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Movie Curiosities: Nightcrawler
November 5, 2014 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
My reaction going into this one was very simple: “What the hell is Nightcrawler?”
The title told me absolutely nothing. The poster told me absolutely nothing. The trailer told me absolutely nothing. Sure, I could tell that it was a vehicle for Jake Gyllenhaal (who produces as well as stars), but again, that told me absolutely nothing.
My expectations were at rock bottom until the movie actually came out to rave reviews. And to my surprise, I must agree that it is in fact very good.
Nightcrawler tells the story of Louis Bloom, played by Gyllenhaal. We first meet Louis cutting chain link wire off a fence in a Los Angeles railyard. When Louis is approached by some rent-a-cop security guard, Louis beats the guy up and steals his watch. Louis then takes his stolen chain link wire — and other materials! — to a construction manager, who then buys the scrap for below market price. And then Louis has the balls to ask this manager for a job. Even if it’s an unpaid internship. Quoth the manager: “I’m not hiring a fucking thief.”
That, in a nutshell, is everything you need to know about this character.
Louis is a completely immoral sociopath. He’s so laser-focused on his plans and his wants that absolutely nothing else registers. The guy acts entirely on ambition, without the least bit of regard for legality, morality, ethics, integrity, compassion for others, or even common sense. If Louis has any thought for the consequences of his actions, how others might be affected, or what objections anyone else could possibly have, he doesn’t seem to care. Yet Louis is so deceptively clever that he somehow manages to get his way no matter how many people get pissed off about it.
One of the many reasons why Louis rubs so many people the wrong way is because so much of his dialogue is comprised of motivational platitudes about success and determination. It’s like corporate rhetoric is his native tongue. Moreover, he recites them in a creepy and heightened way that seems inherently untrustworthy, like everything about him is fake. The guy never even blinks, for God’s sake. So either Louis doesn’t really believe a word he’s saying or he’s a man unfamiliar with how people normally talk.
There’s a point in the movie when one character tells Louis that he just doesn’t understand people. Louis counters, suggesting that maybe he just doesn’t like people. That possibility has some terrifying implications, given how the movie unfolds.
Early in the movie, Louis stumbles onto a car crash. The accident is quickly visited by a couple of “stringers,” also known as “nightcrawlers” (one of whom is a veteran played by Bill Paxton). These are the people who swoop in to get video footage for news broadcasts while all the union cameramen are asleep. If they can get there before the police arrive and cordon off the crime scene, even better. Also of note is that these cameramen are freelancers, selling their footage to whichever channel pays highest. Perhaps most importantly, stringers tend to follow violent crimes, since those can easily be found by way of a police scanner. Plus, gory images of violent crimes tend to be good for ratings, so news networks will pay through the nose for that stuff.
If you’ve been paying attention, you should already have guessed that a career of chasing after violent crimes and capturing them on tape for TV broadcast meshes very nicely with Louis’ brand of unhinged crazy. He’s making money off the blood and suffering of others, breaking all sorts of laws and rules to get the absolute perfect shot, making enemies everywhere he goes, and he never even begins to give the smallest of fucks. This begs the question of just how far he’ll go, sinking to unfathomable depths even as he climbs up the ladder. Yes, that’s a mixed metaphor, but you get my point.
Then there’s Nina Romina, played by Rene Russo. She’s a news director working for the lowest-rated local news station in LA. Her stance on the news is very clear: If the network is legally capable of broadcasting a story that gets people riled up and tuning in, she’ll do it. Naturally, her amoral views blend nicely with Louis’ immoral methods, so Louis agrees to a “first look” deal with Nina. The catch, of course, is that Nina may not realize exactly what she’s dealing with. This leads the both of them to get very confrontational with each other regarding what they want and how much leverage they have.
(Side note: It may be of interest to know that Rene Russo is married to Dan Gilroy, the writer who makes his directorial debut with this picture. The film was also co-produced by older brother Tony Gilroy and edited by fraternal twin brother John Gilroy. Oh, and niece Carolyn Gilroy appears in a cameo role. Quite the family affair, no?)
Getting back to Louis, there’s no denying that he’s an absolutely despicable protagonist. Yet that’s played in such a genius way that it works in the movie’s favor. After all, the film is about our right to privacy and how our personal tragedies can be used for the entertainment and profit of others. More importantly, it’s about how the news tends to inflate and exaggerate events, less concerned with informing and educating than getting viewers energized over a blood-chilling storyline. That message gets clearer and the point gets sharper as Louis and Nina sink deeper into depravity. In fact, there are times when the message is pushed to the point of caricature and the dialogue becomes ridiculously blunt, but those moments are just brief enough that I’m willing to let it slide. And anyway, it’s still interesting to watch all the same.
What’s more, the film offers quite a few supporting characters to provide a more rational counterpoint. There’s Frank (Kevin Rahm), an editor who vocally objects to Nina’s treatment of the news no matter how many times she shoots him down. There’s Detective Fronteiri (Michael Hyatt), who takes serious umbrage with Louis breaking laws and obstructing justice so he can make money off of dead bodies.
But the most prominent sounding board for Louis’ mania has to be Rick (Riz Ahmed), the poor sap who answered Louis’ want ad for an assistant. Rick and Louis are alike in that they’ll both put in hard work to make a living, but that’s where the similarities end. Where Louis is ambitious and always thinks a dozen moves ahead, Rick lives hand-to-mouth without the luxury of thinking past his next paycheck. Moreover, Louis is very smart with a strangely intimidating personality, so he has a knack for negotiating with people and getting his way. Rick has absolutely neither Louis’ intelligence nor his gift of gab, but that doesn’t stop Rick from trying to learn. Basically, Rick shows just how fucked up Louis is, both in how Louis treats him and in what Louis shapes him into.
