In the Heart of the Sea review

Ron Howard’s “In the Heart of the Sea” is a 3D, special effects reimagining of Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” that’s oddly bashful about its source material. The conceit is that this film is based on the true story that “Moby Dick” was inspired by, but given the level of artifice involved in the movie’s production, truth and authenticity hardly feels like the Howard's cinematic goal with this project. It’s also a special effects film in which the last 30 minutes primarily focuses on a group of starving men floating around in still waters.

Perhaps we need a new word for year-end, awards-baiting 3D films like “Gravity” and “Life of Pi”; not quite blockbuster, but not quite prestige film either. They exist somewhere in the middle, attempting to draw people in with the promise of spectacle, boasting a well-regarded cast and director and expressing just enough dramatic oomph to suggest a deeper regard for story than the summer’s brand of overblown toy commercials and comic book properties--or at least that’s the intended impression.

The story here is wrapped around a distracting framing device in which Brendan Gleeson recounts his time at sea as the youngest passenger aboard the movie’s nautical whaling adventure. As he tells this story to a young Herman Melville with writers-block (Ben Wishaw), we go back to the early 19^th century when whale-oil was a huge political and economic commodity.  Gleeson’s character is now played by future-Spider-Man Tom Holland, who looks up to the handsome and masculine Owen Chase, played by Chris Hemsworth. Chase is upset because, though he is more qualified and experienced, he is made second in command of his whaling ship to George Pollard (Benjamin Walker), who was hastily made captain through nepotism. After spending months at sea with little to show for it, the crew is told that there is a stretch of ocean a few thousand miles off the shores of Argentina lousy with whales, so long as they can survive a monstrous, vengeful sea-demon known as…well, not Moby Dick, because this isn’t that story…exactly.

Out of the gate this film is hobbled by the story within a story about a story concept, and with the narrator’s timeline intermittently weaving in and out of the film’s primary narrative, a lot of dramatic tension is broken to serve the movie’s and the tension that exists between it’s want to relish in lush production and its perceived ‘truthiness.’ Besides the whale attack money shots and the occasionally impressive vista, Anthony Dod Mantle’s cinematography is beholden to the 3D moments and blandly color-corrected with an aqua-marine tinge that actually flattens the dynamics of every shot.

That said, I can’t deny that the film eventually wormed its way into my psyche as the third act delved deeper into its characters and raised the stakes of their personal sense of humanity. Though the movie slows down to a crawl and essentially abandon’s its high-concept effects-ride premise, I could appreciate some of the narrative risks it was willing to take. Of course these risks are somewhat undercut by the need to have Wishaw and Gleeson explicate the movie’s themes every time the movie felt the need to cut back to the framing device.

“In the Heart of the Sea” is a gaudy, noble failure that mostly doesn’t work, but it’s also not entirely unentertaining. A lot of the movie is undeniably hokey. The performances are a little over-mannered, even by seasoned pros like Hemsworth and the great Irish actor Cillian Murphy, and with their old-American costumes and warbled accents much of it plays like an expensive episode of Comedy Central’s “Drunk History.” Which isn’t to say that there isn’t some inherent fun to be had in that aesthetic. Thematically, the movie struggles to tie together its semi-environmental ideas about the oil industrial complex with its sub-“Jaws” competition of masculinity themes and by the end of the film audiences are likely to feel bait-and-switched by how slow and dark the movie allows itself to get.

Grade: C-

Originally Printed in the Idaho State Journal/Dec-2015

Listen to more discussion about "In the Heart of the Sea" on this week's "Jabber and the Drone" Podcast.

Krampus review

The yuletide horror film has long been a tradition of the scary-movie genre, from 1974’s “Black Christmas,” to 1984’s “Silent Night, Deadly Night.” Michael Dougherty’s “Krampus” takes the twisted-fairytale approach to common Christmas movie tropes and perverts them with the same sense of gleeful menace that Joe Dante brought to his staple of the Christmas horror-comedy sub-genre “Gremlins.”

