We Tell The Story

Year: 2016

Director: Travis Knight

Cast: Charlize Theron, Art Parkinson, Matthew McConaughey

Run Time: 1 hour 41 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

I didn’t want to see Kubo and the Two Strings. Its trailers looked esoteric and incomprehensible, and nothing grabbed me. Luckily, I had a Sergio by my side, who always seems to have the exact opposite opinion about movie trailers. For once, he was right.

The fourth film by stop motion studio Laika (which debuted in 2009 with Coraline), Kubo and the Two Strings is a curious beast. It’s a Frankensteinian creation that grafts together half a dozen different family film genres into a lumbering, frequently clumsy monstrosity. And just like Frankenstein’s Monster before it, it might leave a trail of wreckage in its wake, but it snags your sympathies nonetheless.

Box office, bad.

In Kubo and the Two Strings, Kubo (Art Parkinson) lives in a remote village with his comatose mother, who only comes to life at night to tell him stories and remind him to always hide from the night sky, lest her sisters (both played by Rooney Mara) find him and pluck out his other eye. Oh yeah. Kubo is a descendant of the Moon King (Ralph Fiennes), an immortal denizen of the sky who looks coldly down on humanity with blind eyes. Also, he stole one of Kubo’s eyes because this is a fairy tale and fairy tales are f**ked up.

Anyway, Kubo makes a living using his innate magical powers to animate origami figures with his guitar, using them to tell stories of heroic adventure to the townspeople, but he always has trouble coming up with endings. After attempting to contact his dead father on a spiritual holiday, he accidentally stays out too late and must escape the clutches of his pursuing aunts. His companions are Monkey (Charlize Theron), a protective totem given life as his mother’s final act, an origami samurai, and Beetle (Matthew McConaughey), an amnesiac samurai who served under Kubo’s father and has been cursed with an insect body. They must find three pieces of armor that will allow Kubo to face off against the Moon King.

You know, quest stuff.

And that’s the short version of the plot. For most of the first act, Kubo doesn’t immediately explain what’s going on, plunging the viewer into the world and allowing them to learn the details as the story goes on. This feels like a fun, interactive storytelling style until it doesn’t. It keeps on going, right on into the second and third acts, revealing that it probably wasn’t an intentional choice, just a symptom of the irreparable damage that has been done to this script.

Kubo clumsily attempts to blend a grand quest storyline with categorically juvenile comedy setups, and a feint toward Pixarian heartstring plucking, but the cartilage linking these pieces together is severely eroded. Kubo’s powers flourish and fade according to totally inexplicable rhythms that are nowhere to be found in the actual story. The screenplay attempts to wring out two facile Grand Twists that it doesn’t notice are the exact same as each other, and which could easily be predicted by even the toddlers in the audience if the story was actually comprehensible. And the third act is utter nonsense, bringing the script’s didactic tendency to cudgel us over the head with its themes to the forefront for a wholly unsatisfying boss battle. Or maybe it’s a clever tie-in to the fact that Kubo can never finish his stories. Either way, it sucks. But in spit of all this, Kubo is still kind of great.

Look, our other option this year is Ice Age 5. We takes what we gets.

Although the film stumbles through the smoking wreckage of its narrative, nearly everything in the moment works spectacularly well. It helps to ignore the big picture, but look: This is a movie for kids, who I daresay possess that skillset in spades. 

First off, let me qualify my statement about that juvenile humor. That’s not a detraction, merely an observation that this is a family film of the purest variety, with squeaky clean wholesome material that doesn’t give into the “one for the kids, one for the adults” impulse of almost all post-Shrek animated films. It’s actually quite amusing, and it’s fun to see Charlize Theron converting her badass persona honed in Mad Max into a razor-sharp ‘straight-man” role. And Matthew McConaughey lets off some of that hyper-serious Free State of Jones steam with a  light, breezy vocal performance that reminds us he’s actually capable of nailing comedy.

But what Kubo and the Two Strings boasts above anything else is truly exquisite stop-motion. Next to Pixar’s short film “Piper,” it’s the best animation of the year (not that Sausage Party provided tremendous competition), rendering scenes so gorgeous you just have to sit there, mouth agape, as they wash over you. I’m thinking particularly about the water animation, which is impossibly precise and fluid, pushing the boundaries of what the medium is capable of. They also lean toward their darker impulses, sprinkling in healthy doses of nightmare fuel with the blank porcelain design of the Moon Sisters and a delightfully creepy skeleton monster. The only dark spot on the film is the rendering of the old woman Kameyo (Brenda Vaccaro), which seems to have been imported from some student film. And not even a senior student.

And then, like, there’s emotions and stuff. I’m not convinced Kubo comes by its teary dramatics honestly, but I was openly weeping for about 50% of it, so maybe I was just in a mood. Really, at the end of the day, Kubo is a fun, stylish (that living origami concept is rockin’) family adventure and while it’s a bit muddled, I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

TL;DR: Kubo and the Two Strings is a deliriously haphazard narrative, but it makes up for it with exquisite animation and genuine humor.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 990

Popcorn Kernels: I'm A Classic Man

In which a weekend of classic film viewing is deconstructed with a set of mini reviews.

Rashômon

Year: 1950

Director: Akira Kurosawa

Cast: Toshirô Mifune, Machiko Kyô, Masayuki Mori 

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

The murder of a samurai is depicted through the wildly varied perspectives of four witnesses.

I was very excited to watch Rashômon. As a film school graduate, I’m always happy to fill in the gaps of my classic cinema education, and this was an egregious one. Before Rashômon, I had ever seen a film by celebrated Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. Now that I have seen one… Either I made the wrong choice or I’m just not a fan of Kurosawa.

