Boyhood review

                 Since emerging from and headlining the indie film explosion of the early ‘90s, Austin Texas director Richard Linklater has never been content to stay in familiar territory, constantly pushing himself into unexplored and challenging storytelling avenues. While contemporaries such as Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith were defining their brand and building a devoted fanbase on genre familiarity, Linklater strove to try new things and ignore all expectations.  Later on when he would occasionally make a mainstream comedy like “School of Rock,” in the context of his wildly diverse career even that felt like formal experiment to make a movie in direct opposition to his interest in narrative stream-of-consciousness, displayed in films such as “Slacker” and “Waking Life.”

                With this in mind, it seems only fitting that Linklater would be using his off-time between the  shoots of his regular film schedules to whittle away at a 12 year passion project, documenting the growth and the age of the same cast around the malleable blueprint of a plot. “Boyhood,” in many ways, is the ultimate thesis of Linklater’s formal interests in storytelling and character examination through means of pure cinema. Of course, all of this would mean a whole lot of nothing if it weren’t also emotionally engaging, brutally honest and surprisingly funny.

                On the surface this film tells the story of Mason (Ellar Coltrane), a Texas-born child named named Mason (Ellar Coltrane) as hewho transitions from childhood to manhood, starting at age six when the production began in 2002 and ending with his move to college in 2014. Certainly, the movie’s center of consciousness is with Mason and he's our emotional conduit through the broader story of his broken family (and to a greater extent, the condition of post-911 Americana). But it is within the journey of his formative years that the lives of his parents also play out in subtle complexity.  After a rocky divorce his mother, played by Patricia Arquette, goes back to college to make a better living for Mason and his older sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater), and his father, played by Ethan Hawk, also makes his transition from deadbeat struggling musician to accepting eventual responsibility.  Each story interweaves and informs the other, creating a breathy, yet dense emotional tapestry of modern suburban angst.

                By casting a six year old unknown and hoping that he would appropriately age into the role, Linklater gambled on the entirety of the film’s artistic success on this actor, and luckily for him the experiment pays off without ever feeling like a needless gimmick or publicity stunt.  Earlier on  Coltrane's performace is interior and quietly effecting, oftentimes letting the louder characters in his scenes shape his on screen personality through contrast. As he grows the character slowly exposes a firmer identity and develops from a cypher of our own nostalgia into having his own distinct perspective and intellectual agency. Both Ethan Hawk and Patricia Arquette are better here than they may have ever been before and, impressively, they sustain their performance over the long period, infusing their characters with the natural growth they have accumulated both as actors and as people. Simply put, they ‘act’ real, and the significant trick that the movie plays on the audience is that after a while you stop thinking about production’s logistics.

                Almost a formal cousin to Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise” trilogy, this film is interested in the deep exploration of character through dialogue, social milieu, and scenic rhythms in editing that outlines the passage of time.  Because of the purposely fluid nature of the plot—oftentimes avoiding the kinds of traditional conceits and beats of more rigorously written coming of age dramas—“Boyhood” may alienate some audiences hoping for the excitement of rising tensions, the exuberance of an underlined ‘ah-ha’ moment, or the comfort of resolution.  What you get instead is a teenage life lived in all its messy and glorious intricacies.

Grade: A-

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Aug-2014

A Million Ways to Die in the West review

                 Seth McFarlane has created a brand of comedy full of endless in-jokes, references, and absurdist asides that have cemented his popular animated sitcoms like” Family Guy” and “American Dad” as the “Simpsons” for the ADHD generation.  Last year his first feature “Ted”, about a foul-mouthed magic teddy bear voiced by McFarlane himself, proved for many that his raunchy non-sequitur style of humor could play just as well in a long-form three act structure. But underneath all his frat-bro bravado and his edgy envelope pushing, McFarlane is a traditional genre enthusiast. Like Matt Stone and Trey Parker of “South Park”, he writes a lot of his own music, he’s a Broadway song-and-dance geek, and the majority of his best jokes owe everything to the classic Hollywood references he liberally pulls from.

                Unlike “Ted”, which I found to be mildly funny when it wasn’t being obnoxiously sexist and homophobic,  “A Million Ways to Die in the West” has a slightly better sense of consistency and engaging storytelling, without having to sell out the dignity of his characters for a joke.  Moreover, it seems to celebrate its comedic influences—specifically the western parodies of the ‘70s such as “Three Amigos”,and even more specifically “Blazing Saddles”—in a way that projects a fanboy-ish glee built from feely-good memories of McFarlane’s youth.  And like an excited fanboy, Seth occasionally puts the minutia cart in front of his comedic horse and struggles to find the balance between his usual bawdy humor and the innocent joy for the genres he’s sending up.

                McFarlane plays Albert, an awkward sheep farmer who feels alienated from the dangerous lifestyle led by the other cowboys during the 1860s wild wild west. His girlfriend Louise (Amanda Seyfried) has just left him for a mustachioed dandy named Foy (Neil Patrick Harris), leading Albert to stupidly schedule a duel with his enemy without having any knowledge of how to shoot a gun. Luckily, his new mysterious friend Anna (Charlize Theron), the secret wife of a traveling Bandit played by Liam Neeson, helps prepare him for the worst by teaching him the basics of gunplay while at the same time unpacking his guarded masculinity.

