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Film Review: Dumb and Dumber To

I don’t think Dumb and Dumber To had to be a good movie for me to enjoy it. It’s absolutely not, and I absolutely didn’t. Yet somehow my experience with it feels more like a blameless misunderstanding than a confrontation of taste.

Though the proceedings are completely tasteless (the opening scene contains the forceful removal of a catheter), it is a really nice thing to see Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels share the silver screen again. They are both, after all, fine actors and a natural pair. Carrey has always been the more defined of the two, a boisterous funnyman with a knack for making a cartoon of himself without squeezing the heart out of his larger than life characters. That heart is what made him such a sympathetic presence in pantheon films like The Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, films perhaps better suited for someone not so much defined, but refined—like Daniels.

But here we are again on Carrey’s turf, where physical comedy rules supreme and where it’s expected that he’ll go long on anything writer-directors Peter and Bobby Farrelly throw at him. He goes long, too long, snarfing down whole hot dogs, baring his derrière on more occasions than can be counted on one hand and repeatedly engaging in acts of gross-out sexual misconduct like he’s trying to impress somebody.

I guess there is a story here. Lloyd (Carrey) and Harry (Daniels) are a couple decades older, the best years of their lives wasted on each other because of a gag (it involves the aforementioned catheter and there are several—several!—flashbacks to Harry changing Lloyd’s dirty diapers). It turns out Harry needs a new kidney, and then it turns out he has a daughter he never knew about. In response, Lloyd invokes the term “genital donor match,” and they’re off to find the girl.

If anything stands out about Dumb and Dumber To, it’s Daniels. Like Carrey, he throws himself into the character he inhabited 20 years ago, but he also retrieves some of that affection that made the original film fun. Even nostalgia-driven audiences won’t be able to ignore how cynically staged this thing is. Most of the interiors (and interiors are mostly what we get) are obviously constructed on a set, betrayed by blown-out lighting that gives everything a lifeless, plastic sheen. For all his efforts, Carrey fades into it. Daniels simply belongs in a much better film.

“Wouldn’t it still have been funny if…”

“Yeah, but not as!”

Part of me wonders if this is what it was like working with the Farrelly brothers, who share writing credits with four other people. They’re primarily interested in bits, sketches loosely taped together by toilet humor and bigotry.

The truth is, Dumb and Dumber To is a toilet, and it turns out we’re all sitting on it.

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Film Review: Interstellar

There was once a time when Christopher Nolan didn’t let himself get carried away. His feature breakthrough Memento was as spare and cunning as its protagonist, a bereaved husband whose means of seeking his wife’s killer consisted of piecing together the shifting puzzle pieces of his own failing short term memory (ingeniously conveyed through a backwards cascade of tightly-scripted vignettes). A ruthless rivalry between two magicians set the stage for Nolan’s bigger and bolder undertaking in puzzle box storytelling with 2006’s The Prestige, which triumphed by virtue of Nolan’s emphasis on emotional clarity, never letting us lose track of the motivations of his characters. The same cannot be said for 2010’s cool-the-first-time-you-see-it Inception. What that film had in mind-bending plot contrivances and aural bombast, it gave up in narrative resonance—the spinning top was always going to fall, regardless of which dream level the movie left you on.

Interstellar is, for better and for worse, one giant leap along that trajectory. It gets by on raw power, but not before blasting all semblance of unity out of its own orbit.

We begin in the near future, somewhere in American farm country. Thanks to an environmental collapse called the “blight,” farming is one of few remaining ways of life, and corn one of few viable crops. In this isolated setting, the global food shortage is felt in the frequent gales of dust that coats cars, porches, dining tables and bookshelves in a tangible state of destitution. Matthew McConaughey plays Cooper, an engineer-turned-farmer, who lives with his daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy), his son Tom (Timothée Chalamet) and father-in-law Donald (played by a pithy John Lithgow). There’s a blind optimism to their existence, which Cooper laments with melancholy aphorisms. (“We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars, now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.”) If Cooper and his family aren’t living like ghosts, they seem to be haunted by them—Murph one night mistakes the sounds of Cooper’s restless sleep for a ghost that visits her room, knocking books off her bookshelf.

There is an explanation for the haunting, but it functions as little more than a means to get Cooper on his way. One night, he and Murph stumble upon what remains of NASA, whose underground facility houses the world’s most brilliant minds (exposition machine Michael Caine as Professor Brand and a quietly poignant Anne Hathaway as his daughter Amelia among them) along with the last best hope to survive this world: a plan to leave it for one of three habitable planets scouted out by the ominously named “Lazarus” missions. Once Interstellar finally leaves the stratosphere, it’s a breathtaking spectacle, and here, Nolan doesn’t know how to take a false step.

Yet it all lives and dies by Newton’s third law of motion: to go forward, you need to leave something behind. Interstellar finds new life in its second act, but by the time the third rolls around, it becomes clear that too much was already carried away in the dust.

