Jurassic World June 12, 2o15

Here’s the thing. Jurassic World is not a bad movie because it might be sexist. It’s not awful because the dinosaurs don’t have feathers even though all the leading  proctologist—oh, excuse me . . .  leading paleontologists say that REAL dinosaurs most certainly (at least for now) had feathers. And it’s not an awful movie because it’s racist, though it may well be exactly that. AND it’s not a bad movie because of whatever political or social rules that you, the audience, believe movies should always follow. The reason that there are glitches in this film is due solely to bad character development in the script.

The problem with the Claire Dearing  (Bryce Dallas Howard) character isn’t that she’s a low life corporate lap dog B**** in high heels. The problem is that she is not a character at all . . . she’s a plot point. Her whole reason for her existence in this make-believe world is to do one thing . . .get that big a** killer dinosaur that the scientists created out of its cage so IT can go KILL humans (and the other dinos it encounters) and just raise holy hell in this utopian, live action Disneyland that the producers and director and writers have created.

 

The same goes for the Simon Masrani (Irrfan Khan) character. He’s not there to show the world how corporate bosses can be greedy, and at the same time, concerned about the wellbeing of the folks visiting his sideshow park. His job is to jump in that helicopter and smash it into the park's pterosaur aviary so all the cute little pterodactyls can fly around and terrorize and eat a lot of extras and one particularly nonessential character, the assistant to Ms. Dearing who was supposed to watch over Claire’s nephews.

 

Almost every supporting character in this movie was either totally unnecessary or used solely as a human prop. And while I’m on a rage: what the HECK is Jimmy Fallon even doing in this movie?! Don’t get me wrong. I love Jimmy Fallon, but in this movie? The gag of him showing up on in an instruction video inside the human hamster ball . . . is not funny, doesn’t at all fit in with the movie. I know, the director thought it would be cool to have Jimmy in his movie . . . but the bit is so haphazardly thrown into the flow of things that it just knocks the audience out of that reality the moviemakers are trying to establish.

My point is this: no matter what we say, we audience members go to the movies, to the theatre to SEE human characters go through their struggle for life, for happiness, for whatever it is that the characters hold dear. No, we don’t just go to see giant dinosaurs, or car crashes, or imaginary people eaten alive, or bombs blowing up buildings . . . we go to see “human” characters struggle to survive that which we REAL people struggle with every day, life. Yes, I said it! Life is far more dangerous and scary than any CGI dinosaur ever made. And we know it. We know it from the moment we step into that theatre, get our popcorn and our large ice teas with lots of ice. Yes, we know that what we are seeing is a representation of life, not real life. However, for us to believe in this imaginary world, we need a guide, a humanlike character, an imaginary person that we can trust. When the production team doesn’t create characters that walk and talk and behave like human beings . . .we know it. And once we know you’re conning us . . .well, good luck in getting us involved in your movie.

P.S. Soon more reviews will be available: Nightingale, Tomorrowland, San Andreas . . . and many more.

 

 

Mad Max: Fury Road May 2o15

Hell-hath-no-FURY-like-a-woman-scorned-ROAD!

Look, if you are expecting Mad Max: Fury Road to be just a carbon copy of the original, The Road Warrior, you are going to be both surprised . . . and not surprised. Yes, Mad Max: Fury Road is exactly like every Mad movie you have seen  . . . and also totally different. Confused? Join the club. I’ll admit that it took me a few minutes to realize that the title character, Mad Max, wasn’t the lead or the focus of this movie. He is supporting character, a utilitarian character, a character not unlike The Feral Kid in Mad Max 2.

The real Mad Max character in this movie is a female character named Imperator Furiosa who rose from her slavery to become a general in Immortan Joe’s kick-booty army of paint huffing War Boys. And what does she do? Well, as soon as she gets her War Rig,  and the opportunity, she snags Joe’s wives and hightails it to some feminist fantasy land called the Green Place.

 

And yes, this movie is full of “feminist propaganda!” How do I know? Well, the director says so, the author of the script says so, and if that’s not enough proof for you, they cast a woman in the lead role. So, ergo: it’s feminist propaganda. I mean, that’s the way we all American, eat all you want, heterosexual white dudes think, right?

 

Woman in lead role = feminist propaganda

 

Never mind the that if the lead role had been cast as a white male we’d all be thinking that it was a brilliant movie about “. . . the MANly spirit standing proudly up for “HIS” rights against the evil powers of a totalitarian regime—

 

Irate Fan Boy: Hey Woodie! I thought this was going to be a movie review?

