Category: Reviews

Rapid Response: Chasing Ice

The debate over climate change is an issue of perception, not of facts and figures. This is the argument made by James Balog, a climate scientist and longtime nature photographer. There’s a flawed sense that climate change simply doesn’t exist because you can’t see it, he explains.

“Chasing Ice” is a documentary about perception and about images. It’s a gorgeous looking overview of nature at the top of the world and a new, practical way of viewing science and global warming threats that skeptics for years have dared to ignore.

Two years since this film has been released, Balog may view the climate change debate as less of one of perception and more of sheer insolence and extreme partisan politics, but this film holds up as very hard to argue with.  Continue reading “Rapid Response: Chasing Ice”

How to Train Your Dragon 2

The sequel to “How to Train Your Dragon” is a bit more action heavy and less charming, but it still captures the original’s spirit.

How does the saying go? You can’t teach an old dragon new tricks? That’s the actuality behind “How to Train Your Dragon 2”, which models off the original “How to Train Your Dragon” in many ways and yet does so without losing any of the original’s surprising quality.

Dreamworks’s film was the first since “Shrek” that had both real humor and heart. It was a gorgeous example of what 3-D could do, it captured some of the breathtaking spectacle behind “Avatar” and put it into a kids’ film and it even included an adorable wordless montage that could plausibly be talked about in the same breath as the one from “Up.” Those more tranquil moments made the epic dragon battle in its finale more significant and tolerable.

“HTTYD 2” is a bit more action heavy and a bit lighter on the charm that made the first film a hit. All the training has been done, and now a bigger fight is about to begin. And yet Dean DeBlois’s film (he co-directed the original) uses the same structure that slowly brought out the original’s best qualities. Continue reading “How to Train Your Dragon 2”

22 Jump Street

’22 Jump Street’ is quite literally the same story and idea as the first film, and it’s much lesser for it.

Nick Offerman delivers a monologue at the start of “22 Jump Street” about the surprise success of the 21 Jump Street case, i.e. the plot at the center of 2012’s “21 Jump Street,” obviously. He explains that no one cared about it the first time around, but now they’re going to throw more money at, as though that would produce better results, do the same thing and keep everyone happy.

It’s a wickedly self aware moment, and Offerman is talking about this original film, but he may as well be talking about “The Hangover” or any action sequel ever made.

Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller proved earlier this year that they can be transparently self-aware and still be innovative with “The LEGO Movie.” So they more than anyone know that for “22 Jump Street” to be good and even better than the original, it would have to be more than a sequel about bad sequels.

And yet here Jonah Hill is, doing slam poetry that isn’t as funny as his Peter Pan song. Here’s a drug tripping sequence involving split screen dream worlds for both Hill and Channing Tatum that isn’t as funny as Tatum diving through a gong or Rob Riggle trying to put Hill’s tongue back in his mouth. And here’s Tatum stupidly saying Cate Blanchett when he means “carte blanche,” and the movie not following up on getting that cameo the way they did with Johnny Depp the first time around.

“22 Jump Street” is literally the same movie as the first one with more money thrown at it, and that might be the point, but that doesn’t make it a stronger or equal film. Continue reading “22 Jump Street”

The Fault in Our Stars

The adaptation of John Green’s book by Director Josh Boone lacks the attitude that made the novel distinctive.

The blockbuster YA novel of today has become so closely aligned with all the Hollywood clichés of the last decade: dystopian futures, chosen one teenagers, dark overtones, epic CGI battles for the fate of all mankind and one book needlessly split into two films.

“The Fault In Our Stars” by John Green is as big as they come but has been adapted into a single, trim, two-hour love story and tearjerker, and a modest one at that. Both the success of the book and the movie is that they can take big, melodramatic themes of death, disease, heartbreak and even oblivion and make them feel intimate and personal.

Green’s novel is the story of a 17-year-old cancer patient named Hazel Lancaster (Shailene Woodley) who meets 18-year-old and now cancer-free Augustus Waters (Ansel Elgort) at her cancer support group. He’s forward, strangely eloquent and a bit awkward, and she’s sarcastic and pessimistic with a slight frump and eye roll to send his way. Gus dubs his crush with the new identity of Hazel Grace and they soon fall in love, but she fears the damage she’ll do to both Gus and her parents when she inevitably passes away.

The screenplay by pair Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber (“500 Days of Summer”, “The Spectacular Now”) follows the source material as well as any major YA adaptation, even lifting full passages out of the book, but it’s missing the punchy, brash and flippant energy to Green’s novel. Continue reading “The Fault in Our Stars”

Chef

The director of “Iron Man” feels like he’s making a movie about struggling to make the movie he really wants.

Certain movies are called “passion projects” for a reason. It often involves a filmmaker leaving his or her comfort zone to make something different that they still care deeply about. But it also involves putting your personality as an artist on the line. In fact “passion project” is sometimes used as a slight against artists when it seems like they’ve made something for themselves and no one else.

With “Chef,” John Favreau may have just made a passion project about passion projects. The story about cooking and food is easy enough to swallow, but the special sauce are all the transparent parallels to Favreau’s career as a filmmaker and trying to be a populist artist while inside a system that saps creativity. Continue reading “Chef”

Edge of Tomorrow

“Edge of Tomorrow” is a hugely clever summer blockbuster and a reminder of why Tom Cruise is today’s biggest action star.