Adam Scott and Toni Collette play Tom and Sarah, two frustrated suburban parents who’re dreading the yearly visit from their backwards extended family. Sarah’s sister Linda (Allison Tolman) and her gun-toting, loud-mouthed husband (David Koechner), along with their drunken matriarch (Conchata Ferrell) and their two brutish children, complete this RV-driving nightmare family that seems hell-bent on ruining the perfect holiday weekend for Tom and Sarah’s youngest boy Max (Emjay Anthony). When Max gives up on the possibility of his family getting along he tears apart his handwritten letter to Santa Claus and, in doing so, inadvertently conjures the dark magic of the Krampus, a massive horned and hooved beast that turns every Christmas tradition into a deadly trap. Having experienced something similar in her youth, Tom’s elderly German mother Omi (Krista Stadler) tries to warn the group against going outside or letting the fireplace stay unlit. 

Dougherty’s previous holiday-themed cult-horror movie “Trick ’r Treat” was a tryptic, portmanteau narrative that brought together different story elements within the same group of characters, shifting from one plot thread to the other. “Krampus” is a much more traditionally structured three-act story, and because of that has more responsibility to its build-up and its pay-off. The movie’s set-up is pretty loose and given enough to air to inform the characters and comedy. Structurally, National Lampoon’s “Christmas Vacation” certainly played in similar water, as far as the awkward family dynamics go, but Dougherty’s screenplay never seems to penetrate the surface of these character’s one-note identifiers, underselling the potential for anything more than a mild chuckle. The actors do their best with what little they’re given, but before the horror-element kicks in, the movie’s foundation as a story is disappointingly thin.

Where Dougherty excels here is with his visual flair and his wild imagination when it comes to the effects and movie’ atmosphere. The Germanic pagan design of the “Krampus” himself, along with the wooden faces of his demonic elves are delightfully sinister and brings to mind the playful and practical creature effects of 1980s B-movies such as “Troll” and “Pumpkinhead.” Dougherty is clearly having fun within his limitations and plays the story like a director putting on a perverse puppet show for an unsuspecting audience. Unfortunately, the PG-13 rating dampens the levels of violence and shock necessary for the film to be anywhere near as subversive as it often thinks it’s being, forcing the movie to rely too heavily on its hacky and tepid comedy.

As a mostly-silly genre exercise, “Krampus” is acceptable pop-corn fodder and destined to be a cable-television curiosity. The plot mechanics and characterizations are certainly lazy and it’s never fully commits to the sense anarchy it teases throughout, but it’s filmed with visual confidence and it has just enough schlocky exuberance to keep you entertained.


Grade: C+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal - Dec/2015

Listen to more discussion about "Krampus" on this this week's episode of the Jabber and the Drone Podcast.

Creed review

Ryan Coogler’s unlikely “Rocky” spin-off “Creed” is an uncompromisingly traditional sports drama that works as a piece of pop-entertainment because of its commitment to emotional storytelling. Much like the director’s approach to his debut indie about police violence “Fruitvale Station,” Coogler spends a lot of time getting inside the heads of his characters and building a tangible, and believable world for them to inhabit. The big sports movie moments are present and the familiar beats of the genre are eventually paid off, but Coogler informs these moments with care and precision when it comes to the plight of the characters and the strength of the film’s performances.

This story picks up decades after the death of Rocky mentor and adversary Apollo Creed. Outside of the margins of the sequel’s cannon, it is learned that Creed had an illegitimate son named Adonis Johnson (Michael B. Jordan) with a women outside of his marriage. When the young boy’s mother dies and he is left orphaned Creed’s true wife Mary Ann (Phylicia Rashad) finds him in a juvenile detention center for boys and decides to bring him to her home in Los Angeles and raise the child like her own. After he’s grown, though she would like him to focus on his career as a business man, Johnson has a yearning to be a great fighter like the father he never met, secretly training in Mexico and building his natural talent as a boxer.  Soon enough, Adonis decides to quit his suit and tie job and move to Philadelphia to train with the aged and broken Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone).

