Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Avengers: Age of Ultron" (PG-13 - Marvel/Disney - 2 hrs, 30 mins)

Short Version- It's good, not as good/iconic as the first one, but it's still a total blast to watch. Take the kids, they'll love it. Only one mid-credits scene, so you can go home early.-Long Version...

Alo Party Peoples.

Directed and Written by
Joss Whedon

If The Avengers was the original Star Wars, and Winter Soldier was The Empire Strikes Back, then Age of Ultron is Return of the Jedi. The first rewrote the book on modern action cinema, the second went bigger, bolder, and completely rejiggered the status quo with massive revelations, and the third is still a satisfying action film but doesn't quite reach the highs of either of its predecessors.

Make no mistake, Age of Ultron will likely be one of the summer's finest offerings of spectacle. It's funny, it's gorgeous, it's entertaining, but there's no "Puny god." or "I'm always angry." or this scene to make it something truly amazing and push it into pop-culture immortality like it's predecessor. With such a large expansive universe juggling multiple platforms, one of these movies just being good was probably an inevitability for Marvel, but they've set such a high standard for themselves that it feels like more of a letdown than it is.

Age of Ultron picks up in the wake of Winter Soldier with the Avengers picking off the last remnants of Hydra and capturing a base containing Loki's scepter, which has been used by a mad scientist to turn a couple of war orphans with a grudge against Tony Stark into the super-humans Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch. When Stark and Banner discover that the Scepter basically works like a computer, they decide to use it as the basis of an artificial intelligence program meant to run a global network of Iron Legionaries meant to tackle threats too big for superheroes. This "suit of armor around the world" quickly becomes an iron maiden when the AI immediately becomes a deranged lunatic that decides that making the world safe means killing the Avengers, and the rest of humanity not long after. Except for the war orphans since Scarlet Witch's telepathy proves useful in seeding discord among the Avengers.

Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr, Chris Evans, Jeremy Renner,
Scarlet Johannson, and Chris Hemsworth as the Avengers

This is the kind of big, ridiculous storytelling that could only originate in characters originally meant to entertain children, and while certain other superhero films treat that legacy like a burden, Age of Ultron embraces it wholeheartedly without any sense of irony or self-depreciating humor. This makes it, more so than any other Marvel Studios production, feel like a live-action cartoon in the best possible way. The action scenes are a ton of fun, the dialouge is consistently funny and quotable, delivered by actors that are by now immensely comfortable embodying these characters, and no matter which one is your favorite, you will love what they do with them, especially a much expanded role for Hawkeye that somehow turns him into an interesting character.

James Spader as Ultron

If there's one place where it comes up short, besides lavish editing for time that turns a second act spirit quest by Thor clearly meant to set up his third solo-outing into a weird digression that goes nowhere, it's Ultron himself. Don't get me wrong, he looks gorgeous, and James Spader is clearly having a blast playing him as having a serious god complex and a fragile ego, but he's a surprisingly shallow villain. Sure, this isn't and was never going to be an Ex_Machina level exploration of AI, but there's no real reason for him to immediately go crazy and decide that genocide is the only route to peace. There's not even a scene of Tony Stark being a prick to him that pushes him over the edge or something, it just comes out of nowhere.

But that's mostly nitpicking in what's almost certainly going to be a real highlight for summer 2015. When I say that Age of Ultron is only good, that's in comparision to the other Marvel Cinematic Universe films, and their standards are set so high that just 'good' is closer to amazing. Age of Ultron may not as good as it's predecessor, but it's still a fantastic action film. I had a wonderful time with it, and I'm sure that many of you will as well.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2" (PG - ColumbiaPictures - 1 hr, 34 mins)

Directed by Andy Fickman
Written by Kevin James and Nick Bakay

Alo Party Peoples.

I had no intentions of seeing Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 this weekend. I already had a perfectly good post about Ex Machina up, and I thought to myself "No, just no. This is below my dignity as a filmgoer and as a film critic, I refuse to pay money in order to subject myself to Paul Blart 2." I was not alone in this, Sony didn't hold press screenings for it - which almost never happens unless they have something truly terrible on their hands - and critics that did decide to see it have universally panned it.

