The Lego Batman Movie

Alternate Title:  The Hero we Need

                                                                                                                                                            

One sentence synopsis:   Batman struggles with attachment issues relating to adopted-orphan Robin, newly-minted police commissioner Barbara Gordon, and long-suffering Alfred, even as the Joker plans to unleash a horde of the worst evildoers in all of fiction.

Things Havoc liked: Of all the staggering surprises I have experienced in my years of watching movies for this project, very very few have been as astonishing to me as 2014's Lego Movie, a film that seemed like it was to be the children's version of Battleship, and turned instead into the best film of 2014. The reasons it did this were complicated, and likely best summarized by reading the review in question, but foremost among the qualities that movie presented were its sense of infinite wonder, its frenetic pace, and its complete and utter disregard for things like canon and continuity.

So how fares its sequel? Well... two out of three ain't bad, folks.

The Lego Batman movie is a very good film, bordering on an excellent one, a film that is directly in the vein of its predecessor with a similar sense of irreverent insanity and disregard for the super-serious canon that Batman, and other such superhero properties, have built up for themselves. Replete with in-jokes, references, and ballistic-grade visual gags, the movie is energetic, off-the-wall, and a lot of fun, simultaneously the most and least loyal film ever made to the tremendous backlog of Batman's history. I wasn't sure, going in, how in the world you could possibly follow up on something as... strange... as the Lego Movie, but this is hardly the worst idea that they could have come up with. Well done.

The list of voice actors that populate The Lego Batman is long enough to serve as its own review, so suffice to say that the film involves Batman's (Will Arnett) first encounters with such series staples as Dick Grayson (Michael Cera) and Barbara Gordon (Rosario Dawsom), who in this film are portrayed respectively as a heartwarming orphan in the traditional sense of the term, and an analytics-based police officer who intends to put Batman out of business through the novel approach of actually doing policework. This Batman, who is both entirely the same and completely divorced from the previous incarnation of the character, is intended to be a send-up to the character, a meat-headed dude-bro obsessed with his dead parents and with how effortlessly awesome he is, whose reaction to change is uniformly negative, and whose comfort level beyond the confines of his cowl and batcave is nonexistent. Lest this sound like another recap of Batman v. Superman however, the character is played explicitly for laughs, a ludicrous man-child of undeniable skill whose password in the Batcave is "Iron Man Sucks", and whose butler, Alfred (Ralph Fiennes), reminds him periodically of the last few times he entered a brooding phase (the dates of every other Batman movie ever made, as well as the Adam West Batman TV episode where he danced the Batusi).

Yeah, in case it wasn't clear, this is a movie that doesn't take itself overly seriously, and given the propensity for comic book films, particularly DC/Batman-related comic book films to do just that in the last decade, the result is a welcome change away from the "SERIOUS BUSINESS!" style that every other Batman property has had, to varying effect, since Joel Schumacher gave it up. Early on in the movie, Batman simultaneously defeats his entire rogue's gallery at once, all while singing (and occasionally performing a guitar solo) about how incredibly awesome he is, because he's Batman. That's not to say that there's no heart to the story, certainly, just that the movie accepts that we all know how badass Batman is, and wishes to tell something else about him, something not seen in proper Batman media outside of fan comics. Along with this comes The Lego Movie's wanton disregard for the boundaries of licensing and canon, as Joker, in his quixotic quest to get Batman to admit that he hates him most of all (this is exactly as ridiculous as you think), eventually comes by the services of such luminaries as Sauron, Agent Smith, Voldemort, Godzilla, The Wicked Witch of the West, and the Daleks, not as cameos, but as actual elements of the plot and story. This tendency by the Lego Movie series (recall that the last movie had Batman beating up Han Solo so as to steal a vital component for his impending rescue of the 2002 Los Angeles Lakers) has always been one of the great uses of a master-license in modern filmmaking, and it's refreshing to see it all over again, even if they inexplicably miss an opportunity to have Fiennes reprise his voice-role for Voldemort. Even when not literally robbing the stables of other great properties, the film uses visual gags and even voicework ones to send-up largely every superhero convention in existence, from the Bane and Mr. Freeze voices clearly pasticheing their most famous portrayers, to the Justice League "forgetting" to invite Batman to their anniversary party at the Fortress of Solitude because he's such a misanthropic douche. What's not to love?

