Popcorn Kernels: Dumping Out The Net

In which we briefly review two movies produced for Netflix, and one that feels like it absolutely could have been.

Roma

Year: 2018
Director: Alfonso Cuarón
Cast: Yalitza Aparicio, Marina de Tavira, Diego Cortina Autrey
Run Time: 2 hours 15 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

We spend a year in the life of Cleo, a live-in maid for a rich family in 1970's Mexico City.

Now, I'm gonna front load this one so you know I don't only watch Hallmark garbage. Roma is a frontrunner for Oscar season, because really what else even looks remotely watchable this year? This movie sees celebrated Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón return to his roots, having taken five years to recover from his Earth-shattering, cinema tech-redefining hit Gravity. Roma seems small compared to anything, but especially that. And the crew is pared down too. For this semi-autobiographical piece, Cuarón not only wrote, directed, and produced, but he also shot and edited the damn thing. It's definitely a labor of love and it shows.

Loosely based on the life of Cuarón's beloved nanny, Roma is one of those walk-a-mile-in-my-shoes movies that depicts the everyday life of someone who popular audiences might not have thought about before: a working woman who has just barely escaped poverty and must live constantly under the shadow of people who are freer and more privileged while. It's full of mundane tasks and chores (the way dog poop piles up in the driveway might seem tedious, but sooner or later the sight of it will strike pure terror into your heart), but it builds to grand crescendos of emotion that are captured in those little routine, familiar actions. It's not a question of if this movie will make you cry, it's how many times.

It's a tender paean to the importance of every single life, especially in the way Cleo is weaved into the tapestry of Mexican political unrest of the 70's. She's not necessarily consciously participating, but she's an essential thread just like everybody else around her. But enough with the story (which is great). Roma is a cornea-crushingly beautiful movie. Cuarón knows how to frame a f**king shot, and he uses his patented technique of uninterrupted takes to draw you inexorably into the center of a world that feels entirely real, tactile, and occasionally entirely overwhelming.

There's a lot to devour in the imagery of Roma, so I don't know if I would say it peaked early, but one shot I would like to highlight - and in my eyes it is certainly the single best shot of the film - runs beneath the opening credits. I hesitate to even spoil the image, but what seems at first boring and menial transitions suddenly into a breathtaking display that is at once small, quiet, and profound.

And that sound design. The man knows ears just as well as eyes. The first thing that knocked me out about Gravity was the fully realized sonic world that swallowed you whole, and Cuarón treats the vistas of Mexico City and its environs with all the spectacle and wonder of outer space. Honestly, the whole film is a perfectly sumptuous sensory experience, which makes perfect sense why it's going to be viewed on... millions of people's laptops?

Thank you so much Netflix for making this movie, but seriously, f**k you.

Rating: 9/10

The Princess Switch

Year: 2018
Director: Mike Rohl
Cast: Vanessa Hudgens, Sam Palladio, Nick Sagar
Run Time: 1 hour 41 minutes

A duchess trades places with a Chicago baker so they can experience each other's lives on Christmas.

Netflix really plumbed a new niche last holiday season when they learned that there is a ravenous audience for crappy Hallmark-level Christmas films, and this year they've pumped out even more of the things. I'd hesitate to say The Princess Switch is the most notable, considering there's a sequel to the smash hit A Christmas Prince and a movie where Kurt Russell plays Santa, but this is the only one where Vanessa Hudgens from High School Musical plays two characters, so which did you think I would watch?

The Princess Switch does exactly what it says on the tin. It's a predictable but charming plot that's not quite good enough to actually recommend, and not quite bad enough to have a great time mocking, but exists somewhere in between being generally sweet. It's like eating a single Hershey's kiss. It'll give you that little kick of sugar, but it'll just make you hungrier for a more substantial treat.

And while I wouldn't say Hudgens is giving a tour de force performance, her distinction between the two characters is always entirely clear, to the point that I imagined Vanessa Hudgens the baker as the lead and the duchess character as being played by somebody entirely different. Though that might be due to the fact that, as a wish fulfillment fantasy, the movie couldn't give half a f**k about how the duchess is liking her normal life, and spends about two and a half seconds with her every other scene. Probing character study this is not.

