Out in Theaters: WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS

February 18, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Ben Fransham, Cori Gonzalez-Macuer, Jonathan Brugh, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Rhys Darby, Taika Waititi, What We Do in the Shadows 1 Comment

From 1984 to 2006, Christopher Guest lampooned perplexing cultural phenomenons from dog shows to community theater. Guest was quick to caricature and mock but never did so in lieu of creating earnest characters. Rather, his work paired the easy-to-poke-fun-at ludicrousness of small town obsessions with the genuine earnestness of their salt-of-the-earth makeup. For every Meg and Hamilton Swan and their posh Weimaraner, there was a Harlan Pepper and his basset hound. Were Guest still making movies today, one might expect his signature mockumentary stylings to take on child beauty pageants or vocal protest groups. Or vampire flatmates. Read More

Out in Theaters: FIFTY SHADES OF GREY

February 12, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Dakota Johnson, E.L. James, Fifty Shades of Grey, Jamie Dornan, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Sam Taylor-Johnson

When I’m in the mood to do the pant’s dance, you won’t find me reaching for airport smut the likes of Fifty Shades of Grey. Rather, I prefer my sex with a little, uh, sex. I have been told the crop of humans that find this lewd drivel titillating are mostly repressed housewives and jittery virgins. Even then I find it hard to believe that the virginal palette is whetted by domestic abuse dressed up as BDSM and that housewives crave the kind of punishment on display in Fifty Shades of Grey. I imagine the more apt female fantasy involves turning the table and gaining the whip rather than submitting to an older, powerful, pain-obsessed billionaire. I’m willing to admit that maybe I just don’t get it but I have an inclination that I’m standing on the right side with this one.

Fifty Shades of Grey is fifty shades of shady. It’s porn for people who don’t watch porn – filled with nudity (you even snag a glimpse of shaft-top), playroom tools (Mr. Grey keeps his own personal, in-house red light district stocked to the brim but never gets around to using any of his actual instruments. When he does finally turn to his tool box of BDSM trinkets, he uses an ordinary belt? Really? But you have a wall STOCKED with sick canes?!), and waiting – but the film is improbably light on actual sex. And, more importantly, sex appeal. For a movie that’s two hours of contrived tension and nothing in the way of plot, the payoffs suffer creative erectile dysfunction en masse and fail to tick the arousal dial even slightly clockwise.

It’s no surprise to learn that the concept from Fifty Shades was explicitly born from “Twilight” fan fiction. Doing my best to know as little as possible about these kinds of things, I had no idea this was the case when I turned to my girlfriend during the screening and said, “This is just Twilight without the vampires”. After over two hours of Fifty Shades though, I was begging for Twilight. That should give you a sense of just how putrid a product Sam Taylor-Johnson‘s adaptation of E.L. James‘ bestselling romance novel truly is. At least Twilight had a story.

Starring two nobodies that no-one cares about – Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan – Fifty Shades of Grey purports the telling of a peculiar love story but to call what unfolds a story is unfittingly generous. A story involves characters being forced to make choices and subsequently developing because of those choices, their relationships thickening as various circumstances swirl around them, pushing them hither and thither. Fifty Shades revolves around one choice – whether Ana will submit to the dominant Mr. Grey – and only by curtain time has our character made her choice. It’s 125-minutes of will-they-or-won’t-they BDSM-lite cinematic garbage and to spent any more time discussing the “plot” is a waste of resources, yours and mine both.

Perhaps what is most off-putting about the whole affair is (my admittedly personal) perception that the sexual acts that take place are in no way, shape or form sexy. Their bumping uglies is either as awkward as losing your V-card or as painful to watch as sitting through Blue is the Warmest Color with your parents, and Taylor-Johnson has little to offer in terms of variety to spice things up. Surely she was handed a pile of narrative yuck so it’s hard to put the blame on her for trying to dress that yuck up as pretty as she could. In the midst of the second act, the movie appears as if it might switch gears and turn its engines to full steam ahead but just piddles out shortly thereafter and gets back to the will-they-won’t-they grind.

Not having read the source material, I genuinely wonder if this kind of novella smut could have ever made a good movie. The plain truth of the matter is Fifty Shades of Grey just isn’t a story. There’s no three act structure. There’s hardly characters so much as denuded cardboard cut-outs sticking themselves into each other, brewing with overt undertones of sexual violence.