 

Oh, yeah, the movie. The movie’s great, man. Just the cinematography alone is worth the price of admission (Which if you go to a matinée showing like I do, it ain’t that much). The shots of the Namib Desert are just devastatingly beautiful. The pic above this review is a still from the movie. Granted, not too impressive in miniature, but on the BIG screen, totally awe-inspiring.  And forget about any action sequences you’ve seen in the past. The chase scenes across the desert are brilliant! New camera techniques, incredible car crashes, great, extremely great stunt work make this “sequel” the best movie of the Mad Max franchise. Okay, I do admit I STILL don’t like the way they shoot hand-to-hand combat scenes these days. They speed up the camera to make the fight seem more “powerful(?)” and to also cover-up the fact that the lead actors can’t do stunt work. It makes it all look a bit herky-jerky  . . .  like this:

 

Anyway, no matter what, if you love great action, exceptional acting and storytelling, Mad Max: Fury Road is a must see!

 

“Oh what a day, what a lovely day!”

 

Ex Machina, April 2015

Nathan: One day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil

skeletons on the plains of Africa. An upright ape living in dust with crude language and
tools, all set for extinction.

 

It’s difficult to write a review of a movie that has inspired you so much that you feel compelled to entice other people to go see it. You don’t want to say too little, but you don’t want to overstate the brilliance of the movie because folks are folks and they’ll probably be disappointed if you glorify it too much.

 

Ex Machina is at its core a Sci-Fi/Thriller. But it is even so much more than that. It’s an exploration of morality, ethics and human strengths and weaknesses. Yes, there have been many A.I. movies that use Artificial Intelligence as a plot device more than a study of human behavior. But, as I said, this movie goes beyond the basic thriller genre without being a bit preachy or making you feel as if you just stepped into a Philosophy 101class. It is an extremely personal and human exploration of the relationship between humans, a nonhuman/sentient being and, if I dare say the word . . . God.

 

Everything is working for this film. A really intriguing script that gives you just enough info to want to stay and see what’s going to happen next, lots of clever, human dialogue that always has something hidden just under the surface to make seeing this film more than once a pleasure and not a chore, and the acting? Forget about it! The three main actors (Alicia Vikander, Domhnall Gleeson and Oscar Isaac) are at the top of the Thespian food chain. Man, they know how to play an action and how to make the words they’re saying sound like music to my over-educated, theatre oriented ears

 

Unfortunately, the grandeur of this little film is being dwarfed by the humongous shadows of this summer’s blockbuster hits: Avengers: Age of Ultron and Mad Max: Fury Road. But if you look for it, you should be able to find it somewhere close to you. And see it? Yes, definitely, you should see this movie!

 

If you have an interest in A.I. movies (and who the heck doesn’t?), you can check out some of my favorites: Gog (1954) Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) Blade Runner (1982) The Matrix (1999)The Thirteent Floor (1999) I, Robot (2004)

Avengers: Age of Ultron, May 2o15

Like every other comic book/film geek in the universe I was pawing at the ground just waiting for Avengers: Age of Ultron to hit the movie houses. Get this! David and I were so pumped to see this flick that we got up early enough to catch an 8:30am showing at the Regal Spotlight! And we weren’t the only ones. Fast head count in the dark, there were at least three other fans who braved the early morning just to see the sequel to one of Marvel’s biggest movies, The Avengers! And after 2hrs and 21min of almost nonstop action, I can say whole heartedly that this movie was . . . okay. Yeah, you heard me, it was okay but it did suffer somewhat from a mild case of:

 

MSS (Matrix Sequel Syndrome)

 

You remember The Matrix (1999), right, that kick-ass little fantasy/action film by the Wachowskis that took Hollywood by its box office receipts and sent all us action geeks running to the closest theater showing it. And WOW! What great action! What great fight scenes! And I remember when the Wachowskis won best picture at the MTV Movie Awards, one of them smiled at us real big and said, “You liked this movie? You ain’t seen nothing yet!” And lo, they madest two sequels, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolution, and guess what? We had seen their “something yet,” and it was called, The Matrix (1999). Yeah, pretty much both sequels were about the same as the original The Matrix . . . just bigger, faster and cluttered to hell with uninspired action scenes.

 

And that’s the problem with Age of Ultron; we’ve seen pretty much all the action sequences before in the original The Avengers. Remember the cool fight scene in A1, Thor vs Hulk? Well, the second action scene in Ultron is Ironman vs. Hulk. Granted, it was a longer action sequence than in A1, but virtually the same except that the battle Between I & H was sped up so fast that it looked like blurry globs of red and green mashed potatoes whizzing across the screen!

 

And do you remember the great climactic war at the end of Avengers 1 where our heroes kick the crap out of Loki’s inept alien army? If you didn’t see it, no worries because the opening scene to Age of Ultron has the Avengers fighting an inept  army of puny humans . . . and again, if you missed that cause you were dipping into your popcorn barrel instead of paying attention to the movie. . . no worries. The final battle has the Avengers kicking the crap out of Ultron’s inept army of robots. Now, you’d think that at least one of those smart villains would have figured, “Hmmm, these Avenger guys are tough cookies! Maybe I should create a less wimpy army?”

