X-Men: Days of Future Past review

After essentially kick-starting the cinematic superhero renaissance fifteen years ago, the X-Men movie series has undergone many drastic creative shifts, including confusing continuity tangles and some exceedingly bad press surrounding one of its directors. Following two especially disappointing sequels in “X-Men: The Last Standm” by substitute director Brett Ratner and the unforgivably dreadful spin-off “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” a few years later, the franchise was partially revitalized in 2011 with the ‘60s cold-war installment “X-Men: First Class," starring Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy. James Mangold’s “The Wolverine” was also watchable but mostly forgettable in the long run. Now, in an attempt to clean the slate, original director Bryan Singer has the unfortunate job of tying all of these films together and bridging their plot-holes with his newest entry, a time-travel thriller called “X-Men: Days of Future Past”, staring key players from both timelines.

Not only is there very high stakes for the cautiously optimistic fans who have endured and celebrated previously great and awful X-films, “Days of Future Past” has many tasks to carefully maneuver for itself. It must be reasonably faithful to the beloved comic story in which it takes its name, it has to tie together two timelines that are just different enough to makes things complicated, and it has to ret-con the mistakes of the previous sequels. Surprisingly, while not home-run success, it manages to do so with only a few notable discrepancies.

The plot immediately drops us into the near future of 2023, in a post-apocalypse where most of the X-Men have been killed by giant self-regenerating robots called the Sentinels who patrol the earth to terminate all of mutant kind. Aged Professor, Charles Xavier (Patrick Stuart) sends Wolverine’s consciousness back into his younger body during the ‘70s where he must inspire the recently jaded and crippled Professor (James McAvoy) to let out his imprisoned enemy Magneto (Michael Fassbender) to stop a misguided Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) from assassinating the engineer responsible for starting the newly-formed Sentinel program. Jumping back and forth from these two events in time, we watch the future X-Men try as hard as they can to hold their defense, while Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) has to prevent all the pawns of their eventual destruction from falling into place.

While I'm more than aware of the narrative heavy-lifting this plot has to do before we can even get into the main points of its story, unfortunately the first third of the film gets to a wobbly start with achingly stilted, tech-jabber dialogue and blunt introductions to the characters and their vague future-world, all of which are too brief and glossed over to effectively build to an appropriate emotional connection. But once Jackman gets zapped into the 70s and we get the 411 on where our "First Class" heroes have been since the last movie, the pieces start to come together, slowly building towards a grand climax that’s just as good or even better than anything we've previously seen from the series.

While “Days of Future Past” occasionally feels pieced together from hunks of scripts that were torn from different drafts, rewritten by committee and reshaped in the editing room, about half of its movie-parts contain genuinely original superhero moments; most notably some great comedic action sequences with X-newbie Quicksilver (Evan Peters), where his speed powers are portrayed by showing us how he moves normally in the slowed-down world around him. X-Men mainstays such as Lawrence, Fassbender, McAvoy, and Jackman are just as reliable as we have come to expect and newcomers like Peter Dinklage,  who plays the mutant-phobic scientist Bolivar Trask, are given their own scenes to steal as well. Most of all, by the end of the film, however rocky it was to get there, it’s very gratifying to see the fruits bared from the franchise’s willingness to apologize for its past mediocrities.

Grade: B -
Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/June-2014

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 review

                 Expectations of Marc Webb’s sequel to Sony’s successful 2012 Spider-Man reboot was  perhaps insurmountable. For some, the first film that was released only five years after Sam Raimi’s generation defining trilogy, satisfied what people wanted to see with the continuation of this superhero staple. For others (including this reviewer) despite having a terrific cast, the film lacked a unique point of view and the obvious rush to re-launch the series made for a somewhat competent but mostly tepid rehash of over-cooked Spidey-lore.

                You might think that now that the pesky origin story has been tediously reestablished, this anticipated sequel would be allowed the narrative freedom to further explore Webb's new interpretation of this timeless character and the cinematic universe he inhabits. But what we end up getting with this installment is a manic tangle of incongruent plot threads fighting for screen-time in an overlong, over-stylized disaster of a movie that's been marred by invasive studio-notes.  

                This movie has about six different movies going on at any one time, but most prominently we follow Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) as he's reeling from guilt by ignoring the dying wishes of his girlfriend’s father, and continuing to put Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) in harm’s way simply by dating her.  This then leads him to break things off with her to further his personal investigation surrounding his father’s mysterious death. The unfinished genetic research that surrounded this mystery is now being exploited by Oscorp’s new CEO, Peter’s childhood friend Harry Osborn (Dane DeHaan). Harry plans to use the radiated spider venom to treat his body against the same genetic disease that killed Norman.  Unbenounced to Harry or Peter, or Gwen who still works for the secretive lab, the company has an insidious strategy behind this new science.