Things Havoc disliked: As with any sequel, the question must arise as to whether The Lego Batman Movie is as good as The Lego Movie was, and no, it is not. The reason for this isn't just because The Lego Movie caught lightning in a bottle and that this film cannot possibly replicate the astounding surprise that was its predecessor, though of course there is that. It also has to do with the fact that The Lego Movie's scale and breadth of imagination was satisfyingly vast, with settings and characters stolen from fantasy films, crime dramas, space operas, sports teams, internet memes, Adult Swim cartoons, and the works of Leonardo da Vinci and Aristophanes, all tied together with an intensely humanizing meta-story about the nature of imagination and wonder. The Lego Batman movie does not contain those things, content instead to tell a fairly conventional Batman story, albeit one that is both well-crafted, and unlikely to be seen outside the bounds of imgur or Fanfiction.net. Beyond the fact that vast numbers of villains from other properties exist and are thrown into the story, there is really no hint of the wider Lego Metaverse that the first movie established, and the whole concept of Master Builders or the assembly of ridiculous contraptions out of the ubiquitous Lego bricks is either absent entirely, or surfaces just for a second here and there throughout the movie. There's nothing wrong with that per se, as the film's predecessor more or less said everything that needed to be said on that subject, but it does leave the film feeling much more restricted than The Lego Movie itself did. That puts it in good company with 99% of movies made, of course, but it also makes the inevitable comparisons all the more obvious. The Lego Batman movie is a very good Batman film. The Lego Movie itself was a masterpiece.

Final thoughts:   But at the same time, I have never, ever allowed myself to fall into the trap of disliking a film simply for not being another film, and a very good Batman movie is quite a thing in and of itself, particularly one that is so radically different from all the previous Batman movies we have experienced. As such, my recommendation is that people leave the previous film entirely out of their calculations when deciding whether or not to see this one, and simply try to see the movie as its own thing, an extremely-funny send-up to the conventions and tropes of the Batman franchise and legacy. It may not be a stone classic the way that the first one was, but it is a fine, well-crafted, and highly-entertaining film. And if that's not good enough for you, then you either see way too many movies, or none at all.

Final Score:  7.5/10

Next Time:  Whoa...

The General's Post Winter Roundup

And now, one last note from The General

2016 has been a brutal year for my schedule, hence all these roundup posts that you have been seeing instead of more in-depth reviews as per usual. The reasons for this are many and varied, but the base fact is that, at this stage, I've been behind on my reviews for something like ten months. It's time to finally put a close to all of that by catching up once and for all. Here we go.

The General's Post Winter Roundup

Moana

Alternate Title:  Insert Rock Pun Here

One sentence synopsis:    The daughter of a Polynesian chief sets out to find the legendary demigod Maui, and to stop the evil force that is sucking the life from her island home.

The Verdict: Let's talk about Disney.

It's no secret that Disney's been on a tear recently, what with animated movies like Frozen, Big Hero 6, and Zootopia (to say nothing of the work of their subsidiaries: Pixar, Lucas, and Marvel). It's consequently also no secret that I've started looking forward to a new Disney film with more than average anticipation, particularly given the general quality of films this year. Add in The Rock, whom I'm always happy to see, and this one looked like a film not to be missed.

Based around a polyglot version of Polynesian mythology, Moana is the story of a Disney Princess, in this case the titular Moana, daughter of an island chief who dreams (as most Disney princesses do) of the the typical "more", in this case of becoming a legendary "wayfinder", a navigator who seeks for new islands across the breadth of the South Pacific. Propelled into leaving her home-island in search of a remedy for a terrible curse that has settled over it, she meets with demigod Maui, (a figure revered all across Polynesia as a sort of semi-divine culture hero), who very reluctantly joins her quest to destroy the evil forces that have brought scarcity and dearth to her island. Along the way, there are ludicrous, over the top villains, thrilling action scenes, gorgeous animation, a bunch of rousing songs, and an animal sidekick thrown in for comic relief.

