The Top 10 Films of 2018

When thinking about 2018, it’s difficult to identify a unifying theme or direction that's indicative of the overall mood of the pictures that I saw. What was 2018? It wasn’t a bad year for movies at all. There are a lot of films that deserve to be on any year’s list, but there aren’t as many that demand to be crowned the movie of the year. Rather, there were many films that exist as pillars of their own particular niche. Sometimes that makes for a more varied and interesting year in movies.

10 – Tully - Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody reunite to tell the story of an exhausted mother (Charlize Theron) who is reeling from post-partum depression. Mackenzie Davis as the titular fairy-godmother/wet nurse lights up the screen with what should have been a star-making performance. But it's the turn towards magical realism that helps distinguish this film from the usual indie-drama Sundance slosh bucket.

09 - The Ballad of Buster Scruggs - Who doesn’t like a good anthology movie? Scruggs boasts a competent buffet of short stories depicting the myth of the American western, as presented by the Coen brothers with the perfect amount of post-modern side eye. Every tale explores themes of death, redemption, and the pitfalls that come with the Western mentality of the self-made man.

08 – Hereditary – Ari Aster’s demonic melodrama about a family torn apart by grief is as emotionally draining as it is terrifying. Toni Collette balances a difficult performance that asks her to simultaneously anchor the story in an emotional reality and to sell the spectacle of the horror/supernatural elements. Hereditary is a heavy and bleak movie-going experience but its nuance and masterful direction demand thorough consideration.

07 – Thoroughbreds – Anya Taylor-Joy and Olivia Cooke play a twisted game of master manipulation in Cory Finley’s directorial debut. Finley's stage-like thriller is tinged with just the right amount of black comedy as it explores the notion of two teenagers who plot to kill one of their stepfathers. Brewing beneath this premise is a clever satire about medically induced teenage apathy and anti-social affluenza.

06 – Spider-Man into The Spider-Verse - This is exactly the kind of kick in the butt that the word of animation desperately needs. The mix of three-dimensional CGI modeling with tactile illustration explodes with the color and creativity that’s usually limited to graphic design and comic books. The out-of-the-box plot managed to tell a compelling story while introducing us to six new spider characters and establishing a new movie universe for them to play in.

05 – Bad Times at the El Royale - Drew Goddard’s period noir that takes place at a tourist-friendly Tahoe hotel is probably the most slept-on wide-release movie of the year. This fantastically directed thriller pulls together multiple plot threads and a big cast into a slowly unfolding, tense game of shag carpet Clue. The performances are finely tuned, and Goddard’s considerate use of subjective camera helps to bait the audience into every exciting reveal.

04 – Annihilation – Not since Ridley Scott’s “Alien” has a science fiction horror film so effectively crept into my consciousness. This hellish "Through the Looking Glass" is experienced from the perspective of a team of female scientists who are biologically altered as they explore the interior of a psychedelic radiation bubble that has formed around the landing site of a meteor. The film effectively taps into the fears we have about our own bodies as well as our fears about the vastness of the galaxies. 

03 – Eighth Grade – Millennial stand-up comedian Bo Burnham has made with his first feature what is probably the most accurate portrayal of awkward pre-adolescents. Elsie Fisher is heartbreakingly perfect as the fragile and emotionally underprepared Kayla Day; a teenager who is desperately trying to navigate a world of ever-changing social cues, as she herself is still settling into a new life after exiting childhood.

02 – Blindspotting - Hollywood has explored racial tensions in America through the power of filmmaking over the last few years and many new voices have emerged. Carlos Lopez Estrada’s film deals with the social woes of racial injustice, police brutality, and gentrification. Daveed Digs and Rafael Casal as the leads are both relatable and engaging and the hipster-infested Oakland that Estrada shows us feels just as recognizable as when we watch our own neighborhoods change over the years. The experimental rap-like dialogue within Casal and Dig's near-perfect screenplay is a bold stylistic choice that pays off.

01 – Sorry to Bother You – While “Blindspotting” deals with racial injustice and gentrified Oakland through the interpersonal struggles of the main characters, Boots Riley’s take on the same subject uses absurdism and broad satire to explore the political and social reasons for said inequalities. This audacious comedy about telemarketing, workers strikes, and unions delivers big laughs while also skewering the corporate structure of the Silicon Valley industries that have kicked out the bottom rungs of the social ladder. No other film this year has spit this amount of venom while also experimenting with tone, genre, and visual storytelling with the same amount of punk rock gusto.

Honorable Mentions: If Beal Street Could Talk, Avengers: Infinity War, Mid 90s, Blackkklansman, Crazy Rich Asians, A Star Is Born, A Quiet Place, The Favourite,

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Jan-2019

Incredibles 2 review

Nearly fifteen years have passed since Disney released Pixar’s "The Incredibles." The movie arrived just as the superhero film boom was heating up and it remains one of the best examples of the genre. Hype for a sequel maintained, even as Pixar further expanded their brand and gave some of their lesser properties multiple sequels of their own. Now with “Incredibles 2” finally here, we are at a different vantage point; the genre clichés and tropes that the first film was poking fun at are now used without irony by every studio who wants to stay competitive. “Incredibles 2,” while perfectly enjoyable and a worthy successor of its original is both too little too late to the party and unfairly judged against a type of filmmaking it helped to foster.

This story picks up minutes from the point where the last film ended. After a battle with a villain called the Underminer, the authorities charge Mr. Incredible (Craig T. Nelson) and his family with illegally engaging in vigilantism. While away from their home, awaiting legislation, a wealthy philanthropist named Winston Deavor (Bob Odenkirk) and his techy sister Evelyn (Catherine Keener) approach the family with a proposition. Together, these two mysterious investors plan to reinstitute superhero legality by body-camming Mrs. Incredible/Elastigirl (Holly Hunter) and showing the public that she can save lives while keeping collateral damage to a minimum.  With Helen now away fighting for their futures, Bob is stuck at home helping their kids Dash and Violet with their school lives, as well as trying to maintain their unpredictably powerful baby Jack-Jack.

Whereas the first adventure with this family focused on the concept of the retired-superhero as a metaphor for post-war threatened masculinity, this film extends the metaphor now to American men of a certain age coming to terms with the wife working while they stay at home. Writer/Director Brad Bird certainly has his finger on the pulse of these classically American moments in time, as well as a fascination of pulp, science-fiction archetypes from the 50s and 60s, sprinkled with a dash of Ayn Randian objectivism by way of Alan Moore's dystopian deconstruction of the superhero myth within works such as "Watchmen." All of that is very interesting and gives this world a totemic universality that informs the relatable family concerns and the smaller-scale character work.  What's less interesting is the basic mechanics of this adventure when it comes to the nuts and bolts of its storytelling and way that it manages screen-time between the A and B plot

The mystery Helen solves involving a technological terrorist called the Screenslaver is disappointingly easy to solve and a bit tedious to follow as it's telegraphed from beat to beat. While the animation that goes into these high-octane action-sequences is beautifully rendered and the set-pieces themselves are designed with detail and care, it's difficult not to feel that in this go-around action is often supplanting story.  As far as Bob's adventures with the kids goes, the concept is a nice change of pace, but where Bird could have used these moments to deepen the characters and speak more specifically to Bob's frustrations as a sidelined super, we're treated instead to fluffy sit-com set-ups that only connect to the overarching narrative during the final act, when story is almost forced to dovetail.

