Fury (2014)

October 16, 2014Posted in2014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, War

Fury14

*½/****
starring Brad Pitt, Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Michael Peña
written and directed by David Ayer

by Walter Chaw Signifying not much, David Ayer's Fury is another of his brutal excoriations/celebrations of men under pressure that people like Howard Hawks did really well because people like Howard Hawks are geniuses. It follows Wardaddy (Brad Pitt), a tank commander in the 2nd Armored Division doing mop-up duty in the heart of Nazi Germany during the first months of 1945. His motley crew of battle-hardened, psychopathic misfits is composed of backwoods inbred "Coon-Ass" (Jon Bernthal); the quietly religious one who's going to go insane, Bible (Shia LaBeouf); Mexican guy Gordo (Michael Pena); and clean-cut-rookie-whom-Wardaddy-will-take-under-his-wing-and-see-himself-in-while-they-both-learn-something-from-each-other-they-didn't-think-they-could Norman (Logan Lerman). Episodic in the way of such things, it's a story of men and war told through a series of tank battles, intra-tank squabbling, and dramatic scenes like the one where Wardaddy makes Norman kill someone in cold blood, and that other one where Wardaddy makes Norman sleep with a beautiful young fräulein they discover hiding in the rubble (Alicia von Rittberg). Woe be to any woman in an Ayers joint, however. Spoiler.

Gone Girl (2014)

October 2, 2014Posted in2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: David Fincher, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

Gonegirl

**/****
starring Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Neil Patrick Harris, Tyler Perry
screenplay by Gillian Flynn, based on her novel
directed by David Fincher

by Walter Chaw The only question David Fincher’s movies try to answer is whether it’s possible to do everything well (better than well, really–I mean better than anyone has ever done anything before) and still produce what is essentially a piece of shit. He’s the king of garbage cinema, David Lean doing Jackie Collins for some damn reason. Sometimes, he does misanthropic stuff that’s transcendent (Se7en, The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), and sometimes he does misanthropic stuff like Gone Girl. Don’t get me wrong: for what it is, Gone Girl is a masterpiece, but its source, Gillian Flynn’s ridiculously popular potboiler, is so trashy that at some point one can’t help but wonder if Fincher isn’t testing himself with the weakest possible material. After tackling this and Stieg Larsson, I suspect he was in the running for, and disappointed not to get his hands on, Fifty Shades of Grey; how about this one with Fabio on the cover, Mr. Fincher? There seems no low to which Fincher wouldn’t descend, and here goes your deeply, comically misanthropic proof.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014)

August 8, 2014Posted in2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

Teenagemutantninja

½*/****
starring Megan Fox, Will Arnett, William Fichtner, Johnny Knoxville
screenplay by Josh Appelbaum & André Nemec and Evan Daugherty
directed by Jonathan Liebesman

by Walter Chaw Jonathan Liebesman’s brutally awful Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a Michael Bay co-production in conjunction with kid’s basic-cable network Nickelodeon, meaning it’s a PG-13 piece of shit aimed at preteens that packs a payload of sexual objectification, mild torture, and assorted grotesquerie. That’s really all there is to say about it. It implies bestiality in the constant come-ons aimed at Bay’s favourite target (Megan Fox) by a foul-looking monster, then makes a joke out of a human counterpart staring at her ass while she’s dangling out a car window. Best is the moment where one of the monsters declares Ms. Fox to be “so hot I can feel my shell tightening,” which comes just after she’s equated with a “sexy bird,” because birds are slim animals as opposed to fat animals like pigs and cows. Later, Whoopi Goldberg appears as that Cabbage Patch doll you didn’t get for Christmas because you’re going to a Michael Bay-produced movie advertised on a children’s cartoon channel, and one of the bad guys instructs his henchmen to “drain every last drop of blood” from our heroes, “even if it kills them.”

