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Avengers: Infinity War (2018)
Man, That's Quite a Corner You've Written Yourself Into
The Big Bang created six stones that each govern aspects of the universe. Somebody wanna 'splain me why they aren't scattered in galaxies billions of light years apart, maybe in the cores of planets, instead of being in one small region of space where they can all be collected? So Thanos, mastermind of the previous attack on New York, has a theory that saving the universe means bringing it back within its carrying capacity by killing half the sentient life forms on every world. So he sends his minions to earth to collect the stones he's still missing. To combat them, all the various Marvel characters come together, and it is indeed great fun to see them. There's a climactic battle in Wakanda, where Thanos completes his quest and people, including some Marvel folk, begin disintegrating, presumably because Thanos can now will their disappearance. We see Thanos sitting under an alien moon, and given the reassurance that he will return.
Okay, where do they go from here? Just imagine the chaos if half the human race vanishes. It'll make the "Left Behind" scenario look mild in comparison. What will Thanos do for an encore? He already has the Infinity Gauntlet. And do they fight Thanos with magic and psychic powers? No, plain old "Biff" "Pow" mechanical force. Stuff that the military does quite capably. So wouldn't a few F-35's help a little bit? Wouldn't a few gunships help with that attacking horde at Wakanda?
So a lot of very fun stuff that fizzles out into yet another chaotic mass melee and a profoundly disappointing ending.
Coco (2017)
Spectacular, but one serious flaw.
Considering how easy it can be these days to run afoul of cultural sensibilities, the universal praise heaped on this film is amazing. Some Mexican friends of ours saw it and were lavish in their praise. Miguel is a music-loving boy in perhaps the only family in Mexico that hates music. His great-great -grandfather left the family to pursue a career as a musician, and to make ends meet, his wife took to making shoes, and banished all music from the home. Miguel wants to enter the music contest for the Day of the Dead but his hopes are dashed, literally, when his grandmother smashes his homemade guitar. And this is why I give this a 9 rather than a 10. She's an utterly despicable, mean-spirited witch, and the rest of the family is too cowardly to stand up to her. At the end of the film she sheds a tear, a perfect example of what I call a Nazi With A Puppy Dog Moment, where a repugnant character gets a token humanizing moment.
In desperation, Manuel "borrows" the guitar from the shrine to the most famous musician in the town's history, and in so doing he ends up crossing over to the Land of the Dead. Wow, is this a dazzling film. The color and intricacy of the Land of the Dead is beyond amazing. Miguel attempts to reach the spirit of the great musician, and in the process discovers that his great-great grandfather had been murdered and all his work stolen.
A year later, at the next Day of the Dead, all Miguel's ancestors can now come back to visit, and his great-grandfather gets the credit he deserves.
One figure that has pursued Miguel through his adventures was a gigantic spirit jaguar who looks terrifying but is actually benevolent. Anyway, during the next Day of the Dead, we see a dog and cat emerge from an alley. Look carefully at the shadows on the wall just before it happens.
Black Panther (2018)
I Probably Expected Too Much
When I saw Black Panther in "Civil War," I seriously hoped he'd appear again, and when I heard they were making a film about him, I was thrilled. The glowing reviews added to my excitement. The pluses are that the villain has a rational reason to want revenge, and he wants to stop the oppression of black people. (Sure, he wants to trigger a global race war, but nobody's perfect.) So the plot revolves around real-world issues, not some abstract Nyah-hah-hah take-over-the-world scheme. But the basic premise is preposterous, that you can hide a nation more technically advanced than anyone else behind an invisibility cloak. Where does Wakanda get all its scientific and technological expertise? If students go abroad, doesn't anyone wonder why there are all these exchange students from a dirt-poor country, or what happens to them? And even if Wakanda can cloak itself now, how did it keep its first steam engines secret? And the finale involves a chaotic set-piece battle royale like in "Civil War," again with nobody appearing even to get a skinned knee. Finally, I think they missed an opportunity by killing off Killmonger. In his final scene, he looked like he might be open to redemption. They could have done a lot with him as a flawed but slowly maturing hero.
Downsizing (2017)
And then it gets weird
The first third of this film rolls along smoothly. A size reduction technology allows people to become 5 inches tall, with the result that modest wealth in our world becomes vastly multiplied in the miniature world. Before downsizing, people have to have all foreign matter, like tooth fillings, removed. (We find out later what happens if they're not.) Matt Damon and his wife (Kristen Wiig) decide to transform, but his wife, er wiigs out at having all her hair removed and chickens out. Matt gets miniaturized, and how do you get miniature people off the gurney? With a spatula, of course. He comes to and gets a call from his wife when he leans that she's still normal sized. Matt moves into his mini-home, which in his world is a mega-mansion.
