Finding Dory review

“Finding Dory” is Pixar’s latest attempt at recapturing the magic of one of their flagship animated films. “Toy Story” managed to go back to the well twice, resulting in satisfying sequels that arguably eclipsed the original. On the other side of the spectrum they have “Cars 2;” a sequel nobody asked for, which managed to annoy non-child audiences even more than its predecessor. “Finding Dory” falls somewhere closer to that, even though, unlike “Cars,” 2003’s “Finding Nemo” was beloved by many and is still quoted and referenced to this day.

Ellen DeGeneres’ Dory, a blue fish with short-term memory-loss, was the quirky comedic relief of the first film and helped to offset the stern and humorless Clown fish Marlon (Albert Brookes) as they searched the ocean for his son Nemo. Here she now takes center-stage after having flashbacks of her childhood, becoming concerned with finding her parents and rediscovering her roots, of which she only has fragmented memories. Marlon reluctantly agrees to help her along the way before the two become separated and Dory is placed in quarantine tank at a California marina. There she meets an octopus named Hank with seven tentacles (Ed O’Neill), a near-sited whale named Caitlin (Kailin Olsen) and a beluga named Bailey with broken sonar (Ty Burrell).

There’s plenty to admire about this production and the animation is more rich and vibrant than we’ve seen from Pixar in a while. The ocean vistas are alive with all kinds of activity in each frame and Dory, along with the new characters in her adventure, are entertaining and humorous, but structurally, this story struggles to find a natural flow, often labored in clunky set-pieces that increasingly dares to break the audience’s suspension of disbelief. Director and co-writer Andrew Stanton find far too many cheats to get their ocean creatures out the water, with Dory spending much of the movie in a coffee bowl while Hank slithers her around their marina enclosure—an enclosure which seems to be fairly easy to escape from and, for some characters, is completely open to the ocean.

Believability aside, the characters suffer from a lack of clarity or specificity. The nature of Dory’s memory-loss, which has now been upgraded from a quirk to a plot-point, is inconsistent and the severity of which is often changed for jokes to land and for action sequences to work, which only undercuts the movie’s emotional themes about overcoming and transcending disability.  Poor Nemo and Marlon are given practically nothing to do in their piddling B-plot, which slogs its way an eventual convergence with Dory’s more-lively, if not somewhat ridiculous, A-plot.

The script feels unfinished and banal and the movie as a whole doesn’t justify its being made—other than Disney’s obvious cash-grabbing opportunity—but “Finding Dory” is still watchable. The voice talent helps to elevate the telegraphed jokes and the eye-rolling call-backs, and the animation, as previously mentioned, is gorgeous to look at. Pixar sets a high bar of excellence that both damns the films in their catalog that are merely mediocre while still shaming most their competitors, but I can’t help but consider this a missed opportunity.

Grade: C-

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Jun-25

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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

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The Nice Guys review

Shane Black’s hardboiled comedy “The Nice Guys” uses its 1970s Los Angeles setting to mirror the disillusionment of its masculine archetypes and to highlight a turning point in which people no-longer trusted their politicians. It also happens to be an amiable buddy caper in the tradition of Black’s similar screenplays such as “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” “The Last Boy Scout” and “Lethal Weapon.”

Russell Crowe plays Jackson Healy, a world-weary heavy for hire who’s looking to protect a young girl gone missing named Amelia. On his trek to punch out the seedy men who’re following her, he runs into Ryan Gosling as Holland March, a hapless private eye who’s been hired by an elderly woman, looking for a dead porn star who happens to resemble Healy’s client. When the two realize they have a common goal they decide to team up to find out what the connection is between their missing girl, city-wide scandal involving the adult film industry, the police, a dangerous group of hitmen and the LAPD. Holland’s precocious pre-teen daughter Holly tags along and turns out to be much more useful than the duo would have originally assumed.

Like other jokey private-eye mysteries, “The Nice Guys” uses common Raymond Chandler tropes such as too many characters, convoluted plots and multiple red-herrings and turns them into intentional aspects of the comedy. Similar to the Coen brother’s “The Big Lebowski” or Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of “Inherent Vice,” the plot is not the point, but merely a structure to support the characters, the larger themes and comedy set-pieces. Though not as idiosyncratic and instantly quotable as Lebowski or as ponderous and heady as “Inherent Vice,” Shane’s take on this kind of material is peppy and littered with his writerly fetishes.