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Film Review: Nightcrawler

Jake Gyllenhaal’s physical transformation for Nightcrawler goes beyond the obvious signs of weight loss that lend the picture’s central character, a social maladroit named Louis Bloom, his angular, gaunt look. After similar transformations by Christian Bale and Matthew McConaughey for 2004’s The Machinist and last year’s Dallas Buyers Club, respectively, the cynical moviegoer could be tempted to dismiss Gyllenhaal’s efforts as a stunt that’s, if nothing else, starved for recognition.

And there’s certainly is a lot of cynicism evoked by the iconic, neon glow of nighttime LA, where every shadow seems to echo the skulking figures of streetlights overhead. It’s a breeding ground for misfortune, and in the world of crime journalism, there’s a high premium on the most impactful content—the bigger the misfortune and the more well off the victim, the better. Enter Gyllenhaal (who plays the aforementioned Lou) and the whites of his eyes, which are here about as exaggerated as those of a whacked out bushbaby.

It seems like a natural, evolutionary trait of someone whose most productive hours are slotted for the dead of night. Lou, while ever on the lookout for more gainful employment, is making due as a thief. We first see him trespassing on a restricted industrial zone, cutting a chain link fence to sell for scrap. Then, when a security guard pulls up and confronts him, Louis beats him up and steals his watch.

Though his actions may betray a depraved state of desperation, Lou's demeanor does not—at least not in a way invites pity.

For a thief, Lou is also an enterprising businessman, spewing motivational maxims whenever the going gets tough. (“If you want to win the lottery, you have to make the money to buy a ticket.”) After a chance run-in with a seasoned “nightcrawler” (Bill Paxton) filming the burning wreck of a car while policemen try to rescue the unconscious driver still inside, Lou sets his entrepreneurial sights on becoming a freelance videographer himself.

Doing what others won’t proves to work in Lou’s favor, which includes breaking the ethical barrier between being an observer and becoming a participant. Though Gyllenhaal looks something close to reptilian with his jutting cheekbones and sallow lips, the chill we get from the cold-blooded way Lou regards human suffering is all conveyed through performance.

After he sells his first story to LA’s lowest rated news channel, the station’s producer (Rene Russo) obliges Lou with advice on what kind of content to focus on in his new line of work.

"Bloody?" he asks. She pauses to spin it into something more palatable.

"Graphic," she replies.

There’s enough accruing menace in Gyllenhaal’s performance to make us really uncomfortable whenever he shares the screen with someone else. You sincerely worry that with pupils as wide and empty as Lou’s, it wouldn’t be entirely out of the question for him to turn ravenous for something that can’t be adequately captured or consumed on video.

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Film Review: John Wick

John Wick is nothing if not expedient, which proves to be worth a killing in his line of work.

Though when we first meet Wick (played by a wispy Keanu Reeves), it seems that “the life” has gotten the better of him. On a particularly rainy night in New Jersey, a bullet-riddled SUV slowly rolls up to some forlorn building on the harbor. The car comes to a stop with the sudden, unpleasant sound of its bumper crumpling against a concrete ramp. The driver’s side door opens just enough for Wick to slip out, buckled over from a severe case of bleeding knife wound. He makes it to the edge of the concrete ramp where he collapses, looking unlikely to get back up. He then produces an iPhone from his pocket. A video is ready to go—a memento of a better life, his wife (Bridget Moynahan) smiling at the camera. Pressing play, it isn’t long before Wick keels over, the light of the screen catching a rare look of respite.

As far as subtle moments go, this speechless intro is a nice one. Neither John Wick the film nor the character are really about them, which quickly becomes apparent by the montage sequence that follows. We learn that Wick and his wife lived happily until she fell ill with cancer, and that he was stoutly at her bedside during her prolonged struggle with the disease that eventually takes her life. At the rain-soaked funeral, an old associate (played by a perfunctory Willem Dafoe) makes an ominous appearance, and later that night, Wick weeps at his wife’s final gift to him: a pre-trained beagle pup named Daisy.

Nobody plants daisies this early without trouble being right around the corner.

Sure enough, Wick’s 1969 Ford Mustang attracts the attention of a mob brat Iosef (Alfie Allen). After his financial offer is curtly rebuffed, Iosef breaks into Wick’s house to steal the beloved car, committing a needless act of puppycide in the process.

The mechanics that compel Wick on his road to revenge are eye-wateringly obvious, almost to the point of parody. In an attempt the take out the unstoppable force that his son has awakened, the comparatively refined mob patriarch Viggo (a deliciously watchable Michael Nyqvist) sends his goons to Wick’s house. Wick dispatches them with a deftness of touch not unlike that required to stack a house of cards, moving nimbly to dodge and dispense bullet justice. Only when this house falls, you’re left with a pile of bloodied bodies, a problem that people like Wick have a ridiculous contingency for: an on-call cleanup crew that take gold coins as payment.

Though I don’t believe the somber setup means it should be beyond winking at the camera, there’s a video-gamey quality to the violence that ends up working against what the film is trying to do. By the fourth setpiece, which takes place in a church parking lot, it’s clear that John Wick becomes too concerned with leveling up the brutality when it may have rather benefited from a more subtle touch.