Magic in the Moonlight (2014)

July 31, 2014Posted in2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

Magicinthemoonlight

**/****
starring Eileen Atkins, Colin Firth, Marcia Gay Harden, Hamish Linklater
written and directed by Woody Allen

by Angelo Muredda There’s a scene late in Woody Allen’s mostly forgotten You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger that briefly complicates its status as one of the prolific filmmaker’s lighter doodles. Swept away by her feelings for her boss (Antonio Banderas), Naomi Watts’s normally buttoned-up Sally takes a chance and confesses. In turn, she is swiftly rejected, and summarily dismissed as a partner, a colleague, and a person in one cruel wave of the arm. It’s a scene Allen has indulged in before: he’s always liked to see his onscreen women suffer a little, whether in Isaac’s callous it’s-not-me-it’s-you dumping of Tracy (Mariel Hemingway) in Manhattan or the unceremonious jilting of poor Cecilia (Mia Farrow) in The Purple Rose of Cairo. But it’s a sharp sting in a film as innocuous as Stranger, a reminder that for all the comforts of settling into his aesthetic of Windsor typeface and big-band music, Allen is not an especially warm filmmaker, not even in his comedies. Even with that in mind, his newest, Magic in the Moonlight, is an especially baffling thing–a dry, mean-spirited essay about that old romantic-comedy staple: the inevitability of death and decay.

Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

July 30, 2014Posted in2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

Guardiansofthegalaxy

***/****
starring Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Benicio Del Toro
written by James Gunn and Nicole Perlman
directed by James Gunn

by Walter Chaw After years of looking for a Star Wars for my son (too little for Lord of the Rings; nothing to attach to in Pacific Rim), here’s James Gunn’s awesome Guardians of the Galaxy to fit the bill. It’s science-fiction in exactly the same way that Star Wars is science-fiction–essentially a serial western, with Chris Pratt as both Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, green Zoe Saldana as Princess Leia, and a raccoon and a tree subbing for Wookiee and droid. It has a secret history for our hero, a scary baddie in a black cloak, and an entire universe of wonders it treats like an amusement park. It’s also fun in the same way Star Wars was fun, and fresh in the same way, too: heedlessly, carefree, even bratty, which explains the post-credits cut-scene that’s easily the best of them. Furthermore, it has a soundtrack packed with AM Gold that lends the picture camp and hipster cred simultaneously. Heavy on exposition at times, squandering a few opportunities to demonstrate a better team action dynamic, and not about anything at the end of the day, Guardians of the Galaxy‘s sword and shield is that its irreverence and self-awareness land as self-deprecating and warm. Doesn’t hurt that it’s a blast.

Lucy (2014)

July 23, 2014Posted in2014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, France, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

Lucy

*/****
starring Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, Amr Waked, Choi Min-Sik
written and directed by Luc Besson

by Walter Chaw I recall Luc Besson confessing that his The Fifth Element was based on an idea he’d had as a child; I’m going to wager the same is true of his dreadful Lucy. It’s a pre-pubescent boy’s fantasy of cool: a mash of silly pop-science buoying a beautiful woman’s mutation from impossible party girl into deity through the agency of stem-cell-related drug abuse. The good news is that South Korean superstar Choi Min-Sik (Oldboy) gets a mainstream American debut in a juicy role that nonetheless feels like a wasted opportunity (see: Beat Takeshi in Johnny Mnemonic). The bad news is Lucy is prurient pap that pup-critics will declare proof of “vulgar auteurism,” no matter the redundancy and ignorance of the term itself. Perhaps fitting, then, that the only defense of a movie this obnoxious and wilfully dumb is a term and movement founded on the same principles. I’ve defended Besson in the past–I’m an unapologetic admirer of Leon/The Professional and The Messenger (and Danny the Dog, which he produced, is a peerless statement on the relationship between Western and Asian action stars). But Lucy is reductive, sub-La femme Nikita effluvia that takes a premise niftily played with in Ted Chiang’s beyond-brilliant 1991 short story “Understand” and grinds it into a grey paste.

Boyhood (2014)

July 17, 2014Posted in2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Directors: Richard Linklater, Drama, Theatrical

Boyhoodcaption

***½/****
starring Patricia Arquette, Ellar Coltrane, Lorelei Linklater, Ethan Hawke
written and directed by Richard Linklater

by Angelo Muredda “I was somebody’s daughter, and then I was somebody’s fucking mother,” Patricia Arquette’s Olivia complains early on in Richard Linklater’s uncommonly rich, deceptively titled Boyhood. Though it’s been rightly celebrated for its guerrilla shoots and nomadic production history–depicting an adolescent’s maturation from six to eighteen by reassembling the cast once a year, more or less in secret, for a few days at a time–Boyhood might be most impressive as a reflection on the impossibility of fully capturing what happens in all those “and thens” that constitute a life. An impressionistic masterwork, Boyhood is arguably both Linklater’s most ambitious project and his most easygoing, revelling in the amorphousness of his conceit as well as the freedom it allows him to putter around in the unformed material of his characters’ still-unfolding lives.