While I might be a little hard on "Incredibles 2" I'm aware that the demographic for this film is young enough that these nuanced concerns will likely not register.  Plot contrivances aside, I still recommend this sequel for its achievement in action direction, its impressive animation and the characters I still like hanging out with, but when comparing this to the pillars of Pixar's output, including the movie's 2004 predecessor, the grading curve becomes steep--perhaps unfairly so.

Grade: B -

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/June-2018

Ibiza review

It’s increasingly obvious that Netflix doesn’t care what’s in their library of original content, so long as they can expand on and broaden said library. Who needs classic films and the hidden gems of cinema’s history when we can have fresh, direct-to-streaming movies like Adam Sandler’s tone-deaf western spoof “The Ridiculous Six,” the misguided fantasy/cop-drama hybrid “Bright,” or this year’s cold, dead fish of a buddy comedy “Ibiza.” Every once and while Netflix will treat us to a genuinely tasteful experience like the heart-breaking war drama, “Beasts of No Nation,” but more often then not, I scroll through my choices and see more and more dreck like “Ibiza.” Built on the dated premise that ‘female Hangover’ is still a winning hook to use in a Hollywood pitch meeting, “Ibiza” is at best an extended travelogue and at worse a silicon valley executive’s excuse for a tax write-off.

Gillian Jacobs plays Harper, a New York advertising agent who’s brimming with jittery affectation and professional neurosis. Harper’s supposedly evil boss (because the movie tells us to hate her) sends her to Barcelona to score a big deal with a client, but she decides to take her two selfish friends Nikki (Vanessa Bayer) and Leah (Phoebe Robinson) along with her, where they spend the trip dancing in clubs, popping pills and talking to hunky European guys. When Harper becomes obsessed with hooking up with a famous DJ (Richard Madden), the girls decide to move their party to the island of Ibiza. Can Harper get into the exclusive club to reconnect with her fantasy love-boat, dance all night and make it back to Spain early enough to prepare for her big meeting?

I don’t have a principled stance against an all-female comedy about girlfriends cutting lose and indulging a wild weekend getaway, but I do have a bias against hacky comedies in which the actors are tossed in front of the camera and forced to generate material on the spot because the screenwriter couldn’t be bothered to construct actual scenes. In the many sequences that meander in no discernable direction, three leads seem desperate to generate humor from the deep black void that is this movie, doing over-mannered impressions of who I assume are the most annoying people they ever met.  I’ve seen Gillian Jacobs play prickly and damaged in the Netflix series “Love,” as well as cute and bubbly in the sitcom “Community,” and I’ve seen Vanessa Bayer create interesting sketch characters on Saturday Night Live. Their performances here are so severely unfunny, but if I didn’t already know better, it would have been inconceivable that these people make their living in comedy.

It’s obvious the director (Funny or Die alum Alex Richenbach) lost complete control of the shoot when over forty percent of the runtime is devoted to techno dance montages and barely connected plot points that only exist to get the characters from one location to another. The story doesn’t advance so much as it changes the setting every ten minutes. I suppose the theme here is about friendship and self-discovery, but that’s almost entirely lost when the protagonist’s journey is based on hooking up with a vacuous EDM Prince charming that we barely get to know, and her friends constantly use each other for personal gain. “Ibiza” completely lacks in anything approaching reality, humanity or anything remotely recognizable as a true human emotion.

Grade: F

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/June-2018

Solo: A Star Wars Story review

There are usually two types of “Star Wars” fans; the people who watch it for Darth Vader and the people who watch it for Han Solo. Nobody watches for Luke Skywalker (Sorry-not-sorry). Because we already have two trilogies essentially devoted to the rise and fall of Darth Vader, it was almost a foregone conclusion that someone would build a story around the cocky flyboy turned space outlaw originally played by Harrison Ford. Ron Howard, who previously worked with George Lucas on the 1988 fantasy film “Willow,” directs “Solo: A Star Wars Story, “a tangential prequel that helps fill the gaps between the larger sagas, primarily focusing on Han as a youthful runaway.

Father and son writers Lawrence and Jonathan Kasdan begin this movie showing Han (Alden Ehrenreich) escaping an enemy occupied planet without his lover Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke). Proclaiming that he will one day return to save her, Han assumed the moniker Solo and joined the Imperial military to steal something large enough to buy a ship and return to his girl. There he meets up with a group of competing smugglers led by the cynical Beckett (Woody Harrelson). After joining, he makes a deal to help the group steal a volatile weapons payload for a dangerous arms dealer named Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany).

 As the film progresses, we get to see the young Solo’s first encounters with the Millennial Falcon, the vein gambler Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover), and his destined lifelong partner Chewbacca. We should expect the character’s greatest hits and catchphrases within this style of conceptual universe building, but it also smells a lot like fan-service, and as each of these moments pass, you can almost hear Kasdan’s red pencil drag a line through the list of directives ordered down from Mount Disney. That’s why I felt slightly guilty by the big grin that came over my face as the movie plopped these elements into the story like farmer filling the trough for his hungry pigs. I’ll be the first to admit that even as I acknowledge the pandering here, I enjoyed almost all of it.

Howard handles the sci-fi/western themes and the action sequences well. Hints of Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” and the cult television series “Firefly” feel present here, even as those properties wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the influence of “Star Wars” in the first place—a classic example of the pop culture snake eating its tropes.  Handheld shaky cam obscures some of the ground combat, and the runtime feels about 15 minutes too long, but any motion picture that gives us a train heist, a prison escape and an aerial dogfight all within the same theater experience at least has a good understanding of what populist filmmaking should be.

Is “Solo: A Star Wars Story” essentially Star Wars fan fiction? Yes, but that doesn’t automatically make it bad, even if it doesn’t move the needle very far within the overall mythology. Ehrenreich carries everything adequately, even if his boyish take on the character isn't the spot-on Harrison Ford impression people are expecting. The supporting cast is all given enough to do to keep us invested in their place within the story as well.  There’s almost nothing that’s essential or impactful about this franchise mortar of a movie, but it’s highly entertaining and full of characters (new and old) that we want to spend our time with, which is more than I can for almost half of the other entries in the Star Wars cinematic universe.

Grade: B

Originally published in Idaho State Journal/June-2018

Black Panther review

“Black Panther” finds itself in a middle of an explosion of black-oriented superhero content. In 2016 Netflix released the first season of their Marvel series Luke Cage, featuring a black urban superhero and a soundtrack by New York hip-hop legends A Tribe Called Quest, and there's a second season set for release later this year. In response, the CW released the first season of the DC hero Black Lightning, which premiered January 2018. On the heels of this new hunger for racially diverse representation, Marvel released “Black Panther,” co-written and directed by black director Ryan Coogler and featuring a predominately black cast, with the hopes of still attracting the widest possible global audience.

This story imagines a free country in the heart of Africa known as Wakanda, which has been hidden and protected from colonists, war, famine, disease, or any of the other factors that have devastated much of the known continent. Through the abundance of a powerful alien ore known as Vibranium, Wakanda has become the most technologically advanced nation the world has never known, and by avoiding conflicts with other world governments, the area has been able to thrive in secret. Chadwick Boseman plays T’Challa, the young heir to the Wakandan throne after his father, the previous Black Panther, was killed in the political bombings featured in "Captain America: Civil War."

