Saturday, 10 August 2013

The Smurfs 2 : Reviews

Cast:Neil Patrick Harris, Brendan Gleeson, Jayma Mays, Hank Azaria, Katy Perry, Jonathan Winters, Christina Ricci, JB Smoove, George Lopez, Anton Yelchin, John Oliver
Direction: 
Raja Gosnell

Story: The cute-as-a-button Smurfette has been kidnapped by the evil, scheming Gargamel who needs to get the formula for creating 'true blue' Smurfs. While Smurfette soon finds herself suffering from a bit of a crisis herself, it's up to the rest of the Smurfs to rescue her, foil Gargamel's plot and save the day.

Review: While the initial Smurfs flick was set in New York, this one takes a continental turn and shifts the scene to Paris, where the irrepressible Gargamel (a very eager Hank Azaria) needs something called 'Smurf Essence', which he uses as part of his magician's act. So, he sends out one of his Naughties called Vexy ( Christina Ricci) to kidnap Smurfette ( Katy Perry, who fits the role pretty nicely) via an inter-dimensional portal he has opened. He believes that Smurfette is a key ingredient in his quest for world domination. The fact that Smurfette is herself feeling a little blue, so to speak, because the whole village has forgotten her birthday (or so she thinks) doesn't help matters.

The pursuit begins with Papa Smurf ( Jonathan Winters), Clumsy ( Anton Yelchin), Grouchy ( George Lopez) and Vanity ( John Oliver) in hot pursuit. Papa Smurf, the voice of wisdom, uses magical crystals to port into the real world to enlist the help of Patrick Winslow ( Neil Patrick Harris) and his stepfather Victor Doyle ( Brendan Gleeson).

The pace, along with the live action, keeps moving and the script has several witty asides. In an attempt to appeal to a wider audience, there are a few sub-plots too, among them a moralistic take on who really created Smurfette. The rest of the Smurfs also get their 15 minutes of fame and gags. Apart from that, the film's score (Heitor Pereira) adds a non-verbal emotiveness to some of the scenes. Also livening things up a bit is the comic timing in the movie.

All said and done however, while there is nothing disagreeable about this movie, there's nothing very remarkable about it either.

The Conjuring : Reviews

Cast: Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Lili Taylor
Direction: 
James Wan


Story : Carolyn (Lily Taylor) and Roger Perron (Ron Livingston) with their five daughters move into a secluded Rhode Island farmhouse. Strange things start happening in and around the house at night. Turns out, it's not just fear that's playing hide-and-seek with their minds.

Review : Alarmed with the rise in horrific events taking place, Carolyn requests noted Paranormal investigators Ed ( Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine Warren (Vera Farminga) to look into the case. What surfaces will make you think twice before being intrigued by old and abandoned mysterious houses, antiques and musical toys.

Most horror films claim to be 'based on real life incidents'. While they rarely live up to the hype around them, The Conjuring is an exception. The atmosphere build-up begins even before the film does, as a disclaimer is flashed before the opening credits, warning you that you might seek psychological help after watching the movie. The strategy works, as the film can scare the living daylights out of you. While we didn't feel the need to undergo any counselling, unsettling it certainly was.

With haunted houses, creepy cellars, possessed dolls, cold and lonely nights, paranormal occurrences and exorcism, concept-wise, The Conjuring is not earth-shatteringly 'different'. While the setting and story are familiar, it's the no-nonsense execution that makes the difference.

Much to our satisfaction, filmmaker James Wan's (Saw, Insidious) direction defies the done-to-death horror movie cliches that have so far caused most people to disregard the genre. There are no cheap thrills, no over-the-top sound effects, no annoying camera angles (found footage style), overindulgence in gore or visual grossness and no aping horror's cult classic The Exorcist.

