Songs Of The Wild

Year: 2016
Director: Christophe Lourdelet & Garth Jennings
Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Reese Witherspoon, Seth MacFarlane
Run Time: 1 hour 48 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG

The Illumination Entertainment brand kicked off with Despicable Me and never looked back, to the point that it seemed like the company was incapable of creating a movie (or, at least, a good movie) without the involvement of the Minions, the adorable little yellow buffoons that ignited a pandemic among local retail stores and toy boxes. Sing is probably their heartiest bid at creating a new brand yet, what with its Zootopia-esque world of anthropomorphic animals, and it more or less works.

If you can’t make kids enjoy a movie about cartoon animals, I hear they’re hiring at the 7-Eleven.

In the plot of Sing, which was engineered in a laboratory to appeal to the widest demographic possible, cartoon animals are holding a singing competition, performing covers of pop songs. This is a show put on in the Moon Theatre by its owner, the roguish koala Buster Moon (Matthew McConaughey) who just wants to keep the crumbling building (and his dream of owning a theatre) afloat. Due to a typographical error promising $1000,000 in prize money that he doesn’t have, animals throng the theater, excited to participate.

The contestants have all joined for their own reasons: Rosita the Pig (Reese Witherspoon) – who is paired with the shamefully amusing German provocateur Gunter (Nick Kroll) – wants to prove to her lazy husband and 25 kids that she’s more than just a frazzled housewife; Mike the Mouse (Seth MacFarlane) just wants to be rich and spend the money on the closest analogue to drugs this kids’ film can afford; Johnny the Gorilla (Taron Egerton) wants a career path away from his father’s gang and to raise his dad’s bail; Ash the Porcupine (Scarlett Johansson) wants to use the money to build a recording studio for her rocker boyfriend Lance (Beck Bennett); and Meena the elephant (Tori Kelly) – who initially joins as a stagehand – wants to overcome her shyness and share her gift with the world.

They all want the money, but they find that the power of music and dance that unites them is the most precious prize of all.

And I’m uncannily reminded of how great La La Land is in comparison.

Ask yourself one question: Would you enjoy a movie where animals sing songs? There, you have your answer about whether or not you should see Sing. Case closed. It doesn’t hide what it is, and it’s a totally fine bit of disposable entertainment. If you’re looking for a story though, good luck. The contestants are engaging enough, but they’re a rough assemblage of tropes that indicate characters rather than committing to fleshing them out. Look, shortcuts are necessary if you want the last half hour to be a full concert and keep the run time at a length reasonable enough that children’s attention spans don’t explode.

At the very least, there were wacky little quirks tucked into the corners here and there, enough to keep my attention occupied during the story bits. I especially love the score that calls back to 70’s heist movies whenever Buster pulls his Music Man huckster act. And the fact that they dug up the Beatles deep cut “Golden Slumbers” is certainly a boon to getting me on their side. Then Sing goes bananas during the close of the second act, unstoppering a sequence that’s part-Titanic, part-Final Destination, all massively inappropriate for young audiences, but so bizarrely out of place that it’s truly captivating.

Yeah, Sing is survivable if you have kids who want to see it. Those musical numbers are pretty fun. But if you want to watch a world of anthropomorphic animals where they feel truly integrated in with humanoid society, just watch Zootopia. And frankly, the jukebox musical conceit worked much better in last month’s Trolls. But Sing is a solid stab at non-Minion entertainment that gives me more hope than their abortive Secret Life of Pets, and that’s good enough.

It could have used more Minions though.

Of course, Sing is also filled with fart humor and other juvenile attempts at comedy that stomp allover Japanese culture and African-American stereotypes, as well as throwing in a coded gay frog for a joke that blatantly misses the obvious punchline, so it’s double irritating. But whatever, man. We takes what we gets with these guys.

