The BFG

*** out of ****

It’s been too long since the childhood experience of my sister and I on each side of my mom as she read The BFG to remember its story. Seeing the new film version directed by Steven Spielberg working from a screenplay adapted by the late Melissa Mathison brought back the captivating atmosphere and the characters I remembered, but the story felt as fresh and strange as anything to be expected from the great children’s novelist Roald Dahl, when revisiting his work as an adult.

It is the story of a child taken from her unhappy orphanage existence to a mystical hidden land where giants live, who are mean and stupid man-eaters - aside from her captor, the bullied runt giant who prefers treating everyone and everything with kindness when he isn’t tending to his work in concocting dreams in the form of vaporous potions that he spreads to humans at nighttime. The girl decides to call him "Big Friendly Giant."

As the movie went along, I felt surprised that it was one of Spielberg’s. This is the kind of children’s material full of such bizarre fantasy, that it seems more suited to the likes of Terry Gilliam, Guillermo Del Toro or even Wes Anderson (when considering his work on Fantastic Mr. Fox). Compared to other family films Spielberg has done in the past, this exists somewhere different than the relatable emotion of E.T. or the pandering melodrama of Hook (or worse: his segment in Twilight Zone: The Movie). This movie is about dreams and the whole experience feels like a big weird dream unburdened by reality.

I’ve often made the case that Spielberg isn’t as stylistically redundant as he seems and likes to try new approaches. This movie seems to be picking up where he left off when he and Peter Jackson collaborated on the underappreciated comic-book-come-to-life, Tintin, by utilizing the surreal potential of motion-capture animation again - only this time merging it with live-action filmmaking. Disney’s been doing this in a lot of their so-called live-action films lately, but Spielberg has a better grasp in keeping the simulated content and filmed content on the same page.

His amazing find in the young actress Ruby Barnhill works with imaginative chemistry against Mark Rylance’s digitized magnificence in the title role. The various esteemed actors who lend their talents to small roles also add richness to a story that isn’t very investing by itself. It’s the attention to Dahl’s details, which allows this movie to work.

I see a big risk in Disney and Walden Media releasing a slow-paced quirky family film in the middle of the heat of the summer. Don’t these two parties remember what happened in 2008 when they tanked the Narnia franchise by releasing its second entry in late spring? There’s something about warm magical fantasy films and cold weather that go together like black coffee and a sweet doughnut.

I do wish this film the best. It’s one very imaginative story that goes in crazy directions but may lose the attention of less patient viewers. If you’ve seen Time Bandits, Spirited Away or The Boxtrolls, then you should know what kind of movie to expect. 

Independence Day: Resurgence

**1/2 out of ****

Talking about the sequel, Independence Day: Resurgence, opens up a whole other issue regarding the value of the original 1996 blockbuster. Was Independence Day a bad movie due to its two-dimensional characters, brainless story and generic alien concepts or was it a great movie for sharing a dream of world unity with potent cinematic emotion and some of the most exciting special effects sequences to ever to be projected on the big screen?

When the original film was released, it was a hit with audiences but not so much with critics. At age fifteen, I certainly thought it was one of the most amazing experiences I’d ever had at the movies. 1983’s Return of the Jedi” was the last time anyone had seen such an endless array of miniatures and explosions being simultaneously combined on the screen while accompanied by beautiful melodramatic music to match.

It came at a beautiful time when decades of refinement in the art of practical effects found a temporary ally in the newly proven abilities of computer-generated imagery. This was also a time when special effects were still special and this movie’s imagery caused jaws to drop, whether people were seeing a clip of it on TV or watching the movie on a giant screen in booming THX.

Twenty years later, I still find the film to be uniquely beautiful regardless of how brainless it is, but I would have never wanted a sequel for it. The original was an epic about mankind triumphing over annihilation and there is absolutely no call for another chapter to the story.

I guess this mega-budget monster of a hit didn't get its sequel back then because prevailing minds weren't greedy or shameless enough.

