Arrival review

Amy Adams stars as a grieving mother who embarks on a personal journey to connect with her past by ensuring the safety of our future, as she helps our government make first contact with an intelligent alien species. Over the last few years the awards season has spawned a new genre, and this high-brow science fiction release echoes the emotional timbres of Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” as well as Alfonso Cuaron’s “Gravity,” along with the pro-science message of Ridley Scott’s “The Martian.” Space exploration and a thirst to better understand our place in the universe has been reflected in these high-budget, philosophically-minded genre films, and in that regard, Denis Villeneuve’s “Arrival” reaches for headier themes, heavier emotions and leaves a larger gap for the audience to meet its challenging narrative structure.

After twelve massive, bean-shaped vessels arrive at seemingly random locations on our globe, Adams’ Dr. Louise Banks, a scholar of linguistics, is recruited by Colonel Weber (Forrest Whitaker) to make sense of the aliens’ vocalizations. After joining the effort, she meets mathematician Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), who notices patterns in the otherworldly scribe they photograph while trying to talk with the beings through a translucent barrier deep within their ship. While the American team is making slow progress, other world governments are less cautious about enacting a preemptive strike against their new visitors, making it all the more imperative for Dr. Banks and her staff to decipher the aliens’ exact purpose for landing.

It’s hard not admire Villeneuve’s ambition here, as this picture aims to weave structure with emotional storytelling, with the intentions of being a broad science-fiction and a character piece at the same time. The movie also wishes to work as a social allegory about the state of our international relations and how an event such as a global alien arrival could easily activate simmering political tensions around the globe.

 Under the visual and tonal guidance of Villeneuve, the screenplay’s tricky flashback/flash-forward mechanics doesn’t overwhelm the themes or the emotional core of the film, though Adam’s portrayal as the multi-layered and complicated lead is at times coldly beholden to mystery of her character.

The film’s many storytelling goals prevents Adams from revealing too much about her interior state through her performance, which creates an impressionistic take on the character that doesn’t always gel with the film’s pulpier leanings. After we are given the character’s backstory and we with her in real-time as she’s interpreting an intergalactic coffee ring alphabet, we want to be closer to the character when the script keeps pulling her away for the sake of a clever third-act reveal. Renner works to provide a lighter and more immediate foil for Adams to exist on screen with, but even he is sometimes obscured by film’s impressionism.  

Villeneuve’s recent crime-thrillers “Prisoners” and last year’s “Sicario” shared bleak and hopeless views of humanity, while “Arrival” aims to give us clarity and hope for our future. While the production design and key set-pieces recall the scale and awe of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Bradford Young’s tender cinematography evokes the warmth and spiritual montage of Terrance Malick’s later work, marrying the cerebral and instinctual cinema of both directors. The script’s gotchya revelations eventually pay off and once the film’s many flashbacks are informed by the twist, the movie’s complex structure blends quite nicely into a much-needed message of optimism and enlightenment.

Grade: B+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Nov-2016

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

Doctor Strange review

Marvel Studios is an anomaly of modern populist filmmaking. Based partly on the rules of comic book publications, serialized television and the producer-driven classical studio system, Kevin Feige and the other Marvel executives designed a fruitful model that spawns and nurtures multiple, converging franchises that can share and swap characters. They’ve also successfully introduced general, non-geek audiences to super-dorky pulp characters like Thor, Ant-Man, The Vision, the whole Guardians of the Galaxy team and now, their nerdiest character of all, Doctor Strange. The reason audiences continually eat this up is because of the studio’s steady oversight and a strict style-guide that keeps their films uniformed and consistent. In the case of Scott Derrickson’s “Doctor Strange” this same-ness, delivers an amiable blockbuster but stifles the possibilities for creative experimentation.

Benedict Cumberbatch plays our hero Doctor Steven Strange, a smug celebrity neurosurgeon who’s looking to execute a complicated procedure that will further elevate his status. Amid this pursuit, Strange is seriously injured in a car-accident that leaves his hands unable to perform with precision. As he travels the world looking for a miracle surgery that will allow him to work again, he discovers a house of mystics in Katmandu that promise to show him ways to heal himself through the use of magic and sorcery. Strange is then caught up in a secret war between the temple’s Sorcerer Supreme (Tilda Swinton) and a band of rogue magicians, led by a disgruntled student of the dark-arts named Kaecilius (Mads Mikkelsen) who’s hell-bent on bringing an evil entity upon the earth.

Derrickson’s history in horror filmmaking (“Sinister,” “The Exorcism of Emily Rose,” “Deliver Us From Evil”) could have easily gone hand in hand with the occult-leanings of the Marvel’s magician hero. Instead of punching his way to victory or blowing up his opponents with wrist-rockets, Doctor Strange uses his intellect and skills as a sorcerer to defeat other-worldly foes. Yet, what we are given in this movie is another standard superhero origin story about a reluctant hero who must overcome his own hubris for the good of man-kind. Many beats of the plot repeat what we’ve recently seen in “Iron Man,” “Thor” and “Ant-Man,” and the shiny, non-threatening tone of Marvel’s happy-meal presentation disguises every genre cliché with lavish sets and complicated special effects.