And here's where stuff starts getting weird. Suddenly he's living in an apartment building with upstairs neighbors. I must have blinked because I have no idea how that happened. His upstairs neighbor is Christoph Waltz. I'm so used to seeing Waltz in sinister roles I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. Waltz is indeed a scoundrel, but he never does Damon any dirt.
Repressive regimes, it turns out, find downsizing very handy for getting rid of dissidents. Damon encounters a Vietnamese activist who smuggled herself into America, after being imprisoned and shrunk, and discovers there's a dark underbelly to miniature Utopia, shipping containers turned into mini-slums. Because somebody has to clean the houses and do the dirty work.
Lots of movies have a "Deus ex machina" to steer the plot. This one has a "diabolus ex machina," (devil out of the machine), in this case a massive release of methane in the Antarctic. So do we suddenly have catastrophic warming? No. Mega-storms? No. Catastrophic social upheavals? No. Pandemics? No. We end up at the first tiny-people colony in Norway, which is preparing to take refuge in an underground vault to ride out the extinction-level event. Damon decides to stay outside and go home.
It's awful hard to get excited about an extinction centuries in the future, especially when we're told it's an "actuarial certainty" but nobody has a clue what the actual cause will be. It's far easier to sympathize with Damon's discovery of the mini-underclass. But this film jumbles these themes around and pulls them out at random, like lottery balls.
Wonder Woman (2017)
Great in so many ways but terribly chiched ending
The film opens with a hint of a superhero crossover, as a courier from Wayne Enterprises delivers a package to Diana Prince, containing a century old photograph. The photograph sets her off on a reverie of her childhood on the hidden island of Themyscira, which ends when a plane piloted by Steve Trevor crashes through their shield followed soon after by a German gunboat. The Amazons kill the Germans but several Amazons are killed, including their beloved general. Trevor tells them of World War I raging outside. So the first question is, if a stray plane and gunboat can discover them, why weren't they repeatedly discovered by stray ships many times before? In response to his question as to how she speaks English, Diana tells Steve that they speak hundreds of languages. So how can they know hundreds of modern languages and yet be unaware of World War I? Diana decides she must leave to help end the slaughter. They set out in a small boat and when they wake up at dawn, they're in London. How did they get from a presumably Greek island to London in a single night?
The historical nexus is well chosen. A fanatical German general and a mad scientist are plotting to unleash a super gas against the Allies on the eve of the Armistice, to prolong the war and ultimately win it for Germany. Trevor, Diana, and a few of Trevor's seedy friends decide to infiltrate behind German lines and stop the Germans. Diana's astonishment and horror at the effects of modern war are moving and wonderfully acted out, and the scene where she leads a charge across No- Man's Land to rescue a village would be utterly absurd if it weren't so thrilling and inspiring.
Diana believes the plot is master-minded by the god Ares, who rebelled against Zeus in anger over the creation of mankind. In due course they infiltrate the German base, Steve hijacks the German plane full of gas bombs and pilots it to his inevitable heroic death. Diana and Ares have it out. Ares explains to Diana that he merely plants suggestions in people's minds, but that humans cause wars all by themselves.
So Diana and Ares slam into each other, each flinging the other hundreds of yards, landing hard enough to shatter pavement. Didn't Superman and Zod do that in "Man of Steel?" They each hurl lightning bolts at each other, so very Palpatine and Darth Vader. The utter unoriginality and physical absurdity of this climactic fight detracts sadly from the film.
So at the end we understand the photograph. It shows her, Steve Trevor and his motley crew just after they liberate the village. She types an e-mail to Bruce Wayne, thanking him. Then we see her on a high perch above modern London, aware that her mission is far more complicated than she ever imagined.
A Dog's Purpose (2017)
Unabashedly Sentimental
I totally get why some people gave this a low rating because the over the top sentimentality is not for everyone. It usually isn't for me either, but the film has enough appeal to make it worthwhile. It's odd in that I liked the film better after seeing how it all came together than I did watching it unfold.
Bailey, the dog, lives his life as the best friend of young Ethan. He dies, and comes back as a Chicago police dog, who saves a little girl from drowning. This is the scene that drew such outrage from animal rights people, although from my perspective the dog was never in the slightest danger or fear of its life. After dying while saving his handler, he comes back as a Corgi in a loving black family ("one of my nicest lives"). Then he comes back as something like Bailey and ends up with a neglectful owner, who finally dumps him on the roadside. That turns out to be a good thing because Bailey eventually finds Ethan's home. By now Ethan is a lonely middle-aged bachelor. He brings Ethan's old love back, and Ethan gets that rarest of treasures, a solid chance to do things over and get them right. Bailey even convinces Ethan that he really is Bailey.