The stars are charming, the pacing never flags, and you don’t feel like you’ve wasted your time when the credits roll. Sometimes that’s the best you can hope for, and you don’t need to dread being dragged to this should the opportunity arise over the holidays. You won’t catch me singing Sing’s praises, but I enjoyed myself.

TL;DR: Sing is a mostly enjoyable bit of silly kiddy fluff.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 810

When Tony Comes Marching Home

Year: 2016

Director: Anthony & Joe Russo

Cast: Chris Evans, Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson

Run Time: 2 hours 27 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Captain America: Civil War is one of those frustrating movies that renders film criticism even more useless than it already is. A negative review is but a fragile echo in the void while Marvel plows through their stacks of money with a bulldozer. And a positive review is extravagantly pointless, because you know you’ve seen the goddamn thing. But I watched it, and I’m morally obligated to give my two cents. Why not have some fun with this exuberantly pointless exercise?

I’m not a regular blog. I’m a cool blog.

So, Captain America. The Avenger that nobody would give a flying fart about if he weren’t played by the human mountain we call Chris Evans. Full disclosure, I haven’t seen the first two Cap movies, but I’ve been on my roommate’s Tumblr page enough to grasp the gist of things. The constant between the films (aside from a set of wholly bland villains) is Captain Steve Rogers and James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes (Sebastian Stan), and the fact that the series is essentially a longform exploration of male friendship is by far the most interesting thing about it. Oh, also Cap’s friend Falcon (Anthony Mackie) is there, though he hardly finds a convincing reason for his presence. A third wheel is a third wheel, even if you’ve got a bird suit.

Bucky has been brainwashed by the Nazis Hydra to become the Winter Soldier, a mindless assassin who carries out their wickedest deeds when read a special passage from a Dr. Seuss-esque red book. Tensions have already been rising between the Avengers when, following a botched mission, the government decides to regulate the team, having them answer to the UN. Because nothing streamlines saving the world like handing the reins to international bureaucracy. This effort is spearheaded by Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.), Iron Man himself.

When Bucky lands himself in the sights of the coalition, an already dubious Steve assembles a team of MCU cameos to help him save his friend and also the world (from the requisite milquetoast villain, Zemo – played by Daniel Brühl), defying the UN Accords. Iron Man assembles his own team, including an olive branch from Sony: Spider-Man (Tom Holland).

Meanwhile, Hulk and Thor are vacationing in the Poconos.

It’s intriguing that both of this year’s major superhero mash-ups (Civil War and Batman v Superman, and please allow me to extend my humblest apologies for bringing up that crapfest again) directly grapple with the collateral damage caused by superhero brawls. It’s an important conversation to be having, in terms of the depiction of onscreen violence, but I can hardly think of a less exciting tend for comic book movies. It’s just one step above that stultifying superhero standby of “I must resist using my powers because they’re bad (and we can’t afford the special effects).”

And do you want to know the worst thing? In terms of directly addressing the repercussions of their own violent content, Batman v Superman is actually the superior film. Only in that regard, mind you, but talk about a plot twist. That movie, while incomprehensible, actually had high stakes and some clear consequences. In Civil War, the Accords are pretty inconsequential, just a garnish for a massive action sequence between two sides chosen as arbitrarily as a game of dodgeball.

Civil War plays it way too safe, and the supposedly grand, operatic plot beats feel like they’re tiptoeing on eggshells, not wanting to throw a wrench in Phase 3 with anything as gauche as [SPOILERS a major character death or even a stubbed toe. They refuse to even allow ludicrously minor characters like War Machine (Don Cheadle) the dignity of being bumped off to raise the stakes, no matter how clearly he super duper died in the film. And so help me God, if I don’t get to see Thanos crack open Vision’s (Paul Bettany) stupid, didactic Klaatu forehead before the end of Phase 3, I’m going to rip myself in half.] All I’m asking for is that a storyline as grand and sweeping as Civil War be treated with a little more gravity than Thor’s latest bubble bath.

Well, maybe I’m overextending myself expecting gravity from this guy.

