The Conjuring

Vera Farmiga in The Conjuring

*** out of ****

“Based on true events."

(Sigh)

The Conjuring is a new horror movie from director James Wan (Saw) that takes inspiration from a case handled by famous paranormal investigators, Ed and Lorraine Warren, whose claims of witnessed supernatural phenomena have inspired other horror films like The Amityville Horror. In this film, they are played by Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson who both make a fun attempt in making such a profession seem credible.

Let me stop for a minute and say that this movie’s only real annoying flaw is one that comes attached to many supernatural horror films: The implication that this B.S. really happened. Trust me, without that condescending suggestion, this movie would be just as terrifying.

The film is set in 1971 in a rural section of Rhode Island where strangely no character has a New England accent. When the title drifts into the frame and dominates the screen with sharp serifs, there is a definite sense of homage to many great horror films of the seventies. When we see the haircuts, wardrobe, and imagery often captured with a slow zoom lens, we feel a good sense of the period.

The atmosphere Wan creates here reminds us that the scariest American films were made around this time. There were still no cell phones, no internet and a lot of repressed religious fear in the hearts of an adult generation that was trying to maintain a sense of liberation. Throw that all into a secluded setting and you have a lot of room for terror.

As we learn about the Warrens and the disturbing things they regularly encounter, we are also introduced to the Perron family, moving into a creepy old house in the middle of nowhere. Roger and Carolyn are played by Ron Livingston and Lili Taylor. The two have several daughters whose giddy joy and playfulness possibly plays a role in awakening the evil spirit that looms in the home.

As the situations of incredibly nerve-racking suspense unfold, the film keeps us up to date with the Warrens and their work elsewhere but does not allow the two groups to cross paths until nearly an hour in to the film. This is one of many elements that seem similar to The Exorcist, but it gives this movie an engaging sense of pace. We’re forced to watch this tortured family but are reassured when we see the Warrens who will understand what they are experiencing.

The entire cast does a wonderful job with this hokey materiel. The sound and its use of very deep rumbling bass, is quite effective. The gore factor is rather minimal. So are digital effects of the obvious variety. There are a few cheap instances of startle tactics but they are thankfully outdone by the segments of growing nightmarish dread where all the fear is in knowing that something is around the corner. Also, characters make the effort to turn the lights on when they hear something creepy in this movie, which makes them sympathetic.

There is only one big, “Oh come on!” moment for me, which is when the girls are all shown asleep into their beds following a night when one of them screamed bloody murder after seeing a demon! Like that kid would go back to bed in there anytime soon!

This is very much a conventional horror movie that borrows from others, but like Pacific Rim is to other giant robot movies, it does a way better job in entertaining you. To call The Conjuring an innovative horror film would be a big lie, but it sure conjures up a lot of intense scares. If you don’t see it in theaters, keep it in mind for a dark night at home this October!

World War Z

Enough is enough! I've had it up to here with these...

**1/2 out of ****

Here's World War Z, an entertaining and intense thriller that seems as if it could have been so much more. It was probably supposed to be. When I first heard that this highly-regarded property would be in the hands of director Marc Forster, I was only compelled to chuckle at Paramount's failure to note that this guy has proved to be good at everything (Stranger Than Fiction, The Kite Runner, Finding Neverland) except for action movies (Quantum of Solace). So I was surprised to see that his Paul Greengrass-inspired handheld kinetic action mostly worked with a zombie movie that aimed for realism.

Brad Pitt plays a former U.N. agent spending the day with his wife (Mireille Enos) and two little girls, when the Zombie Apocalypse starts. After a long struggle to get them to safety aboard an aircraft carrier, he is recruited by his former employers to go on a dangerous mission around the world to find the origin of the zombie outbreak.

It occurred to me while watching, that Forster may have been much more the man for the job than I gave him credit for. If there is something he successfully imposes on this materiel, it is his sense of worldliness, which is obvious when you study his career in film. Right off the bat, this epidemic is suggested to be an international crisis and unlike other zombie movies, this one is about a guy with the resources to give us a globe-trotting perspective on this all-too-familiar genre. 