Cinematically “Creed” distinguishes itself from the other “Rocky” movies with a quiet and grounded sensibility. There’s a loose, handheld style used throughout and a much more somber tone than is usually expressed in the rest of the movies of this franchise. Coogler directs the film as if the other movies were a mythologized version of a real-life figure that we’re meeting for the first time in this iteration. Of course this isn’t the case, but the grit of this movie world is an effective tone-setter and Coogler informs the mentor-mentee clichés of the plot with a documentary style realism that helps the film’s urban setting feel properly lived-in.

The camera work also allows for longer lasting cuts that boarder on virtuoso filmmaking without ever announcing a flashy movie-moment or any post-Scorsese directorial muscle-flexing. Instead, much like the performances, these longer cuts are used to open the scenes up and allows the visual language to breath, especially during the climactic fight sequences.

Michael B. Jordan is terrific here as the young Adonis Johnson. I won’t say that he’s written with a ton of depth or complexity, but Jordan’s interiority and natural screen presence fills in the blanks left of the page. When young Creed moves to Philadelphia he meets a neighbor played by Tessa Thompson, a musician with progressive hearing-loss. This relationship never feels like a superfluous B-plot, mostly because of the real chemistry that exists between the performers and because the attention payed toward the film’s themes of living in the moment before opportunity eventually fades. Stallone is also allowed to play his iconic character with more vulnerability than we have seen from him in some time.

“Creed” is a movie that we’ve seen before. The tropes of the boxing-genre are inescapable and just about every one of those boxes are checked in this somewhat pedestrian screenplay. But cinema should also exist off the page, and that is where Coogler finds his strength as a storyteller, often better at expressing how a scene should feel rather than what it tells.  

Grade - B+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Dec-2015

Listen to more discussion about "Creed" and "Room" on this week's Jabber and the Drone podcast.

Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 review

Susanne Collins’ book series and its subsequent film adaptations “The Hunger Games” has lead the pack of young-adult dystopian fiction. As an outside observer and a non-reader of the source-material, my familiarity of the films' well-worn pulp and science-fiction tropes combined with the overall seriousness in which they are presented has often left me cold. As the series has progressed both in budget and quality and as the story shifted from the hokey set-up of booby trapped game shows—hokey in execution, not necessarily concept—to the devastation of a revolutionary war scenario, my patience has increased in terms of the films’ undeniable tween demo targeting.

“The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2” concludes this franchise with an emotional and visceral payoff for those who have been invested since the first page of the first novel. It’s by far the darkest of the four movies and challenges “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows Part 2” with its mounting body count. But unlike many of the films in this series that awkwardly juxtaposed its themes of violence with its interest in filling the multiplex with 13 year old girls, this installment is fully committed to the trauma and complex psychological torture involved with oppression and war.

Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) has decided to break out on her own, away from the safety net of the other rebels and away from the propaganda war perpetrated by the rebel leader Alma Coin (Julianne Moore). With a little help getting out of her city district, Katniss and a group of other young soldier attempt to travel across the war-torn Capital to assassinate President Snow (Donald Sutherland).  On their journey they must avoid a series of dangerous booby-traps—less hokey this time around—while staying under the radar of the Capitals extensive surveillance.

After spending much of the last film brain-washed by the leaders of the evil government, Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) has rejoined the rebels, now suffering from post-traumatic stress. The rest of the group, including Katniss’ other would-be suitor Gale (Liam Hemsworth), are skeptical of Peeta’s reintegration and Katniss’ loyalties are once again divided. By this point in the series, amongst all of the death and destruction at hand, the last thing I want to see is the further development of a love triangle. Though much of it is truncated in favor of the film’s more interesting arc about the exchange of one governmental dominion to another, whenever the movie pauses to pay lip-service to this sub-Twilight will-they-or-wont-they, the tragedy of war is momentarily trivialized.  