It’s too bad, because John Wick is a handsomely mounted action film that boasts several strong sequences, including an extended nightclub scene that recalls the best of Michael Mann’s Collateral without cowering in its shadow.

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Film Review: Fury

Fury is a war movie all about enclosed spaces, though it’s not interested in making combat seem small—even in the dark night of the soul, the walls can come crashing down on you in a flash of hellfire.

The scene: the dying days of the Third Reich, somewhere in the heart of Germany. Here, the landscape is an otherworld of blackened earth where dead bodies are a muted feature compared to the angular distinctiveness of the gnarled machinery of war. Camouflaged in it is the Sherman tank from which the film takes its name, painted in white on either side of the barrel of the main cannon like a ghostly calling card. Her crew, led by its commanding officer known as Wardaddy (Brad Pitt), look as if they themselves rose from the dirt, somehow still mustering defiance against the inevitable but also longing for a dead man’s sleep.

There’s plenty from Fury’s opening scene that betrays writer-director David Ayer’s primary concern in this fictional account of World War II: the deterioration of the human soul. From the blood-spattered mementos once-decorating the tank’s interior to the civilian corpses hung as deterrents against mutiny by the ruthless SS, the corporeal cost is something we frequently take for granted as a grim but simple consequence of war. But Ayer wants us to see it differently—death is all around, but it only matters to the living.

“Wait’ll you see,” says Bible (played by a heartbreaking Shia LaBeouf), “what a man can do to another man.” Bible earned his nickname as the crew’s lone believer, frequently reciting scripture with equal parts weariness and anger, accusing the carnage around him of making eternal sinners bound for hell out of all of us. One hapless recipient of Bible’s sermon is the crew’s replacement assistant driver Norman (Logan Lerman)—a lamb led to the slaughter if there ever was one. If the remains of the guy he’s replacing is any indication, Norman is already in a very hot place.

In addition to the ravages, Ayer also shows us plenty of ravaging. As Wardaddy and his crew lead an Allied advance on the remaining Nazi outposts, they endure several desperate ambushes. In one such instance, the scene quickly escalates into a four-versus-one tank battle, with the odds of survival favoring the sole German tank. The furious calculation involved in mediating the grinding mechanics of a 30 ton war machine and the fraying human element driving the thing often goes unaccounted for in this sort of picture, and are here rendered with grueling detail. Where most clashes are resolved with sight and trigger, these are settled with grunt and grimace.

Fury does a terrific job of entrenching us in these tense standoffs, the outcomes of which verge on the unpredictable, though they never quite glimpse that sniper sequence from Kathryn Bigelow’s modern warfare masterpiece The Hurt Locker. While we certainly sense that every character’s days are numbered, there’s an incidental reprieve in knowing which tank is commandeered by Pitt’s Wardaddy, a pathos surrounding him so measured you’ll know exactly when enough is enough.

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Film Review: Dracula Untold

You wouldn’t think that with a moniker like “Vlad the Impaler” there’d be any further need of rebranding for the bloodthirsty Transylvanian prince. Sure, Dracula Untold makes a conscionable effort to not completely debase the historical narrative of The Impaler by grossly glorifying his brutal reputation for making signposts of his enemies. Instead, Dracula Untold appears to think it’s taking the nobler road of showing us the man behind the fang, which the film misjudges to be best achieved with pints and pints of bloodcurdlingly basic melodrama.

That’s not to say that we don’t get Vlad (Luke Evans) single-handedly sticking it to a couple thousand Turks. The first time he exercises his newfound vampiric powers, Vlad clears a battlefield of charging soldiers with the pretend cool of a guy that doesn’t look at explosions.

“We must never speak of what happened here tonight,” he tells the citizens of Castle Dracula. Yet Dracula Untold is distinctly pitched to PG-13—only a prepubescent audience will look past that pesky solar allergy which renders Vlad completely useless in the daytime, ensuring the inevitable destruction of the people he is sworn to protect.

For a movie that’s nice to look at at times—thanks in large part to its costume department—it adds very little to its well-trodden premise. If not completely incidental, however, Dracula Untold is passably comic fare. Not that it should have inspired a Stephen Colbert-inflected re-reboot: Dracula Retold: Rebecoming the Legend He Never Wasn’t. But in more competent hands, it could’ve.

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Film Review: The Judge

While on the promotional circuit for The Judge, Robert Downey Jr. urged audiences on social media to help “prove that films about people can do business.” Outwardly, this family dramedy by way of courtroom procedural appears cynically geared to do just that—business. It is, afterall, a glossy bit of filmmaking that knows well enough to bank on the central performances by Downey and Robert Duvall. But therein lies an important distinction that elevates The Judge well above the stink of Oscar bait: for an actor who is at this point as much “brand” as he is “actor,” Downey gives an actor’s performance here as the high-powered Chicago lawyer Hank Palmer, which seems could only be brought out by an actor’s actor like Duvall, who plays “the Judge,” his estranged father.

It helps that the sharp script by Nick Schenk and Bill Dubuque is incredibly attuned to Downey’s hyperverbal style, which goes a long way to make this sort of thing entertaining if the film’s more genre-leaning moments start to wear out their welcome. (When Hank eats dirt while riding his bike along the empty roads of rural Indiana, his highschool sweetheart predictably happens by in her gleaming Ford SUV.)