Best not to push the metaphysics too far. Did Bailey have lives before Ethan? Does he miss the other families who loved him? What will happen after this life, or when Ethan dies? And while the thought that your old pet can come back again might be nice, the thought that he might be out there somewhere missing you and searching for you is sad beyond words.
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016)
Not a Harry Potter Copycat by any Means
From my perspective, the Harry Potter saga peaked at Prisoner of Azkaban, then began a long slide downhill into progressively darker, drearier, and more cheerless story lines. This film has a flavor of an early Harry Potter film, where everything is still a surprise. Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) is a magical zoologist and conservation activist in the 1920's. On a visit to New York, he runs into Kowalski (Dan Fogler), a Muggle, and accidentally switches cases with him. So Scamander has to chase his escaped critters down. This brings him onto the radar of Tina (Katherine Waterston), a semi-disgraced magical police inspector. They also meet Tina's ditzy sister Queenie (Alison Sudol), who, though not exactly oversexed, is a mind reader and fully aware how men react to her. In the background, however, is a plot within the U.S. version of the Ministry of Magic. Villain Grindlewald (Johnny Depp) has assumed a false identity and is plotting to launch a war against Muggles. Grindlewald is defeated, Tina is restored to her job with honor, and though Kowalski has to be wiped of his memories, he gets a gratifyingly happy ending. Tina is an absolutely enchanting pixie of a heroine, but she doesn't do much, not so much from misogyny as because she has to chase after Newt and events at headquarters are hidden from her. And in contrast to the haunting themes of Harry Potter, the music is forgettable. But a load of fun. Oh, one last point. Some occultist complained that while Harry Potter used actual mythical beasts, the beasts in this film were "made up." Trust me, they're every bit as real as unicorns and griffins.
Arrival (2016)
This will not be easy
The always agreeable Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner are two scientists tasked with communicating with the inhabitants of mysterious ships that suddenly appeared over the earth. No shoot-em-ups or explosions (except one). The aliens are seriously alien looking and have a symbolic written language which Adams slowly deciphers. The film mostly deals with the painfully slow process of sorting the alien language out. Meanwhile the rest of the earth freaks out. The U.S. is blessed with the usual crop of conspiracy bloggers, while Russia and China start to get itchy trigger fingers. The way Adams defuses the global crisis involves a mind-warping temporal loop, and would make a great and emotionally satisfying ending. Unfortunately, there's a sappy coda tacked on that contributes nothing and seriously detracts from the emotional impact of the film. We step back from the brink of interstellar war, humanity's better impulses win by a razor thin margin, the aliens leave in peace, leaving their language, which may hold the key to radically new concepts, and instead of ending on a hopeful and triumphant note, the film makers resort to an ending with the emotional impact of a damp sponge.
Moana (2016)
Breathtaking.
Disney's string of heroic female leads just keeps going. And despite that unfortunate misstep with the Maui Halloween suit, work of the same sort of people who trashed "Up" because they didn't see it leading to any marketable toys, everyone seems to like the movie. Certainly it seems to treat Polynesian traditions with deep respect. Moana is a chief's daughter in a paradise that lives by one rule, "Don't go beyond the reef." But her sly and subversive grandmother tells her the story of how the demigod Maui stole the heart of an island, and unleashed a great danger, and someday someone was going to have to confront Maui and return the stolen heart. She finally reveals the secret of how their ancestors came to the island. When the crops are blighted and the fish disappear, Grandmother tells Moana with her dying words to go. She finally meets Maui (Dwayne Johnson), a cynical anti-hero who has been stranded for centuries on an island because his magic fishhook has been taken, stripping him of his powers. They recover the fishhook, confront the evil that Maui unleashed, and Moana returns to an island prepared to resume voyaging again. The scenes of canoe fleets racing across the waves are exhilarating, thrilling, visually stunning, emotionally moving, and left me with a taro-size lump in my throat. The confrontation with the lava monster and its final redemption are everything you want a fairy-tale ending to be. Moana is fabulous, and Dwayne Johnson (who is of Polynesian descent) just keeps getting better. Lawrence Olivier he may never be, but he's worth the price of a ticket.
