The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Gandalf (Ian McKellen) and the dwarves prepare to battle the goblins and their king.

*** out of ****

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is the first part in an epic trilogy adapted from J.R.R.Tolkien’s short children’s novel. The 1937 book would introduce young readers to a mystical land known as Middle-earth and would be revisited in his epically complex and mature Lord of the Rings trilogy, which as we all know, has already been brought to the big screen in the form of three huge award-winning live-action movies. Those films -and this one, were made by New Zealand’s ambitiously talented director Peter Jackson.

Unlike the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Hobbit is not a dark journey for the fate of the world. It is an adventure story about Frodo’s uncle Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman of The BBC’s The Office and Sherlock) and a long adventure for which he would embark, to help a group of ragtag dwarves reclaim their long lost city and its treasure from a dangerous dragon.  Along the way Bilbo will acquire a seemingly innocent magic ring, which allows him to vanish when in danger. We all know that there will be terrible consequences as a result of this find but that’s another story.

While Jackson and Co. condensed the hell out of the Lord of the Rings books for the screen (and still wound up with three very long movies) they’ve taken the short Hobbit book and expanded through fleshed-out events and characters simply referred to in Tolkien’s literature and created entirely original material that doesn’t seem too out of place.  By the end of this movie, they’ve appropriately covered about a third of the book and found a good stopping place.

I’m a big fan of these movies and the work of Peter Jackson, so I cannot claim to be without bias. I’ve seen the movie twice now and will definitely see it again before it leaves theaters. This is a movie filled with effective fan service and tells a back story that feels way more natural and connected than another prequel trilogy you many know of.

The visuals are a feast of rich escapist eye candy, even when they don’t look perfectly real. I love Martin Freeman as young Bilbo Baggins. He creates a humorously reluctant and nervous rendition that seems worthy of Ian Holm’s approach to the character as an old man.

The return of Gollum in this movie is maybe the best part, with Andy Serkis giving a motion-capture performance that may outdo his scenes in the other films (The animation on the character has also advanced incredibly). The Dwarves are a fun bunch of characters with potential for development that may be reserved for the next two films. Most of the creatures look great. The Trolls and the Great Goblin thrive in their comic nastiness.

While the addition of Radagast the Brown Wizard (Sylvester McCoy), is delightfully quirky, I found his sled pulled by rabbits and the action scene that surrounded it to be the biggest eye-sore in the movie. It’s an original scene that I could do without. The other unwanted element is a new antagonist for this trilogy, a pale warrior Orc seeking to destroy the dwarves and find his way back to the videogame he came from.  

If you hated the Lord of the Rings movies, there’s no way you’ll like this one. It’s sillier, more fantastical, and has way more computer animation. If you loved the Lord of the Rings trilogy but never read The Hobbit you should be prepared for a heavy dose of Disney-esque whimsy. If you’re like me, and can excuse Peter Jackson of his hunger for excess (because you know you want it), prepare for a lot of fun.

Now… How to see it? Well this brings me to a unique subject this movie offers. There are multiple ways to see this film ranging from standard-motion 2D (which will resemble the experience of watching the previous trilogy) to seeing it in the new controversial High Frame Rate 3D (which will not look the way you normally see movies in the theater). The latter of those two is an experiment, which calls to question the small amount of motion information we’ve been accustomed to seeing throughout the history of cinema. I will dismiss claims that it is an overwhelming experience, which will give you a headache. If anything, I thought it made the motion seem more life-like and the 3D more comfortable. That doesn’t mean that it felt normal to see characters in a fantasy movie move around with the fluidity one would expect from a live sports broadcast. This is a process I would recommend for the most open-minded of moviegoers, tech-heads, and unbiased people who don’t see movies often. I would not suggest it to your average movie fan. Thankfully for them, it down-converts to the standard frame rate seamlessly. And there’s nothing wrong with seeing a bright and colorful two-dimensional image on the big screen.

Hitchcock

Scarlett Johansson is Janet Leigh, Anthony Hopkins is Hitchcock, and Helen Mirren is his wife.

** out of ****

Hitchcock is a new biopic on the famous director revolved around the making of Psycho which would become his most notorious and successful film. I suppose the notion here, is that the famous horror movie and everything that surrounded its production defines the title character.

