Mexico Star Theater

Year: 2014

Director: Jorge R. Gutierrez

Cast: Diego Luna, Zoe Saldana, Channing Tatum

Run Time: 1 hour 35 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

Hollywood is making a change. Because it's Hollywood, it's not an enormous change and it's more than a little half-hearted. Because it's Hollywood, the change is driven by utterly mercenary motivations. But also because it's Hollywood, it has stumbled across a realization that, with a little polishing, could change the world of media as we know it.

That world-changing discovery seems like a simple one and it is: Latino people go to the movies. In fact, they go to the movies a lot. Not surprising, considering just how diverse the American population is, though Hollywood prefers to ignore this fact. But studios have finally begun to take notice of this heretofore unplumbed demographic, making movies that cater to - get this - audiences who aren't just white people.

One of the first truly high-profile movies with this demographic in mind was Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones, the Latin-American spin-off of the decade's most popular horror franchise. But behind this film lie many others that have slowly been shifting the tides. Which now brings us to one of the first wide release Latino-themed kids' movies - The Book of Life.

Where was this guy when I was doing my Sexiest Animated Characters list?

Book of Life begins with a framework narrative that's essentially useless, but as it informs the aesthetic of the entire film - and oh, what an aesthetic it is - it's only fair to begin there. Mary Beth (Christina Applegate) is a puckish museum docent who takes a gaggle of detention kids on a field trip to a special secret room containing the Book of Life, which is full of stories and legends about Mexico. She uses a set of dolls to tell the kids one of the stories, so the bulk of the film is animated like wooden puppetry - more on that later.

SPOILERS FOR THE FIRST ACT - IF YOU SAW THE TRAILER YOU'RE FINE The chosen story centers around two mythical figures: La Muerte (Kate del Castillo) and Xibalba (Ron Perlman) - the rulers of the two underworlds, the Land of the Remembered and the Land of the Forgotten respectively. On el Día de los Muertos, they make a fateful wager. Xibalba is desperate to escape the realm of forgotten souls, so he proposes that each of them place a bet on Maria (Zoe Saldana), a young girl in the nearby town with two best friends/suitors. Xibalba bets on Joaquin (Channing Tatum), a cocky explorer who lives in the shadow of his valiant father, and La Muerte vouches for Manolo (Diego Luna), a sensitive musician whose father expects him to pick up his family's bullfighting legacy.

Although Maria is clearly smitten with Manolo's fumbling charm and put off by Joaquin's egocentric antics, she'd really rather hang out with her pet pig. But Manolo proves his worth, not quite soon enough after Joaquin proposes. After Xibalba pulls a devilish trick, Manolo is sent to the Land of the Remembered and must find his way back to the land of the living and reclaim his true love.

Although he did snag a great look just in time for Halloween so it's not all bad.

It's a children's film and a legend-based tale so once it settles in, it's quite simple to follow. Parents want their kids to be something other than their dreams, but individuality wins out and everyone learns the importance of being themselves. Boilerplate kid movie stuff, really. It's everywhere but the plot that Book of Life rises above the average family-friendly fare.

I've already mentioned the film's Latino themes, but the truly astonishing part is that it depicts a culture with customs, music, legends, values, and aesthetics much different from our own without being hideously offensive! There are some dubious elements that squeak by (including having only two actors of Mexican descent in the lead cast, a smattering white-culture signifiers for Mexico, and the fact that the entire story is framed by a puppet show put on for some dumb-ass white kids), but overall the film shines as a beacon of cinematic diversity with Mexican director Jorge Guiterrez and producer Guillermo del Toro preventing things from getting too out of hand. 

And even those rough patches are smoothed over with an ample supporting cast including Cheech Marin, Danny Trejo, and Plácido Domingo, along with strong cultural musicality combining banda and mariachi styles with modern pop-musical lyrics and themes. I can't tell you how refreshing it is to see a film presented by somebody other than fussy old white dudes. Their contributions are numerous, it's true, but it's time to let somebody, anybody else take the stand.

And now for something completely different: Protagonists who don't have the delicate complexion of a glass of skim milk.

OK, now that we have the boring but vastly important stuff out of the way, let's focus on how utterly fun this movie is. Regular kiddy movie tropes (an animal sidekick; a Greek chorus) are turned on their heads (an adorable pig is the sidekick; the chorus is a group of hilarious nuns), boisterous characters burst with vividly colorful life, and the music doesn't suck! The great thing about the soundtrack is that it so easily could have drained the vigor from the film but instead injects it with energy. 