T’Challa is alerted to action by an Oakland-based young freedom fighter known as Eric Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan), who wishes to challenge the African leader for the technology Wakanda is hoarding from the rest of the world’s black society. It’s then up to Black Panther to keep his land protected from any outside threat, whilst the nation itself is arguing whether or not they should risk exposing their power through defensive battle abroad. Along for the ride is the three women in T'Challa's life that help protect the hero in different ways; his warrior bodyguard Okoye (Danai Gurira), his little sister Shuri (Letitia Wright), who works as a weapons specialist, and his politically active and ideologically driven partner Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o).  

This incredible ensemble also includes Martin Freeman, Daniel Kaluuya, Angela Basset, Forest Whitaker and Andy Serkis.  

Coogler’s first foray into large-scale, effects-driven action filmmaking features an exciting cast, wildly colorful production design, overt science-fiction premises and charged political points of view, and by most accounts, this mainstream Marvel release manages to hit most of its targets as the plot unfolds, but not without a few stumbles along the way.

Coogler’s cinematic training in independent film is a bit narrow and his camera placement is oddly closed-in. Much of film is done in traditional coverage, containing a lot of close-ups and mid-shots, which underutilizes the movie’s grand Afrofuturist production design and reveals just how much of the movie is actually spent on conversation set-pieces and walk and talks. Because the movie—to its credit--is more interested in battles of ideology rather than blockbuster action scenes, the few action pillars that hold up the longer dialogue driven sequences are open to harsher critique and don’t always satisfy the audience’s patience.  The best action moment in the film takes place at a casino in Busan, South Korea and it concludes with an exciting car chase. The ritualistic hand to hand challenges for the throne that take place on a Wakandan waterfall contains fewer effects but they have an emotional grounding in the story. In contrast, the concluding battle sequence as well as the final fight between Black Panther and Killmonger safely puts the movie on autopilot and concludes without surprises.

Despite my grievances with some of the technical elements of the film and the lack of sustained dramatic tension when it comes to the relationship between the hero and the villain—the script is often stretched too thin, trying to cover all its bases—I fully acknowledge that the reasons a person of color might be excited by this film are far more interesting than the reasons I might find fault with it. It’s not a perfect piece of genre filmmaking but it’s certainly unique and is working through a lot of bigger ideas, and if a Marvel superhero film can get teenagers to start talking about passivism, globalism, and post-colonialism without it feeling like homework, then I can forgive the pacing issues and the unintentional camp.

Grade: B-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Feb-2018

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

The Cloverfield Paradox review

“The Cloverfield Paradox” is the third installment of this sci-fi anthology franchise and by far the least impressive of the three. Released by Netflix on Super Bowl Sunday, the same day the film was promoted during the game’s commercial interruptions, this space-thriller landed in the laps of its potential viewers with a dramatic thud. Director Oren Uziel and Doug Jung originally wrote this screenplay under the title “The God Particle," then acquired by J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot company under the Paramount umbrella. After production began, the decision was made to include it as a spiritual successor to 2008’s “Cloverfield” and 2016’s “10 Cloverfield Lane.” This decision by Bad Robot to acquire unrelated scripts, to then include vague narrative threads to link them together in a similar cinematic universe has been increasingly arbitrary and forced in execution.

The film begins with a crew of scientists working in a space station designed to harness cosmic energy through the use of a massively powerful particle accelerator. Just below them, the earth is suffering from an energy crisis that has the world’s superpowers on the brink of war. It’s up to the Cloverfield team to bring back test results that will save us all. Unfortunately, upon firing up their super laser, the team is suddenly zapped into an alternate dimension on the other side of the sun, where the regular rules of reality are bent and nothing is familiar. Severed arms are writing secret messages, parts of the ship are found in the organs of their dead shipmates, and they find a strange female passenger caught in the walls and circuitry of the space station. The mission shifts to fixing the accelerator and getting back into their own reality.

Given how under-budget and schlocky most of this is, the picture features a talented cast of Hollywood notables such as David Oyelowo, Daniel Bruhl, Chris O’Dowd and John Ortiz. But it’s British actress Gugu Mbatha-Raw whose story we’re following as the main character. Because she lost her family back on her version of earth, the character is met with increasingly moral conundrums through the stresses of the plot. It’s too bad that Raw's performance is the most stilted, as she has to carry the entire emotional arc, but she also has the misfortune of delivering painfully obvious dialogue.

Even with a premise this familiar--the movie liberally borrows from "Solaris," "Event Horizon," "Sunshine" and more-- it didn't have to be this bad. The special effects are fine but always noticeable when the movie shifts from “Battlestar Galactica” looking soundstages to CGI outer space exteriors. Uziel even uses the old Star Trek technique of tilting the camera while the cast pretends to brace for impact, which also reveals the film’s monetary limitations. This deficit combined with the hokey dialogue and poorly executed attempts at dread and tension kept me from investing in either the attempts at emotional storytelling or the movie's base genre appeal.

“The Cloverfield Paradox” is a failure and waste of money for those who invested in it, but living its life on Netflix it isn't likely to damage the reputation of Abrams or the future of the Cloverfield concept. I definitely encourage the idea of an anthology universe, in which Bad Robot can continue to champion these large-scale Twilight Zone episodes, but I can't abide the gimmick when it produces work as unoriginal and as poorly made as this. If Abrams and company wish to continue this project, I would suggest they write screenplays with a vision already in mind rather than buying cheesy spec scripts and half-heartedly branding them during production.

Grade: D+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Feb-2018

Paddington 2 review

Many adults were pleasantly surprised when 2014’s live-action adaptation of "Paddington" turned out to be watchable. Given that most of the animated properties of our past that are revamped into live action/animation hybrids (ala  "Smurfs,” “Garfield,” “Chipmunks") are usually mind-numbingly obnoxious, the warmth and wit of Paul King’s "Paddington" films have become a healthy change in the kid-vid diet. “Paddington 2” manages to improve on the previous entry by grounding the visual gags more effectively in storytelling while also managing to be even more ambitious when it comes to its many Rube Goldberg-esque action sequences.

Here King and his co-writer Simon Farnaby simplify the plot by focusing on a few tangible goals for the characters. Paddington (voiced by Ben Wishaw) wants to buy an antique pop-up book about London for his dear aunt Lucy who’s still living as a cultured bear in Peru. Things go wrong when our cuddly protagonist is framed for the robbery of the book by an actor/vaudevillian/magician named Phoenix Buchanan (Hugh Grant), who happens lives down the street from Paddington’s adopted family. After the polite and naive bear is sent to prison, he has to convince his family to prove his innocents while also doing his best to make friends with the other hardened inmates.

Paddington is a believable character because the animation that brings him to life is surrounded by terrific actors who are as naturally animated in their expressions. Irish tough-guy Brendan Gleeson as the prison chef Knuckles pulls faces in the camera that shouldn’t work as broadly applied as they are, but somehow they do. Hugh Bonneville and Sally Hawkins are given more to do in the plot this time other than arguing whether or not they want to keep a clumsy bear in their attic, and by giving them more proactive roles they have more weight in the plot. Grant as the vein and foppish villain is camping it up with zero abandon, but King’s control of the movie's tone keeps every wild gesture and zippy one-liner contained in the context of our hero’s journey.