But The Judge is not all about playing it safe­. In a scene depicting the frailty of diseased old age, the bright lights dim in favor of a darker, better film. It’s small in the big picture, but it leaves an indelible mark.

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Film Review: Gone Girl

As the mystery of David Fincher’s adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl begins to unfold in the quiet suburban community of North Carthage, it’s hard not to feel like you’re being led by the nose. Here are, it seems, the makings of your typical whodunit, where the movie’s happy to do all the work for you—a scavenger hunt whose puzzles will solve themselves. You’ll only end up where you started if you’re content with that sort of thing, but the yarn that Gone Girl spins invites you to take a second look. Here, the expression “the simplest answer is often the correct one” could not be further from the truth.

Whether you’ve read the book or not, Gone Girl is thankfully more concerned with how we see over what we see. The central mystery of the film revolves around the disappearance of Amy Dunne (played by Rosamund Pike), the inspiration for the beloved “Amazing Amy” series of children’s books. Her case quickly attains high profile status as a result, and when evidence points to a violent domestic struggle prior to her getting gone, Amy’s husband Nick (Ben Affleck) becomes the main suspect.

Obviously, nothing is as it appears.

And that’s a good thing. From its very opening frame, Gone Girl is unsettling, and not necessarily for its content, but for its inflection—the back of a blonde woman’s head fills the screen as Nick narrates how he pictures “cracking her lovely skull” to find out what’s inside, what she’s thinking, what she’s feeling, before the head swivels around the show his wife looking up at him with a faint, dead smile. “What have we done to each other?” Nick asks, his voice more heavy with disdain than regret.

It isn’t until about halfway through when we learn about the circumstances leading up to Amy’s disappearance that the movie really starts to go places, often into the absurd. As Nick gets irreversibly entangled in the media hysteria, which has deemed him a murderer, the movie poses an interesting question: when you first plant a seed of doubt, can you ever fully uproot it? Whatever you feel the most cynical answer to that question is, that’s the one the movie runs with. (Gone Girl revels in toying with its audience, but it never comes across as snide or masturbatory.)

You can’t help but feel a little left behind, however, if only because we’re forced to accept what little weight tragedy bears in this world. Fincher called it a condition of “tragedy vampirism” in a recent interview, where we consume tales of gross misfortune for all the blood they’re worth. This condition has a way of transforming the players forced into the spotlight—Nick, initially a bumbling innocent, develops a seething cunning as his past misdeeds threaten to undo him (Affleck is surprisingly good here). As Nick and Amy’s harshest judges, we have to recognize our implicitness in drawing out their flaws by what we choose to see and not see.

Gone Girl is effective in making us feel uncomfortable with ourselves in a way we may not want but probably need. With all the ugliness and injustice perpetrated by these characters, we still sympathize with them. Nick's sentiments regarding Amy's skull flip as we wonder with more regret than disdain, “can they really get away with this?” That question is directed at Fincher as much as it is the characters themselves, and the answer is yes. Yes—he can (no spoilers).

If you wanted to take Gone Girl at face value and experience it as a straight up psychological thriller, you could. The cool thing about it is that its narrative trickery is only an entry point, the scene of the crime. The real fun of this particular hunt is finding all the uncomfortable answers hidden in plain sight.

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Film Review: The Boxtrolls

I never thought I’d remark on the makeup applied to the face of a character in a stop motion film, but The Boxtrolls—the latest from Oregon-based animation house Laika, responsible for the quirky horror-fantasies Coraline and ParaNorman—is absolutely caked with this sort of visual detail. Far have we come from the primitive age of claymation when animators had to rely on exaggeration to make up for the limitations of plasticine, which could merely approximate the literalness of real life through crude and uncanny caricature. Aspects of this certainly still hold true in animation today, except now there are layers to the caricature—the characters of stop motion film can now express themselves by what they choose to conceal.

Though nothing really comes as a surprise in the wonderfully realized world of The Boxtrolls, at least not in a narrative sense. The story, based on the book Here Be Monsters! by Adam Snow, is set in the cobblestoned town of Cheesebridge, a melange of the more tranquil parts of a 19th century European industrial borough that looks as if it had been stacked on top of itself over time, jutting vertically out of some Anglo-English countryside (even the setting is a caricature). It's a place ruled by social order where the aristocratic "white hats" sit at the top of the town, contented to a life of aromatic cheese tastings while supposedly discussing important governing affairs between nibbles. Lower on the social rung is Archibald Snatcher (voiced by Ben Kingsley), a lowly "red hat" who devises a scheme to attain a seat at the table of curdled delicacies despite a severe dairy allergy. He plans to rid Cheesebridge of the Boxtrolls, a falsely-feared community of oddball creatures who wear cardboard boxes like clothes and come out of their underground dwelling at night to scavenge for scraps of metal to use for building harmless, and often humorous, contraptions.

