Nocturnal Animals review

With his second feature “Nocturnal Animals, fashion designer Tom Ford tackles the very things that inspires great art and how the different people in our lives leave impressions that help form our creative responses. This is a lofty theme and with his adaptation of Austin Wright’s novel “Tony and Susan” Ford compares and contrasts two different genres and two different styles of visual filmmaking to comment on the formation the art and storytelling itself.

Amy Adams plays Susan Marrow, an icy and disconnected art curator who’s married to a traveling trophy husband named Hutton (Armie Hammer).  While Hutton is away on a clumsily obvious secret trip with his mistress, Susan receives a manuscript for a novel written by her ex-husband Tony Hastings (Jake Gyllenhaal). The book comes with a note about how the how the story was inspired by their turbulent history. The film then visualizes the contents of Tony’s book, in where Gyllenhaal also plays the main character of Tony’s Novel Edward Scheffeild. Edward is an easily frightened man who loses his wife and daughter to a gang of drunk rednecks after being forced off a West-Texas road after a car chase in the middle of the night. He seeks to punish these men with a rogue desert detective named Bobby Andels (Michael Shannon), a man of few words who no longer fears losing his job or his life to do the right thing.

 The film opens on an audience-testing slow-motion sequence where morbidly obese elderly women are shown dancing seductively to the movie’s melodramatic stringed score. This title sequence lingers on close-ups of sagging body parts before revealing these women are part of art exhibition curated by Adam’s dispossessed character. The mix between the grotesque the gorgeous permeates Ford’s every narrative and aesthetic choice here. The framing device about Susan rediscovering her young and complicated passion with the struggling writer of her post-college years is couched in the story to represent the ‘real-world.’ Yet the painfully stilted dialogue, the intentionally cold and bloodless performances within these scenes and the careful framing of Ford’s modern-art Los Angeles set-design presents a less relatable world than what is represented in the scenes depicting Tony’s pulpy and hyper-violent western/thriller manuscript.

With this strange juxtaposition, Ford tries to make the argument that success and wealth stifles creative expression by cutting the artists away from humanity, and in doing so, he proves his own point by constructing a film that is stifled by battling creative agendas. The two stories are supposed to be symbiotic and analogous but the movie lacks the necessary connective tissue to develop either story past their highly-stylized surfaces. Though pulpy and overly-treaded genre territory, the Coen Brothers-esq manuscript segments are far more engaging and impactful than the sterile soap-opera framing plot, which resembles the high-art sleaze of the 60s and 70s Italian filmmakers, as filtered through the steely cynicism of “Dead Ringers” era David Cronenberg. The two styles constantly trip over each other as the film cuts between them and their intended symbolic relationship reveals a disappointingly shallow connection.

“Nocturnal Animals” is filled with a lot of style and the structure of the story attacks character-motivations and themes in a challenging and indirect way. This is a laudable storytelling approach, but it fails to meet those challenges in a way that doesn’t seem overly self-conscious and ill-considered by the director. Gyllenhaal gives two great performances and Michael Shannon does what he’s made a career of doing and gives the best performance in a problematic movie.  Adams is almost denied an emotional reality so that she can act as a vessel by which the movie’s (unintentional?) misogyny is accounted for.  What makes the film all the more frustrating is that its ambitions are the cause of its own failure.

Grade: C

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Dec-2016

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "Nocturnal Animals."

Moana review

Disney’s tradition with the Princess protagonist motif has been a staple of the company’s long-term success.  They’ve returned to that particular wishing-well so many times, in fact, they now have to think of ways to consciously subvert the trope, lest they run the risk appearing out-of-touch or out of ideas—their live-action remakes notwithstanding. “Moana,” the mouse house’s latest animated adventure, tries its best to arrive at a new spin on their girl-with-a-destiny story, using its Pacific Island mythological setting to embellish and disguise many reworked Disney tropes.

This oceanic fairy-tale tells features a young island daughter of a Chief named Moana (Auli’li Cravalho) who is sent on a journey to return a magic stone back to heart of a neighboring island after a darkness creeps onto their land, making it impossible to fish or grow crops. On her way, she finds a Hawaiian demi-god named Maui (Dwayne-The Rock-Johnson) who wants to retrieve his magic hook weapon that allows him to shape-shift into any animal he chooses.  Johnson’s Maui must learn to curb his hubris as he helps the determined ruler to be, and Moana must learn how to believe in herself.