This installment of weaves together the title character’s mission through a series of creative and wildly visual set-pieces, such as the robbery of the antique store, a window washing montage and the many exploits of Hugh Grant’s master-of-disguise sleuthing. The film also indulges many beautiful sequences that imagines Paddington’s London as a flipbook come to life.  This is 3D cinema accomplished without the need for the annoying glasses and these sequences successfully welds together the CGI character with his modern, live-action environments. There are a few set-pieces that register as stock or somewhat familiar, such as a prison escape sequence that involves a laundry hamper and a final battle on a steam train. Neither of these scenes is executed poorly, though they lean into their clichés rather than subverting them. But hey, this is a picture about a talking bear that’s obsessed orange marmalade, so…

King obviously has a vision for this silly franchise and his ear for dry comedic dialogue, combined with a creative visual sense and big heart for his characters elevates this experience beyond its base expectations as an electric babysitter.  It’s only a shame that content geared towards children has become so dumbed down and so cynical that a movie as effortlessly positive and crowd-pleasing as "Paddington 2" has become the exception to the rule.

Grade: B+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Jan-2018

Top 10 Films of 2017

Altogether, 2017 wasn’t a bad year for movies. Even if I had to travel to art houses to watch something worthwhile, there was never a shortage of interesting things to see. There were also a handful of mainstream movies such as Patty Jenkin's "Wonder Woman," Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk,” and  Marvel’s “Thor: Ragnarok” that made an impression beyond their minimum financial requirements. My list contains many unabashed genre movies, including three monster movies, one superhero film, and two psychological horror films. In fact, only three of the films listed tell relatively common stories within a fairly naturalized version of the world we live in. Nevertheless, the list below represents last year’s films that stuck with me the most.

10 – Okja
South Korean director Bong Joon Ho’s subversive allegory tells the story of a girl who fights the powers of the food industrial complex to keep her genetically modified super-pig from being killed. It’s heartwarming, weird, campy, smart, disturbing, and politically conscious without forgetting to keep you entertained.

09 – Call Me by Your Name
Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of Andre Aciman’s novel of the same name explores first love and the complicated emotions associated with young hormones and queer awakening with the perfect proportions of guilt, lust, and righteous indignation. The performances by romantic leads Timothee Chalamet and Armie Hammer are honest and the movie’s total sensory immersion within this 1981, summer vista in Northern Italy only helps to drench this dream-like romance in youthful idealism.

08 – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri
Every year has a great crime film, and this year’s entry by playwright/director Martin McDonagh, while not without a few tonal and narrative stumbles along the way, left a lasting impression.  McDonagh embraces the story’s pulpy post-Cohen trappings while finding surprising ways to empathize with every morally complicated character in his southern-gothic murder ballad.

 07 – Logan
 “Logan” went far and above anyone’s expectations, considering it was the third spinoff from 20th Century Fox’s wildly uneven X-Men franchise. This hard-R action thriller only concerned itself with its comic book origins when it needed to advance the thoughtful arc of its title character. This is the type of action fare that originally set the bar for fanboys, back when movies like “Robocop” and “Terminator 2” were the standards, instead of toothless, PG-13 cartoons, designed by committee.

06 – Colossal
Anne Hathaway and Jason Sudeikis explore gendered power dynamics and alcoholism in Nacho Vigalondo’s unique comedic fantasy “Colossal.”  The relationship depicted here is mirrored by (and perhaps in control of) giant monster attacks in Seoul, South Korea. This is unquestionably one of the most creative and underappreciated films released in 2017.

05 – The Shape of Water 
After a decade of playing in his toy-box and exploring new technology with films such as “Hellboy: The Golden Army” and “Pacific Rim,” Guillermo del Toro was in desperate need to scale things back and explore emotional storytelling again, and that’s exactly what he did with his spectacular inter-species, cold-war romance, “The Shape of Water.” This takes familiar sci-fi/horror tropes and weaves them into a sophisticated love story about living in the margins of society.

04 – Get Out
Comedian Jordon Peele released his post-racial horror-comedy “Get Out” just as our country began to reexamine the old prejudices that we had been trying to ignore for decades. His film cleverly reinterprets the tradition of paranoid, socio-political supernatural thrillers such as “The Stepford Wives” and “Rosemary’s Baby,” but it’s also become a conversation piece around a time when Americans were forced to deal with the fact that polite racism is still racism.

03 – Raw
This Belgian horror film explores the sexual awakening of a college-aged vegetarian through the metaphor of cannibalism and manages to be vicious, disgusting, and painfully relatable at the same time. Scenes of grotesque mutilation and bloody meat-eating are fetishized through the laser-focused perspective of our confused protagonist. While being one of the gnarliest seat-squirmers released in recent memory, this also happens to contain one of the most honest portrayals of competitive sisterhood captured on film.

02 – The Florida Project
Sean Baker’s film about struggling families living week to week in cheap hotels outside Disneyworld was one of the more affecting movies I came across last year. This contains strong performances by children and non-actors and a subtle compassion that glows through the entire production. Baker presents these marginal lives with an insider’s objectivity that refuses to other them or turn into magically-wise gypsies.

01 – Lady Bird 
“Lady Bird” is my favorite film of the year for the sheer reason that it kept me in a good mood for at least forty-eight hours after I watched it. The level of specificity in its character dynamics and its 2002 Sacramento setting, alongside the underlying mother-daughter story and its themes about embracing your small-town roots, sets this film apart from the usual ‘quirky’ Sundance fodder. This is what great American filmmaking should look like.

Honorable Mentions: The Big Sick, Thor: Ragnarok, Downsizing, Happy Death Day, It, Blade Runner: 2049

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about our year-end lists.

The Disaster Artist review

The cult-movie phenomenon “The Room” has had an interesting arc in pop-culture since its single-theater release in 2003. The film was a word-of-mouth curiosity among a growing fan-base of LA hipsters looking for a good chuckle, which then became a frequent subject of online conversation about the train wreck that is Tommy Wiseau’s (producer/director/star) vanity project. Only a few years later, Adult Swim began airing an edited version of the film, and soon enough, the movie began its new life an unintentional comedic masterpiece of so-bad-it’s-good paracinema.

James Franco’s “The Disaster Artist” tells the story of how Wiseau’s mess originally came together. The story is told through Tommy’s (James Franco) friendship with The Room’s second lead actor Greg Sestero (Dave Franco). After meeting in a San Francisco acting class, the two set their sales for Los Angeles, where they hope to break into film and television. Greg puts all of his trust in the enigmatic and independently wealthy Tommy, who refuses to disclose his age, his source of seemingly bottomless income, and his country of origin. After flailing from one audition to another, Tommy decides to write and direct his own feature, casting himself and his best friend as the movie’s stars. What ensues is the troubled conditions and inept filmmaking that lead to The Room’s now-quotable English as second-language dialogue, awkwardly hilarious soft-core sex scenes, and the film’s many football-tossing conversation set-pieces.

This eccentric biopic has a few notable standouts; firstly there’s James Franco’s wild and committed performance, in which it’s obvious that the actor has spent hours studying every tick and every idiosyncratic gesture of his ambiguously European muse. The story arc between Greg and Tommy, the rise and fall of their friendship, and how it making of their film relates to their careers and legacies is interesting and played with some amount of charm and heart, even if this angle is offset by a large chunk of the film that is more concerned with recreating fan-favorite moments from “The Room,” as well as Dave Franco’s unfortunate underacting. 

Sestero, who wrote the tell-all for which this film is based, is a whitebread, undescriptive Hollywood baby-face, but his role in Tommy’s life gives him a jolt of unearned intrigue. Dave Franco’s performance as the actor turned author never quite settles beneath the surface of either the movie’s comedic potential or its emotional intent. Because of this, James’ Wiseau performance becomes more of a long-form impression than a fully realized character.