I decided to take my girlfriend out to a different movie instead, so I gave her a call, and it turned out she didn't want to see Unfriended (why is that coming out now and not in October?) so we were talking about alternatives, and I brought up that she probably didn't want to see Paul Blart 2. But then she said to me "It can't possibly be that bad, let's give it a shot!", and I said "Really?" and she said "Yes, really." so we did just that. Two minutes in, they tried to make a joke out of an old woman being run over by a truck, and I knew this was a mistake.

Surprising absolutely no one, Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 is a terrible movie, a seriously, seriously terrible movie.  Joke after joke lands with a resounding thud, every character has no discernible personality - even by the very generous standards of modern family films - there is no sense of place with its setting in Las Vegas, and the whole thing is just alternately depressing or dull, depending on whether or not you care in the first place.

Kevin James as Paul Blart

It's not like the first Paul Blart was a masterpiece or something - not by any stretch of the imagination - but it wasn't bad, or it was at least tolerable. The sequel on the other hand, is horrible, mostly by virtue of the age old problem of bad comedy sequels. It has no new perspective to give on the concept and mostly feels like reheated leftovers of the first installment. To wit, after saving the mall in the first one, Paul Blart has hit a rough patch in his life. His wife of just six days filed for divorce, his mother was run over by a milk truck, and his daughter is growing up too fast since she's been accepted to ACLU.

At the same time, Paul gets an invitation to a security officer's trade show in Las Vegas, or more specifically at the Wynn Hotel and Casino TM, and decides this is just the opportunity he needs to bond with his daughter, and he stumbles upon an attempt by organized thieves to steal the hotel's art collection. If that sounds familiar, that's because it is. Paul Blart 2 is just Paul Blart again, but in a different setting, sort of. You see, this is a film from Happy Madison, which is Adam Sandler's production company. Also known as Adam Sandler's excuse to take a bunch of his fellow comedians out on vacation with Sony and the moviegoers of Middle America footing the bill.

Jack and Jill was an excuse to go on a cruise, Blended was an excuse to go out on a safari, and Paul Blart 2 is an excuse for Sandler, James and company to hit the Vegas Strip, but we never get to see the strip for ourselves since leaving the Wynn TM would mean doing actual work. Once the characters get to the hotel, we never leave it. It's almost like a feature-length commercial for the Wynn TM, which I'm sure was a significant source of funding to make up for the surprising lack of Sony's signature product placement.

The bottom line is, Paul Blart simply isn't funny, at all. It's a comedic black hole that sucks any humor or charisma out of Furious 7 playing one theater over. Every joke falls flat. Every. Single. Last. Joke. They're mostly composed of Paul Blart running into heavy objects, Paul Blart being a prick for no reason, or sad attempts at banter. The first one may not have been comedy gold, but it was at least in good spirits, this one isn't even trying, and Blart himself has gone from a likable shlub to an insensitive obstinate prick. As a result the film's emotional core, his growing ever more distant from his daughter, just doesn't work because we want her to get away from this jerk.

Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 is a failure. A lazy, uninspired sequel to an original that couldn't sustain a sequel. At least in my mind, this does more damage to Sony Pictures' reputation than North Korea or Wikileaks could ever manage to inflict. An instant contender for the Worst of the Year title, and it's April.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Ex Machina" (R - Universal/A24 Films - 1hr, 48 mins)

Directed and Written by Alex Garland

Alo Party Peoples.

If you liked Inception or Alien or The Matrix, then you will likely enjoy Ex Machina. If you want sci-fi with some intellectual meat to chew on, something in the spirit of The Twilight Zone, then you will enjoy Ex Machina. If you were disappointed by Lucy and want to see its themes properly explored, then you will love Ex Machina. I meet those criteria, and I suspect that Ex Machina will be one of the best films of 2015.

The reason Ex Machina is such a great film is simple, it's a great script playing with big ideas paired to a good director and good actors, with an amazing technical department to boot. It all adds up to a lean, tight, no-nonsense sci-fi thriller that Lucy wanted to be but utterly failed to.