The pairing of Crowe and Gosling never quite gels as the unlikely comedy duo we never knew we wanted but individually they are both good enough to carry the movie, even as their chemistry is obscured by their natural interiority as actors. Both of them are one hundred percent committed to the interpretation of their roles and they both do stellar work—Crowe in particular is better here than we have seen from him in a while—but in scenes where they are meant to exchange quick banter and snappy conversational dialogue, rather than acting off of each other they seem to be acting next to each other. Angourie Rice as the young Holly surprisingly becomes the glue that holds them together and becomes the heart of the film, symbolizing the moral center of this story about bottomless corruption and impotent protest.

Despite its muffled impact as a comedy, by the end I was romanced by the film’s thematic goals and was eventually invested in the lives of its characters.  “The Nice Guys” is not as fresh or vibrant as the movies it will remind you of—particularly those in Black’s filmography—but it’s confidently made and a good time at the theater nonetheless. The 70s production design is effective and immersive and there’s enough hardy chuckles to justify its failings.

Grade: B-

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/May-2016

The Darkness review

Blumhouse Productions has defined their brand by creating low to mid budget haunted house thrillers that essentially combine the same elements from “The Shining,” “The Poltergeist” and “The Exorcist.” James Wan, so far, has embraced this style of pop horror filmmaking most successfully with his “Insidious” pairing and the “The Conjuring.”  Scott Derrickson’s “Sinister” had its moments as well and “The Purge” films seem to have a consistent draw that perplexes me. Most of Blumhouse’s other output has been spotty and it’s become all the more apparent that their formula is rapidly becoming stale. Their latest “Poltergeist” rip off, “The Darkness,” is just as lazy and bland as the title suggests.

Kevin Bacon and Radha Mitchell play Peter and Bronny Taylor, the parents of a dysfunctional American family—Mitchell is a recovered alcoholic and Bacon once had an affair. Their children consist of a pre-teen boy named Michael (David Mazouz) who lives with a form low-functioning autism and their seventeen-year-old daughter Stephany (Lucy Fry) has body image issues.  Shortly after a trip to the Grand Canyon, where Michael found and secretly brought home some ancient Anasazi artifacts, the family is slowly tormented by a dark presence in their home. Michael’s idiosyncrasies have become more violent and disturbing as everyone else in the house has experienced the psychological terror of strange noises, dirty hand prints, weird smells, barking dogs and self-starting water faucets.  

Forget for a moment that the movie’s handling of Native American culture and the subject of autism is surprisingly regressive, it’s also presented in a way that’s painfully boring and completely without entertainment value. It’s becomes clear that the filmmakers struggled to find any real moments of tension or fear in this lifeless slog and instead tried to make up for its lack of real scares with an annoyingly manipulative score, full of random jolts and ineffective moodiness. Bacon and Mitchell are trying their best to take this insipid, underwritten material seriously and guest star Paul Reiser, as Bacon’s misogynist boss, is trying his hardest to not take it seriously, but even when the character moments occasionally slips into “When a Man Loves a Woman” it’s undercut by the hapless shlock of the rest of the movie and transformed into unintentional Lifetime melodrama.  

Mazous, known by most as young Bruce Wayne on television’s “Gotham,” is given nothing to do here and his performance of a person with a real and complex condition is played with the seriousness of an after-school special. Hell, even the blatant transphobia of the first “Sleepaway Camp,” was at least shocking and audacious, even if a bit dated by today’s standards. Both the story’s autism angle—how are parents supposed to tell the difference between normal-weird and possessed by ancient Native spirts-weird—as well as the production’s Anasazi stylistics are never exploited in way that registers above cliché and tired.

At one point a large dog suddenly attacks the daughter in her bed. That was kind of cool.

It’s hard to say what went wrong here. Director Greg McLean made of my favorite modern horror films with the Aussie serial killer thriller “Wolfe Creek” but none of the style or the simmering tension of that project is transferred into this PG-13, overblown “Goosebumps” book. The shoddy screenplay isn’t helping anyone and the movie’s clear and direct influences loom large in sullen judgement. 

Grade - D

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/May-2016

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Captain America: Civil War review

Whether it’s “Batman v Superman” or Hillary v Bernie or Trump v the eventual democratic nominee, this has been a year of highly publicized, clashing ideologies. Marvel’s “Captain America: Civil War” is based on a 2008 run of “Avengers” comics about a government plan to register superheroes to end vigilantism. The fictional law split the team down the middle and for six or so issues the heroes fought on different sides of the issue. This film takes the bones of that premise and carries over the “choose your side” marketing hook, playing into the vaguely political, red verses blue temperature of this year’s election cycle. The movie itself, however, isn’t nearly as divisive or as politically minded as even the comic presented said dispute and instead settles into the usual action blockbuster, good guy/ bad guy stuff that easier to tell and, of course, easier to sell.

