The Visit review

M. Knight Shyamalan is a name that’s hard to live-down for a lot movie-goers these days. After reviving the supernatural-thriller in 1999 with his Oscar-nominated film “The Sixth Sense” and solidifying his brand with a few notable follow-ups, his career hit an irrevocable downward slide, and over the last decade he’s been bumbling into mistake after another.  Films like “Lady in the Water” and “The Happening” revealed a tendency towards half-baked concepts, overwritten screenplays, and lack of directorial sense of self-awareness that’s burdened the bulk of his later work. Even taking-on for-hire projects like the “The Last Airbender,” adapted from the popular Nickelodeon cartoon, as well as the awkward Will and Jayden Smith vehicle “After Earth,” couldn’t refocus the floundering filmmaker, despite relying less on his own ideas.

 Shyamalan has now teamed with the successful horror production factory Blumehouse (“Paranormal Activity,” “Insidious,” “Sinister,” etc...) to get back to nuts and bolts of suspense directing. With this ninety minute, found-footage B-movie, he has no sights set on prestige or deliberately paced auteur ambitions, but even with nothing to prove and his toolbox taken away from him, his ego and writerly obsessions get in the way of this uneven and problematic popcorn thriller.

Olivia Dolange and Ed Oxenbould play Becca and Tyler, two suburban tweens who have been sent on a week-long trip to visit their distant grandparents for the first time. Their single mother (Kathryn Hahn) is up-front about the tense relationship she has with her parents, with whom she hasn’t spoken with in many years, but is rather cagey about the specifics of their estrangement. To uncovering the mystery about what happened the night her mother left her parent’s house, Becca has decided to film this trip as a documentary about reconciliation. Her younger brother Tyler, a wannabee hip-hop lyricist, is more interested in figuring out why their newly acquainted grandparents are acting so strange; Nana (Deanna Dunagan) wandering the halls nude in the middle of night, scratching at the walls like an animal, and pop pop (Peter McRobbie) taking many private trips to a locked shed in the back yard of their country property.

Conceptually “The Visit” is promising enough, tapping into the societal strain of generation gaps, the paranoia of isolation from familiarity, and the universal fear of growing old and losing your physical and mental capabilities. All the ingredients are present for a Hitchcockian Hansel and Gretel tale, but Shyamalan peppers the entire experience with derailing creative choices. In framing the narrative as a found-footage video project, the film is allowed to move quickly with a sudden cuts and time-hops, which admittedly streamlines M. Knight’s penchant for dimly-lit, slow-burning ponderousness, but it also constipates the picture’s aesthetics, deadening much of the suspense in justifying and limiting camera placement and shot set-ups.

 This conceit also feeds into the director’s weakness in defaulting to expository dialogue whenever he needs to reveal more about the characters or the world he’s building. After all, if we are viewing a diegetic documentary in the works, then characters are in the position to say what they are feeling and thinking and are given the opportunity to explain any other necessary back-story directly to the camera. As a result, the story is largely told instead of shown, which is bummer because most of the performances are either misdirected, hammy, or flat-out bad. Dolange has a spark of sincerity underneath her achingly affected cineaste dialogue about framing and mis-en-scene but Oxenbould’s bright-eyed audition-face, combined with the choice to have him spitting out bratty one-liners and battle raps, grates in way that’s almost as if the director is deliberately trying to cut our sympathies with the protagonists.

Occasionally the best version of this movie peaks through the tone-deaf fog that shrouds the majority of its run-time. Dunagan and McRobbie are fully committed to their bizarre performances and, by the third act, a shreiky, camp quality, combined with a twisted sense of dark humor, gels together in a way that’s entertainingly misanthropic. But these moments are too few and infrequent and clang quite abrasively against Shyamalan’s ham-fisted themes about broken-homes and forgiveness.  I really wish I could join the sizable chorus calling this a return to form for the troubled filmmaker, but I simply don’t see much here that’s effective, evocative or even scary enough to give it a pass.

Grade: D+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Sep-2015

American Ultra review

“American Ultra” is a moody action-dramedy that attempts a difficult balancing act between tone and genre expectation. Not only does it showcase two somewhat misunderstood actors in Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart as the leads—rekindling their indie-romance appeal from “Adventureland”—but it also wants to be taken seriously as a savage action-thriller and a hysterical satire.  The fact that it manages to hit these disparate targets fifty percent of the time speaks to the strength of Max Landis’ overly ambitious script and the earnestness of Eisenberg and Stewart’s slightly out-of-tune performances.