The Book of Life tends to parlay in anachronisms, a risky venture that works more often than it should. A mariachi Mumford & Sons cover? Strange but it works perfectly. Acoustic Elvis on a Mexican guitar? Lovely. A Radiohead song? Not so much, but it made sense at the time. The three original songs likewise manage to match this tone of marrying children's musical standards with Mexican instrumentation to blissful perfection. On top of it all, Diego Luna's voice - while a tad rough around the edges - provides the perfect DIY kick to these lovably offbeat arrangements.

All of this rolls into a film that's tirelessly heartfelt and kooky while at the same time buoyantly reveling in Mexican culture to its fullest extent. This is portrayed nowhere better than the animation itself, which depicts rickety wooden figures with grace and artistry, pumping them full of vibrant, colorful, joyous life. The film's portrayal of the endless fiestas of the Land of the Remembered is an explosion of brassy, rich, eye-popping technicolor dreamscapes as far as the eye can see.

And the attention to detail in unmatched in modern computer-animated film. Once you notice how Xibalba's pupils are little skulls or the way La Muerte's candles delicately float around the train of her dress, the film will have you in its thrall completely - assuming you have the capacity for childish wonder necessary to take it all in.

And compared to Reel FX Animation's last feature film - 2013's Free Birds, the step up here is about the height of the Tower of Babel.

And the acting is top notch, especially Diego Luna with a brave, limit-stretching vocal performance and Tatum in yet another pristine comic role and WHY AREN'T WE LETTING HIM DO MORE COMEDIES! Personally, I could do without Ice Cube in a comic relief part, but it's not as intrusive as you'd think.

All said, The Book of Life would be an utter masterpiece if it weren't for just a few minute stumbles. As I stated before, the story is a bit too wooden, overusing hoary thematic tropes. And the post-Frozen quasi-feminism doesn't ring as true as it could considering that Maria still tends to be a damsel in distress. But all in all, in the field of children's animation as well as that of 2014 cinema itself, you can hardly do better than this vivid multi-cultural extravaganza.

TL;DR: The Book of Life is an eye-popping experience of grandiose proportions that doesn't mistreat its cultural heritage.

Rating: 8/10

Should I Spend Money On This? Absolutely yes. Don't give Ouija the satisfaction.

Word Count: 1328

I Don't Know About You, But I'm Feeling 22

Year: 2014

Director: Phil Lord & Christopher Miller
Cast: Channing Tatum, Jonah Hill, Ice Cube
Run Time: 1 hour 52 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Dynamic duo Phil Lord and Chris Miller are tearing up Hollywood at the moment, having already turned three terrible ideas into immensely entertaining films with Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, 21 Jump Street, and The Lego Movie.

Cloudy, an adaptation of a children's book with a modicum of plot, became a pun-filled adventure comedy. 21 Jump Street, a film reboot of a classic late-80's television show, had surprisingly fresh humor and heart. And The Lego Movie turned what should have just been a cheap cash-in shill into one of the best animated comedies of the decade with a central moral about the nature of creativity.

So the pressure was on them when it came time to do the unthinkable - plan a sequel to a comedy reboot of a classic late-80's television show. 22 Jump Street might just be the weakest of their endeavors, but it still delivers what one has come to expect from one of their films - a delightful comedy wrapped around a startlingly firm central core.

And for once I'm not referring to Channing Tatum's abs.

22 Jump Street follows youthful undercover agents Schmidt (Jonah Hill, looking admittedly slightly too old to play the part, even with the film's comedic emphasis on his age) and Jenko (Channing Tatum) to college after their undercover high school antics in the first film. Their mission is to discover the source of the dangerous Whyphy drug that is circulating the local campus. Once again the two agents find their own niche - Jenko with the football-playing frat boys and Schmidt with the hipster art crowd.

But things begin to fall apart when Jenko befriends frat leader and potential suspect Zook (Wyatt Russell) and Schmidt fears that it will ruin their investigation as well as their friendship. There's also some business with potential love interest Maya (Amber Stevens), but that never coalesces into anything more than a series of gags that - though funny - tend not to have anything to do with the matter at hand. She has about as much effect on the plot as the bean bag chair, which - come to think of it - might actually get more screen time.