The actors all do fine work, but of course this is Gyllenhaal’s show. And god damn, what a show it is. I almost feel sorry for all the fine cast members who get acted off the screen by Gyllenhaal’s unearthly repugnant yet irresistably magnetic performance as the main character. A lot of credit is also due to writer/director Dan Gilroy, who beautifully depicts LA as the sort of uncaring purgatory where this story could only take place. The visuals are beautiful across the board, especially in how the film shoots Louis’ brand new late-model bright red muscle car. That climactic car chase was creative and exciting in a way that I haven’t seen in recent memory.
It’s too early to tell if Nightcrawler is a serious awards contender, but it’s absolutely a film worth seeing. Dan Gilroy presents a compelling directorial debut and a script that presents pitch-black (if perhaps a little too blunt) satire on the news media and our collective lust for violence. Also, Gyllenhaal’s performance is worth the ticket price all by itself.
If you can stomach a film with an unrepentantly awful protagonist, definitely give it a look.
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Movie Curiosities: Before I Go to Sleep
November 3, 2014 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
This is another of those times when a movie has so much potential that I have to see how and why it all went wrong. Nicole Kidman, Mark Strong, and Colin Firth in a movie with a novel psychological thriller premise. Sure, it was written and directed by Rowan Jaffe, previously responsible for the screenplay of an overrated snoozefest called The American, but even that movie had its strong points.
Yet Before I Go to Sleep only has a 37 percent Tomatometer as of this writing. Though I don’t personally believe the movie should be rated that low, I can certainly tell you why so many critics were turned away by it.
Christine Lucas (Kidman) was subjected to several brutal head injuries, either as the victim of an accident or an attack. The details are unclear. All we know is that Lucas is now an amnesiac whose brain effectively resets itself on a nightly basis, wiping away the last twenty years of memories while she sleeps. So every morning, she wakes up to a husband she doesn’t recognize (Ben Lucas, played by Firth), who has to explain this whole drill over and over. It seems that no progress has been made in figuring out her condition or what happened to her, until Christine’s psychiatrist (Dr. Nasch, played by Strong) suggests keeping a video journal of her new memories each day. And strangely enough, he suggests that Christine keep the journal a secret from her husband.
Let’s pause for a moment to acknowledge that yes, this premise is absolutely ridiculous. The very concept of short-term memory loss makes for a very implausible hook to hang a story on, and of course we’re going to find contrivances and contradictions along the way. Yet I’m okay with the concept because it serves a higher and far more interesting thematic purpose.
As Christine investigates her own past, she of course finds that things have been kept from her. I won’t go into details, but suffice to say that a whole ton of memories come to light that cause Christine immense pain. And while we have the luxury of getting used to our emotional baggage, Christine’s grief never gets any lighter. Every time she learns about her pain, it’s as bad as the first time. And she does this every single day.
But does she have to?
Christine is in the unique position of being able to live without her mistakes and losses. She never has to know grief or guilt or suffering. Every day is a blank slate, with a fresh opportunity to live a happy and carefree life in ignorant bliss. The drawback, of course, is that she may not necessarily be the one making that choice. She’s completely at the mercy of the other characters, dependent on their accounts of everything that happened. She has her own mnemonics, sure, but those can still be tampered with. So who does she trust?
It goes without saying that Kidman is fantastic as our protagonist. At this stage in her career, she could play the role in her sleep (no pun intended, I assure you). What’s even better is that she was cast opposite Mark Strong, who has of course built his career on playing villainous characters. Yet Strong is still charismatic in such a way that he’s still very likable and easy to trust, which potentially makes him even more dangerous. Colin Firth has a very different reputation (he won an Oscar playing a stuttering British king, for God’s sake), but that appears to be shifting a little bit. Between his performance in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and his upcoming turn in Kingsman: The Secret Service, it seems that Firth has quietly been adding a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” persona to his bag of tricks. Though I missed out on The Railway Man (coincidentally another film in which Firth was married to Kidman), I hear he did something similar in that film as well.
Unfortunately, the limited cast works very heavily against the film. After all, the cast is only comprised of three characters (depending on how you count) and at least one of them is a psychopath. When you get right down to it, there’s a very limited number of ways in which that scenario could possibly play out. This gives the movie a degree of predictability, which is something for any suspense thriller to desperately avoid. What makes it even worse is that the filmmakers went with the easiest, laziest, most predictable route they possibly could have chosen. It’s not a complete waste, since the big plot twist is positioned for maximum impact and of course the incredible cast plays it superbly, but the point stands.
It’s a disappointment that the filmmakers didn’t apply more creativity and effort into finding a more left-field resolution, but everything else is strong enough that I might have forgiven the movie for being a touch predictable. But then the ending happened, and it stood in preposterous contrast with everything that had come before. The movie is all about uncertainty at its heart and core, which leads me to wonder why the filmmakers would wrap everything up in such a pat and saccharine way that it verges on a deus ex machina.
Speaking of contrivances, there’s another problem with the plot. Because the protagonist’s development resets itself every day, the movie has to use very elaborate and far-fetched means of advancing the plot. It’s not just enough for Christine to have a visual diary, oh no. She also needs dream sequences and memories that spontaneously come back to her at plot-convenient moments. We’re told that these flashbacks aren’t necessarily reliable, but of course we all know that’s bullshit.