Now, I understand what Rashômon is doing. It’s a parable on the truth, and how we all experience reality from different perspectives that we may ever be able to synthesize into one coherent fact. As I digested the film, I began to develop an appreciation for how this idea was presented (in the trial during which the 3 perspectives on the story were told, we never see the judge The witnesses speak directly to the camera because we, the audience, are meant to be the ultimate judge). It is and will always be an interesting message, but that doesn’t mean it’s an interesting film.

It can’t help its profoundly boxy aspect ratio, but its capacity to be cinematic is severely stunted, warding off the delicate imagery that Kurosawa is reportedly known for. It also can’t help the tenets and morals of feudal Japan, the time period in which this story takes place. However, the systematic sexism with which the film treats its sole female character is deplorable, and the fact the she is either punished for being raped or submits wholeheartedly to her attacker makes me want to scrub my skin with steel wool.

I understand that, as a modern critic, these complaints lack the context of Japanese culture and film technology in 1950 and as such are somewhat invalid. But you know what isn’t invalid? Rashômon is kind of a snoozefest. We’re treated to a stroll through the woods that lasts what feels like a half hour, and the endlessly repeated stories might differ wildly in the details, but the follow the same, plodding, over-formal structure, endlessly repeating it into oblivion.

Again, I recognize the qualities that helped make Rashômon a respected classic. Some of the stylized imagery is dazzling (a half-destroyed temple and the clawed hands of a murdered man stand out particularly) and a scene of a medium channeling the victim’s spirit to get is testimony is certainly disconcerting. I also love Toshiro Mifune’s acting choice to five his criminal a tic of rubbing his neck to imply that he is flea-bitten and mangy. However, the presentation is stultifying, constantly shifting back and forth between three superfluous layers of storytelling and constantly recycling itself, unspooling more and more officious narrative rigidity as it goes along.

Rating: 6/10

The Constant Gardener

Year: 2005

Director: Fernando Meirelles

Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Weisz, Hubert Koundé

Run Time: 2 hours 9 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A timid diplomat uncovers a vast conspiracy that links the British government to illegal African drug testing while investigating his wife’s murder.

Good thing it’s chic to disapprove of Oscar nominations now, because otherwise I think this blog might get me lynched. Let’s throw more kindling on that rage fire, shall we? The Constant Gardener, sitting pretty at four nominations and one win, is a monumentally obnoxious motion picture. It doesn’t reflect well on film critics to toss around dismissive, subjective words like “pretentious,” but The Constant Gardener is a film that strains very hard to impress its audience with visual acrobatics rather than actually compelling content.

It’s an arid, emotionally vacant film that underplays each and every beat of an interesting if not action-packed storyline in favor of a wholly disingenuous third world misery porn scenario. Every single aching moment of this didactic white guilt extravaganza grinds your face into its Important Message, liberally slathering the frame with overexposed whites to remind you that this is Art. It’s so insecure that it feels the need to restate its themes in a mortifyingly on-the-nose wrap-up speech, actively defying its misguided impulse to tell its story in non-chronological order, filling in details only on a need to know basis.

Of course, by this point the film is already hopelessly muddled. I’d say The Constant Gardener loses track of its own storyline about once every twenty minutes, requiring it to send us through another kaleidoscopic barrage of weak metaphors before it gets back on tis feet. But enough complaining. There are enough annoying arthouse films out there to fill an encyclopedia, and this is hardly the worst of them.

There are several points where The Constant Gardener does actually succeed. It manages to pull the rug out from under you several times during Fiennes’ investigation, although it never manages to convince you these characters are worth caring about. And during the third act, there are some excellent visual representations of all-consuming paranoia, especially during a scene with a motorcycle in Germany. The Constant Gardener might be a haphazard affair, yet it does have at least a dollop of verve. But it’s not the sharp political thriller it thinks it is. It’s a self-consciously artsy film that strives for aesthetic greatness but mostly just ends up cutting off Ralph Fiennes at the hairline.

Rating: 5/10

Year: 2007

Director: Sean McNamara

Cast: Skyler Shaye, Janel Parrish, Logan Browning

Run Time: 1 hour 50 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

The Bratz must maintain their friendship despite a clique-obsessed class president’s attempts to separate them.

What makes any movie a masterpiece can vary wildly across cultures, mindsets, and time periods. Critics hated The Shining when it came out, but now it’s hailed as a classic film. Ditto Citizen Kane. Ditto John Carpenter’s The Thing. No film is set in stone. So, keeping that in mind, please allow me to submit Bratz: The Movie as a bona fide masterpiece of world cinema. A stakes-lite wish-fulfillment teen movie based on a popular line of skanky dolls, Bratz might not be an obvious candidate for this title, but let me assure you. In terms of pure, unintentionally comedic, hyper-earnest, mind-boggling insanity, no movie even comes close to Bratz. The film is a glittering absurdist prank against art that challenges everything we know about the craft of cinema.

You don’t watch Bratz. You experience it. It’s a pastiche of high school movies that tosses every established tenet of narrative filmmaking out the window, so there is literally no way to predict what may be coming around the corner. This makes Bratz a careening adventure through a vision of human life as interpreted by an outsider. I don’t know whether the film was made by Martians or just people who had never interacted with teens, Hispanics, principals, cheerleaders, nerds, or girls before, but it presents a fascinating, demented way to view the world.

This is a universe where Hispanic households have mariachi bands practicing in their living room. Where high school bears prison-like signs reading “OBEY,” “SUBMIT,” and “NO LITTERING.” Where that same high school has a principal who 1) receives a grotesquely enormous salary, and 2) is played by Jon Voight. I could go on and on, and in fact my notes on this movie last a good five pages, but I’ll be brief.