OK, I’m calming down. Though Civil War fails to reach the heights of the raging maelstrom promised by the comics, the trailers, and the advance reviews, that doesn’t mean it’s a bad film. I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed. But as a piece of popcorn superhero mayhem, the film largely delivers. Frankly, the one-on-one action sequences between Captain America and Iron Man pull so many punches that they end up smacking themselves in the face (and yes, a hardcore moment that is almost instantly retconned counts as a pulled punch), but when our other heroes get in on the fun, the movie gets a shot in the arm.

Where Civil War truly triumphs is its ensemble action, which is an astonishing feat of character juggling. The ubiquity of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is helpful, precluding the film from having to reiterate backstories for returning characters like the spuriously-accented Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), the expert agent Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), or the sharpshooter Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner, and I am pleased as punch to report that his appearance got the biggest applause from my audience), but the script stays true to their personalities and longform arcs.

It manages this while also introducing two entirely new heroes to the pack: the vengeful Wakandan prince Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman) and the snotty teen Spider-Man in his third cinematic iteration. I’m deeply concerned to admit that I actually enjoyed Tom Holland in the role, because I sure as hell don’t want to shell out money for an umpteenth Spidey flick.

The guy has more regenerations than a Time Lord.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah. The movie doesn’t get as distracted by its massive smorgasbord of superheroes as I do. In a jam-packed chase sequence as well as the inevitable showdown between both teams in a massive airfield, Civil War effortlessly weaves an infinitum of motivations, personalities, and character struggles into one seamless, breathtaking tapestry. The only hero who doesn’t get his fair share of the pie is Ant-Man (Paul Rudd), who’s just here to have fun. Although, considering the cotton candy froth that his film turned out to be, I guess that’s still staying true to Ant-Man’s mission statement.

Plus, despite the stakes being dismayingly low on the grand narrative scale, these fight scenes are filled with little moments that will sock you in the gut. One scene in particular with a helicopter stopped my heart for a second.

OK, TWO scenes in particular with a helicopter.

The relative intensity with Russo brothers bring to the action also serves to give the Whedon-tinged dialogue more comedic punch when it does arrive. This is a transitional film between two Marvel phases with two distinct personalities, and tonally it’s an excellent midpoint between the both of them. So while I found myself immensely frustrated by large portions of this overlong film (this is no empty complaint – I could slice half an hour off this behemoth and never miss it – including two, count ‘em, two romances so chaste they feel vacuum sealed), it’s still an excellent entry in the overall Marvel canon. Enough that I can confidently proclaim that, whatever happens, Doctor Strange will still be the worst MCU flick out this year.

TL;DR: Captain America: Civil War is a grand achievement in unwieldy ensemble filmmaking, but plays it too safe to be a superhero classic.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1286

Reviews In This Series
Avengers: Age of Ultron (Whedon, 2015)
Ant-Man (Reed, 2015)
Captain America: Civil War (Russo & Russo, 2016)
Black Panther (Coogler, 2018)
Avengers: Infinity War (Russo & Russo, 2018)
Ant-Man and the Wasp (Reed, 2018)

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

The Best Friends Gang

Year: 2015

Director: Joss Whedon

Cast: Robert Downey, Jr., Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo

Run Time: 2 hours 21 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

I'm not sure if you've noticed, but comics are kind of a big deal now. Audiences worldwide just can't get enough of hot women in leather, even hotter men in leather, robots, monsters, sardonic quips, and wanton property damage. After Marvel combined the superhero formula with the geek champion auteur Joss Whedon, the ne plus ultra of nerd culture was born: The Avengers. The film went on to make all the money in the world.

This year's sequel, Avengers: Age of Ultron is more or less the lynchpin of Marvel's Phase Two, the success of which could make or break the approximately 2,600 years of scheduling that the studio has already announced. It was inevitable that Avengers 2 would make money on name value alone, but a massive dip in quality could really poison audiences against the Phase Three efforts, which will include lesser-known properties like Doctor Strange, The Black Panther, and Captain Marvel.