To address the elephant in the room, this is why the movie fails so hard in comparison to that other thriller about short-term memory loss, Memento. That film also had a protagonist whose development was constantly reset, but it managed to be at least a million times more clever about how to keep the audience engaged and curious while also accelerating the plot at a good clip. Memento had more innovations and creative twists in one scene than this one did in the whole movie.
In spite of all its myriad flaws, I can’t bring myself to completely hate Before I Go to Sleep. The banal plot and the ridiculous ending keep it from being a good movie, but the sterling performances and creative thematic material keep it from being a bad one. I’ve heard critics say that it’s unmemorable, but I don’t agree with that. The central moral of taking the good with the bad in life is presented in a way that’s very compelling and very memorable. It’s just deserving of a better film is all.
Between this and The American, my assessment is that Rowan Joffe is a very poor storyteller. I’d be perfectly happy to see him direct something else, given his talent for luring top-notch actors (his debut film, Brighton Rock, featured Helen Mirren, John Hurt, and Andy Serkis, among others). Just please, for the love of God, let someone else write the screenplay.
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Movie Curiosities: Fury
October 27, 2014 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
Earlier this year, there was a little movie called The Monuments Men. I gave the film a negative review (as did most critics) because it leaned far too heavily on comic relief and charm. In a WWII movie, those things should definitely be the exception and not the rule. If we’re going to hear a story set in the middle of a battlefield in Germany, we need life-or-death tension and a proper sense of scale for all the millions who died in the battle for world domination.
So here’s Fury, which sets itself firmly on the other side of the spectrum. Perhaps too far for its own good, in fact.
A title card helpfully sets our stage in April of 1945. The Nazis are just about defeated, which means that they’re getting desperate. Hitler is throwing every last thing he has at the Allied forces, even going so far as to force women and children onto the front lines. Naturally, this puts the Allied soldiers in the difficult position of having to fight and kill armed children. Even worse, it gets harder to tell the Germans apart: Which of them want to keep on fighting, and which of them genuinely want to surrender because they’re tired of the Third Reich’s bullshit?
This is the mess in which we meet the eponymous Fury, a tank manned by our cast of main characters. Brad Pitt plays the leader of the group, name of Sgt. Don “Wardaddy” Collier. Shia LaBeouf plays Technician Boyd “Bible” Swan, the gunner and resident chaplain. Then there’s Pfc. Grady “Coon-Ass” Travis (Jon Bernthal), who’s not only the loader and mechanic, but also the most outrageously violent caveman in the crew. And believe me, that’s saying a lot. Last but not least is Cpl. Trini “Gordo” Garcia (Michael Pena), who drives the tank. There would be a fifth member to introduce, but Gordo’s co-pilot got his head blown off at some point just before the movie starts.
Seriously, we actually see bits of the guy’s face splattered on the inside of the tank. In close-up. But we’ll get back to that point.
Anyway, the Fury crew is now in need of a fifth member. Enter Pvt. Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman) who enlisted only eight weeks ago. Never mind that he was trained as an administrative assistant and he’s never seen the inside of a tank before, the army needs tank operators, so it’s off to the battlefield with him.
Needless to say, Ellison is in a very tight spot. He’s not equipped for battle in any way, and he certainly isn’t ready to kill a child. There’s even one point in the film when he’s told that he has to kill or be killed, and Ellison flat-out says that he’d rather die than take someone else’s life. Naturally, this doesn’t sit well with the other four guys who depend on him to help keep the team alive.
The film is very explicit in its statement that war is hell. Wardaddy himself says outright that “Ideals are peaceful. History is violent.” But the film goes a bit further with those sentiments, stating that war isn’t really about good vs. evil so much as it’s about bad vs. evil. It’s one of those moments in life — blown up to a global scale — when there are simply no good options to choose from.
The themes in this movie all boil down to the question of what’s worth dying for. As an example, there are Germans who’d kill to save their homeland from invaders, and there are Germans who don’t think that Hitler’s regime is worth dying for. We even get a look at some Germans who really did die for their refusal to fight the Allies. As for the Fury crew, they keep on fighting to help save their compatriots in the tank, certain in the knowledge that any of them would (and probably did) take a bullet for each other. And anyway, it’s not like anyone ever needed a reason to kill a Nazi in time of war.
Our leads have no shortage of reasons to kill. Their given reasons to keep on living, however, are scarce.
At no point in the movie did anyone in our main cast — not even Ellison — give any indication of what was waiting for them back in America. I couldn’t for the life of me tell you what any of these guys possibly thought they’d be doing if they ever survived the war. By all appearances, it would seem that every crew member of the Fury — Travis most of all — was put on this planet for the sole purpose of killing Nazis. Needless to say, this was a huge missed opportunity to develop the characters into more relateable people. Granted, the characters still have enough personality and fantastic interplay to keep the emotional investment high, but every last bit counts in a film like this one.
Then there’s the matter of Irma and Emma. See, a lot of screen time is given to a sequence in which Wardaddy and Ellison come across a couple of friendly German women (respectively played by Anamaria Marinca and Alicia von Rittburg) in a town recently captured by American troops. Everyone gets along just fine and it looks like they’re having a peaceful, civilized time together. Right up until the rest of Wardaddy’s crew barges in and acts like a bunch of drunken jackasses. The sequence makes a lot of sense symbolically, illustrating how war tends to ruin just about everything. But from a character standpoint, it’s horribly rushed and contrived. Way too many actions in that sequence are motivated more by plot and less by the characters themselves.