Damian Grey’s misunderstanding of consensual sexual congress comes cloaked in contracts, a fact that should be an immediate red-flag for any self-respecting female. “Oh, I need to sign my rights away in order to bone you? Sounds legit!” When asked what she gets out of the deal, Grey purrs, “Me”. Fucking spare me.

When Mr. Grey does let his demons out of the closet and sparks the engines on his lingering dungeon tools, his coital playbook is closer in form to The Rapes of Wrath and Ho-piercer than the soft femininity of Nicholas Spark’s The Throatbook. Even then – in the midst of an aggressive buttocks bludgeoning – I had trouble feeling anything towards the lip-biter on the receiving end because she asked for it AND had a carefully-outlined safe word prepared. If only there had been a safe word to make this movie stop.

Those sexually-repressed tittering housewives looking to get their jollies off in the biggest budget, softest soft-core porno ever, will find their faces fully flushed, hooting and hollering as the hot bodies on screen run their whips across bared flesh and eventually insert themselves in one another. Those who’ve gotten lost in a Borders to find themselves surrounded by self-same covers of disposable romantic novels – those with the bare-chested hunks and the impossibly helpless damsels dangling from them – and have run screaming, those poor few ought prepare for the absolute overdose of senseless smut that is Fifty Shades of Grey.

At the screening I attended, they distributed Fifty Shades fashioned blindfolds before the showing. You wouldn’t be worse off wearing it during the film.

D

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Out in Theaters: KINGSMAN: THE SECRET SERVICE

February 12, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Colin Firth, Dave Gibbons, Kingsman: The Secret Service, Mark Millar, Matthew Vaughn, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Samuel L. Jackson, Taron Egerton

Absurdist superspy farce that tips its top-hat to the JB’s (James Bond, Jason Bourne, Jack Bauer) while rampantly assaulting its way into the 21st century, Kingsman: The Secret Service is filmic reassurance that ridiculous fun can still be had in the theater. Over the past decade, the spy spoof (Austin Powers, Spies Like Us) has mostly gone the way of the Crocodile Dundee (unless we’re counting the underwhelming, geri-action Red films. Note: we shouldn’t be). Leave it to genre revivalist Matthew Vaughn to inject that tired and trying genus with the same eye-widening, pulse-quickening hit of adrenaline that he’d previously brought to the superhero and crime genre with Kick-Ass, X-Men: First Class and Layer Cake. Brimming with tactful homage and just enough youthful zest to make its balls-to-the-walls-ness truly one-of-a-kind, Kingsman is a shining, shimmering, splendid example of why we go to the movies.

In Vaughn’s murderous opus, the titular Kingsmen are a copacetic society of mustache-twirling gentleman/gun-totting acrobats renown for their secrecy, military effectiveness and hand-tailored suits. When world leaders want the job done right, they hire the Kingsman and if everything goes according to plan, you don’t hear peep about their success in the papers. One might assume from the cut of their jib that the Kingsmen are a group of pacifist nancies but Vaughn wastes little time conveying just how deadly his crew of well-dressed gentlemen is.

The stage is set with a fortress under siege, explosions tumbling block letter title cards to Dire Straight’s pounding “Money for Nothing″. Through a window, a masked agent informs an Arab man bolt-strapped to a chair that he will count down from ten and if he doesn’t have the information he needs in that time frame, ten will be the last thing he ever hears. There’s no deliberation, no hesitation, just counting. At five, he caps both the captive’s knees. There’s no breathy drawls, no pregnant pauses. This ain’t that kind of movie, bruv. Harry Hart, code name Galahad, counts down like a metronome.

Caught unawares, Galahad is too late to stop the prisoner from pulling the pin on a stashed grenade, but finds himself and his fellow Kingsmen saved when a fellow super-agent in training throws himself on the explosive. Seventeen years later, Galahad feels indebted to his savior and, with a recently opened spot on the team, seeks out the promising-but-problematic son of the man who saved his life so many years ago, Gary ‘Eggsy’ Unwin (Taron Egerton). Eggsy is a kind-hearted ruffian, loyal to a fault and entangled with the wrong crew because of his mother’s not-so-cunning choice of gentlemen friends.