Wan does not succumb to sensationalising the story either. It's the subtle and steady build-up of suspense and psychological tension, coupled with sudden spine-chilling scares and dramatic silences that make you go numb with fear. Above all, other than demons, evil spirits, ghosts and darkness, the film has a soul, where you feel for the characters. Not many horror films manage to achieve this.

Performances are understated, yet effective. Vera Farminga plays psychic Lorraine Warren with utmost conviction. Lily Taylor's performance as the vulnerable mother is noteworthy. James Wan pulls all the right strings to create an atmosphere so tense and unnerving that if evil spirits feed on your fear, so does the film.

Note: You may not like the film if you find psychological horror films disturbing.

R.I.P.D. Reviews

Cast: Jeff Bridges, Ryan Reynolds, Kevin Bacon, Mary-Louise Parker
Direction: 
Robert Schwentke

Story : A Boston cop is shot dead, only to have his spirit join the ranks of a police force comprising the deceased. Their job? To capture ghouls who refuse to leave Earth.

Review : About half an hour into R.I.P.D, its ingredients become apparent: Take one part Ghostbusters, throw in a helping of Men In Black, some Van Helsing, add a buddy-cop garnish and what you get is gloop instead of stew.

Nick (Reynolds) and his cop partner Hayes (Bacon) find themselves in a shootout in a tough part of town. Bad cop Hayes fills Nick full of hot lead, and the latter is sucked into a vortex in the sky (not quite a stairway to heaven, this!) to land up in the office of Proctor (Parker) who helms the Rest in Peace Department.

She makes him an offer, telling Nick that their job of capturing spirits is critical because too many of them loitering around on Earth can cause some kind of cosmic imbalance that can prove cataclysmic for humankind. The briefing done, Nick is introduced to his new partner, Roy (Bridges) who grudgingly accepts him. Along the way, they learn about a plot that could lead to Earth's destruction.

There are some fun bits - when the two walk amongst the living, they are visible to humans as an 'avatar'. Roy appears to people as a hot blonde and Nick, an old Oriental dude. An incongruous pairing from which more gags could easily have been extracted.

Ryan's expressions oscillate between angry, incredulous and gobsmacked; it's as if he's wondering what the hell he's doing in such an inert, roughly-scripted movie. Bridges, resembling a gun-slinging Colonel Sanders with a bigger moustache, is his gruff, comic self. His gags save the movie from utter dullsville. On the whole, despite some zippy camera work and the occasional time-slice photography, it's surprising how plain this big budget ($130 million) film looks. By and large, grossly underwhelming for a movie that could have delivered so much more.

Thursday, 1 August 2013

The Great Gatsby – Review

The Great Gatsby

F Scott Fitzgerald did more for Hollywood than it has done for him. After his first stint in California he wrote the pitiless story, "Crazy Sunday", about an alcoholic screenwriter. In the late 30s came the series of insightful comic tales about the ageing movie hack Pat Hobby, and finally The Last Tycoon, the best, least patronising of novels about the movie industry, all the more intriguing for being unfinished. In return, Hollywood paid him handsomely for a while but treated him without respect and made mediocre movies of his books.

So what of this 3D fourth screen version of The Great Gatsby? It is, you might say, a story of three eggs. The mysterious central character is the self-made Jay Gatsby, a millionaire bootlegger who in the summer of 1922 lives at West Egg, the township outside Manhattan on Long Island Sound where the nouveaux riches have built their mansions. Across the bay at East Egg are the grand houses of the old-money people, among them the rich, brutal, Ivy League philistine Tom Buchanan, husband of the southern belle Daisy, whom Gatsby courted as an officer and temporary gentleman in the first world war. After losing her to Buchanan because he was penniless, he now seeks to recapture her. The third egg is Baz Luhrmann's curate's egg of a film, good and bad in parts, but mainly a misconceived venture. Luhrmann is a cheerful vulgarian and his movie suggestive of Proust directed by Michael Winner.