Luckily for the company and for comic fans everywhere, Age of Ultron is a fairly worthy successor to the Avengers throne. Marvel ain't going nowhere just yet.

And yet there's still no Black Widow movie.

Age of Ultron begins where absolutely nothing left off: with the Avengers re-teamed, storming a Hydra stronghold to steal Mr. MacGuffin Loki's scepter. If you don't have a thorough knowledge of all 10 previous Marvel Cinematic Universe entries as well as one or two of the television shows, prepare to hit the ground sprinting and wheezing. 

While you're hacking up a lung, let's have a brief re-introduction to our main cast of characters. The assembled Avengers include Iron Man aka Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.), the billionaire playboy weapons manufacturer with a robotic exoskeleton; Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), a gamma radiated scientist who turns into the opposite of the Jolly Green Giant when he's angered; Captain America (Chris Evans), the long-preserved purveyor of the American Dream; Thor (Chris Hemsworth), an otherworldly being with otherworldly deltoids about whom Norse mythology has been written; Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), an ex-spy with thighs that can snap your neck; and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), an ace shot with a bow and arrow, and my personal favorite Avenger. 

While we're on the subject, where's my Hawkeye movie?

The Avengers are mowing through the faceless goons when Hydra introduces their two newest creations, the X-Men mutants Eastern European experiment volunteers, the twin siblings Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen). Their parents were killed by Stark weaponry and they want nothing more than good ol' fashioned revenge on Iron Man and his posse. Eventually, for reasons that he is a dick, Tony Stark decides to see if he can create artificial intelligence. He does, and it is called Ultron (James Spader, of all people), and it wants to destroy the human race. Good work, Tony.

While Ultron tries to find himself an enhanced body and wipe out the population of the Earth, the Avengers work their way through a series of interpersonal tensions and have climactic, building-leveling fights in just about every location across the globe that will let film crews past Customs.

My personal biggest concern with Age of Ultron was if it could capture the sprightly comedy of the first installment, and I was not disappointed. Sarcasm and wit drips from the eaves of the film like the aftermath of an explosion at the molasses factory. The best scenes of the film are those that take a break from the Important Comix moments to just let the personalities of the characters ping off of one another. As this was exactly what I was looking for, I was immensely pleased, but the fact remains that the film is a little lopsided. The renewed strength of the dialogue can't quite match the diminishing returns of the battle sequences.

I understand that there's only so many combinations of blows, laser beams, and hammer thrusts that the action scenes can provide (which they do, amply), but there's a certain lack of creativity behind the combat, especially in the climactic sequence. There are some admittedly terrific combo moves when two Avengers combine their powers, but for the most part these sequences feel disjointed. It doesn't feel like a team working together so much as a series of vignettes about punching.

Hella rad vignettes, but still.

The biggest flaw of the film, and the only one than comes even within a mile of being film-breaking is its middle third. There is a swath of about 30 minutes in which the humor is dropped in favor of arbitrarily introducing what feels like dozens of plot strands that make the whole mess far more complicated than it needs to be, leaning a little heavily on extracurricular comic-reading to get its point across. Also there's a few scenes sprinkled into the middle that feel like they're ripped directly from a 90's techno-thriller where high school kids battle online villains through the "'Net." It doesn't make a lot of sense and it's not particularly fun, but it doesn't take too long for the film to incorporate these elements and get back on its feet.

Also there's some shockingly dark implications that the Avengers might not be much better than a terrorist group considering the widespread damage they inflict across the globe, some of which echoes 9/11 imagery a little too closely for comfort. The film seems tentatively tempted to explore this thread before it jams itself back into Fun! Action! Mode.

HA! HA! HA! Big funny Iron Man! Please don't think about the skyscraper we just leveled.