Now it's the year 2016 and while we're collectively recovering from the black-lung we got from Batman v Superman before holding our breath for the flood of digital slime in the reboot of Ghostbusters, the needless idea of a sequel to one of the dumbest fun movies ever, is in theaters -and boy is it dumb. Strangely though, I still enjoyed it a little. I certainly laughed quite a bit.  

To its credit as a sequel, they actually devised some great ideas. I love that the alien attacks of the last film resulted in the whole world being united and the two-decades that passed have resulted in a progressively futuristic alternate 2016. When you look at how real life disasters have only influenced separation in the real world, this is quite a desirable fantasy. Some further development on the motivation of the aliens is pretty good too.

Ultimately it is a losing sequel because once the aliens return with a cataclysmic boom, it never takes a minute to let feelings set in or have composers Harold Kloser and Thomas Wanker provide a score as powerful as David Arnold’s. Returning director Roland Emmerich (whose reputation for brainless disaster movies hasn’t improved in the past two decades) continues to invent situations that should challenge any audience member’s notions of what our planet cannot survive. Maybe Emmerich doesn't care and finds this whole thing funny. I did.

This movie isn’t helped by the inexplicable absence of Will Smith’s hero character, but it gains a lot of deliberate laughs through the inexplicable continuation of Brent Spiner’s Area 51 scientist –who was presumed dead in the last film. Bill Pullman’s hammed-up performance as the traumatized former President is unintentionally one of the funniest aspects to the film. Jeff Goldblum’s continued role as the neurotic genius with a knack for rationalizing nonsense also continues to inspire smiles. The weirdest aspect to the film is a bad subplot involving Judd Hirsch’s character who couldn’t be denied from coming back, considering that the man doesn’t look like he’s aged a day since the last movie.

The film also attempts a passing of the torch to a younger generation that so many of these sequels-of-late are attempting - some more effectively than others. Maika Monroe, Jessie T. Usher, and Liam Hemsworth all represent a young generation, which lost a lot of parents and have good introductions but the movie only vaguely develops their motivations as new heroes.

If you experienced the original as I did in '96, don't expect that impact here, but you knew that. Movies are crammed with special effects now and they only leave an impression when they don't look terrible (This movie varies in that regard) or contain enough shots with no effects at all - if only to add a little contrast.

Simply put, the legacy of Independence Day is not improved by a guilty-pleasure sequel, worthy of a view at the drive-in, but when I watched the first film on a newly re-mastered Blu-ray recently, its magnificence was in no way lessened.

IN RETROSPECT: Matinee (1993)

"You think grown-ups have it all figured out? That's just a hustle, kid. Grown-ups are making it up as they go along, just like you. You remember that, and you'll do fine."
-Lawrence Woolsey (John Goodman) in Matinee

Those partial to famous director names may have already forgotten Joe Dante by now. While the director currently sits in the outskirts of filmmaking, far away from Hollywood's big investments, he spent the 1980s and the 1990s as a well-liked director-for-hire. Dante started as one of many Roger Corman protégés, learning the importance of budget efficiency, which sent him on a path to B-movie horror before he caught the attention of Steven Spielberg and major studios, who set him up with Gremlins and a career in dark family entertainment.

Dante's filmography has so much in common with Tim Burton's, that their work, which takes so much inspiration from classic horror films, could easily be confused. Innerspace was just as funny as its special effects were mesmerizing, his segments in the sketch comedy film Amazon Women on the Moon were among the best parts, Gremlins 2 was an underrated prank of a sequel, The 'Burbs put a brilliant slapstick twist on the paranoid thriller genre, but it was 1993's Matinee that most likely allowed this director to express his love for movies. In my opinion, it's his masterpiece.

Written by Charlie Haas, this comedy revolves around the release of an atomic-mutation-themed B-horror movie due for an early screening in Key West during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Told mostly from the perspective of an adolescent movie fan (Simon Fenton) in a Navy family that has recently settled in the Florida town before it goes into panic, the film's nostalgia for bad monster movie escapism and its relationship with real-life anxieties adds so much meaning to the hilarious nonsense of the period.

The opportunistic Hollywood filmmaker (John Goodman) revels in the possibility of a shook-up community being the ideal audience to prove his film's value to a distributor (played by the late Jesse White). 