Domhnall Gleeson plays Caleb, a computer programmer for a massive tech company that wins a contest to spend a week with the company's reclusive founder Nathan played by Oscar Issac, at his secluded mansion out in the middle of the wilderness. He finds out that it wasn't a contest, and that he was chosen by Nathan the human component of a Turing Test, sort of. Nathan has built Ava, an intellegent AI played by Alica Vikander, and he wants to find out if, even though she is obviously not a human, she acts enough like one for people to still empathize with her. She definitely passes, perhaps too well, and Caleb starts to suspect that Nathan has some ulterior purposes in mind.

Domhnall Gleeson as Caleb, Oscar Issac as Nathan

This is the directorial debut for novelist and screenwriter Alex Garland, and it shows. Huge segments of the film are presented with chapter headings, the screenplay is filled to the brim with allusions to myths, legends, scriptures, and visual arts, and it is just so rare to see cinematic sci-fi these days asking deep questions about free will and authority and what it means to be human and society and technology's place therein. Most cinematic sci-fi tends towards the fanciful realms of action or horror, so when something like Ex Machina comes along, it is something to be deeply cherished.

The actors are great, Domhnall Gleeson's Caleb is a relatable schlub, but in a very connectable way. Alica Vikander as Ava is simply amazing. This role requires absolute muscle control to show just enough emotion so the audience can empathize with them, but hold enough back to remind them that she's still essentially the daughter of HAL 9000 and Siri. Oscar Issac, oh dear lord, Nathan is a great, complex character. He plays him like an amalgam of Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, and Larry Page that created the source code for a search engine at the age of thirteen, and grew stinking rich off of it, and isn't happy with it at all. He's so unhappy wit the rest of humanity, and has such a massive ego, that he's convinced he can create a better version of it, hence his creating Ava. (oh hey, that's really similar to Eve)

Alica Vikander as Ava

Ex Machina is practically the definition of a well produced film. Alex Garland seems to be taking his cues from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Apple. So there are a lot of stark, sterile whites, and greys, and the whole house looks like the inside of an iMac, the precision of design almost makes it look like Wes Anderson's The Shining. Not to mention the seamless effects work it took to make Ava look the way she does. It took  It also does amazing things with sound, like, it had better win the Oscar. Unlike, say, Interstellar, the pounding sonic weight of the soundtrack emphasizes the action onscreen instead of drowning it out.

Ex Machina is brainy, big idea sci-fi of the best possible kind, and an instant contender for the Best of the Year title. It has already played in much of Europe, but is currently playing at select theaters in the US before going national next week. It's definitely worth checking out if you get the chance.

Have a nice day

Greg.B

TV Time: "Daredevil" (TV-MA - Netflix/Marvel/Disney - 13 ep., 50 min. avg.)

Note- Once upon a time, I saw Winter Soldier and thought, "This is the best Marvel movie period." Then I saw Guardians of the Galaxy and thought "This is the pinnacle of modern blockbuster filmmaking." I couldn't wait to see another film from these mad geniuses that reached those levels, and I found it in a Netflix Original.-End Note

Created by Drew Goddard

Alo Party Peoples.

One of the unique advantages the Marvel Cinematic Universe gets from being an interconnected universe is that there is a wide variety of story types and genres that can be explored within that universe. Captain America can go from old-fashioned pulp adventure to paranoid conspiracy thriller, Guardians of the Galaxy is a comedy space opera, Thor is a science-fantasy epic, they can do anything.

But not every story possibility lends itself to blockbuster film making. You can easily get a big audience draw from Thor, or Captain America, with Iron Man or The Avengers you can even pass the billion dollar mark, but I'm not sure there's a sizable amount of people on Earth that want to see a movie about Howard the Duck. (although that didn't stop George Lucas from trying) That's why I was excited when Marvel announced that they would be doing Netflix series based around their more obscure street-level characters, it shows that they're big enough to go small. Streaming services in general has opened the floodgates for concepts that wouldn't be viable in theaters or on broadcast TV to find a dedicated audience. The inner workings of the ascent to power of a congressman, or the complex social hierarchies of a women's prison, generally stuff too taboo for mainstream audiences to touch, suddenly gets to flourish under this new business model.

Besides changing what we expect from media, it's also been changing the way we consume media. Once upon a time, if you didn't watch something as it aired, you generally didn't expect to ever get another chance too see it outside of reruns. That's why so many shows were episodic in nature, i.e. each episode was its own self contained story, you just couldn't expect everyone to tune in week to week. VHS may have mitigated the problem somewhat, but the tapes had limited storage capacity, degraded over time, and took up far too much shelf space for keeping an entire season of something to be practical - all of that assuming you had a VCR to record and play back shows with.