Venus in Fur (2013)

July 17, 2014Posted in2013, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Theatrical

Venusinfur

La Vénus à la fourrure
***½/****
starring Emmanuelle Seigner, Mathieu Amalric
screenplay by David Ives, based on his play
directed by Roman Polanski

by Walter Chaw If it’s stagebound, Roman Polanski’s Venus in Fur, an adaptation of David Ives’s play that is itself an adaptation in part of the Leopold von Sacher-Masoch novel, is at least not stagebound without a purpose. It reminds of Adaptation. in its awareness of itself as an object open to deconstruction (and Derrida is mentioned in the text to make it metacritical in that sense as well); the fact that it’s a play captured on film only underscores its conceit. Venus in Fur is also a career summary for the octogenarian director at a point where his contemporaries are declining steeply in their dotage. Spry and clever, surprisingly funny at times, and at all times indisputably alive, it finds Polanski’s themes of gender subversion in high dunder, opening with a quote from the Apocryphal Book of Judith where the titular heroine seduces enemy general Holofrenes and decapitates (read: emasculates/castrates) him as he reclines in post-coital bliss. Polanski casts an actor who could be his younger doppelgänger, Mathieu Amalric, and opposite him in this two-person drama Polanski’s own wife, Emmanuelle Seigner–transparent, vulnerable, courageous casting that reminds very much of Hitchcock in his late masterpiece period. Venus in Fur is Polanski’s Marnie: a grand survey of all of his sexual peccadilloes that works as apologia, confession, and explication, eventually conveying Polanski’s acceptance of himself as deeply flawed, but better for the wisdom.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)

July 9, 2014Posted in****/****, 2014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

Dawnoftheplanetoftheapes

****/****
starring Andy Serkis, Jason Clarke, Gary Oldman, Keri Russell
screenplay by Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver and Mark Bomback
directed by Matt Reeves

by Walter Chaw Matt Reeves’s remarkable Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (hereafter Dawn) isn’t the best sequel since The Empire Strikes Back, but it is the best sequel since The Dark Knight. It’s uncomplicated but beautifully executed–so pure and genuinely felt that its conclusions about the unavoidable zero-sum game of tribalism land are not didactic but poetic. That certain sense of Tennyson bleeds into the overgrown post-apocalyptic landscape, all torpid acedia in its human ruins and in a tree-bound ape village that represents a sort of circular hopelessness. We recognize it as the beginning of a successor civilization that is unfortunately exactly like the beginnings of the civilization on which it’s being built. Dawn‘s best trick is in balancing our sympathies in this way. We cast our lot with heroic Caesar (Andy Serkis, in a motion-capture performance that is one of the great silent-movie turns, ever), who’s pushing against a Cheney-manqué in Koba (Toby Kebbell). Caesar gratifies our instinct for the underdog: it’s easier to identify with Adam than with Nero. And then Reeves shifts to a human refuge and populates it with people, specifically Malcolm (Jason Clarke) and Ellie (Keri Russell), working on a peaceful solution against the more bellicose and paranoid of their number (Kirk Acevedo and Gary Oldman). No fair guessing which philosophy wins out–it’s the only one that ever seems to.

Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014)

June 26, 2014Posted in2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Michael Bay, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

Transformers4

ZERO STARS/****
starring Mark Wahlberg, Stanley Tucci, Nicola Peltz, robutts
screenplay by Ehren Kruger
directed by Michael Bay

by Walter Chaw Early on in Transformers: Age of Extinction (hereafter Trans4), director Michael Bay seems to be equating the unjust hunt for our noble robot allies the Autobots with the Tea Party’s persecution of immigrants, and then it goes to shit. It’s a meaningless, impossible-to-follow trainwreck in the patented Michael Bay style that, also in the Michael Bay style, is deeply hateful of women and difference. What’s new this time out is that the central object of violation for our lascivious appreciation is 17-year-old Tessa (19-year-old Nicola Peltz), who, upon introduction, is leered at by an assortment of older gentlemen before Bay whips out a (no-kidding) legal justification for our statutory interest. It reminds of the Tony Danza vehicle She’s Out of Control not only in that its father figure, Cade YEAGER-because-it’s-America-fuck-yeah (Mark Wahlberg), is over-interested in his daughter’s budding sexuality, but also in that Trans4 is awful. Awful in its misogyny, sure, and awful because, in what has become a tradition in Bay’s Transformers franchise, the only African-American character is comic relief…and a slave. Never mind. Oh, and it hates the infirm and misses no opportunity to mock their infirmity. Again, never mind.

