Kubo and the Two Strings review

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

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

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

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

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

Grade: B

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal - Sep/2016

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

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

The Wolf of Wall Street review

            The economy has been the underlying theme of many of the films released in the last 3 years, and this year being no exception. But whereas “The Hunger Games” and “Killing them Softly”  focused on the  struggle of the lower class and the inertia of the economic climb, moves of this topic in 2013, such as “The Bling Ring”, “Spring Breakers”,  “The Great Gatsby” and  “American Hustle”, are bleak satires of the bloated excesses of the one percent and the material obsessions of American culture.  Martin Scorsese’s latest, “The Wolf of Wall Street”—bizarrely released on Christmas weekend—is perhaps the most salty and biting of this crop; an unrelenting, tenacious carnival of queasy decadence and mind boggling affluenza.

                After losing his first fortune in the big Wall Street crash of 1987, young stockbroker Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) builds his way back up through an unregulated investment scam, tricking small start-up companies to sell stock to him for half the profits they receive. Later, when Belfort learns he can take this same business model to catch the bigger fish, his life, his friend, his wives, and his firm begins to quickly spin out of control.

                Not unlike Marty’s “Goodfellas” back in 1991, this film follows the rise and fall of an overconfident and mostly unlikable main character as he narrates the events of his life in a barely confessional, but mostly self-congratulatory, tone.  The friends and colleagues who surround Belfort, such as his sloppy yes-man Donny Azoff (played with spot-on comic sleaze by Jonah Hill), his mentor Mark Hannah (A Mathew McConaughey cameo, that almost steals the entire movie in one scene), and even his playboy-model second wife Naomi Lapaglia (played by newcomer Margot Robbie, who’s tough enough to keep up with all of the barking dogs in this movie) not only encourage his extreme behavior but they count on it to maintain their own status.  And when I say extreme behavior, sex, drugs and rock and roll is a reductive bumper-sticker in comparison to the day to day risk-taking these executives indulge in, as they engage in company-funded sex-parties on airplanes and consume fistfuls of illegal pills before and after meetings.

                Barely avoiding an NC-17 rating, Scorsese and company have been heavily scrutinized for portraying this lifestyle as all party and no hang-over and for possibly giving Belfort more money for his actions by adapting his own autobiography. While I can’t speak for Belfort’s royalties, I can say that if this had been a ninety minute blaze of orgiastic crunking, I could see the cocaine ecstasy that this film displays as being problematic. However, this is a three hour film, and after the first few hours of scandalous fun, the darkly-comedic beats begin to ramp up faster and faster until it becomes a numbing montage of capitalistic gluttony. What was once funny, dangerous, and sexy in the first half of the film becomes depressing, disgusting, and irredeemable by the second half, and I don’t consider that as a point of criticism. That, I believe, is exactly the point.

                The half-way mark is where audiences will likely take their position on the film. While some will find the epic build of this to be a monumental critique of privileged narcissism—a kind of Citizen Kane by way Gordon Gekko on bath-salts—others will not be as charmed by Scorsese’s persistent energy and may simply feel like they are sloshing in a bog of exploitation.

                 If this were a straightforward morality tale the characters would learn something valuable and karma would be the ultimate victor, but history isn’t fair and justice isn’t thorough.  Instead, you’re supposed to watch the actions of these men with conflicting sense of curious envy and outraged condemnation, and in that sense, “The Wolf of Wall Street” boldly puts its money where its mouth is.

Grade: A


Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Jan-2014