It winds up being an incredibly plain and shallow experience of a movie with a People Magazine perspective on his personal life while the theme of his ingenious craft takes the back seat. I felt like I was viewing a TV movie on the big screen -Though it did have a high caliber cast -So let’s say, an HBO–made movie.

Anthony Hopkins plays the bloated well-spoken British caricature famous for his deranged yet dry sense of humor. It’s a performance that captures his public image but attempts to integrate that persona into his private life -which I didn’t buy.

While this movie is about the man, it is also about the woman behind the man. His wife, Alma Reville, is played by Helen Mirren as a woman with cutting determination to support her husband’s projects. This movie makes the case that she was his strongest collaborator and tolerated a lot from him as he lusted after his leading ladies while simultaneously jealous of her time. While she lives a life devoted to managing her husband without much credit, she strives for artistic fulfillment and takes on a writing project with screenwriter Whitfield Cook. Hitch recognizes the potential for an affair between the two, which results in irate outbursts while on the set of his film.

He begins to have violent fantasies and the movie regularly creates pointless fantasy sequences of Hitch conversing with serial killer Ed Gein. Why? Because Psycho was loosely based on the man? Because Hitch sees his inner darkness as being similar to Gein’s? It just comes off as silly superficial filmmaking.

The imposition of the marriage drama and Hitchcock’s dark psychology feel like nothing more than conjecture on the part of this film’s makers and doesn’t prove to be interesting. Screenwriter John J. McLaughlin (Black Swan) may have delivered a screenplay with potential, but the direction of Sacha Gervasi seems to be distracted with making everything feel lush, colorful, and nostalgic rather than real.

I do admire how this is about the making of a movie and the restraint to show any authentic or reenacted footage of that movie. When Psycho is finally premiered, all you see are audience reactions while Hitch hangs out in the lobby amused by the sound of their screams.

Hitch’s personal assistant, Peggy Robertson (Toni Collette) and his agent, destined for Hollywood greatness, Lew Wasserman (Michael Stuhlbarg), are given good screen time. What about his artistic collaborators? Where’s the eccentric costume designer Edith Head? Where’s the angry composer Bernard Herrmann? The legendary title designer Saul Bass is nowhere in this movie nor does his work have an influence on the film’s aesthetics.

This film rightly takes time to demonstrate how Psycho was a risk for the director who was banking on his success to stretch the boundaries of the horror genre and was still met with resistance from Paramount Pictures and the ratings board. Unfortunately the Hollywood politics are laid out in condescending layman’s terms for the benefit of the audience. Don’t expect Aaron Sorkin dialogue here.

Hitch was forced to shoot the movie on a small budget but they don’t seem to display the results of this except for choosing lesser-known stars. A pleasant surprise in this film was how the new stars hired to play stars of the past didn’t look their parts but they seemed to pull it off. Okay, I saw no connection between Jessica Biel and Vera Miles, but Scarlett Johansson actually made a decent Janet Leigh and James D’Arcy made an incredible Anthony Perkins.

I think one of the most remarkable facts that this movie failed to mention was how the forced low-budget led them to shoot Psycho in black and white which had the artistic benefit of filtering the gory imagery the film would display.

The real dissatisfaction I felt was the movie’s preoccupation with celebrity icons, money, desire and scandal. Maybe the great filmmaker himself loved all of those things but if they intended to make a Hitchcock movie about Hitchcock, they should have left the job to Brian De Palma. 

Half way through the film, I realized that despite my love for Vertigo, North by Northwest, Rope, Rear Window and my appreciation for many others (Psycho included), I’m only interested in the professional artist behind them. The man? I was never very interested and I walked away from this film even less interested.

Here's the best review I've read on the film.

Life of Pi

Suraj Sharma in Ang Lee's Life of Pi

**** out of ****

I was moved by Ang Lee’s new movie, Life of Pi which achieves it’s beauty from all the state-of-the-art digital utilities imaginable. It is a mysterious spiritual journey, which invites the audience to experience something interpretive.

I found the computer-generated imagery in Life of Pi to be the kind that is so immersive, that my concept of its artificiality faded away. It’s the kind of visuals that are tailored to evoke emotions and make the achievement of photo-realism a second priority.

Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain) has made a variety of different films and most of them are sad stories. This is the most hopeful and life affirming of them all. Based on Yan Martel’s 2001 fantasy novel, it follows the adventures of a shipwrecked Indian boy stuck in a lifeboat with a hungry tiger. His struggle to co-exist with the tiger in a survival situation is filled with symbolism in a way that makes me understand why many readers thought this to be an un-filmable story. It is almost abstract in concept.