                From the opening credits, accompanied by an original song by the director himself, it becomes obvious that this film is meant to be a throwback to a simpler style of spoof comedy, and for the most part, as a story, the movie moves easily and without much narrative fuss. Unlike his cartoons, McFarlane tempers his urge to jump to asides and tangents and admirably keeps the story about his characters and their—admittedly cliché—motivations.  Uncharacteristically, rather than trying to build a story around a pile of pre-written jokes, as is usually the Seth McFarlane way, it’s the comedy in the film that’s often forced and, at times, poorly integrated. What results is about a 40% laugh to joke ratio.  Neil Patrick Harris steals every scene he’s in and there are a handful of visual gags that inspire a decent chuckle—that is if the movie’s trailer didn’t already spoil them for you—but just as many gags fall flat and sometimes Seth’s pandering to the  lowest common denominator peeks through, especially in a series sorely unfunny sequences featuring Giovanni Rabisi as Albert’s virginal best friend and his prostitute girlfriend played by a wasted Sarah Silverman, whose making him wait for their wedding night.   

                Though this film will eventually find a life in mid-afternoon cable programming, “A Million Ways to Die in the West” is a well-intended mixed bag. McFarlane’s natural confidence and good looks slightly miscasts him as a believable nebbish, but he has genuine on- screen chemistry with Theron and I would love to watch these two in a classical Hollywood musical parody someday (come on Seth, you know you want to). Ultimately, this comedy is more fun than it is funny. 

Grade: C+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/June-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 Amazing Spider-Man 2 review

                 Expectations of Marc Webb’s sequel to Sony’s successful 2012 Spider-Man reboot was  perhaps insurmountable. For some, the first film that was released only five years after Sam Raimi’s generation defining trilogy, satisfied what people wanted to see with the continuation of this superhero staple. For others (including this reviewer) despite having a terrific cast, the film lacked a unique point of view and the obvious rush to re-launch the series made for a somewhat competent but mostly tepid rehash of over-cooked Spidey-lore.

                You might think that now that the pesky origin story has been tediously reestablished, this anticipated sequel would be allowed the narrative freedom to further explore Webb's new interpretation of this timeless character and the cinematic universe he inhabits. But what we end up getting with this installment is a manic tangle of incongruent plot threads fighting for screen-time in an overlong, over-stylized disaster of a movie that's been marred by invasive studio-notes.  

                This movie has about six different movies going on at any one time, but most prominently we follow Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) as he's reeling from guilt by ignoring the dying wishes of his girlfriend’s father, and continuing to put Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) in harm’s way simply by dating her.  This then leads him to break things off with her to further his personal investigation surrounding his father’s mysterious death. The unfinished genetic research that surrounded this mystery is now being exploited by Oscorp’s new CEO, Peter’s childhood friend Harry Osborn (Dane DeHaan). Harry plans to use the radiated spider venom to treat his body against the same genetic disease that killed Norman.  Unbenounced to Harry or Peter, or Gwen who still works for the secretive lab, the company has an insidious strategy behind this new science.

                You might think that’s enough story for one movie, but wait, there’s more! An awkwardly pitched Jamie Foxx plays a geeky disgruntled lab-tech with an unhealthy obsession towards Spider-Man. After an unfortunate accident at Plotcorp--I mean Oscorp—which apparently has an alarming track record of unsettling accidents involving staff, visitors and its proprietors, Foxx is then transformed into a translucent energy being called Electro. Can Spider-Man defeat him, while keeping Gwen from moving to London? Will she give up her dreams of becoming a super-scholar at Oxford and continue to put herself in danger in New York?  In only five minutes can Peter convince the audience that he and Harry have a believable, preexisting best-friend relationship? Can director Marc Webb figure out a way to make anyone still care about anything dealing with Peter's stupid dead father?  Can Spider-Man save danger-addicted children from Paul Giamatti as he marches the streets in giant, Rhino-shaped mech-suit? Wait, the Rhino’s in this movie too!? *Sigh*

                Despite a half-way decent love story between the real-life couple of Garfield and Stone, the rest of the movie is an over-crowded step latter where scenes seem to only exist to set up other scenes--half of which can’t even be resolved until the next sequel. Tonally, the movie oscillates between post-Twilight angst, superhero action movie spectacle, and campy Saturday morning silliness that clangs against the film’s more somber moments of sincerity. 

                “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” is without a doubt an undisciplined, compromised affair, and the story suffers greatly from Sony’s desperation to catch up with the long-form world-building of Disney’s Marvel-Universe epics, but when Webb is able to slow the action down enough to let his characters actually breath, they momentarily expose a beating heart underneath all of the movie’s overbearing aesthetics and the screenplay’s stifling mechanics.

 Grade: C-

Originally published by Idaho State Journal/May-2014