Eisenberg plays Mike Howell, a nervous stoner who’s in love with his layabout girlfriend Phoebe (Stewart), but can’t stomach the commitment it takes to move even slightly forward with their relationship.  After purposely postponing the vacation where he planned to pop the question, a mysterious woman approaches the counter of the convenience store where he works and activates a code in Mike’s brain that reveals years of spy training he received before having his mind wiped by the government. This proves to become helpful because, as it turns out, he’s been declared classified evidence of a failed program by the CIA.  As he’s being hunted down by psychotic operatives, and the media is covering up the trail of bodies behind him, he’s left with only his wits and his untapped physical skills to protect himself and his lover.

Like Landis’ debut screenplay “Chronicle,” this is a genre movie that deconstructs the tropes of genre movies through the ironic lens of millennial pop-culture curation. The way the plot is set up and moves forward is clearly drawing on video game mechanics, that’s complete with boss-battles and a princess to save at the end. The classic reluctant hero’s journey, combined with a Kevin-Smith-y smirkiness about the story tradition in which it’s engaging, speaks to Landis’ knowledge and appreciation of post-modern, alternative comic book meta-narratives.  All of this is interesting and plays out in surprising bursts of violence and scenes of real emotional weight, but never in a way that feels fully intergraded or cohesive.

Director Nima Nourizadeh, who previously helmed the teenage party movie “Project X,” is out of sync with the complicated material and the motivations of his actors. Nourizadeh is clearly making a darker action film with brutal fight choreography, the script is concerned with the nuance of the genre and the actors are concerned with the relatability of their performances. With three distinct drivers behind the wheel, the comedy and the satire that should have moved things along, was left on the side of the road and out of breath to keep up with the competing tones of the film.

John Leguizamo as a tweaked out drug dealer who has a neon basement and a rocker van is perhaps the only performer in the cast who understands what movie he’s actually in. Topher Grace as the CIA, yuppie bad-guy is tuned so unpleasant and mean-spirited that he comes off as genuinely hateful and shrill in way that better direction and editing should have protected him from stepping into.

Whether you love it or hate it, or are simply too confused to commit to an opinion, “American Ultra” is an original curiosity in which the things about it that are most compelling are very things that are obstructing its success as a movie. The central love story and emotions behind the film are surprisingly sensitive and effecting but ultimately exhausted in mitigating the heavy-metal direction and the screenplay’s allusive attitude.

Grade: C

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Sep-2015

Z for Zachariah review

The post-apocalyptic genre is officially back in vogue. This year alone we have seen the return of “Mad Max,” a “Walking Dead” spin-off series and there’s still one more “Hunger Games” before that franchise comes to a close. It’s the end of the world and not only do we feel fine, we want more. But unlike the studded leather jackets, crossbows and sandstorm car-chases that usually occupy the genre, Craig Zobel’s “Z for Zachariah” is a slow-burn melodrama, using the setup of the post-apocalypse as a way to tell a deeply intimate and small-scale parable that reflects the larger complications of society as we know it today.

“Wolf of Wall Street” actress Margot Robbie plays Ann, a bright-eyed survivor who lives in a mystical valley in the woods that’s somehow been spared from the nuclear fallout and radiation that has poisoned the rest of the world. After what was left of her religious family took to road find other survivors, she spent the better part of a year keeping the crops growing and preparing for the rough winter ahead, with only her dog at her side. This all changes when she meets Loomis (Chiwetal Ejiofor), a wandering civil-engineer who she decides takes in and nurse back to health after he nearly dies from radiation poisoning.

Together Ann and Loomis try to rebuild their lives and ration their food supply, and after sharing meals and memories together, they begin to develop an emotional connection. Enter Caleb (Chris Pine): a cocky young coalminer with piercing blue eyes and a GQ smile. As it turns out, three’s a crowd and with two men now in the house, Ann is forced to mitigate the bubbling competition between one man who’s charming and who shares her down-home Christian values and another who’s fatherly and practical but a spiritual skeptic.

With “Twilight” fresh in our rear-view, the love-triangle aspect of the film might seem trite and tired but Zobel doesn’t allow this familiar dynamic to sit on the surface as a simple fantasy born of sexually frustration. Instead he uses this trope to create a quiet and subtle chamber piece that alludes to much bigger questions about faith, skepticism and racial familiarity, all with feminist undertones.

At one point Loomis sees the budding attraction between Caleb and his would-be life-partner and quietly informs Ann that she can make whatever decision she wants—as if she needed his permission. Nevertheless Ann is then forced to feel pressure and guilt over an unfair choice that has been thrust upon her. Without realizing or asking for it, she is then put the touchy position of possibly being chastised by the men in her life, including the deified memory her father who’s hand-built church must be torn down to create a water combine to restore energy to the house.