Ultimately, there’s nothing that one can say about “The Room” that the “The Room” doesn’t already say about itself, and to devote a so much screen time on pointing out the untethered ego of its director and the film’s obvious artistic shortcomings simply becomes a tedious act of picking low-hanging fruit. With that said, “The Disaster Artist” is entertaining enough as an extension of a cinematic meme. If you’ve ever endured Wiseau’s 2003 opus, or, despite being objectively bad, you find it endlessly watchable because of its otherworldly tone, then Franco’s extended inside joke will give you enough laughs to justify its existence, but I'm not sure how well any of this will play for those who are entirely uninitiated.

Grade: B-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Dec-2017

Listen to this episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "The Disaster Artist"

Star Wars: The Last Jedi review

Under the steady control of Kathleen Kennedy and J.J. Abrams, this third Star Wars trilogy has built upon the traditions of George Lucas’ mythology and pays homage to the type of fan-service that sells light-sabers at Toys R’ Us. But the director of the latest installment, Rian Johnson of “Looper,” “Brick” fame, plays the storytelling of this new sequel like a bored gamer who decides to break away from the core missions to see how far the boundaries the video-game will go. This isn’t to say that “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” is wildly off-topic or even experimental, but it does play with the expectations of the audience with narrative risks not seen in the franchise since Irvin Kershner’s 1980 sequel, “The Empire Strikes Back."

The story picks up where 2015’s “The Force Awakens” left off; Rey (Daisy Ridley) has found Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) hiding as a hermit on a distant planet. There, she hopes to be trained in the ways of the force by the former Jedi master. Cocky flyboy Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) and the reluctant and frightful ex-Stormtrooper Finn (John Boyega) are traveling with the Resistance, trying to survive the intergalactic pursuit of the imperial First Order, which is led by the vengeful Kilo Ren (Adam Driver).

Structurally, many of these story beats are very similar to those built into the plot of “The Empire Strikes Back,” and similarly, this installment wishes to disturb the canon with a few sharp left turns and a few shocking reveals. But rather than making his bed in the comfort of nostalgia, Johnson’s tricky screenplay also challenges Lucas’ classical, Campbellian tropes. Rey’s journey of self-discovery does not lead to self-assuring revelations about her past, and only further complicates her place in this battle between good and evil. Ridley and Driver share several scenes in psychic conflict, in which the characters bridge the bureaucracy of war and destiny to make a deeper connection that defies both of their places in their spiritual and philosophic struggle.  This potentially treasonous relationship is very well acted and is some of the most compelling drama the series has produced thus far.

We’re treated to another side story in which Finn and a young resistance mechanic named Rose (Kelly Marie Tran) travel to a space Casino full of intergalactic one-percenters to find a hacker who can help them stop the First Order from being able to track their ships whilst escaping in light-speed. This mission, while bouncy and played like a high-stakes movie heist, is also subverted and woven into the greater peril of Leia's command (Carrie Fisher) and difficult decisions made by her Vice Admiral Holdo (Laura Dern).

Johnson’s visual take on the material is a little left of center as well, and the set design is often beautifully stark and minimal. His work with the actors is generous and thankfully he gives aged performers like Fisher and Hamill more to do in the story than to simply act as camera-winking cameos. This is a terrific action film and great advancement of the Star Wars canon.

Some long-time fans have bucked to the risks Johnson took with his entry, but what I appreciate the most about “The Last Jedi” is that, while it’s a half hour too long and some of the humor doesn’t land, this is one of the most story-driven installments the series has ever seen. Rather than serving a classical hero’s journey about good versus evil, the characters are now forced to move forward with a plot that has greater ties to their unpredictable motivations.

Grade: B+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Dec-2017

Listen to this episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "The Last Jedi"

The Shape of Water review

Mexican born filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro is fascinated by the idea that people are often drawn to what initially scares them, usually only because they fundamentally misunderstand themselves and the greater context of their own fears. As such, his films--both indie darlings like “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “The Devil’s Backbone,” as well as studio blockbusters like “Pacific Rim” and “Hellboy"--are chock full of interesting and intricately designed monsters. As a visual artist and a storyteller Del Toro loves his monsters and for him, they always represent a complex emotional truth about the nature of humanity. With his latest film, “The Shape of Water,” the balance between his directorial compassion and his genre obsessions is blended delicately into a contemporary “Beauty and Beast” style narrative, with a central focus on diversity, tolerance, and equality.

The story is set in the cold-war 1960s at the height of the red scare. Sally Hawkins plays Elisa Esposito, a mute janitor who cleans a secret government science compound. Things get interesting when an amphibious humanoid merman is captured from his underwater home in South America and brought into the facility to be studied. Some of the scientists wish to keep him alive to understand his capability to learn, and others, like the stone-faced, military-minded Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon), plan to dissect the creature to develop new science to use against their Russian enemies. Hawkins secret friendship and eventual romance with the amphibious man leads to a rescue effort that involves co-worker Zelda (Octavia Spencer), the sympathetic Dr. Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg), and her graphic designer neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins).

Given the time period this movie is set and the basic structure of the plot, it would have been easy to allow a story of this kind of coast of genre expectations alone. What makes the film stand out from being yet another high-concept take on “E.T” or “Free Willy” is Del Toro’s willingness to dig deep into a psychology of his characters and their worldview. The film's theme of what it is to be ostracized as a minority dominates and naturalizes the fantasy.  Hawkins’ character is mute, Spencer is black, and they both work as women in a government-industry dominated by white men. Likewise, Jenkins plays a closeted gay man, and it’s the unified ‘other-ness’ of this grouping of minorities that is manifested through the struggle of this abused and imprisoned merman. As we see the civil rights struggle in the background of this story, it becomes all the more evident that the creature's rescue becomes their rescue. 

The central love story between Elisa and this mysterious being, played with wonderful physicality by Doug Jones, takes risks and goes beyond the usual slow build to acceptance and eventual affection. Hawkins’ wordless performance strips away the possibility for coyness or coded language when it comes to all of her emotions and as the story progresses their love is expressed both emotionally and physically. This, along with Guillermo’s biting sense of humor, and the occasional jolts of visceral violence may alienate some audience members, but even if this is too weird for you to swallow, it’s difficult to deny the movie’s bold commitment to its premise.

Everyone already knows that Del Toro is Hollywood's current king of creature design and art direction. “The Shape of Water” is no exception. However, by putting his focus on one central creature, instead of a smorgasbord of weird looking monsters we are usually treated to in one of his previous films, he is able to dig deeper into the wider human world his characters inhabit. The 60s sets are well lit and creatively designed and the “Creature From The Black Lagoon” inspired look of Jones’ costume is textured and utterly believable, but it's Del Toro’s capacity to empathize with these characters and ground this world into an emotional reality that elevates this movie beyond its fairytale tropes and trappings.

Grade: A

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Dec-2017

Listen to this episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "The Shape of Water"

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri review

Writer, director, and playwright Martin McDonagh has reached new heights and new ambitions with his latest effort “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri.” This is a strangely American story for the Irish filmmaker; a dark, rural noir about a community plagued by tragedy and bitter rivalries. The film’s dark sense of humor and colorful dialogue, as well as actress Frances McDormand as the lead, brings to mind bleaker work of the Coen brothers, and while “Three Billboards” isn’t quite as structurally sound or tonally confident as something like “Blood Simple” or “Fargo,” this Midwest murder ballad has its own eccentricities to boast.