So yeah, pretty much par for the course for a standard Disney film. But Moana pulls most of this off well, particularly the visuals, which are staggeringly gorgeous, with a rich, deep color palate and the latest and greatest computer-animated effects for water, storms, and sand. Though Disney's animation style is fully intact, with crisp visuals and well-drawn characters, certain elements branch out into a (fittingly) more Polynesian art style, particularly the animated tattoos that adorn Maui's body describing his exploits. The voice acting, from The Rock, from Flight of the Conchords' Jemaine Clement, and from newcomer Auli'i Cravalho, is excellent across the board, with particular honors going to Clement, who plays a gigantic jewel-obsessed crab in the best tradition of Tim Curry in Fern Gully. Action, and there is plenty of it, is high-speed and clearly shot, incorporating everything from Eroll-Flynn-style swashbucking scenes to Hakka war dances performed by warriors confronting evil volcano gods. All told, the movie has everything you would expect to see from a concept like "Disney does the South Pacific", including Alan Tudyk as the world's stupidest chicken, and messages about following your dreams.

So is Moana a triumph on the level of Frozen or The Lion King? Not really. For one thing, the songs themselves, an important element in any kind of Disney film are pretty undistinguished. We've got the grand sweeping "I Want Moooooooore" style ballad, the fun "I'm a Whimsical Character who is Kooky and Weird" pop number, all the standard stuff, and while all of the songs are perfectly workable, there's nothing here to compete with the great Disney animated songs of yesteryear, from Let it Go to Tale as Old as Time to Be Prepared. And speaking of Be Prepared, the one major song archetype the film lacks is a good Villain Song, that time-honored Disney tradition that has given us their best work. Part of the reason for that is that the villain in Moana is a complete cypher, a roaring volcano-god of raw destruction with no personality beyond looking scary and wanting to kill, and while there are plot reasons for this lack of sophistication, it still hurts both the narrative and the song-selection, as we get no opportunity for a great Villain piece along the lines of Hellfire or Poor Unfortunate Souls. Granted, it's not exactly fair to criticize Moana for not being just like another movie, but Disney is a formula studio, and in everything but this, they adhere quite closely to the standard Disney formula. It's good, don't get me wrong, but lacks that key moment that would push the film over the top, either through innovation, or through perfect execution. The pacing is generally undistinguished, with too much downtime between moments of excitement, and there's a certain lack of ambition involved in a film that spends most of its time on a small boat in the middle of the ocean making (admittedly pretty funny) references to Mad Max movies as opposed to giving us a more cohesive world, the way some of the best Disney films have.

Moana is a good film, well-executed and with a trembling eye towards the masses of people who were waiting to accuse Disney of cultural appropriation if they slipped up (some of whom did so anyway, because they are stupid). But it is not a masterpiece in the vein of Disney's last three or four attempts. Unoffensive and entertaining enough, it's a fine movie to go see for a weekend trip to the multiplex, but I do not expect to find people humming its songs to themselves while walking down the street six months from now. Then again, a good film is no slur to anyone's reputation, not even modern-day Disney. And if this is the worst film Disney put out this year (and it is), then that's a hell of an achievement by itself.

Final Score:  7/10

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Allied

Alternate Title:  Pittfalls

One sentence synopsis:   A Canadian SOE operative and a French Resistance fighter fall in love and marry, only for her to be accused of being a Nazi spy.