As for the cast, the standouts are Brad Pitt and Logan Lerman. And I mean that in a bad way. Michael Pena, Jon Bernthal, and even Shia LaBeouf all do fantastic jobs of blending into their characters, but I could never bring myself to forget that I was watching performances by Brad Pitt and Logan Lerman. I’m not really sure what it is about Pitt (his slicked-back hair certainly doesn’t help), but he has way too much movie star shine to play a role in a film this gritty and “realistic.” Wardaddy looks and acts exactly like the guy that Lt. Aldo Raine was pretending to be, and I simply couldn’t convince myself otherwise. As for Lerman, he’s just not ready for a film of this scale. I admire the guy for his ambition, and he’s clearly putting in a great deal of effort, but he still doesn’t have the talent or the stage presence to hold his own against a cast like this. Moreover, he looks too naive and squeaky clean to look like he belongs in this gruesome war movie, and no amount of caked-on mud is going to change that.
And so we come to the elephant in the room: The tone. It of course goes without saying that any serious war drama is going to be dark and violent. That approach would be to the film’s credit, if writer/director David Ayer didn’t seem to treat gore and grit as an end in itself. There were so many times in this movie — most notably the entire first act — that seemed gloomy and mean-spirited for no real reason at all.
It bears remembering that the best war dramas — Saving Private Ryan being the definitive example — used violence and grit as part of an immersive experience. It’s all about bringing the audience into the warzone, not just showing us that war is hell but also making us feel it. By comparison, this movie didn’t make me think “Wow, it’s like I’m in the middle of the battlefield,” so much as it made me wonder “Why am I bothering to watch this?”
The exceptions, however, are the tank fights. When this film gets to the tank-on-tank combat, that’s when it really fires on all cylinders. The action is shot and edited to make the movements coherent and to provide a sense of speed, the latter of which certainly can’t be easy when we’re dealing with such heavy machinery. These scenes also show our main cast at their best, working together as five parts of a single cohesive team. Yet even these tank battles come with a few minor caveats.
Some critics will take issue with the level of violence in these scenes, as we see heads and other body parts blown to red mist in clear and gruesome fashion. I personally didn’t mind this approach, since it added to the “you are here… in hell” feel that I’d expect of a serious war drama. But if it’s not your cup of tea, I won’t complain. Also, as much as I love the visuals, I take issue with the portrayal of artillery fire. The Allied guns fired bullets that seemed to leave a bright red trail, and the Nazi guns fired bullets that looked bright green. It seriously looked more like something out of Star Wars than a WWII battlefield.
Overall, I think that Fury worked much better in concept than in execution. The characters and casting have some persistent flaws that drag down the whole movie, and the recklessly dark tone doesn’t help matters. Still, there’s no denying that the scenes of tank combat are superbly delivered, and the film has several bold themes that are made very interesting by the wartime setting.
I don’t know if I’d say that the movie is good or bad. I only know that if Ayer set out to make a film that pressed its audience into feeling something, then he succeeded. Whether that feeling is worth remembering, repeating, or even experiencing the first time is another story, however.
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Movie Curiosities: John Wick
October 26, 2014 in Curiosity Inc., Uncategorized
This is one of those lamentably rare times when I find myself asking “Where the hell did this come from?” Seriously, this wasn’t even on my radar until the first trailer came out and blew everyone’s hair back, and that was only a month ago. Now the film has been released to rave reviews, and I’m still left wondering how it could have been released with virtually no advance hype.
Movie Curiosities: The Book of Life
October 18, 2014 in Curiosity Inc.
I had every reason to be hyped about this one.
The trailers for The Book of Life showed a film with superb animation, a stellar voice cast, and a classic archetypal fairy tale story, wrapped in a distinctive “Dia de los Muertos” style and presented by Guillermo del Toro himself. Granted, he’s only credited as the film’s producer, but everything about this movie practically had his name written on it in huge neon letters.
On the other hand, a trailer also showed a few comic relief side characters warbling out a chorus of “Just a Friend” by Biz Markie. Leaving aside the godawful singing on display (there’s no way to sing that chorus on key, after all), why the hell would this fairy tale romance feature a song about some guy getting played for a chump by a two-timing bitch? Then came subsequent trailers, in which Ice Cube actually says “Today was a good day.”
Dia de los Muertos, fairy tales, and ’90s rap? What’s the connection?
Of course, pop culture references in kids’ films are nothing new, and plenty of films in the genre have included jokes meant solely for the adults in the audience, but I thought we had moved past that. None of Laika’s movies ever had such pandering, so far as I recall. Neither did Frozen. The Lego Movie and Wreck-It Ralph? Okay, pop culture references were built into the premises of those films, but never in a way that felt dated or immature. And there’s the irony of it. Pop culture references included to make kids’ films more modern only made them dated, and more “mature” humor only made the movies more immature. I thought Hollywood had finally learned that lesson, but I guess not.
Of course, I realize that I’m putting the cart before the horse. I really should know better than to judge a movie by its previews, after all. But oh, gentle readers. I had no idea just how awful the soundtrack could get. Even when the rest of the movie surrounding it was so much better than I could have predicted.
Admittedly, The Book of Life starts out on very shaky ground. The film opens with an introduction to our narrator (Mary Beth, voiced by Christina Applegate), a museum guide who gives a very special tour to a group of teenage underachievers. Why is she telling this story to a bunch of random kids? And why is there a side door to the museum hidden by way of an optical illusion? Those issues make some degree of sense in the film’s closing moments, but in the meantime, this framing device is contrived as hell.