But the dark side of Age of Ultron isn't ample. It's not like this is a Christopher Nolan flick. For the most part it's an engaging, light adventure pic that reliably executes what should honestly be a premise as stale as a Big Lots gingerbread house. It's fun, it's big, and it's thrilling. What more could you want, honestly?

And now that we have an entire Avengers film and umptybillion Iron Man/Captain America sequels under our belts, we know the characters more intimately than ever before so the juggling act of handling so many personalities simultaneously is a little smoother. This is perhaps the only element of the film that's actively better than its predecessor. Age of Ultron grabs a handful of genuine character moments  and tosses them to each of the Avengers like an overeager flower girl. These developments are perhaps a little bit more reliant on basic emotional indicators rather than truly intensely three-dimensional personas, but holy hell we're talking about a comic book movie. This is revolutionary.

So overall, yes, Avengers: Age of Ultron is a fun time at the movies. It doesn't capture the lightning in a bottle that the original film did, but its light bulb in a bottle does the trick.

PSA: Once the black and white credits scroll, feel free to take off. You can stick around until the end of the credits if you wish, but brace yourselves for a fat wad of nothing.

TL;DR: Avengers: Age of Ultron is a reliably entertaining sequel to a generation-defining superhero hit.

Rating: 7/10

Should I Spend Money On This? You already have.

Word Count: 1217

Reviews In This Series

Avengers: Age of Ultron (Whedon, 2015)

Captain America: Civil War (Russo & Russo, 2016)

Avengers: Infinity War (Russo & Russo, 2016)

Ant-Man and the Wasp (Reed, 2018)

Women Are From Venus

Warning: This review contains moderate visual spoilers for Under the Skin. Because the film operates on a plane almost entirely separate from what we mortals would consider a "narrative," these are actually more relevant than actual plot spoilers. Keep that in mind and carry on if you dare.

Year: 2014

Director: Jonathan Glazer

Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy McWilliams, Kevin McAlinden

Run Time: 1 hour 48 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Hello everybody, and welcome back to Women in Horror Month! As I mentioned in my catch-up post, one of the most influential horror(ish) films of the past year was Under the Skin, which I have finally had the modest pleasure of receiving into my eyeballs. Starring Scarlett Johansson, this experimental sci-fi/horror picture is playing a game where the rules are made up and the points don't matter, but it's more than a little stirring.

And not in the way you're probably expecting.

Under the Skin is about many things, most of them as intangible and ephemeral as a midsummer night's dream. Or one of Lady Gaga's bras. But the one thing it can confidently assert to be about is the Female (Scarlett Johansson), a woman who is pretty clearly an alien although this film's definition of the word "clear" is in a completely different spectrum of reality than the one we live in. On the scale of clarity, it's long gone from "it's outright stated in the film," past "it's implied in the film," and somewhere in the vicinity of "the IMDb page says it's sci-fi so I guess something must be going on."

Anyway, the Female drives around Middle of Nowhere, Scotland in an unmarked van, chatting up random dudes and observing the rest with a keen eye. The ones that she successfully picks up she takes to her home, an inky black void that swallows them up. Presumably this is how she eats, or powers her ship, or... gets off? Honestly, I don't know. This film views specificity as a sort of mangy dog that should be kept in the backyard when company is around.

Just like men, Amirite?

As she examines the human race inside and out, she slowly begins to form a sense of her own identity. Her exploration of what exactly that means forms the extended third act, which is where the film drops its experimental, inscrutable nature in favor of a perplexingly dull slog through the woods in the extended third act.

All said, Under the Skin is a very unique little duckling. Focusing on tiny human events and interactions that form a tableaux of life, love, and violence to underscore the Female's journey, it's like the Boyhood of experimental horror. It doesn't cohere quite as well as Linklater's film, but director Jonathan Glazer has had considerably less experience in the realm of the perfectly meandering narrative.