Jersey Boys (2014)

June 19, 2014Posted in2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Clint Eastwood, Drama, Musical, Theatrical

Jerseyboys

*/****
starring John Lloyd Young, Erich Bergen, Michael Lomenda, Christopher Walken
screenplay by Marshall Brickman & Rick Elice
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Angelo Muredda Clint Eastwood has never been the most self-referential filmmaker, preferring shopworn competence to flashy displays of idiosyncrasy. But it’s hard to imagine he’s not at least slightly gaming his audience throughout Jersey Boys, an otherwise limp tour through the Four Seasons‘ early discography. What else are we to make of the gag where baby-faced songwriter Bob Gaudio (Chris Klein dead ringer Erich Bergen) catches an image of his director’s grizzled mug in “Rawhide” on a hotel TV? While that feels like a pretty straightforward joke on Eastwood’s uncanny endurance all the way from “Sherry” (1962) to Jersey Boys the Broadway musical (2005), it’s a bit harder to read an equally surreal moment like the dispute between producer and sometime lyricist Bob Crewe (Mike Doyle) and wise-guy guitarist Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza) over the band’s sound. “I’m hearing it in sky blue,” Crewe whines in the middle of a recording session, “and you’re giving me brown.” On the one hand, it’s not like Eastwood to take the piss out of his own work, but on the other, what better analogy for his adaptation process can there be than the conversion of a sky-blue all-American songbook to a shit-brown sung résumé, rendered all in blacks and greys save for the odd splash of salmon and the occasional scrap of tweed?

22 Jump Street (2014)

June 11, 2014Posted in2014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Theatrical

22jumpstreet

½*/****
starring Jonah Hill, Channing Tatum, Peter Stormare, Ice Cube
screenplay by Michael Bacall and Oren Uziel and Rodney Rothman
directed by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller

by Walter Chaw The smart parts are unbelievably stupid and the stupid parts are unendurable, making 22 Jump Street, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s follow-up to their well-regarded The Lego Movie, one of those things like Shrek that should do pretty well. Itself a sequel to a reboot of a cult television show about twenty-something cops pretending to be teenagers, the film finds buddy-cop heroes Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Jenko (Channing Tatum) going undercover in college, the better to bust some drug dealer. They have a tough-talking superior in Capt. Dickson (Ice Cube), who, this time out, gets a glass office someone refers to as a “cube of ice.” Get it? There’s much acknowledgment that sequels are often terrible, inflated things deficient in new ideas and reliant on amplification, and it’s delivered with this exhausted, arch air. At least that’s how I read it. I didn’t even crack a smile.

Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

June 5, 2014Posted in2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Tom Cruise

Edgeoftomorrow

***/****
starring Tom Cruise, Emily Blunt, Bill Paxton, Brendan Gleeson
screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie and Jez Butterworth & John-Henry Butterworth, based on the graphic novel All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka
directed by Doug Liman

by Angelo Muredda Whatever one thinks of his weaselly insouciance as a performer, it's hard to argue against Tom Cruise's record of choosing solid collaborators to bring a certain kind of high-concept amuse-bouche to life. From Joseph Kosinski's Oblivion, a derivative film about derivatives, to the more or less solid auteurist permutations of the Mission: Impossible franchise, the results have varied, but Cruise's reputation as the sort of star who can get moderately interesting pulp bankrolled and realized by moderately interesting talents has deservedly persisted. So we arrive at Edge of Tomorrow, Doug Liman's first kick at the Cruise can–a clever, fleetly-paced sci-fi riff on Groundhog Day with all the paradoxes of Duncan Jones's structurally similar Source Code but a more playful demeanour.

The Double (2014) + Cold in July (2014)

May 29, 2014Posted in2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Revenge, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

Thedouble

THE DOUBLE
**½/****
starring Jesse Eisenberg, Mia Wasikowska, Wallace Shawn, James Fox
screenplay by Richard Ayoade & Avi Korine, based on the novella by Fyodor Dostoevsky
directed by Richard Ayoade