Bratz is obviously not a good movie. The four Bratz are defined only by their race, and the de facto protagonist – Hispanic Brat Yasmin – is by far the weakest performer. Also, Bratz strains to convince us she can sing despite clear evidence to the contrary. But the movie shifts gears as often as its soundtrack (which contains, by my count, 29 distinct songs, from sub-Simple Plan moperock to straight-up opera, and that’s a rate of one song at least every four minutes), lending the film a whirlwind pace to the effect that you never spend too much down time with the Bratz. It’s difficult to hate them, because they’re always sprinting on to the next cotton candy coated activity, whether it be an alarmingly violent food fight or a rundown of school cliques that includes – mysteriously – “disco dorks” and a set of mimes.

At every turn, Bratz so eagerly defies logic with random cutaways, inscrutable production design choices, and over-the-top teen mayhem that it overrides the system, something that only the very best bad movies can do. I’m forced by my formula to assign a numerical score to this film, but I urge you to ignore it and seek out Bratz, even if you must go to the ends of the Earth to find a copy.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1467

Would That It Were So Simple

Year: 2016
Director: Joel & Ethan Coen
Cast: Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich
Run Time: 1 hour 46 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13

An apology for the delay in getting this review out for the new Coen brothers venture Hail, Caesar!. Incidentally, I started reading Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar around the same time I watched it and held back on the off chance that the play would allow me more insight into the film. It didn’t. My ulterior motive was that maybe the extra time would allow me to fully sort out my complex and twisted feelings about the film. It didn’t. So now here we are, a little too late and with nothing to show for it.

So it goes.

In Hail, Caesar! Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) is a Hollywood fixer in the 1950’s, keeping the raucous stars out of trouble and – more importantly – out of the newspapers. While scandals and drama erupt from all corners – pregnant Brooklyn nymphette DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson), snooping twin journalists Thora and Thessaly Thacker (Tilda Swinton), uptight British director Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes), down-home Western star turned leading man Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich), and charming, some might say magical, musical star Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum) – he must balance his work, his Catholic morals, and an intriguing new job offer.

But first he must find Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), the studio’s biggest star, who has just been kidnapped and held for ransom by the enigmatic conglomerate The Future.

I know that was a short description, but there is somehow both more and less pot in Hail, Caesar! than I described, so I figured I found a happy medium.

What stands out about Hail, Caesar! (other than the fact that it sends my computer’s grammar checker into a sputtering rage) is that it utterly defies classification. It’s alternately a screwball comedy, a throwback musical, a crisis of faith story, a satirical economic treatise, and a pastiche of Old Hollywood, sometimes all at once. Some of these elements are much better than others, though the vast majority of them are geared toward the funnier end of the spectrum. Which is good news because Hail, Caesar! is at its strongest when it’s fishing for laughs.

There are some truly amazing comedy moments in Hail, Caesar!, scenes that allow a talented cast to obliterate their comfort zones in order to achieve something truly magnificent. Tilda Swinton excels, grounding a cartoonish concept in deliriously silly reality (and between this and Trainwreck, she really ought to consider making the leap to comedy full time), Ralph Fiennes gets a rare opportunity to show his lighter side, exquisitely maneuvering through an uproarious Abbot and Costello homage, and “newcomer” Alden Ehrenreich (critics like to pretend he wasn’t in Beautiful Creatures) deftly navigates his scenes with a  dopey incalculable charm. Ehrenreich handily makes a bigger impression than megastar George Clooney or Josh Brolin, though to be fair they are saddled with two of the dullest characters in the script.

Also, he’s purdy.

The second greatest strength of Hail, Caesar! is its two original musical numbers, which perfectly recreate and comment on the filmmaking of the 1950’s. The swimming pool number featuring Scarlett Johansson is the lesser of the two, though it features impeccable costume design. I don’t know why I seem to have a physical inability to appreciate swim-dance sequences (Miss Piggy’s in The Great Muppet Caper similarly vexed me), but a scene I have absolutely no reservations about is Channing Tatum’s tap-dancing sailor number “No Dames.”

In addition to being the flamboyant, homo-erotic spectacle that has charmed many reviewers, it’s a downright perfect dance routine. It’s a stunning, delightful number that wouldn’t be out of place in a Gene Kelly environment, utilizing every last element of its seaside pub setting with gusto. Like, it’s funny or whatever, but its brilliant choreography should not be sidelined by its subtext. It’s a glorious, sparkling diamond in the crown of Hail, Caesar!’s comedy.

And then of course, everything falls apart. Hail, Caesar! is, from its opening frame, an exceedingly scatterbrained motion picture, but at sometime around the point that Frances McDormand teleports into the film for about thirty seconds to indulge in a  spot of harebrained physical comedy, the movie’s incohesiveness begins to set in like a rot. The film’s characters (especially McDormand and Jonah Hill’s Joseph Silverman) are but vapors, haphazardly colliding with the plot at random intervals and disappearing for huge chunks of time, sometimes never appearing again, swallowed by the ether. Plot points, story threads and themes similarly circulate, bobbing up and down in the overcrowded stew.

Let's take another quick look, shall we?

However towering the film’s comedic highs are (including a boardroom religious debate that’s downright untouchable), they’re too precarious to maintain, sending it tumbling down again and again. Hail, Caesar! finds the Coens indulging in cinematic gluttony and choking out their own ideas by cramming in as much pseudo-religious imagery, economic theory, and jerry-rigged philosophy as they can get their hands on. It’s a distracting mess that prevents access to some of the truly great subtext bubbling beneath the surface.

As much as I dearly want to extol it to the high heavens, I can’t get past its crazed, half-baked presentation. It’s like a crazy, politically abrasive uncle at Thanksgiving dinner. You have no choice but to love it at least a little (especially if you’re a fan of classic Hollywood cinema), but spending more than five minutes at a time with it is immensely taxing.I’m Brennan I do the click clack clickity clackity click click clack on my compy. Click Clack. Bathroom break. Clickly Clacky. Art. 
TL;DR: Hail, Caesar! is a messy comedy with some truly outstanding moments that are mired in impenetrable messiness.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 960

New Year's Resolutions: Overlooked

Continuing my slate-clearing to begin 2016 with a bang, here is a selection of mini-reviews of classic and classic adjacent genre flicks that I have watched but unfortunately failed to cover over the past few months.