Besides the tonally inappropriate love-story, the majority of the movie has a shocking lack of levity. The stakes are as high as anything the series as presented thus far and director Francis Lawrence flavors the rebel’s deadly pursuit with almost horror-movie levels of tension and anxiety. In one particularly suspenseful scene, Katniss’ group are held up in a subway tunnel where they are attacked by subterranean mutant vampire-like creatures. There’s not a lot of blood-letting or gore in this sequence but the set-up and its cinematic effect adds up to some pretty scary stuff for a younger than teenage audience. It also happens to be the only moment in which Lawrence seems to be havin fun with the pulpier elements of this franchise.

“Mockingjay Part 2” makes interesting points about the way classism and war exploits those most vulnerable, doing most of the heavy lifting for the privileged outliers who only wish to propel their own ideologies. The film’s final act—minus a saccharin and pointless epilogue—includes a shocking political gesture and a bravely messy cap on the good-guys-verses-bad-guys nature of the story. It’s about 25 minutes too long, drags whenever the characters have talk to each other, and cannot be bothered to consider its existence as a piece of genre entertainment, but as the full maturation of a YA property, this final installment is smart enough and intense enough to warrant the lesser entrees that preceded it.

Grade: B-

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Nov-2015

Listen to more discussion about "Mockingjay Pt.2" and "Carol" on this week's Jabber and the Drone podcast.

Beasts of No Nation review

Netflix has forever changed the traditional models of content delivery. Video stores were put on the endangered species list when people began subscribing to the company’s mail-based DVD rental system, and were later forced into extinction by its ever-expanding streaming service. Entire seasons of television shows, old and new, could be accessed with a single click and movies that people may have never considered watching were put on the same digital shelf as familiar classics. It wouldn’t be long before Netflix would start creating its own content, first in the form of serialized dramas like “House of Cards” and “Orange is the New Black,” and now in the form of stand-alone movies.

Netflix’s first original film “Beasts of No Nation” is an attempt to draw in a new audience that may not already be sold on the service’s versatility. In order to be eligible for awards consideration, this movie was given a day-and-date release, where it was available to stream from home alongside a limited theatrical run. This African war-thriller was written, directed and shot by Cary Fukunaga, director of the first season of HBO’s popular crime series “True Detective,” and the seductive style and the rich atmosphere that drew people into that show is certainly evident in this project as well.

The story here follows the life of a young villager named Agu (Abraham Attah) who is left an orphan when his family is gunned down in the streets by an invading government army. Agu manages to survive the vicious attack when he escapes into the bush. After a few days of struggling on his own, he is ambushed by a group of militant rebels who promise to give him food, water and safety if he joins their cause. Even more enticing, the young survivor is given a chance to avenge his family’s murder with the opportunity to train as a child soldier.

The group’s charismatic Commandant is played by English actor Idris Elba, who portrays the ragtag war-lord with a weighty sense of pathos and psychosis that makes it uncomfortably difficult to label him a monster, even as he indoctrinates eleven year olds into slaying grown men with machetes and keeps them enslaved to his agenda through heroin addiction. Elba plays this tyrannical Pied Piper with a world of pain behind his tired eyes and an unrelenting cycle of aggression expressed through the delivery of his radical speeches.

Attah is also given a strong arc as an actor, mentally aged far beyond his years as he is forced to endure and internalize the worst of human instincts. His character quickly loses his innocence while marching through the jungle with the other brainwashed lost boys and slowly loses his humanity as they pass from one massacre to another.