I’d be interested to know what fans of the book found to be lost in translation because I got a lot out of this story. It had the kind of euphoric effect I crave from cinema and rarely find in a 3D movie like one should expect.

Anna Karenina

Keira Knightley in Joe Wright's Anna Karenina

**1/2 out of ****

Anna Karenina, starring Keira Knightley, is the first version in a long legacy of cinematic incarnations that I have seen. I have not read Tolstoy's novel nor am I versed in Russian literature. Let's call my perspective on the matter fresh -to put it lightly. This version is directed by the very talented Joe Wright -whose work has a rich quality which is reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick films. This is his third period costume drama (as well as his third film to star Knightley). His work with the genre is very good at avoiding the clichés you would normally come to expect and seems to be guided with genuine imagination and creativity that has potential to give a movie life. His 2007 film, Atonement is a remarkable accomplishment to say the least and I think it remains his best film.

Wright has taken a very unconventional approach to this material by staging most of it like one would a theatrical production. He wants the audience to imagine the environments more than see them. Most of the film is shot on old dilapidated theater stages. There’s even a scene when a character makes a trip through a poor part of town passing by peasants in what is supposed to be the streets but is set in the loft above the stage surrounded by ropes and sandbags.

The idea of making a film about infidelity in nineteenth century Russian aristocracy on a theater stage implies a lot about how everyone is participating in the theater of life and must play their part. The film occasionally parts from the theater atmosphere suggesting liberation from the artifice of high society.

As much as I love what Wright is attempting to do, I don’t think it really works. I felt an absolute detachment from the emotion of this story. I think it is possible to shoot a film this way and get the audience involved but Wright’s pacing is too rapid for that to work very well. The great screenwriter, Tom Stoppard (Brazil), cannot be faulted for his work here. This is the issue of ambitious experimental direction, which dishes out narrative in a dizzying stylized fashion that makes a film an unquestionable aesthetic masterpiece but unintentionally buries the story.

I think that this film has a future for argument and speculation. It has a bold artistic drive and is very worth seeing if you are intrigued by the daring ideas of visionary filmmakers. I still admire Wright for making the movie he wanted to make.

Roger Ebert rightly says at the end of his review:

This is a sumptuous film — extravagantly staged and photographed, perhaps too much so for its own good. There are times when it is not quite clear if we are looking at characters in a story or players on a stage. Productions can sometimes upstage a story, but when the story is as considerable as Anna Karenina, that can be a miscalculation.  

Silver Linings Playbook

Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper in David O. Russell's Silver Linings Playbook

**** out of ****

Writer-Director David O. Russell’s adaptation of Matthew Quick’s novel, The Silver Linings Playbook is a classic screwball romantic comedy by design but much more with its great one-liners, a perfect ensemble cast and manic direction. It has everything required for the kind of film it is with the welcome addition of biting dialogue and fierce confrontations.

In films like Flirting with Disaster, I Heart Huckabees and The Fighter, Russell has displayed a knack for creating frantic atmospheres where characters engage in banter which may go in the direction of viciousness and sometimes violent passionate outbursts. A romantic comedy about a man with bipolar disorder is right up his alley.

The brilliant Bradley Cooper plays Pat, a former teacher just released from a mental institution who is now without a job and who’s ex-wife has issued a restraining order. Forced to move back in with his parents, played by the excellent Australian actress Jacki Weaver and the great Robert De Niro, he visits old friends with the ulterior motive of reconciling with his ex-wife. A police officer (Dash Mihock), a psychiatrist (Anupam Kher) and Pat’s parents are all on his back, trying to keep him under control. Cooper plays Pat with absurdly hilarious mood-swings, a desperation for enthusiasm, and a talent for locking eye contact when making conversation. It is a superb job.

Here is an interview with Cooper.

He meets Tiffany, played by the “Louisville is so damn proud of you” - Jennifer Lawrence who came to this movie to save all manic pixie dream girls from their sins. Her winning screen-presence seems to prove more range with every film in which she appears. Lawrence plays a young widow who has been sexually reckless since her husband’s death and is prone to fits of rage when she feels judged. Pat and Tiffany’s inappropriate frankness about everything creates beautiful chemistry and ugly explosions. It’s all funny. Pat is forward with Tiffany that he needs her because she has connections with his ex to whom she may be willing to deliver a letter. In exchange for this service, Tiffany wants Pat to participate in a dance competition for which she requires a partner.