Escape From New York

Year: 1981

Director: John Carpenter

Cast: Kurt Russell, Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine

Run Time: 1 hour 39 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Renowned criminal Snake Plissken is coerced into rescuing the president from the island of Manhattan, which has been converted into a prison in the distant future of 1997.

Now, here’s a film that’ll put hair on your chest. If you squeezed all the testosterone out of every pituitary gland in the world, Escape From New York would put it in a glass and drink it for breakfast. A towering tribute to the American testicle, Escape From New York is essentially the U.S. translation of the Mad Max ethos (with all the musky homoeroticism that that implies).

Depicting a prison state populated exclusively by men and the handful of objects that other, lesser beings know as women, Escape From New York indulges in excess of the highest caliber in the costuming, production design, and performance. On paper, the film’s action would also join that list, but unfortunately this leads us directly into the most fatal flaw of the film. Although there are plenty of exciting ideas crammed into the script (ninja stars, cab chases around bridge minefields, etc.), much of the actual excitement is choked out by the films all too casual approach to their execution.

John Carpenter as a director likes to pace his films as deliberately as possible, which works for a ponderous fablistic slasher or a relentless experiment in Arctic isolation. However, when that tendency is transplanted into the action genre, everything feels like it’s playing at half speed. Car chases, fistfights, and sudden attacks are staged about the same as a character making a sandwich. They play out at a snail’s pace, which makes it awfully difficult to care about the tremendously operatic plot beats that drive them.

As a cheesy, macho ham sandwich, EFNY is worth a watch. However, it’s a Mad Max world with a Calm Max execution.

Rating: 6/10

The Shining

Year: 1980

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Cast: Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd

Run Time: 2 hours 26 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A man gets a job as a winter caretaker for the secluded Overlook Hotel. When he and his family are snowed in, the haunted building starts to drive him crazy.

By now, any horror fan has probably heard that Stephen King hates Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of his bestselling novel. For good reason, too. His thinly veiled tale of a father struggling to redeem himself while backsliding into his alcoholism is deeply personal and utterly obliterated by Kubrick’s standoffish direction and casting of the permanently deranged Jack Nicholson. But while it’s true that Kubrick’s Shining is a downright abysmal adaptation of its source novel, the things that make it a classic are completely, exclusively different from what made the book a classic. Taken as two separate works, one a spine-tingling allegory and the other as a chilly mood piece, both Shinings have a place in the canon of classic horror history.

This incarnation of The Shining is certainly style over substance, but oh what a style it is. This is perhaps the film where Kubrick’s habitually precise style and the content work best. His penchant for lengthy Steadicam shots pulls you into the preternaturally still world our characters are trapped in, and the smooth gliding of his frame evokes a sinister presence keeping watch over our characters. His camera really drives home the sheer enormity of the Overlook, dwarfing its subject every chance it gets. There’s an occasional bit of ego wanking (was it absolutely necessary to zoom in on the cook’s apartment for six minutes?), but for the most part – and in a 146 minute film, it’s ALL the most part – it clicks.

And another thing. If you show me a 1980 film with a more exquisite sound design than The Shining, I will cry tears of gratitude from my ears. Listening to The Shining in cranked-up surround sound is the best burst eardrum you’ll ever have, with its atonal jangling score careening into common household noises expanded to unearthly proportions. It’s like the Devil’s white noise machine.

Last but not least, we have the actors. Kubrick’s casts tend to be largely incidental, but here they are integral cogs in the film’s mechanism. Shelley Duvall is the standout as the shrill, mousy wife, giving such irritating nuance to the role that you can begin to understand why the hell her character might continue to be married to the professionally psychotic Jack Nicholson. Naturally, he too inhabits his role with aplomb, but even young Danny Lloyd (as their son Danny) is unbearably terrifying, giving maybe the best child performance of the decade. And the 80’swere nothing if not crawling with child performers.

So no, The Shining ain’t no Stephen King movie, but it’s certainly worth its reputation. Just make sure you empty your bladder before sitting down to watch it.

Rating: 8/10

Trick 'r Treat

Year: 2007
Director: Mike Dougherty
Cast: Anna Paquin, Brian Cox, Dylan Baker
Run Time: 1 hour 22 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

A variety of stories play out in a small town on Halloween night, in which people are punished for not respecting the traditions and rituals of Halloween.

I’ve seen my share of horror anthologies, so please don’t take it lightly when I say that Trick ‘r Treat is one of the best. Not only does it integrate its distinct stories in a colorful, creative way, it is actually pretty great. Not content to merely avoid being unwatchable crap (something many anthologies flagrantly fail to do), Trick ‘r Treat is genuinely well-directed, by first-timer Mike Dougherty (who has since lent his holiday fever to the largely charming Krampus).

Combining traditional Halloween imagery with a uniquely spooky atmosphere, Dougherty has birthed a series of unforgettable shots, my favorite being the lights from jack-o-lanterns flickering in the fog as children vanish one by one. Trick ‘r Treat manages to sustain its campfire tale atmosphere, even during the more overtly silly vignettes, including an excellently timed Dylan Baker tale.

Embracing and inverting typical horror tropes, Trick ‘r Treat is a film that truly loves Halloween rather than just taking place on the holiday as a gimmick. Trick ‘r Treat wants to marry Halloween and massage its feet for the rest of its life, and it shows. This spirit can e felt in the film’s major contribution to popular culture, the bag-headed Sam, a trick or treating spirit of holiday vengeance with a singularly prepossessing design. Just like Sam, Trick ‘r Treat is fun, spooky, and oh so stylish. It should earn an immediate spot in everybody’s October screening list.