Then Mary Beth introduces the movie proper, setting our scene in San Angel. It’s a sleepy little town in the dead center of Mexico, which — as Mary Beth points out — is in the center of the universe. I shit you not: The entire universe revolves around Mexico. That is explicitly stated in the movie, within the opening five minutes. I don’t even know what to say to that. Throw in a couple of bewilderingly godawful poop jokes within the opening minutes, and I seriously started to worry that I was in trouble.
Then things started to pick up.
Our San Angel fairy tale involves three deities. First is the Candle Maker (Ice Cube), a jovial fellow who makes and protects the lit candles that represent individual lives. When the candles go out, that’s when the other two deities step in. One of them is La Muerte (Kate del Castillo), who presides over the utopian Land of the Remembered, a paradise for the souls of the deceased who are still remembered among the living. Then there’s Xibalba (Ron Perlman), the demon who rules over the forgotten souls in the dark and dusty Land of the Forgotten.
Let’s pause for a moment to look at La Muerte and Xibalba in greater detail. Yes, the Candle Maker does have a significant role in the third act, but the other two gods are much more crucial to the narrative. The interplay between La Muerte and Xibalba was so rock-solid that I loved every moment they had onscreen together. Theirs is a very playful relationship, with constant rivalries tempered by terms of endearment. She knows that he can’t be trusted, and he’s incredibly jealous of what she has, yet there’s so much genuine passion between them that they keep coming back to each other. After all, I very much doubt that there’s another being in all the cosmos who’s powerful enough or smart enough to keep up with either of them.
Anyway, it seems that Xibalba was forced to rule the Land of the Forgotten because he cheated on a bet with La Muerte. Now, after rotting in that hellish landscape for several eons, Xibalba wants to turn the tables with another bet. If he wins, he switches realms with La Muerte. If he loses, then he never interferes with the living ever again (which, sad to say, is his only form of entertainment).
Enter our three main characters.
Manolo, Joaquin, and Maria (respectively voiced as adults by Diego Luna, Channing Tatum, and Zoe Saldana) are three childhood friends who love each other deeply, though Manolo and Joaquin are locked in fierce competition to marry Maria someday. Thus we have our wager: La Muerte bets on Manolo, Xibalba bets on Joaquin, and we’re off to the races.
Let’s take our main characters one at a time. Manolo, the primary hero of the story, grew up with a deep love for music. He’s spent his entire life working to be a great singer, but that clashes horribly with his long family heritage of bullfighting. What’s more, Manolo steps into the bullfighting ring, and he’s a natural. The guy can handle a bull and a cape with unbelievable flair. But he can’t bring himself to kill a bull, which makes him a pariah to the town and to his family. Manolo claims that he won’t kill bulls out of compassion, but everyone else calls him a coward who won’t fight anyone even at the potential cost of his own life. It could be one or the other, or maybe it’s something in between.
Next up is Joaquin. He’s the son of a solider who died in a blaze of glory on the battlefield, and Joaquin himself goes on to become a great soldier in his own right. In fact, Joaquin is commonly regarded as the only person in all the world who could possibly keep San Angel safe from a monstrous bandit named Chakal (voiced by Dan Navarro). There is a problem with that, however. See, Joaquin secretly possesses a powerful artifact created by Xibalba, which makes its wearer invulnerable to harm. Chakal finds out about this magical badge, and he charges out to San Angel with an army behind him to try and get it.
So basically, Manolo is being judged against the standard of Joaquin, and no one has any idea that Joaquin’s bravery and fighting skills are completely fake. Compare that to Manolo, who has to earn every step of his development and think his way out of conflict without the aid of magic or brute force. This of course leads to the question of how the two will measure up to each other once Joaquin finally loses his badge. The results may surprise you.
It also bears mentioning that Joaquin is a primeval, misogynist, self-centered git. This could easily have made him into a Gaston-type figure, more a villainous parody of a hero than anything else, yet there are so many ways in which Joaquin is kept from falling into that trap. First is the involvement of Channing Tatum, who’s quickly building a career out of poking fun at his own impossibly good looks. Second, the guy never comes off as willfully misogynist. Joaquin’s ego is so huge and his experience with women is so limited that he simply doesn’t know a thing about how to deal with the opposite sex. Perhaps most importantly, as much as Joaquin loves himself, there’s still enough room in his heart for San Angel and everyone in it. Though his rivalry with Manolo is always present and the two can cut each other deeply, there’s always a brotherly sense that neither of them could ever hate each other. Moreover, the guy has a moral code. As badly as he wants Maria, he wouldn’t cheat for her or commit any crimes to win her heart.
This brings us to Maria. She’s the daughter of the town’s de facto ruler (General Posada, voiced by Carlos Alazraqui), who ships her off to a boarding school in Spain to teach her a few manners. When Maria comes back, she’s grown into the most beautiful woman that anyone in the town has ever seen. And she still has a rebellious streak wider than the Panama Canal. Maria is not only gorgeous, but quick-witted, well-read, fiercely independent, and surprisingly capable of holding her own in a fight. Nobody in the town really knows what to do with her, especially since she seems so determined to make sure that her suitors truly earn her hand. No, Manolo and Joaquin aren’t getting off easy just because they all go back a long ways.
Zoe Saldana has shown a predilection toward strong female roles, and this is no exception. She does an incredible job of portraying Maria as a woman who wants to be treated as an equal — and more than earns her status as an equal — and not just someone who breaks suitors’ hearts to be a bitch about it. She’s proactive, she’s funny, she’s smart, she’s so much of a joy to watch. There seems to be a trend of empowered female characters in kid-friendly films (see also: Katniss Everdeen, Anna and Elsa of Frozen, Wyldstyle of The Lego Movie, Saldana’s portrayal of Gamora, etc.) and that’s a very positive sign. We need more of that.