 

The post-Matrix/post-Inception visuals and the film's art-direction is spectacular and eye-popping—particularly the set-pieces and fight-sequences that take place among the shifting and folding Escher-esq cityscapes—but they are placed almost randomly and with very little stakes within the story. Most of the screenplay consists of long sequences where Swinton’s Ancient One and Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Mordo explain to Cumberbatch all the ins and outs of mirror realms and astral projection and forbidden libraries and magic imbued weapons and so on and so on. To the credit of the screenwriters and the performances from the actors, this exposition-heavy dialogue is peppered with enough humor and whit to distract from its utilitarian function.

Aside from a slightly rushed plot and another stale Marvel-Studios villain with a weird face, “Doctor Strange” is perfectly entertaining and keeps true to the company brand, but it’s the very nature of this idiosyncratic character that begs for a less calculated approach. Given Derrickson’s past work and given the prestigious background of the cast, the movie’s familiar superhero trappings are more nakedly obvious and its getting increasingly harder to overlook Marvel’s unwillingness to challenge their formula.

Grade: B-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Nov-2016

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

Moonlight review

Now that awards season is in full swing, attention has been turned to Barry Jenkin’s second feature “Moonlight,” an archetypically American tale about the cross sections between poverty and identity. While embracing an exciting and vivid style of its own, the film is stripped bare, minimal and noticeably low-budget. Even still, Jenkins carefully puts every dollar on the screen, directing with his feelers fully extended to capture every meaningful moment with his actor’s vulnerable and honest performances.

This story focuses on three time periods in the life of a struggling African American boy named Chiron (Alex R. Hibbert) who has to constantly dodge the neighborhood bullies for being too quiet and sensitive. Making things even more difficult, he discovers his mother (Naomi Harris) is using crack and bringing home strange men to access it. He then finds refuge in the unlikely parental figures of a local Florida drug dealer named Juan and his right-hand-woman Teresa (Mahershala Ali and Janelle Monae).

We meet our protagonist again as a teenager (Ashton Sanders) when he’s forced to confront his inner conflicts with his only friend and confidante Kevin (Jharrel Jerome) after their school-yard relationship reaches a new level of emotional possibilities. Towards the last third of the film we drop in one last time with Kevin and Chiron as adults (Trevante Rhodes and Andre Holland), reconnecting after years have passed and their lives have taken them down widely diverging roads.

Through these stories are connected by a single timeline, each third works well on its own as an individual short, which makes a lot of sense given Jenkins many years working in the short-film format. What he accomplishes in this structure is something like Richard Linklater’s growing-up opus “Boyhood.” The audience is forced to look at these three moments in the changing life of Chiron and fill in the blanks between the juxtaposing segments. This successfully creates a larger world than the movie has the budget or time to accomplish on its own, giving the film both an overarching timelessness and the individual spirit of cultural specificity.

What makes the film live and breathe is the cast who works hard to be as natural and as delicate as possible. Because the movie is exploring themes of repression and the defensive masculinity that queer people in tough urban environments must front in order to survive, the actors play their parts very close to their chests, avoiding melodramatic Oscar-clipping as much as possible. The whole cast puts their trust in Jenkins sensitive direction to use their every hesitated breath and every raised eyebrow to inform the emotional realities that’s often deliberately left out of the dialogue. Naomi Harris as the dysfunctional mother is probably the broadest character and most literal performance given. Compared to the quiet intensity expressed by the rest of the cast, her portrayal is much less nuanced and the lines she delivers often mirrors her emotions exactly. Harris is faithfully playing the role as written, but it looks rather reductive compared to the subtly sublime work by the three actors who play her son.

This might not be your personal growing-up story but the raw emotions expressed in “Moonlight” are universal. While the ending comes to a disappointing halt just as the movie’s momentum is peaking and there’s nothing particularly new in the storytelling-- the plot touches on many tropes in both the coming-of-age and coming-out genres—the finely tuned performances and Jenkin’s filmic execution feels personal and authentic, even as he employs familiar narrative techniques.

Grade: B+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Nov-2016

13th review

Ava DuVernay’s new documentary “13^th” should be required viewing for every high school civics course across the country. The film focuses on how the American justice system has been systematically rigged against people of color since the passing of the 13^th amendment ended slavery in the 1800s, conveniently leaving in the clause that strips humans of their rights as soon as they enter the prison system and often long after they have served their sentences. This documentary creates a comprehensive examination of how these laws have specifically targeted the black communities through the segregation era and into the ever-expanding war on drugs, dramatically spiking our incarceration numbers over time.

Released in a particularly salty election year in which minority issues such as Black Lives Matter and immigration have been front and center in the political discussion, the film’s decision to release on Netflix streaming, rather than only engaging in a limited theatrical run, allows for the possibility of a wider reach and deeper cultural impact.

