Colossal review

The Anne Hathaway starring hybrid film “Colossal” solves the problems of both blockbuster spectacles and formulaic romantic comedies. Rom-coms often suffer from a lack of tension in the drama, leading to forced conflict that undermines the characters, and blockbusters often overlook their characters in favor of eye-popping visuals and ratcheting the stakes in the plot. Like the designer-dog puggle breed, that stops a pug’s snorting and stops a beagle’s howling, Nacho Vigalondo’s first English-language feature blends the two Hollywood traditions in a mutually beneficial way.

Anne Hathaway returns to her “Rachel Getting Married” acting toolbox, playing another mess who’s looking for redemption and respect at the same time. Her character Gloria returns to her small town after getting kicked out of her boyfriend’s (Dan Stevens) swanky New York apartment.  While sulking in the streets of her hometown, she runs into an old high school friend named Oscar (Jason Sudeikis) who’s been recently divorced and trying to keep his father’s bar alive.  Figuring that she might need a leg up, he offers Gloria a part-time job, unaware of her history with alcoholism.

Meanwhile, in Seoul South Korea a giant monster appears roughly the same time every night, seemingly unaware of its surroundings and stumbling into buildings before mysteriously disappearing into thin air. After watching the TV footage of this phenomena, Gloria and Oscar realize that the monster only appears across the globe whenever she visits the a grade-school park after a long night of drinking.  When Gloria has some conflicts at work and her ex decides to come back to visit her, this heightened sense of personal responsibility is challenged further.

Vigalondo’s film works on a number of allegorical levels.  Obviously there’s the commentary about alcoholism and its relationship to our past traumas and the many damages it can cause by accident. Hathaway’s interaction with fragile masculinity as an active female character is also fascinating to observe. Again, by flipping the romantic comedy love-triangle trope on its head, this story explores the inherent misogyny bred into that stock fantasy. 

The movie also discusses how the media treats disasters and wars abroad as a form of endless news cycle-entertainment. Having been released between two fresh bombings performed overseas by our government, and having watched certain news commentators wax poetic about the aesthetic beauty of our missile launches, the film's depictions of American's glued to the televised destruction seems all the more prescient.

Despite some undercooked narrative vagueness surrounding a couple short flashbacks and some truncated special effect sequences that gives away movie’s limited budget, “Colossal” executes it’s quirky goals fantastically. Sudeikis and Hathaway are great at shifting back and forth from comedic amiability to dramatically tense, and their arc is always reinforced by the movie’s larger ambitions as a commentary on genre cinema. Given that audiences are inundated by many movies per year about giant robots vs. giant monsters (“Power Rangers,” “Transformers,” “Pacific Rim”), it’s nice to finally see one with a core concern for relatable human experiences.

Grade: B+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Apr-2017

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

Interstellar review

               Much has already been written about Christopher Nolan’s space-time exploration epic “Interstellar.” Every aspect of the film, including its confusing scientific premise and its controversial ending has been debated and scrutinized ad nauseam.   Never mind the fact that this is science fiction, in which the movie’s complex premise and narrative follow-through are supposed be taken only as a creative thought experiment, inviting audiences to dig deeper into the metaphorical layers of the film — at least that’s usually the implied contract we enter in with when it comes to genre fare of this type.
                   What the endless articles and analysis of the supposed plot-holes and “bad-science” says to me is that the movie’s story (not the same thing as plot) apparently isn’t engaging enough to keep people from withholding their suspension of disbelief. Sci-fi deconstructs real paranoias and takes fictional premises to their logical extremes to discuss natural concerns, but this only works if we care about the world created or the character’s involved enough to ignore that everything going on is essentially ridiculous. This, unfortunately, is where “Interstellar” falls short.
                 Like most of Nolan’s movies — especially his original auteur work — this film is filled to brim with ideas. We’re fifty years into the future and the world is struck by another dust-bowl, killing most crops except corn, which, after global climate conditions have worsened to the point of devaluing science, technology and space exploration, puts the priority on basic societal agriculture. Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is an astrophysicist turned corn-farmer who, after discovering a strange message within a gravitational anomaly in his daughter’s bedroom, gets recruited into a secretly-funded NASA exploration, set to enter a wormhole near Saturn that could lead us to a planetary system environmentally specific enough to sustain human life.The downside being that he and his crew of five would enter into a space-time differential caused by relativity, where decades pass like hours and their families would age out of their lives.
               As with most films in this sci-fi tradition, once they get to their destination, things aren’t quite as they thought they would be and plans aren’t as cleanly executed as they’d initially hoped.
Within this setup, Nolan addresses the critics who had previously complained about his emotional remoteness by weaving into the plot a supposedly tender father/daughter story about sacrifice and abandonment.   Towards the middle of the movie, Anne Hathaway, who plays another astronaut, reveals an ulterior motive that contradicts the crew’s prime directive, in which she declares that love is a quantifiable scientific measurement. She’s wrong, and so is this movie.
                 Despite Nolan's best efforts, every attempt at emotional reality and observation is squashed by the movie’s intensely calculated puzzle-box construction, which, like “Inception,” leaves every character (as   tearful as they may be through this three-hour ordeal) more like a pawn in Nolan’s technical chess game than a fully realized, three-dimensional human being. Performances like McConaughey as the film’s conflicted protagonist, Hathaway as the film’s needless counter-argument, and Jessica Chastain as Cooper’s embittered adult daughter who’s waiting impatiently on earth for his return, are realized to the best of their abilities and somewhere underneath the weight of this overloaded script and the oppressively fractured cross-cut editing, they might have even made a real impact.  All of this, along with an increasingly labored third act that piles plot on top of plot and then reverses everything in on itself (the signature Chris Nolan “ta-dah”), left me completely frozen out of the picture.
                Cinematographer Hoyt Van Hoytema shoots the film in a gritty realism that remarkably contrasts with the overwhelming space vistas. Make no mistake about it; a lot of this film is breathtaking and technically accomplished, and Nolan’s ambition as a screenwriter and director is totally in reverence to the art-form of cinema. And thank god that he’s given the money and studio go-ahead to fully explore his passions, but unfortunately, with this, and much of his latter commercial work, his filmic ambitions have created a stumbling block that often defies audiences to interact with his stories on a human level.

Grade: C+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Nov-2014