The Secret Life of Pets (2016)
New York is Beautiful, a Few Funny Moments, but Overall, Meh
New York has never been more spectacular and has fall colors New England would die for. And there are a few funny moments, the best being from the trailer where Leonard, the pampered French poodle, turns into a hard rock fiend once his owner leaves. Max's idyllic life with his owner Katie is turned upside down when she brings home a giant shaggy mutt named Duke. Max tries to shake Duke, and they both end up fleeing the pound and falling in with a bunch of vengeful abandoned pets. Meanwhile all the other pets from Max's building join forces to find them. There are wild chase scenes that are more chaotic than exciting, and none of the animal characters are particularly visually appealing. I was fascinated to find out New York has only two dog catchers and they cover both Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Independence Day: Resurgence (2016)
Better than I expected but still huge plot holes.
What's bigger than a spaceship that can span continents? Some of the plot holes in this movie. For one thing, why did they rebuild the Capitol building so ugly? More importantly, when one of the alien ships from 1996 landed (the only one), and an African warlord spent years defeating the aliens, why didn't the rest of the world pitch in? Why did he refuse to allow access to the ship for no sensible reason? When the mother ship from 1996 sent out a signal, why didn't people figure out immediately it was a distress call? The other alien ships all crashed and burned, true, but there should have been plenty to salvage from them. Why weren't all the world's linguists swarming all over trying to decipher the alien language? Why wasn't every physicist on earth working on learning the aliens' physics? Why wasn't every intelligence operative on earth working to figure out where the aliens came from? Why doesn't every university have an alienology program?
Oh, Area 51 now has a hospital named after the President's wife from the first movie. Sort of a consolation prize for having a huge science complex and zero equipment or personnel to perform surgery.
The movie opens with characters being introduced and defined briskly. An alien ship appears over the moon and is shot down. It turns out not to be from the bad guy aliens, but contains an artificial intelligence that fortunately doesn't carry a grudge. The real alien ship turns up soon after and, for reasons never explained, picks up Dubai and dumps it on London. Then it gets silly. The idea that the aliens would need a ship 3000 miles across is stupid beyond words. The alien ship starts boring into the earth to reach the core, which it supposedly uses to power its ships. Why any old molten iron won't do, and why Earth's core as opposed to, say, Venus, is never explained. It turns out the aliens want the artificial intelligence, which holds the key to the only thing that can threaten them. And the aliens are a hive mind with a queen. Except when we see her, she isn't a shapeless, helpless grub, she's more like the Cloverfield monster, a lean, mean, queen machine. We kill the queen and the alien ship departs, summoned back by other alien queens. There's a strong hint we'll have a sequel. We're told that the artificial intelligence holds the key to interstellar travel. Now wait a minute. You've had alien ships for twenty years, plus the debris from the mother ship, much of which is still in space. You mean nobody tried to figure out their drives in all that time?
This movie gets an NOSW rating - No Other Scientists in the World. In an NOSW film, there are maybe three scientists in the whole world working on key problems, and the rest are, what? Chasing coeds? Cataloging lint?
This film is ill served by the trailer, which makes things look more disconnected than they are, and also juxtaposes dialog with actions completely differently than in the film.
Finding Dory (2016)
Not Quite up to Finding Nemo But Lots of Fun
A fun sequel to Finding Nemo that somehow treats California and Australia as close together. Dory's attempt to locate her dimly remembered family lands her in a marine aquarium in California. Much of the undersea action takes place in deeper and murkier waters than Finding Nemo, so the visual appeal isn't quite up to the original film. The high point of this film is an octopus named Hank whose ability to camouflage himself and squeeze through tiny openings is exploited to the max. Also Hank has the wise- cracking ability of his voice actor, Ed O'Neill (AKA Al Bundy). Dory is about to be shipped to an aquarium in Cleveland, but she and Hank hijack the truck in a hilarious escape sequence. Eventually Dory meets her parents, though the meeting isn't as heartwarming as it could have been and just seems a bit flat. As is the custom these days, viewers are encouraged to stay through the end credits by the promise of humorous interludes. Do stay. There's a great tie-back to the original film at the very end.
Independence Day (1996)
Why all the pseudoscience?
Much as I like the film from an action standpoint, I give it 7 stars for being full of just plain stupid science fiction clichés. An object one fifth the mass of the moon would show up from its gravitational effects long before getting anywhere close to Earth. Then it sheds a fleet of ships 15 miles in diameter that station themselves over major world cities. Ships that huge would be almost impossible for anything short of a nuclear weapon to damage, plus big enough to house fleets bigger than any nation's air force. But no, they have to have shields, too. Then it turns out the aliens have - you'll never see this coming - telepathy, too. In desperation, the President orders a nuclear strike. A ship 15 miles in diameter and a mile thick would suffer a hole maybe a couple of miles across. Something that, on the scale of that ship, would just buff out. But, no, the shield protects the ship. It's not like they'd be likely to have a defense system capable of shooting down any incoming weapon.