Meanwhile Pat’s father, an obsessive-compulsive Philadelphia Eagles fan demands the presence of his son when watching games for superstitious reasons. He has financial troubles and is now desperately dependent on making bets with a friend. De Niro is a great actor who recently seems to be in a semi-retired mode. He tends to take roles for which little effort is required and one could imagine another actor playing. Playing Pat Sr., he breaks this trend beautifully as a father who unconsciously shares neurotic tendencies with his son.

Also in the cast, is John Ortiz as a friend troubled by a marriage which Pat is keen to judge in front of groups of people. Chris Tucker plays Danny, a friend Pat made at the institution, who enjoys visiting Pat and regularly escapes the ward to do so.

As with many cherished romantic comedies of the quirky variety, everything comes together too conveniently during the final act and somehow, I’m not bothered by this. This movie, unlike many others in its genre, defeated my cynicism. I wanted to see a little magic happen to these people.

Silver Linings Playbook is one of the best movies of 2012 making great comedy out of characters who perceive each other's problems but not their own. I laughed constantly throughout this movie not so much out of mockery but more from empathy. Everyone has his or her own history of emotionally driven inappropriate behavior and what really works about this film is that I could see myself in it. 

Listen to David Edelstein's review here.

Skyfall

Daniel Craig and Javier Bardem in Sam Mendes' 007 film, Skyfall

***1/2 out of ****

Skyfall is one of the best James Bond movies I’ve seen.

I’m a moderate Bond fan. I don’t think this franchise has much with which to become invested. It stars a very superficial hero who fans like because the vicarious experience of being Bond is hard to resist. Understanding him isn’t part of the experience. You don’t get to know him more than the suits he will wear, the cars he will drive, the gadgets he toys with, the women he will bed and the bad guys he will kill. James Bond is a cinematic tradition. No matter how much the world changes or how manhood and feminism are redefined, James Bond will return in some way or another, with modifications to fit him into the current state of the world.

The pleasure I get from a 007 flick, is simply out of watching essentially the same movie again and again which preserves characteristics of traditional flare, but with a new style every time. There can be a new way of shooting it, a new style of music, new materialistic goods, current fashions, state-of-the-art special effects and maybe a new actor in the lead.

Daniel Craig appears, for the third time, as Bond and he may be my favorite actor to play him… Yeah… Better than Connery. When I first saw him in the incredible franchise-reboot, Casino Royale, I was surprised how well he worked in the role. He has the reckless charm everyone has displayed as the famous character but more importantly his eyes make me think of someone who has a very dark side and a killer’s streak.

Craig worked with director Sam Mendes in the excellent 2002 film, Road to Perdition and reportedly influenced him in recent years to take on this project. Mendes may seem unlikely to some, since his most successful film to date is 1999’s Best Picture Winner, American Beauty, but as a fan of his, I can’t tell you how thrilled I was to read that he would be making a 007 movie. Upholding the tradition of classic spectacle-driven cinema comes to mind when I think of this franchise. Mendez has a consistent ability to utilize every traditional element in cinema that culminates in the magnificence of the medium.

The simplest of these elements, is an inspired cast. So many in-demand talents have come together for Skyfall. Aside from Craig as Bond and Judi Dench as M, we now have Ralph Fiennes as a British Intelligence Committee chairman, Ben Whishaw as the new Q, the beautiful Naomie Harris as an agent, Albert Finney as a man from Bond’s past, and Javier Bardem as this film’s funny and unsettling villain. We also get a relative newcomer, which is preferable for a Bond love interest, with the gorgeous French actress Bérénice Marlohe.

A bolder element to Mendes’ work is cinematography, and for the third time, he works with director of photography, Roger Deakins, who has possibly shot the most beautiful looking Bond movie ever. This is the first in the series to be shot without film. As much as I am an advocate for the preservation celluloid cinematography, this movie is a fantastic example of how far digital cinematography has come in terms of looking warm and organic. The shots are wonderfully composed, lit and timed. To explain one sequence of many, there is a scene set in a Shanghai high rise where Bond fights an assassin in the dark as the two are silhouetted by giant video display billboards, which reflect off the glass surrounding them. Gorgeous!