What transpires next involves a global climate change world domination plot, X-Men: First Class-style training montages, an ultra-violent blitzkrieg in a church that will assuredly go down as one of the year’s most memorable and visually-arresting sequences, Samuel L. Jackson playing a despotic billionaire with a lisp and a soft stomach for blood using the subterfuge of free data plans to “clean the slate” and loads of not-so-subtle James Bond references. If the above does not at least pique your interest, Kingsman is probably not the film for you.

The film again pairs Vaughn with the authors of the comic book source material on which Kingsman is based; Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons (Kick-Ass). So again if you weren’t won over by the wacky, violent antics of Kick-Ass, this is likely not going to amuse you. And though shy a Hit-Girl, Kingsman has plenty of fun, memorable characters to play with, most notably Colin Firth as Galahad. Liam Neeson reinvented himself as an action hero in his twilight years so why not the King with the lisp? asks Vaughn. Firth makes the most of his pithy dialogue and provides an adroit aging action hero – a lovingly rendered throwback to the age of the smooth-talking British spy. Engaged in a carousel of gun shots and knifings, Firth shines in the action scenes too, even if it’s a fair gamble to say that most of his stunts are mostly the work of computer animations.

There are a few notable sequences that feature spotty CGI work (Eggsy’s mid-air, knife-tipped shoe stab makes him look like a plastic action figure) but in the center of Kingsman go-for-broke, give-em-all-ya-got approach to breathless bombast, it couldn’t matter less. The eyebrow-raising smarm and au courant irreverence of Vaughn’s rhapsodical vision just make for one hell of a show. Plus, there’s nothing quite like capping off your film with the prospect of slamming the back door of a princess. In the end, isn’t that the point of this whole spy venture anyways?

A-

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Out in Theaters: LEVIATHAN

February 12, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Alexeï Serebriakov, Andrey Zvyagintsev, Elena Liadova, Foreign Film, Leviathan, Oleg Negin, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Roman Madianov, Sergueï Pokhodaev

Leviathan is the work of an artist struggling with his heritage. Hailing from Novosibirsk, Russia, Andrey Zvyagintsev paints a Roman tragedy with Biblical implications into the modern seascape of Northern Russia’s Barents Sea and the result is staggering. Interpersonal power struggles and structural corruption pollute the scenery of Zvyagintsev’s vision presenting a modern man’s saga of David and Goliath as a simple mechanic faces down an nefarious but forceful mayor.

Russia’s official selection for the 87th Academy Award for Best Foreign Film (and a strong contender for the win) also took home the prize for Best Screenplay at last year’s Cannes Film Festival in large part due to the many layers of Leviathan’s searing and potent critique. Zvyagintsev’s pages cut deep emotional and intellectual slashes, destined to linger long after the curtains are drawn. Aided by Oleg Negin, Zvyagintsev has written a screenplay that reveals itself a piece at a time, delicately peeling back layers of a narrative onion until we’re at its nasty center and likely as tearful as after dicing an onion.

The plight of Zvyagintsev’s characters – each a flawed shade of simpleton doing their best to get by – give emotional weight to his cold, procedural dealings but it’s what he does with the idea of institutional extortion that really transforms Leviathan into a foreign epic worth remembering. After all, when is red tape an equal villain to a vodka-slugging Mafioso?

Kolya (Alexeï Serebriakov) leads an earnest life with new wife Lilya (Elena Liadova) and son Roma (Sergueï Pokhodaev) as a part time auto-repair mechanic. Recently under one roof, Roma and Lilya have yet to come to an understanding about their newly forged stepson-stepmom relationship, forcing Koyla into an unwelcome focal point between two occasionally feuding forces. Pressure from corrupt major Vadim Shelevyat (Roman Madianov) only further yaws their domestic equilibrium and an all out land war erupts in the form of paperwork, blackmail and eventual murder.

Zvyagintsev’s curt and gloomy voice shines through in every scene, lending a pessimistic but pragmatic air to the overwhelming fogginess of his feature. Hope is a long shot but events never feel forcibly grim. Even when they are, there’s an understanding that Zvyagintsev courts his catastrophe with a fair potion of verisimilitude. No matter how black and bleak his world becomes, he approaches despondency from a position of hard-won credibility; credibility that can only be won first-hand from a lifetime of institutional injustice.