The Boxtrolls are an expressive bunch even though there are no discernible words in their gibberish speech beyond the designations they use for each other, as determined by the labels on their respective boxes (Fish, Bucket, Shoe). The cavern they inhabit is bedecked with wacky inventions of their design, each of which have a warm, familiar quality that makes their little world one to care about. There’s also a mystery surrounding an orphaned boy named Eggs (voiced by Isaac Hempstead Wright) who the Boxtrolls have adopted as one of their own, but his journey of discovering and coming to terms with who he really is, which unfortunately is the heart of the story here, is predictable and not especially interesting.

As Laika showed with Coraline and ParaNorman, it’s the gristle of the thing they’re really after (it’s no accident that one of Snatcher’s henchmen is called Mr. Gristle). Cheesebridge feels lived in with its dark, grimy alleyways and its distinctly painted characters—the snooty Lord Portley-Rind (Jared Harris) and his daughter Winnie (Elle Fanning) are literally painted white with the pomposity of upper class privilege while Snatcher’s greasy appearance can’t help but turn his concealer to crust. There’s a good bit of icky body horror that comes from an otherwise sweet scene where Snatcher coerces his reluctant minions—they know what’s about to happen—into a cheese tasting, each donning a makeshift white hat that falls woefully short of the textural lusciousness of the real thing.

The Boxtrolls is a dazzling thing to look at—it’s the stuff of costume and set design that draws us in—yet it’s strange to say its biggest strength is how “real” it all looks. But some of that gristle extends into delightful bits of dark humor provided by Winnie, whose obsession with the grotesque makes her a willing companion to Eggs. Brought up on the violent rhetoric Snatcher used in his public pledge to exterminate the Boxtrolls, Winnie’s thirst for blood is left unquenched when she finally sees their colorful lair for herself.

“I was promised mountains of bones,” she says.

We may not quite get that, but it’s still a pretty good haul.

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Film Review: The Drop

James Gandolfini’s final big screen appearance in The Drop cannot help but feel like an ebb in the late actor’s expansive career, which, sadly, has little to do with his performance—his penchant for conveying melancholy like it’s a passive function of his being remains intact, and he is no less magnetic here than he’s always been. Watching him reprise the role of another broken thug, however, is a bittersweet affair. On one hand, it’s a poetic return to the type of supporting role that paved the way to the mountaintop where he was to inhabit Tony Soprano, and on the other, it instills a disturbing sense that he’s not really “there.” It’s an unfortunate bit of real life encroaching on the life of the art, but perhaps it’s just hard not to want more from Gandolfini now that we feel his absence.

In The Drop, Gandolfini plays Marv, the manager of Cousin Marv’s, a Brooklyn bar that bears his name in title only (the bar was bought out years earlier by a Chechen gang who occasionally use it as a “drop” for dirty cash to be laundered). Tom Hardy plays Bob, to whom Cousin Marv is his actual cousin. Bob tends the bar and generally looks to be keeping his head down, known around the neighborhood to be something of a loner—a nice, quiet guy, but still conspicuously alone.

Walking home from work one night, he rescues a badly-beaten puppy left in a garbage can belonging to Nadia (Noomi Rapace), a woman with visible scars who takes to Bob in part because he doesn’t ask where they come from. (“Everybody has a past,” he seems to offer without a second thought.)

Almost concurrently, Cousin Marv’s gets held up on a “drop” night, which puts Marv and Bob in the pressing position to get their Chechen overseer’s sizable sum of money back before something really bad happens.

The pup’s the thing, though.

As Bob, Hardy crosses a range of familiar savant characters, recalling in parts the soft earnestness of Forrest Gump, the charming demure of Rocky Balboa and the silent professionalism of the Driver, as made famous by Ryan Gosling in Drive. Alongside the staunchly dependable Gandolfini, it’s evident that Hardy’s act is not one of dilution, but one he holds with a master’s hand—it all fits in this shadowy world full of fallen men, none of whom fell from great heights to begin with. (Matthias Schoenaerts puts in a nuanced performance as Eric, an imposing physical double to Bob whose bloodless demeanor threatens to turn rabid at any moment.)

What works about The Drop is that it asks us to wait—seeing things the way Bob does means lying low and just being the guy that tends the bar. No one—no one who wants to live, anyway—makes a move until it is absolutely necessary. In order to survive in this world, you can’t blink when the pressure’s on.

For what it’s worth, The Drop didn’t cause me to blink once.

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Film Review: Lucy

It isn’t often that the roller coaster metaphor holds up with action movies these days. With the overreliance of CG stunts and explosions, Inception-esque foghorn swells turned up to the 11th power and typical running times strolling nonchalantly past the two-hour mark, the adventure picture experience in American cinema has become more akin to spending your lunch break at the carwash: the lights go down, the slap, splash and whooshing is served up in high order but it’s an altogether divorced event that takes you nowhere fast, somehow leaving you feeling a little dirtier—a slice off your billfold and the change from your pockets is all it cleans you of.

Enter Lucy, the latest from French director Luc Besson, whose auteur status seems singularly constructed around his persistent use of visual hydraulics to move his stories forward, sometimes past the bounds of logic, but never losing sight of the interlocking mechanics of the medium: moving pictures.

