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."

Sicario review

There’s been a long tradition of southwest, boarder-town noirs that reach as far back as Anthony Mann’s 1949 film “Boarder Incident” and as recent as the Coen brother’s “No Country For Old Men,” as well as television’s “Breaking Bad.” Surprisingly, as worn as this genre may be, Denis Villeneuve’s “Sicario” still manages to find new life underneath old tropes and effectively tightens the screws with tense, Hitchcockian set-ups.

Emily Blunt plays Kate Macer, a moral FBI agent who’s hired by a government special operations unit to take down a powerful cartel leader who’s responsible for a number of indiscriminate killings and mutilations. In hopes of doing the right thing to get to the worst evils of society, she realizes that the deeper she gets involved the less her convictions and her morals will help her with the job at hand.

From the opening sequence when we see Blunt and her fellow agents break into a remotely located drug-house, with gunmen behind every corner and dead-bodies shrink-wrapped behind the dry-wall, Villeneuve establishes a Dante-like hell that increasingly challenges our hero as she descends deeper into each circle of its depravity. Josh Brolin plays her duplicitous guide into this journey named Matt Graver, a man who smugly wears flip-flops to office meetings and hides his elusive motives behind a casual smile. Benicio Del Toro’s Alejandro is an even tougher nut to crack, as he seems to be able to brutally operate outside of the strict confines of the law with complete immunity. Blunt serves as the audience’s surrogate but also as the movie’s moral center and its heart. To her credit, given the mechanical function of her character, she manages to breath in sync with the camera and effectively embodies Villeneuve’s tone of paranoia.

As with the director’s last film “Prisoners,” this feature was shot by the much-celebrated cinematographer Roger Deakins, and like his past work—including “No Country for Old Men”—every shot is precisely considered and milks each frame for ominous drama. Deakins’ artful approach to photography, along with the film’s doom-laden score by Jóhann Jóhannsson perfectly accents the movie’s many apocalyptic establishing shots and creates a malevolent sense of dread within the world these characters inhabit.

Luckily “Sicario” understands that aesthetics alone doesn’t make a movie without an assured story to tell and a confident director at the helm. Taylor Sheridan’s hard-boiled screenplay examines the war on drugs as a complicated parable with a “Chinatown” sense of pessimism. Villeneuve perfectly captures this with his nightmarish vision of violence as the last form of communication between the law and lawless.


This certainly isn’t a happy film and if you’re not inclined to watch a crime story that stares deep into the abyss without any tangible hope to keep from falling directly into it, then this might not be your ideal Saturday night. I, however, can’t recommend this movie highly enough. The performances across the board are fantastic—perhaps the best I’ve seen from all the leads in years—and it’s great to see a mainstream movie that’s isn’t satisfied with simply fulfilling its genre conventions.  Instead “Sicario” digs its familiar premise deeper for existential conflict and a darker tonal ambiance. 

Grade: A

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Oct-2015

Into the Woods review

        After the awards buzz and accolades that surrounded the 2013's cinematic adaptation of “Les Miserables,” it was only natural that another well regarded Broadway production would make it's way into the next year's crop of holiday releases. Disney's reworking of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's “Into the Woods” is a gleefully traditional musical comedy full of big stars doing big hammy performances, and it's camera-winking dorkiness is probably the most endearing thing about it. Though director Rob Marshall ("Chicago," "Nine") uses his mouse-house money to fully realize the fantasy world in which these intertwining stories take place, on some level, the movie still operates like a high-budget, high school musical staring the most popular jocks and cheerleaders of Hollywood, and within that tonal imagining there's definitely a charm to be had, but the film never quite makes the impact that the cast or the budget would suggest.

        In an extended overture we are introduced to this fairy tale mash-up world where in the same village lives Little Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford) and the Big Bad Wolf (Johnny Depp), Cinderella (Anna Kendrick) and Prince Charming (Chris Pine), Rapunzel (Mackenzie Mauzy), and Jack of the beanstalk fame (Daniell Huddleston). In the background while these stories play themselves out more or less like we have seen before, the primary plot focuses on baker and his wife played by James Cordon and Emily Blunt, who desperately want to have a child and who find themselves manipulated by a witch (Meryl Streep). Together they orchestrate all of these tales in such a way that they can obtain the items they need to perform a fertility spell. It's all very convoluted and for the most part incidental when giving in to the mindless joy of watching our favorite Grim's fairy tales unfold this ironic, post-modern context. Later, when the second half kicks into gear and adds a 'be careful what you wish for' twist to every premature happy ending, the movie oddly runs out of creative juice and the amicable tone of the first half of the film is replaced with ponderous and severely unearned character dilemmas.