Anyway, despite her best efforts, Maria may not have a choice in who she marries. See, everyone in the town is afraid that Chakal and his banditos could sack the town at any moment. They need Joaquin to keep the bogeyman away, which means that they need Maria to marry Joaquin and keep him there. Thus we have a wedding arranged by Maria’s father, though of course things happen to complicate matters.
If you take another close look at the three main characters, you’ll notice that all three of them are heavily influenced by their fathers. In this way, the film explores the concept of stepping out from the shadows of our forebears, encouraging the audience to go out and write our own story. The related theme of fate is also explored, which of course goes hand in hand with death. The film’s theology with regards to death is actually quite fascinating, structured in such a way that dying alone and forgotten would be a worse fate than merely dying. It also presents the idea that the dead are never really gone until they are forgotten, so the spirits may still be there to comfort those who remember them. Especially during the day of the dead, when spirits may come back to walk among the living.
Of course, the highlight of the film comes at the 45-minute mark. The film was impressive enough up to that point, with neat character designs, sterling animation, and overwhelming fun, but the whole film shifts to a higher gear after Manolo goes to the Land of the Remembered. Not only is the film loaded with vibrant colors and overwhelming spectacle, but it also shows Manolo reuniting with his deceased loved ones. Manolo meets with family he never even knew he had, and they all welcome him in poignant and jaw-dropping style. Seriously, if I died and went to a heaven that looked and felt like this, I’d be perfectly happy with that.
There’s a lot to like about this movie. The visuals are superlative across the board. The action is energetic and spectacular. The voice cast, with a few exceptions, is very strong. Debut writer/director Jorge Gutierrez does a shockingly good job of weaving so many disparate themes and storylines into a tight and coherent 95-minute whole. So what’s not to like? Well, let’s start with some nitpicks in the voice cast before we get to the really huge problem.
Diego Luna, Kate del Castillo, Hector Elizondo, and Danny Trejo all do fine work in this film. Jorge Gutierrez himself voices a prominent comic relief side character, and Guillermo del Toro gets a cameo role that’s laugh-out-loud hilarious in retrospect. Gabriel Iglesias and Cheech Marin don’t fare nearly as well, but that’s mostly because their characters were so completely useless.
HOWEVER. I’m a little bit peeved that the filmmakers put this much time and energy into assembling a top-notch voice cast of Hispanic actors and they couldn’t seem to find any room for Edward James Olmos. Seriously, what’s the excuse for that?
Getting back to the voice cast we got, there’s no question that Ice Cube is the weak link here. It’s not because he’s a black actor in a largely Hispanic cast — so is Zoe Saldana, and she gets by just fine. [CORRECTION: I have since been informed that Saldana is the daughter of a Dominican man and a Puerto Rican woman.]
No, the big problem is that Ice Cube keeps drawing attention to the fact that he’s Ice Cube. I have no idea if it’s his performance or the way his character was written, but the Candle Maker was portrayed in a laid-back streetwise sort of way that didn’t remotely mesh with anything else in the film. His voice was completely wrong for the character, and the character was written in a way that was completely wrong for the movie.
Which brings me to the soundtrack. Sweet merciful Quetzalcoatl, the soundtrack.
I thought it was bad when “Just a Friend” was sung in the trailer, and yes, it’s every bit as awful in the film proper. Then the film set a growing-up montage to a cover of “I Will Wait” by Mumford and Sons, and that was horrendous. But then Manolo started to play a cover of “Creep” and I damn near walked out of the theater. That’s right: This movie features a cover of “Creep.” By Radiohead.
Let’s set aside that “Creep” has been covered to death so many goddamn times that it’s lost all semblance of meaning. The far more important question is to ask why the hell this movie’s soundtrack contains so many horrible covers of modern pop songs. This is supposed to be a Mexican-themed fairy tale set at some time in the distant past, so why the hell is everyone singing modern American pop songs?! How does “Can’t Help Falling in Love With You” (another song that’s been covered by everyone and their goldfish) even remotely fit into this story and advance the plot in such a special way that they had to use that particular song?
As best I can figure it, the covers were included because the original songs suck. I have no idea how such incredible talents like Gustavo Santaolalla and Paul Williams could write anything as mind-numbingly bland as “I Love You Too Much,” but they did. The only time — and I do mean the only time — when the music was anywhere near bearable was during the aforementioned Land of the Remembered scene when everything else was firing on all cylinders (aside from a bit of redundant voice-over).
The Book of Life features an undeniably painful soundtrack, but that’s all the more disappointing because everything else about the movie is so damn good. It’s energetic and fun, with a good strong heart to match its dazzling visuals. The voice cast is generally solid, the characters are great to watch, and the jokes hit way more often than they miss. Though they do miss often, especially at the very beginning.
I very much regret missing out on the 3D premium for this one, because I’m sure that would’ve been a trip and this is a uniquely enjoyable movie that’s well worth the extra money. My recommendation comes with some very sizable caveats, but it’s happily given all the same.
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Movie Curiosities: Dracula Untold
October 15, 2014 in Curiosity Inc.
We’re living in an era when major Hollywood studios live and die on their tentpole franchises. And right now, that’s really bad news for Universal.
