The Girl on the Train review

Tate Taylor’s adaptation of Paula Hawkins best-selling crime novel “The Girl on the Train” owes much of its intended style and tone to David Fincher’s much more interesting take on Airport pulp “Gone Girl,” but unlike that film, which took many risks and was able to carefully balance icy sensuality with pitch-black cynicism, this sleepy thriller never quite marries its objectives between the narrative, the themes and its genre conventions.  Given all of these obvious shortcomings, lead actress Emily Blunt still manages ride the bumbling vehicle in a way that, at the very least, allows her to showcase her dramatic range.

The story focuses on the broken life and the fractured memories of Blunt’s character Rachel. Erin Cressenda Wilson’s adaptation of Hawkins’ novel decides to tells the story in a similarly non-linear way, emulating Rachel’s foggy recollection of the past events within the plot. The screenplay purposely withholds information or gives us false memories to obscure the later reveals. What we know early on is that Rachel is a hard-drinking alcoholic still reeling from a divorce with a man named Tom (Justin Theroux), who’s recently remarried and had a child with his younger mistress Anna (Rebecca Ferguson). Unable to get over their failed marriage and her inability to bear a child for her former husband, Rachel rides a train past their old home every day to see the progression of Tom and Anna’s new life. One day while pining for her past she witnesses her former neighbor Megan (Haley Bennett) kissing a strange man on an outdoor balcony, only a few days before Megan herself goes missing. This makes a Rachel a lead suspect because of her history with being seen around her ex’s property uninvited. In getting closer to Megan’s worried and cuckholded husband (Luke Evans) this event also invigorates Rachel into solving the case to both exonerate her and to bring closure to her messy past.

This movie has some very interesting things to say about women’s relationship with their domestic lives, in terms of what they’re ‘supposed’ to be as a wife, a lover, a fantasy, a mother and modern careerist. The film posits that most of these identities are unfairly defined by the expectations of men and that a woman’s fully formed identity and a true sense of absolution can only be achieved by realizing their life outside of the confines of a traditional marital paradigm. Blunt and the other leads in the cast do well to underline these themes with their performances and they help to carry the feature through its many weighty scenes, but the slowly accumulating structure of the plot never truly satisfies as the brooding whodunit mystery it wants (and needs) to be.

This unconventional take on the neurotic detective, the unreliable narrator and the Hitchcockian wrong-(wo)man protagonist should have crackled more than Taylor’s lilting direction allows for. Taylor borrows style from many sources but never synthesizes them in a way that supports the narrative elements or its boiler-plate genre surprises. What could have been a dark satire about the American domestic fairytale—the angle Fincher’s “Gone Girl” already mastered—or what could have been a suburban “Silence of the Lambs” feminist mystery ends up being a suffocated character study that sacrificing its pop sensibilities for an air of safe and unearned prestige.

For a Lifetime movie writ large “The Girl on the Train” has moments and individual scenes that highlights nuances performances, as well as some thoughtful set design, but the film is so concerned with its rainy tone and its structural juggling that it’s never in conversation with the audience. The result is a somewhat flat and edgeless piece of fast-food filmmaking that can’t sell the shocking reveals it depends on.

Grade: C-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Oct-2016

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "The Girl on the Train."

Magnificent Seven (2016) review

Antione Fuqua’s reworking of the classic 1960 western “The Magnificent Seven” neither challenges or ruins the original’s winning formula. Of course by original we have to speak in general terms, as the initial version of this story was first told as Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 Japanese action film “Seven Samurai,” and that epic's plot, about a rag-tag group of rogue mercenaries who help a small village/town of farmers defend their property from a murderous group of thieves, has been an oft-utilized source of cinematic inspiration over the following decades. The first American version spawned a few sequels of its own, was remade as a TV mini-series in 1998 and Pixar’s “A Bug’s Life” even took a stab at the same story structure.

 Denzel Washington plays the grizzled hit-man Chisolm. On his way through the west to find a bounty he's hired by a grief-stricken young girl named Emma Cullen (Haley Bennett) after she watched her brother get shot down by an evil thief named Bartholomew Brogue and his group of well-armed cronies. Knowing how outnumbered and outgunned they will be, Chisolm collects the best gun-men and criminals he knows to help the town prepare for an all-out war. This group includes Chris Pratt as the mouthy trickster Josh Faraday, Ethan Hawke the ex-confederate sniper Goodnight Robicheaux, South Korean superstar Byung-hun Lee as Robicheaux’s knife-wielding bodyguard Billy Rocks, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as the wanted-man Vasquez, Martin Sensmeier as the deadly Native American warrior Red Harvest and Vincent D’Onofrio as the jittery, mountain man spiritualist Jack Horne.