Hill and Tatum reprise their roles with gusto and in fact, I maintain with absolutely no trace of irony that Jenko is the best role Channing Tatum has ever played. Better even than comedy superstar Hill's slightly wan Schmidt, Tatum embraces the blind jocky enthusiasm of Jenko with verve and skill, proving that he might fare much better in the business should he decide to stick with comedy rather than wan romance or popcorn action flicks.

The boys at the center impress, although they are no longer surrounded by the stellar supporting ensemble of the first film, something which really tamps down on the effervescent humor. Russell and Stevens have their share of moments, but they are nothing compared to what came before. In fact, Rob Riggle and Dave Franco's brief cameos immediately outshine any of these newcomers' output. Only Jillian Bell as Maya's put-upon roommate Mercedes does anything of interest, bubbling relentlessly forth from the screen like a force of nature.

An adorable blonde force of nature.

So no, it doesn't capture the newness and utter joy of 21 Jump Street, but that was never going to happen. And the slick music video sensibility of the production design and cinematography tends to bring you out of the film somewhat, especially when the soundtrack overwhelms the dialogue to such a point it becomes clear that the Hot New Track is more important than what jokes are being told (one such track, "Turn Down For What" having the unfortunate potential to instantly date the film when it fizzles out of its 2.7 seconds of popularity).

This is an unfortunate new trend in Hollywood comedies (last seen by Yours Truly in the remarkably unbearable That Awkward Moment) and likely has more to do with studio tampering than the work of the two directors, who I hold in too much esteem to think they stood for the idea of burying their jokes. Anyway, I hope it goes away soon and think it best not to spend too much time dwelling on it, lest they catch on.

What 22 Jump Street does have in spades is electrifying meta humor. Nearly every single joke is geared toward one level of self-awareness or another, whether it's the fact that the characters are nearly always on the cusp of being aware they're in a movie, the more cloying "this is a sequel" jokes that are beaten into the ground with a baseball bat, then pile-drived into the planet's core, erupting in a volcano of meta that showers the entire universe, or the subtle and infinitely clever gags like the one concerning Tatum's previous role in White House Down.

See above: "Popcorn action flicks"

In short, some of it works, some of it doesn't. Fortunately the jokes featured most frequently and at the forefront are the kind that work. And it wouldn't be a Lord and Miller film without a totally unexpected and cleverly thematic philosophical manifesto buried within the comedy, and this film is no different. In fact, it's utterly brilliant - elevating the repeated meta gag of "sameness" as the centerpiece for the entire film.

What starts it off is a cheesy joke Ron Swanson makes about how important it is to do the exact same thing as last time. Yes, it's just a meta joke about being a sequel, but that idea branches out throughout the film into a startlingly dense web. It's Miller and Lord's way of dealing with the pressure of handling a sequel to a highly successful film and it's genius.

(THEME SPOILERS? ARE THOSE A THING?) When Jenko makes friends with Zook, a man exactly similar to himself, he begins to act upon that theme in earnest. Sure doing the same thing can be comforting and desirable, but he soon discovers how empty it is to just mindlessly repeat the same things over and over again. A central tenet of the film is that it is perfectly acceptable to repeat oneself, but a twist to the formula is absolutely necessary. It's the only way to grow and change as a person and to stop from dragging yourself and others down. 

Leave it to our boys to turn their funny meta sequel for a TV reboot into a musing about the nature of mindless repetition. So there's the twist that justifies the entire thing. Seriously, the pieces all click together like an episode of Arrested Development on the fourth rewatch. It's an impressive endeavor emphasized within the film at every turn, sometimes quite strongly and obviously (like the characters that constantly reprimand the agents for not doing the same thing) and sometimes with delicate subtlety (like the sets of twins that pepper the film in various supporting roles.).

Hell, the film even features twin statues.

Because of the dedicated efforts of the directing team, they have once again achieved a resounding success. 22 Jump Street is not a Kubrickian puzzle box of a film, but it's a dreadfully smart sequel that, while never quite as funny as the original, is definitely worth a watch. If you loved 21 and want more of the same, you'll get it, but with that oh so delicious twist of lemon.

TL;DR: 22 Jump Street is an astoundingly clever film but ultimately isn't quite funny enough to obviate its more intrusive elements.

Rating: 7/10

Should I Spend Money On This? Honestly, no. Wait for RedBox and do a double feature at home sometime. But definitely check it out before the year is over.

Word Count: 1300