         The cast is obviously having fun here and are given license to fully send-up the cliches attached to their stories and their character's. Chris Pine's turn as the egomaniac Prince Charming and Streep, who's doing her best Margaret Hamilton impersonation, keep things lively and funny. Blunt and Cordon also do a fine enough job working as the glue that keeps these dispirit plots from overwhelming the spinal narrative, but it's Marshall's lackluster visual design and directorial blandness that chains this movie to the floor and keeps it from fully taking flight. Much of this production is lit in muted blues and grays and creates for a dreary, damp looking post-Burton conceptual expression that doesn't reflect the buoyancy of the performances or Sondheim's varied musical numbers. Many scenes are shot in traditional coverage, composed mostly of simple masters, close-ups and over the shoulder shots, without hardly any swooping cranes, impressive single-takes or even occasional grandiose establishing shots that would open up the frame, resulting in musical set-pieces that feel small and televisual.
       Far less melodramatic or irritating as last-year's overlong “Les Miz”, and with sing-along musical sequences that are more confidently and skillfully performed, recorded and mixed, “Into the Woods” is a benign, if somewhat banal, movie going experience. Family's who're looking to escape the polar-vortex and/or the discomfort of having to talk to each other will most likely enjoy the majority what they see here, even if by the last thirty minutes they might be thinking more about their holiday dinner leftovers than how the movie will be resolved.

Grade: C+  

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Jan-2015

Edge of Tomorrow review

               Historically there has never been a great videogame film adaptation. Sure, some might argue that movies like “Mortal Kombat” or “Prince of Persia” are watchable, but given their competition within the genre that simply isn’t saying anything. Regardless, videogame aesthetics in production design, special effects and level-boss-level-boss plot structuring have definitely infiltrated the action movie genre, especially in the last 10-15 years.  “Edge of Tomorrow”—not based on a game property—is an action sci-fi that not only understands the appeal of videogame logic, but, more importantly, it understands how to integrate it into a compelling narrative without having to shoehorn fan-bits from a known franchise.

                Tom Cruise plays Cage, a propagandist for the new world military after a meteor landing sets loose a full-on alien takeover.  After paying his dues around the edges of the war he is drafted in by his superiors and thrown into battle, only to quickly die on the beaches of an ambush, finding himself returning to the same day and the same battle over and over again until he can learn from his mistakes well enough to find the source of the Alien hive-mind. In discovering the best ways to avoid his demise he meets Rita (Emily Blunt), a war hero who once shared the same deja-vu experience and who can best help Cage accomplish his existential mission.

                “Edge of Tomorrow” is an exciting, well-constructed action movie that doesn’t assume the worst of its audience. While I would hardly call it an intellectual experience, it’s at least formally interested in breaking down the genre in terms of its use of temporal space within its stop and start-over conceit. In creating a ‘game’ like narrative with something similar to a save points and boss-battles, the movie subtly challenges the notion of action movie death and the meaningfulness of second chances. Walk of characters such as Bill Paxton as the barking drill Sargent is afforded the choice to change his reactions and his line delivery a little bit every time the story rewinds, as well as other characters whose parts, had they only been on screen the one time, would have registered as incidental at best.  Impressively, by the very nature of its mechanics the movie forces us to get to know background characters, see things from multiple perspectives, and analyze the structure of the plot, and, to its credit, it does so without ever feeling fussy or overtly experimental.

                Cruise and Blunt have just enough screen chemistry to keep the ball rolling and the special effects and the world building are adequately high-tech and cleanly presented, if not somewhat underwhelming in terms creating a visual experience original enough to comfortably call this movie a modern classic. But while “Edge of Tomorrow” may not break the mold visually, its tight script, its considerate storytelling and its light comedic touch elevates this film from summer movie CGI-pulp to something at-least worth giving a second look.

Grade: B+

Originally published on the Idaho State Journal/June-2014