Month: May 2015

Tommy Egan (Ethan Hawke) suffers from a new kind of culture shock. An F-16 military pilot with six Iraqi tours under his belt, he now finds himself inside a claustrophobic trailer that serves as a drone command center near Las Vegas. Major Egan, surrounded by newcomers recruited because they “were a bunch of gamers,” has also become an increasingly rate breed of specialist–one with actual combat experience. The triggerman for numerous drone strikes in Afghanistan and Yemen, he pines to get back in the cockpit of an jet airplane–a place where the fight is at least fair. In a plane he felt an oddly intoxicating fear. Here he feels revulsion and self-loathing.

Egan’s maintains a steely, reliable demeanor that exists in his work sphere only. Once he gets behind the wheel of his vintage Mustang and drives home to his wife (January Jones) and kids, his fragility begins to emerge in between the fissures of a complacent family life. Good Kill veers between revealing scenes of what drone warfare actually looks like close up and the effects such a dehumanized, vile activity has on a “good soldier.” It mostly succeeds, although its family scenes are less convincing.

Practical arguments defending the practice of “prosecuting” specific targets despite the very real constant danger of collateral damage, are advanced by Egan’s sidekicks, and especially by his commanding officer Colonel Jack Johns (a very good Bruce Greenwood). Taking the opposite position is new-girl-on-the-block Airman Vera Suarez (Zoe Kravitz) who is Egan’s assistant. Yet she’s not the only one who squawks when CIA (“Christians In Action,” jibes Colonel Johns) superiors seem to be going too far. Many in the team express regret that the CIA has changed the requirements for a kill from a specific target to a “pattern of behavior.” This expansion’s wider scope endangers even more innocent civilians.

It’s hard for a viewer to come out of Good Kill with an unenriched viewpoint on drones. Director Andrew Niccol introduces meaningful nuance on the subject. War is still hell, only hell has suddenly changed its dimensions. People required to work with drones are penting up an enormous amount of negative energy. In Good Kill, it’s just a matter of time before Egan unravels–the only question is how. Niccol has crafted a credible look at a moral quagmire. He gets a little greedy with the film’s ending where he rather ceremoniously tries to do too much but it’s a fairly minor complaint. Hawke, on a roll as an actor lately, takes possession of his character, offering a victim worthy of empathy and, however ironically, valor.

From Xbox to Armageddon….3.5 (out of 5) stars

Tomorrowland comes off like an expanded Super Bowl TV advertisement: cocksure of itself and sure to dazzle but ultimately a hollow, superficial gewgaw. Director Brad Bird (the excellent Ratatouille and The Incredibles) even has a wonderful young actress (Raffey Cassidy) and two venerable pros (George Clooney and Hugh Laurie) going for him, but the film’s fatal flaw is it fails to provide an inspiring vision of the future. It resurrects Dale Carnegie’s The Power of Positive Thinking, and (shudder) not a little Ayn Rand in declaring a shrill diatribe against all the disabling negativity of our current society. Look how humanity holds back this utopian future by believing it has to be this grim! How self-defeating!

What future? Here the wonders of this ideal society only appear in a few squishy scenes of ubiquitous whirring vehicles in the air and well-groomed people walking around what seems like a pretty shopping mall. All the cranky, shrill sermonizing in the film’s closing sections seems like a poor substitute for a coherent story and deeper insight into its characters. Unlike the riveting Remy in Ratatouille, his equivalent here is Casey Newton (Britt Robertson) but she ultimately fails to inspire. We’re told over and over how special she is but Bird barely shows us why she is singled out.

I’ll refrain from revealing much in the way of spoilers, but what we have here is a kid, Frank Walker (Thomas Robinson), takes a bus to the 1964 World’s Fair, proudly lugging along his bulky invention: a jet pack that almost works. Here he encounters a gruff and dismissive David Nix (Laurie) and also an encouraging, sharp-as-a-tack young whippersnapper, Athena (Cassidy), who provides him with a key that unlocks the treasures of either an intoxicating (to Frank anyway) vision of the future or a parallel universe.