The film within the film, is called Mant! - about a man transforming into a giant ant after an dental X-ray mishap. Like the showmanship of William Castle films during that time, the movie is filled with corny audience participation gimmicks.

While Matinee's marketing focused on Goodman's star-power, the story focuses on the coming-of-age experiences of the young characters. The main kid has been moving around for most of his life and taking his easily scared younger brother (Jesse Lee Soffer) along to see monster movies has been the only constant in his personal activities.

Strangely, it is the nuclear scare that brings about a social life for this kid when most of the boys at school learn that his father is on one of the blockade ships and regard him as a military insider (even though he's just as in the dark). He also develops a crush on a rebellious liberal schoolmate (Lisa Jakub) who sees in him a boy who just wants his father to return home safely.

The movie also features an array of fun characters, such as the filmmaker's hilariously jaded starlet/girlfriend (Cathy Moriarty). There's also a girl-crazy student (Omri Katz) with a crush on a naive dream-girl (Kellie Martin) but must overcome the threats of her delinquent greaser ex-boyfriend (James Villemaire) who ineptly spouts off his own bad brand of beat poetry with delusions of profundity.

There are also Joe Dante regulars sprinkled throughout the cast, such as Dick Miller, who, along with Dante's former collaborator - director John Sayles, play a couple of demonstrators, seemingly protesting against the amorality of Mant! Belinda Balaski is a melodramatic mother with confidence in the duck-and-cover motto, and Robert Picardo steals as the theater's anxious owner.

Dante's knack for making movies within movies is exercised better in Matinee than any of his other films. The briefly shown, The Shook-Up Shopping Cart stars Dante regular Archie Hahn and a young Naomi Watts in what resembles a 1960s live-action technicolor Disney film. Mant! dominates the final act of Matinee, where events at the movie premier are intercut with the silly black-and-white B-movie being projected on the screen, which features uncredited veteran stars Robert Cornthwaite, William Schallert and Kevin McCarthy.

I originally saw Matinee as a kid when it first hit video after an unsuccessful theatrical run. At age 12, I didn't think much of it, but in my early adult years which included a lot of time seeing movies and working a movie theater, I revisited the movie and found that, along with Cinema Paradiso, it is one of the very best movies about people who see movies.

In appreciation for standards that still existed in movies of the '90s, Dante's style contains lengthy -but not showy takes with deep focus wide angle cinematography to compliment ensemble acting where every actor hits their beats beautifully. This is even true of the less-experienced kid actors. Jerry Goldsmith's score also reminds me of an era when seasoned composers were turning out great orchestral music for just about anything.

The film's comic nostalgia may take a few easy jabs at ridiculous attitudes of another time, but it serves to remind us that we always have some ill-informed fear of disaster or how to save ourselves from it. We also strangely make movies about these things for our own perverse entertainment. 

Goodman's character is a glorified fear profiteer who believes that a movie can scare an audience with world-ending terror, but when it's over they go through those exit doors back to a world that may be troubled, but it's still standing. I wish I had his job.

Central Intelligence

** out of ****

Central Intelligence doesn’t represent bad taste or mean-spirited entertainment, but it does represent so much of what is wrong with American comedy movies today: It’s so confident in its comic star-power, that it ends up being unfocused and lazy. Many people will see this movie and many will enjoy it, but I cannot ignore its problems in the same way that the filmmakers ignored its potential.

Mediocre crowd-pleasers are the enemy of so many critics because they aim to please people who don’t freely see movies as often as critics are required to. Critics want to speak for the people but can’t conscionably recommend something when its cheap tactics fail to rise above the run-of-the-mill fare of which they’ve seen too much.

As a part-time critic, I often avoid movies starring two popular entertainers, who, when featured on the poster, are against a plain background with a title in some easy-to-read typeface and are possibly holding firearms. It presents the promise of basic-level action and comedy like the picture of a burger and fries on a McDonalds drive-through menu.

It was when I saw that this movie shared creative minds with those behind Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, We’re the Millers and The Mindy Project, that I chose to give it a shot. I regard none of these as great works, but they all rose above their expected banality.