The movie does a good job at distinguishing all of these different characters and allowing for enough breath and space between the shoot-outs to get to know the ensemble and understand their contrasting dynamics as a team. Denzel is commanding as their sturdy leader and helps to support the more idiosyncratic players in the cast. While Pratt, Hawke and Washington get the most to chew on the others do well with their limited screen time, even if much of the cast barely develops past their archetypes, but with such an archetypal story, these broad choices function well within the limitations of the mechanics of the plot.

Given Fuqua’s history in action filmmaking and urban-based crime thrillers such as “Training Day,” “Bait” and “Equalizer,” less racial stereotypes than the 1960 version and brings more diversity to the cast, commenting ever so slightly on America’s moral growing pains after the civil-war. But the picture exists primarily as a piece of consequence-free, pop-western entertainment that’s generally more interested in being cool than clever.  Here Fuqua evokes not only the original “Magnificent Seven” but also the blunt ultra-violence of Sam Peckinpah’s the “The Wild Bunch,” occasional flashes of Sergio Leone’s expressive Spaghetti Western style, and the post-modern irony of Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained.”

As a pastiche the end result is successful as visceral film experience but a bit empty as a comment on the genre or the movie’s it pays homage to. Luckily that Kurosawa structure is rock solid and can support just about any interpretation, so long as the cast is interesting and the director is capable. In the case of this iteration of “The Magnificent Seven” both of those boxes have been checked the job has been fulfilled adequately even if it doesn’t go above or beyond the parameters of the assignment.

Grade: B-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Oct-2016

Sully review

Both as an actor and as a director, Clint Eastwood has explored his fascination with the conflicted hero narrative. World weary and downtrodden seems to be the resting constitution of most of his protagonists and their stories usually test their personal doubts with a greater conflict that effects the good of their environments. In this year’s “Sully” Tom Hanks takes on this position as the real life commercial airplane pilot Captain Chesley Sullenberger, who in 2009 safely landed an American Airlines jet of 155 passengers along the surface of the Hudson river with no casualties. The story caught the aged, life-long pilot in the middle of a media storm where he and his co-pilot Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart) was crowned heroes by many, while simultaneously enduring pressure and scrutiny by the organization investigating the crash.  

Using Sully’s tested psychosis as the story’s framing device, much of the story is told in flashback, as well as the occasional PTSD-induced nightmare sequence. Hanks plays Sully with a lot of insular angst and quietude and uses his eyes to convey his character’s discomfort and mounting self-doubt. It’s not a particularly showy performance and it leans further into Hanks’ transition into that of a senior performer. Eckhart is then given more room to be vocal and expressive about the nature of their character’s odd position within the media and their stressful behind-the-scenes case.  

The film is also interested in the notion of experienced intuition verses blind empiricism, as the board of investigators keep telling both pilots that every simulation demonstrates that they should have been able to safely make it back to the tarmac without risking a dangerous water-landing (as well as destroying expensive company equipment.) This argument, as presented by the film, could be read as a condemnation of expert analysis and a celebration of blue-collar, folksy instinct but the conclusion to this case wisely factors in human experience and emotional error as a variable itself, saving the picture from slipping too far into an anti-science, finger-wagging appeal to the viewer’s emotions.

 The special effects and the flight recreations are both familiar to the experience of flying and the fear that comes with its risks.  The daydreams and nightmare sequences are  realistic and spiked with harrowing 9/11 imagery, which ties in subtly with New York and America’s exaltation of Sully’s rescue landing.

“Sully” is a competent drama. Hanks is a professional, Eastwood knows exactly how to tell this story and the screenplay aims low enough for both of them to hit their intended marks. If the film does have a flaw it’s Todd Komarnicki’s successful but safe adaptation of Sullenberger’s book “Highest Duty.” Kormarnicki tries to weave in Sully’s past as a war pilot and crop duster to show his experience and his relationship with the air, but that gesture is never really paid off or integrated well enough to fully inform the character or the plot. While studied and precise, the screenplay lacks the amount of narrative ambition it needed to propel the picture from good actor’s showcase to being truly great film.