 McDormand stars as Mildred Hayes, a hardened town’s woman who is still in mourning after a year of waiting for the local police to solve the sexual assault and brutal murder of her teenage daughter. When it seems like the local authorities have exhausted all their leads and have let the case get cold, Mildred takes action by renting three un-used billboards on an old highway, calling out the police chief Bill Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) for his inaction. Sam Rockwell plays Jason Dixon, the hot-headed officer who works under Willoughby and whose reputation as an underachiever places him in a conflicting position between the locals, the vengeful Mildred, and his boss.

Speaking only for his cinematic work, McDonagh is one of the many filmmakers who graduated from the school of post-Tarantino, making bratty, self-conscious and genre-defying crime movies. In this regard, he shares a lot of same obsessions as his British crime comrades such as Matthew Vaughn (“Layer Cake”) and Guy Ritchie (“Snatch”), but where he departs from all of these influence, is his ability to be arch and ultra-violent while never losing sight of his interest in deep-rooted emotional storytelling. His debut “In Bruges” as well as “Three Billboards…” lets the flashy style and sassy dialogue carry us to unexpected tenderness flowing beneath the surface of his movies’ genre appeal. This latest work pushes the sincerity of its lurid subject matter even further and finds McDonagh dialing into his actors’ performances with more clarity and a new sense of Zen confidence. This is why it's all the more frustrating when the movie undercuts its emotional core with corny punchlines or crass jokes.

The majority of the film balances the dark humor and the darker tragedy with commendable grace and agility, but occasionally when these two tones run into each other, they loudly clang. “Game of Thrones” actor Peter Dinklage is essentially included in the cast for the sole purpose of delivering an extended little-person joke, and both Harrelson as Chief Willoughby and John Hawkes as Mildred’s abusive ex-husband are both sporting young trophy wives played by Abbie Cornish and Samara Weaving; a strange parallel that isn’t addressed and is often played for tonally-inappropriate laughs. Though McDonagh is stretching his abilities here and has perhaps made his most fulfilling and ambitious movie yet, the stretch-marks are definitely visible.

“Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri” isn’t a perfect film but it’s a welcome surprise during the usually-stuffy prestige season. It’s a twisting crime yarn that you can never predict and that’s equally concerned with presenting the film as both an art-form as well as a means for populist entertainment. This is the director’s best-looking film to date, with cinematographer Ben Davis capturing the landscape in a way that informs the movie’s southern-gothic undertones perfectly. And yet, even with a bigger canvas being utilized, the performances never drift too far from the intimate relationship they successfully build with the audience.

Grade: B+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Dec-2017

Listen to this episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "Three Billboards..."

Lady Bird review

Quentin Tarantino once said of Kevin Smith’s “Chasing Amy” “Yeah, it’s personal, but if it isn’t good who cares?” This was, of course, Tarantino’s lead into a strong endorsement of the indie filmmakers critically high-point, before Smith eventually squandered most his good will on half-baked stoner comedies and non-sense podcast fodder. But it’s this sentiment that comes to mind when reviewing actress Greta Gerwig's “Lady Bird,” her debut film as both writer and director. Based heavily on the 34-year old’s  own coming of age experiences in 2002 Sacramento, the movie plays as both a love letter to the California capital, as well as a tender-hearted comedy about a big fish in a little pond who’s awkwardly splashing her way to grander opportunities.

Christine McPherson (Saoirse Ronan) is a high-school senior who is desperately trying to leave her small town life. While forced to live a lower-middle-class existence, fighting with her pragmatist mother (Laurie Metcalf) and preparing graduation from her strict Catholic education. As she tries on many new personalities she ready’s herself for a more cultured life at one of the prospective east-coast universities she hopes to attend. This is made explicitly known to her friends and family when she forces them to refer to her as Lady Bird instead of her given name. After deciding she needs an artistic outlet, her and best friend Julie (Beanie Feldstein) take small parts in the school musical, just before Lady Bird finds a new group of partying, pseudo-intellectual parking-lot rebels. In the background of this, with the help of her out-of-work father (Tracy Letts), our protagonist tries to apply to as many out-of-state schools as she can without her easily-worried mother finding out.

Gerwig’s treatment of this coming-of-age story is grounded by its specificity. It’s not a story that has to take place in Sacramento to work, but in doing so the city becomes another character whose relationship with Lady Bird is just as nuanced as the other human relationships in the movie. This didn’t need to be set in 2002, but the music and wardrobe choices, as well as the pre-smartphone, pre-social media time-frame that’s captured here, keep the characters isolated in their suburban malaise that’s lovingly recreated. It’s also nice to see a story about a realistically middle-class family who is struggling financially but without shifting the narrative away from the protagonists

The other element that separates this effort from the film’s generic teen-movie lineage, is the quality of the performances combined with Gerwig’s funny yet truthful, conversational dialogue. The many prickly scenes between Metcalf and Ronan’s mother-daughter exchanges is like watching two tennis pros bat the ball back and forth without ever letting it hit the ground. These actors are totally in tune with each other but not at the expense of movie’s larger impact. As real and emotional as the acting is, it never overwhelms the story or dampens the scripts many comedic highlights. Actor/playwright Letts also has complicated arc throughout the story as his personal and professional failures are redeemed through his daughter’s naive ambitions. It’s a heartbreaking arc that the film doesn’t explicate in an overly sentimental way. 

Not only is “Lady Bird” an exceptional effort from a first time director, this has been one of the strongest films to come out this year--though it should be stated Gerwig’s collaborations with directors Noah Baumbach and Joe Swanberg was more extensive than the usual co-writer or actor. Every scene advances or complicates the characters and never lets them settle into a comfortable archetype, and the craft behind the earthy, amber-hued visual design of the picture also shows a level of stylistic confidence that elevates the project beyond either the teen genre or the usual Sundance crowd-pleaser.  Like any great filmmaker who understands how to balance story with style, Gerwig’s snappy dialogue and personal touches are in perfect sync with the rhythm of the narrative and in service to the overall quality of the final result.

Grade A+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Dec-2017

Listen to this episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "Lady Bird."

Justice League review

Well, whether we wanted it or not, Warner Bros have released the not-very-long-awaited “Justice League.” Of the film’s six central heroes (Wonder Woman, Batman, Superman, Aquaman, Cyborg and The Flash) we’ve only been properly introduced to three of them.  This started with director and producer Zack Snyder’s 2011 “Man of Steel” and continued with last year’s misbegotten franchise booster-shot “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice,” which teased a Wonder Woman cameo, who, earlier this summer, starred in what has so-far been the DC cinematic universe’s only coherent origin story.  Somewhere in all of that, we were also treated to the stylistically confused, tangential distraction known as “Suicide Squad,” which added nothing to the world of pop-culture other than insufferable Joker/Harley Quinn true-love memes and bad tattoo ideas.

But this is it; this what is what all that other non-sense was leading up to. This was supposed to be Warner’s live-action “Super Friends” that would rival the blockbuster assembly-line that is Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe. How well did it accomplish this goal, you might ask? Well, unlike the bulk of the DCU’s previous efforts—“Wonder Woman” notwithstanding—“Justice League” makes narrative sense, insomuch that is has a beginning, a middle and an end, and for 10-15 minute increments the unintentional camp that comes from Snyder’s inability to understand cinema beyond its ornamental surfaces overlaps with the most base pleasantries that come with superhero genre storytelling.