Plus, while it's not as relentlessly mockable as some of these other Netflix titles, there's still plenty of cheerily dumb gems lying around to be picked up and dusted off. Like the fact that "getting the coats" and "doing the dishes" are treated as two tasks that take the exact same amount of time. Or that the fictional land of Belgravia consists of one castle, one orphanage (complete with mistletoe for some despicable reason), one arts and crafts Christmas fair, and a huge corporate TV studio. Or the prince having a "meeting with Spain." Or the fact that they literally sit down to watch A Christmas Prince on Netflix at one point (scrolling right past A Christmas Inheritance, which is clearly madness). OK, maybe I love this movie.

Rating: 6/10

Little Italy

Year: 2018
Director: Donald Petrie
Cast: Hayden Christensen, Emma Roberts, Andrea Martin
Run Time: 1 hour 42 minutes
MPAA Rating: R (I don't understand it either)

Two hot young things fall in love despite their families being the owners of rival pizza places.

While Little Italy clearly is a branch of the cheesy (pun absolutely intended) family of Hallmark and Netflix original rom-coms, there is one thing I did not expect it to be, and the only thing about it that's unpredictable in any respect: It's also a rip-off of My Big Fat Greek Wedding. There are a lot of clues. For one thing, it's about how a big loud ethnic family can interfere with a modern love life. For another, they literally cast Andrea Martin, whose race is a mystery to Hollywood (she's Armenian by the way) and has played family members from all across the Mediterranean.

Like The Princess Switch, Little Italy has its share of fun dumb moments (I've even got myself a Champion Dialogue: "Best friends gotta eat, right?") that are delightful to rib. But unlike the former, this movie also has a grab bag of jokes that are offensive to just about every minority group on the planet, including Italians. There are two Indian side characters, which would normally be a sign of increasing diversity in a film, but they can not stop making jokes about curry powder, Jai Ho, and magic carpet rides (Aladdin was Arabian, first of all. Second of all, please stop.) At least those two aren't paired off in the end as the display of heteronormative race-matched pair-bonding that these types of comedies can't resist. Tragically, the same can't be said about the film's only gay character (a man who inappropriately gropes his straight friend), who instantly falls in love with the only other Gay in the room, a man who has swished onscreen only about thirty seconds before.

At least the central couple is racially diverse, because while Hayden Christensen is attempting his best, broadest Brooklyn Italian accent (strange, because this film is specifically set in Toronto), Emma Roberts attempts nothing at all. She doesn't even manage to convince us that she's capable of eating pizza, let alone having chemistry with Anakin Skywalker. It's a lazy, slapdash couple for a lazy, slapdash movie (it literally opens and closes with a "nunya" joke) and the only reason it exists is that the director also made Mystic Pizza, so he's got himself a Roberts family connection and people were like "sure, he did it once, we're Hollywood and we love doing things all over again!"

It's all a boring, unpleasant slog that is only redeemed by Andrea Martin who is of course terrific anywhere you put her, and Geri Hall in a one-scene role as a cop who has the hots for Christensen. It's the oldest, creakiest character archetype in the book, and it's definitely a bit more Me Too-y than the producers were probably hoping for, but Hall has an actual sense of comic timing and she manages to squeeze a lot of charisma out of a few lines. So at least there's something? But I'm sure one can find that scene on YouTube, and there's no use digging it out of a 102 minute movie whose single selling point on the DVD cover is that is features the hit Shawn Mendes song "There's Nothing Holdin' Me Back."

Rating: 3/10
Word Count: 1548

Surely You Can't Be Sirius

Year: 2004

Director: Alfonso Cuarón

Cast: Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint

Run Time: 2 hours 22 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is the point where the series begins to settle in for the long haul. It’s still self-contained and epic-lite, not yet reaching the dark depths of the following entries, but the series first finds its personality in the chapters of this, the third book.