The Fast & Furious series is easily the most successful franchise at Universal… as of last year. Now that Paul Walker is dead, it’s a huge freaking question how much longer the property can stay viable. Speaking of which, Despicable Me is going on its third movie, and there’s no sign of how much gas is left in that tank. They’ve also got Jurassic World coming out next year, but a fourth Jurassic Park movie thirteen years after the ill-received third entry is a very dicey proposition. To say nothing of Dumb and Dumber To next month. Oh, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Riddick, the franchise that seems to be fueled entirely by Vin Diesel’s mania. The most recent film in that franchise — last year’s Riddick — couldn’t even break $100 million worldwide (which, to be fair, isn’t bad for a movie with a reported $38 million budget).
Then we have Battleship, R.I.P.D., Skyline, and other such spectacular failures that never yielded sequels. That isn’t even getting started on Namor, the superhero Universal acquired from Marvel in 2001 so they could let him sit in development hell for over a decade. It’s little wonder why Universal is giving sequels to movies like Ted, Pitch Perfect, and The Purge — they have nothing else to work with.
…Well, almost nothing.
The studio retains its stable of Universal Monsters, comprised of such classic creatures as Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolfman, the Mummy, et al. Though these monsters remain iconic and marketable nearly a century after their introduction to theaters, Universal has been struggling for ages to revamp them. Granted, it’s not like the Universal Monsters have been completely absent from pop culture. Stephen Sommers rebooted The Mummy with very impressive success, until The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor tapped that well dry in 2008. There was also the 2010 remake of The Wolfman, though behind-the-scenes difficulties doomed that project long before it ever premiered. And of course, there was Van Helsing, an attempted crossover that shit the bed in such extraordinary fashion that Universal execs are still living it down a decade later.
It seemed like no one at Universal could figure out a way to reintroduce the Monsters to modern audiences. Then two things happened.
First, Alex Proyas came to Universal in 2010 for a project called “Dracula: Year Zero.” The plan was to tell a reimagined origin story for Dracula, comprised of vampire lore spliced in with loose historical tidbits about the character’s real-life inspiration, Vlad “The Impaler” Tepes. That project stalled until the second major event happened: Marvel Studios made over a billion dollars on The Avengers, pioneering the concept of the superfranchise. In the time since, every studio in Hollywood has been slowly trying to build their own line of interconnected film series to replicate Marvel’s ongoing success.
In response, Universal dusted off Year Zero, gave it a new cast and crew, and tinkered with it right up through post-production reshoots. Thus we have Dracula Untold, the planned launching pad not only for a new Dracula franchise, but for the new Universal Monsters superfranchise. It will be followed in 2016 by a rebooted Mummy film directed by studio shill extraordinaire Alex Kurtzman. No word on what they’re doing with Wolfman, though I can’t wait to see how they address the 2010 remake and how that fits into all of this.
Incidentally, I find it hilarious how Universal is pinning so many of their hopes onto creatures that are public domain. Case in point: 20th Century Fox has a Frankenstein adaptation coming out next year, written by Max Landis with James McAvoy and Daniel Radcliffe starring, and it’ll be so much fun to see if that throws a wrench in Universal’s plans.
Before moving onto the film proper, there are two more facts that merit consideration. First, it was co-produced by Legendary Pictures, the same company that developed 300, Pacific Rim, Godzilla (2014), Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy, and other such blockbusters for Warner Bros. until contract negotiations brought them over to Universal. Second, the movie was directed by Gary Shore with a screenplay by Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless, all three of whom are complete newcomers.
Anyway, Dracula Untold. Our protagonist is a good and noble monarch with a distinguished military history, loved and respected by all his subjects, played by a white guy who looks impossibly good with his shirt off (Luke Evans). Our villain is a power-mad lunatic dressed entirely in gold, played by some brown man of ambiguous ethnicity (Dominic Cooper). Our story begins when the lunatic emperor sends a messenger to our protagonist, asking for a tribute as a sign of allegiance. Rather than give up his freedom, our brave and noble monarch instead kills the messenger in brutal fashion before engaging in combat against a vast army that greatly outnumbers his own.
Gee, doesn’t that sound familiar?!
I mean… wow. Legendary couldn’t possibly rip themselves off any harder if they tried. What makes it even worse is that Dracula shows all the two-dimensional morality and straight-faced line deliveries of 300, but without any of the over-the-top machismo or breathtaking visuals that gave 300 its campy charm. The result is a movie that’s not scary enough to be a horror film, isn’t fun or energetic enough to be an action blockbuster, and it’s too damn ridiculous to work as a character drama. But of course, we’re just getting started.
See, Mehmed (the power-mad emperor) demands a tribute of a thousand boys who will be trained into soldiers for his army. Never mind that his Turkish Empire quite clearly has enough faceless disposable goons to man the fucking Death Star, he needs a thousand more soldiers. But Vlad (our protagonist, natch) refuses because he has a son who would be eligible for the draft, so to speak. Never mind that there are hundreds of Transylvanian families who would lose their children to the slaughter, Vlad has to save his son. Unfortunately, since Vlad was very clear in his intention of raising a peaceful kingdom, his army is laughably incapable of fighting back the Turks.
Luckily, as fate would have it, there’s an undead creature of unspeakable power living in the big scary mountain right next door.
Vlad goes to visit the unnamed Master Vampire, played by Charles Dance. The creature agrees to give Vlad a small sampling of full vampiric power — still more than enough to singlehandedly wipe out an entire army, as we see later on — though it comes with an insatiable thirst for human blood. If Vlad can resist his bloodlust for three days, the curse will wear off and he’ll go back to being a mortal. Hopefully after driving the Turks back for good. But if he gives in and uses his powers to imbibe blood (as we know he must, because franchise), Vlad turns into a full-on vampire for all eternity.