Fukunaga evokes Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” by giving us the same long, dead stare into the abyss, and in many ways “Beasts of No Nation” is a similar triumph of stylish and emotional filmmaking. It’s very well acted, it’s directed with confidence and conviction and the oppressive tone of the film lingers hours after the credits roll. Much of it is very well made and the power of individual scenes are undeniable, but the movie ultimately seems more concerned with mood than it does theme—of course the very same could be said of “Apocalypse Now."

Not unlike a perverse take on “Oliver Twist,” the fable-like nature of the film’s structure gives the movie something stylistically tangible to hold on to as it throws its audience into psychologically difficult terrain. Though sometimes this technique registers as pat or sensational when juxtaposed with the movie’s all-too-serious subject matter.

In the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks a film like this, although documenting a very different culture, helps viewers understand the process of radicalization by humanizing those we may so easily label monsters and villains. The difficult truth is that in unstable governments it is often previous victims who become the most dangerous victimizers.

Grade: B+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Nov-2015

Spectre review

The James Bond films are one of the only enduring movie franchises that’s given as much freedom as it has to constantly reinvent itself. The actors can change, the settings are always in flux and the adventures are allowed to be episodic as they like, without much of a rattle from the audience as to why or where the characters are going. There’s a base expectation for this series that’s pretty much summed up by its aesthetic choices; fancy cars, beautiful women, long chase scenes, tuxedos and disfigured bad-guys. If they manage to cram enough of those ingredients in each film, than things like plot coherency or emotional stakes almost have no consequence on the final result.

 The truth is most of these movies are bad. A lot of them are fun-bad, like eating a churro and frozen slurpee before riding on the tilt-a-whirl, but very few of them transcend the franchise and stand alone as compelling films on their own. Don’t get me wrong--recent offerings such as “Goldeneye,” “Casino Royale” and “Skyfall” come pretty close to as good as these movies have ever been, and as far as the classics go, I would wholly recommend the often under-discussed “On Her Majesties Secret Service.” But for every “Goldeneye” there’s a “World is Not Enough” and for every “Skyfall” there’s a “Spectre.”

“Spectre” picks up where “Skyfall” left off, after the death of Bond’s leading officer M (Judy Dench). And like every great spy, she left a video message for the international man of mystery explaining that there is a very threatening loose-end out there that still needs to be tied up. 007, still played by Daniel Craig, with his particular style of world-weary swagger, is set off on a personal mission to hunt down the mysterious leader of a shadow organization (Christoph Waltz) who is currently attempting to hack an online, global terror surveillance—not unlike the NSA. Along the way, Bond runs into the daughter of one of his former villains (Lea Seydoux) and tries to keep her protected from Spectre assassins while trying to figure out how all these things are connected.

A lot of what the Craig iteration of these movies have aspired to do is to reinterpreting the Bond aesthetic through the post-modern lese of post-911 terror-noia. Though this movie suggests a deeper subtext about the dangers of electronic spying and governmental overreach, the majority of this film is much more concerned with filling the run-time with wall to wall action sequences. They’re certainly shot with a lot of technical skill and attention is payed to the construction of a set-piece, but too often they are placed with no intention of moving story along or informing the characters in any meaningful way.  All of these chase scenes and extended fight sequences, as expensive and as thrilling as they sometimes are, have an undeniable lack of gravitas when compared to the true sense of danger that permeated the other Craig films.  This is amplified by the fact that Waltz’s villain is off camera for the majority of the film and is never integrated enough in the narrative to properly earn his reputation as the baddie above all baddies, that the script is trying to sell him as. And despite lacking the simple payoffs of decent storytelling, the movie still manages to clock in at an awkwardly paced two and a half hours.  

“Spectre” will ultimately be counted among the filler that exists between the highlights of the Bond franchises but it has a charm and devil-may-care sense of irony that almost apologizes for its schlock with a wink at the audience.  While it’s undeniably a stupid movie, a lot of it is superficially entertaining, in that junkie, Bond-movie sort of way. Sam Mendes is a terrific visual director and the action, as baseless and banal as it ends up being, is, at the very least, considerate of its presentation.  I would have like villain with a little more incentive, a hero with a little more conflict, and plot with a little more…well…plot, but instead I simply enjoyed another spin on the tilt-a-whirl.