“Edge of Tomorrow” starts with scattered flashes of cable news quickly informing us that aliens have invaded the Earth, Europe has been ravished and the rest of humanity is next. Tom Cruise shows up as a talking head on panel after panel and assures the anchors that this latest human assault will be a success.

Why should a sci-fi action movie start this way? Because Director Doug Liman knows that we go through this song and dance over and over again, and every time, nothing seems to get better.

“Edge of Tomorrow” is a smarter and more deeply profound thriller than anyone will give it credit for. Despite the on the face similarities to “Groundhog Day,” (or better yet “Source Code”, which everyone seems to have forgotten) the film has a clever sci-fi conceit that introduces daring wit, drama and romance into a genre in desperate need of more. Continue reading “Edge of Tomorrow”

Muscle Shoals

“Muscle Shoals” tries to capture a distinctive sound found only in Alabama but gets lost in its own nostalgia.

In 20 to 30 years when all the stories of blues, early rock and early R&B and soul have been told, rock documentarians will be forced to look away from this golden age to the music scene of today. No doubt they’ll find less of the “magic” that was apparently everywhere in the good ‘ol days, but they might start looking for a new way to depict the recording process of today as special.

“Muscle Shoals” is a rock-doc about a small Alabama river town and the legendary music that inexplicably was recorded there. Everyone from Mick Jagger to Aretha Franklin to Bono speaks of the “Muscle Shoals Sound” and the special “something” that they discovered and achieved there. But following along those ambiguous terms, “Muscle Shoals” becomes a formless history lesson and appreciation rather than a documentary worth remembering. It’s a dry and familiar doc in the worst ways and needs a new outlook for how to frame this unique cultural moment.

Here in this beautiful, pastoral, Southern slice of Americana, everything is described in spiritual, figurative terms. No one is quite sure what makes this place alluring, but they all say it has “something”. Some even believe the Native Americans’ old story that it’s the only place in the country where the river actually sings (the other is supposedly in Liverpool and spoke to The Beatles).

Frankly, the platitudes get tired quickly, and Director Greg ‘Freddy’ Camalier finds little drama with which to set inside Muscle Shoals and its musical history. It seems as though the real magic behind Muscle Shoals was not the river, the food or the scenery but the small town record producer Rick Hall and his house band The Swampers. Continue reading “Muscle Shoals”

The Immigrant

James Gray’s lush period drama is a movie about loss and wondering what your life has become rather than a historical document.

How did I get here? What happened to me that this is what my life has become? How do I find my way and some hope leading toward a bright future?

For many Europeans at the turn of the 20th Century, the answers to those questions lied across the Atlantic Ocean on the shores of America. And American films, even those period pieces that have explored the hardship of immigration, are seduced by the allure of The American Dream.

Director James Gray uses this backdrop to explore those questions on universal terms. In “The Immigrant,” coming to America means being stuck in a state of purgatory, being without hope or happiness and always fighting for survival. It’s a film about being lost, and not only in America.

The film starts as Ewa (Marion Cotillard) and her sister Magda are arriving at Ellis Island from Poland. Magda is immediately swept out of line to the infirmary for treating tuberculosis, and Ewa is about to be deported after being accused of being a “woman of low morals” while on board the ship.

We see none of her time back home or on the ship, and what exactly a “woman of low morals” means is not readily explained. But here Ewa is, stuck in Ellis Island about to be deported without her sister and wondering how she wound up in this mess in the first place. Immigrant or not, this feeling is not unique to Ewa. Continue reading “The Immigrant”

Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon

This is the story of how Shep Gordon met and eventually dated Sharon Stone: “I went to a party in Cannes with Mike Douglas, Mick Jagger and Roman Polanski, and the party was in the house Napoleon built for Josephine. It’s priceless.”

We’ll let slide that Shep knows Michael Douglas by a nickname, and that his trio of party guests would make the best and oddest #TrueDetectiveSeason2 assortment yet. I’m more impressed that he got to go to a party at a friggin’ castle owned and built by friggin’ Napoleon. And that’s just the setup to his story.

“Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon” tells the story of the life and career of the Hollywood manager and producer Shep Gordon, who has plenty more anecdotes like this in his back pocket. But what’s so amusing about it is not even the story but the humbled way in which Shep tells it. Continue reading “Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon”

The Monuments Men

George Clooney stars and directs this World War II drama with a rich cast and a weak execution.

Art has been a part of human culture since the dawn of man. People like me spend their lives writing about it, protecting it and debating it because it tells us about ourselves, defines our history, makes us think, moves us to act, provides escapism and many more things that can fill a term paper. And we should preserve it at all costs because Hitler is bad and go America.

George Clooney’s “The Monuments Men” champions art and the soldiers who helped to salvage it from the Nazis during World War II, but it’s a muddled war film rather than a stirring piece of art full of ideas and meaning itself. It’s about the lofty Idea of art, only important on the motivation of preventing Hitler from making someone else’s culture his own.

“Art is to be held up and admired, just like these men,” Clooney says. And the extent to which Clooney feels art should simply be placed on a pedestal or hung on a wall like the way America treats its military reflects how pretty and patriotic, yet empty “The Monuments Men” feels. It has echoes of being an amusing buddy caper complete with manufactured camaraderie and a role call of movie stars called into action one by one, not unlike Clooney’s “Ocean’s Eleven.” But it also wants to be a grave war drama and paints the melodramatic set pieces and themes of war, justice and serving your country with a broad brush. Continue reading “The Monuments Men”