 

To give Age of Ultron some credit, the writers did try to create a few scenes that had

something more to offer than the Avengers kicking bad guys’ bottoms and saving the world (again) from total annihilation:

 

Natasha and Bruce Love Scene (paraphrase)

Natasha: Hey, Bruce wanna hook up?

Bruce: Well, I can’t have kids.
Natasha: Neither can I.
Bruce: Well, then, maybe we shouldn’t.
Natasha: (catch in her voice) Oh, okay.

 

Or how about that heated moral debate over the creation of AI?

 

Bruce and Tony moral Debate (paraphrase)

Tony: I’m gonna create Artificial Intelligence!

Bruce: That would be immoral!

Tony: I’m gonna do it anyway.
Bruce: (catch in his voice) Oh, okay.

 

There are so many subplots going on in this movie (Hawkeye and his secret family, the love triangle between Natasha, Banner and Cap, The backstory of Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, etc.) that there’s no time to explore any of them in depth, so they come off as being totally artificial and lacking a real sense of life.

 

But that’s cool, right, ‘cause the only reason we go to see this type of movie is for the “KICK-ASS” action scenes, right? Well, maybe not. I’m pretty sure that most of us want a bit more story and a lot less of the amateurish, CGI hokum that the directors and producers force on us movie after movie, after movie . . .

Furious 7, April 2o15

Clusterfu**

n. A chaotic situation where everything seems to go wrong. It is often caused by incompetence, communication failure, or a complex environment.

v. To fu** (something) up, to make a total mess of. –Wiktionary Creative Commons

 

I’ve been a closet fan of the Fast & Furious Franchise from the get go. Yes, I admit it, I did NOT express my love for this series of movies until F&F 5 and 6, but I WAS dedicated. I loved the simple stories, stereotypical antihero characters AND I have always dug the hell out of the fast cars, the live action crashes and stunts. The F&F franchise brought the car chase back from the edge of extinction by snubbing CGI effects and relying (mostly) on practical car stunts and live action, precision driving. Yeah, life was good for us closet couch-jockey street racers . . . until something awful happened:

 

Car Chases & Stunts

What was (in all the other F&F movies) fast, precision car chases, turned into muddled mush when the previous director, Justin Lin, decided to call it quits and the production team hired James Wan to take over. Wan's got a pretty good résumé as a director of horror films but nothing when it comes to high octane action films . . . and it really shows. His mistake was to think that  if you jump cut all the time, use thousands of camera shot changes (long, medium, close-up and variations of such) through all the action scenes it will make the action seem faster and more urgent. Unfortunately, it has the opposite effect on the audience. Too many changes in point of view confuses the mind, it doesn’t have enough time to figure out what the hell it’s looking at. before it changes to something else So, instead of seeing a car chase that is Fast & Furious we experience action sequences that are Slow & Tedious. Want to see some incredibly exciting car chase choreography? Checkout any of the previous F&F movies, and some of these old favorites: Bullitt (1968), The French Connection (1971),
Vanishing Point (1971), The Seven-Ups (1971), To Live and Die in L.A. (1985)

 

Explosions & GUNS . . . LOTS of BIG GUNS

Okay, we do go to these action films to see cars crashing into each other, buildings exploding, guns going off . . . No, BIG GUNS going off, but in this film it’s far too much BOOM! BOOM! BANG! BANG! So much that after about the third explosion in the last action sequence I was thinking . . . “I wonder, should I have pizza for dinner?” 

 

Hand-to-Hand Combat

And my pet peeve, “Don’t over use camera tricks in a Fight sequence.” They are using this camera technique these days that sort of cuts section out of a fight so you don’t really see the fluid movement of the actors. It was used pretty well in Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) but they didn’t over use the technique. In Furious 7 all the fight scenes are in a state of constant blurriness. You never really see the fight, and you never really connect with the action: “Hmmm, maybe some pepperoni on that pizza.” Some of my favorite hand-to-hand combat movies are: Enter the Dragon (1971), Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003), Haywire (2011), Merantau (2009), The Matrix (1999)

Did I like anything about this movie? Yeah, I really got into the scenes where the characters are just talking to each other. No guns going off, no fast cars, no explosions, just people talking. Yes, the “romantic” dialogue in a few of the quieter places was a bit clunky, but the actors’ commitment to the whole “We are Family” concept of the film made me believe them, that they really felt the love for each other that the script dictated. And I—YES I DID—I did, have a bit of a tear in my left eye as I watched the heart felt tribute to Paul Walker at the very end of the show.

 

The F&F series has been a pretty successful franchise except for this one misstep. I hope they continue it . . . hopefully, with a director that knows how to film an action scene. But if they decide to stick with Wan on the next one, and he does a really good job . . . I'll send him a pizza.