Prisoner of Azkaban, the third film in the franchise, is directed by Alfonso Cuarón, the man behind Gravity, my second favorite film of 2013 and one of the most perfect sci-fi thrillers ever created. Needles to say, he is a deeply idiosyncratic director capable of tremendously great things. Azkaban is not one of them, but it’s a damn sight better than the profoundly impersonal Chris Columbus’ Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets, which feel like dusty museum pieces. Azkaban may have inherited many of their laws, but at the very least it crackles with much-needed life.

And great ties.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, in case you have been buried in soft peat for the past 18 years out of reach of a library, tells the story of thirteen-year-old wizard Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe). When he returns to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry for his third year, he discovers that a violent escapee from the wizard prison Azkaban – Sirius Black (Gary Oldman) – has him in his sights. As a result, the school is being guarded by the dementors, a race of hooded, soul-sucking creatures that feed on happy memories and who affect Harry tremendously thanks to the atrocities in his past.

To help defend himself from the dementors, Harry takes extra lessons with the new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, Professor Lupin (David Thewlis), with whom he develops and instant rapport. As the year wears on, Harry – along with his best friends Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson), must battle the dementors, discover the truth about Sirius Black, and fight to save the life of Buckbeak the hippogriff – a favored companion of their friend Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane) – after it nearly gores their rival Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton) for being a douche with hair like a cantaloupe dropped from a skyscraper.

The mid-2000's were a hard time to be a teenager.

The jump in quality between Columbus and Cuarón is immediately apparent from the opening scene – which is the best in the series thus far - and continues until the very end, enveloping the film in a warm, loving embrace. The difference in the aesthetic and production design is legitimately staggering. 

The magical world of Hogwarts dusts itself off to become a nuanced, living, breathing organism that acts as an additional, fully fleshed out character. Included in the castle’s thorough redesign is a clock tower, a beautiful spindly bridge that could only be held up by magic, and a Stonehenge-like structure that connects the passage from the castle to the grounds. With these additions, Hogwarts becomes more open and fluid (not to mention unbelievably pretty), lending it a sense of unified geography instead of the previous films’ disjointed Rolodex of medieval-looking university broom cupboards.

The costume design is also similarly unstifled. Variations are provided in the black Hogwarts uniforms and the film introduces street clothes to the characters’ wardrobe, allowing them to switch up the color scheme and spruce up the one-note drabness of the previous, more book-reliant entries.

On top of all of this, Cuarón introduces some stylistic fillips that do wonders fleshing out the vast world around the miniscule scope of Harry’s school adventures with his friends. The film’s transitions are effortless, showing the castle in bustling action (my personal favorite touch being the use of the Whomping Willow to depict the passage of the seasons), allowing the film to sprint along at a spritely pace.

It’s a real breath of fresh air following the interminable Chamber of Secrets.

I could go on and on about how the film displays increased facility with framing, containing more singularly striking images than the other two films combined, or how the inclusion of a  “toil and trouble” musical motif introduces a cheerily baroque, almost medieval tone, but I must remember that my esteem for Azkaban is largely hyperinflated in comparison to its immediate predecessors. As a matter of fact, Azkaban has a tendency to get bogged down by almost the exact same problems, though they are fewer in number.

First and foremost, the plot, while more limber and fast-paced thanks to some well-executed excision, is a little too thin on the ground, cutting out important details. And I don’t mean “wah, wah, they cut out the reveal that Crookshanks is part kneazle, I’m a nerd, kick me.” I mean, “The third act is based almost entirely on a series of revelations that hinge upon information we weren’t actually given.” Yes, it’s true that most of the modern world has read the Harry Potter books. But that’s no excuse to lazily leave half your character moments scattered on the cutting room floor like they’re so many intern corpses.

Prisoner of Azkaban is likewise weighed down by an uncommonly shaggy cast. The child actors neither match their highest highs nor their lowest lows, trapped in an unremarkable limbo, but the adult cast buries its shiniest gems too deep into the third act. Beginning with Mark Williams’ unfocused turn as Arthur Weasley, the torch of mediocrity is carried beyond the prologue by David Thewlis’ stop-and-go performance. Their acting is about as patchy as their robes. In addition, Michael Gambon (replacing the late Richard Harris as Headmaster Dumbledore) has yet to settle into the ethereal otherness of the role, and Potter mainstays Maggie Smith and Alan Rickman are unceremoniously stacked in a disused corner.