After the Avengers botched a rescue mission in Africa and one of their own, Scarlett Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), is held responsible for the failure to psychically contain an explosion, the U.S government presents the group with a new global initiative to have every member contracted with the government. Steve Rogers/Captain America (Chris Evans) sees the Sokkovia Accords as a possible hindrance to the team’s overall effectiveness and rightfully doesn’t want to The Avengers or any other super-team become militarized. Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) feels guilty about the mass destruction involved in taking down aliens, gods and sentient robots and agrees that it’s better for the team to play ball. They fight. And hey, Marvel has the rights to Spider-Man now, so he fights too.

Joe and Anthony Russo, the same team who brought us the considerably better “Captain America: Winter Soldier,” presents superhero material with a certain amount of gravitas and grit that lacks in most of the other Marvel films. Through the first half of the movie, while they set up their chess pieces on their narrative board, the seeds of an interesting and emotionally satisfying political-ish thriller are promised. Bucky Barns/Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan) may or may not have turned back to the dark side, T’Challa/Black Panther is looking for retribution after losing his father during the movie’s inciting incident, and the other team members, such as Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), War Machine (Don Cheadle), Falcon (Anthony Mackie) and Vision (Paul Bettany) all have interesting and compelling reasons for choosing the sides they fight for. That’s why it’s all the more deflating when the movie forgets to pay off or conclude any of the previous threads of this grounded Boun-esque thriller and slides comfortably into blockbuster auto-pilot for the final third, when the Russos grab their action figures and clack them together in a big, silly fight. Whatever resolution we do get is merely there to set up a future sequel and the battle of ideologies presented in the initial Civil War concept is somewhat easily resolved.

Reservation’s aside, before the story reveals all its cards and before the narrative tension is eased, this movie is pretty damn satisfying and is still somewhat sophisticated for the genre. As with any Avengers team-up flick—and make no mistake, this is an Avengers film through and through— there’s a lot of characters to keep track of and a lot of plates to keep spinning, and in that regard “Captain America: Civil War,” while less consistent, is substantially better than the previous Avengers adventures. The plot gives up two thirds in, and Spider-Man is shoe-horned in for pandering, fan-baiting reasons (full disclosure: I took the bait and it tastes pretty good) but it can’t be ignored that this installment contains some of Marvel’s most impactful action scenes and strongest performances yet.

Grade: B-

Originally written for The Idaho State Journal/May-2016

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Keanu review

Keegan Michael Key and Jordan Peele have been responsible for a smart and topical breed of socially aware comedy since their days as cast members on the now-defunct sketch comedy show Mad TV. Later, on their eponymously named Comedy Central sketch show “Key and Peele,” they were given the means and freedom to bring their ideas about race, identity, and class to the forefront, with a poignancy that elevated their knack for quotable line-delivery, over-the-top characters and impressive production values.  Now, with their first movie as a duo, “Keanu,” they’ve ported over a lot of the qualities that people expect and appreciate from their brand of humor but not without some noticeable growing-pains as they transition into feature filmmaking.

“Keanu” straddles the line between incisive satire and stoner zaniness and sometimes loses itself in the mediation of both attempts. In what’s the pretty basic framework of a plot—dorky suburban cousins have to pretend to be tough to get a kitten back from a neighboring Los Angeles gang—this premise allows for the duo to further explore their interest in themes such as racial identity, code-switching and the pressure African Americans have to perform masculinity in certain ways.  In the opening of the film we see Jordan Peele’s Rell as a sad-sack lay-about photographer who has recently been dumped by his girlfriend. Posters of famous gangster flicks such as “Heat” and “New Jack City” line his apartment walls. His cousin Clarence (Key) is an uptight corporate team builder and is currently being pressured by his wife to toughen up and break a few rules, as his carefulness is an apparent turn-off. It’s these character traits that are subverted through the film as the characters encounter a real gang leader named Cheddar (Method Man) and infiltrate his group of hard killers, taking to the streets to sling a new party drug.  