Then the arrival of DVDs, and later time shifting services like DVRs and on demand streaming changed everything. It suddenly became a lot easier to do over-arching interconnected storylines with complex characters, because people could now follow it more easily since they didn't need to be in a certain place at a certain time to do so. Fifteen, even ten years ago, something like Game of Thrones or Mad Men or Orange is the New Black - or even the MCU itself now that I think about it - probably couldn't have existed, and they certainly wouldn't have been the norm, but now they increasingly are.

Daredevil is definitely a departure from the norm for Marvel Studios. The closest entry I can think of is Winter Soldier, and even that's a stretch since Daredevil is much smaller in scale and very different in tone. Regardless of their genre, Marvel Studios so far has kept up a standard approach to aesthetics for the most part, usually resembling comic panels come to life. Daredevil ditches that for harsh lighting, handheld cameras, and a pulp-noir texture that feels somewhere between Agent Carter and Gone Girl. To wit, Matt Murdock was blinded as a child by toxic chemicals that enhanced his remaining senses to near-superhuman levels. He grew up, and by day he works as a defense attorney alongside long-time associate Foggy Nelson, but by night he becomes the mysterious masked vigilante only known as "the Devil of Hell's Kitchen". While doing his job, both personas stumble upon an organized crime ring targeting the neighborhood eventually discovering a plot by mysterious billionaire Wilson Fisk to clean up the streets via forced gentrification.

Netflix's loose content restrictions allow Daredevil to go where the movies cannot. Like, the Iron Man movies are a good time, but Disney would never let them go into Tony Stark's drinking problems. This is best exemplified in the Daredevil's approach to action. Whereas most of the action in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been built around lasers and monster punches and magic hammers, but Daredevil's action is built around close-quarters brawling among mostly normal humans with mundane weaponry, which makes it feel a lot more brutal, tactile, and immediate. It's less like The Avengers' candy colored CGI fireworks and more reminiscent of Asian martial arts films ala Bruce Lee.

The action, while certainly impressive, is not the primary focus of Daredevil. Instead, it's a much more character driven show, and that means it lives or dies on the acting, which is phenomenal. Charlie Cox comes across as an immensely likable cad as Matt Murdock, and his Daredevil is appropriately menacing. Eldon Henson brings great comic relief as Foggy Nelson, Deborah Ann Wol works wonders as client turned co-worker Karen Page, and they all have great conversational rapport, but the best by far is Vincent D'Onofrio as Wilson Fisk.

If Marvel Studios has had any real weakness, it's that besides Loki they generally don't have very compelling or memorable villains, but Wilson Fisk is a great, complex character. He has a very specific image of what he wants the new Hell's Kitchen to be, and he will do anything and everything to achieve it, operating with the shy emotional maturity of a twelve year old. All those poor people already living there are either obstacles to be overcome or tools to be used in his sociopathic pursuit of his dream. He comes across as very comfortable with his position at the top of the ladder, but he's got a rage barely concealed below the surface that is always threatening to come loose.

Daredevil can go toe-to-toe with the best of the Marvel Cinematic Universe while also being utterly distinct from it. Even if you don't care for or about the Marvel movies, if you have Netflix, Daredevil is a must watch.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "The Divergent Series: Insurgent" (PG-13-Lionsgate - 1 hr, 59 mins)

Directed by Robert Schwentke
Written by Brian Duffield, Akiva Goldsman,
and Mark Bomback

Alo Party Peoples.

Here we go again. Willed into existence in the wake of The Hunger Games becoming a worldwide phenomenon, Divergent was one of the most frustrating films of 2014. It starred Shailine Woodley as an outspoken teenage heroine in a vaguely dystopian future society, who discovers that she is the one special snowflake that can save them all from an allegorical caste system that holds them in bondage. (If you've heard that enough times to be bored, I could not agree more.)