The newcomer trio of Emma Thompson (as the flighty Divination professor Sibyl Trelawny), Gary Oldman (as the shattered, hollow Sirius Black), and Timothy Spall (as the sniveling, smarmy Peter Pettigrew) are all unforgivably incredible, but their best work comes after a Lord of the Rings-length slog through bare adequacy. Thanks to the hard-earned efforts of a solid cast at their most mediocre, the film’s emotional beats feel cold and perfunctory.

Like a Goosebumps book in the freezer.

The film slightly makes up for these deficits with an omnipresent puckish sense of humor. But sometimes it slips too far into kiddie territory, most notably with a Jamaican shrunken head that talks, which will make you want to fill your ears with cement.

The last bastion of quality in Prisoner of Azkaban is the special effects, which are without qualification the best of the series up to this point. Maybe the extra year gap between 2002’s Chamber of Secrets and Azkaban allowed CGI technology to catch up with the series’ ambition, or maybe the FX crew simply cared more. Who knows. 

They grew a smidge too self-indulgent when they made the decision to digitally animate a dog instead of doing the blisteringly easy thing and picking one up from the pound, but the rendering of the creatures – Buckbeak in particular – is superb, largely free of the alienating side-effect of looking like the monsters are occupying some dimension that’s next door to ours. They even figured out how to make Hagrid work, allowing him to share frame with other actors, rather than sit up all on his lonesome in claustrophobic low angle close-up shots.

The only rough patch is the (SPOILERS – oh, who am I kidding) werewolf, but that’s more the fault of a goofy design than shoddy animation.

Am I a man, or am I a muppet?

So there you have it. Prisoner of Azkaban is unmistakably the best early Harry Potter movie, but it’s still an early Harry Potter movie. There’s a lot more to chew on in a much more manageable time frame, recommending this film far more than the others in the original three, more child-oriented Potters. It’s not Cuarón’s best work, but it’s still Cuaróns work, and that counts for a lot.

TL;DR: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is emotionally thin but aesthetically ebullient.
Rating: 7/10
Word Count: 1357
Reviews In This Series
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Columbus, 2001)
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Columbus, 2002)
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Cuarón, 2004)
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Newell, 2005)
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Yates, 2007)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Yates, 2009)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (Yates, 2010)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (Yates, 2011)

Stars In Space

Year: 2013

Director: Alfonso Cuarón

Cast: Sandra Bullock, George Clooney, Ed Harris

Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Do you hear that sound?

That's the sound of Sandra Bullock's maid clearing a space on her Oscar shelf.

Way back when in July when the incredible first trailer for Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity was released, it was hard to imagine that an entire feature film could be as tense and horrifying as that one and a half minute exercise in pure terror.

It's easier now.

Space is the worst.

There are only two (living) faces in the entire film. Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), a computer scientist who has been sent to update the programming on the Hubble telescope, and her crewmate Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), a cocky space jockey who's trying to beat the world record for longest space walk.

The film opens in the middle of their operation and hits the ground running. Within ten minutes a cloud of debris created by a chain reaction of exploding satellites has ripped through their shuttle, destroying their crew and their ride home and leaving Ryan and Matt stranded in the middle of a zero gravity nightmare.

The International Space Station is visible but a hundred miles away. Matt's prototype jetpack is running out of fuel. And the debris cloud is due to return within 90 minutes to rip them apart.

If you think humans belong in outer space, watching these two drifting helplessly and spinning around uncontrollably above the Earth's atmosphere will certainly change your mind. It's impossible to comprehend the abject horror of being adrift in the void and Gravity leaves you with a pit in your stomach before anything even remotely unpleasant happens.

I can't even.

(MILD MID-MOVIE SPOILERS IN THE NEXT TWO PARAGRAPHS) What follows is an 80 minute adventure to return to the Earth's soil before the outer atmosphere turns into a whirling dervish of sharp metal and desiccated corpses. The two are separated early on and the inexperienced Ryan must fight her way through a series of dilapidated and hull-damaged space stations to get to a functional escape pod as her oxygen tank dwindles away to nothing. It's a bare bones escape plot that provides a backdrop to Ryan's rebirth and transformation. 