For the light-on-blood PG-13 movie that a two-hundred-million-dollar horror movie is required to be, I will admit that it is very intense and often scary. Like The Dark Knight, it's a PG-13 that gets away with murder, so don't let little kids see it.

The movie is based on Max Brooks' (son of Mel) bestselling book, and from what I'm told, the adaptation process left very few of his ideas intact. It was said to be in the form of several spoken-word transcriptions of zombie-attack survivors. Making a movie about one of these characters would be understandable, but making up a whole new one and changing the nature of the cataclysmic event makes it obvious that they only cared about a title that would sell tickets.    

The only part where it collides, is in the digital-effects driven set-piece in Jerusalem when the zombies form an ant-hill of people climbing over one another to spill over the wall. There are only a few shots when this effect is convincing. In all the others, it is a beautiful and terrifying image but not something that fools the eye. This would work in another movie. One more escapist in nature. In this one, however, everything up to this moment has seemed terrifyingly naturalistic and serious. All of this hard work done by computer-animators in a troubled industry seems so unnecessary.

That goes for the rest of the movie, which never finds a purpose as deep as atmosphere it creates. It just finds excuses to move from one set-piece to the next with its sense of story on the back-burner. Good entertainment, but was it worth all the effort? 

Pacific Rim

**** out of ****
 
THANK GOODNESS!!! Just when I was doubtful that I would ever have fun seeing a mega-budget summer movie again, here comes Guillermo del Toro’s, Pacific Rim, a loud explosion-filled CGI show that’s over two hours, and get this: It’s FUN! When it reached the point of two hours, I wasn’t ready for it to end. When it kept going, I felt nothing but gratification.

This is Del Toro’s love letter to Anime, Kaiju movies… or anything that ever involved a robot fighting a lizard. In spite of a brief history included in the film’s prologue, we as an audience are dropped right in the middle of a bleak future where a war between mankind and giant inter-dimensional city-destroying creatures continues. The monsters have been coming through a portal at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean at an exponential rate as the years have passed. The last efforts are being made to assemble a worldwide coalition of man-driven giant robots to combat the invaders. 

The lead-character pilots and their commander, played respectively by Charlie Hunnam, Rinko Kikuchi and Idris Elba are amusingly melodramatic. The comic relief mad scientists assisting the mission played by Charlie Day and Burn Gorman, actually succeed in simultaneously being funny and essential to the story. When Del Toro regular, Ron Perlman shows up late in the game, as a bizarre black market kingpin, the movie gets even cooler. I also like that this movie has no super-stars - only a few well liked character actors. I find this refreshing. 

While this has been a movie summer hell-bent on mass destruction, Pacific Rim is the only one (aside from the hilarious This Is The End) that doesn’t take the apocalyptic atmosphere too seriously. It doesn’t try very hard to sell us on the plausibility or practicality of what we’re watching. It’s simply steeped in the fun of the genre and for that, the loss of lives implied doesn’t have the depressing effects of a film that aims for realism.

This has always been the case with Del Toro films. He creates a stylized reality where the invading supernatural elements seem to fit. Whether it’s his vampire-like cursed man in Cronos, the magical realism creatures in Pan's Labyrinth, or the various trolls and demons in the Hellboy films, the guy is in love with destructive monsters! A lot of boys are and we never grow out of it.

The other thing that makes this movie so enjoyable is the creativity that went into it. The concept of the giant fighting machines having a neural link with the human pilot may be familiar, but in this movie, two pilots are required to guide the right and left hemispheres of the big guy’s brain (If done solo, it is implied to be overwhelming). The challenge is that they need to be compatible with one another when a bond is formed in the sharing of their minds.