And of course, there's something big and secret at Area 51, where we have an alien ship under study. I'm surprised they didn't work in the Bermuda Triangle and the Maya calendar. Meanwhile, the First Lady has been fatally injured and turns up at Area 51 to say good-bye. Ridiculous. There's this huge underground lab with all sorts of equipment, and not a single person with any medical training? Not even someone with combat medic training? She's dying. Operate, already. She can't end up any more dead than if you just sit there and do nothing.
When the mother ship popped into town, the captive ship at Area 51 turned on, to the joy of everyone because "we couldn't replicate their power source." So then Jeff Goldblum decides to fly it by hooking up a terrestrial laptop. So if the alien ship used unknown power, how did the terrestrial PC communicate? Because terrestrial computers use ordinary electricity to send signals. The much ridiculed assumption that the aliens lack firewalls and computer protection pales into insignificance against our not being able to start up the alien systems when they can obviously use electricity.
Oh, spoiler alert, we don't all die.
Captain America: Civil War (2016)
More busy than exciting
An operation in Lagos, Nigeria to stop the theft of a virus turns deadly and there's a lot of collateral damage. As a result, the UN drafts a plan to put super-heroes under international control. Iron Man buys in, Captain America doesn't, setting the stage for the Civil War within the Avengers. First off, blaming the Avengers for the damage to New York (caused by Loki and his alien allies) and Washington (caused by Hydra) is just plain stupid, like blaming the RAF for the damage to London during the Blitz. Anyway, as the accords are about to be signed, a terrorist bomb demolishes the building where the meeting is being held. Captain America and his allies go after the villain, and Iron Man and his allies try to take them down. Because the UN would totally not care about stopping whoever tried to blow up their meeting.
The bad guy is Baron (Colonel in this film) Zemo, whose family was killed in the battle with Ultron. We learn that Cap's friend Bucky was engineered by the Soviets into the Winter Soldier, and could be activated by reciting a list of code words (see AI and Telefon for other examples). There are five more just like him, stored safely in an Arctic stronghold.
So there are battles with all the Marvel characters, including Ant- Man and Spider-Man. Leipzig airport gets trashed, although since the previous action took place in Berlin, I'm still puzzled how they ended up in Leipzig. Bucky gets captured, then sprung by Zemo. (Never answered, what DEactivates Bucky?) It's confusing as heck, trying to keep straight who's fighting whom, or what exactly they're fighting for.
We finally end up at the Arctic stronghold where the other Winter Soldiers are stored. Zemo violates the First Rule of Movies, which is, you never, ever kill off prime villains. These people, according to Bucky, "speak thirty languages and can take down a country overnight." So after waiting impatiently for them to be reactivated and pose a formidable enough threat to reunite the Avengers, or at least furnish a basis for the next film, Zemo shoots them in their sleep, saying one Winter Soldier is too many. Despite seeing for himself that there really had been a threat from Zemo, Iron Man is consumed by rage upon learning that Bucky (as Winter Soldier) had killed his parents, and attacks Captain America because reasons.
One person free-lancing through all this is the new character Black Panther, son of an African chief killed in the UN attack. Black Panther, a role handed down for centuries, had been his people's guardian, though I did wonder how people in Africa centuries ago made super-hero suits. Black Panther captures Zemo, proclaims that the others may be overcome by their desire for vengeance, but he is through, and prevents him from killing himself. We end up with Zemo in a cell that presents serious Eighth Amendment problems, Captain America's allies about to be sprung, and Bucky in cold storage in Black Panther's secret African lair until they can figure out how to undo his malware.
Not only are the fights busy and confusing and mostly pointless, but the best element of all, having a rival, evil set of Avengers, is thrown away. Will Marvel salvage them? Maybe they also have super- healing so their brains can recover from being shot. Maybe Zemo's allies will come up with some way to clone them or fix them. Maybe there's another batch somewhere. But a conflict with these villains would be way more interesting than the set-piece battles in this film. Though I really did like Black Panther.