 

 

Chappie March 2o15

 

*Chappie: An Extremely Crappie Mess

 

I’ve made three very bad decisions in my life: I joined the Marine Corps during the Vietnam era, I let the love of my life walk out the door and didn't even try to stop her, and I allowed my friend, David, talk me into seeing the movie Chappie.

 

I knew it wasn’t a good idea to go see Chappie, I knew it. It was March and the month of March is notorious for puking out the worst movies of the year. Why? Well, because March is the month right before the summer movie season gets started, and it’s always been the opportune time for production companies to dump their crappy, low budget flicks on the public. This horrendous piece of sci-fi fluff, Chappie, seems to have been thrown together quickly without much care for production quality; and it rips-off storylines/ideas from older, more successful sci-fi films (Robo Cop {1987} and I, Robot {2004} for example), and the bigger budgeted Avenger movie, The Avengers: Age of Ultron, that’s to be released later on this summer.

 

There’s nothing positive I can say about Chappie. It’s advertised as being a movie about the birth of artificial intelligence (AI) but it’s so badly produced that it turns out to be a movie about . . . well, nothing much at all. Yeah, sure, it sort of mentions the idea of artificial intelligence but doesn’t really examine the creation or development of artificial life. The problem with this film is that it pays lip service to about every social issue you can think of (corporate corruption, child abuse, urban crime, etc.) but never explores any idea in depth. It’s impossible to review this movie seriously because  the director/writers didn’t seem to care at all about making a seriously good movie.

 

Unfortunately, Chappie tries to be a funny but turns out to be a hateful and extremely condescending mess. There are elongated scenes where Chappie’s “adopted father” teaches him how to be all “Gangsta,” how to cuss and to walk bad-ass and . . . oh, and how to pull off a carjack. Yep, that’s right, the maker of this film thinks there’s something humorous about a cute, robot “Gangsta” ripping the doors off of cars, waving a gun in the faces of terrified drivers, and then grabbing them up and flinging them to the ground.  Yeah, ha-ha, funny.

 

And the acting? Sigourney Weaver, Hugh Jackman, Dev Patel what the hell were you guys thinking? You were texting it in. All three should be arrested by SAG and sentenced to a hundred and twenty days of community theatre! Not one actor in this movie connects with the materiel, each other or the audience. I can forgive Yolandi Visser and Watkin Tudor Jones—oh, forgive me, again, I mean Ninja—for creating two of the most uninteresting characters in the history of forever. But you Ripley, Wolverine, and Dude-From-The-Newsroom, you guys should know better.

 

 

*My friend, Michael, took offense at my being so hard on this movie that he liked. So, I invite Koo to write a review for this blog page and I will post it here so my readers (Yeah both of you) can make up your own mind! {smiles}

American Sniper 2o14-15

American Sniper (2014)

 

. . . With a more than fifty percent rate of divorce in the United States today most people can relate what it was like to live through a divorce with their parents. Unfortunately, they can also relate to what it was like to feel like pawns in the war that was waged by at least one parent against the other . . . — Allan Schwartz, Ph.D.

 

American Sniper is a great movie if you’re a conservative; it’s a horrible movie if you are a liberal. Yeah, that’s right (or do I mean left?), the public has decided that the success or failure of the movie American Sniper is solely based on . . . the political point of view of the audience member watching the film, and not on the movie itself. American Sniper is the unfortunate kid caught in the middle of a bitter political war between Daddy Right and Mommy Left; they use their poor child as a weapon to beat the hell out of each other.

 

The truth of the matter is American Sniper is an okay war movie. Not the greatest war movie ever made . . . but it’s an okay movie. Its major flaw is it shows us the horrors of war but never really creates the experience for the audience. It’s like watching a news reel from WWII. Yes, we are told in pictures and words that the war is horrible . . . but we don’t really get the opportunity to experience what it might feel like to be in a war. There’s a host of films (Fury [2o14], The Hurt Locker [2oo8], Platoon [1986] to name a few) that depict war in a more personal, visceral way. American Sniper just feels too generic. Too many of the scenes feel like they were stolen from other war movies.

 

The only thing that half way works in this film is its exploration of PTSD. There are some pretty chilling scenes. One scene has Chris driving down the freeway and sees a car in his rearview mirror that resembles “the enemy’s” mode of transportation in Iraq. He spaces out for a minute and nearly causes a wreck. Another scene that works well is when his son’s playing with the dog and Chris beats the dog because he thinks it’s attacking his boy. Yeah, it’s pretty chilling stuff. But unfortunately, it’s not quite enough to redeem a movie that doesn’t really say anything new about war and its effect on the veterans and their family members who must deal with love ones suffering from PTSD.