The thing that set Divergent apart, sort of, was that while other YA fare such as The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, Harry Potter to some extent - or even the genre's great-granddaddy The Catcher In The Rye - appealed to socially awkward teenagers through having protagonists that felt trapped in a long-standing societal order that didn't quite understand them, Divergent took it a step further by arranging its dystopian hellscape according to the pecking order of a high-school cafeteria. To wit, after a vague but incredibly destructive war, society has holed up in what's supposed to be Chicago, and divides itself into 'Factions' roughly aligned with virtues and occupations deemed essential to a functioning society. You've got the Jock Tribe (Dauntless/soldiers), the Nerd Tribe (Erudite/engineers, I think), the Hippie Tribe (Amity/farmers), the Teacher's Pet Tribe (Candor/administrators), the Dropout Tribe (Faction/home-less), and the Home Ec. Tribe (Abnegation/lawmakers).

That last one is the birth-faction of our heroine Tris, but she's never quite fit in with them. Once she goes up to the not-Sorting Hat on her sixteenth birthday, she discovers for a fact that (gasp!) she doesn't fit neatly into any of the Factions, and is instead a Divergent, and possesses all five virtues at once. (Wouldn't 'Convergent' make more sense as a name for all five traits existing in one person?) Because the state considers a varied skill set to be a threat to the social order, she chooses the Jock Tribe, they get used as henchmen in a conspiracy by the Nerd Tribe to take power, she thwarts that plan and escapes on a train headed far, far away from Future Dystopia No. 437.

The thing that made Divergent more than just a bad movie, and in retrospect probably what got it so high on my Worst of the Year list, isn't just that it's insulting how blatantly it panders to my particular age range. (Seriously, I'd like to think that teenagers are smart enough to demand better than this) Nor is it just that it's badly acted and looks worse, but that it's actual conception of social cliques among youth is dying fast in the Information Age.

In the Information Age, nerds have become jocks that happen to root for a fandom instead of a football team, and they can be just as toxic, exclusionary and intolerant if not more so. (Look up GamerGate if you want proof of that) In the Information Age, things that used to be staples of geek-dom; comic book superheroes, video games, high fantasy epics, etc., are now so close to being mainstream in the form of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, smartphone games and Game of Thrones respectively, that the distinction is practically archaic. In the Information Age, even the once ironclad division of musical tastes has gone away. Thanks to the MP3 and the Internet, everyone listens to everything and it's become normal.

The once clear boundaries separating social-cliques of the late 20th' Century are fast becoming obsolete in the 21st' Century, and it would be amazing if one of the authors of the dominant literary trend of that century recognized this by trying to create a different sort of dystopia. Especially since "Social structures are an arbitrary construct of human authorities that don't really exist" is more often than not the point of their multi-volume adolescent angst-fests...

...Two Hours Later...

... Insurgent picks up a few months later with Tris and company living among the Hippie Tribe to hide from the system, which has been fully taken over by the Nerd Tribe in between movies. (Didn't they stop the coup in the first one?) The Nerd Tribe's leader has found a MacGuffin Box from before the war that supposedly contains a way to solve the Divergent problem for good, but it requires one in order to open it, so the city has been placed under martial law as an excuse to hunt down any and all Divergents. When the system catches up with them, they realize that the only way to escape it is to tear it down, and form an alliance with the Dropout Tribe to take down the kinda-sorta Objectivist Nerd Tribe.

(Sidenote- There was a minor thematic line of "Smartness Leads To Arrogant Dickery" in the first one, but it's more apparent here. Our heroes are as dumb as a sack of hammers, and the villains are explicitly stated to be society's brightest minds. - End Sidenote)

While Divergent was a fusion of Hunger Games and Twilight, i.e. it's a dystopian future but with a romance story as it's primary focus, Insurgent is much more of a straight-forward action film, and it shows. They clearly got clearance for a bigger budget, and they're ridiculously eager to show it off with big detailed sets, and big elaborate FX sequences, and big sweeping shots, and a marketing campaign focusing on IMAX presentation meant to show off all that awesome big-ness. Unfortunately, the sets are empty and blandly designed, the effects would have been state-of-the-art in 2002 maybe, on television, and the camerawork- has actually improved from the first one since IMAX cameras are incompatible with shaky-cam.

