Reviews

Avoids the pitfalls that ruined 'Jobs' with Ashton Kutcher, although his performance offered more verisimilitude than Fassbender's. The usual biopic tries and fails to tell the whole story: too many details are lost, so the resemblance is vague and filmmakers fill in the blanks with formula. Aaron Sorkin's screenplay for 'Steve Jobs' is limited to the scenes backstage at three of Job's product-launch keynotes, where Jobs finds himself harried by technical difficulties, paternity issues, conflicts with associates, and the fate of the computer industry. The extent of the dialogue gives the impression that these conversations definitely did not occur. They are used as a microcosm for everything that people know about Steve Jobs' character. Sorkin has obviously seen 'Jobs', and while this is a vastly better film, it doesn't contribute more to the understanding of the man if the viewer already knows (e.g.) that he was a control freak, a perfectionist, and a reluctant father. Since its deep focus doesn't achieve anything new, I might have preferred a film in which something happens.

The business world is usually boring. I never saw Steve Jobs as a hero, an anti-hero or a dramatic protagonist of any kind. He was a beleaguered tech CEO who had a second chance and brought his company from rags to riches. He could have been 'ahead of his time' in the eighties, but like this film shows, he wasn't an engineer, and his forward thinking could be reduced to his ignorance of what was practical given the state of development.

They had me going with the trailer. An urbane man in a suit beating down a room full of goons. I should have considered that this isn't the first time we've seen 'suit violence', but not in a comic vein, so the juxtaposition occurred to me as something fun and new. Too bad this was just marketing. The film doesn't deliver much on its premise. A super -secret society of gentlemen spies, led by Michael Caine, has lost one of its members, and each remaining Kingsman is supposed to propose a new candidate to train for their ranks. There is something like a coming-of-age story for the main character, 'Eggsy', a young hoodlum mentored by Harry Hart (Colin Firth), who was serving with Eggsy's father when he died. The film focuses on younger characters, so it feels like a movie for young people. The violence is comic-book, and while some people do get sliced in half, the film seems to earn its R rating with language and crudity. The Bond films have always used tongue-in-cheek characters in serious plots, but this film is too ridiculous to be taken seriously when it wants to be.

I was hoping that Keanu Reeves would resurrect his career with 47 Ronin, a remarkably boring film with some interesting CGI. Here comes John Wick, from marketing to execution, a bare-bones action flick that leaves nothing to be desired except a better plot. Reeves' titular character is a retired hit man who is unwittingly robbed by the son of a Russian mob boss. In the process, John Wick's puppy is killed. The puppy was a gift from his dead wife who died of cancer days before. Apparently, John Wick feels he has nothing left to lose. John Wick is determined to destroy the man who killed his puppy, no matter how many Russian mobsters must die in the process. And boy, do they die! In terms of action/adventure, special effects, etc. this film is an example of doing more with less. The action scenes had none of that CGI music video feel; they were all realistically choreographed and shot, which helps a lot with the suspension of disbelief. The performances are about as good as the script will allow, but nothing stands up to scrutiny. With John Wick being as unstoppable as he appears to be, it's odd that he would have been the hapless victim of a home invasion. And why, why won't we listen to reason? As the film is aware, "it was just an f-ing dog.'

I didn't hate the first movie in this reboot, when the Abrams franchise had fewer ambitions. The first film literally never left the solar system. This time around, we get to meet the new old CGI rendition of the Klingons, who seem like the enemies from a first-person shooter on PS3. Out of the melee emerges Khan, the abandoned genetically-engineered superman with a Shelley-esque vendetta against starfleet. Anyone involved in the writing, casting, direction, and final cut of this film was complicit in the cardinal sin of adaptations or remakes, taking something that people originally loved and changing it into something radically inferior. This Khan is not the charismatic Ricardo Montalban, transported from Fantasy Island with his worldly, narcissistic charm, but the phlegmatic Benedict Cumberbatch of Sherlock Holmes fame, rendering Khan as a humorless and notably boring villain bent on vengeance without the verve, sexuality, and nihilistic laughter at death that made Montalban's Khan such an interesting antagonist. The writing is comic-book franchise quality, which seems to be what the producers of the pre-branded 'reboot' are going for. Sans comic. I imagine that real Trekkies are as chagrined as true comic book purists when a studio favors the vague cultural familiarity and approval among the uninitiated masses. Here is my beer. Bubbly. Bitter. There is an impending catastrophe! I don't care! Benedict Cumberbatch could not have accomplished this. A Benedict Cumberbatch is only capable of quiet evil on the level of, say, a Juian Assange. This review has me planning to revisit the old franchise before I take aim at the next installment in the reboot. JJ Abrams won't make a dime, but the Trekkies can thank him for a piece of flashy advertising.