Rating: 8/10

Red Dragon

Year: 2002

Director: Brett Ratner

Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Edward Norton, Ralph Fiennes

Run Time: 2 hours 4 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Will Graham must enlist the help of his imprisoned ex-partner, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, to capture a serial killer known as the Tooth Fairy.

Red Dragon is a pointless, pointless movie. An essential remake of Michael Mann’s Manhunter (also based on the Thomas Harris crime novel Red Dragon), Red Dragon was a cash-in on the only remaining Hannibal Lecter property that hadn’t had Anthony Hopkins crudely grafted onto it yet. Although it boasts Ralph Fiennes in an electrifying villainous role, the rest of the film is a wan redo of Silence of the Lambs from the structure down to the production design details, glossing over its own story in order to properly service its connection to the Oscar-winning (read: box office smashing) property.

In and of itself, Red Dragon is a competent, adequate film, but there’s a reason that when looking through my notes, all I can find is ralph Fiennes comments. The relationship between Hopkins and Edward Norton’s Graham is a malnourished trifle, a flaxen imitation of Jodie Foster’s chemistry that refuses to engage with the mountains of readily available backstory that could actually make sense of their alleged connection.

This film is worth seeing for the Tooth Fairy alone. If you pretend that the actual A-story is just the commercial breaks between a nuanced, deranged, transformative character study full of blazing twists and turns, it’s completely palatable. Otherwise, it’s pretty much a bust. It’s less operatically indulgent than the worst Hopkins Lecter film (Ridley Scott’s Hannibal), but it’s even less interesting for it.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1433
Reviews In This Series
The Silence of the Lambs (Demme, 1991)
Hannibal (Scott, 2001)
Red Dragon (Ratner, 2002)

Spy Another Day

Year: 2015

Director: Sam Mendes

Cast: Daniel Craig, Léa Seydoux, Christoph Waltz

Run Time:  2 hours 28 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Now, please keep in mind that I haven’t watched a James Bond movie since I was 14, so maybe they’re all brainless and repetitive and I had too much in common with them to notice. But considering that Goldfinger flits by at 1 hour and 50 minutes and the superspy’s latest effort – Spectre – rolls in creaking and groaning at 2 ½ hours, I daresay the original films didn’t take themselves quite so seriously.

Alas, I’m getting ahead of myself. Spectre is the 24th entry in the James Bond franchise, the fourth for Daniel Craig since Casino Royale rejuvenated the series back in 2006. It’s also the first to appear on the pages of this blog, and it makes a game attempt to ensure that it’s the last. I have enough fondness for the previous entries that I look forward to reviewing them one day, but Spectre’s strip-mining of Bond’s past glories is a recipe for half-baked rehash that leaves a sour taste in the mouth.

Coming soon: the Popcorn Culture Cookbook.

I’m going to streamline the plot as much as possible, because to go into detail would require an atlas, unflagging interest in the high-end car industry, and several gallons of Absolut. Here goes: James Bond (Daniel Craig) is an MI6 agent investigating an evil syndicate known as Spectre led by the shadowy Hans Oberhauser (Christoph Waltz), based on a clue left for him by the late M (Dame Judi Dench, in a cameo that she could have done from her living room).

Meanwhile, the current M (Ralph Fiennes, who I do believe was just trying to tear England apart with a group of wizard Nazis, so this is awkward) is battling through tangles of red tape thanks to C (Andrew Scott), a government official who wants to shut down MI6 and commence surveillance of the world’s digital traffic in alliance with several major world powers, bringing espionage into the 21st century. It is up to M, his secretary Moneypenny (Naomie Harris), and gadget guru Q (Ben Whishaw) to preserve the old ways and avoid going the way of the Walkman.

Oh, also Bond hooks up with Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux), the daughter of a previous bad guy who we’re expected to remember. They scoot across the globe, sticking together even though they have the chemistry of Elton John and a pair of sensible slacks.

I hope you don’t mind that I put down in words, how wonderful life is now you’re – eh, who are you again?

Spectre is a dense amalgamation of previous Bond films, both within the Craig tetralogy and the franchise as a whole, coming full circle within the reboot continuity while reintroducing classic characters and concepts. But as much as it’s beholden to the letter of the James Bond traditions, it fundamentally fails to capture the spirit, which flits away like a butterfly, always in sight but just out of reach.

Take the opening pre-credits scene. Bond takes a woman into his Mexico City hotel room, tells her he’ll be right back, and slips out the window. Thus ensues an explosive action sequence, taking Bond through crumbling mortar, the thrumming Dia de Los Muertos parade, and into the air over a teeming mass of bodies while a percussive drum beat smashes into and merges with the classic James Bond theme.

It’s stylish, high octane perfection, but instead of Bond dusting off, casually adjusting his tie, and returning triumphantly to his lady, we cut immediately into Sam Smith warbling “Writing’s on the Wall” over a singularly uninspired credits sequence. Look, as much as Bond’s I Love Lucy chocolate conveyor belt of conquests is haphazardly misogynistic, it’s all part of the came charm of his character, and the missing button from that scene cuts Spectre off at the knees.

Plus, that lady probably racked up thousands in minibar charges while abandoned in that room for hours.

Admittedly there are a handful of moments that embrace the campy appeal of the character, many of which are pretty unequivocally the best moments in the film. However, the degree to which you are asked to turn your brain off is in direct conflict with the length and girth of the stick up Spectre’s ass. In grand Christopher Nolan tradition, Spectre shrouds itself in dark, gritty realism that blocks out the fun factor as effectively as a smothering layer of gold paint. In fact, the Dark Knight gloomsmith was actually approached to direct this film, so that should tell you where returning director Sam Mendes’ (of American Beauty, somehow) ambitions lay.