Grade: B

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal - Sep/2016

Kubo and the Two Strings review

Laika studios, the animation studio based in Portland Oregon, has built its brand recognition on a style of detail oriented and highly stylized stop-motion puppetry. Their features, “Coraline,” “ParaNorman,” and “The Boxtrolls,” have primarily catered to the same audience who followed “Coraline” director Henry Selick from Disney’s “A Nightmare Before Christmas,” which shares a similar gothy aesthetic. In contrast, Laika’s latest project “Kubo and the Two Strings” is less interested in introverted protagonists and macabre dark comedy and is more concerned with widening the scope and visual boundaries of their storytelling with an eastern-themed, mythic adventure.

The film interweaves an intricate story-within-a-story that purposely blurs the lines between depictions of imagination and actual magic. The movie follows the multi-faceted coming of age of Kubo (voiced by Art Parkinson), a young boy who lost an eye as an infant and who lives with his mother on the top of a Japanese mountain that overlooks a small village. His shut-in mother encourages him to mingle with the others during the daytime hours, but warns her son to return home before dark. While visiting, he relays the bits and pieces of his mother’s stories/memories for the townsfolk in the form of origami puppet shows, created and directed by the music of his rudimentary three-stringed guitar. One day after staying out too late, Kubo is visited by his mother’s evil sisters (voiced by Rooney Mara) who wish to claim him as their own. Their sudden arrival forces the boy into perusing an Odyssey to find three pieces of a magic armor. Once collected he hopes to destroy the evil Moon King; the mysterious and dark magician who’s most likely responsible for his mother’s sudden disappearance. In her place, Kubo is joined by an enchanted and overly-protective Monkey (Charlize Theron) and a charming Beetle samurai (Mathew McConaughey) with a lot of hard-headed courage.

Fans of Japanese entertainment will likely see in “Kubo” shades of the sensitive fantasies that Hayao Miazaki produced with Studio Gibli, as well the airy and patient pacing of Japan’s classic edo-period action cinema. Elements of the plot also recalls the structure and archetypal symbolism of “The Wizard of Oz.”

The animation exhibited here is by far the most ambitious and expansive work we’ve seen from Laika thus far, and the movie’s camera technique and its consideration of the frame allows for wider shots and wilder pans and zooms than previously implemented in their painstaking form of animation. On a technical level, It’s nearly impossible not to give into director Travis Knight’s vision, even if the ending is clumsy and screenplay’s vague mythology sometimes muddles its themes.

This story is interested in familial legacy, adopted communities, and what it’s like to grow up without a sense of personal history, while simultaneously trying to overcome an unwanted path set before you, but the film sometimes struggles in tying all of these ideas together in succinct and assured way. The team behind this project surly deserves much praise for creating a product for children that is thoughtful and contemplative while also beautifully crafted and creatively art-directed. With that said, admiration doesn’t always translate into a full immersion. “Kubo and the Two Strings” is a significant progression for this studio and it’s more than worthy of your attention but as a story it merely nudges the shoulders of greatness.

Grade: B

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal - Sep/2016

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "Kubo and the Two Strings."

Don't Breathe review

“Don’t Breathe” is exactly the kick in the neck that extreme horror needs right now. Fede Alvarez’s new thriller cleverly plays with expectations and tropes within the home-invader genre but it never loses sight of its own momentum, creating a vivid cinematic world of its own within a deliberately designed, claustrophobic setting.  The movie makes a lot of allusions to classic shockers of the past, such as Wes Craven’s “Last House on the Left” and Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs,” as well as scene elements and direct imagery from “Silence of the Lambs,” and “Cujo.” Conceptually, this film is basically a reverse version of the 1967 Audrey Hepburn, Alan Arkin thriller “Wait Until Dark.” But even as those obvious sign posts are visible for the cinefiles in the audience “Don’t Breathe” slams around with enough of its own moves and creative WTF moments to justify its many obvious appropriations.

The story’s set-up is pretty simple; three up-to-no-good, Detroit 20-somethings stake out the home of a blind ex-military man (Stephen Lang) who’s sitting on 300,000 dollars of settlement money after losing his only daughter in a car accident. Rocky (Jane Levy), Alex (Dylan Minnette) and their gun-toting gangster-wannabe frenemy Money (Daniel Zovatto) all hope to use this small fortune to give up their criminal lives and move out west to California, where they can escape their family problems and the general angst of Midwestern, industrial poverty.  Of course, once they break into the house of their mark things don’t go as they had planned.  As it turns out, the blind veteran and his vicious Rottweiler are much more prepared for the occasion than our delinquent protagonists had originally anticipated.