The film's principal figure is not Gatsby but Nick Carraway, a classic unreliable narrator, aged 30 in that summer of 1922, a midwesterner educated at Yale alongside Tom Buchanan and Daisy's second cousin. Nick has taken a cottage next door to Gatsby's mansion while he attempts to establish himself as a stockbroker, and Gatsby uses him as a way of re-engaging with Daisy. Everything we know is mediated by Carraway, and Luhrmann and his co-writer Craig Pearce have had the dubious idea of having Carraway tell the story from a sanatorium as a form of therapy on the advice of a psychiatrist.

He's being treated for alcoholism as Fitzgerald was to be, and significantly the date is 29 December 1929. The roaring 20s and the jazz age are over, Wall Street has crashed, and the story is being presented not as the social diagnosis and prophecy that TS Eliot took it to be in 1925 but as history and judgment. (The 1949 film did something similar by having Carraway and the cynically amoral socialite Jordan Baker look back to the 20s from beside Gatsby's grave.) Words float in the air around the befuddled Nick as he works on his book, and lines from the novel are actually written on the camera lens.

If this wasn't bad enough, Tobey Maguire is miscast or misdirected, playing Nick as gauche, uncomfortable, unsophisticated, childlike – less an involved observer than an intruder. This is a film that tramples on Fitzgerald's exquisite prose, turning the oblique into the crude, the suggestively symbolic into the declaratively monumental, the abstract into the flatly real. It's a pared-down novel where the use of "unrestfully" instead of "restlessly" is important, and where Carraway can speak of Jordan "changing the subject with an urban distaste for the concrete".

Luhrmann has more success with Gatsby, who lurks around the edges the way Harry Lime does in The Third Man, before making his sudden appearance at one of his parties. And Leonardo DiCaprio has some of the fresh, furtive charm of the trainee confidence man trying on suave man-of-the-world roles but regularly revealing the inner decency that, despite his criminal activities, transcends this squalid world of the destructive, thoughtless rich. This is what makes Nick recognise Gatsby as the true upholder of the elusive American Dream and worthy of the final and only tribute he addresses to him: "They're a rotten crowd. You're worth the whole damn bunch put together." Carey Mulligan's sad, weak, characterless Daisy is also fairly successful, more affecting I think (and with a subtler touch of the south) than Mia Farrow in Jack Clayton's otherwise better-judged 1974 Gatsby.

But if Clayton's film was a little too restrained and sensitive, it is the sheer size, overstatement and noise, both visually and aurally, that sinks Luhrmann's picture. An unpleasant drunken gathering in New York at the cramped flat of Tom Buchanan's mistress becomes a lurid orgy, while the principal party at Gatsby's mansion (which seems inspired by the fairytale palace that is Disney's current logo) is, as Nick tells us, a conflation of several such bootleg bacchanals. But it's less something Coppola (who scripted Clayton's film) or Visconti would have contrived than a demented, ludicrously over-choreographed version of the "Beautiful Girls" montage from Stanley Donen's Singin' in the Rain. Equally absurd is the cabaret provided by a chorus of black dancers in a speakeasy behind a corner drugstore, a show worthy of Josephine Baker at the Folies Bergère in 1920s Paris. It's where Nick meets Wolfsheim, Gatsby's middle-aged partner in crime. Wolfsheim, incidentally, has been turned from a Jew into an Indian (played by Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan), a foolish change made presumably to fend off the charge of antisemitism.

Beside these larger blunders of taste and scale, such matters as Nick reading Ulysses while apparently still at Yale and Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue being performed at a Gatsby gathering two years before it was written seem unimportant. But there is one scene that works well, and that's the crucial confrontation between Tom Buchanan and Gatsby in front of Nick, Daisy and Jordan in a suite at the Plaza hotel one hot afternoon. There is tension and depth here. Would that Luhrmann had included the funeral and the meeting between Nick and Gatsby's elderly, working-class father from the book's final chapter.