Truth be told, the motivations of the characters are noticeably surface-oriented and most of the movie is driven plot rather than story. Moana is sent on her journey to prove she can be a capable ruler of her people and because her grandmother encourages her from beyond the grave, informing her that she has been chosen by the ocean itself to restore the magic heart of the sea back to its rightful place. What ensues is an episodic odyssey where Moana and Maui encounter multiple challenges on their way to defeat a giant lava creature. Moana herself is somewhat undefined as a protagonist outside of her immediate goals and circumstances, and the film’s aesthetic focus never allows for her to develop past her function in the plot.

On a screenplay level, the story isn’t terribly interesting or dynamic once you strip away the beautifully rendered animation and the catchy musical sequences written by Opetaia Foa’I, Mark Mancina and Lin-Manuel Miranda of Broadway’s hit play “Hamilton.” Like many classic Disney films the soundtrack becomes another character. The musical numbers are placed strategically and each track has a bounce and melodic structure that rings in your head days after your viewing experience. In some regards, this outing seems a little desperate out-Frozen “Frozen,” as far as the catchy radio-ready music is concerned, but these songs will likely be the film’s largest takeaway.

“Moana” is well crafted and enjoyable but it doesn’t reinvent wheel or step too far out of what’s been comfortable and successful for Disney’s animation studio. The film leans of the studio’s greatest hits, including familiar character types and beats from “Aladdin,” “Little Mermaid,” “Mulan,” “Hercules” and others. But while the story doesn’t offer much substance, it’s hard to totally dismiss the movie’s visual flare and infectious positive energy.

Grade: B

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Dec-2016

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

Fantastic Beasts review

JK Rowling’s has returned to the wizarding world of her successful Harry Potter franchise with her first screenplay for David Yate’s new film “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.” Part Potter prequel and part expanded-universe filler, the origins of this film come from a fictional bio written for a series of magician’s textbooks mentioned off-hand in Rowling’s original novels. While it’s not uncommon for filmmakers such as George Lucas and Peter Jackson to go back to the well for creative inspiration—and/or more money--“Fantastic Beasts” avoids the stench of calculated, corporate cash-grabbing by finding a new way to enter this well-established world.

Recent Oscar-winner Eddie Redmayne plays Newt Scamander, a British magician who’s travelled to early 20^th-century New York to find suitable homes for the magical creatures he keeps in his wizard suitcase/terrarium. After a few of these animals escape into the city, he and a local muggle factory worker named Kowalski (Dan Fogler) must find and capture them before Newt blows his cover and breaches important magician’s secrecy laws. Kathrine Waterson plays MACUSA agent Tina, who tries to help Newt navigate his search without exposing himself.

In the background of this light set-up, Rowling gives us a much darker story element involving Samantha Morton as a wizard-phobic street-corner kook named Mary Lou who’s secretly running a witch’s conversion center, where she abuses and shames young children who come from magical parents. One such teen is played by the always intriguing Ezra Miller, who’s living a double life as a secret agent trading information with a nefarious rogue member of the MACUSA (Colin Ferrell).

Yates and Rowling’s previous collaborations resulted in some of the darker and more menacing Potter sequels that came later in the series, and that tone is returned to here, sometimes appropriately, sometimes not.  The whimsical monster-catching stuff is treated with childlike awe and magical wonder, while other scenes are treated as light-horror or mystery and intrigue. The other films in this franchise could mitigate these same tonal-shifts within the framework of a rather standard Campellian hero’ journey. There’re multiple competing plot threads running simultaneously through the feature and without a central hero such as Harry Potter to follow—Redmayne’s performance as Newt is treated more as a cypher or conduit rather than a fully-fledged character—it’s sometimes difficult to find a narrative track to travel through this installment. After forty minutes of setting up everyone’s individual situations and establishing the illusive stakes of the plot, the movie then condenses into something relatively streamlined and tangible.

Despite a wobbly narrative foundation and an over-stuffed screenplay, Yates still captures the period scenery and production values that are both completely immersive and fully realized. Newt’s computer imagery creatures are always imaginative and memorable and Yates proves again that he can handle special-effects moments in a way that serves rather than overwhelming the story.

“Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” is peripheral and marginal compared to the previous nine films that built towards an epic story over a decade, but the choice to avoid the high-school dramas and the overused good versus evil myth that defined the original Harry Potter films makes for a different and sometimes idiosyncratic blockbuster experience. The film’s ensemble is spread too thin along peaks and valleys of the plot and because of this none of them get a lot to do, but they’re still able inform their characters with enough physicality to ground and realize their performances. Certainly, as a kick off to a somewhat unnecessary prequel expansion, so far this is more enjoyable and substantial than either Lucas’ Star Wars episodes I-III or Jackson’s bloated Hobbit trilogy.

Grade: B-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Dec-2016

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Arrival review

Amy Adams stars as a grieving mother who embarks on a personal journey to connect with her past by ensuring the safety of our future, as she helps our government make first contact with an intelligent alien species. Over the last few years the awards season has spawned a new genre, and this high-brow science fiction release echoes the emotional timbres of Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” as well as Alfonso Cuaron’s “Gravity,” along with the pro-science message of Ridley Scott’s “The Martian.” Space exploration and a thirst to better understand our place in the universe has been reflected in these high-budget, philosophically-minded genre films, and in that regard, Denis Villeneuve’s “Arrival” reaches for headier themes, heavier emotions and leaves a larger gap for the audience to meet its challenging narrative structure.

After twelve massive, bean-shaped vessels arrive at seemingly random locations on our globe, Adams’ Dr. Louise Banks, a scholar of linguistics, is recruited by Colonel Weber (Forrest Whitaker) to make sense of the aliens’ vocalizations. After joining the effort, she meets mathematician Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), who notices patterns in the otherworldly scribe they photograph while trying to talk with the beings through a translucent barrier deep within their ship. While the American team is making slow progress, other world governments are less cautious about enacting a preemptive strike against their new visitors, making it all the more imperative for Dr. Banks and her staff to decipher the aliens’ exact purpose for landing.

It’s hard not admire Villeneuve’s ambition here, as this picture aims to weave structure with emotional storytelling, with the intentions of being a broad science-fiction and a character piece at the same time. The movie also wishes to work as a social allegory about the state of our international relations and how an event such as a global alien arrival could easily activate simmering political tensions around the globe.

 Under the visual and tonal guidance of Villeneuve, the screenplay’s tricky flashback/flash-forward mechanics doesn’t overwhelm the themes or the emotional core of the film, though Adam’s portrayal as the multi-layered and complicated lead is at times coldly beholden to mystery of her character.

The film’s many storytelling goals prevents Adams from revealing too much about her interior state through her performance, which creates an impressionistic take on the character that doesn’t always gel with the film’s pulpier leanings. After we are given the character’s backstory and we with her in real-time as she’s interpreting an intergalactic coffee ring alphabet, we want to be closer to the character when the script keeps pulling her away for the sake of a clever third-act reveal. Renner works to provide a lighter and more immediate foil for Adams to exist on screen with, but even he is sometimes obscured by film’s impressionism.  

Villeneuve’s recent crime-thrillers “Prisoners” and last year’s “Sicario” shared bleak and hopeless views of humanity, while “Arrival” aims to give us clarity and hope for our future. While the production design and key set-pieces recall the scale and awe of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Bradford Young’s tender cinematography evokes the warmth and spiritual montage of Terrance Malick’s later work, marrying the cerebral and instinctual cinema of both directors. The script’s gotchya revelations eventually pay off and once the film’s many flashbacks are informed by the twist, the movie’s complex structure blends quite nicely into a much-needed message of optimism and enlightenment.

Grade: B+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Nov-2016

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Doctor Strange review

Marvel Studios is an anomaly of modern populist filmmaking. Based partly on the rules of comic book publications, serialized television and the producer-driven classical studio system, Kevin Feige and the other Marvel executives designed a fruitful model that spawns and nurtures multiple, converging franchises that can share and swap characters. They’ve also successfully introduced general, non-geek audiences to super-dorky pulp characters like Thor, Ant-Man, The Vision, the whole Guardians of the Galaxy team and now, their nerdiest character of all, Doctor Strange. The reason audiences continually eat this up is because of the studio’s steady oversight and a strict style-guide that keeps their films uniformed and consistent. In the case of Scott Derrickson’s “Doctor Strange” this same-ness, delivers an amiable blockbuster but stifles the possibilities for creative experimentation.