A race of interdimensional locust people is brought upon our world by a demi-god warrior known as Steppenwolf who wants to transform our planet into an apocalyptic kingdom. Superman (Henry Cavill) is still dead, so Bruce Wayne/Batman (Ben Affleck) travels the globe to recruit the world’s strongest remaining meta-humans. These super-powered beings include the naive and socially-awkward Barry Allen/The Flash (Ezra Miller), the brutish sea-merchant and low-key water-god Arthur Curry/Aquaman (Jason Momoa), the surprisingly still-relevant Diana Prince/Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), and the barely-necessary Victor Stone/Cyborg (Ray Fisher). Together they must prevent Steppenwolf from weaponizing three magic cubes that generate enough raw energy to transform our planet.

“Justice League” isn’t totally unwatchable but within an era with endless, formulaic superhero flicks, it reeks of being too little, too early. The story is practically Mad-Libbed from stock comic-book movie tropes and since most of the previous entries in this franchise failed to give us compelling arcs for these characters—some of which we are only getting to know here—it becomes impossible to invest in the film’s message of togetherness. The screenplay is front-loaded with catch-ups and mini-origins, setting up each hero and giving them individual goals to accomplish by the film’s end. Because these characters are so loosely drawn and inconsequential to the plot, this ultimately feels like a waste of time and a slow lead up to the movie’s more pressing concerns with its villain and the possible resurrection of Superman—which, by the way, is not all that interesting either.

As far as action-spectacle goes, this is one of the sloppiest visual productions to have ever come from this director. I haven’t always responded positively to Snyder’s style of green-screen-driven art design, the slow-mo action sequences, or the artificial lighting schemes and color-correction that makes the bulk of his work look like high-budget Linkin Park videos, but even on that level, “Justice League” struggled to blend the actors into their CGI environments and hiding the unnatural physics behind the wire effects. Despite its bloated budget, this feels like discount Zack Snyder, and with a story as shallow and rehashed as this, the movie's effects deficit becomes all the more severe.

You may have heard that this film is better than expected (or even good) because it has a better sense of humor. Yes, unlike the dreadfully serious “Batman v Superman,” there’s Marvel-style jokes and quip-y dialogue (perhaps penned from quip-master himself, Joss Whedon, who stepped in to complete the last leg of the production) and occasionally Gal Gadot and Ezra Miller help to keep the group dynamics lively as they plod from one telegraphed set-piece to another, but as a piece of cinema there’s nothing here original or compelling enough to make up for the multi-car pileup that preceded and laid the foundation for its making.

Grade: D+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Nov-2017

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

Thor: Ragnarok review

Marvel’s “Thor: Ragnarok” sits neatly into the newest phase of the post-millennial cinematic superhero boom; the ironic, smart-aleck phase. After years of sincere, emotionally grounded superhero films and a couple years of gritty, nihilistic superhero films, with the focus mostly on charismatic, reluctant savior archetypes, it would appear that the genre is now in a self-reflexive, experimental mood, no-longer interested in retelling the same tired Campbellian origin stories. This is best exemplified with the success of Marvel’s quirky “Guardians of the Galaxy” films, Fox’s snarky “Deadpool” movie and Warner’s recut and confused “Suicide Squad.” We’ve seen referential superhero comedies before, like Mathew Vaughn’s “Kick-Ass” and James Gunn’s pre-Guardians indie film “Super,” but it’s that these new films are made within the established cannon of their respective cinematic universes that their tonal risks are all the more pronounced.

Chris Hemsworth as Thor returns to the magic realm of Asgard, only to discover that his father Odin (Anthony Hopkins) has failed to keep away his long lost sister Hela (Cate Blanchett), who was banished from the kingdom centuries ago for being a murderous war monger. Having returned stronger than ever, she pushes Thor and his trickster brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) into a junk-yard planet that is ruled by a flaky aristocrat (Jeff Goldblum) who keeps his subjugated people entertained with gladiatorial battles. Thor is eventually captured by a binge-drinking ex-Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) and forced to fight his fellow Avenger, Bruce Banner/Hulk (Mark Ruffalo). Meanwhile, Hela has reclaimed the Asgardian throne and is making her plans to invade neighboring realms.

“Thor: Ragnarok” separates itself from the previous two entrees in the franchise by embracing this new shift into broader storytelling and wilder myth-making. The movie’s aesthetic is knowingly campy and filled with flashy, colorful visuals that zip through every frame. Along with Mark Mothersbaugh’s synth-laden score, this new look and approach—very much informed by “Guardians of the Galaxy”—taps into a pinball arcade peppiness that activates every artistic choice New Zealand director Tiaka Waititi commits to. Unlike the first two Thor films, which were beholden to some earth-bound characters and natural settings to help fit the character into the norms of the conventional superhero mold, Ragnarok has untethered its earthly concerns and introduces us to a host of new space-ships, aliens, mythic monsters and ancient prophecies.

There are times when Ragnarok’s ties to the other Marvel films is cumbersome. Many plot points refers back to the other adventures by the Avengers and many of the movie’s in-jokes refer to what we have come to know about these characters over the last six years. As such, I’m not sure how well this installment stands on its own. The wild joy-ride this story takes us on is unpredictable and refreshing in its full embrace of silliness but there are also moments when the movie is throwing so much at us all at once, that things get momentarily cluttered and borderline incoherent. Waititi keeps all the moving pieces connected just enough that the narrative doesn’t split at the seams, but Blanchett’s darker Asgardian takeover plot is largely pushed away by the lighter gladiatorial stuff, with Jeff Goldblum looking like an extra from the 1980 disco cult-film “The Apple.” This isn’t a detriment to a movie that wants to be funnier and louder in its aesthetic approach, but it does leave the mechanics of the storytelling noticeably uneven.

Waititi took this material, which by 2013’s dower “Thor: The Dark World” had overstayed its welcome, and injected new life into it by strategically stepping away from superhero formulas. Everyone here is having a good time, and you should too. This is a wild, messy space-opera buffet, and as such, feel free to bring a bib and dig in. While there isn’t much here in the way nutritious substance beyond the simple joys of its creative surfaces,  but “Thor: Ragnarok” certainly lives up to its objective as being a spectacle with it's own comedic personality.

Grade: B+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Nov-2017

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

The Florida Project review

Sean Baker’s “The Florida Project” is a near-perfect snapshot of real-world Americana. Unlike the usual glut of LA/NY films about the lives of ad executives and graphic designers, Baker gives us the fly on the wall point of view of a lively Orlando motel filled with immigrants, tourists and vagrants who are all doing what they can to make it through day to day.  Hollywood routinely ignores the poor unless they wish to exploit them or turn them into cartoonish stereotypes, and while Baker doesn’t shy away from the grimmer realities of those who have slipped beneath America’s social cracks, he never judges them and gracefully creates a deep sense of untraditional family with his cast of mostly unknowns.

Newcomer Brooklyn Prince plays the film’s unofficial lead Mooney, a spunky six year old with a potty mouth and an adventurous spirit that gets her and her friends into trouble. Scooty (Christopher Rivera) and Jancey (Valeria Cotto) follow their instigator as they panhandle for ice-cream money, break into the hotel’s breaker room, and vandalize near-by abandoned homes. Mooney lives with her notably young mother Halley (Bria Valley), who sells hot merchandise and prostitutes herself to pay a weekly rent for their room at a Disneyworld-adjacent hotel, which is managed by the bighearted but overstretched Bobby, played by Willem Dafoe.