Please understand that my high praise is not meant to imply that this is high-art. It doesn’t aim to be. It aims to be a grand-scale live-action anime movie and it succeeds with flying colors. This is great entertainment. Why it’s failing at the box office, is an injustice that mystifies me. As far as the rest of the summer goes, I don’t think it’s getting better than this. Pacific Rim is my salvation.

The Heat

** out of ****

Now that it's been in theaters for three weeks and enough people have enjoyed it, I feel like it's safe to say I didn't like The Heat. Since I was one of the few unimpressed people who saw its director's previous film, Bridesmaids, my opinion is pretty irrelevant, when considering the movie's audience.
 
Like his Bridesmaids, Paul Feig's The Heat is a comedy that runs over two hours and is filled with very funny moments outweighed by a lot of needless deadweight. Unlike Bridesmaids, it doesn't have interesting subject matter. The snore-worthy, cliche-ridden, buddy-cop formula it follows, is hardly refreshed by the fact that it stars women as the two main characters.

I'll never forget defending Bridesmaids when a group of elderly women were trying to convince me that it was shameful trash that only despicable people could enjoy. Nothing riles me up more than a person criticizing a flawed movie for the wrong reasons. Maybe they had been very misguided in seeing a low-brow R-rated comedy, but this was only because the cast of women and the theme of marriage had led them to believe they were seeing something safe.

Feig's two films do challenge the roles placed on women in the movies and I'm glad that most moviegoers react enthusiastically, but I must stay objective. I've laughed more at other films and yawned less.

Sandra Bullock is the straight-faced by-the-book federal agent while Melissa McCarthy is the unhinged, foul-mouthed, undercover cop. Get'em together and whoa! The type-casting is obvious and uninteresting. The redeeming side, is that these two can be funny together at times, particularly in an extended drinking montage set in a blue-collar dive bar.  

I get annoyed when I watch a comedy film and a lot of the tactics seem transparent. They set up a lot of shot/reverse shot dialogue sequences waiting for the funniest takes to happen. The results vary but the atmosphere is always plain. Feig makes no artistic attempt to make the funniest things about his films funnier.

The Lone Ranger

** out of ****

There was a point the new film of Disney’s acquired property, The Lone Ranger, when I was having some nostalgic fun. The obligatory William Tell Overture was playing, as the heroes rode their horses galloping along the side of a train, high-jacked by the villain with a damsel in distress. The action was predictable but the fun tone was just right. I can say that I enjoyed this part of the movie. Unfortunately, it took two-hours and fifteen-minutes to reach it.

The running time of this movie was hardly a surprise. I recall when the At the Movies review of the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie featured Roger Ebert congratulating the film for being surprisingly well-made featuring a great performance from Johnny Depp. However, he and Richard Roeper criticized the unnecessarily long run-time for a “silly pirate movie.” A decade later, the very same studio, producer, writers, director and star, bring us a silly “Lone Ranger” movie that makes the same mistake, plus many more.

A long movie isn’t a bad thing if it has the power to stay engaging. Director, Gore Verbinski may have a talent for beautiful composition in his imagery and a tendency to pay homage to the great films that inspire him, but his movies tend to feel impersonal. His animated movie Rango is the best one I have seen because it exists comfortably in an almost surreal cartoon environment.

This director along with producer Jerry Bruckheimer, screenwriters Terry Rossio, Ted Elliot, and Justin Haythe… and I suppose executive producer/star Johnny Depp have stuffed this two-hundred-million dollar movie to the point of indigestion. Like the Pirates sequels, it confuses convolution for depth.

I’ve also had a suspicion for a while now, of tactics used by directors like Verbinski who may be throwing in references and in-joke allusions to other movies, with the belief it will render the film critic-proof due to all the chuckles it will inspire from us movie nerds. If we’re reminded of good movies, maybe we’ll start to think this is one too.