We live in an era when sexual taboos have begun to disappear entirely. If this film was made ten or twenty years ago, Von Trier might have been easily accused of doing something provocative for no other purpose. Today, the limitations on exposure seem like an obstacle, and the 'graphic' depictions of sexuality intermittently permits a greater sense of depth. Nevertheless, this is a film about sex, and Von Trier is a little behind the times in the effort to free his impulses. Compared to something like Gotz Spielman's Antares or Revanche, this is boring and one-dimensional filmmaking, a collage of sexual episodes structured by an awkward voice-over. The narration is fine, but the scenes of conversation between Gainsborough and Skarsgard feature the actors reciting lines that seem unnatural for normal speech. I felt like I was watching scenes from 'Mindwalk' interspersed with bad porn. This is a better film than Antichrist, but as a matter of necessity, Melancholia does more for the viewer. Von Trier has a gift for visuals but fails as a writer and storyteller. Sit through two volumes and four hours of this, well, you must have seen it all before.

The filmmakers weren't determined to make an anti-War film, but what they reveal is the most pathetic aspects of today's armed forces: the boyish, obnoxious young men who go off to war like summer camp in an era when battles are won or lost behind the lines. The media reported the occasional combat deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan like soldiers never die at war, and the boy scout soldiers in Restrepo are ceremoniously devoted to that presumption, memorializing their fallen comrade in a sandbag fort that accomplishes nothing except a handful of deaths: soldiers, civilians, Taliban rebels— does it really matter? The enlisted soldiers seem youthful and sometimes innocent, like we might actually find their deaths to be unfortunate, while the sated, ratlike face of the West Point lieutenant in charge of the outpost shows just how irresponsible today's Army might actually be. "Do I look like I f***ing care?" the lieutenant ejaculates in response to concerns of Afghani villagers. Later, some innocent children die in a misguided air raid. The lieutenant reflects to the camera that it's hard, you know, we're supposed to be fighting them, but we're not fighting them— them, you know, the Afghanis, the oppressed people who may or may not support the regime that may or may not have sponsored terrorist activity. The tragedy of the Bush wars was that the 9/11 attacks weren't undertaken by a nation against whom we should have declared war, but nothing less than two endless wars seemed sufficient for retaliation.

If 'Noah' had not been directed by Darren Aronofsky, I wouldn't have watched it any sooner than 'Clash of the Titans'. Unfortunately, this is Aronofsky's worst film, far worse than 'The Fountain', which might have fared better without the budget like what Paramount greenlit for 'Noah'. The script is not too rich with fake archaism, despite the actors efforts to develop a sense of the ancient period in cautious transatlantic accents, implicitly acknowledging that biblical characters didn't speak any variety of English but the British kind sounds older. The worst aspects of the film predictably involve the liberties taken with the source material, regardless of the sanctity of the texts or the impiety of the interpretation. A large portion of the film is CGI, devoted to animating the 'fallen angels', giant, spidery stone beings that actually seem like a direct rip-off of the Ents from 'The Fellowship of the Ring'. The intervention of crude stone giants might explain, for example, how Noah was capable of building an ark to house two of every living animal, but earthen nature is conspicuously absent from this barren film. Aronofsky should have chosen real settings and a historical take on the ancient story, leaving the element of divine intervention as a premonition, supposing the truth behind the myth might have been an ancient naturalist who weathered a flood, having been possessed to build a boat filled whatever animals he could save. That would have been a quiet, observant film, and not a biblically branded Hollywood spectacle with neither reverence for the myth nor the curiosity about its real origins. Aronofsky isn't Terrence Malick, and apparently success has licensed failure.

The multiple lives of individuals are traced across identities and eras. At least, they should have been. In most of the roles in Cloud Atlas, the casting of single actor in multiple roles was presumed to illustrate their connection, but the effect ranges from completely unnoticeable to completely ludicrous. I have not read the novel on which this was based, but the film plays as a collage or DJ mix of assorted bad movies. The editing feat is actually impressive because we don't have to commit to watching any of the bad movies in their entirety. The only story that holds together is in the roles of Jim Broadbent as a famous composer who wishes to steal the films eponymous piano concerto written by an amanuensis. In his subsequent life, Broadbent's character is a struggling publisher harried over payment for a document. There is no other clear analogy between the character's serial lives, and the filmmakers seem satisfied by the discontinuity, hiding actors in ridiculous makeup, representing awkward racial changes, and generally failing to tell the story they are following. It was not necessary to makeup inhabitants of the futuristic Seoul to 'look Asian'. It wasn't necessary for everyone in the post-apocalyptic future to speak like voodoo witch-doctors. I was sad to see these actors used up, choked for stupid accents, and prodded through roles that weren't so badly written as they were played under such incompetent theatrical direction. As an epic failure, this reminds me of Dune, but that wasn't David Lynch's fault. I don't blame Lana Wachowski for becoming a woman, but I might blame her for thinking that her actors identities were as mutable as her own. Honestly, I enjoyed the potential of this film enough to call its failure unforgivable, and it's a bad ad for an author who is worth consideration.