Then Tomorrowland jumps to Casey, a precocious and daring teen who, despondent her NASA engineer Dad (Tim McGraw) will soon be out of work once the Cape Canaveral launch site is disbanded, takes matters into her own hands. She also feels scientific frontiers should be continuously explored. Athena’s key reappears and we’re on our way to the four main characters staging not-so-jolly reunion after reunion, complete with robot bad-guys and random acts of violence.

Is any of it fun? Yeah, some of it, for sure. However, you’ll want to forget as soon as possible the creepiness of Clooney’s scenes with Cassidy. Walt Disney himself just might be rolling over in his grave over those.

Jumbledland…2.5 stars (out of 5)

With his third film released in this country, Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi continues his growth in stature and deserves to be included among the very best international auteurs. The brilliantly absorbing About Elly was filmed two years before Farhadi’s Oscar-winning gem A Separation (2011) and withheld from domestic distribution until now. Like A Separation and The Past (2013), About Elly also acutely deals with tough ethical choices within the confines of social codes of behavior, and the whole idea of traditionalism versus modernity in a rapidly changing society. It’s also one hell of a suspense film with all around terrific acting.

A group of middle-class urban couples and their young children take off on holiday to a villa on the Caspian Sea. One of the wives, Sepideh (an excellent Golshifteh Farahani), implores her child’s kindergarten teacher, Elly (Taraneh Alidoosti) to come along. Elly may be less progressive than the couples, who spontaneously dance, break out into song, and play a savvy game of charades. Also along is a recently divorced single male friend of the group. Ahmad (Shahab Hosseini) is on holiday from Germany, where he’d gone to live with his ex-bride. The group makes little effort to downplay their collective wish to match up the two young singles.

Elly seems mysterious and she keeps insisting she can only stay one night. Sepideh also seems one to hold onto secrets. She fails to tell the group she hasn’t actually rented their villa for the entire weekend. Still gleeful, they move to a shabbier place without windows or beds. The ever present sea, remarkably captured by cinematographer Hussein Jafarian seems to overrule any possible despondency. It hardly seems like a usually intense Farhadi film since any possible ominous undertone beneath the group’s frolicking is barely present.

Farhadi then brings about a breathtaking tone shift. The less known about the events that transpire the better. The transformation of the characters from carefree to inculpating, from innocent to guilt-ridden, is nothing less than masterful filmmaking. Ordinary events immediately gain an extraordinary nature. Faced with no easy decisions, the couples portray both individual identity crises and a more tradition-bound group dynamic. As if that weren’t enough, an underlying political symbolism presents itself. One where the past and the emerging present are perhaps irreconcilable foes.

Down By The Ocean (All Is Not As It Seems)….5 (out of 5) stars

Never at a loss for finding ways to disappoint us, Hot Pursuit is utterly devoid of a basis in anything resembling reality. Unfortunately, a comedy depends of plausibility every bit as much as a drama. Thus, this new Reese Witherspoon/Sophia Vergara female buddy flick becomes fatally unfunny almost as soon as it begins.

Officer Cooper (Witherspoon) or “My Little Pony,” “the pencil-top gnome,” or “the tiny little weird robot” as Daniella Rivera (Vergara) will come to call her, is assigned to escort the blustery Rivera, wife of a mob associate, to testify against her husband’s boss. The police protection she provides is every bit by the book since Cooper spends much of her screen time monotonously reciting various numerical police codes.

Then there’s the running gag that every time the two women run into a TV or radio report about themselves, the on-air reporters list Cooper’s height as progressively shorter and Rivera’s age as increasingly higher. It was almost funny the first time but director Anne Fletcher runs the joke into the ground. Similar to the police codes bit, just about everything goes on too long or crash lands into a cliche. Fast-talking Cooper becomes a veritable cartoonish motor-mouth once Rivera’s convertible blows up, sending the many kilos of cocaine hidden in the car into the air and into Cooper’s lungs.