Grade: C+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal - Nov/2015

Steve Jobs review

Writer Aaron Sorkin (“The West Wing”) and director Danny Boyle (“Trainspotting”) have teamed up to tell the story of Apple CEO and proto-Ted-Talker “Steve Jobs.” Given the success Sorkin had with his previous techie biopic “The Social Network,” in which he won an Oscar for his adapted screenplay about the creator of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg, his connection to this project makes a lot of sense. Perhaps it’s not the boldest or the most unconventional move for the writer to make at this point in his career, but you can always guarantee that if Sorkin is going to tread water he’ll do so with the grace and agility of an Olympic swimmer.

Like David Fincher, who was considered an edgier genre auteur at the time he agreed to direct “The Social Network,” Boyle’s involvement with this subject matter exists a little farther outside of his comfort zone. His hyper-kinetic visual choices and the psychologically subjective character portraits that have generally defined his style are sheathed to service a very dialogue-centric screenplay, where characters often say everything they’re thinking and feeling before the camera has time to imply it.

The structure of this movie is the most interesting thing about it. Each act of the film takes place during a different launch of Apple technology; starting with the Macintosh 128k in 1984, the NeXT in 88 and finally the iMac in 1998, that helped pull the company out of dire straits after failing to compete with Microsoft for a significant stint of time. Each of these launches play out like separate one-act stage performances where Steve Jobs, played fantastically by the enigmatic Michael Fassbender, is forced to deal with the stresses of his life and consequences of his career achievements, only moments before he’s supposed to unveil his company’s latest gamble. Each time, we are introduced to the same set of personalities that circle Jobs’ world.

Like his Zuckerberg, Sorkin’s take on Steve Jobs is that of a man who is haunted by own hubris, leaving a pile of smoldering bridges behind him as he blazes down the path of his own ambition. In repeating the same beats, revealing these moments of frustration before every new unveiling, the movie is instantly charged with a sense of nervous anticipation. 

All the actors are working hard for supper here, delivering the hyper-verbose Sorkinese dialogue like they don’t have time to get it wrong. Seth Rogen plays the humble but frustrated Apple Co-creator and engineer Steve Wozniac, who wants, and cannot get, a measly shout-out for his team’s Apple II contributions. Michael Stuhlbarg plays an approval-starved engineer who tried to stand in for Steve’s conscience and Kate Winslet plays a type-A work-wife named Joanna Hoffman, who’s desperately trying to keep the world from crumbling under her boss’s feet, even as he stomps through people’s sensitives in defiance.  Jeff Daniels steps in as a financier who also doubles as a father-figure for the so-called genius, all while, at the same time, Jobs carries on an arms-length relationship with his daughter, whom he initially refused to call his own.

Believe it or not, the bigger of a jerk the character of “Steve Jobs” is, the more interesting he is to watch. The movie only stumbles when it tries to humanize him too much, including a final ten minutes that tries to cowardly soften the blow of the two hours of shrewd and uncompromising self-assurance exhibited before it. The moments of dramatic weight come from a tension that exists between the high-stakes of Jobs’ vision to see his products perform well and the emotionally drained lives around the character that are begging for the same level of attention. This unfortunate cop-out of an epilogue is somewhat destabilizing, but not a big enough knock on the film to ruin it completely. 

Everything we see here—the writing, the directing and the performances—should be expected from the high level of talent involved and perhaps the fact that the movie doesn’t exceed expectations makes it feel as though it’s less accomplished. That notion is a mirage based on the unfair reality that this project was released after “The Social Network,” but a silver metal is nothing to be ashamed of.

Grade: B+

Originally Printed in the Idaho State Journal/Oct-2015