Risen (2016)
How to Make an Intelligent Christian Film
First, you get an A-list actor (Joseph Fiennes) to play the lead, Roman Centurion Clavius. Then you set the film in antiquity, where real history constrains your writing. The film opens with a battle between Judaean rebels and Romans, culminating in "We have Barabbas." Since this is the day Jesus is crucified and we don't actually see the "Give us Barabbas" scene, we have to conclude Barabbas is the unluckiest, shortest time recidivist on record. When Jesus turns up missing, Clavius is sent to investigate. He visits the tomb, finds the stone many feet away, the ropes burst instead of cut, and an imprint on the shroud. He begins tracking down followers, and there's one humorous moment when he goes to the barracks and asks the men if anyone "knows" Mary Magdalene, and half the platoon raises their hands. Eventually he ends up among the disciples and helps them evade pursuing soldiers. It culminates with a meeting between Clavius and Jesus before Jesus walks off into the sunrise. The only reason for slightly downgrading this film, which is really astonishingly good, is we don't really see the "then what?' parts. It's safe to say the early Christians didn't do any of the things modern Christians do to demonstrate their Christianity. So the morning after Pentecost, say, they got up and ... then what? What, specifically, did they do differently after believing?
The Finest Hours (2016)
Nonstop Action
Chris Pine stays in condition for captaining a starship in the off season by captaining a Coast Guard rescue craft. There's a brief and slightly stiff opening setup of the love interest where he awkwardly asks Miriam Webber out. Holliday Grainger radiates Fifties wholesome cuteness with almost painful intensity. But then comes a really bad day where two ships simultaneously break apart in the same storm off Cape Cod. With all resources tied up on the first rescue, Pine has no choice but to take a small craft over a treacherous bar in heavy surf to deal with the second ship. Of the 41 men aboard, 32 were saved. Eight died on the bow section and one, as shown in the film, died when a wave slammed him into the ship. Casey Affleck, as Ray Sybert, plays the unpopular ship's engineer who keeps the ship functioning long enough for help to arrive. But mostly it's the sea and the unrelenting tension.
The Jungle Book (2016)
Visually Beautiful, Moving, and Exciting
So can you make a good live action remake of a classic animated film? The first ten minutes or so of this film that set the scene before the story begins, are breathtakingly beautiful, and visually beautiful moments occur throughout. It's been a long time since I read the book, but the film is more based on the animated film anyway. Neel Sethi is excellent as Mowgli, projecting childlike innocence without being cloying or sappy. His wolf cub siblings are about the cutest things on four paws. After the villainous tiger Shere Khan kills wolf leader Akela and threatens the pack, Mowgli leaves, escorted by the noble panther Bagheera. But Mowgli rebels against Bagheera's plan to take him to the human village and instead ends up with the scheming bear Baloo, who finds his courage when Mowgli is kidnapped by the monkeys and taken to their king, Louie, who wants the secret of fire ("the red flower"). The lost temple that serves as the monkey lair is majestic. Disney just can't resist sticking unnecessary musical numbers into films. A reprise of the classic "Bear Necessities" is practically mandatory, but Louie's Godfather style and song are simply grating (why I gave a 9 instead of a ten). After the climactic battle with Shere Khan, Mowgli is shown staying with the wolves, rather than eventually returning to human society as in the book, but that's more the end of a chapter rather than the whole story.
The Young Messiah (2016)
Starts out Aimless, Gets a Bit Better
How to make a period piece about Jesus. Jewish males have absurdly black beards and are all cock-sure in their self-righteousness. All the priests are Downton Abbey arrogant. Evil characters are dissolute or ludicrously effeminate. Roman soldiers are craggy tough guys with a five-day stubble, but open to the truth.
When you have precisely zero historical information to go on, you make things up. Just as early map makers put imaginary lands in the blank places, people made up stories to fill in the long gap in Jesus' narrative. This film incorporates a couple of items from early pseudo-Gospels. The film opens with a seriously unsavory episode of Jesus being bullied. Jesus is a picture-perfect child with long wavy hair and a veddy British accent. The bully trips and falls and is killed, and Jesus is blamed, but brings him back to life again. The family decides it's time to leave their exile in Egypt and go home, and encounter a succession of vignettes to show just what a bad neighborhood Galilee was back then.
The film gets better once it develops a focus. Like the far better "Risen," the film becomes something of a procedural. Herod junior has heard rumors of a wonder-working child and dispatches centurion Severus to find him. They got a good actor (Sean Bean) to play Severus, but Herod is a whiny, superstitious wimp. Severus and his troops clomp around Galilee, finally learn that Jesus and his family are on the way to the Temple (No, not the same visit as recorded in the gospels - Jesus is eight in the movie, not twelve). Jesus talks to a blind priest and in the process cures him. Severus sees this, realizes he's up against something beyond him, and lets the family go. He returns to Herod and reports that he killed the child (i.e., lies), pointing out that it was Herod's order.