Benedict Cumberbatch plays our hero Doctor Steven Strange, a smug celebrity neurosurgeon who’s looking to execute a complicated procedure that will further elevate his status. Amid this pursuit, Strange is seriously injured in a car-accident that leaves his hands unable to perform with precision. As he travels the world looking for a miracle surgery that will allow him to work again, he discovers a house of mystics in Katmandu that promise to show him ways to heal himself through the use of magic and sorcery. Strange is then caught up in a secret war between the temple’s Sorcerer Supreme (Tilda Swinton) and a band of rogue magicians, led by a disgruntled student of the dark-arts named Kaecilius (Mads Mikkelsen) who’s hell-bent on bringing an evil entity upon the earth.

Derrickson’s history in horror filmmaking (“Sinister,” “The Exorcism of Emily Rose,” “Deliver Us From Evil”) could have easily gone hand in hand with the occult-leanings of the Marvel’s magician hero. Instead of punching his way to victory or blowing up his opponents with wrist-rockets, Doctor Strange uses his intellect and skills as a sorcerer to defeat other-worldly foes. Yet, what we are given in this movie is another standard superhero origin story about a reluctant hero who must overcome his own hubris for the good of man-kind. Many beats of the plot repeat what we’ve recently seen in “Iron Man,” “Thor” and “Ant-Man,” and the shiny, non-threatening tone of Marvel’s happy-meal presentation disguises every genre cliché with lavish sets and complicated special effects.

 

The post-Matrix/post-Inception visuals and the film's art-direction is spectacular and eye-popping—particularly the set-pieces and fight-sequences that take place among the shifting and folding Escher-esq cityscapes—but they are placed almost randomly and with very little stakes within the story. Most of the screenplay consists of long sequences where Swinton’s Ancient One and Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Mordo explain to Cumberbatch all the ins and outs of mirror realms and astral projection and forbidden libraries and magic imbued weapons and so on and so on. To the credit of the screenwriters and the performances from the actors, this exposition-heavy dialogue is peppered with enough humor and whit to distract from its utilitarian function.

Aside from a slightly rushed plot and another stale Marvel-Studios villain with a weird face, “Doctor Strange” is perfectly entertaining and keeps true to the company brand, but it’s the very nature of this idiosyncratic character that begs for a less calculated approach. Given Derrickson’s past work and given the prestigious background of the cast, the movie’s familiar superhero trappings are more nakedly obvious and its getting increasingly harder to overlook Marvel’s unwillingness to challenge their formula.

Grade: B-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Nov-2016

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "Doctor Strange."

Moonlight review

Now that awards season is in full swing, attention has been turned to Barry Jenkin’s second feature “Moonlight,” an archetypically American tale about the cross sections between poverty and identity. While embracing an exciting and vivid style of its own, the film is stripped bare, minimal and noticeably low-budget. Even still, Jenkins carefully puts every dollar on the screen, directing with his feelers fully extended to capture every meaningful moment with his actor’s vulnerable and honest performances.

This story focuses on three time periods in the life of a struggling African American boy named Chiron (Alex R. Hibbert) who has to constantly dodge the neighborhood bullies for being too quiet and sensitive. Making things even more difficult, he discovers his mother (Naomi Harris) is using crack and bringing home strange men to access it. He then finds refuge in the unlikely parental figures of a local Florida drug dealer named Juan and his right-hand-woman Teresa (Mahershala Ali and Janelle Monae).

We meet our protagonist again as a teenager (Ashton Sanders) when he’s forced to confront his inner conflicts with his only friend and confidante Kevin (Jharrel Jerome) after their school-yard relationship reaches a new level of emotional possibilities. Towards the last third of the film we drop in one last time with Kevin and Chiron as adults (Trevante Rhodes and Andre Holland), reconnecting after years have passed and their lives have taken them down widely diverging roads.

Through these stories are connected by a single timeline, each third works well on its own as an individual short, which makes a lot of sense given Jenkins many years working in the short-film format. What he accomplishes in this structure is something like Richard Linklater’s growing-up opus “Boyhood.” The audience is forced to look at these three moments in the changing life of Chiron and fill in the blanks between the juxtaposing segments. This successfully creates a larger world than the movie has the budget or time to accomplish on its own, giving the film both an overarching timelessness and the individual spirit of cultural specificity.

