces start to come together, slowly building towards a grand climax that’s just as good or even better than anything we've previously seen from the series.

While “Days of Future Past” occasionally feels pieced together from hunks of scripts that were torn from different drafts, rewritten by committee and reshaped in the editing room, about half of its movie-parts contain genuinely original superhero moments; most notably some great comedic action sequences with X-newbie Quicksilver (Evan Peters), where his speed powers are portrayed by showing us how he moves normally in the slowed-down world around him. X-Men mainstays such as Lawrence, Fassbender, McAvoy, and Jackman are just as reliable as we have come to expect and newcomers like Peter Dinklage,  who plays the mutant-phobic scientist Bolivar Trask, are given their own scenes to steal as well. Most of all, by the end of the film, however rocky it was to get there, it’s very gratifying to see the fruits bared from the franchise’s willingness to apologize for its past mediocrities.

Grade: B -
Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/June-2014

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire review

                Suzanne Collin’s “The Hunger Games”, both the book series and the film adaptations, have become a massive cultural touchstone, but what separates this phenomenon from other young-adult fiction successes is the fact that the protagonist is a strong and empowered female and the story surrounding her is considerably bleak and brutal, considering the readership. Science fiction of this dystopian type isn’t anything new or particularly original but it is certainly new to see a movie about institutionalized murder, genocide, government oppression, and fascistic propaganda presented in  such a tween-friendly, mall-theater way . Unfortunately this unique quality is both the most interesting and the most problematic thing about this franchise.

                Though this sequel, “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire”, does manage to address the suggested violence in a more meaningful way than its flaccid and poorly photographed predecessor, the limitations behind its marketing goals still hobbles the thematic reality behind the tale. More problematic, in order to maintain its soft-PG-13 rating, these films can never clearly decide when violence is ugly, when violence is justified, and when violence is just a plot device… And not to sound like a finger-wagging grown-up, but it disturbs me to know that the children watching these movies, who are being guided through the heroes journey in the safest narrative ways possible, will be subconsciously rooting for which kids they want to live and which kids they hope will die, not realizing that the story is about the pointlessness of all violence and the perversity of power.

                Picking right up where the last one left off, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) and Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) are touring the twelve impoverished districts as the newly promoted winners of the annual Hunger Games; you know, that most dangerous game where twenty four teenage contestants are forced to kill each other on camera until one survivor comes out on top as the lord of the flies. 

                After pretending to be lovers, in order to cheat their way into having a duel sponsorship by their evil government, President Snow (Donald Southerland) puts them back in the arena along with a selection of other past game winners, in order to destabilize their subversive victory and to reinstall fear within the viewing community.

                Director Frances Lawrence takes over this franchise with a sharp sense of where to augment or enhance the aesthetic example set by Gary Ross’s previous film. The camera work is much more confident, the sense of danger and urgency is increased, and the films political subtext about wealth disparity and revolution is treated more directly instead of incidentally. These attributes alone makes this sequel much better than the lackluster original from two years back.

                Yet, as a story, this film suffers greatly from middle-movie-syndrome. The plot begins at an awkward jumping on point and ends without any resolution or pay off. What we get instead is an overlong first and second act and a short battle before a twist is revealed and whole thing cuts off at an unsatisfying moment. I understand that there will be upcoming installments where these plot-points will eventually get ironed out but this isn’t a television show and films shouldn’t exist only to be transitional pieces. 

                So, like the first film, I suppose “Catching Fire” is a mixed bag. As a work of cinematic art, it’s more successful in some ways, but as a piece of storytelling it’s not as rewarding. Lawrence and the rest of the cast are serviceable—if not somewhat dampened by the overall joylessness of this mythology—and newcomers like Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the shady game technician and Jena Malone as a disgruntled ex-player are welcomed additions. Nevertheless, I can’t help but focus on what these films are never allowed to be and how that diminishes the overall power of its purpose.

Grade: C+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Dec-2013