Those with a weak stomach and mild psychological constitution should be warned that this movie serves a pretty strong cup of coffee. Alvarez knows how to wait the appropriate time to strike and he patiently earns his gore, but when the rubber hits the road he doesn’t hold back when it comes to his depictions of blunt violence and seat-squirming shock sequences. In fact, half of the picture’s strength comes from its build up and anticipation towards these moments. This director also never forgets how to structure a scene and uses his wandering camera to layout the architecture of each set-piece so the audience can get a true sense of where everyone is and how hard or easy it should be for them to escape. The best cat and mouse films know that good chase scenes are most effective when they fully incorporate their setting, and in that sense, Lang’s creaky, three-level home becomes another character in the film.

As the movie’s introduces its principle players the dialogue can be stiff and some of the characterizations are at times too broad and archetypal but the actors usually are able pick up the screenplay’s slack in those departments. Things get significantly better once we get into the meat of the break-in. Alvarez revels in the mechanics of his suspense and the cinematic elements of horror as pop entertainment. He loves to pull the strings tight on his scenes and loves to pull the rug out from under the audience, and though the film’s use of sound is especially important here—given that the antagonist is blind—the movie never defaults to the overuse of cheap, quiet-quiet-loud jack in the box scares.

After a summer of misfiring popcorn fare, “Don’t Breathe” is the perfect mean-spirited antidote to start the fall season. It’s unpretentious and unencumbered, and more importantly, it understands the appeal of the genre it’s playing in and knows how to confidently execute it with practical style and craftsmanship.

Grade: B+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal-Sep/2016

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "Don't Breathe."

Sausage Party review

Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s raunchy animated feature “Sausage Party” certainly doesn’t lack audaciousness when it comes to pushing technical boundaries. While it’s not the first of its kind in terms of feature length animated films with adult humor, it is the first to utilize the size and scope of Dreamworks and Pixar’s three-dimensional style. Directors Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon both come from animation backgrounds, and that certainly helps to facilitate Rogen and Goldberg’s vision of a colorful grocery store where food items learn the harsh realities of their place in the circle of life. The ambition of this project is impossible to ignore, and with an over-saturation of talking animal cartoons released every year, a parody was ripe for the making. That is why “Sausage Party” feels like even more of a deflating as missed opportunity. This creative team could have really done something spectacular and sharp, but the film lacks both subtlety and wit and leans on lowest common denominator gags and empty vulgarity.

Rogen voices Frank, a hot dog who is looking forward to being chosen by one of the human “gods” so that he may finally copulate with a bun named Brenda (Kristin Wiig), his across-the-shelf girlfriend. When they finally make it into a shopping cart, an accident separates Frank from his package of hotdog friends voiced by Jonah Hill and Michael Cera. Frank and Brenda must then travel back through the many aisles of the store to regroup. Joining their odyssey is a neurotic Jewish bagel named Sammy (Edward Norton), and an angry, pious flat-bread wrap named Lavash (David Krumholtz). Along the way Frank discovers that their purpose in the lives of their gods may not be the heaven they had in mind.

Lavash and Sammy’s contentious relationship underlines the movie’s more shocking sources of comedy; a total surrender to outdated racial and cultural stereotypes. The food in the store is segregated into ethnicities (Mexican, German, Middle Eastern, Asian…etc), and while the film tries to justify their reductive depictions through the script’s themes of cultural unity in the face of blind faith and superstition, the glee it exudes from exploiting these stereotypes cannot be removed from its comedic premise.

For all of its bombast and expensive production values, this movie just isn’t funny enough. The dialogue is riddled with expletives and filthy innuendo from the first frame, and while South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker have made an art out of profane satire in animation, this screenplay is far lazier in its execution. The writers seemed to believe that to show a cartoon character cursing is funny enough on its own without properly set-up jokes or subversive insight to support each scene. What results is a series of unfunny conversation set-pieces that sound transcribed from preteen boy’s locker room. Case in point; Nick Kroll voices the villain of the story, a feminine product who calls himself “The Douche.”

The movie works best when it explores the violent, darker places within its premise. After escaping the clutches of death from a human, Michael Cera’s character, Barry, leads us into unpredictable and absurdly macabre situations when he ties to make it back to the store to warn his friends of certain doom. These moments are based more on vivid imagery that properly utilizing its animated context--unlike the bumbling primary plot, which relies too heavily on hard-R raunch and Rogen's obligatory pot jokes.