As the film cycles through its metronomically unstructured beats, it slowly loses grip on its already admirably slippery premise. There's more than enough pulsing beneath the surface to lead to many different interpretations of the central theme, and that's great. Experimentation is encouraged in cinema, but there's ambiguity and then there's opacity.

Despite its teeming thematic possibilities, Under the Skin frequently slips into an arcane fog of ostentation. Of all the potential readings of the film (the formation of identity, the performative aspect of gender, the arbitrary nature of death and health and human action), most of them wither and die in the corner during more than one visually stunning occasion where the film firmly plants itself up its own ass.

And the rhythm goes splat.

Now, a film doesn't have to come right out and declare its intentions. If that were true, cinema as an art form would be duller than a vacation to... well, Scotland. So let me just say that a film this arcane in which nothing in particular happens and even the most simple of ideas is hidden behind an obscuring curtain of avant-garde is not necessarily my cup of tea. Moving on.

By far the most invaluable element of Under the Skin is its aesthetic. The costume design is simplistic but evocative of the shoddy, worn aesthetic of the world. The sound design is chilling, juxtaposing long periods of silence with unsettling muffled, garbled noise and a bone-chillingly shrill string score. And the expertly chosen locations help keep the film feeling isolated and alien. Let's face it, Scottish accents might as well be a different language unbeknownst to us regular humans. 

But above and beyond all that, there's the fact that the experimental art pieces that lay scattered about the film are, in actuality, truly superb bits of visual phenomena. Creating colorless voids of pure white and inky black and countermanding them with bold, bright hues, under the skin creates a stark, brutal colorscape that provides an effortlessly disturbing atmosphere. You're never quite sure what's happening, but it's damn beautiful. Also the gore-type effects are rare but stunningly executed. I shall say no more in this regard.

I mean, look. This wig is a work of art.

Oh, also this film shows an erect penis. All of its ample nudity is stalwartly non-erotic, so there's no need to get one's knickers in a bunch, but I always like to point out films that break through our archaic censorship system with some male nudity. Equality!

All in all, Under the Skin is only worth it for the pretty pictures. So if that's what you love, dive right on in. It has enough pristine special effects to make up for its paucity of plot, but for those looking for a more traditional good time, please feel free to move right along.

TL;DR: Under the Skin is an inscrutable experimental film, but it supplies some truly brutal and unforgettable horror images.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 970

Right Ingredients, Wrong Recipe

Year: 2014

Director: Jon Favreau

Cast: Jon Favreau, John Leguizamo, Sofía Vergara

Run Time: 1 hour 54 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

All the online reviews for Chef are populated with unbearably awful cooking puns. I swore never to stoop so low, but the film is way too overbaked for me to avoid their siren call.

I'mma give it to you straight, guys. Chef is roughly three times as long as the amount of time it takes to make a tray of Nestlé Toll House cookies. It would be a much better choice devouring all 180 of those cookies in a row than watching Chef especially considering that it would still be less saccharine than the movie itself.

Indie comedy or Disney Channel original series? You decide!

Chef opens with its title. White on a black background. No frills. The title itself isn't even all that interesting. This lack of imagination permeates the film down to the last frame. I imagine that the plot (which involves an estranged workaholic dad struggling to reenergize his career while connecting with his estranged wife and son) would seem fresh and new if you'd spent the last twenty years inside a test tube (I would have made a "born yesterday" joke, but these plot beats could be sensed even from the womb), but it fails to amuse, especially in the wake of the far superior Begin Again.

In brief. Carl Casper (Jon Favreau) was once a promising young chef, but has been brown-beaten by Riva (Dustin Hoffman), the owner of his restaurant, to simply make the old favorites over and over again. His feelings of being trapped creatively are exacerbated by the food critic Ramsey Michel (Oliver Platt) when he trashes Chef Casper's cooking on his blog.