The movie begins in a flashback where a pep-rally at one Central High School is taking place. A fat teenager named Robbie Weirdicht (Dwayne Johnson –or at least his face during this part) is dancing to En Vogue in the shower of the boy’s locker room while bullies move in on him to pull a prank. Upstairs in the gym, Calvin Joyner (Kevin Hart) is receiving accolades as the most popular guy in school who has been voted “Most Likely To Succeed” by his peers. It is here where the naked Robbie is thrown out onto the gym floor by the bullies and humiliated, only receiving empathetic help from Calvin.

Cut to the present and Calvin is married to his high school sweetheart (Danielle Nicolet) while living in a nice house and working as an accountant. His wife is pressuring him to attend their high school reunion but he doesn’t want to go because he feels like a failure (Although some high school valedictorians have done worse).

Calvin is mysteriously friended on Facebook by Robbie who has changed his name to Bob Stone and insists that the two meet up. Desperate to avoid marriage counseling, Calvin obliges and when the two meet at a suburban sports bar, he is surprised to see the intimidating presence of a lean muscular giant even if Bob has all the same feminine tastes and awkward optimism he did in high school.

Calvin seems a little uncomfortable around Bob, but soon warms up when it’s revealed how much he is idolized by the guy who left high school in embarrassment and went on to be an empowered person who proves his value in a fight later that evening when the two are threatened by thugs.

Things aren’t what they seem, however, when Bob asks Calvin for a favor that results in agents from the C.I.A. (led by Amy Ryan) knocking at Calvin’s door the next day, who reveal that Bob is a rogue agent wanted for treason. From there on, Calvin is trying to maintain the normalcy of his life while the agents and Bob separately shake things up.

That’s not a bad setup for an action/comedy. It’s predictable, yet functional. Central Intelligence is also a rare example of colorblind casting even if it is starring two of the most bankable non-white actors working today. Aside from a couple funny race-related quips from Kevin Hart’s character, he, nor the still critically undervalued Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson seem to be written with race in mind.

The movie establishes itself well but isn’t made of parts that fit together naturally because it constantly blends offbeat humor with awkward humor, a common incompatibility that continues to go overlooked in film and TV.

As a story, it misses many grand opportunities to be darker, leaving little character developments that could have gone in interesting directions unattended. The unearned sentimental character arcs in the film are another expected annoyance. 

Through unexpected cameos, slapstick, clever one-liners and some funny chemistry, this movie has its moments but not enough of them.

Finding Dory

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

Whether you see Finding Dory in effective 3D or brighter 2D, you can expect a gorgeous showcase of animation that lovingly renders its version of the Pacific Coast and its wildlife. The same can be said of Pixar’s new opening short, Piper.

Even in the loose family-movie genre, I can feel wary of sequels that aren’t called for. Unsurprisingly, Pixar gives this movie a sense of purpose with emotion and hilarity. The continued theme of the fears, which come with being a parent works its way into Dory quite cleverly as that fish (voice of Ellen DeGeneres) with great instincts challenged by short-term memory starts to get brief recollections of her childhood that lead her to believe she can find the loving parents who were lost long ago.

With the help of fellow clownfish Nemo (Hayden Rolence) and his dad Marlin (Albert Brooks) Dory travels across the Pacific and into the coastal aquarium where she was born. The rest is quite a funny journey with wondrous sights - this time concentrating on the beauty of the water's surface - and a running gag involving the aquatic center’s celebrity-endorsed voice of Sigourney Weaver.

Like Finding Nemo, the movie is so often good at being heartfelt that the interruption of comic relief gets a little tiresome at times, but you must bear in mind that these are the gripes of a childless adult who likes cartoons.

After enduring some irritating scores in family films lately, it was such a relief to hear the emotional melodies and tasteful timing of Thomas Newman, who is still one of the best composers working today.

Pixar continues to make good movies, and after last year’s brilliantly original Inside Out was one of their best, Dory manages to be found in the shadow of that great film - even if it is a sequel no one asked for. I still don’t want a Toy Story 4, but I’m sure they’ll make it work.