The movie gives us many damning statistics, including the fact that America accounts for 25% percent of the worlds prisoners, despite only representing 5% percent of the global population, or how African American’s make up 40% of those incarcerated, even though they only account for 6.5% of the total U.S. population. These stats are then supported by showing us how both republican and democrat lawmakers have continually stacked the legal deck against minorities to keep prison filled and profits high.

DuVernay makes the argument that slavery didn’t end with the passing of the 13^th amendment, rather it was merely shifted to the prison systems. When seeing footage of minority inmates performing free labor for many successful American manufacturers, it’s hard to argue against this position. One of the stronger points made in the film—also brought to light a while back by comedian John Oliver on his HBO program—is the governmental part played by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) who guides the passing of many restrictive policing and incarceration policies, based on the whims of the powerful corporate lobbyists who fund their initiatives. These initiatives include California’s damaging three strikes policy and mandatory minimum sentencing that took judicial power away from judges and gave it to prosecutors. No matter your race or political persuasion, one ought to be disturbed by how big of a role corporations have played into the withering of freedoms, the expansion of militant policing and growth of America’s prison industrial complex.  

Formally. the documentary shifts between archival footage and talking-head interviews by the likes of activists such as Angela Davis and Bryan Stevenson, educators like Jelani Cobb and commentators and lawmakers such as Newt Gingrich. Graphics and popular music is implemented for the purposes of style and pacing but never distracts from or overwhelms the film’s content.

Here DuVernay brings the activist spirit and polemic energy that she sheathed with “Selma” in order to graciously portray the life and reputation of Martin Luther King Jr. Whereas 2014’s “Selma” aimed to bridge differing political points of view under the reverence of a classy, performance-oriented prestige picture, “13^th” takes off those silk gloves and bares its anger and outrage with a meticulously researched take-down of the white supremacy that’s built into our government’s interpretation of law and order. This documentary is not a casual watch and it was made with the purpose to complicate the hotly divided conversations created by our culture of stagnant left-right squabbling, and for that alone it’s one of the most important and essential films to come out this year.

Grade: A

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Oct-2016

Mascots review

With films such as “A Mighty Wind” and “Best in Show,” actor/director Christopher Guest perfected the mockumentary genre. Since then, television programs like “The Office” and “Modern Family” have utilized this format as a style rather than a conceit, and what used to be a novel presentation for comedy is now a utilitarian way of handling exposition and plot. With Guest’s latest, a direct-to-Netflix project called “Mascots,” he returns to his blissfully ignorant weirdo character archetypes and the niche lifestyles that defined his earlier work. In fact, the film is so firmly designed for this director that it lacks of sense of purpose or comedic drive, occasionally drifting into the waters of self-parody. 

Here Guest takes a winking jab at the world of sports mascots who annually compete for an award called the Fluffy at a convention center in Anaheim. Zach Woods and Sarah Baker play an over-counseled married couple on the verge of collapse, also doubling as a Squid and Turtle mascot duo. Tom Bennet plays the nice-but-clueless Owen Golly Jr, who’s taken on the family mantel as a Soccer playing Hedgehog. Parker Posey plays the head-in-clouds Cindy Babineaux, competing as a modern-dancing Armadillo. Christopher Moynihan plays perfectionist Phil Mayhew (aka Jack the Plummer) and Chris O’Dowd plays Irish bad-boy Tommy Zucarello, a Hockey mascot called ‘The Fist’ who’s been banned from many sports venues for his edgy entertainment style. As one would expect, egos clash and misunderstandings are had at the SoCal convention.

Because Guest’s style encourages and depends on seamless improvisation from his actors, scenes live and die on their performances. The cast is committed to the challenge and they’re all appropriately on the same page, but they’re also too similarly pitched to really distinguish themselves amongst each other in any given scenario. The jokes and one-liners often fall flat or feel forced and the improvised dialogue usually leans on the easiest laugh. The film spends too much of its run-time establishing the characters and their motivations, and once the plot foundation is finally set into place the whole narrative is already winding down to a no-surprises conclusion.

There’s an infectious warmth for this dorky profession and the peripheral performances from Fred Willard, Jane Lynch and Christopher Guest himself—reprising his role as acting-coach Corky St. Clair from 1996’s “Waiting for Guffmam”—infuses this lazy comedy with some genuinely off-beat moments, but the movie’s best sequences come from the well-staged competition routines by the mascots themselves. There’s something oddly cinematic about watching a well-rehearsed physical act and these scenes are competently shot and dramatically informed.

“Mascots” isn’t entirely painful to watch but considering the talent involved in its making, it is painfully ordinary. Perhaps the glut of mockumentary alt-sitcoms such as “Parks and Recreation” have familiarized us with this genre to the point of making it obsolete, and perhaps in our current economic reality the concept of making fun of clueless, low-earning middle Americans who have aspirations for something bigger now registers as tone-deaf. Whatever the problem, something here never here gels comedically and the movie radiates with a sense of Guest and his crew coasting on their reputation.

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 "Mascots."

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