This begs the question: is Zvyagintsev’s film a condemnation of his country? According to his own statements, no. “I am deeply convinced that, whatever society each and every one of us lives in, we will all be faced one day with the following alternative: either live as a slave or live as a free man.” Zvyagintsev continues, “And if we naively think that there must be a kind of state power that can free us from that choice, we are seriously mistaken.” A chilly message blasting like a bullet from an even chillier film, and one seriously worthy of your attention.

B

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Out in Theaters: JUPITER ASCENDING

February 5, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Channing Tatum, Eddie Redmayne, Jupiter Ascending, Mila Kunis, Out in Theaters, Reviews, The Wachowskis

The Wachowskis have been getting blank checks from Warner Bros since pulling off The Matrix in 1999 and with Jupiter Ascending have likely made their last boundless blockbuster. In 2012, Cloud Atlas turned a budget north of $100 million (though no official budget was ever released) into a pitiable $27 million domestic return, a figure almost as bad as the lowly $43.9 domestic box office cume from a $120 million investment on 2008’s Speed Racer. With their latest, they’re about to pull off their biggest magic trick yet, making a $175 budget disappear into thin air. To say the bloom is off the rose is a lie by degree. This movie’s gonna get crushed.

And rightly so. The Wachowskis have always skated by on their awesome sense of spectacle, often at the expense of a cohesive story, but Jupiter Ascending is not just their latest but their most egregious offender of complete and utter style over substance. In their defense, the style is often blindingly cool, if only for a brief moment. No scene better utilizes their captivating handle on big budget pageantry than a first act escape scene, one that reportedly took upwards of six months to film. The issue remains: why dump so much time and resource into a glorified stunt and so little into plot, character and general story cohesion? The answer is mindbogglingly unaddressed.

With Jupiter, one established Wachowski mainstay remains in their FX-driven manipulation of gravity. Bullet time has been replaced by gravity boots and Keanu Reeves’ wooden acting is subbed in by a frequently shirtless and rarely compelling Channing Tatum. Tatum plays the role of a warrior “splice” – a genetically engineered part-man, part-dog. He once had cyborg-enhanced wings but got them hacked off Maleficent-style when he bit the wrong rear end. Or was it ear end? His is a lackluster bit of back story that’s never explained or accounted for in a movie full of lackluster bits of back story that are never explained or accounted for. But such is Jupiter Ascending.

Tatum’s effortlessly seductive (or so we’re told) Caine Wise is tasked with retrieving an Earthling woman at the center of a galactic land grab but in a guns-blazin’ fix gets mixed up and ends up with the wrong chick: a Russian toilet-scrubber by the name of January “I Like Dogs” Jones (Mila Kunis). The maid mix-up winds up COMPLETELY forgotten about as it turns out our heroine is actually an heiress of the highest order – the reincarnation of an interplanetary Tzar and somewhat recently deceased head of family to the Abrasax clan. With a hefty sum of a birthright (including, ya know, the Earth), the rest of the Abrasax fam-damily tries to win over the pea-brained January with various schemes and assaults of paperwork. You can almost hear Wachowski’s whine, “Bureaucracy’s a bitch.” After a few queues to get the ol’ inheritance files in order, many things explodes and Tatum’s dog-boy is called to the rescue – like Lassie with a six pack – more times than I’d like to report on.

In a pinch, Kunis’ Jupiter Jones is as compelling a female lead as Denise Richards’ Christmas Jones and just about as believable as Richards’ is as a rocket scientist. She’s a perma-damsel in distress, haplessly entering herself into laughably dumb situations and finding herself subsequently incapable of getting out without being rescued by her half-canine prince. It makes me wonder why the Wachowskis even bothered making a film with a female protagonist when they’re just going to make her so pathetic and pitiable. It’s an asinine step backwards in an industry that demands two forward. The gross lack of chemistry between Kunis and Tatum doesn’t help either, nor do the odd bestiality undertones.

And just as Channing Tatum is a dog genetically spliced with a human, Jupiter Ascending is The Princess Bride genetically spliced with Star Fox, a bombastic video game of a space-set fairy tale that feels like it needed something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue in order for the studio to marry it to a budget so high. The result is a rip-off by assault; kitchen sink FX hogwash laid upon tired narrative tactics.

What is truly visionary in terms of set production, lavish costumery and creature design results in something totally and tonally defunct in the story department. As Eddie Redmayne greedily dismantles everything great about his work in The Theory of Everything as a necky, whispering, totally bratty villain, the Wachowskis make a mockery of their own legacy as storytellers. Even when they haven’t been firing on all cylinders, the sibling filmmakers have been able to provide dazzling, heady escapism. Jupiter Ascending though just makes you want to escape the theater.