The film has an interesting message about how religious interpretations can divide us in this life while we worry too much about what's in the next, but as a comedy “Sausage Party” is largely a one-trick pony. While its tone-deaf racial humor is supposed to be boldly irreverent, much of it is cringe inducing, and with this much time and effort put into the animation process there is no excuse for the comedy be this tired.

Grade: C-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Aug-2016

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "Sausage Party."

Suicide Squad review

After the clunky and underachieving disaster that was “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” the stakes for David Ayer’s “Suicide Squad” were raised too high. Though Warner Brothers never planned it, because BvS failed to live up to its own hype, this quirky film, inspired by a 4th-teir DC comics property, is now expected to give Warner's fledgling movie universe enough fuel to drive fan interest to the next spin-off. Given that “Suicide Squad” is an already an odd premise—grouping imprisoned super-villains to fight for the government against their will--and features mostly unknown characters, a property this idiosyncratic and niche was hardly positioned to save an entire franchise from failing. Making things all the more difficult, Ayer’s attempts at dark satire and genre subversion are undercut by the studio’s bottom-line priorities and the narrative has been ravaged by intrusive re-shoots and bad editing.

Following the events of “Batman v Superman,” government intelligence decides to create a team of mutants and misfits of their own in case another ‘meta-human’ decides he or she above the law. Agent Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) brings together the unlikely ensemble of a hitman named Deadshot (Will Smith), a dangerous pyro-kinetic named Diablo (Jay Hernandez), the unicorn obsessed maniac Boomerang (Jai Courtney), a sewer dwelling cannibal called Killer Crock (Adewele Akinnuoye-Agbaje), a possessed mystic named Enchantress (Cara Delevingne) and an unpredictable Joker obsessive named Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie). Once the team is assembled they are set on the first mission to stop Enchantress when her vaguely defined witch spirit is reunited with an ancient Mezzo-American war-god, unleashing a horde of amorphous, blob-headed bad-guys onto the city streets.

The movie almost never works either as a streamlined superhero peice or a darkly humorous action-comedy, but as misbegotten or as poorly executed as it might have been I can’t bring myself to dismiss Ayer’s ambitions. There are moments in this swirling, crass, adolescent and tone-deaf glorified videogame that approaches a level of hysteria and anarchy that too few mainstream comic book movies dare to embrace. Even this year’s “Deadpool,” which was celebrated for it’s hard-R raunchiness, played it safe when it came to defining who we’re supposed to root for, who we’re supposed to hate and it created a safe relatability when it came to the protagonist’s goals and desires. “Suicide Squad” muddies all of those waters and celebrates the sickest and most deranged motives within its characters, but it fails to take its punk-rock attitude beyond the surface into the thematic territory where it could have made a bigger impact.

All the actors seem committed and game to embody these larger than life sociopaths—Margot Robbie walks away with whole movie and Will Smith almost reminds us why we liked him in the first place—but the filmmakers are never as committed to the story. The generic and buffoonish cartoon plot is treated merely as an apparatus to house the ensemble and to highlight the film’s overbearing aesthetic choices. The overall production design seems to be inspired by a 13-year old’s pog collection from the mid-90s and the groan-inducing jukebox soundtrack is filled with painfully on-the-nose rock music selections. It doesn’t help that the actors, as hard as they try, never compensate for the one-note, smart-alecky dialogue.  

Somewhere in the creases and corners of this unmitigated disaster exists the seeds of a more interesting movie.  Jared Leto’s minor appearance as the Joker is occasionally exciting but like everything else is buried under the larger beats of the silly and uninteresting A-plot. I can’t help but wonder if a movie about Joker and Harley that fully explores their toxic romance might have been more satisfying (think Oliver Stone’s “Natural Born Killers” in Gotham). Perhaps if the film had been allowed to be R-rated and these supposedly dangerous criminals were forced to plow through the Joker’s hench-men or an opposing military instead of mystically powered, faceless ghouls, the movie could have retained the grit and immediacy of Ayer’s previous work (“Fury” “End of Watch”).  As it stands, “Suicide Squad” is an empty-headed and tonally frustrating missed opportunity and yet another stumbling block in DC/Warner’s desperate attempt to catch up with Marvel’s blockbuster winning streak.

Grade: C- 

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Aug-2016

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "Suicide Squad."