While Casper struggles to regain his dignity, he ignores the transparent neediness of his son Percy (Emjay Anthony) and generally blows him off during the few moments Percy is not with his mother Inez (Sofía Vergara), who is filthy rich and has no definable job, yet remains the most solidly three-dimensional woman in a script dominated by males written by a man (Jon Favreau himself) who evidently has lost any and all perspective on how the female mind works. 

And a question. Has Jon Favreau ever not had money? The script would seem to indicate that he can't conceive of a world in which poverty might be an issue. In one memorable but certainly not unique scene, the ostensibly broke and maxed-out Casper offers to take his kid to Disney World. As if! Bill Gates himself could only afford about three tickets to that place.

As evidenced by Jon Favreau's wife, Chef does not exist in a universe that operates by the same internal logic as our own.

When he quits his job after butting heads with Riva and accidentally starting a flame war with Ramsey, ending up becoming a phenomenon on Twitter, Carl must struggle to earn back his dignity and status by... borrowing his wife's money and starting an instantly successful food truck. Remember what I said about this script coming from a place of upper-class privilege? The stakes in this film are so low that they wouldn't even pose a threat to the most thin-skinned of vampires.

And that's just but one tonal issue within this supernaturally inept screenplay. The idea of a food truck is bluntly introduced in the first scene (before his job is even on the line) in a piece of dialogue so clumsy and forced that it barrels into your ears like an actual truck. The gags are endless, Carl is shown working day and night but never actually sleeping, conversations go in circles and hit the same points over and over (a single line repeats the same word upwards of three times), side characters teleport across the country to blindly serve the protagonist, and Scarlett Johansson is wasted in a role that involves practically reaching orgasm while watching an overweight man cook pasta.

I mean I've heard of food porn, but this is just overkill.

And that's not all. Either the editing is jarring or the characters have taken some Hogwarts Online™ courses in apparition. Glaring continuity errors spice up some of the blander moments, alarmingly ugly rack focus is brought out to unnecessarily spruce up otherwise normal scenes, and some scenes make you wonder if they only ever got one take and were forced to stick with it.

If I were them, I would have done as many takes as possible while eating that barbecue.

To be fair, this movie isn't all bad. In fact it's not bad at all. It's a frothy fun bit of food porn-infused pop entertainment. But it's so self-indulgent and routine that it's hard to avoid noticing all the manifold flaws in the craftsmanship. Perhaps three duties was a tad too much for director-star-writer Mr. Favreau, who is spread too thin to excel at a single one of them.

However, the man surrounds himself with capable actors. John Leguizamo and Bobby Cannavale operate at a pitch perfect level as a sort of Greek chorus of support staff. Their energy is only brought down when they are forced to interact with Chef Casper, who sinks their chemistry like a stone. Vergara and Johansson work magic with supremely limited roles. And Robert Downey, Jr. injects Chef with a much-needed energy boost at the halfway point.

Perhaps the most remarkable element of the film and one of the only things that recommends it in any major way is its handling of technology. I've made my fair share of complaints and theories about the "texts on the screen" effects of films like The Fault in Our Stars, but Chef brings that trope to its inevitable next level.

Chef Casper's tweets appear onscreen, but in an organic three-dimensional manner that allows them to interact with their environment. They appear differently when viewed from different angles and are even occasionally blocked by other objects. And when they are sent, the text boxes turn into little birds and fly off, perfectly integrating the sound, design, and permanence of a tweet.

It's a tad unfortunate that the best thing about the film is its tweeting, but it's enough to keep the bloated and messy thing afloat. I can't recommend it with quite the fervor that it appears to have been receiving, but Chef is a decent enough diversion featuring a couple solid performances as long as its sybaritic star stays out of the way.

TL;DR: Chef really isn't very good, but it features a unique view of technology and several memorable performances.

Rating: 5/10

Should I Spend Money On This? No, but you won't regret choosing it on a lazy RedBox night a couple months from now.

Word Count: 1127

Best Picture Roundup: Siri Not Siri

I actually watched another Best Picture nominee! This might be the highest proportion of contenders I've seen in any Oscar year!