The final Mendes element is Thomas Newman who I believe to be one of the top ten best film composers living today. His score to Road to Perdition is maybe his very best if not his work for Frank Darabont’s Stephen King prison films The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. Newman is Hollywood music royalty and lives up to the family reputation. All his pieces in this ranging from action to romance are in keeping with the Bond tradition.

The theme song by Adele in collaboration with producer Paul Epworth (he also worked with Florence and the Machine to give you an idea of how it sounds) is like a new and very improved Diamonds are Forever and plays to yet another eye-candy filled credit sequence.

Then there’s the action, which is beautifully executed and a mighty apology for the scattered, shaky, Bourne-wannabe coverage and editing of the disappointing Quantum of Solace. Skyfall has an opening chase scene with the kind of fluidity and wide shots that makes an action scene work.

Contrary to my take on this series, this one breaks the conventional approach to the character by making him deeper as well as giving his relationship with M greater meaning. Fans may be put off by this. Me? I liked it. Though I think the information void it’s filling regarding the character is more imaginable than dramatic. The result is making this particular outing feel like more than a Bond movie... it's a real good movie.

Flight

Denzel Washington and Kelly Reilly in Robert Zemekis' Flight

**** out of ****

When I look at the climate of mainstream cinema today, I consider a serious movie from Robert Zemekis to be a breath of fresh air. This is because I don’t think a lot of today’s directors are very good at establishing a tone that can engage an audience emotionally.

Check out AV Club's review.

In the new film Flight, Zemekis returns to directing live-action cinema for the first time in over a decade. It is an incredibly strong and heavy movie about an alcoholic drug-using airline pilot played by Denzel Washington whose character is put to question after a plane crash (The most intense plane crash I’ve ever seen in a movie). The story is thought provoking because the crash is not his fault. It was a technical malfunction and his expert piloting saved lives. Regardless, it wasn’t right for him to put lives at stake on a daily basis with a problem he refused to deal with.

The film is a challenging character-piece that features a broken man on a downward spiral as well as a misery-loves-company relationship with a recovering heroin addict played by Kelly Reilly. Don Cheadle plays the airline’s lawyer, who with Bruce Greenwood, as a higher-up in the company, are doing everything possible to cover up the protagonist’s mistakes. John Goodman is a scene-stealer as Denzel’s sleazy friend who can hook him up with any vice he needs.

The materiel here, by screenwriter John Gatins (Coach Carter) could easily be turned into cheap addiction-themed fodder but it is handled with careful meditative care by Zemekis and the excellent cast who make every scene in the movie take its time without cutting any character short of their humanity.

Zemekis started-off in comedy and found huge success with films that showcased groundbreaking special effects. With Flight, he continues with that ability, but unlike so many technically gifted directors who produce such sights, these tricks have become second hand, as he is just as good -if not better, when dealing with actors, to create real complex characters with a meaningful story to tell. 

Like Spielberg with Lincoln, it is so rewarding to see a director who made my favorite childhood films, make movies that satisfy me as an adult.

Lincoln

Daniel Day-Lewis is Abraham Lincoln

**** out of ****

Steven Spielberg was a cinematic hero in my earliest years as a movie geek. As I got older, I began hear and read opinions from a possibly more sophisticated audience who dismissed his work as sheer spectacle. Even when he moved away from fantasy adventure films and into more dramatic materiel, there was still an element of criticism that he was a manipulative director who had the audacity to tell the audience how to feel. To that, I say that art is manipulation.

In Lincoln, Spielberg has wisely made a film that intimately follows the famous president during the last few months of his life. What could have been a convoluted birth-to-death biopic is instead a story set over a small passage of time that provides a movie’s worth of materiel and an excellent character study.

It is partly based on a book by Doris Kearns Goodwin called Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln and written for the screen by Tony Kushner. Kushner worked with Spielberg before on the excellent 2005 film Munich and won the Pulitzer Prize for his play, Angels in America.


Here is an interview with him on Fresh Air. 

It revolves around Abraham Lincoln trying to end the Civil War and his battle to pass the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery, while trying to maintain a family life at the same time. Daniel Day-Lewis provides an unconventional performance as the sixteenth president with a soft-spoken delivery and not the deep vocal projection we expect from actors playing great men. I don’t need to tell you how good he is in this role.