The story of a law-enforcer-turned-maverick, with the help of a Native-American outcast, has a needless amount of story elements and characters that don’t amount to much. Then it is pathetically framed with an extra narrative layer borrowing from Little Big Man by showing Johnny Depp in heavy old-man makeup telling the “real story” to a young Lone Ranger fan. Why? To show off more of Depp’s energetic, yet disappointing performance as Tonto, which consists of comically intense stares and manic random behavior. This is Depp abusing every acting trait for which he has learned to depend.

As for the title character, I just got a banal vibe from a rather handsome actor who looks the part but needed more direction and Depp was no help in provoking any interesting chemistry between the two. I loved Armie Hammer as the Winklevoss twins in The Social Network. It would be nice to see him in a project with that kind of quality again but it hasn’t happened yet.

There’s also the issue of too many thematic elements which bounce back and forth from B-movie escapism to bitter American expansionist history and Native American genocide. The result is like seeing a concentration camp in an Indiana Jones movie.

This is a mostly lifeless confused movie with some great production and a few entertaining parts. It still seems like a waste of money for Disney and its audience. Again, what was so wrong with John Carter?

Much Ado About Nothing

Amy Acker as Beatrice listens in on false information in Much Ado About Nothing

 *** out of ****
 
Joss Whedon’s adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing is a passion project of honorable simplicity. Upon the completion of principal photography for last year’s The Avengers, the most logistically complex and expensive movie of Whedon’s career, he decided to make his own version of the four-hundred year old romantic comedy starring talented yet lesser-known actors with whom he’s worked in television and movies.

He shot the movie in twelve days using current-day indie film techniques and lit the film for a black-and-white presentation. Whedon isn’t an “all-or-nothing” artist. He clearly wants to stay in touch with his craft and continue working regardless of limitations. 

For those who enjoyed Kenneth Branagh’s splendid 1993 period adaptation, you may feel a tad underwhelmed by Whedon’s much more subtle take on the material. Then again you may feel relieved you don’t have to suffer Branagh’s melodramatic indulgences. It’s a question of preference. Whedon’s super-yuppies, who lounge about the estate (Whedon’s actual home) in modern garb, preserve their American accents and deliver Shakespeare's dialogue with the nonchalance one might expect from a Whit Stillman film. This is the beauty of time-honored works like the plays of William Shakespeare, they can be produced again and again and it’s fun to see how different they are each time. 

While the severe level of drama involving Hero (Jillian Morgese) and Claudio’s (Fran Kranz) botched union feels out of place, the love game of the two stubborn independents, Beatrice (Amy Acker) and Benedick (Alexis Desinof), has never felt more fitting than in this modern context. 

For those unfamiliar with the story, it is about high ranking soldiers (In this film, businessmen) staying as guests at the home of Leonato (Clark Gregg) after a successful battle (Maybe a profitable deal). While there is great potential for love between the soldiers and maidens of the house, manipulative forces of different kinds make and break couples.

Whedon achieves a production on the level of a rare L.A. stage show that we have been given the opportunity to see - for those who can find a cineplex presenting the movie. It isn't overproduced or trying hard to be grand but everthing is serving its purpose, particularly the acting. The players are clearly enjoying themselves. Movies like this are very rare. The fact that it came from a person who has just hit the Hollywood jackpot, it's humble nature is kind of amazing.

The East

*** out of **** 
 
The East, written by its star, Brit Marling and its director, Zal Batmanglij is the second -or third- collaboration between the two. The last time, was with Sound of My Voice, a very low-budget psychological thriller about a cult. There was also a film called Another Earth, where Marling co-wrote and starred for director Mike Cahill and Batmanji was given a special thanks credit. This time, the two take on the world of eco-terrorism with more stars and a bigger budget. I suppose what I am getting at, is the impressive body of work Marling is building.

Here's an interview with Marling during the release of Another Earth.

