How to Train Your Dragon 2

The sequel to “How to Train Your Dragon” is a bit more action heavy and less charming, but it still captures the original’s spirit.

How does the saying go? You can’t teach an old dragon new tricks? That’s the actuality behind “How to Train Your Dragon 2”, which models off the original “How to Train Your Dragon” in many ways and yet does so without losing any of the original’s surprising quality.

Dreamworks’s film was the first since “Shrek” that had both real humor and heart. It was a gorgeous example of what 3-D could do, it captured some of the breathtaking spectacle behind “Avatar” and put it into a kids’ film and it even included an adorable wordless montage that could plausibly be talked about in the same breath as the one from “Up.” Those more tranquil moments made the epic dragon battle in its finale more significant and tolerable.

“HTTYD 2” is a bit more action heavy and a bit lighter on the charm that made the first film a hit. All the training has been done, and now a bigger fight is about to begin. And yet Dean DeBlois’s film (he co-directed the original) uses the same structure that slowly brought out the original’s best qualities. Continue reading “How to Train Your Dragon 2”

Criticism as a Cost Center: More on the Economics of Movie Reviews

Is film criticism not financially viable or are publishers and editors not doing enough to innovate?

More than anything else, the best and most frequent word of advice for young writers looking to become film critics is don’t.

The point here is not, “give up,” but the sad realization that being a film critic is not actually a career and just about no one in the 21st Century makes a living just watching and reviewing movies. David Bordwell actually put this advice best:

“Forget about becoming a film critic. Become an intellectual, a person to whom ideas matter. Read in history, science, politics, and the arts generally. Develop your own ideas, and see what sparks they strike in relation to films.

Some critics go the route of grad school and being a professor or author for a living. Some find passions in programming for festivals or art house theaters. And others take up journalism and learn how to edit or report as well as write. Although the other sad realization is that becoming a journalist is not that much more lucrative a backup plan.

That’s why it hurts to see great, versatile writers and critics lose their jobs seemingly every week. Just this past April it was one of the legends, Owen Gleiberman over at Entertainment Weekly. You wonder how anyone can get into the game if even the people you admire can’t make it work.

The conclusion for why its so bad out there for the movie critic is predictable: the Internet pits criticism in a losing battle against cat videos, Justin Bieber and listicles, and it’s a damn shame that the world just doesn’t respect or value film criticism as much as the rest of us. Continue reading “Criticism as a Cost Center: More on the Economics of Movie Reviews”

Rapid Response: Zelig

“Zelig” is Woody Allen’s genius mockumentary set in the 1920s.

What really works about Woody Allen’s “Zelig” and makes it brilliant is that no matter how outlandish, ludicrous and fantastical Leonard Zelig’s scandal or condition gets, you still kind of buy it. Allen’s got Susan Sontag and Saul Bellow giving plausible sounding and descriptive diagnoses of Zelig’s mental state, all of it following a sense of empathy and dramatic arc, and it’s all total nonsense.

“Zelig” is Woody Allen’s mockumentary, although to call it that conjures up ideas of “This is Spinal Tap” and “Best In Show” in which the subject being mocked is someone other than the director himself. “Zelig” is more accurately a real documentary on a fake person, and not just that, but a proto-Woody Allen, a version of himself we see in many of his films. It uses Leonard Zelig’s condition as a human chameleon to get inside the mind of a person always begging to fit in and be liked, even going as far as to say there’s really not much wrong with that. Changing our personality and even our appearance is something just about anyone does, and the movie acknowledges that this could be anything from lying about having read “Moby Dick” to pretending you’re an experienced psychologist so you can go to bed with your doctor. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Zelig”

Johnny Guitar: A Feminist Western with a dark twist

Joan Crawford leads Nicholas Ray’s film that’s surprisingly relevant on gender politics.

In a time when women are as vocal as ever about the hypocrisy of being shamed for their sexuality by both men and other women and when women become the villains and not the victims of abuse or even rape in relationships, a movie like “Johnny Guitar” in a genre historically associated with men, the Western, is surprisingly and strangely relevant.