D+

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Out in Theaters: THE BOY NEXT DOOR

January 21, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Ian Nelson, Jennifer Lopez, John Corbett, Kristen Chenoweth, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Ryan Guzman, The Boy Next Door

Ugly, rapey stalker thriller The Boy Next Door doesn’t get the first thing right about stalking, nor does it care to. Starring the curve of J Lo‘s booty and an Oedipal whelp of man meat, Rob Cohen‘s delightfully crummy feature probes madcap, self-deprecating territory but squarely settles for a damning self-serious tone. Had Cohen (he of Fast and Furious, XXX, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor and Alex Cross acclaim) just gone for intentionally laughable bombast, we could have been howling with him, not at him.

Wasting no time revealing how laughably bad it is, The Boy Next Door opens with exposition as information dump. J Lo’s husband cheated on her, divorce papers appeared but were never signed, forgiveness is on the horizon. All of this narrative hooey is communicated in a 30 second flashback/montage clip, making for one of the worst openings this side of Blackhat‘s “inside the computer” start. The only foil to J Lo’s marital reconciliation is the fact that hubby (John Corbett) is scheduled for a trip to San Francisco, hometown to his partner in infidelity.

Enter Noah Sandborn (Ryan Guzman), your garage-fixing, alternator-switching boy of the next door persuasion. The guy’s got an enviable six pack – which inexplicably occupies more camera minutes than J Lo’s most prized ASSets – and J Lo’s Claire Peterson isn’t afraid to peep at them from across the way. Spinning from dating woes and palpably seduced by Noah’s youthful magnetism, Claire winds up bedded by her high school neighbor in a scene that alternates between being sketchy, funny and sexy and is downright useless to the film. (Also: it shows zero boobs.)

In amazingly little time, Noah begins an unhealthy obsession with his hot pepperoncini of a neighbor, even after she tries to put the kibosh to things. Bing, bang, boom, Noah starts showing his bad side as his whole rape fanta…I mean stalking escalate at neck-break speeds.

Pointing out all the little narrative infidelities of The Boy Next Door is like trying to pin down exactly how many men a porn star has slept with. It’s a film that features a race against the clock to discard ribbons on ribbons of smutty photocopies; that features a bully-target of a son with an allergy to…being nervous?; a film where you know the breaks are cut minutes before the car starts swerving. Apparently, it exists in a vacuum of cell communication as well, because aside from one or two instances, we never see our characters disclose critical details to one another. You have to count the instances in which near death experiences occur and then are never spoke of again.

Step Up‘s Guzman is awful in the leading man’s shoes, all kinds of ham and cheese in a role that might have even thrived in the hands of a Dan Stevens type. The parallels to Adam Winguard’s infinitely superior The Guest are so many and so obvious that a fellow film critic turned to me at the end, postulating that it might end in the exact same fashion. For what it’s worth, Jennifer Lopez is the best part of the film – managing to skimp her way through Barbara Curry‘s hackneyed script mostly unscathed – but she’s also the only one trying. Kristen Chenoweth playing a low-rent Cameron Diaz offers up miffed comedic relief while relative newcomer Ian Nelson is more breakfast cereal goody-two-shoes than Walt Jr.

The effort just isn’t there and the product shows it. There’s a late scene sequence – all engulfed in flames and shot to shit – in which Cohen seems to fully abandon the serious tone and go for broke, making for some absurdist, genuinely funny material. It’s not entirely clear if this is his throwing in the cards moment or a side-glancing wink at the audience but it’s exactly the kind of bonkers “what the hell is this crap?” moment that the movie needed much, much more of. Or could have done without entirely.

D-

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Out in Theaters: THE WEDDING RINGER

January 15, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Jeremy Garelick, Josh Gadd, Kevin Hart, Out in Theaters, Reviews, The Wedding Ringer

The five second pitch to The Wedding Ringer is eerily like another black-guy-teaches-fat-white-guy-to-be-cool. I’m talking of course of Tracy Morgan’s Totally Awesome. And yes, fine, the wide released, box office champion Hitch as well. The final products couldn’t look any different though. The mandatory bromance angle may be as far fetched as Kevin James and Will Smith BFFing, or James and Sandler shackin’ up for that matter – and there are two too many wincingly cheesy portions that highlight said narrative cheapness – but on the whole, Jeremy Garelick‘s film is all about the laughs, and features a good many of them. At times, a surprising amount.