The acting, which may have salvaged some of this, is almost uniformly terrible. Theo James is seemingly incapable of emoting, Ansel Elgort has left his Manic-Pixie-Dream-Boy charm on the set of The Fault In Our Stars, Miles Teller comes closest to a good performance, bringing some of his flippancy from Whiplash to the show, Kate Winslet gets nothing to do as the villain other than look menacingly upon efforts to open the MacGuffin Box, but the worst performance by far comes from Shailine Woodley. I like her as an actress, she's been good elsewhere, but she's at her best when she's can crack some jokes, which Insurgent's heavy-handed melodramatic screenplay sadly never lets her do.

The screenplay is atrocious. The characters make no sense, they either get one personality trait or no personality traits, our lead is practically a Mary-Sue, the plot is shoddy logic stacked on coincidence stacked on deus ex machina, and the world-building is shoddy at best and nonsensical at worst. For example, the factions are supposedly based around personality traits, but anyone can choose to enter any faction. How is the varied skillset of a Divergent supposed to be out of the ordinary if there's frequent unregulated inter-faction mixing going on? (Is it just a crime to have more than one personality trait?) Why is a society built to achieve maximum efficiency leaving all these ruins filled with useful building material lying around? Why is that society using 17th' Century farming equipment for food production to sustain a population at modern levels? If you poke around at the seams even the tiniest bit, the whole illusion just falls apart.

From terrible writing to wooden acting, horrid production design taken from a Build-Your-Own-Fascist-State Kit, and terrible direction marinating all of it, the Divergent Series' second verse is the same as the first. The song goes on and on, my friends, and it never, never ends....

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: 'Cinderella' (PG - Disney - 1 hr, 52 mins.)

Directed by Kenneth Branagh
Written by Chris Weitz

Alo Party Peoples.

Ever since around the start of the New Tens, the Disney Empire has been back on top of the world. (Not that they ever really left on a financial level, but they've got their pride back now.) The ongoing Marvel Cinematic Universe project prints money hand-over-fist and has become the envy of... every other entity involved in blockbuster film making.. Their animation department has come out of its post-Renaissance 2000s dark age with a vengeance, and is slowly taking the once mighty Pixar's place as America's gold standard for the medium. (At least on film, they're a bit less prevalent on television.)

The big trend of their most recent golden age seems to be taking a sledgehammer to the post-war golden-age before Walt's death and to the money-printing princesses of the Disney Renaissance. From Frozen assaulting the idea of love at first sight while stating that true love need not be romantic, to Maleficent also doing that while being a shockingly dark allegorical rape-revenge film. After seeing that I was intrigued by the idea of a live-action version of Cinderella, which is the archetypal Disney princess movie.

Two Hours Later...

I probably should not be surprised that this turns out to be a rather straight-forward retelling of Cinderella, it's a family movie from Disney, of course it's going to stay in a land far, far away from anything controversial. But if they turned Sleeping Beauty into a story of recovering from sexual assault, then surely Cinderella becomes about domestic abuse and/or dysfunctional families, right? But no, this new version from Kenneth Branagh is more interested in reconstructing the Disney fairy tale after Frozen and Maleficent had a wonderful time tearing it down. Telling the story of Lily James as a young peasant woman that is horribly abused by Cate Blanchett as her stepmother and stepsisters Sophie McShera and Holliday Grainger after her father's untimely death. One day the local king holds a ball and invites all the maidens of the kingdom, only for her overseer to forbid her from going, prompting Helena Bonom Carter as her fairy godmother to dress her up for the ball.

In keeping with the arch, dream like beats of the fairy tales that inspired it, the film looks and feels in tone and texture like a live-action cartoon. From the lavishly designed and decorated sets, to the just exaggerated enough costumes (the dress is actually one of the less impressive outfits on display) and even more exaggerated makeup, to every member of the cast giving professionally embarrassing but compulsively watchable performances. Cinderella is probably the best looking film of 2015 so far. The sets are wonderful, the camerawork is outstanding, the costume design is Oscar caliber, I just wish as much attention to detail went into the script. It isn't bad, far from it. In fact, for exactly what it is Cinderella is a really damn good film. It foregoes the dark revisionism of Maleficent or the pumped-up epic fantasy of the Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland in favor of getting back to basics, and comes off as utterly charming as a result.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: 'CHAPPiE' (R - Sony Pictures - 2 hrs, 0mins.)