\The Verdict:  Brad Pitt is a gorgeous man, somehow more handsome at the age of 53 than he was twenty-five years ago (I stand by this), but he's not a very good actor and has never been one. Oh there's been plenty of movies in which he elevated himself, 2014's Fury for one, but overall he's usually just a pretty face with a narrow range of emotions who is there to look good and eat food on camera. More than one film has been salvaged by casting Pitt opposite someone who COULD act, be it Tom Cruise in Interview with the Vampire, David Thewlis and B.D. Wong in Seven Years in Tibet, or everyone the Coen Brothers ever met in Burn After Reading. This time, in Allied, a period war drama about resistance fighters, spies, and double-crossings, the filmmakers thoughtfully gave us French actress Marion Cotillard to play the part of the real actor in the movie, a part she is indisputably qualified for. She plays Marianne, a French Resistance fighter who has escaped to Casablanca and who meets up with Pitt's Max Valan to assassinate a German General and escape back to London. Cotillard was born to make movies like this, rich period pieces in the style of Casablanca itself, showcasing the danger, excitement, and glamorous locations of the more espionage-laden sides of WWII. She's so good in the movie, that she almost excuses the fact that Pitt is not, as his typical stone-faced approach re-asserts itself, leading us as the audience to, almost impossibly, wonder what someone would see in one of the most gorgeous men alive. Such is Cotillard's performance that we almost buy the absurd twists that the plot deploys against her, and she almost singlehandedly makes the film work.

Almost.

Allied, frankly, is not a very good movie, and the reason it's not a very good movie is because it sticks way too close to formula. Director Robert Zemeckis is, of course, an excellent filmmaker, but his strengths have always been movies that stretch the imagination a bit, whose stories are weird and quirky and offbeat, such as in Back to the Future or Death Becomes Her or last year's The Walk. When he tries to make a formula picture, especially one he hasn't written, the result looks an awful lot like this, mediocre films like Cast Away or What Lies Beneath, movies that are serviceable entries in their genres, but not destined to be remembered as anything special. The movie boasts stellar cinematography, but the war-scenes are almost pro-forma exercises in obligatory violence which happen and are then over, the better to advance a plot that, while decently original, is rendered entirely uninteresting by Brad Pitt's inability to emote anything beyond self-satisfaction and blank-faced stoicism. For all the criticism I've heaped upon him in this review, Pitt can act when he wants to, I've seen it happen, but he chooses this film to morph back into his cypher from Tree of Life, which is the death knell to sweeping romantic dramas like this one. The pace is agonizingly slow, even with massive time-jumps to bring us periodically through the war, and the lack of anything interesting happening allowed my historian's mind to wander through the absurd contrivances that the film employs for its historical veracity, such as having British citizens wandering outside during a Blitz raid, setting undercover spy missions in cities months after they were historically liberated from the Nazis, and employing an ending that left me baffled as to just what the plans of all those concerned were. I know that people get tired of me complaining about historical details in every movie set before 2010, but with acting this wooden from one of our leads and a plot that lends itself to soap-opera "twists", there was little else for me to do for large chunks of its runtime.

I've certainly seen worse films than Allied, even ones starring Brad Pitt, but for all the pretensions Allied makes of being an Old-Hollywood-style epic romance, it lands with an audible 'thud', doomed by a bad performance, overdirection, and a lack of crispness to any elements of plot or story. Those with souls more romantic than mine may well find a way to let Allied sweep them away into a realm of danger and romance, but for me, the fundamental lack of anything interesting going on dooms the film to the ranks of those I shall likely not be remembering at all.

Final Score:  5/10

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Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Alternate Title:  Make Magical America Great Again

One sentence synopsis:    A magical wildlife researcher whose specimens break loose in 1920s New York becomes embroiled in a conspiracy involving murder and monsters in the American Magical establishment.

The Verdict:  I was always kind of ambivalent on the Harry Potter films, a series based on books that I loved, but whose film adaptations... varied, shall we say, in quality. There was nothing globally wrong with them or their casts, but my interest waned after a while, and I skipped the last couple altogether, split as they were into two films for mercenary reasons. With the prospect of a reboot (sort of), however, one starring actors I admire and un-anchored to any textual source, I actually re-discovered a bit of excitement for the Potterverse, and found that I was interested in seeing what they had to show me. And so, now having seen Fantastic Beasts and processed it thoroughly, a single thought occurs to me.