In The Wedding Ringer, Kevin Hart owns and operates an underground Best Man Rental agency. Just as one might rent a tux or a town car, Hart’s Jimmy Callahan rents out his easy charm and A+ best man speeches to guys with an unfortunate amount of friends (read none). With his wedding just ten days away, young money-bagger Doug Harris (Josh Gadd) seeks out the help of seasoned pro Jimmy to pull of the illusive “Golden Tux”, in which he must employ and train a slew of groomsmen as well as attend various family events, all while trying to fit into his terribly off-colored assigned role of “military priest.”

The Wedding Ringer may not find its groove early – and its first scene is absolutely horrendous – but when it does, there are a string of embarrassingly rich potty-level-laughs. Kevin Hart moves a mile a minute, spinning his face into a number of comical screw-ups – adapting 1990s Jim Carrey’s rubber-faced, visage contortionism – and spouting off glib one-liners as quickly as he can think of them. While the script from Garelick, Will Packer and Jay Lavender revisits old territory, the film shines when Hart ad-libs his way to preposterous comic heights.

The raunch can be found ratcheted up to tasteless levels and those with a distaste for the underbelly of humor will certainly find themselves fully disgusted. With scenes that involve dogs biting peanut butter-smothered nether regions, displays of oddly number testicles, a mulleted adult berating a child before throwing a beer can at him and other nut shots of a similar breed, The Wedding Ringer is no display of fine-tuned highbrow comedy. But for how low some of the blows can stoop, the train of beefy laughs still steams forth.

Striking at the potent middle ground where sentiment and humor meet, The Wedding Ringer caps off with an emotionally-rending third act that, although predictable, features some of Hart’s most genuine moments on screen to date. And though Josh Gad has trouble keeping up with the Tasmanian whirlwind that is Hart, he gets him moments in, infrequent as they are. The product is a dumb, paint-by-numbers comedy that’ll surprise you with its amount of laughs. And though it’s a hard one to recommend without a big asterisk, I found myself occasionally rapt with its overtly immature humor. Oh and to whomever decided to end the entire film on an out-of-nowhere Lost joke, I applaud you.

C

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Out in Theaters: PADDINGTON

January 15, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Ben Whishaw, Hugh Boneville, Julie Andrews, Michael Gambon, Nicole Kidman, Out in Theaters, Paddington, Paul King, Reviews, Sally Hawkins 1 Comment

Paul King tells the story of the Peruvian hat-wearing bear Paddington with painless charm and a cool wit, crafting a family-friendly outing that’ll leave baby, momma and poppa bear equally satisfied. Though never quite reaching the heights promised in its subversively droll opening sequence (travel piano FTW), Paddington plays its “home is where the heart is” message safe but effectively, wearing its heart on its sleeve in a decidedly not saccharine manner. Skirting the fine line of overt mushing, King has his cake and eats it too, serving up a delightfully cheery rendition of everyone’s favorite anthropomorphic duffle-coated bear with just a spoon full of sugar to help it all go down smoothly.

So named for a London train station, Paddington (voiced by Ben Whishaw) is an unassuming, though habitually catastrophic, little bundle of CGI fur prone to incidents of the wrong-place-wrong-time variety. Ejected from his homelands of Darkest Peru after an earthquake levels his Ewokian tree fort abode and his uncle Pastuzo (Michael Gambon), Paddington heads to London armed only with a suitcase full of marmalade and a baggage claim necktie that reads “Please look after this bear. Thank you.” Confident that he can seek out the explorer who discovered his super-intelligent species so many years back (and was thoughtful enough not to “bag a specimen”), Paddington soon realizes that London isn’t the chipper, uber-polite metropolis he had envisioned.

Stranded in a subway station, the Brown family happens upon the dejected bipedal bear, now plum out of marmalade. Hugh Boneville‘s Mr. Brown shrugs him off as a pesky louse while Sally Hawkins‘ Mrs. Brown discovers a quick soft spot in her heart for the definitely not-stuffed little caniform, convincing her portly hubby and incalculably-not-escatic children to house him. At least until they can find wee Paddington a proper guardian. Bathtub shenanigans follow.