Nicholas Ray’s film is a classic Old Hollywood Western, but at times it may as well be “The Scarlet Letter.” Joan Crawford plays Vienna, a saloon owner in a small town that for some reason wants nothing to do with her. The railroad is on its way and Vienna has scooped up the rights to the train depot, so the value of her land is about to skyrocket. But on a particularly quiet and stormy night when a mysterious man named Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden) has arrived to serve Vienna, a posse of men and the town marshall show up to harass Vienna and demand she leave town in 24 hours. The posse’s leader Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge) suspects Vienna’s involvement with a local gang led by The Dancin’ Kid (Scott Brady), and she viciously wants all of them hung, believing them to be responsible for the death of her brother in a recent stagecoach robbery.

The story turns out to be intricately layered. Love triangles abound, no character is remotely trusting of the others, and some like Emma harbor deep seeded hatred of Vienna and the local gang. Emma is in fact so vindictive and spiteful of Vienna that she gets sadistic pleasure out of burning down Vienna’s saloon and calling for her hanging. She’s a coldly brilliant villain in the hands of McCambridge, and her performance is so good that she makes puddles into these hardened male gunslingers.

But Emma’s spite of Vienna runs so deep that she’s been labeled a tramp for no good reason, assumed to be involved with these bad men and harboring worse intentions. Emma also secretly loves the Dancin’ Kid, despite his own unreturned fancy for Vienna, and this only amplifies the sexual tension. In an early scene, Vienna speaks of this dilemma in a way that might still seem relatable to all women of today. “A man can lie, steal… and even kill. But as long as he hangs on to his pride, he’s still a man. All a woman has to do is slip – once. And she’s a “tramp!” Must be a great comfort to you to be a man.”

That kind of nuanced feminist plea feels mighty rare in a genre like this, and it carries all the way through to the showdown at the end between Vienna and Emma. Having two women face off in the spots where John Wayne and Clint Eastwood have stood so many times before may just be unprecedented.  Continue reading “Johnny Guitar: A Feminist Western with a dark twist”

22 Jump Street

’22 Jump Street’ is quite literally the same story and idea as the first film, and it’s much lesser for it.

Nick Offerman delivers a monologue at the start of “22 Jump Street” about the surprise success of the 21 Jump Street case, i.e. the plot at the center of 2012’s “21 Jump Street,” obviously. He explains that no one cared about it the first time around, but now they’re going to throw more money at, as though that would produce better results, do the same thing and keep everyone happy.

It’s a wickedly self aware moment, and Offerman is talking about this original film, but he may as well be talking about “The Hangover” or any action sequel ever made.

Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller proved earlier this year that they can be transparently self-aware and still be innovative with “The LEGO Movie.” So they more than anyone know that for “22 Jump Street” to be good and even better than the original, it would have to be more than a sequel about bad sequels.

And yet here Jonah Hill is, doing slam poetry that isn’t as funny as his Peter Pan song. Here’s a drug tripping sequence involving split screen dream worlds for both Hill and Channing Tatum that isn’t as funny as Tatum diving through a gong or Rob Riggle trying to put Hill’s tongue back in his mouth. And here’s Tatum stupidly saying Cate Blanchett when he means “carte blanche,” and the movie not following up on getting that cameo the way they did with Johnny Depp the first time around.

“22 Jump Street” is literally the same movie as the first one with more money thrown at it, and that might be the point, but that doesn’t make it a stronger or equal film. Continue reading “22 Jump Street”

The Fault in Our Stars

The adaptation of John Green’s book by Director Josh Boone lacks the attitude that made the novel distinctive.

The blockbuster YA novel of today has become so closely aligned with all the Hollywood clichés of the last decade: dystopian futures, chosen one teenagers, dark overtones, epic CGI battles for the fate of all mankind and one book needlessly split into two films.

“The Fault In Our Stars” by John Green is as big as they come but has been adapted into a single, trim, two-hour love story and tearjerker, and a modest one at that. Both the success of the book and the movie is that they can take big, melodramatic themes of death, disease, heartbreak and even oblivion and make them feel intimate and personal.

Green’s novel is the story of a 17-year-old cancer patient named Hazel Lancaster (Shailene Woodley) who meets 18-year-old and now cancer-free Augustus Waters (Ansel Elgort) at her cancer support group. He’s forward, strangely eloquent and a bit awkward, and she’s sarcastic and pessimistic with a slight frump and eye roll to send his way. Gus dubs his crush with the new identity of Hazel Grace and they soon fall in love, but she fears the damage she’ll do to both Gus and her parents when she inevitably passes away.