Tuesday, 30 July 2013

The Iceman : Reviews

The Iceman
                  Cast : Michael Shannon, Winona Ryder,
                            Ray Liotta, Chris Evans

 
Direction : Ariel  Vromen
Story : Can you ever escape who you really are? The film is a crime biopic on hitman Richard Kuklinski, who adored his family, but didn't regret killing over 100 people, for money, out of anger or just to cover up his own crimes!

Movie Review : The film gives a disturbing account of Kuklinski's life from being a porn distributor to becoming one of the most diabolical contract killers in American history. Since he kept his family in the dark, they continued to live off his blood money until he got arrested in 1986 in an undercover operation. How he led a double life all those years - by playing a doting family man and a cold-blooded killer - is what forms the story.

The Iceman is grim, dark and gritty. A certain sense of paranoia engulfs the proceedings, which helps build the psychological tension. Vromen manages to capture the period setting required. The background score is unsettling and does complete justice to the film's creepy theme. Michael Shannon is outstanding as the devilishly smooth deadpan psychopath, as passionate about the wellbeing of his family as about staring at his victims before he brutally murdered them. He gives a solid performance as the soulless, unsmiling man who solely cared for his family and had no qualms about confessing he felt that way, either.

Shannon arrests your attention and sends shivers down your spine with his impeccable portrayal, especially in scenes where he struggles to hide his inner monster from his family. However, the film becomes sluggish after a while as the script relies heavily on Shannon's acting. The story runs out of steam as you sit through a series of generic mafia wars and killings. The scenes start looking repetitive and events monotonous. Fortunately, it all culminates in a gripping climax.

Winona Ryder as Kuklinski's wife and Ray Liotta are effective. Chris Evans and James Franco make special appearances, making you wonder why they did so! The film works as a documentary.

However, it fails to dramatise the character in order to evoke an audience reaction, which is what is usually expected from crime thrillers.

Pacific Rim : Reviews

Pacific Rim
Cast:Burn Gorman, Charlie Day, Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba, Rinko Kikuchi, Ron Perlman 
Director: Guillermo del Toro

Viewed from one angle - from below, say, as you cower before the Imax screen, your 3-D glasses digging into the bridge of your nose, condensation from your Diet Coke dripping onto your leg - Pacific Rim looks a lot like other movies of its type. Dinosaurish creatures as big as skyscrapers do battle with equally gigantic robots on land and sea, pulverizing familiar cities and churning up geysers of spume. Human characters (some of whom are actually inside the giant robots) bark out catchphrases, spout fake science and express noble sentiments as they fight to save the planet. More than two hours of your life elapse before they do.

So consider yourself warned. If you walk in expecting subtlety, or even novelty, you may find yourself more tormented than entertained. But Pacific Rim is also a reminder - either just in time or much too late - that this kind of movie can and should be fun. Some of those catchphrases are mildly clever. The lab coat mumbo-jumbo is amusing. The noble sentiments touch sweet chords. And who does not delight in seeing a robot punch a dinosaur every now and then - or pretty much constantly for two hours?

The director, Guillermo del Toro (who wrote the script with Travis Beacham), is an unabashed genre enthusiast and a feverish inventor of fantastical worlds, enchanted by the visual and symbolic power of monsters and intoxicated by his own imagination. It is true that he has employed that imagination to more memorable effect in other movies, notably the wonderful Hellboy pictures and the shattering Spanish Civil War horror-allegories Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone. Admirers of those films may find this one crude and overscale by comparison. Still, Pacific Rim, with its carefree blend of silliness and solemnity, is clearly the product of an ingenious and playful pop sensibility.

“But Gipsy is analog!” This exclamation, though not immediately intelligible out of context (or in it, for that matter), is in some ways the key to the movie. A bit of explanation is in order, though I’m afraid it will not be as exhaustive or as breathless as the voice-over narration that begins the movie or the expository dialogue that pops up throughout. Gipsy is a Jaeger, one of the enormous metal bipeds built to fight off the Kaiju, horrible creatures who have popped up through the bottom of the Pacific Ocean via a portal to their native dimension.