What makes the film live and breathe is the cast who works hard to be as natural and as delicate as possible. Because the movie is exploring themes of repression and the defensive masculinity that queer people in tough urban environments must front in order to survive, the actors play their parts very close to their chests, avoiding melodramatic Oscar-clipping as much as possible. The whole cast puts their trust in Jenkins sensitive direction to use their every hesitated breath and every raised eyebrow to inform the emotional realities that’s often deliberately left out of the dialogue. Naomi Harris as the dysfunctional mother is probably the broadest character and most literal performance given. Compared to the quiet intensity expressed by the rest of the cast, her portrayal is much less nuanced and the lines she delivers often mirrors her emotions exactly. Harris is faithfully playing the role as written, but it looks rather reductive compared to the subtly sublime work by the three actors who play her son.

This might not be your personal growing-up story but the raw emotions expressed in “Moonlight” are universal. While the ending comes to a disappointing halt just as the movie’s momentum is peaking and there’s nothing particularly new in the storytelling-- the plot touches on many tropes in both the coming-of-age and coming-out genres—the finely tuned performances and Jenkin’s filmic execution feels personal and authentic, even as he employs familiar narrative techniques.

Grade: B+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Nov-2016

13th review

Ava DuVernay’s new documentary “13^th” should be required viewing for every high school civics course across the country. The film focuses on how the American justice system has been systematically rigged against people of color since the passing of the 13^th amendment ended slavery in the 1800s, conveniently leaving in the clause that strips humans of their rights as soon as they enter the prison system and often long after they have served their sentences. This documentary creates a comprehensive examination of how these laws have specifically targeted the black communities through the segregation era and into the ever-expanding war on drugs, dramatically spiking our incarceration numbers over time.

Released in a particularly salty election year in which minority issues such as Black Lives Matter and immigration have been front and center in the political discussion, the film’s decision to release on Netflix streaming, rather than only engaging in a limited theatrical run, allows for the possibility of a wider reach and deeper cultural impact.

The movie gives us many damning statistics, including the fact that America accounts for 25% percent of the worlds prisoners, despite only representing 5% percent of the global population, or how African American’s make up 40% of those incarcerated, even though they only account for 6.5% of the total U.S. population. These stats are then supported by showing us how both republican and democrat lawmakers have continually stacked the legal deck against minorities to keep prison filled and profits high.

DuVernay makes the argument that slavery didn’t end with the passing of the 13^th amendment, rather it was merely shifted to the prison systems. When seeing footage of minority inmates performing free labor for many successful American manufacturers, it’s hard to argue against this position. One of the stronger points made in the film—also brought to light a while back by comedian John Oliver on his HBO program—is the governmental part played by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) who guides the passing of many restrictive policing and incarceration policies, based on the whims of the powerful corporate lobbyists who fund their initiatives. These initiatives include California’s damaging three strikes policy and mandatory minimum sentencing that took judicial power away from judges and gave it to prosecutors. No matter your race or political persuasion, one ought to be disturbed by how big of a role corporations have played into the withering of freedoms, the expansion of militant policing and growth of America’s prison industrial complex.  

Formally. the documentary shifts between archival footage and talking-head interviews by the likes of activists such as Angela Davis and Bryan Stevenson, educators like Jelani Cobb and commentators and lawmakers such as Newt Gingrich. Graphics and popular music is implemented for the purposes of style and pacing but never distracts from or overwhelms the film’s content.

Here DuVernay brings the activist spirit and polemic energy that she sheathed with “Selma” in order to graciously portray the life and reputation of Martin Luther King Jr. Whereas 2014’s “Selma” aimed to bridge differing political points of view under the reverence of a classy, performance-oriented prestige picture, “13^th” takes off those silk gloves and bares its anger and outrage with a meticulously researched take-down of the white supremacy that’s built into our government’s interpretation of law and order. This documentary is not a casual watch and it was made with the purpose to complicate the hotly divided conversations created by our culture of stagnant left-right squabbling, and for that alone it’s one of the most important and essential films to come out this year.

Grade: A

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Oct-2016