More hijinks ensue when Nicole Kidman‘s villainous Millicent enters the picture with nefarious plans to capture and perform a case of emergency taxidermy on the fuzzy critter from Darkest Peru. For the dollar dollar bills y’all. Performing midair acrobatics (and unmistakably riffing on Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible wire work) Kidman throws himself completely into the campy role, providing a Looney Toon of a villain as a necessary pivot point to get the emotional ball rolling for the ever-stubborn Mr. Brown.

Though the third act fails to get off the ground – literally and figuratively – in much of the same ways that the first two do, the accordant motif of high heights remains – Mr. Brown on a balcony risking life and limb being the linchpin finale we all knew was in store. It all adds up to emotionally rich though highly retread territory; its promises of originality reduced to the likes of a safari in our own humble backyard. But that innit all bad, issit? Though not necessarily high-minded, Paddington is a compilation of pleasantries set out to win the hearts of its observers, if not necessarily their minds.

B-

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Out in Theaters: BLACKHAT

January 14, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Blackhat, Chris Hemsworth, John Ortiz, Leehom Wang, Michael Mann, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Viola Davis, Wei Tang

The only way to make sense of Blackhat is to imagine Hansel (of the Zoolander variety, not he of the breadcrumbs) taking an online computer science class, changing his name to Michael Mann and setting out to wow the world by going “inside the computer.” The result is 135 minutes of excruciating, unequivocal gobbledegook led by the most frigid onscreen couple since Joel Schumacher‘s Mr. Freeze squabbled with Poison Ivy. To call it bad is a lie by degree; it’s impossibly poor. For over two simply unbearable hours, join Mann as he sullies his good name with a film so awesomely abhorrent you’ll be doubting that he (he of international critical acclaim and assorted Oscar nominations) ever stepped foot on set.

Unfortunately, Mann’s fingerprints are undeniably all over Blackhat. His signature wide-lens nocturnal cityscapes are too crisp to be the work of even a dedicated understudy. If we’re digging deep to give Mann points (something we really shouldn’t be doing for a movie this embarrassingly bad), at least those fleeting heli-shots of x or y city at night provides temporary respite from the narrative implosion happening all around it. With force, Mann throws down the gauntlet for a movie where the establishing shots are incontestably better than the actual goings on of the film.

The plot (if you’re generous enough to refer to this “RAT after cheese” hunt as a plot) consists of a rogue hacker con (Chris Hemsworth) furloughed by the FBI in an attempt to hunt down those responsible for bringing a Chinese nuclear reactor to the brink of a meltdown, old MIT buddies reunited under the most improbable of circumstances, a kid sister sidekick with eyes for the hunky Hemsworth and one ESL-lesson shy of a TOEFL-degree and evil hackers who lounge around with their pale bellies protruding. Blackhat pivots on the oh-so-exciting prospects of coding, stock manipulation and the DOW value of soy. And eventually tin. If only 1995 Michael Mann could hear how tinny it sounds.

Hemsworth isn’t to blame for the bed-shitting puddle of yuck that is Blackhat (though he could have tried a touch less humorlessness), nor is seasoned compatriot Viola Davis (though I’d like to have a word with her heavy-handed makeup artist). The other leads though – those of the Asian persuasion – seem culled from the international recycling bin. As the female lead, Wei Tang has less restraint than a local weatherman and her consistent jumbling of volume and cadence leads to some wonky audio issues that a finished, wide-release film should never encounter. The conversations are loud, then inexplicably quiet and then overbearingly tremble-y. Like someone sat on the audio control board and no one cared enough to fix it.

But Blackhat is filled with those brush-it-off-the-shoulder moments, as it succumbs steadily to a tide of directionless, thoughtless bunk. The perceived mounting suspense-by-laptop is as exciting as waiting two hours to discover a broken roller coaster at the end of the queue. Or watching a friend play a video game. As in watching only them, without being privy to what’s happening on the screen. For two hours.

The second time that Mann dips into the computer circuits to spider around for an improbable amount of time, you know you’re in trouble. When the leads lunge at each other like caged rabbits, holding back hearty howls is as impossible as enjoying the film. It’s all the worst habits of bad filmmaking puked onto the screen and shown over and over again. If The Fifth Estate is a golden boy for laughable hacker drama gone wrong, Blackhat dares to one-up it.