The amount of time Spectre spends on its knees kissing your boots, begging, groveling for you to take it seriously is its very downfall. It’s never a good idea to approach a Bond flick with an eye for realism, but with this particular entry – and its plot holes big enough to host bar mitzvahs in – it’s cinematic suicide. The second you boot up your brain, the threadbare patchwork of the plot unravels in your hands, leaving you to stare in perplexion at a disheveled mass of thread.

Of course, this is a spy movie, so a certain amount of narrative tomfoolery is permitted (arbitrary countdowns, Rube Goldberg death traps that permit the hero ample time to escape, and the like). It’s all in good fun, but Spectre’s deficiencies sink much deeper than the average espionage flick. Characters mysteriously vanish never to be heard from again, plot points are introduced but never followed up on, and many of the blistering actions sequences take place in preternaturally empty environs. Spectre’s Ghost Train rivals even Halloween II’s Silent Hospital in terms of normally bustling locations that appear to have been abruptly abandoned, leaving only the core cast and maybe a handsome porter for decoration. It’s like they filmed on the Bermuda Triangle or something.

Or maybe the European extras were just all on vacation.

There’s a lot wrong with Spectre, nearly all of which is showcased in the interminable third act (when only two trailers played before this film, I knew it was a portent of doom for my bladder). A vast majority of the plot is pointless wheel spinning and wearisome monologues that leave your adrenal glands parched and shriveled. 

Perhaps it would work better if it balanced on a different central couple, because the crude archetype that Madeleine is brutally crammed into during the finale is hardly appropriate for her character or her shallow relationship with Bond. Watching her blankly go through the motions of a more developed plot only draws attention to the anemic characterizations that populate the film.

Christoph Waltz gives a game attempt at overcoming the peculiar inadequacies of his character, who is rejected from the plot like a bad skin graft. But there is only so much menace he can breathe into the banal, chinos-clad villain with sharply defined motivation but a wicked plan so vague that one can only assume he’s working from a first draft.

But there’s one thing I haven’t talked about: the action. It isn’t particularly original, but it’s as dazzling as altogether too much money can buy. There’s only so many times I can watch a secret agent discover a hidden door or punch an indestructible henchman (this time a totally wasted Dave Bautista) in the face, but this is the one element where Spectre totally embraces its over-the-top pedigree. Armed with his pistol that has the range of a rifle and the delicacy of a dart, Bond sweeps through the massive, inexplicably varied setpieces with relative aplomb.

It’s not enough to fully redeem the film form its monotonous, triumphantly silly depths, but it’s a totally adequate night at the movies. It will hold your attention more often than not, and in today’s climate sometimes that’s the best you can get. If you come into Spectre with an open mind, it does give you some bang for its buck. While 300 million bangs can be exhausting, it’s still quite a spectacle to behold.

TL;DR: Spectre is an acceptable trifle, but a plodding, unsatisfying James Bond movie.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1367

Through The Fire And Flames

Year: 2007

Director: David Yates

Cast: Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint

Run Time: 2 hours 18 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

The first four Harry Potter movies are like distant relatives overstaying their welcome during the Christmas holidays. They devour the full stock of your pantry (i.e. any working British actor above “street mime” caliber), they keep you up with their excessive snoring (or rather their brobdingnagian run times), and to your consternation, they just keep coming back every year without fail.  They are all jagged, ungainly narrative detritus usually brought back from the brink of stultifying despair on the strength of a veritable army of veteran adult performers and production designers so untouchably brilliant that they could literally murder someone, make their ribcage into a lampshade, and it would be so beautiful that nobody would find any problem with it.

When last we left our heroes, it was with 2005’s Goblet of Fire, the last stage of Harry Potter’s “childish” phase. That entry was marked by a particularly devout slash and burn approach when it came to the story, leaving the film a smoldering rubble with only Ralph Fiennes standing triumphant amid the flames. But after all that painful slogging, David Yates stepped up to the plates, and like its titular bird, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix rose from the ashes of the franchise, heralding a new dawn for us all.

Plus, it’s the shortest film of the series. Rejoice!

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, in case you yourself are a book and haven’t grown self-aware enough to discover the concept of reading, is about the fifteen-year-old wizard Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe). At the end of last term, he saw the Dark Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) rise again, but the paranoid Minister of Magic Cornelius Fudge (Robert Hardy) believes that his claims are false, brought on by the promptings of the avaricious headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon). This is patently untrue, of course, but he appoints the syrupy and officious Professor Umbridge (Imelda Staunton) to the post of Defense Against the Dark Arts to ensure the Ministry’s hold over Hogwarts while he continues his smear campaign on Potter and Dumbledore from the outside.

Torn between the inordinate responsibility he feels toward the Order of the Phoenix (a secret society leading the charge against Voldemort – to which his godfather Sirius Black (Gary Oldman) belongs), the very adult bureaucratic and political pressures of the Ministry, the surge of teenage hormones and exam stress that lead to infighting with his best friends Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson), and the sudden urges to storm off and listen to Simple Plan alone in his room, Harry is going to have a very rough year.

Being 15 is just a barrel of dicks, isn’t it?

So a hawk- or particularly talented pigeon-eyed viewer may ask, how exactly does one accomplish the Herculean feat of adapting the doorstopper Order of the Phoenix into the shortest movie of the franchise? And that includes the two films that tackled only half the final book apiece, thank you very much. Screenwriter Michael Goldenberg might tell you this or that about writing while standing up or the miraculous powers of lime extract, but the answer is very simple: He actually cared about telling a coherent story that doesn’t rely on a thousand page children’s book to fill in the alarmingly huge gaps that could (and frequently did) fit a grown man.