Did I also mention the movie’s MacGuffin is an adorable tabby kitten, who, at one point, wears an adorable gold chain and a tiny, adorable do-rag? The kitten is in stark contrast to the hyper-masculine world these gangsters inhabit, as well as the film’s many Jon Woo inspired shoot-outs.  These sorts juxtapositions makeup the screenplay’s comedic engine. Another version of this inversion is the George Michael soundtrack and the many jokes surrounding Clarence’s unabashed love of the famously-out-gay, pop-star of the ‘80s. In a one of the more successful comedy set-pieces, Clarence convinces his new gangster brethren that George Michael is a light-skinned thug who offed his former Wham! partner before embarking on his solo-career. This is crosscut between a downright nerve-racking scene where Rell is caught in a sleazy Hollywood hotel room where drug-deal just gone horribly wrong. This back and forth between the world of the white and the world of black and what is seen as acceptable masculinity and what as seen as weakness is at the heart of what makes this comedy mostly work. Where things fall apart is in the vagueness of the characters as they’re written.

Much of the movie only works as a premise, much like sketch. We know Clarence is a corporate dork and his wife wants him to act stronger only because we are told so in a few bits of brief dialogue before the plot quickly progresses beyond that. Likewise, Rell’s fascination with gangster movies and hard-life as a fantasy is also never explicitly defined. Because their characters are more archetypal their arcs within the story are sometimes difficult to track and the jokes often rely on easy visual gags to make up for the lack of specificity within the script. As the movie stomps through its plot the action-film parody aspect begins to swallow-up the tone, resulting in long stretches of screen time were things become more manic than funny.

While “Keanu” is a commendable effort and entertaining on a base-level, it’s overall impression is slight when stacked against its thematic goals. Key and Peele’s comedic chemistry and the film’s few comedic eccentricities help to keep things light and bouncy and the movie serves as a satisfying distraction, but I can’t help but see through to the smarter, edgier satire that’s begging to break through.    

Grade: B-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/May-2016

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Jungle Book review

Disney’s reboot/remake of their 1967 classic animated film “The Jungle Book” is a rare achievement, in that it pays lip-service to the most iconic beats of the original feature, while still finding a way of presenting the material without becoming all-together tired and superfluous. Jon Favreau, the character actor turned director of such blockbusters as Marvel’s “Iron Man” and the Christmas comedy “Elf,” has taken on the task of putting this digital IKEA piece together, working within an almost entirely animated environment and using hardly any live-action sets or actors.  This working method of course demands a lot of trust with his crew and the post-production effects team to ensure that his vision, whatever it may be, is represented accurately, and with a multi-million-dollar budget and a small army collaborating to make it work, any number of things can snag on the process. Luckily, things seem to have gone well enough here to bring what is essentially a safe and non-offensive retelling of a slightly better movie.

Neel Sethi gives the only live performance as Mowgli, an orphaned human child who was saved at birth by a black panther named Bagheera (Ben Kingsley). The cat then leaves the boy with a pack of wolves to raise as one of their own cubs, which upsets a tyrannical Tiger names Shere Kahn (Idris Elba) who fears the child might serve as a danger to the Jungle and its current political landscape. It becomes apparent that Mowgli is drawing too much unwanted attention to the pack from Kahn and he offers to leave the forest to be with his own kind in a nearby village. On the way, he is separated from his panther chaperone and falls into the easy life with a lazy bear named Baloo (Bill Murray), nearly escapes a slithering soothsayer named Kaa (Scarlett Johansson) and is trapped by a massive orangutan mobster named King Loui (Christopher Walken).  

There aren’t enough risks taken with this project to be proud of its sustainability as a story, but there’s just enough love and passion put into the production effort to accept its purely corporate purpose for existing. The animal animation is convincing and the CGI jungle environments are beautifully rendered. The team involved did a wonderful job creating a digitally sculpted world that has weight and tactility and Sethi is able to interact with it seamlessly. The celebrity voice cast is given updated dialogue to work with and they all fit their parts well. Murray’s Baloo is warm and inviting and Elba’s Kahn is genuinely intimidating—in an age appropriate, Disney sort of way.

The plot is familiar but it’s comfortable in its own skin and moves naturally. Though largely inspired by the 60s animated feature, the few divergences it takes seem to be cued directly from Disney’s other jungle adventure, The Lion King, and the two stories share enough structural similarities to mix without complications. Sometimes the movie is confused as to whether or not it should include the iconic musical sequences of its predecessor, and most of the it doesn’t, which only makes it all the more awkward when a song or two is attempted without the musical foundation to lay them on. Outside of that hang-up “The Jungle Book” plays like a good time a community theater production of your favorite play – it’s doesn’t have the zest or originality of its reference point, but it’s an acceptable and faithful recreation.

Grade - B- 

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/April-2016

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