We pick up on the steps of a lavish hotel in downtown Taipei, Taiwan, where Lucy (played by Scarlett Johansson), a 25-year-old American university student clad in a leopard-print shirt and little else argues with her boyfriend of one week—his greasy appearance capped by a knockoff Stetson, playing second fiddle in what is a delectable duel of bad taste—over whether or not she can do him a solid and deliver a mysterious briefcase to the front desk for a Mr. Jang (Min-sik Choi). It was never going to end well for either of them, and seemingly before the Stetson hits the ground Lucy is already pondering the bandages covering a fresh incision in her lower tummy, a plastic pouch of a blue synthetic superdrug pressing, unprotected, against the stitches.

If Besson is to thank for just how tightly the picture follows Lucy and her rapid evolution into a hyper-supreme being of limitless ability, Johannsson deserves praise for pushing back against the constraints of the genre, most of which Besson smartly disguises with harmless defiances of logic—just watching Lucy recall the taste of mother’s milk during a phone call home hints at an unquantifiable sum of energy fizzing at the edges of the frame.

Lucy goes from a good action film to a great one in the unexpected moments we find ourselves in reflexivity with it. One such instance sees Morgan Freeman’s classic wise character, here a prominent figure in neuroscientific research, confronted with Lucy at 20 percent of her power. As she details the extent of her developing nature, manipulating the various electronic appliances outfitting his hotel room for show, a look of wondrous bewilderment dawns on Freeman’s face.

I shared that look with him. And as an audience member, you can’t fake that.

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Film Review: The Giver

If I went in for this sort of thing, I’d probably find complaint with The Giver for the simple fact of it being yet another young adult film adaptation about a dystopian society on the brink of revolution. Though this version certainly adheres to the strict rules of conduct set by the likes of the Hunger Games and Divergent series, the familiar tale of an extraordinary teenage figure upsetting the seemingly fair and balanced establishment is secondary to the film’s more compelling aspects, all of which are rooted in its own sort of revolutionary idea: show the audience the beauty that still exists within the boundaries of an oppressive system.

The setting is future, where a small human population resides in what is called the Community, a meticulously designed campus (a la Google or Apple) built atop a flat top mountain perpetually surrounded by clouds (lending it obvious island-like connotations). The encroaching clouds are thanks to the Community’s “climate control,” which is but a small part of its strict efforts to stabilize every facet of the life of its citizens.

During the Ceremony, at which children are assigned their lifetime occupation and are thereby deemed adults, Jonas (Brenton Thwaites) stands out when he is selected to become the next Receiver of Memories, a position that promises to bring him something new and unfamiliar: pain. Jeff Bridges plays the Giver, a Community elder tasked with passing on memories of the Community’s deep past to Jonas.

The film shines in these master-apprentice moments, where an experience like riding a sled in a snow-covered forest flashes in Jonas’ mind, awakening him to the splendor of a life beyond his station. Thwaites plays it straight and proves surprisingly sympathetic in instances when all he is asked to do is react, a tough task even for a seasoned actor (his young castmates, in stark contrast, don’t fare as well). Bridges, a warm and somewhat ironic presence here, if only because the role so exactly suits his brand of dispensing bits of garbled wisdom, is the one who really lends the film its emotional weight.

The pieces put in place by an impressive cast (among which is a woefully uninteresting Meryl Streep as the Chief Elder) and the universal appeal of its source material suggest that The Giver was drained of its promise from the inside out. It’s pathos The Giver gets wrong, something its contemporaries seem to revel in. When it comes time for Jonas to receive painful memories, the fabric of the film starts to tatter, showing just how flatly director Phillip Noyce employs clichéd visual figures to illustrate complex concepts—one particular memory of war ends up looking less like Platoon and more like the Battle of Endor from Return of the Jedi as a result.

The Giver should be commended for its earnest desire to tell a familiar story beautifully, but outside those key moments it’s damned by the sameness of it all.

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Film Review: The November Man

The November Man waits until just before the very end to explain how Peter Devereaux, an ex-CIA operative on the warpath (played by Pierce Brosnan), earned his chilly nickname. The explanation doesn’t matter—it’s not a very smart epithet anyway, drawing the obvious and correct conclusion that Devereaux is one cold mother.

Regardless, outmanned and outgunned, we, along with Devereaux, have to suffer the most perfunctory sort of bad guy monologue before we inevitably escape with our lives. If only just.

If The November Man is a spy thriller, it’s not my kind of one.

Set almost entirely in Belgrade, Serbia, the movie converges on a corrupt former general Arkady Federov (Lazar Ristovski) and his potential ascension to the Russian presidency. Seeking to clear any evidence of the atrocities he committed during the Second Chechen War, Federov targets an old flame of Devereaux’s whom the CIA also has a vested interest in. Devereaux himself comes out of retirement only in time to witness her catch a bullet through the windshield of their getaway vehicle.

Luke Bracey plays Mason, a killing hand employed by the CIA who also happens to be Devereaux’s former protege. At one point in the film Mason is praised for his reliance as a “weapon,” but I contend his ‘80s action movie haircut remains by far the most reliable thing about him.