The other intertwined plot is that Jesus is just beginning to become aware that he's special, and Joseph stubbornly refuses to answer his questions. So Jesus looks first to the rabbi in Nazareth, then prods his family to take him to Jerusalem. Jesus is a typical eight year old, if you know any eight year olds who look 14, and have the theological knowledge of a rabbi and the diction and vocabulary of an English Lit professor. Did Jesus ever fall and skin his knee? Did he ever bang his thumb with a hammer, cut himself, measure something wrong or split a piece of wood in the carpenter shop? Because any sign that Jesus was ever less than omnipotent and omniscient is bound to rattle some people.
Zootopia (2016)
Not as deep as some animated films, but great, great fun
Some recent animated films, like How to Train Your Dragon or Inside Out, combine visual appeal and strong moral or psychological insight. Zootopia does a little, but mostly it's a great looking film with a good, complex plot and very, very, funny. The different environments are nicely realized, especially where the two heroes, small by Zootopian standards, cross over into the rodent habitat and become giants who have to avoid crushing things. If you were going to make a movie about mammals living as humans, who would you have staffing the DMV? (Remember, turtles aren't mammals) Well, Zootopia nails it, hilariously. There are homages to The Godfather and Breaking Bad. The end credits rave scene is a tour de force of animation. A total blast.
The Peanuts Movie (2015)
Even My Grandkids Got Bored
Five stars might give you the impression this movie is way worse than it is. It has all the things that have made Peanuts so beloved. It's just that you've seen it all fifty times before in dozens of TV specials. Kite eating tree? Check. Snoopy and the Red Baron? Check. The good news is that the CGI isn't absurdly overdone. Picture the old fashioned animation with a little shading added. We saw it in 3-D, but for any action farther from the camera than three feet, 3-D adds nothing. The plot is that the Little Red-Haired Girl moves to town and Charlie Brown is smitten. (If Charles Schulz's proposal to the real red-haired girl had been accepted, he's have probably had a happy career drawing something as limp and insipid as Ziggy or Marmaduke, and there would be no Peanuts.) The story ends in a more upbeat fashion than we're used to seeing from Peanuts, but he still doesn't get to kick the football.
Pan (2015)
Why the hate?
How dumb do you have to be to misunderstand a movie like Pan? Because this movie has generated some of the dumbest review comments I've ever seen. "There's no Wendy." Because this is a PREquel. Look up "pre" in a dictionary. "It's dark." All fairy tales are, and their modern imitations like Peter Pan or Pinocchio have to be, too, to remain true to the genre. Fairy tales originated in a time when meeting wolves and bears in the woods was all too likely, and they weren't cute and anthropomorphic, either. And the original Grimm stories, unlike their sanitized modern retellings, carried the clear message that Awful Things happen to Naughty Children Who Don't Obey The Rules. The prize comment was someone complaining that a flying pirate ship over WWII London was unrealistic. So name some historical periods when it WAS realistic.
Overall it's a satisfying action story, and wholly undeserving of the scorn some reviewers have dumped on it. The weakest links are Garrett Hedlund as Hook (still a good guy at this point) and Rooney Mara as Tiger Lily. Hedlund tries to be Harrison Ford, complete with Indiana Jones' hat and Han Solo's flying off to save his own skin but coming back to save the day, but he just doesn't have charisma. Neither does Tiger Lily, who's pretty but bland, and goes through life with a deer in the headlights expression. They're both stiff and lifeless.
The Martian (2015)
Because I don't have eleven stars
This film lived up nicely to all the pre-release hype. Matt Damon is stranded on Mars when he's blown away by a Martian windstorm and presumed dead, and the expedition has to abort the mission. But he survived, and fixes his injuries, grows potatoes originally intended as a Thanksgiving treat, burns thruster fuel to create water, uses human wastes as fertilizer (for some reason, only his own) and recovers an old Mars lander to improvise communications with Earth. There are a few scientific quibbles. Martian windstorms are just not that powerful since the air is only 1/1000 as dense as earth's. It seems unlikely that the habitat wouldn't have its own communications with Earth, or at least the ability to communicate through the fleet of satellites orbiting Mars. And the ending piles on problems simply for the sake of piling them on. Really, instead of blowing off one end of the rescue ship to generate thrust to slow down, why not just turn and use the thrusters? That way the whole ship is habitable for the return trip instead of just a few cut-off modules. Matt Damon certainly delivers an effective recruiting pitch for NASA, though Jessica Chastain "swimming" in zero-g gives him worthy competition. At a time when many people don't consider characters interesting unless they manifest at least half the conditions in DSM-V, some unapologetic rational behavior is a breath of fresh air. Competence porn? Bring it on.