Unfunny comedies are rampant these days but repellant ones are a rarer breed. Something about two usually fine actresses slogging through material this lame thwarts even the virtually automatic laughs Vergara can eke out of almost any role with her eyes closed. It’s not even as if Witherspoon and Vergara wrangled a paycheck at the expense of compensating for the lack of quality mature women’s roles theses days. They both executive produced so they have themselves to blame.

Odd Couple Sputters While Audience Cringes….1 (out of 5) stars

Trying to come off as simultaneously cynical and warm-and-fuzzy, D-Train succeeds somewhat tantamount to a flat tire. Starting with an insipid premise, and scaling new heights in screenplay vapidness, the new Jack Black vehicle possesses a jittery, shifting point of view and a horrid plausibility quotient. Its main character, Dan Landsman (Black), part schizoid and part sociopath, is a low self esteem schlub who tries to make up for being a high school nobody by taking the reins as the chairman of the 20th Class Reunion Committee. It’s an admittedly vainglorious job title yet Dan seems to have somehow seized the position rather than have gotten elected to it. After all, he’s so unpopular the rest of the committee avoid inviting him for post-meeting drinks. His idea of witty banter is miraculously even dumber than Will Farrell’s in Get Hard.

Even dumber is Dan’s boss Bill Shurmur (Jeffrey Tambor), who is somehow duped by Black into thinking a huge business deal is in the works in Los Angeles. The running gag is Bill is a total Luddite regarding online technology. First time directors Jarrad Paul and Andrew Mogel stretch this already flimsy idea into basically making Bill a total idiot. You see, Dan needs to go to L. A. to recruit the high school cool guy, Oliver Lawless (James Marsden) for the reunion and he needs to get there without his wife knowing he’s a lunkhead who would take a mission of that sort so seriously. So he lies to his boss about a fictitious deal. Only Bill decides to come along on the trip, too. All of which is some strange shit since he also decides to do absolutely no due diligence whatsoever on the impending deal. If you’re starting to get the idea that this film resembles a queasy train wreck, you’re not far off.

Black, who fairly recently has done some of his very best work (Richard Linklater’s excellent Bernie), has a yeoman’s job to attempt to keep the screenplay from showing its true colors. He fails as miserably as the rest of this production. And now for the SPOILER:

Dan, the pathetic victim of much high school wrath, receives revenge of sorts when he not only convinces Lawless–now an L.A. actor–to hang out with him but also to attend the reunion. He also gets swept into a sexual alliance with Lawless, and it’s from here on the film quickly goes off the rails. Lawless also impersonates the CEO from the fictitious deal, too, so the business deal scam suddenly preposterously takes on a new existence mainly as a backdrop for Dan and Oliver’s bickering. Days go by and Bill thinks the deal is still on. Ha ha.

Deciding to go with the least honest denouement wins the film no further favors. It goes from almost thoughtful edgy to Disney-esque cliche in no time flat. Dan is, in turn, wimpy love struck, vindictive jilted lover, and, finally, mature, lesson-learned wise man–presto! The film’s title is also a quandary. For lack of a better, it may have something to do with Dan’s 14-year-old son’s overcoming his trepidation about taking part in a threesome. Or it may not. For that matter, D-Train may just suck. Or it may suck on multiple levels priming itself for year-end Ten Worst Lists ….I’m thinking the latter.

Jack Black wastes his time (and ours) …. 1 star (out of 5)

“What will happen to me if I fail your test? Do you think I might be switched off?” asks the lovely and stone-serious android Ava. Her examiner Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), startled by her comment, need not look any further in answering his own question of whether Ava possesses a self-awareness, and perhaps, a consciousness. To the delight of the viewer, the apparent answer to Caleb’s question spawns a deeper level of intriguing puzzlement . What are Ava’s intentions and motives beyond self-preservation?