Also mixed up in the proceedings is Olga Kurylenko as Alice, who aptly captures the panic of not being able to process things as quickly as those around you, which is a pervasive feeling instilled by The November Man. The plot is nonsensical stuff, its mechanics blunt and stunted as if someone copy-pasted dictionary definitions of stale beer tropes like “gritty,” “edgy” and “morally ambiguous” directly into the screenplay and called it good.

Good, this ain’t.

The movie outstays its welcome early on—while the body count is still in single digits—and if by the end you aren’t begging for it to stop you’re certainly not wondering what it all means.

“They knew the risks,” Devereaux grumbles when confronted about his recently-deceased colleagues. “We all did.”

Reflective of Devereaux’s too-cool-for-spy-school posturing, The November Man doesn’t care what I think of it. In fact, it would probably prefer I didn’t have any thoughts at all.

If only it would leave me alone about it.

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Film Review: Boyhood

“Show them life,” Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky once said, addressing the misguided desire of his fellow filmmakers to directly communicate their ideas to the audience, “and they’ll find within themselves the means to assess and appreciate it.”

Boyhood can very much be defined along these lines. Shot intermittently over a 12-year span, the film casts Ellar Coltrane as Mason, a boy who is, at the beginning of the film, just starting school in Texas.

There is no inciting incident—Mason’s parents (played by Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette) are no longer together but their split occurred long before the beginning of the story, and his older sister Samantha, played by Linklater’s daughter Lorelai, is equal parts ally and tormentor in the confounding but typical way only siblings can be.

Instead we find Mason lying on the grass, reposed inside the narrative frame (he frequently plays the role of observer, but writer-director Richard Linklater smartly doesn’t constrict him to it). Even as he grows up before our very eyes, we never lose the essence of Mason, and it’s in large part thanks to how un-navel gazy the gazing is here—occasionally the camera catches a certain look on Coltrane’s face that recalls the moment we first saw him gazing upward, guessing at what life might bring, the gaps in time closing in such a way as if to affect the disorienting wishfulness of time travel.

In a scene between Hawke and an 18-year-old Coltrane about to embark on his college journey, the men have a heart to heart, reflecting on lost love and the meaning of life. Neither of them draw any discernible conclusions, thankfully, but we feel the weight of their search.

“The good news is you’re feeling stuff,” Hawke says.

Boyhood brims with moments like this, the stuff of life.

(Originally published in Colorado Mesa University’s The Criterion, on August 26, 2014)

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Film Review: Guardians of the Galaxy

Perhaps the most overlooked character in the vast universe of the latest, great Marvel experiment Guardians of the Galaxy is that of Peter Serafinowitz’s Denarian Saal, a high-ranking officer in the armed forces of Xander (a planet that looks to have been designed in California by Apple), who hits it right on the nose when he remarks about the titular characters, “What a bunch of a-holes.”

In that moment, he is overseeing the processing of our five unlikely heroes—three of which are mostly human while the remaining two certainly walk and talk (and kill) like humans but are in fact more of the raccoon and tree persuasion—before they are to be transported to what is effectively a high-security space prison. Of course Denarian becomes the butt of the joke later in the climactic battle when he sneers, “I can’t believe I’m taking orders from a hamster.”

In this way Guardians of the Galaxy delights in being old school—which is to say it has a sense of humor about itself. Obviously, it’s getting a lot of help from its source, a 2008 comic book reboot of an original run of comics from the ‘60s featuring a different, but equally zany, lineup of alien heroes. In this quadrant of the galaxy, there are no scowling dark knights or laser-eyed, neck-snapping men of steel with messiah complexes, and that’s just the way Marvel likes it (and that’s fine by me). Plenty of dead role models still, but more on that later.

The leader of the Guardians is Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), whom we first see flying solo as a space-faring scavenger and self-proclaimed outlaw. Abducted from Earth as a child in the ‘80s, Quill is caught in an amusing suspension of cultural development, enacting the cool-guy personas inspired by the likes of Indiana Jones and Kevin Bacon’s character from Footloose—“You may know me by another name,” he offers as he is cornered by armed mercenaries, “Star Lord,”—a particular brand of campy bravado that is antiquated even by yesterday’s standards. (Another relic of Quill’s childhood, a walkman, is wonderfully interwoven not only into the story of his character but how we experience the events of the film).

Following his recovery of a sought-after artifact known simply as the Orb, Quill is forced to forge an uneasy truce with the other would-be Guardians. Rocket is a genetically enhanced raccoon with a penchant for weaponry and tech (Bradley Cooper provides the voice). Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel) is Rocket’s own personal homegrown enforcer and surprises as a remarkably emotional presence despite only being able to speak three words, a recurring joke that somehow doesn’t become tiresome. (This makes it so that when he finally utters a fourth its significance is potent enough to make a tree weep, as it were). Zoe Saldana’s stony, green-skinned assassin Gamora and Dave Bautista’s tank-like Drax may be the most undersold of the team but thanks to invested performances they still provide some of the film’s punchier character moments while retaining the pathos of their respective backstories.