Marling plays a spy, working for a private company that specializes in the security and information to protect major corporations. Her boss (Patricia Clarkson) gives her the assignment of infiltrating an
anarchist group known as The East who are suspected as a dangerous threat to the lives of clients. She finds the group and gains their trust quite effectively. Their leader, known as Benji (Alexander Skarsgård) and members (including characters played by Ellen Page and Toby Kebbell), whose motivations to terrorize corporate CEOs are revealed to be more personal than one might presume, have very risky plans ahead. Marling’s character begins to grow sympathy for their causes. 

Marling and Batmanglij have taken on daring subject matter, but I am a little disappointed at how simple-minded The East turns out to be. While I anticipated these young filmmakers to continue with moral complexity, the fictional group in this film is made up of sympathetic and intelligent characters who know exactly who to go after in cases of undeniable crimes against humanity caused by people too wealthy to be dealt justice. 

After seeing 2011’s Oscar nominated documentary, If a Tree Falls, I saw the actions of The Earth Liberation Front ranging between honorably heroic to petty pointless destruction. The documentary featured rebels who seemed disciplined as well as obnoxious ignorant thrill-seekers. The East is a group eco-terrorists only dream to be.
I suppose my criticism with The East is that it’s taking on a subject that is very complex and simplifying it on a moral level so that it can function in a genre film. That’s not such a bad thing, as it helps the movie stay entertaining, but when it fails to embrace that kind of melodrama when this story reaches its compromising conclusion, it made me wish the story was more faithful to such a bold subject. The East is enjoyable but mostly forgettable.

Monsters University

Sully makes a hero out of Mike for a stolen mascot in Monsters University

*** out of **** 

Pixar Animation continues the story of Mike and Sullivan, two characters from another dimension made up of monsters who visit our world in the middle of the night to scare children in order to harness their “scream energy,” which fuels their monster world. In this story, the comical explanation as to why, as little kids, we thought there were monsters in the night, is expanded. Instead of the quirky absurd industry of Monsters Inc., we get to see the academic preparation they must endure to be worthy of the scaring profession.

The last movie had a conclusion that wouldn’t lend itself well to a sequel, so going back in time was the logical choice. Mike, once again voiced by Billy Crystal, arrives at his first day of college, eager and book-smart. After enrolling in the “Scaring Program,” he meets Sullivan, once again voiced by John Goodman. Sullivan is a natural in the trade, refusing to take the academic aspect of it seriously. While Sullivan finds favor and acceptance from the fraternities, Mike finds his from their professor and does everything possible to technically qualify, but is mocked by Sullivan and others for not being scary.

After an act of rivalry results in disaster, the two are disqualified from the program, Mike makes a high-stakes deal with the Dean, voiced by Helen Mirren, to be allowed into the annual “Scare Games,” in order to prove himself worthy of the program. The downside is that he needs a team. With a nerdy group of hopeless characters, Sullivan is his only hope.

So obviously this is a kid’s movie that rests comfortably in the formula of an adult-aimed college comedy. As predictable as the story may be, there’s something refreshing about a normally decadent genre being made sweet and innocent. Thankfully, topical pop-cultural references are mostly absent and the movie’s writing thrives on its fun concept.

Monsters University doesn’t excel, but doesn’t aim to. I only expected a nice comfortably simple story and dazzling eye-candy. I got both. Monsters Inc. was made at a time when Pixar was still wowing audiences with innovations in animation. Audiences were appreciative of their work even when the idea was simple. Like the Toy Story sequels, it’s a surprise that they can revisit an older property and make it new again.

Pixar still has a talent for keeping the most satisfying aspects of animated cinema together. They know how to generate a feel-good tone through consistently pleasant imagery and music, as well as an enthusiastic voice cast.

While Monsters University is a far cry from Pixar’s way overdue need for a fresh and different movie, those seeing it in theaters, shouldn’t arrive late. Their obligatory short film, before the main feature, is a new milestone for the studio. You’ll be amazed that everything on the screen is simulated. Hopefully, Pixar is planning a feature-length project of equal ambition.