COLD IN JULY
***/****
starring Michael C. Hall, Sam Shepard, Vinessa Shaw, Don Johnson
screenplay by Nick Damici & Jim Mickle, based on the novel by Joe R. Lansdale
directed by Jim Mickle

by Walter Chaw Writer-director Richard Ayoade’s follow-up to his well-received feature debut Submarine, this loose interpretation of Dostoevsky’s The Double plays rather like Kafka adapted by David Lynch, or Terry Gilliam at his most restrained. It’s good. It doesn’t plough new ground, necessarily, but its dedication to a theme and a very fine performance by Jesse Eisenberg as a man and his titular doppelgänger carry it over its rougher patches. Visually engaging with its washed-out, diseased, Cronenbergian/Lars von Trier colour palette and packed with innovative, maybe self-conscious camera flourishes and affectations, it all plays out a bit insular, a little too obvious given the entire history of the double in this kind of movie, but at least it’s executed with a persistence of vision. What catches me up short about Ayoade’s films, though, is that ineffable quality of audition reel. They’re entirely identifiable by the breadth of their references: Submarine for its obvious connection to Harold and Maude (and why do I keep hearing “The Only Living Boy in New York” when it unspools?), now The Double with its portfolio of referents. If it happens to be assembled smartly, more’s the frustration. I can’t tell whether the movie is good because Ayoade’s a gifted filmmaker or simply a great scrap-booker. I guess it doesn’t really matter.

Maleficent (2014)

May 29, 2014Posted in2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Revenge, Romance, Theatrical

Maleficent

***/****
starring Angelina Jolie, Sharlto Copley, Elle Fanning, Sam Riley
screenplay by Linda Woolverton
directed by Robert Stromberg

by Walter Chaw A gyno-centric reimagining of Disney’s own Sleeping Beauty, visual-effects guy Robert Stromberg’s directorial debut Maleficent (from a script by never-good Disney house-overwriter Linda Woolverton) takes all the ingredients for a horrible disaster and somehow wrestles a fitfully fascinating film from them. It hates men, that much is certain. Paints them as alternately servile and monstrous. Good men follow orders and are easily intimidated; bad men are sexually dangerous and violent. Good men know their place, led about on a tether and bullied into situations by women in groups or singly; and the rest, well…sufficed to say that Sharlto Copley, the most Ellis-from-Die-Hard human, is cast as chief BigBad, the good king Stefan. The film even goes so far as to suggest that romantic, heterosexual love is a sham, a dangerous one at that–something it tries to soften with a couple of doe-eyed exchanges during the epilogue, though I’m not buying it. In fact, had Maleficent truly committed to its themes of feminine empowerment and rage, had it linked them together hand-in-hand without entire agonizing stretches of Disney-fication, it could have entered into the same conversation as Tarantino’s Kill Bills. Here’s another film with a kick-ass female protagonist who finds strength in motherhood. Alas, for as often as it’s great, it’s limited by what its masters will allow.

X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)

May 22, 2014Posted in2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, Time Travel

Xmen7

***½/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, James McAvoy
screenplay by Simon Kinberg
directed by Bryan Singer

by Walter Chaw The seventh X-Men film including the two Wolverine flicks, Bryan Singer's X-Men: Days of Future Past (hereafter X7) is a sterling return to form for Singer, exiled after X2 for choosing to helm the spectacularly-underestimated Superman Returns. He brings with him, as he brought to the Superman mythology, a complete empathy with the material. He understands that the X-Men property–comic-book mutants battling human bureaucrats aiming to outlaw them as alien threats–is, just like the Superman property, at its heart about the pain and complexity of being born different. They're assimilation melodramas that present their heroes with the seductive choice to pass as "normals" when possible, to seek vengeance against bigotry as it presents itself, or to rise above it to achieve a sense of self and carve out a corner of the world for themselves.

Godzilla (2014)

May 14, 2014Posted in2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

Godzilla2014

***½/****
starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ken Watanabe, Elizabeth Olsen, Bryan Cranston
screenplay by Max Borenstein
directed by Gareth Edwards

by Walter Chaw Gareth Edwards's Godzilla, the 32nd Godzilla film just including the Toho series and the three previous American contributions, manages somehow to walk the line between nostalgia for the guy-in-a-suit heroism of the earlier installments and the demands and expectations of the modern CGI wonderland. It has Japanese actor Ken Watanabe be the mournful, grave centre of the piece, allowed at one point to utter "Gojira" (later, on a radar, we see it spelled out in obeisance to the movie's origins) and given the film's most crowd-pleasing line, right before shit gets real in San Francisco. It cares deeply about the monster's place in Japanese culture as a simultaneous reminder of what happened to the country during the war, its humiliation afterwards, and its ambiguous place in the world as Japan reconstructed its image. What confused me most when I watched the Toho flicks on Saturday afternoons on a 9" b&w television was that Godzilla seemed heroic–every bit as nuanced, as conflicted, as ronin as a Mifune samurai; a hero who would return, like Arthur did for England, when the nation needed him. The Godzilla legend is a fable of reconstruction and self-sufficiency–a Leda and the Swan story, where power is drawn from the very source of victimization. He's a complex national symbol, perhaps the definitive cross-cultural Japanese signifier, and the movies that get that (my favorite is Destroy All Monsters, with its dabbling in female hive minds) are brilliant bits of sociology and history. Edwards's Godzilla gets it.