...I'm not a great film major.

Year: 2013

Director: Spike Jonze

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson, Amy Adams

Run Time: 2 hours 6 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Before I dive into some of the harder to swallow nominees like Dallas Buyers Club or 12 Years a Slave, I thought it best to start with the soft, pastel embrace of Her, Spike Jonze's tale of love in the not too distant future. A strangely divisive movie, this love it or hate it story details a future world in which a newly divorced man, Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) falls in love with an artificially intelligent operating system named Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson).

That's about all there is to the plot, really. Chris Pratt magically appears (inexplicably dressed like Ron Swanson) in a couple scenes because he is contractually obligated to show up in the exact places you'd least expect him. Also Theodore's friend Amy (Amy Adams) has troubles with her husband (Matt Letscher), a man who proves that no matter how much things change, douchebaggery is eternal.

Although it doesn't commit the Wolf of Wall Street sin of stretching a diaphanous plot to an unbearable three hours, it can hardly make it to two without tearing somewhat, despite the strengths of the screenplay and performances.

Although any movie with Amy Adams deserves at least two hours of your time.

Largely a one man show, Her relies entirely on credible interactions between one man and a disembodied voice and Phoenix sells it utterly, packaging it all in a man full of tics and an invisible complete backstory hidden behind every gesture and expression. Not to be petty, but he certainly deserved that acting nomination far more than Leo ever did. Sorry, Shannon.

Johansson also does a terrific job, exuding effortless Rashida Jones charm and singlehandedly steering a script that loses track of her character around the beginning of Act Three. All without being onscreen for a single second! It's hard to synthesize naturalistic emotions on a soundstage stool clutching a bottle of mineral water, but she owns it.

And oh, the production design! All creamy pastels and just a touch beyond modern architecture, Her imagines a future seamlessly attached to the direction of the world as we are living it. The set design is soft, smooth, tactile, and pleasant - the exact culmination of a society that is slowly collapsing inward as people find newer and newer ways to ignore each other.

And what else could this film possibly be about but the way in which modern technology provides us enough comfort to ignore those niggling feelings like loneliness or unfulfillment? Don't get me wrong, I love technology. But there people who use it as a crutch to avoid ever having to interact with people and, well, the metaphor isn't too difficult to unpack.

Nope. Nothing metaphorical here.

What Her does best is casual and relaxed world building, one of my favorite elements of sci-fi/futuristic films. Only one of the technological advancements of this future is important to the story, but there's enough information in the dialogue and background to provide a complete and credible universe for this technology to exist within.

I guess I'm just a sucker for well thought out alternate universes. But the way Theodore's video games can interact seamlessly with his AI and his desktop files makes me yearn just a little bit. Really incredible production design that was put together with great care and love makes me proud.

But anyway. The rest of the movie. There's some great cinematography at work here that actually enhances the story instead of clouding it with artsy squartsy nonsense (although it does have its fair share of inscrutable visual symbolism) and the screenplay is sprinkled with Oscar bait nuggets of wisdom tailor made for inspirational Tumblr blogs.

The third act is where things begin to unfortunately unravel. The enjoyable premise loses a lot of its flair past the 90 minute mark and begins to drag as the plot scrambles to find an ending (which I won't spoil here but I will say that the company that makes the OS's should prepare for a hell of a class action suit).

There's several problems inherent in being in love with the device that's in charge of your entire computer.

Her always operates at a base level of pleasantness that it rarely departs from, but it finds it difficult to be both pleasant and meaningful for the entirety of the run time, although it does come close. I certainly enjoyed it and would recommend it, but maybe it's not such an important film as all that, despite the many high quality efforts put into its production.

TL;DR: Her is a tad overlong but never unpleasant.

Rating: 7/10

Did It Deserve Best Picture? Probably not, but it was an interesting piece of intellectual cinematic fluff.

Word Count: 833