“Z for Zachariah” is a film that stands back and lets the performances and the characters guide the bigger picture. As such, some might find the veiled motivations of the three leads, and the ambiguous nature of their actions to hold little dramatic traction as a science-fiction premise. I myself become entranced by the Garden of Eden/Cane and Able metaphor that plays out and the subverting of their original moral purpose.  Robbie, Ejiofor and Pine carry the whole the thing effortlessly and explore the quiet intensity of their character’s repressed conflicts. Though the movie might seem minimal in form, the nuanced performances and expressive camera work hints a world of mythic and political complexity that exists just underneath the love story.

Grade: B+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Sep-2015

Straight Outta Compton review

 NWA were a raw force in the music industry and helped popularize what would later be known as ‘gangster rap.’ The band’s break-up also resulted in the influential and successful solo-careers of Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and Eazy-E.  With “Straight Outta Compton,” director F. Gary Gray makes a statement about the plight of underprivileged African Americans through the gauze of a traditional rock and roll biopic, and manages to do so with a certain amount of style and competence. 

One could say history repeats itself or one might prefer to say that there’s never really been a break in the depressingly familiar pattern of police brutality and the unfair treatment minorities are given by law enforcement. Either way, without having to make broad or obvious symbolic gestures to draw the connection, this movie mirrors the history of what was happening in South-Central LA  in the late-80s and the early 90s, with how  these modern tensions with police have expressed themselves today.

In what is probably the best sequence of the film, Gray introduces us to each character by their surroundings and their lives in the hood. Dre (Corey Hawkins) is a struggling DJ at a club, looking to further his own career in hip-hop, while Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) is a fresh talent and an ambitious lyricist who’s also trying to find a comfortable fit. Eazy (Jason Mitchell), on the other hand, is the only member of the group who actually lived the life of hustling and dope dealing to survive on the streets, but is looking for a way out.  When the three find each other in Dre’s studio, magic is almost instantaneous as their message and their aggressive attitude reflects the frustration within culture they represent. 

Their independently produced album sells well beyond expectations, their tour becomes a growing success, and their explicit messages about the police and the world of violence they come from attracts a ill-informed warning from the FBI. Yet, things only become complicated when their local manager, Jerry Heller (Paul Giamatti), begins to play favorites among the group and refuses to share contractual information with all the members. 

The movie’s strengths come from its world-building and its authentic sense of time and place. Gray and his wonderful production designers do a great job of keeping things period; down to the cars, the real south-central locations and the now-embarrassing jerry-curl hairdos.  All of these details play into the narrative to help a modern rap-friendly, suburban audience understand the genuine sense of shock and surprise white-America had towards the group’s assaultive artistic approach.  The cast of mostly unknowns are totally believable and commit fully to the personas of their real-life counterparts, especially O’Shea Jackson Jr. who fearlessly takes on the risky task of accurately playing his movie-star father.

The film falls short during its extended second act, where it feels the need to include all the West-Coast’s greatest hits before coming back to the heart of the story. After the events of the LA riots, the script’s political drive is simmered. In its place we get a tangential story about the Dr. Dre’s successful solo career and his struggle to run Death Row Records with his intimidating manager Suge Knight (R. Marcos Taylor).  This plot builds in the wrong direction and causes a fifteen to twenty minute lag that seems more concerned with salacious Behind the Music gossip than it does the history and legacy of NWA.

Nevertheless, “Straight Outta Compton” is a must-see this summer and contains a contagious passion and vigor to get its story out there. Very few biopics have as much energy and youthful appeal as this one does and even when it delves into pandering references or easy TV-Movie story-telling, the strength if its performances and the weight of its cultural relevance insists a sense of vitality upon the piece as a whole. 

Grade: B+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal - Aug/2015

Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation review

The “Mission: Impossible” franchise has become low-stakes cannon of summer-fluff films, and I mean that in a good way. Unlike the Bond franchise, which means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, or the superhero movies that always come with an unfair amount of fan-pressure and canonical expectations, nobody is that invested in the integrity of Ethan Hunt’s continued misadventures in espionage. With that in mind, filmmakers are now allowed a certain amount of freedom to let the movies exist for their own sake and to reinterpret their appeal for newer generations, as most younger fans have not seen the earlier films and practically none of them have watched the 60s TV show in which they’re based.