Mind you, the storytelling of Phoenix is not airtight. Several of its marbles roll irrevocably out of bounds, most notably with the character of Tonks (Natalia Tena) who may well have been a large chocolate gateau for all the purpose she serves the film. But when narrative corners are cut (and with source material as extensive as this, it requires more cutting than a Flock of Seagulls reunion tour), Goldenberg uses pre-established elements (like alternate characters or story beats) to bridge the gaps instead of just skipping past the difficult bits like the faulty record needle of the previous four films.

In addition to the first generally coherent script of the franchise, Order of the Phoenix also boasts a remarkably adept visual schema courtesy of cinematographer Slawomir Idziak. As I said before, the films have always had nut-busting production design (a tradition continued here with Stuart Craig’s glittering obsidian Ministry of Magic and the defined yet somehow infinite complexities of the Room of Requirement), but only Goblet of Fire’s encroaching gloom came close to resembling a unifying aesthetic. Here, the knobbly yet prim structure and stolid lighting of Umbridge and her domain contrast sharply with the heavy shadows, vivid blues, and bright slashes of light that define the clutter of Harry’s reality. This helps emphasize the central conflict of the film, between the Ministry’s careful restructuring of the media narrative and the grim reality they’re hoping to conceal from the world at large as well as themselves.

Perhaps my favorite detail of the film, Phoenix in a microcosm, is the mirror in the Room of Requirement, where Harry and his friends secretly practice defensive spells under the nose of the Ministry. Over the course of the film, the mirror begins to fill up with newspaper clippings and photographs depicting the missing and the dead as Voldemort and his Death Eaters continue their wicked work in the shadows. This collection is never explicitly mentioned in the dialogue, but it fleshes out the dangerous and terrifying world that lies in wait outside the walls of the school. It’s subtle, powerful, and entirely visual, and a big part of why Phoenix is the best Potter yet.

Plus, Daniel Radcliffe was 18 at this point and beginning his conversion into a fully weaponized cute person.

So, have we had just about enough of Film Major Brennan for one article? Let’s just tuck him away again until he can wax poetic about slasher sound cues where he can’t hurt anybody. Because Order of the Phoenix is also a remarkably fun movie. It’s dark, brooding, and deals with mature themes, yes, but it’s also a school rebellion flick. There are moments that capture that summer camp rush of subversive mischief, finally giving the caretaker Filch (David Bradley) something genuinely amusing to do, and allowing the ensemble – especially Neville Longbottom (Matthew Lewis) and newcomer Luna Lovegood (the incomparably dizzy Evanna Lynch) – to truly inhabit their roles and create a living tapestry to support Harry and his exploits.

The acting is likewise much improved, especially after the discouraging Goblet, which almost led to a series of costly psychotherapy sessions. Emma Watson’s eyebrows still clearly long to be set loose in the untamed wilderness, but as a whole, the trio at the core are improving markedly as they age, and the adult performers are back on track as the fossil fuel that keeps the engine running smoothly.

Alan Rickman and Maggie Smith carry on as always, because they are untouchable denizens of Mount Olympus, Michael Gambon has finally settled into his wizened peak as the powerful but ancient headmaster, and Ralph Fiennes returns with his excellent, bored Drawl of Evil, but two newcomers steal the show. Helena Bonham Carter’s performance as the insane prison escapee Bellatrix Lestrange is like an exploding nail gun, pure menacing power, and Imelda Staunton provides a perfectly pitched, sickeningly sweet performance reminiscent of a genius pantomime villain. You boo and you hiss when she comes on and you love to hate her, but the depths of her wickedness turn your stomach, especially in the showstopping detention scene. 

It’s saying something when Emma McFreaking Thompson turns in the worst performance of your entire adult cast, I’ll just leave it at that.

Please note that I don’t say these things lightly. I’m literally sitting next to a VHS copy of Dead Again as we speak.

However, for all the massive improvements Phoenix amasses upon its predecessors, it’s still weighed down by certain demining flaws. The purely anonymous score by Nicholas Hooper would be damaging enough, but when it shades into out-and-out lyrical rock songs, the film dives directly into the nearest dumpster. And the climactic battle sequence that closes the film alternates between electrifying thriller imagery (and some truly impressive visual effects, especially between Dumbledore and Voldemort) and wimpy light shows hardly more arresting than a game of laser tag. It too frequently slides into camp territory to sell its emotional climax, which it then immediately forgets about anyway. Also there’s a shot where it looks like Voldemort is doing jazz hands.

Let’s just say it’s a bit of a bumpy landing. But it’s the least turbulent Potter thus far, and I could see myself rewatching this one without wanting to stick a fork in an electric eel, so three cheers for Order of the Phoenix!

TL;DR: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is a fun, flashy, aesthetically precise film.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1497

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)

The Holey Grail

Year: 2005

Director: Mike Newell

Cast: Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint

Run Time: 2 hours 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

We’re halfway there! As I revisit the fourth of the eight films of the Harry Potter franchise, which I have not watched since graduating high school and, subsequently, film school, I have come to an interesting and I daresay valuable midpoint conclusion: Don’t grow up. 

Of the first four Harry Potter films, the best of them (which, in my opinion at least, is unambiguously Prisoner of Azkaban) is still a muddled, conflict-free pile of dizzy aesthetic that leaves itself unguarded to quite justifiable attacks about its misuse of inveterate British actors as overqualified set dressing and being easily outshone by its own children’s choir. It’s a sorry lot, to say the least.

But we shall sally forth and hope that somebody somewhere along the line figures out how the hell to makes British teenagers interesting. You’d think magic would do it, but you would be wrong.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, in case you’re an emu who found this page open on a safari-er’s lost iPad and have never heard of one of those “book” things, is about the 14-year-old wizard Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe). What he really needs to do is get a haircut, but what he does instead is attend the Quidditch World Cup with his BFFs Ron (Rupert Grin) and Hermione (Emma Watson). An attack by Death Eaters – supporters of the Dark Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes, but not until much, much later) – cuts the event short and casts a pall over the kids’ return to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, quite literally, in fact.