Alo Party Peoples.

Directed by Neill Blomkamp
Written by Neill Blomkamp and
Terri Tatchell

Way back in 2007, Peter Jackson and then newcomer Neil Blomkamp were set to make a movie out of the Halo video game franchise that never came to fruition. Left with some time and cash on their hands, they decided to turn Blomkamp's independent short film Alive in Joburg into a full length feature. The result was District 9, which took off with both audiences and critics alike, and even got a Best Picture nomination from the Academy. (Which almost never happens for genre films.) Everybody wanted to see what this fresh-faced new auteur talent would do next.

What Blomkamp did next was piss away most of that good will on Elysium, an awkward hard-left polemic on American immigration policy and wealth disparity dressed up as allegorical sci-fi that highlights his biggest problem as a film maker. Even if he's one of the better directors working today, at least from a technical standpoint, as a writer Neill Blomkamp has yet to grasp that subtlety does not involve sledgehammers.

(I mean, just look at that poster! It's hilariously on-the-nose, and I doubt that was intentional.)

Neill Blomkamp is like a hybrid of Andrew Niccol and the Wachowskis, but if you sucked out any and all skill with words. He has Niccol's detailed world building and desire to use the fantastic as a lense to explore real-world issues, and the Wachowskis' big out there sci-fi concepts realized through millions of dollars in CGI. But he can never make the two mix in a satisfying way, and his constant bludgeoning of the audience with heavy-handed political points keeps his films from working either as serious drama or as crowd pleasing spectacle. Which is a shame since he really knows how to tell a story with pictures, he just doesn't know how to come up with a story to tell...

Two Hours Later

...until now. I'm pretty sure I just watched a hard-R Pixar movie, but I mean that in the best possible way. I can't believe I'm saying this, but CHAPPiE is actually pretty good. It's certainly Neill Blomkamp's best film, and that's because he's dropped almost any pretense. Despite being set in a near-future Johannesburg where the police force has been almost entirely replaced with emotionless robots to control high crime rates, there's no sociopolitical messages to monger this time. That lets Blomkamp focus on doing what he's always done best, wringing pathos out of each and every expertly arranged shot.

It's near-future Johannesburg, the police use robots called 'scouts' as field agents, and our focus is on Dave Patel as Deon Wilson, a programmer for Tetravaal, the company responsible for manufacturing the scouts. He's managed to make true artificial intelligence, but Sigourney Weaver's CEO won't let him test it on a company dime, so he steals a damaged scout to use as a test subject. Unfortunately, he's kidnapped by South African gangsta' rap act Die Antwoord playing gangsters Ninja and Yolandi to pay off a debt, and is forced to hand over the robot to them. Once they find out he's the scout's creator, they force him to upload the AI into it, dubbing him Chappie and using him for their heists.

CHAPPiE's central conceit seems to be positing Deon and the gang as two different kinds of adoptive parents. Chappie is a child, and incredibly eager to please, and he's torn between Deon teaching him to embrace creativity, and the forbidden fruit allure of Die Antwoord's dangerous gangsta' antics. As played by Sharlto Copley via some top notch motion capture, Chappie also questions why Deon, who he calls his 'maker' put him in a body with a damaged battery that's doomed to run out of power in a few days, at one point asking him "Why did you make me so I could die?" Blomkamp is just as unsubtle as ever, but this time it comes off as endearing instead of pretentious since he's just trying to make you feel emotions for Chappie, who is essentially Baymax mixed with ET in terms of onscreen presence.

(Incidentally, any kids that sneak into the theater are going to fall in love with this movie.)

If CHAPPiE has one very serious problem, it's that Blomkamp may be trying to do too many things at once. You could work an entire movie out of Ninja and Yolandi trying to raise the robot, or Deon's blossoming god complex, or an entirely different big sci-fi idea that comes up at the very end which probably should have been saved for a sequel or a different film, but that's mostly nitpicking since the parts that work, Chappie's slow discovery of his own humanity, work like gangbusters.

CHAPPiE is actually pretty awesome. It will be better a year from now once some random kid puts a bunch of money shots set to an inspirational pop ballad on YouTube, but for now it's a pleasant surprise and worth seeing, but I'd wait for DVD instead of seeing it in a theater.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B