Stylistically like Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller ripping off LA Confidential, this halfheartedly resembles one of those 'crack team' capers, except with cops. The chief of police enlists a brave detective (Josh Brolin) to assemble of secret team of officers and surreptitiously take down powerful Los Angeles crime Boss Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn). The simple plot formula seems almost non-existent in its execution. Apparently, we are supposed to to believe that Cohen is an indomitable, omnipresent power, but the film does little to portray that, making the heroic and unlikely task undertaken by the film's namesake 'squad' seem neither particular heroic nor unlikely. We get the reluctant wife, embarrassing camaraderie among men, and moments when characters overcome doubt with statements like "Let's finish this!" Predictably, people die, and there is no intrigue to the confrontation, nothing to expect and nothing to surprise us.

At first, I thought that 'Breaking Bad' went wrong because the drama was played out over too many seasons. The premise of a high-school science teacher who becomes a meth cook had its dramatic elements, but was primarily comic due to the sheer unlikelihood of the situation. As the audience to a drama, we want to identify with the characters, and we can't sympathize with a protagonist who acts without reason. We did have sympathy for Walter White as a cancer patient in a last-ditch effort to leave money for his family. We wanted him to succeed as a meth chef, and we are only willing to consider his moral dilemmas to the extent that we excused his crimes. Breaking Bad should have placed its protagonist in juxtaposing situations involving drug users, like the season-one relationship between Walter and Jesse. The show should have been about Walt considering the effect of his actions and his interactions with people who use drugs. Instead, the writer thought to make a cinematic crime drama, not the episodic, serio-comic look at a teacher, a man in mid-life, and an apparently upright citizen coming to terms with his hypocrisy and accepting others. In season one, Walt has contempt for Jesse, and we hope that this tense relationship continually resolves itself in camaraderie. Instead, the partners in crime hate each other more, and the conflict makes for a ridiculous spectacle as the series lays waste the best aspect of its first season. VInce Gilligan began with 'The Sopranos' before helming this project, and it is easy to see how a plot about the criminal mind of a high school science teacher was derived from the plot about the average suburban life of a mobster. In the latter, we sympathize with a criminal because we see a vulnerable life behind the goombah violence. In Breaking Bad, we lose sympathy with a vulnerable character becoming an egomaniacal criminal and ruining lives. In the Soprano house, there were few household secrets, and no insufferable moments of vile anti-drama when an audience hates the protagonist. The writers here should have allowed Walt to keep his secret throughout the series, which might have ended when his wife found out. Indeed, the initial story wasn't played out long enough. I find it almost unfathomable that five seasons of a show about making drugs might elapse without the main character even considering to try some. At most, the show could have revealed that Walter was associating with odd individuals and possibly using drugs. The series could have portrayed Walt's teenage son in admiration of Walt's young friends, or a wife who disapproved but was led toward consideration. A plausible familial drama would have been one in which a wife disapproves of her husband in a midlife crisis, condescending to youth. If that led to a divorce, the writers could have created ancillary drama about marriage and children. Anna Gunn would have played an estranged wife, not be wasted in the role of a domestic hostage. She fears for her children's safety, totally despises her husband, but never reports him to the police despite having every reason and opportunity to do so. One wishes that Bryan Cranston had found his character as insufferable as it became. This show was ruined by its early notoriety, and a writer encouraged to take himself too seriously. This is still TV, and the novel idea that Breaking Bad was TV art licensed the stupidity and boring suspense that ensued.

Why doesn't this film scratch the surface? We never learn much about Morris the politician outside of campaign offices, and the sidelines at a few events leading up to a primary: we don't know what kind of politician he is even *supposed* to be, and we don't know what the Gosling's idealistic campaign manager really believes in. Clooney appears to have been content to rely on recent events to develop the character of an Obama-like liberal rather than to develop the story of a career both on the verge and in jeopardy, and it isn't much of an emotional letdown for us when we learn the truth about Morris. The story does well with the machinations in and between campaign offices, with good performances by Gosling, Giamatti, and Seymour-Hoffman, but there is not much in the way of political reality here.