The dominating aesthetic of Goblet of Fire is gloom, and it creeps in around the edges of every frame. Dull blues, searing oranges, and dreary greys loom everywhere you look. It’s a rather striking statement, especially combined with the sudden intimacy of the sets. Cast sizes are smaller, excesses are toned down, and in general it lends to a feeling of the film closing in on you, by far the single most effective cinematic achievement Goblet can boast.

But I digress. This year, Hogwarts is playing host to the Triwizard Tournament, an international championship between the wizarding schools of Durmstrang – a Bulgarian school represented by the champion Viktor Krum (Stanislav Ianevski) -, Beauxbatons  - a French school whose champion is Fleur Delacour (Clémence Poésy) – and Hogwarts – as represented by Cedric Diggory (the pale white, ice cold, impossibly fast and strong Robert Pattinson). This is the first time in many years that the notoriously dangerous tournament has been played, because the Ministry of Magic has figured that, between the rampaging troll three years ago, then those pesky attempted basilisk murders, then the repeated break-ins by a convicted killer, Hogwarts is, like, totally chill now.

Naturally, dark forces set to work almost immediately and Harry is forced against his will to enter the tournament, facing the trio of deadly tasks and set on a path that will, unbeknownst to him, eventually lead to the resurrection of Lord Voldemort himself.

It’s not that much worse than finals, really.

There is a certain challenge inherent in adapting a 700 page book into a film that won’t rupture children’s bladders. I’m aware of that, but Goblet of Fire plows through the plot at a blistering pace. It clips a subplot here, an entire story branch there, mowing down characters and story beats like a mad slasher. Don’t misunderstand me, I’m all for some ruthlessly efficiency editing, but the mad pruning that takes place here has the curiously dissonant effect of simultaneously removing far too much to let any of the scenes breathe, choking out any emotion or wonder, and leaving too many loose ends haphazardly jammed in (merely because they were things that happened in the book), hopelessly bereft of any connective tissue. If you can come up with any justifiable reason for Rita Skeeter, the Quidditch World Cup, or the Yule Ball to be in this movie, you are a far better filmmaker than I. Or Steve Kloves. Oh, and the film is too damn long, but complaining about that at this point s like trying to drain the ocean with a funnel.

As the film is sprinting along through its slapdash parade of half-digested scenes, it’s a miracle that it even finds the time to alight upon something so aesthetically present as the “closing-in gloom” I mentioned above, so it should come as no surprise that Goblet of Fire does absolutely nothing else cinematically surprising for the remainder of its duration. It might be literally too much to expect even anonymous directing from the man behind Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, so I guess we should consider ourselves lucky the film turned out as stylistically responsible as it did. It might be stuffy, awkward, and overlong, but this was 2005 after all. Even the actors’ hair was like that.

The Hot Topic generation will be the death of us all.

Actually, in many ways Goblet of Fire is very similar to puberty: It’s a bumbling, creaking shift to a more grown-up stage in the Harry Potter franchise, replete with barely understood mood swings, a vague, foggy idea of how girls work, and a supreme lack of humor about itself. Where Azkaban had a sprightly, fun fairy tale quality woven throughout, Goblet of Fire is just plain dour, only saved by two splendid comic scenes performed by Shirley Henderson (Returning as the freewheeling avalanche of self pity that is Moaning Myrtle) and – bizarrely – Alan Rickman, the franchise’s patron saint of pregnant pauses and nasal wickedness.

This pair of performances is two-thirds of a trio that forms the Holy Trinity of Goblet of Fire. For, in the finale, they are joined by Ralph Fiennes, whose Lord Voldemort is a tiger caged in a barely human body; fluid, powerful, and unspeakably evil. His make-up is flawless, his performance doubly so, but he comes too late to repair the deep tissue damage that he film has already suffered at the hands of his co-stars and his scene is marred by perhaps the film’s single worst use of the audience’s knowledge of the novel as a narrative crutch.

About those co-stars: The trio of child actors at the core of the series have been remarkably inconsistent as they’ve been passed from director to director like cheery British hot potatoes, but Goblet might just be their lowest point. Emma Watson’s eyebrows seem to have become sentient, living a completely separate and perfectly happy life atop her head, wriggling about without a care in the world, Daniel Radcliffe jerks about like a wind-up monkey clashing his cymbals together, and Rupert Grint vanishes for long stretches of the film, allowing one to forget that he was there in the first place. 

The adults hardly fare better. Michael Gambon in particular is making me look like an idiot for expressing ill-remembered faith in him several reviews ago as he dashes about barking random lines like a child playing with a new toy, and Roger Lloyd Pack (as ministry official Barty Crouch) fills what the slashed script has suddenly rendered an empty characters with twitched wiggling. 

It’s like he’s his own private sign language interpreter.

It’s unambiguously unimpressive to say the least, though at least the action sequences are blanketed in the best CGI of the series to date. In fact, a flying scene with Harry and a dragon zipping around the turrets of Hogwarts castle is a spectacularly seamless moment and perhaps the best single sustained effects sequence in the entire first half of the franchise.

All in all, Goblet of Fire isn’t a total wash, and it never ever sinks to the tedious depths of Chris Columbus at his most taxidermic, but it’s an uneven, anonymous movie, and that goes against the grain of everything that Harry Potter needs to be.

Excuse me while I go cry nerd tears, because this one was my favorite book. Until next tie, I’m forever yours in Potterdom. For better or for worse. Usually worse, I’m afraid.

TL;DR: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is an uneven movie spiked by a gloomy, mature aesthetic and a trio of stellar performances.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1380

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)