She begins the film as a shell of a person. Her young daughter died in a playground accident and she no longer has the drive or motivation to do anything with her life. She just exists. She's, dare I say, drifting. The film is heavy on visual metaphors for this rebirth process, starting off with the "umbilical cord" connecting her to Matt and an unforgettable shot that, clear as day, imitates a fetus in the womb. I am loathe to spoil any of the rest of the film or take away the joy that comes with unpacking a film's symbolism, but I'll just say the final act and closing shots of the movie are masterful and elegant.

If you've seen the film and are interested in my interpretation of her development, please highlight here [She is "born" through the atmosphere in the escape pod and "baptized" when she is submerged in the water of the ocean. Her crawling out of the muck and onto the beach, then taking a few shaky steps into the light resembles both the child development process and the evolution of man. She is a different person with a newfound lease on life thanks to her evolution in outer space. And the three times Ryan is pelted with debris mirror the three trimesters of pregnancy. If you want to read that far into that.]

Sorry about spoilers. Does this picture of George Clooney make it better?

Gravity manages to be a high octane action thriller and a subtle meditation on the nature of being thanks to Alfonso Cuarón's delicate visuals. His predilection for long tracking shots has never been put to better use than this film (the majestic and detailed opening shot is a staggering 17 minutes long), with its sinewy zero G camera that suggests weightlessness almost as much as the manifold angles with which we view the characters. There's no gravity here, it doesn't matter if the characters' feet are pointing up or down or any which way but loose. Cuarón knows this and his camera moves with the grace of a pirouetting ballerina.

And about the 3D: I had my doubts about it going in, but it absolutely wouldn't be the same experience without it. In 3D, you can peer through the curved glass of an astronaut's helmet, cower in fear at the shrapnel flying out of the screen (in a way that avoids the gimmicky side of "things coming straight at your face" and opts for the more organic approach of "Holy crap we're gonna die!"), and have space to sit back and marvel at how the hell they did any of this.

But the film's images, nimble and refined though they are, can barely hold a candle to the gale force that is the soundscape. Gravity is an out and out miracle of sound design. An entire satellite is smashed to bits, ripped apart by flying scrap metal and all we hear is breathing and a heartbeat. There's no sound in space, yo. Every single thing you hear apart from the score (which is wonderful as well, by the way) is a noise either produced by the human body or within the confines of the suit. Suck on that, Star Wars.

The lack of noise on visuals of massive destruction provides a dissonance that racks the tension up to eleven in an already supernaturally anxiety-producing film. And the surround sound. Oh, the surround sound! I beg you to see this film in theaters, where every little blip and click has a precise location that throws you headfirst into the world of Gravity.

Though that may not be desirable. 

So why is Miss Congeniality in this massively beautiful film? Frankly, because she earned it. Sandra Bullock's performance is an exquisite ballet of physically challenging and precise action and utterly breathtaking and natural emotion, injected with a raw humanity that will penetrate your soul. This is a one woman show, and nobody but Sandra Bullock (I honestly never thought I'd be saying this) could be that woman.

Gravity is a marvel of engineering, suspense, performance, and storytelling. And, like I always say, no good story can't be told in 90 minutes. Cuarón knows how not to overstay his welcome and the film zips along at an unprecedented clip. It's taut, airtight, and manages to avoid being a bloated and overwhelming ego trip (couugh cough 2001: A Space Odyssey cough).

I'm well aware that it must not be perfect, but so help me I can't seem to find a single flaw. In the middle of one of the worst runs of Hollywood filmmaking in the history of the medium, Gravity has singlehandedly restored my faith in cinema.

It's one hell of a ride.

TL;DR: Gravity is about as close to a masterpiece as a sci-fi/action film could ever be. If the pile of Oscars this film wins doesn't weigh more than my car, I'll be surprised.

Rating: 10/10

Should I Spend Money On This? Absolutely yes, go see it now. In 3D. Surround sound. Before it's too late. Hurry. Right now.

Word Count: 1233