While the Guardians find a common enemy in an interplanetary warlord known as Ronan—a nothing villain whose imposing silhouette is at least given some heft by an unembarrassed, scenery-chewing turn by Lee Pace—it is their struggle with personal loss that sifts through to the forefront. Here writer-director James Gunn proves himself perfectly suited for the job, already having shown a deeply effective and unsettling take on loss and revenge with Super. That Gunn manages not only to make these characters pop in their own right but also have them come together with a clearly defined understanding of each other’s pain and motivation puts Guardians of the Galaxy above and away from clunky, fan-pleasing fare like The Avengers. 

With all the prerequisite bluster of a summer blockbuster, all of which the film handles exceptionally well for that matter, the staying images come from the moments when these characters reach out to give, or grasp, a helping hand. Even the final confrontation becomes less about defeating an external threat than healing an internal one—a crucial detail that made the last Batman and Superman movies fall so flat. There’s nothing flat about Guardians of the Galaxy, maybe excepting the villain, but then you know he’s just there to be the butt of the joke. And how old school is that?

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Film Review: Transcendence

Transcendence opens with a bookending present-day sequence depicting the post-technological ravages of Berkeley, California. Here, the denizens silently walk the dusty downtown streets and shopkeepers run military-guarded trade posts where keyboards serve as doorstops. Emerging in a neighborhood dormant with overgrowth, Max (Paul Bettany) narrates vague, expository stuff about mankind’s “inevitable collision” with technology as he makes his way to an empty house once belonging to Will and Evelyn Caster (Johnny Depp and Rebecca Hall).

The movie then flashes back to the day Will, a prominent researcher in the field of artificial intelligence, is shot by an agent of a terrorist group called R.I.F.T. (Revolutionary Independence From Technology, a name loudly indicative of the level of writing on show here), which has simultaneously staged attacks on multiple of Will’s research teams. Though he survives his initial injuries, the bullet that struck Will was laced with a polonium isotope that will kill him in a month’s time, which spurs his wife Evelyn and friend Max to upload his consciousness into the remnants of an existing artificial intelligence framework called PINN (Physically Independent Neural Network—again, the writing).

Wally Pfister’s directorial debut (he made his name as Christopher Nolan’s director of photography, dating back to the Memento days) is not so much a mess of big scientific and philosophical concepts as much as it is lifeless procession of those concepts. Much of the problem derives from the proliferation of big-name actors (Morgan Freeman, Cillian Murphy and Kate Mara) playing characters who exist on a logical plane that solely works in favor of the clunky plot. (In response to Will’s developing godlike powers of cell regeneration, Murphy’s FBI Agent Buchanan leads an bafflingly small special forces team in an attack on the underground facility housing Will’s AI while the other characters just look on.)

On a smaller budget, Transcendence at least couldn't afford calling so much attention to its shortcomings. What’s here shows that Pfister, on his own, is not a long form storyteller. In fact, everything that happens in Transcendence is so incidental, I’m not even sure he’s seeing the page for the words written on it.

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Film Review: The Raid 2: Berandal

At a runtime of 150 minutes, The Raid 2: Berandal takes a while to get going, and that’s a strange thing to say about a film that opens with an execution.

We pick up hours after the conclusion of 2011’s staggeringly action-packed The Raid: Redemption with not-so-rookie cop Rama (Iko Uwais), still bleeding from the ill-fated raid on a 16-story drug lord stronghold, delivering the crooked police lieutenant Wahyu to Bunawar, the head of an internal affairs unit. In order to weed out corruption in the highest ranks of Jakarta’s police force, Bunawar convinces Rama to go undercover as a common prison thug, arresting him for the brutal beating of a politician’s son with the eventual hope that Rama ingratiate himself with Uco (Arifin Putra), an overambitious crime boss’ son serving time. 

The Raid 2 spends its first hour setting up a vast, entangled web of characters whose motivations and alliances are rarely immediately clear. Returning writer-director Gareth Evan’s handling of such a large scope both works and doesn’t. To his credit, the film never overtly explains the significance of each narrative thread, relying instead on blink-and-miss-it visual storytelling. It can be a lot to take in at times, especially if all you’re expecting is more of the relentless, bone-crunching fight sequences from the original. It is a welcome addition, though, that rewards its audience and in turn makes every action set piece feel earned (and boy, there are many, and they are incredible). 

There are moments, however, when the lack of explanation translates to the film abandoning its primary narrative in favor of fringe characters whose most significant traits are defined by their respective weapons of choice (see: Hammer Girl and Baseball Bat Man). Evans the Action Director more than justifies the presence of these characters—Evans the Director of Drama, not so much. (A troubling example of this is when Rama disappears for almost 45 minutes in service of a subplot featuring a sad, machete-wielding homeless assassin with baby issues that never ends up affecting the plot as much as the time devoted to it would suggest.)

For its unevenness, The Raid 2 nevertheless lands the big hits with surgical accuracy, rightly focusing its attention on the impossibly well-choreographed action. For The Raid series going forward, I take it as a good sign that, even with bits of broken teeth lining their throats, these characters have a lot more to say.