Here's an interview with Daniel Day-Lewis.

The cast of characters is gigantic. I am curious how history buffs will take to this film because it is tailored for them. Me? I was trying really hard to keep up with everyone (I’m definitely seeing this movie again). I don’t have room to list the great actors -and the characters they play, but I will stop to talk about a highlight performance by Tommy Lee Jones as Congressman Thaddeus Stevens whose radical support of abolition and equal rights is compromised in order to give the proposed amendment leverage.

I have too many congratulations to give this very rich film. Above all, Spielberg has continued his legacy as one of our greatest living directors who can bare the responsibility of such an important subject: A president working with a divided nation –which feels very relevant today.

The Man with the Iron Fists

RZA in The Man with the Iron Fists

** out of ****

The Man with the Iron Fists is the debut film by Wu-Tang Clan’s The RZA. His long-time obsession with Kung-Fu movies has led him to making his own exploitation-style movie. As a director, his inspiration comes across well enough, but he doesn’t manage to avoid a lot of the pitfalls that come with directing for the first time.

Quentin Tarantino (this film’s producer) made his Kill Bill movies with a very similar purpose in mind but he knows how to borrow from low-brow cinema and augment the more valuable aspects in the artistic act of an homage. The RZA (who scored the first Kill Bill) doesn’t seem to be particularly selective and makes a movie that’s just as good -and bad as what he’s paying tribute too. I don’t sense a unique voice from him as a cinematic artist.

The story developed by RZA and Eli Roth is too crammed with conflicting characters to begin to explain it (The first cut of the film was four-hours and was then reduced to ninety minutes). Lets just say that the movie is set in nineteenth-century China. Starring RZA as a blacksmith, Rick Yune as a warrior, Lucy Liu as a whorehouse proprietor with tricks up her sleeve, and Russell Crowe as a lustful traveling Englishman who is not to be tested.

 

The movie has its moments but it doesn’t help at all that it is plagued with a lot of the standard problems that annoy me in modern action films. Fight scenes are filled with Michael Bay methods: Tight shots and quick editing that make it hard to get a sense of the space around the characters and who’s doing what. To make matters worse this movie has very obvious digital blood effects.

The Man with the Iron Fists has its share of deliberate corniness, wire tricks, cool stunts, and is acceptably set to modern rap music at times. The end result is still a B-movie, and maybe that’s all The RZA and co-writer Eli Roth wanted out of it, but it’s not a very gratifying one. 

Wreck-It Ralph

 **1/2 out of ****

Wreck-It Ralph is videogame nostalgia blended with candy obsession. With it’s bright colors and the occasional annoying pop-song, it’s a sugar rush to the senses and kids will dig it. Adults may overdose.

The movie begins with the Wreck-It Ralph game being played and the 8-bit rendering is down to the last detail, everything you could expect from an early eighties arcade game. Then the arcade reaches its closing time and all the characters come to life as we the audience, are transported inside their world where everything is three-dimensional but some of the jerky animation is still preserved.

As a kid, I found the videogames I played to be kind of magical and inspiring but the concept of them coming to life or having an internal real world never occurred to me while toys coming to life did, like in Toy Story. When I saw cartoons as living beings working the movie business in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, that seemed kind of natural too. However, I think the concept of video game characters coming to life in the arcade after closing time isn't a fantasy I can relate to. Whatever, I’ll go with it.

The characters socialize by traveling through the arcade’s circuitry but when they venture outside their game they run the risk of dying without an extra life to help them. They also have the top priority of fulfilling their roles to keep the game working correctly during operating hours. Getting unplugged by the arcade owner is the worst fate. Cute. That’s what this movie is. Just imagine Shrek meets Tron and you’ve got it. That’s not the best news for animation enthusiasts. It depends on what you value in movies like this. Personally I’m annoyed by animated movies that try to thrive solely on their cuteness. I love Ratatouille and I hate Madagascar. Wreck-It Ralph is somewhere in the middle.