Still with me? The Kaiju are, as alien invaders tend to be, quite hostile. They are also diabolically clever, evolving quickly in response to military attempts to defeat them. After a long war of attrition (dramatized in a precredit chunk that is almost a movie in itself), only a handful of Jaegers remain, concentrated in Hong Kong for a last stand against the enemy. Commanded by the wondrously named Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba), the Jaeger pilots - who must work in pairs assisted by technology that links their brains - are a motley global crew. Our attention is particularly focused on Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam) and Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi), who seem to have especially traumatic experiences with Kaiju in their pasts.

There is also an Australian father-son team (Max Martini and Rob Kazinsky) - Raleigh and the son, who are hard to tell apart, trade a few punches at one point - and a duo of manic, mismatched scientists (Charlie Day and Burn Gorman) for comic relief. Hellboy himself (that is, Ron Perlman) shows up as a local underworld figure, doing more for the film’s attitude than for its plot. Wearing dark glasses and metal-toed shoes and spouting Runyonesque gangster gibberish, he reminds you that Pacific Rim is, more than anything else, a cartoon.

Which brings me back to the analog identity of Gipsy, which is able to keep fighting when some bad Kaiju mojo shuts down the fancy digital Jaeger. Pacific Rim is loaded with computer-generated imagery, but its soul is proudly mechanical. Its off-kilter sense of proportion harks back to the inspired models and stop-motion techniques of the late special-effects maestro Ray Harryhausen. Even in 3-D (which does not add much of interest), the images are composed of bright tones and blocky shapes, like old comic-book panels. And this future, for all the talk of “neural drift” and dimensional wormholes, is a world of tubes and rivets and pistons. Jules Verne and HG Wells would appreciate it.

The pleasures of Pacific Rim, in other words, are somewhat nostalgic, and maybe also regressive. This in itself is hardly unusual: Most of the movies released by major studios from May to September cater to the childish impulses of the audience. But they also often aspire to be more than juvenile, puffing themselves up with money and fuzzy, heavy themes. Sometimes they succeed and find a measure of real grandeur. This summer, though, has so far largely been a parade of joyless bombast. In these circumstances del Toro’s exuberant nonsense comes as a relief.

PRODUCTION NOTES: PACIFIC RIM

Directed by Guillermo del Toro; written by del Toro and Travis Beacham; director of photography, Guillermo Navarro; edited by Peter Amundson and John Gilroy; music by Ramin Djawadi; production design by Andrew Neskoromny and Carol Spier; costumes by Kate Hawley; visual effects supervisors, John Knoll and James E. Price; produced by del Toro, Thomas Tull, Jon Jashni and Mary Parent; released by Warner Brothers Pictures and Legendary Pictures. Running time: 2 hours, 11 minutes. With: Charlie Hunnam (Raleigh Becket), Idris Elba (Stacker Pentecost), Rinko Kikuchi (Mako Mori), Charlie Day (Dr. Newton Geiszler), Rob Kazinsky Chuck Hansen), Max Martini Herc Hansen), Ron Perlman (Hannibal Chau), Clifton Collins Jr. (Ops Tendo Choi) and Burn Gorman (Gottlieb). Pacific Rim is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). The usual wanton, carefully edited slaughter of untold millions, and a lot of Kaiju blood.

Monday, 29 July 2013

The Wolverine : Review

The Wolverine

Loosely based—very loosely based—on the early story arc from Chris Claremont and Frank Miller’s eponymous comic, The Wolverine had several strong advantages going for it before 20th Century FOX settled on a director: one of Marvel’s most popular and enduring mutants, the return of Hugh Jackman for a sixth time in a role he owns, and one of the richer story arcs tied to the character’s many decades of adventures from the page panels. (Plus, it couldn’t possibly be worse than X-Men Origins: Wolverine.) As much as director James Mangold’s cinematic interpretation had going for it prior to pre-production, it’s a pity it only seldom succeeds—largely due to the decisions made way back before Darren Aronofsky was attached to helm. 