The forceful catalyst for Caleb’s search for truth is his ubiquitous (through surveillance) boss and mentor, Nathan. Director Alex Garland’s excellent screenplay teases with the additional dilemma of whether Nathan is actually an objective scientist intent on discovery or a genius gone mad or a little bit of both.

Oscar Isaac, in a flat-out fabulous performance, plays Nathan with an edgy, jaded charisma. Nathan always seems a step or two ahead of Caleb. From the outset, he does not appear to be playing this experiment by the book. The hard-drinking, self-assured Nathan is clearly intent on giving Caleb a maze of sorts to figure out. The puzzle at hand will also include Nathan as more than a dispassionate observer. Yet figuring him out is a relatively easy for Caleb next to figuring out Ava. Her stark advances contain an eerie ambivalence. Alicia Vikander, trained as a ballet dancer, brings a stunning screen presence as Ava. She’s an actress to definitely keep an eye on.

Ex Machina is a thinker’s paradise next to most films on the subject of artificial intelligence. Screenwriter and novelist Garland, in his first film directing, presents an amazing visual style and a patient, deliberate sense of pace. The film’s impactful twists are arrived at organically, with a heavy dose of plausibility.

Ex Machina never loses its footing in favoring the cerebral over the sensational. In many ways an anti-action film, it takes its time presenting its case for the questions at hand. Image by image it nails its commentary yet adroitly avoids sounding too academic. With a first film this good, Garland stakes out a place in imaginative cinema that should keep stimulating for a long time.

An Edgy Provocative Classic .. 4.5 (out of 5) stars

Complaining about Avengers: The Age of Ultron may be as futile as complaining about the weather, but next to the first film in the series, the new installment is a dull cloudy day compared to its relatively sunny predecessor. Basically a non-aficionado who merely dabbles in the Marvel world, I identified with the deer-in-the-headlight gaze of the film’s two new rather indistinct characters, the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) and Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who often seem lost. Hankering for a kick-in-the-pants approach similar to the refreshing Guardians of the Galaxy, I was treated instead to a $250 million banging and whirring replete with an overly dense plot and copious artificial intelligence gobbledygook (For the real thing in A. I., rush out to see the excellent Ex Machina).

Sadly, it’s most interesting character, Vision (an excellent Paul Bettany) doesn’t appear until three-quarters of the way in, and despite the film’s 141-minute length, his screen time is curtailed. Instead, director Josh Whedon makes sure his central characters get plenty of screen time: Captain America, Thor, The Incredible Hulk, the. Black Widow, Hawkeye. The all-star cast all do a credible job of portraying their comic book counterparts. What’s missing is the film has little soul. It almost seems like a parody of a clunky, stiff, overly serious superhero film.

While the witty bantering from the first Avengers is still present, with the exception of the steadily reliable Robert Downey as Tony Stark/Ironman, the quips often seem forced. It’s somewhat moving when the Black Widow Natasha (Scarlett Johannson) and Hulk Bruce Banner (Mark Rufalo) stake out an oddly unrequited romantic thing. Natasha’s matter-of-fact mix of seduction and tender patience with Banner’s reluctance possesses a plausible haltering rhythm. Yet even here the half-baked, inert tone of their conversations suggests Whedon’s real goal is sacrificing what might have been any real substance in their relationship for the laying of the groundwork for a sequel.

And now for the obligatory, “But if you’re a Marvel freak, go ahead and see this and knock yourself out.” You may even find Ultron (the voice of James Spader) a fascinating character. His ability to replicate himself insures he hangs around awhile despite the dire danger he presents to the human race. All these superheroes are indestructible, right? Maybe, but all the characters in the Marvel Encyclopedia are not as omnipotent as The Marvel Franchise itself. With the Avengers: Age of Ultron the proceedings have become downright labyrinthine, and not a little patronizing.

Bring The Red Bull….2.5 (out of 5) stars