Like Donkey Kong, Ralph is the bad-guy of his thirty-year-old videogame and is having a midlife crisis (I wonder how bad videogame characters get when they turn forty). He chooses to jump into other videogames to see if he can find his place as a good guy instead. Ralph is perfectly voiced by John C. Reilly. Along the way he ends up in a candy-themed race-car game ruled over by King Candy voiced by Alan Tudyk channeling Ed Wynn’s Mad Hatter. There he meets a reject named Vanellope, voiced with gleeful obnoxiousness by Sarah Silverman, who wants to race but can’t because her character has a programing glitch. Ralph befriends her and learns the value of being a real good-guy while he helps someone no one else wants to. 

It's a generally fun movie but it was all I expected it to be and nothing more.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi

 **** out of ****

Jiro makes me hungry.

Cloud Atlas

Halle Berry and Jim Broadbent in Cloud Atlas

**1/2 out of **** 
 
Here it is: An ambivalent review.

Cloud Atlas is a gigantic film that must have been a massive undertaking and seems to exist in a valley between the mountains of astonishment and the cliffs of the ridiculous. You are essentially watching six –yes, six movies at the same time! They are all different genres telling stories of human oppression ranging between dystopian science fiction and modern dark comedy. They also span across time from the mid-nineteenth century to an unknown post-apocalyptic time. The stories are edited with intercutting constantly interrupting one another.

So what’s it like watching it? Imagine taking Waterworld, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Logan’s Run, Billy Budd, The China Syndrome and One Flew Over the Cookoo’s Nest, then abridging each one and splicing them all together giving the audience five minutes of each film at a time. I found this to be disorienting but I think I started to get used to it at the two-hour mark. Oh yeah… This movie is three hours. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I just need to let you know what you’re up against.

Ebert loved it. Here he talks about our comprehension of movies.

An interesting thing the film does to connect the stories, is the use of the same cast throughout. This gives us a showcase of the range our given players possess and the work of very busy makeup artists.

Tom Hanks, Jim Sturgess, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Doona Bae, Keith David, James D’Arcy, Hugh Grant, Hugo Weaving, Ben Whishaw, and Susan Sarandon are all challenged with playing a range of characters varying in race, sex, good, and evil. The results range between convincing and not so convincing. Sometimes, it’s like watching a high caliber cast do experimental theater. Then again, you may feel like you’re watching an Austin Powers movie, feeling all too aware of the multiple performance gimmick.

Tom Hanks and Halle Berry seem to be getting top billing in the domestic marketing campaign for this film. Despite their good work in the film, they seem like bait for the wrong audience. If you hated Magnolia, Babel, Short Cuts, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and The Tree of Life, then Cloud Atlas doesn’t stand a chance with you. Personally, I can say that most of those movies I felt unsure of on my first viewing but eventually grew to love them.

The content and form of this movie is quite like Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain. Around the middle, I was finding it as difficult to enjoy as Charlie Kaufman's very challenging Synechdoche, New York. If I were to compare this movie to something much closer, it would be Todd Haynes' Bob Dylan-themed, I'm Not There. which left me with a very similar feeling to this movie.

I was never bored when watching this film, no matter how strange it felt. The truth is, I felt frustrated getting yanked out of a story when it started to get interesting and thrown into another one for which I didn’t care as much. I was on the edge of my seat in awe during the futuristic Orwellian nightmare story, felt the pain of the melancholy drama surrounding the young composer in nineteen-thirty-one Belgium, and laughed out loud several times during the modern comedy about the elderly publisher tricked into incarceration at a rest home.

The most challenging part for me was the post-apocalyptic tribe speaking in a futuristic form of English for which I had trouble adapting. That story took the longest time for me to care about. I eventually did but it felt like the most awkward of all the film’s interruptions. 

This movie's form is working with the assumption that the central theme, being the struggle for freedom, can connect these stories in a philosophical and emotional sense. Seeing this movie once wasn’t enough for me to be sure if it really succeeds at that. All I know is that I saw something very strong.

David Edelstein has a review of disappointment.

There are also more literal connections between characters. For example: A character from one story may be reading the preserved diary of a character from another. The movie keeps making the statement, often literally through dialogue, that we are all connected. Sure, it’s pretentious. Then again, many great movies are. The novel by David Mitchell, on which the film is based, is said to work in a similar way but organized differently. I am easily curious if this works better on paper.