God’s Pocket (2014)

May 13, 2014Posted in2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical

Godspocket

**/****
starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Richard Jenkins, Christina Hendricks, John Turturro
screenplay by John Slattery & Alex Metcalf, based on the novel by Pete Dexter
directed by John Slattery

by Walter Chaw A few things become clear as John Slattery’s God’s Pocket unspools unsteadily in the titular, fictional Philadelphia slum: that it’s perhaps as difficult to adapt Pete Dexter as it is Ray Bradbury, for many surprisingly similar reasons (like him, Dexter’s power is in the rhythm and economy of his prose and the poetry of his characters’ interior lives); that Philip Seymour Hoffman is irreplaceable and doomed to be remembered for too rarely finding roles worthy of him; and that young Caleb Landry Jones is consistently an astonishment and someone to follow. Indeed, the cast is mostly above reproach; the problems are all in the scripting and directorial decisions by first-timer Slattery that betray a certain indecisiveness in pruning repetitive sequences. It’s not a matter of too much patience, but of too little interpretation. As is, it lands somewhere between the voices of Armistead Maupin and Michael Chabon, neither of whom are nearly as dangerous as Dexter, causing one to wonder if God’s Pocket wants to be widely loved rather than admired at arm’s length. It shouldn’t be cuddly or adorable (and it isn’t)–but it tries. What’s left is another exceptional Hoffman turn wrapped in layers of undifferentiated bland. Maybe it seems that way so often because Hoffman was so difficult to match.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)

April 30, 2014Posted in2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Spider-Man, Superhero, Theatrical

Amazingspiderman2

***/****
starring Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Jamie Foxx, Sally Field
screenplay by Alex Kurtzman & Roberto Orci & Jeff Pinkner
directed by Marc Webb

by Walter Chaw A notable improvement in almost every way on Marc Webb’s first film in this reboot series, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (hereafter Spidey 2) sports the same weaknesses, the same bloat, the same catering to the summer cult of boom-boom, but it ramps up the intelligence and a certain comfort with darkness that pays off in a pair of genuinely gratifying character resolutions. Despite what the trailers would spoil, it really only has one antagonist, Jamie Foxx’s Electro–well, him, and our hero’s (Andrew Garfield) struggles with trust in his relationships, whether they be with his Aunt May (Sally Field) or girlfriend Gwen (Emma Stone) or best friend Harry (Dane DeHaan) or lost father Richard (Campbell Scott). It’s a film about class struggle, as May picks up double-shifts and moonlights in nursing school to provide tuition for her adopted boy (giving Sally Field the chance to resurrect her blue-collar Norma Rae), while shut-in Max (Foxx), electrical engineer at monolithic Oscorp and low man on the corporate totem pole, comes clear, fascinatingly, as a riff on the unnamed protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

Transcendence (2014)

April 17, 2014Posted in2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

Transcendence

**/****
starring Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, Paul Bettany, Morgan Freeman
screenplay by Jack Paglen
directed by Wally Pfister

by Angelo Muredda If his name wasn’t already plastered over the ads for the nerd bona fides the studio hopes it will signal, you’d still know that Transcendence was the work of Wally Pfister from an inimitably-portentous opening shot featuring the long, steady fall of a raindrop: as meaningless a totem as Inception‘s ever-spinning (or is it wobbling?) top. Having lensed all but one of Christopher Nolan’s joyless epics, including that “Twilight Zone” episode told with Miltonic gravitas, Pfister has at last graduated to making his own Nolan film about serious men making serious moral choices in the name of serious ideas–here, sending the first human consciousness up into the cloud to fuse with an artificially-intelligent program, the better to meddle in the affairs of mortals. The Pfister-Nolan collaboration was a fruitful one, the equivalent of a hammer repeatedly meeting its companion gong, but watching the alternately soapy and chilly Transcendence, one can’t help but feel the cinematographer-turned-director would have been better served by a more conspicuous departure, a project that better indulged his more melodramatic instincts.