                You might think that’s enough story for one movie, but wait, there’s more! An awkwardly pitched Jamie Foxx plays a geeky disgruntled lab-tech with an unhealthy obsession towards Spider-Man. After an unfortunate accident at Plotcorp--I mean Oscorp—which apparently has an alarming track record of unsettling accidents involving staff, visitors and its proprietors, Foxx is then transformed into a translucent energy being called Electro. Can Spider-Man defeat him, while keeping Gwen from moving to London? Will she give up her dreams of becoming a super-scholar at Oxford and continue to put herself in danger in New York?  In only five minutes can Peter convince the audience that he and Harry have a believable, preexisting best-friend relationship? Can director Marc Webb figure out a way to make anyone still care about anything dealing with Peter's stupid dead father?  Can Spider-Man save danger-addicted children from Paul Giamatti as he marches the streets in giant, Rhino-shaped mech-suit? Wait, the Rhino’s in this movie too!? *Sigh*

                Despite a half-way decent love story between the real-life couple of Garfield and Stone, the rest of the movie is an over-crowded step latter where scenes seem to only exist to set up other scenes--half of which can’t even be resolved until the next sequel. Tonally, the movie oscillates between post-Twilight angst, superhero action movie spectacle, and campy Saturday morning silliness that clangs against the film’s more somber moments of sincerity. 

                “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” is without a doubt an undisciplined, compromised affair, and the story suffers greatly from Sony’s desperation to catch up with the long-form world-building of Disney’s Marvel-Universe epics, but when Webb is able to slow the action down enough to let his characters actually breath, they momentarily expose a beating heart underneath all of the movie’s overbearing aesthetics and the screenplay’s stifling mechanics.

 Grade: C-

Originally published by Idaho State Journal/May-2014

The Other Woman review

                I get it, I’m a guy and this movie wasn’t made for me.  I am nowhere near the target demo for this kind of comedy, so if I tell you that “The Other Woman” is a rancid, misogynist, unstructured, belly-ache of a mess it can only mean that I just didn’t ‘get’ it, right? Wrong! These kinds of high-concept rom-coms come out every year between the weeks that are programmed full of comic-book action movies, and I sympathize with the girlfriend audience who can’t bear to see another chase scene, another mid-flight battle or another building explode, but girls, I promise, you deserve better than this.

                Carly (Cameron Diaz) has finally met ‘the one’ in Mark (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), a handsome, successful CEO who seems ready to commit but whose scheduling is a little erratic. After bailing on a dinner to meet the father, Carly decides to surprise her new lover in sexy plumber garb but is surprised to meet his wife Kate (Leslie Mann) when she answers the door.  Instead of instant hysteria or angry phone calls made, Kate decides to slowly gain the trust and friendship of her husband’s mistress and together they decide to travel the scenic route to his eventual takedown.

                Like many other pandering romantic comedies, aiming to lull the lowest common denominator into submission with poop jokes and slapsticky sit-com gags, this movie wants women to believe that the message of this retaliation plot is empowering, when in actuality it is doing very much the opposite.  Mann and Diaz are putting it all out there for the jokes and Mann especially sacrifices all sympathy for every contrivance this movie puts her pathetic character through. Despite knowing that her husband is a cheating with multiple women, embezzling from other companies with her signature, and even spreading STD’s, she still has to be convinced and reminded of his horribleness up to the very last 10 minutes. All the while, Diaz’s strong lawyer character gets over the heartbreak of losing Kate’s husband by eventually seducing her impossibly attractive brother.  But hey, it’s okay, because girl power!

                Essentially, “The Other Woman” plays like an evenly-lit, wealth-obsessed, PG-13 version of a rape-revenge exploitation film like “I Spit on Your Grave.”  And like those kinds of reprehensible movies, the women in this story have to be humiliated throughout the picture to finally earn their moment of payback, while at the same time furthering the beliefs that liberated or not, they still need men for sex, money and social position. Never mind the fact that whatever tension exists in the plot, only exists because we’re supposed to believe that everyone involved in this silly caper, including the brothers and fathers of the interested parties, agree to not spill the beans to this clueless dope of a husband. To fill time between this nonsense, director Nick Cassavetes—oh how far the acorn falls—lets the movie drift into baggy montages of bikini-beach partying and lazy, girl-bonding time-lapses. 

                Is it funny? Sometimes Mann’s physical performance and Diaz’s straightly delivered pep-talks generate a giggle or a desperate-for-anything chuckle, but the organic chemistry between these women is undercut by headache inducing, comedy set-piece clichés involving laxatives, spying in bushes with binoculars, and people falling out of windows. And of course, when we finally arrive at the overhyped moment of comeuppance, it’s treated with as much grace and as much plausibility as a Scooby Doo unmasking with Roadrunner violence. Make no mistake about it ladies; this toxic, cynical movie hates you.