The stories are split up among the film’s three directors you have Andy and Lana Wachowski who were both responsible for The Matrix Trilogy as well as an awesome little thriller called Bound. Then there is Tom Tykwer, who is famous for the German movie, Run Lola Run but made two very underrated films, The Princess and the Warrior and Perfume. A marathon of their films would easily be labeled, "A Celebration of the Subversive.” They love clever outlaws and anyone struggling against the intimidation of power. A collaboration between the Wachowsis and Tykwer sounded very promising and had me very exited to see this ambitious endeavor.

Christy Lemire thinks the movie is unintentionally "laughable".

Now that I have seen it, my brain won’t rest. Is it great? Is it horrible? Does it need an alternate cut? Does it need to be seen multiple times in order be appreciated? Maybe someone will see it once and instantly fall in love. Maybe they will walk out of the theater as I saw several people do during my viewing. What is certain is that this is no mainstream mindless escape. This is a film with a vision and is nothing to forget about. 

Here's the Wachowskis and Tykwer discussing their work experience.

Sinister

Ethan Hawk gazes at a snuff film he's discovered in Sinister

*** out of ****

“Turn the light on… Just turn the light on…”

That’s what my girlfriend kept whispering at the screen as we watched Ethan Hawke explore his dark house while armed with a baseball bat in the new supernatural shocker, Sinister. How could anyone help but think this? Why did the set designer allow so many light-switches to be within reach of the film’s hero? Why don’t characters in horror movies do the rational thing and turn the light on? We all know the answer: It wouldn’t make the scene as scary.

Doesn’t it also drive you crazy in thrillers, when the desperate protagonist comes across an opportunity for vital information to their obsession, and they somehow fail to ask important questions? In this movie, the protagonist starts to learn that both of his children are getting visions and knowledge from the beyond (as he is) and he doesn’t seem interested in asking them more about what they know and how.

Sinister has many needless conventions to be expected in horror movies. They are the kind that can make you start to lose sympathy with the character in peril. But this movie is still scary… very scary. It is directed by Scott Derrickson, who made the eerie yet underwhelming, The Exorcism of Emily Rose and the crappy remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still. The screenplay is co-written by Ain’t It Cool News alum C. Robert Cargill (aka Massawyrm) who may be preserving the conventions I find annoying because he loves them. Regardless, the story to this film is successful at building its tension all the way to a beautifully designed climax. 

Check out Harry Knowles interviewing Massawyrm regarding this movie.

It is about a true-crime writer who moves his family into a house without sharing with them his knowledge that a gruesome unsolved murder of a family took place there. It is his intent to write a book about the massacre with hope that he can find new evidence that could point the way to the killer and the missing child of the family who was not found among the dead. When exploring the attic, he discovers a box full of Super 8 home snuff movies of other family massacres dating back to the sixties and spanning all over the country. While horrified by this discovery he knows that it will guarantee him a bestseller and he begins to research their grainy footage. Analogue distortion is the number one tool for scaring our digital generation at the movies.

While regularly working late into the night, his findings become more and more terrifying. Then he starts to hear noises in the house leading to shocker moments that truly work. His sleepless nights and heavy drinking, in response to the unease of his new home, start to make his life fall apart.

Ethan Hawke plays the writer with a self-obsessed smug demeanor filled with pride for making discoveries where police investigations have failed. This gives him a bad reputation with law enforcement wherever he chooses to live. At the beginning he is given an unwelcome greeting by the local sheriff played by none other than Fred Dalton Thompson. Great casting! Seeing Hawke’s grungy liberal indifference to authority and Thompson’s stubborn old conservatism sharing the screen is perfect.

I think this movie makes the assumption that no one in their right mind would move into a place where such things happened. Am I sick to say that I might? I really don’t believe in the supernatural and I think it is a sin to leave a nice house vacant. Leaving it empty is just allowing a community to dwell on its tragedy. Give sad places love and new life. That’s my attitude. But I digress. We’re talking about the movies where in such places, evil may loom!

I love the movies for being able to make things I don’t believe in seem real. Once I’m watching, I get wrapped up in how things exist in the environment that has been created. Every strange element introduced plays a role and amounts to something in this movie’s logic. The filmmakers wisely have the majority of the movie take place at the house and don’t follow their characters going into town or anything of the sort for a long time. It really helps the movie maintain its scary atmosphere.

Sinister is a terrifically terrifying movie filled with predictable elements but surprising ones too. Overall, I was really creeped-out when it was over. I am catching up to this one a little late, but it is still October and not too late for anyone who loves horror movies to see this chiller in a dark movie theater.