The last two films in particular have become less about characters realizing anything new about themselves and more about setting up a loose framework for directors to show-off their set-piece skills, upping the ante with new exotic locations and complicated stunt coordination. 

In the first scene of “Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation,” Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is framed for the murder of a fellow agent and forced to go into hiding from his own network. While on the lam, he discovers a shadow cell of spies known as The Syndicate who are organizing global terrorist acts, using trained spy techniques. Hunt must then clear his name and convince his friends to help him take down the mysterious Syndicate leader known as Solomon Kane (Sean Harris). On the way Hunt runs into another British spy named Isla Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) who may or may not be working for or against Kane, and he is forced to decide if he trusts her enough to get close to the core of The Syndicate or to keep her at a careful distance.

As this series has progressed Ethan Hunt has become less and less interesting on an emotional or psychological level. Cruise plays him with confidence and still performs the stunts in a way that looks deceptively effortless, but we are no longer expected to follow hunt as a hero with wants and needs that reflect our own--and sometimes that’s okay. Christopher McQuarrie, who wrote and directed this installment, gives all the movie’s needed humanity to Cruise’s costars like Simon Pegg’s Benji who gets to deliver the best dialogue and Jeremy Renner’s William Brandt who’s slowly transitioning into becoming the franchise’s new lead. With the charisma now in place by the satellite cast, McQuary can concentrate on wowing the audience with gracefully shot and delicately edited sequences of spy verses spy.

In one of the finest pieces of visceral filmmaking all year, McQuary sets an extended set-piece in an opera house, cross cutting between Hunt on the lookout for a group of saboteurs while he is also unknowingly being followed by the cat-like Faust, all while Benji is working behind the scenes in the electrical room. Not unlike Michael Powell’s complicated sequences in films such as “Tales of Hoffman” or the “The Red Shoes”—yes, I really am making this comparison—this scene is beautifully composed to the diegetic opera being performed in the background and reminds us that a good action scene structurally has more in common with the classic movie-musical than some fans might care to acknowledge. We’re also treated to a very thrilling underwater sequence and a smoothly edited motor-cycle chase that’s largely shot from the first-person point-of-view.

I can’t say that I ever cared about the film’s story because most of the plot points are unforgivably lazy and familiar, but “Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation” proves that some films can coast on stock genre tropes and skeletal character motifs, so long as the visual filmmaking is as skillfully executed as it is here.

Grade B -

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal Aug/2015

Trainwreck review

Amy Schumer has become the unlikely voice of a new generation in stand-up and sketch comedy. Her work is thoughtful, brazen and cleverly funny, taking on all kinds of relevant subjects like feminism, ageism, body-shaming and race, while still retaining just enough gleeful locker-room filth to make it palatable to the masses.  After receiving awards attention and praise for her ambitious and subversive sketch comedy show, Schumer has teamed with producer/director Judd Apatow to tell a more personal story that exists somewhere between the detachment of her ironic wit and the pain that it masks.  “Trainwreck” is a conflicted and sometimes frustrating film where Amy shines as a performer and a burgeoning writer, but lacks the narrative consistency and the truth of convictions that we have come to expect from her point of view.

Amy’s character Amy is a hard drinking, sex-starved city girl who enjoys her life the way it is, much to the displeasure of her family and her pro-wrestler boy-friend (John Cena) who breaks up with her after discovering her multiple hookups. Later, after her magazine editor boss (Tilda Swinton) has her interview a sports doctor named Aaron (Bill Hader), the two develop a wholesome relationship and Amy finds herself unable to reconcile her fear of commitment with her newfound fondness for the nice-guy surgeon. This personal struggle is augmented by the mounting tension between her and her sister played by Brie Larson and their father played by Colin Quinn who’s struggling with the early stages of Parkinson’s disease and needs to be put into an affordable facility.

Every actor here has their moment to shine, including, and especially, Amy Schumer. Because much of the comedy derives from her stand-up as well as her real life issues, there’s definitely a vulnerability presented in this film that Schumer usually tries to avoid on stage, which is refreshing and revelatory too see from her. Compared to the broad characters he’s become known for playing on Saturday Night Live, Bill Hader dials things way down and functions more as a graceful support for Amy’s louder screen persona and the movie’s surprisingly conventional romantic comedy plot.  Side characters and cameo performances such as Tilda Swinton as the venomous editor, Ezra Miller as the weird-quiet intern, Dave Attell as the friendly bum, and Labron James playing himself to great affect keep every scene activated and entertaining even if the movie as a whole runs about 20 minutes too long—a typical Apatow problem. 