Grade: D -

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/May-2014

Transcendence review

                Wally Pfister, the talented cinematographer behind modern classics such as “The Dark Knight”, “Inception” and “Moneyball” brings us his directorial debut in “Transcendence”, a sci-fi drama starring Johnny Depp as a mad scientist who becomes a highly sentient computer with ambiguous goals towards the human race.  Tonally and visually, considering his recent work with director Christopher Nolan, the movie is presented in a way we might expect; cold, stark, and sterile, mirroring the dehumanizing technologies that the plot warns the audience against.

                Though Pfister hands over the photography work to Jess Hill his fingerprints are all over the film, but unfortunately when it comes to storytelling, pacing, and drama this curiously drab blockbuster lacks the same sense of meticulous identity.  Many scenes drag their feet when the movie is begging for acceleration and the themes of loneliness, the gradual loss of individuality, and progress by any means are somehow bluntly beat into the ground without ever really committing to any of them.

                Depp stars as Will Caster, a Ted-Talking computer genius who’s figured out the process of creating fully formed artificial intelligence. His wife Evelyn, played by Rebecca Hall, is working in union to create medical nano-bots.  When her husband is fatally injured by a gunshot from a technophobic revolutionary, Evelyn does what she can to keep him alive and uploads his consciousness into the mainframe of his super-computer. There, he’s not only able to access all of his memories and knowledge but he's able to think exponentially faster and more efficiently, using Evelyn’s nano-technologies to heal the sick and injured and to build fields of solar panels, expanding his ever-growing digital network. 

                This cyberpunk Frankenstein plot should have provided a simple but useful framework for the actors and the screenplay to really go in a myriad of different, and hopefully interesting directions. Unfortunately, Phister never really gives us a clear sense of the key players in the narrative when it comes to why we should care about anything that’s going on. Depp and Hall’s tragic romance is underwhelming and almost nondescript, leaving all the pulp-genre elements of the film feeling derivatively old-hat.  We're never as sad as we should be about the Evelyn’s straining marriage to her computer husband as he becomes less human and we're never as worried as we are supposed to be about Will’s descent into cold calculation over compassion due to Depp’s flat-line performance through each point of his character’s arc. 

                Cillian Murphy and Morgan Freeman step over from Nolan’s stable of repertory actors and are given almost nothing to do here as concerned investigators. Them, along with Kate Mara as the leader of the human rebellion against Castor’s digital army, are strangely disconnected from the more interesting—though ultimately flailing--emotional story. Paul Bettany, as a former colleague of Depp’s character, who is then recruited by the militaristic insurgence, probably gives the best performance in the entire film, picking up the slack dropped by everyone else. Rebecca Hall is clearly trying her hardest but has absolutely nothing to work with or against, rendering her best scenes into an ineffectual, one-women juggling act.

                Despite the fact that “Transcendence” has the right budget, the right actors, and a promising director--given the pedigree of films he’s worked on as crew--the final result is a depressing slog, not worth your time or consideration.  It’s competently framed and lit but the screenplay lacks any kind of specificity or vitality, and the simple joys of the movie’s sci-fi conceits are almost instantly drowned in its bland austerity.

Grade: D+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/April-2014

Oculus review

                It’s no exaggeration to say that haunted-house movies are in vogue right now.  Why, probably because they are cheap to produce and boo-scares are easy to manufacture. Unlike a slasher flick or a gore-fest, ghost thrillers can remain relatively bloodless, thus allowing for that coveted PG-13 rating that can bring in as many young mall-dwellers as possible.  “Oculus”, however, was bought at this year’s SXSW festival and later released by the same producers who brought us “Sinister”, “Insidious” and “The Conjuring”—three reasonably scary movies in a currently overplayed horror sub-genre.

                Unlike most of it's contemporaries, “Oculus” boasts an ambitious screen-play full of brilliant shocks, and tricky sequences of psychological editing. Within every scene the movie is working on multiple levels. It’s a satisfying gotchya shrieker, a wildly structured procedural thriller, and thoughtful allegory about domestic abuse and childhood trauma.

                Tim Russell (Brenton Thwaites) has recently been released from a mental institution and on high-alert by his care-takers and therapists. After years of convincing himself that the brutality he experiences in his past is explainable in natural terms, his older sister Kaylie (Karen Gillen) decides to bring him to the house where they grew up to take on their past-demons face to face. Over the night, the two argue about what’s real, what’s memory and what’s impossible.  With many cameras and safeguards in place, Kaylie is determined to convince his brother that he isn’t crazy and that they can destroy the evil that savaged their family 11 years prior.