Taking place some number of years after the fallout from the events of 2006’s bald-faced lie of a movie title X-Men: The Last Stand, audiences find Logan (Jackman) in self-imposed exile, guilt-stricken from the death of Jean Grey (Famke Janssen, haunting and cock-teasing him in his dreams). He’s only pulled back into civilization due to his need to avenge the death of a Pleistocene-sized bear, illegally killed by that most dastardly of Hollywood stock character—the Mean Redneck. (Though, honestly, given how bad the ursine CGI was, its death probably qualified as a mercy killing.) Arriving in time to help the invincible superhero beat up a bar full of hapless plaid-clads is mysterious Japanese fighter/emissary Yukio (Ria Fukushima). Her employer, Yashida (Hal Yamanouchi), happens to be a very powerful CEO, whom Logan rescued from the atomic blast in Hiroshima 60-odd years ago. Yashida is nearing the end of his days and insists on paying his life’s debt to Logan—by relieving the superhero of his immortality. 

Though not part of the original comic, it’s nevertheless an intriguing element to explore with the character—a tragic Wagner-esque caveat to the power that makes him otherwise fearless. Between this classic theme and the dependable fish-out-of-water tale (the Westerner in Japan), there’s an adamantium-coated skeleton of a script here, but it’s so fitfully delivered that it’s difficult to stay interested between the Yakuza-dicing set pieces. Despite a scant number of intimate moments where the protagonist is wearing his shirt, The Wolverine, even at 126 minutes, feels rushed. It’s as though Mangold himself became exhausted knowing he had to reach the Big Final Action Sequence (BFAS). (If this particular 10 minutes of BFAS feels eye-rollingly familiar, it’s because the audience has already seen it in virtually every other superhero film of the last five years.) 

But beyond the aforementioned advantages this film enjoyed at the outset, Mangold deserves credit for exercising some restraint within a shared universe populated with over 50 years of established science fiction and magic. The fan-servicing cameos are kept to a bare minimum, and his lens never strays far from Jackman. This particular compliment might read as faint praise, but compared to the mutant-a-thon of the last film, it’s downright refreshing: Gavin Hood’s supposedly Logan-centric film tossed wave after wave of distraction in the form of Sabretooth, Silver Fox, Maverick, Deadpool, Wraith, Gambit, Cyclops, the Blob, etc.—as well as an additional truckload on non-superpowered cast members—making its title feel at times like the most Wolverine-flavored aspect of the entire affair. 

And although it barely merits mention at this point, given his now half-dozen (with another underway!) appearances as Wolverine, Jackman again proves why there’s no passing the baton to another actor while he’s still willing and able to play the role. As far as comic book film adaptations go, only Robert Downey Jr. has trumped Jackman for effective interpretation of a heroic role. Whereas Downey Jr. transformed Tony Stark from a somber, morose alcoholic to a breezy, sarcastic, high-functioning alcoholic, Jackman’s Logan has come a long way from rage-filled feral scrapper to a man who wears a scowl as a mask to hide centuries of suffering. In both cases, it’s difficult to argue the makeover doesn’t make for a better silver screen incarnation. 

As far as the other cast, the performances service the proceedings well—particularly Fukushima as the Comic Con Booth Babe siren, who goes all-in on the high-flying action. And, hell—go ahead and give Mangold and the studio another point for actually casting primarily Japanese actors in a film set mainly in Japan. Taken as a whole, The Wolverine is nearly as hit-and-miss as the rest of Mangold’s filmography: it ain’t Copland or his first-rate remake of 3:10 to Yuma, but nor is it Knight and Day or Kate & Leopold. However, given the enviable headstart this movie had at its greenlight, viewers may be disappointed they couldn’t do better than two steps forward, one step back.