As I’ve alluded to already, “Trainwreck” suffers from a strange double standard. When it comes to how women who openly enjoy sex are viewed in society, Amy uses her persona as an outspoken satirist to build her character and set up the movie’s sense of unexpected laughs. This is then contradicted when the story reinforces the traditional rom-com values of waiting for ‘the one’ to come in and set her straight. It’s clear that her character is irresponsible with other people’s feelings and for dramatic purposes she would need to express some sort of change , but the choice to have that change occur through a familiar Hollywood romance is somewhat disappointing, if only because it’s coming from her.  The gender roles of this romance are swapped and the film makes a point to show how it changes the perspective of the archetypal narrative structure, but turning a male sports doctor into a white-knight cure for promiscuity undercuts the entire point of the experiment.

All that aside, this movie’s funny. Schumer’s comedic voice is present throughout and the satellite performances constantly jolt the audience with a surprise laugh. Directorially, this is also one of the stronger efforts from Apatow in a while, even if he’s too generous with his actors and still doesn’t know when to say cut. If the worst thing we can say about “Trainwreck” is that it’s traditional, then I suppose we can chock that up as a moderate win for Schumer as a first time screenwriter.

Grade: B

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Jul-2015

Ant Man review

Marvel’s latest entree “Ant Man” is a curious bobble of a film that dares a non-comic-initiated audience to hold on to the general appeal of charismatic actors bouncing around in CGI environments without the comfort or ease of John Wayne approved heroic posturing to get them through. What I’m trying to say is this movie is unabashedly geeky, in way that Marvel Studios might have underestimated a regular movie going audience to roll with without noticing. And good for it! “Guardians of the Galaxy” was definitely weird—what with talking trees and smart-alecky raccoons and what-not—but it was also nestled in a space-opera/fantasy trope that the average beer-drinking, football-throwing American’s can recognize from their childhoods as far back as “Star Wars.”  “Ant Man,” on the other hand, is a little more niche.

Michael Douglas plays Hank Pym, a scientist who learned how to shrink himself down while still having the ability to fight with the strength of ten men. He was forced to leave his secret government agency, where he fought as a spy, after he learned that the wrong developers wanted to use his tech for dangerous, military purposes. Fast-forward thirty years into the future and a younger protégée of Pym named Darren Cross (“Corey Stoll) has seemed to develop a similar enough technology that Pym feels the need to interject.  Enter a white-caller cat-burgler and hacker named Scott Lange (“Paul Rudd”), who’s trying to get his life and family together after finally being released from prison. He’s tricked by Pym into breaking his parole to steal the Ant Man shrinking suit, and after some light blackmail he  agrees to help the older inventor break into Cross’s facility to destroy the progress of the dangerous Yellowjacket.

Despite scenes of Paul Rudd learning how to telepathically control ants into sugaring his coffee or flying on the back of harnessed insects, this is basically a heist movie at its core, with a mark, a plan of action, and the booty that needs to be retrieved. What director Peyton Reed does well with this material is he brings us into this idiosyncratic world through the eyes of the affable Rudd as he bumbles his way into becoming a passive hero. Though maybe he’s a bit too passive at times - to the point of almost having no agency within the plot. Nevertheless, he’s charming to watch and he knows how to hit the comedic beats that’s laced throughout the narrative.  Moments between him and his street-wise, criminal friends—Michael Pena almost steals the entire movie away with only a handful of scenes—keep you smiling in good spirits, even when you get the feeling that the movie isn’t entirely invested in its own brand.

Things don’t work quite as well when the story shifts into more character driven territories, particularly anything involving the vague sub-plot dealing with Pym and his estranged daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly) who is working within the offices of her father’s enemy, while secretly bringing back useful intelligence. When it came to their emotional arc, the revelation of how Pym lost his wife, or even Lang’s difficult relationship with his ex-wife and the daughter he’s barely allowed to visit, I never cared quite as much as the movie wanted me to. It’s clear that the writers wanted to ground the superhero pulp and the comedy with a thematic parallel between Lang and Pym about what it means to be a responsible and present father, but these underwritten moments register more as plot motivators than they do real character builders.

Still, “Ant Man” is a fun and unassuming summer blockbuster that’s refreshingly low-stakes and casual for Marvel action movie. The set pieces are creative and occasionally there’s stylistic flashes of a better movie that might have been possible had the studio let things bake a little longer. As it stands the heist plot could have paid off more satisfyingly and characters could have been more clearly defined, but overall this was a totally inoffensive offering, if not somewhat banal.

Grade: B -

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Jul-2015