                “Oculus” is an efficient little horror movie that cleverly keeps the audience fighting between hiding behind their palms and leaning into their chairs to keep up with its complex, puzzle box plot.  Shifting back and forth from past to present, this duel narrative builds in a psychological spring-loaded trap, where, without even realizing it, by trying to figure it out you end up within its grasp. Actors Brenton Thwaites and Karen Gillen look and behave like television actors and much of the first third is spent trying to get the audience to forego their obnoxiously milk-toast appearance. But as the movie dives deeper into the abyss, the scares are delivered in a way that both offsets the goofy Twilight Zone set-up and televisual appeal of its younger cast.

                In the flashback sequences, the main players, led by Battlestar Galactica’s Katee Sackhoff and Argo’s Rory Cochrane, are much stronger. The pain of the family’s deterioration is palpable and even if you can’t buy into the plot’s mystical conceit the tragic subtext is wrought with emotional truth. The movie ties together fuzzy dream-like memory with supernatural terror expertly and ends in a somewhat depressing but thematically satisfying way.

                Written with consideration and shot with economic skill, “Oculus” is a tight little genre treat that nobody asked for but will ultimately please those who take a chance on it.  It tries something new and mostly gets away with it. Even as some of the cast are annoyingly nondescript the material doesn’t allow them to be boring.

               

Grade: B+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/April-2014

Captain America: The Winter Soldier review

                  Captain America is a tricky Marvel character to sell to global movie market, despite his recognizable brand and the backing of a powerhouse film production conglomerate. These days people are a little jaded when it comes to national pride and a character that fights for truth, justice and the American way is an increasingly harder pill to swallow, especially when party divisions have dramatically split the country on the specific interpretation of what the “American Way” is even supposed to be. Even when conflict is injected into the character to please those on the homeland, the blatantly patriotic imagery of Cap-Am risks appearing like propaganda to those abroad.

                Though Disney/Marvel Studio’s first attempt to introduce this character in 2011 wasn’t an altogether failure, it really only managed to work as a placeholder for the anticipated Avengers movie being hyped at time.  Now, with the overwhelming success of “The Avengers” in 2012, “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” is afforded the benefit of doubt by those who may have been skeptical before. Surprisingly, in changing time-period, style, tone and directors, this movie cleverly takes advantage of its second chance and manages to exceed expectations by simultaneously defying and celebrating its genre-conventions.

                Having grown up in the ‘30s and ‘40s, only to be preserved in ice and unfrozen to become a superhero soldier, fighting alongside sci-fi anomalies like Bruce Banner’s Hulk and Tony Stark’s Iron-Man, Steve Rodgers (Chris Evans) is now suffering from state of mild temporal dysphoria, with only his work as a SHIELD super-spy to keep him focused and grounded. However, when his boss and mentor, SHIELD’s leader Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) is targeted and hunted by his colleagues, Captain America is then forced to go rogue and figure out how high the governmental corruption infiltrates. Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and military veteran Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) help Rodgers with his impossible mission, while keeping guard from a mysteriously lethal mercenary known as the Winter Soldier.

                It’s actually difficult to be prepared for just how exceptional this pop-corn thriller is. Not since Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” has a sequel so magnificently improved upon its predecessor in a way that actually fixes some of the problems of the previous film. Rather than the cartoony, gee-golly pulp aesthetic of Joe Johnston’s “Captain America: The First Avenger”, Joe and Anthony Russo’s steely, post-Bourn, politically-minded sequel resembles the kind of cool immediacy of Michael Mann’s “Heat”, as well as ‘70s paranoid dramas like “The French Connection" and "All the President's Men."  The tensely-blocked, handheld bursts of action-violence is impactful, the performances are confident--particularly Evans who'd previously appeared a little stiff within the do-gooder limitations of his characters--and unlike even the best films from Marvel’s amoeba-vers, this world feels lived-in and dangerous with a semi-realistic sense of scale and threat. 

                With that said, this is still a comic-book action movie aimed at a young teenage audience, and we're reminded of that whenever the plot makes an illogical leap or when there's an occasional tonal hiccup. This includes some high-concept sci-fi tech that feels out of place compared to the movie's more sober interpretation of the Marvel world, as well as, a sporadic line of Saturday-morning dialogue.  In the third act, as is the demand for any film that costs more than 100 million dollars, the movie eventually devolves into an extended effect-driven sequence, slowly drifting the whole thing away from the refreshing tactility and level-headed sophistication it had built up to that point.

                Flaws and nitpicks aside—though not excused—“Captain America-The Winter Soldier” is still an exciting and daring move forward for the superhero genre, and it at least hints towards a maturity that Marvel Studios hasn’t been as interested in exploring since the Iraq war metaphors of the first “Iron Man."  Here, themes of political unrest and social distrust regarding NSA monitoring and military drone technologies make this sequel not only satisfying as a genre picture, but timely and relevant as well.

Grade: B+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/April-2014