While there is clear character arcs the narrative there isn’t a clear three act structure with an inciting incident or second act moment of conflict to be resolved. Because of the movie’s impressionistic, montage approach to storytelling, some might find the lack of a “plot” frustrating. Baker doesn’t want to bog these characters down with a plot contrivance like a personal mission to achieve or a big problem to overcome. Instead this focuses more on the moments between the plot-points in our lives, and since most of this is being experienced through the perspective of a child, we are sometimes shielded from the harder aspects of Mooney’s daily experiences. What Baker creates is a painterly collage of brief moments of recognizable American childhood, where harder adult truths like making rent, finding free food and avoiding the police is treated like a fun game or a way of keeping yourself occupied during summer vacation.

With the exception of Dafoe as Bobby, who turns in a wonderful un-Dafoe performance as the hotel’s surrogate father, the rest of the cast blends into Baker’s attempt at documentary-style verisimilitude.  This means that the acting, like in Baker’s last picture—the iPhone filmed dark comedy “Tangerine”—is too real to focus on performance as an individual element. Much of the dialogue feels improvised and the children often scream and squeak their lines over each other, giving the audience the impression that they aren’t watching a movie, so much as peering through their window, wondering like a nosy neighbor just what the hell these kids are up to.  This, along with the non-traditional narrative structure, is likely to weed out viewers who are more accustomed to Wheaties- commercial style annunciation from their child actors.

The accumulative effect of “The Florida Project” is devastating if you’re willing to open your mind to its unique rhythm. The cinematography by Alexis Zabe combines the handheld immediacy of “Tangerine” with warmly lit, deliberate camera placement that recalls the moodier moments of last year’s Florida-based indie drama, “Moonlight.” Though all the individual components of the film work in harmony, with the exception of some random bathtub shots that are seemingly shuffled in to break up later scenes, the movie’s big takeaway is the compassion it displays for its characters and the tangible, relatable world they inhabit.    

Grade: A-

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Nov-2017

The Babysitter review

Netflix’s “The Babysitter” is a horror-tinged action-comedy with a surprising amount of charisma and charm. Surprising because it's directed by McG, best known for hacky schlock like “This Means War,” “Terminator Salvation” and the “Charlies Angels” movies, Here he scales down his budget and the broad scope of his desired audience, and in doing so manages to helm something that feels specific and personal, while also retaining enough visceral hijinks and well-intended snark to keep things entertaining.

The film centers on the relationship between a nerdy twelve year old named Cole (Judah Lewis) and his babysitter Bee (Samara Weaving). Cole is getting old enough to know that he’s probably too old for a babysitter, but Bee is everything a bullied brain needs in middle-school; she’s smart, she listens, she gives great advice and she’s smoking-hot. The only downside is she also happens to be the leader of a teenage devil-worshipers cult. One night, while Cole’s parents are away, he stays up late to see what Bee and her friends are up to, only to disrupt a murderous death ceremony, which kicks off a night-long game of cat and mouse between our worry-wort protagonist and this group of sinister high schoolers. 

This movie mostly works because of the well-established dynamic between Lewis and Weaving. We have to fall in love with Bee just as Cole does, so that when the story reveals her for what she is, we feel the same kind of betrayal. To the director’s credit, he does the proper leg-work with these characters so that the drama is informed and the action stakes are energized. Samara Weaving gives what would normally be a star-making performance as Bee--she’s confident, funny and powerfully sexy, without ever leaning into vacuous objectification. The versatility she displays with this wildly audacious role is better than any acting reel one could hope to cobble together.  Judah Lewis is also good at portraying believable innocents in a film that revels in poppy ultra-violence and subversive fun.  It’s for this reason that the other teens, played by Bella Thorne, Hanna Mae Lee, Robbie Amell and Andrew Bachelor feel all the more underwritten in comparison.

While Weaving and Lewis are fully realized and complicated from the page to their performances, these other roles are far more comfortable existing as basic teen horror archetypes, often spouting sophomoric, unfunny dialogue. But despite the quality imbalance between all the characterizations, “The Babysitter” still knows how to build small-scale action set-pieces with creative kills and effective moments of splattering slapstick.

Besides working well as a violent dark comedy, Brian Duffield’s screenplay also remembers to root everything within the context of an effective coming-of-age arc. As a result, this left-of-center project is without a doubt the most original and heartfelt film to come out of McG’s spotty catalog, and that’s saying something for a picture littered with satanic blood rituals, hangings and indoor car crashes.

Grade: B-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Oct-2017

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

Happy Death Day review

There was a time, not too long ago, when horror movies used to be made for teenagers.  The 80s was full of populist scary flicks that catered to the 11-24 marked, with films such as “Friday the 13^th,” “Fright Night,” “Slumber Party Massacre,” “Night of the Comet,” “The Lost Boys” and many more. Wes Craven’s first “Scream,” and its subsequent sequels and rip-offs, might have been the last era of that tradition. In its absence, we’ve seen grim supernatural chillers, cheap found-footage shocks and a small splattering of gore films, derisively labeled ‘torture porn.’  Christopher Landon’s “Happy Death Day,” released by Blumhouse Productions, tries to find that sweet spot between made-for-TV tween-age Halloween movies and the slightly more sophisticated slashers of the 1980s.

Jessica Rothe stars as Tree Gelbman, a young sorority girl who, on her birthday, finds herself waking in a strange boy’s dorm room after a hard night of partying. Quickly gathering her things and leaving, she’s goes about her day with smeared eye-liner and a short fuse, pissing off everyone she encounters, including Carter, the boy she presumably spent the night with (Israel Broussard), her college roommate (Ruby Modine) and the professor with whom she’s currently having an extra-marital affair (Charles Aitken). Her night ends at the end of knife held by a masked killer, and after she's murdered, she awakes on the same day, in the same bed, only to relive these encounters over and over until she’s able to outsmart her attacker.

The fun of this “Groundhog’s Day” premise is that Landon and his screenwriter Scott Lobdell can fully explore the geography of their set-pieces and they can tease the mystery element with a gimmick that allows the audience to play along with the protagonist. In this way, the movie succeeds in its slumber party ambitions, but it excels in its layered character work. Tree begins the film as a terrible person who has little to no regard for anyone other than herself. Her journey, by reliving a horrible death over and over again, is to explore who she’s wronged and what their motivations might be. In doing so, she is forced to think about the feelings of others and she is also forced to come to terms with her own past trauma that made her become so cold to begin with. This Scrooge-ish character arc might not be the most revolutionary angle to go with, but there’s at least an emotionally rooted purpose for it’s the screenplay’s high-concept.

All the performances are strong. Rothe has the most do, as she learns to become a better person throughout the runtime, but her eventual partnership with Broussard is also a highlight, as we watch them plan and scheme together like the Hardy Boys. The film only slips when it over plays its red herrings. An element is introduced near the mid-point that steps too far away from what was carefully established in the first third. This plot point is eventually dealt with in a way that’s satisfying and still rooted in character, but given the obvious mechanics of the plot, the placement of this story element is the only thing that registers as labored and forced.

“Happy Death Day” is a love letter to a simpler time in horror. It uses post-modern techniques to explore these simpler, somewhat optimistic themes, but in doing so, manages to cleverly deconstruct the slasher genre in way that isn’t too ponderous or academic.  It’s probably not as scary as it could have been but this is the type of horror date-movie that was made to enjoy some popcorn with, and sometimes that’s okay.

Grade: B

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Oct-2017

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