The premise is a nifty way of bringing the classic vampire themes of temptation and man’s primal nature into play. The film even throws in Stoker’s classic religious themes of salvation and sin without getting too blunt about it. Even if those concepts do lead the characters to act in impossibly stupid and/or ridiculously contrived ways, the effort is nonetheless appreciated. But of course, the primary reason for the premise was to give Dracula a more sympathetic origin story and turn him into a kind of superpowered antihero. Because Universal wants in on the superhero business and — as established above — they can’t be bothered to do anything with Namor.
On the one hand, I don’t mind this so much. No, really. The idea has some merit. The superhero genre is getting wildly oversaturated and we could always use something that stands out from the pack. Plus, I’ve been saying for years that the superhero boom should be considered a golden opportunity to introduce new characters and franchises, not just ones from pre-existing comic books. Hell, Marvel is doing something like that right now with “Agents of SHIELD,” as Coulson, Ward, May, Skye, and FitzSimmons are getting incorporated into the comics after their introduction and development on TV. We very badly need more of that.
On the other hand, Dracula isn’t some brand new superhero property. He’s goddamn Dracula (if you’ll pardon the pun). Not only is he a public domain character, but he’s easily one of the most adapted characters in one of the most reprinted stories in the history of fiction. This character is quite firmly established. More to the point, he’s established as a monster. And not just any monster, but the king of all vampires. Trying to reimagine Dracula as a hero — even a conflicted antihero — is putting the character in a role he was never meant to play, and that trick will only go so far.
It kind of worked in this movie, even though we know his development arc here will end with him becoming a bloodsucking demon, but then what can the filmmakers do for the sequel? They can either turn Dracula into a villain — thereby negating an entire movie’s worth of character development and rendering this movie a complete waste of everyone’s time — or they can find a contrived way of putting him against some improbably greater evil and just kick the can further down the street. Based on what I’ve seen from this movie’s ending, I’d put money on the latter.
I’ve already said that this movie was written and directed by complete unknowns. I’d wager that these newcomers were chosen specifically for their lack of leverage, so they wouldn’t be able to push back against the studio execs who were really making the movie. Universal already did something similar with Snow White and the Huntsman, and Disney used the tactic to sufficiently mediocre effect with Tron: Legacy and Maleficent. All of these movies shared a similar problem with Dracula: It’s clear that nobody behind the scenes had any idea what they were trying to do, other than make money. I think about this watered-down and misguided film, and I weep at the thought of what might have been under a visionary like Alex Proyas.
Take the action scenes, for example. The fights in this movie are shot and edited in a way that looks terribly weak, and the vampires attack in a way that shows remarkably little blood. Instead of biting his victims, you see, Vlad prefers to attack by way of turning into a swarm of bats and flying into soldiers at top speed. The camera shows this by way of movements and angles that look like an even less dignified knockoff of the forest swooping shots from The Evil Dead. I’m so glad I decided to see this on a normal screen, because I can’t imagine how nauseating those shots would be on IMAX.
Even when the visuals work in a clever way, it seems almost by accident. For example, there are a lot of truly awful day-for-night shots, but they work in this movie because… well, our main character can see in the dark. Also, vampires have an aversion to silver and crosses, and their effect on Vlad is shown by way of shots that are bright and blurry enough to give J.J. Abrams a seizure. It’s a simple effect, but it works quite well. Aside from that, it’s mostly bad CGI, battles reflected on swords, and other ideas that are so pitifully lame for how hard they’re trying to be cool.
I said yesterday that I’ve never seen Luke Evans or Dominic Cooper give a bad performance, even in the crappiest of movies. Well, now I have. I don’t blame the actors themselves, since they visibly look angry for having to work with this script and this direction. Even so, it’s painful to watch. As for Sarah Gadon, I’m sorry to say that her casting was totally misguided. She’s an underrated actress, don’t get me wrong, but she doesn’t have anywhere near the maturity or gravitas to play Vlad’s wife. She is, however, absolutely perfect for the role that the filmmakers cast her to play in the next film.
Incidentally, Gadon’s character is named “Mirena.” If you know anything about the character and story of Dracula, you’ll immediately take this as a flagrant sign that the filmmakers are insulting our intelligence.
Finally, there’s Ramin Djawadi, who composed the score for this movie. The same guy who wrote kickass theme songs for Iron Man, Pacific Rim, and “Game of Thrones” is the same guy who wrote this mess. That absolutely breaks my heart. At best, the score is completely unremarkable background noise. At worse, it’s loaded with vocal tracks that are tacky and annoying as hell. Then again, it’s not like the film deserved much better.
Everything about Dracula Untold feels forced. It feels like a stand-alone movie that was twisted into the start of a franchise. It’s an R-rated concept that got mutilated to fit a PG-13 rating. The potentially interesting original concept is buried under sequel requirements and ideas pulled from other, more successful movies. Just like most superficial four-quadrant films, this one tries to have everything and walks away with nothing.
Of course, I don’t begrudge a studio for trying to make money, and I don’t blame Universal for trying what made Marvel so successful. Unfortunately, this is a battle they’ve already lost, because Universal clearly missed a few key lessons from Marvel’s success. The most important of which is that Marvel created a cinematic universe that’s genuinely fun to revisit once or twice a year, rewarding the viewers for immersing themselves in this world and exploring it from all angles. I sat through Dracula Untold and saw a world that is not in any way worth revisiting.
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