War Room (2015)
It's Hard to Make a Good Christian Movie
When I read the reviews for this film, I thought back to the 1983 Billy Graham film "The Prodigal," which made an all-out effort to have good production values, talent and writing, and which nevertheless fizzled at the end because the writers couldn't bring themselves to abandon religious jargon. This movie does a far better job of translating concepts into everyday language. Nobody says the Sinner's Prayer or answers an altar call. Tony, a pharmaceutical salesman and his Realtor wife Elizabeth have a great life materially, but their marriage is filled with anger. Then Elizabeth meets Miss Clara, an old lady who schools her in the power of prayer. The acting starts off wooden but gets better, and there are some genuinely good moments, such as when Elizabeth exorcises her home (it's way better than it sounds) or Tony helps the antagonistic V.P. who was instrumental in his firing. There are also some nice touches of humor. When Tony describes his wife's prayer closet to his Christian gym buddy, the buddy replies "Dude, this is serious. When did you ever hear of a woman giving up closet space?"
Since there is no place for car chases, explosions, or nudity in these films, they pretty much have to be psychological dramas. And the problem is that their audiences expect things neatly wrapped up. We don't see the wife who prays for her straying husband, but he cheats anyway. We don't see Miss Clara defying a mugger in the name of Jesus, but getting stabbed anyway. We don't see Tony doing the right thing by returning stolen drugs, but going to jail anyway. If a woman decides not to have an abortion, the baby is never born with some really hideous condition like Treacher-Collins Syndrome. We don't see the Christian parents who pray for years on end for their drug-dependent children without apparent results. In short, too often Christian films comfort the comfortable.
Ironically, the best Christian movies aren't explicitly Christian. Schindler's List is the story of a selfish, womanizing opportunist who discovers moral heroism. A Man for All Seasons and the legendary Lilies of the Field deal with religious issues, but mostly as a framework for character studies. Perhaps the best Christian film of recent times was The Hundred Foot Journey, which never mentions religion at all, and whose characters are not Christian, but it deals with tolerance, acceptance, forgiveness, and ultimately love in an eminently Christian way.
Chappie (2015)
Engaging, fast moving, and complex tale
The trailers gave me the impression this would be some sort of saccharine "Iron Giant" film, where compassionate people shelter an intelligent robot from the police and military. It's not at all like that. There are three interlaced sub-plots. A programmer for a robotics company that builds police robots develops a program for true artificial intelligence. When he's refused permission to try it, he steals a robot slated for demolition and uploads his program. Meanwhile a criminal gang kidnaps the programmer to force him to divulge how to shut down the robots so they can pull off a heist to pay off a debt to an even more ruthless gang. After they learn the robots can't be shut down, they take the reprogrammed robot (Chappie) and start training him as an accomplice. In the third sub-plot, a rival programmer sabotages the police robots to launch his own robot, a human piloted beast that looks recycled from RoboCop.
The criminals, especially the girl member, have a dash of humanity and humor. The girl especially treats Chappie compassionately. There are a few technical oddities. It seems silly that Chappie can be programmed for full human intelligence, but not language and real-world knowledge, so that he has to learn like a toddler. The most frustrating lack of closure is that the film opens with short interview bites from computer scientists astonished by Chappie, then the film flashes back to 18 months prior, but it never closes the loop by returning to the present. But on the whole, a complex, intelligent story with characters who engage the viewer. The South African accents can be tough to follow.
Jurassic World (2015)
A decent monster movie
We know they can clone dinosaurs, so we don't have the element of wonder from the first film. What we do have are some of the stupidest "scientific" criticisms ever made. "The dinosaurs are still shown with leathery skin instead of feathered." Well, we know some small dinosaurs were feathered, but we have no evidence on the larger ones. Whales, elephants and hippos are all mammals and theoretically have hair, but not to a casual observer. "The dinosaurs are drab colors." But so are most birds, to the point where an ornithologist friend of mine referred to many as "LBJ's" - "Little Brown Jobs." They're either trying to prey on something or avoid being prey, and camouflage helps.
Jurassic World's numbers are going flat, so the suits decide on a new and scarier dino, a hybrid of T-Rex, raptor and other things. And it's clever enough to dig out its tracking device and escape. And while it effectively destroys the security teams sent in to get it, most of the carnage in the park itself is done by flying reptiles that escape from their dome. The jury is still out on whether they had powered flight at all, and they certainly could not have carried a human, let alone the baby dino we see being lifted at one point.
And of course they have corporate bad guys. This is something of a Law and Order reunion, with Vincent D'Onofrio (the mild mannered stammering detective) as a creep with a scheme to weaponize raptors, and B.D. Wong (the prosecutor) as an amoral geneticist. D'Onofrio's demise is entirely predictable but still satisfying. Gee, a corporation shown as evil in a movie - once again. So much for "speaking truth to power."