The screenplay by pair Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber (“500 Days of Summer”, “The Spectacular Now”) follows the source material as well as any major YA adaptation, even lifting full passages out of the book, but it’s missing the punchy, brash and flippant energy to Green’s novel. Continue reading “The Fault in Our Stars”

Chef

The director of “Iron Man” feels like he’s making a movie about struggling to make the movie he really wants.

Certain movies are called “passion projects” for a reason. It often involves a filmmaker leaving his or her comfort zone to make something different that they still care deeply about. But it also involves putting your personality as an artist on the line. In fact “passion project” is sometimes used as a slight against artists when it seems like they’ve made something for themselves and no one else.

With “Chef,” John Favreau may have just made a passion project about passion projects. The story about cooking and food is easy enough to swallow, but the special sauce are all the transparent parallels to Favreau’s career as a filmmaker and trying to be a populist artist while inside a system that saps creativity. Continue reading “Chef”

Edge of Tomorrow

“Edge of Tomorrow” is a hugely clever summer blockbuster and a reminder of why Tom Cruise is today’s biggest action star.

“Edge of Tomorrow” starts with scattered flashes of cable news quickly informing us that aliens have invaded the Earth, Europe has been ravished and the rest of humanity is next. Tom Cruise shows up as a talking head on panel after panel and assures the anchors that this latest human assault will be a success.

Why should a sci-fi action movie start this way? Because Director Doug Liman knows that we go through this song and dance over and over again, and every time, nothing seems to get better.

“Edge of Tomorrow” is a smarter and more deeply profound thriller than anyone will give it credit for. Despite the on the face similarities to “Groundhog Day,” (or better yet “Source Code”, which everyone seems to have forgotten) the film has a clever sci-fi conceit that introduces daring wit, drama and romance into a genre in desperate need of more. Continue reading “Edge of Tomorrow”

Muscle Shoals

“Muscle Shoals” tries to capture a distinctive sound found only in Alabama but gets lost in its own nostalgia.

In 20 to 30 years when all the stories of blues, early rock and early R&B and soul have been told, rock documentarians will be forced to look away from this golden age to the music scene of today. No doubt they’ll find less of the “magic” that was apparently everywhere in the good ‘ol days, but they might start looking for a new way to depict the recording process of today as special.

“Muscle Shoals” is a rock-doc about a small Alabama river town and the legendary music that inexplicably was recorded there. Everyone from Mick Jagger to Aretha Franklin to Bono speaks of the “Muscle Shoals Sound” and the special “something” that they discovered and achieved there. But following along those ambiguous terms, “Muscle Shoals” becomes a formless history lesson and appreciation rather than a documentary worth remembering. It’s a dry and familiar doc in the worst ways and needs a new outlook for how to frame this unique cultural moment.

Here in this beautiful, pastoral, Southern slice of Americana, everything is described in spiritual, figurative terms. No one is quite sure what makes this place alluring, but they all say it has “something”. Some even believe the Native Americans’ old story that it’s the only place in the country where the river actually sings (the other is supposedly in Liverpool and spoke to The Beatles).

Frankly, the platitudes get tired quickly, and Director Greg ‘Freddy’ Camalier finds little drama with which to set inside Muscle Shoals and its musical history. It seems as though the real magic behind Muscle Shoals was not the river, the food or the scenery but the small town record producer Rick Hall and his house band The Swampers. Continue reading “Muscle Shoals”

The Immigrant

James Gray’s lush period drama is a movie about loss and wondering what your life has become rather than a historical document.

How did I get here? What happened to me that this is what my life has become? How do I find my way and some hope leading toward a bright future?

For many Europeans at the turn of the 20th Century, the answers to those questions lied across the Atlantic Ocean on the shores of America. And American films, even those period pieces that have explored the hardship of immigration, are seduced by the allure of The American Dream.

Director James Gray uses this backdrop to explore those questions on universal terms. In “The Immigrant,” coming to America means being stuck in a state of purgatory, being without hope or happiness and always fighting for survival. It’s a film about being lost, and not only in America.

The film starts as Ewa (Marion Cotillard) and her sister Magda are arriving at Ellis Island from Poland. Magda is immediately swept out of line to the infirmary for treating tuberculosis, and Ewa is about to be deported after being accused of being a “woman of low morals” while on board the ship.

We see none of her time back home or on the ship, and what exactly a “woman of low morals” means is not readily explained. But here Ewa is, stuck in Ellis Island about to be deported without her sister and wondering how she wound up in this mess in the first place. Immigrant or not, this feeling is not unique to Ewa. Continue reading “The Immigrant”