When affairs get gun-fighty, you breathe a sigh of relief. “Well at least Mann knows how to shoot the hell out of a gun fight. We’re all set here guys. Right?” Wrong. One couldn’t predict how horribly clunky and straight-to-video the transpiring blaze of gunfire is if they had a crystal ball. It’s almost unreasonable to be expected to come to terms with the fact that the same Michael Mann who directed the infamously taut bank shootout of Heat filmed what is quite reasonably the worst wide-release gunfight of the 21st century. Hang your head heavy Mr. Mann, feel the shame waft over you. Either that or your captors should feel rather guilty (“Where is the real Michael Mann and what have you done with him?!”)

The hacker thriller is a tough cookie to crack and has led to more certifiably misfires than any other action subgenre I can summon (yes, even more so than the geri-action sort). The closest anyone’s ever gotten to a great hacker thriller is The Matrix, and I use the comparison softly because calling it a hacker thriller is me admittedly bending the lines. Michael Mann’s film doesn’t come close to great. It’s not even within the realm of good. It couldn’t see the periphery of good with 400x binoculars. To have his name attached to it is to bear a Scarlet Letter from this point hence. Insufferable and tacitly overlong, his shameful film is an early contender for being crowned worst film of the year. Play at being Neo for a day: dodge a bullet and skip Blackhat.

F

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Out in Theaters: INTO THE WOODS

December 24, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Anna Kendrick, Billy Magnussen, Chris Pine, Daniel Huttlestone, Emily Blunt, Into the Woods, James Corden, Johnny Depp, Lilla Crawford, Meryl Streep, Musicals, Out in Theaters, Reviews 2 Comments

Last year, Telltale Games released a video game called “The Wolf Among Us.” The interactive story re-imagined fairy tales of lore – from Snow White to Georgie Porgie – as a community of troubled New Yorkers caught up in a multiple homicide investigation. You play as Bigby Wolf, a detective with a past as coarse as his beard hair, now a man doing his best to pay penance for the huffing and puffing of his past.

Rob Marshall‘s Into the Woods has its own Big, Bad Wolf – Johnny Depp with a crumpled mustache and a rapey solo track. He bays at the moon while singing about how badly he wants to gobble up Red Riding Hood. It’s weird, off-putting and noxious – essential Depp 101. Where Telltale was able to take familiar characters and weave a story around them that benefits from our understanding of their respective fables, Into the Woods relies entirely on mimicking the collective conscious of lore, spoon-feeding back a narrative that’s more anecdotal smorgasbord than anything refined and singular. It’s one big inside joke that’s sure to tickle musical fans pink while leaving those on the other side of the fence howling for respite.

The story starts out in precious sing-song with a baker and his wife wailing their woes of a womb left barren, a pernicious Little Red (Lilla Crawford) embarking to grandma’s with a basket brimming with baked goods, Jack (Daniel Huttlestone) unwittingly off to trade his milky white cow for some magic beans and a spindly witch played by Meryl Streep hemming and hawing about an aged curse and popping in and out of frames in daffy gusts of smoke. Their paths, for one reason or another, have all been pointed into the woods. And so we embark with ballad after ballad, lungs brimming with gusto.

It’s within said woods that The Baker (James Corden) and his Wife (Emily Blunt) must gather a cow as white as milk, hair as yellow as corn and a slipper as gold as…gold? in order to break the curse that Steep’s witch placed on their house many years ago. Many songs follow.

For those turned off by musical numbers, Into the Woods is an auditory onslaught that fails to break from the repertoire of singing, singing and more singing long enough to develop a story beyond the patchwork of colliding fairy tales. Chris Pine steals the show with in-film brother Billy Magnussen in a number called “Agony” but clever moments of tongue-in-cheek nods to the adults in the audience like this are woefully sparse.

The cast is admittedly stellar – Anna Kendrick, Corden, Blunt, Pine and, to a lesser degree, Streep all own their numbers, even if I personally found some of those numbers grating. But such is the nature of the musical. You’re either in it or you aren’t. It’s just not my cup of tea. What I completely fail to understand is any Oscar buzz surrounding the film as the mere idea of Streep with a nomination frustrates me beyond belief (in a year stuffed with excellent, unsung female performances.) She’s played the Academy Darling card too many times recently, earning a nod nearly every time she puts her face to celluoid. The Iron Lady doth protest too much, methinks.

C

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