These movies are fucking dark.

There's always been a strong anti-authoritarian streak to Harry Potter, no doubt the product of its author, what with children (or other marginal figures) being revealed as possessing simple wisdom, while almost all authority figures are revealed as being shallow-minded, bureaucratic incompetents at best, and outright genocidal bigots at worst, with the former often being transformed into the latter once you get to know more about them. Fantastic Beasts continues that trend to such a degree that I would be tempted to complain about an Anti-American bias if it weren't for the fact that the series has always been just as merciless with everyone else. The Magical Government of the United States may look glittering and inclusive, with Art Deco-styled magical buildings, fedora-and-longcoat-wearing Aurors, and a black, female President whose stylings look like those of a flapper crossed with Cleopatra, but beneath the surface it is a gang of brutal, anti-miscegenation (forget 'mudblood' prejudice, American Wizards are forbidden under pain of death to marry or have children with mundanes), blinkered reactionaries, arrogant, contemptuous, and stupid, who primarily exist to throw obstacles, lethal or otherwise, in the way of our plucky heroes trying desperately to save the day. This is a film where anyone competent is evil, and anyone incompetent is merely antagonistic, and while that's fine, generally speaking, it does result in a rather unavoidable tonal clash when the rest of the film is trying to be an enchanted adventure of whimsy and wonder.

Another thought that occurred to me as I watched this film was that it appears to be a good year for autistic heroes, as first The Accountant and now this film have showcased leading characters that are... shall we say... neuroatypical? Our lead here is Newt Scamander, previously a background character in the wider Harry Potter universe, portrayed here by Eddie Redmayne as either a high-functioning autist or simply the most awkward British introvert alive (it can be difficult to distinguish the two). Honestly, Redmayne is excellent in the role, a committed magical-zoologist with little interest or time in anything else, who has no idea how to interface with most people beyond a veneer of officious British charm, and no particular interest in learning. I suspect most British actors are born with the ability to exhibit charming befuddledness on command, but Redmayne nevertheless goes above and beyond, delivering a performance that's surprisingly nuanced and warm, despite the requirements of the role, even when the Oscar-winning actor is called upon to perform an elaborate mating dance for a creature that appears to be a cross between a rhinocerous and a stag beetle. Behold, the dignity of acting.

Would that the rest of the movie were as good as Redmayne is, but sadly it is not. Comedian Dan Fogler and Alison Sudol turn in serviceable roles, the former as a Nomaj (No-Magic, or Muggle in Brit-speak) cannery worker who gets caught up in the magical madness against his will, the latter as an airheaded Legilimens (mind-reader) with a big heart. Newcomer Katherine Waterston, playing leading lady Tina Goldstein, an ex-auror trying to solve the case, does not. Her character is supposed to be a no-nonsense gumshoe battling for what's right despite the orders from on-high, but she plays the character like a wide-eyed innocent, constantly bursting in on important meetings of the magical congress (called MACUSA for short) before forgetting what she was going to say. The character never gels properly, which unfortunately makes her look rather stupid, a quality I do not admire among my plucky protagonists. Colin Farrel, meanwhile, takes the villainous role of Percival Graves, and he's fine... at least by comparison to your typical Colin Farrel role. His character, ultimately, is nothing more than a teaser for other movies to come, though how this is accomplished is obviously something I shall not be describing here. The rest of the plot, which involves among other things a group of neo-Salemite witch-burners, child abuse, a newspaper magnate played by Jon Voight, and his son, a normal, non-magical Senator, is confusing and belabored, with Deus Ex Machinas liberally strewn throughout for whenever the writers get themselves in trouble and have no idea how to resolve things. It's nothing horrific, and it doesn't rob the film of all of its charm, but it takes a big enough bite out to be noticeable.

Ultimately, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is a decent enough film, one that has enough imagination, whimsy, and hammer-handed political allegory to satisfy any die-hard Harry Potter fan. But I doubt seriously it's going to convert too many fence-riders to jump one way or the other, especially not given some of the promises it makes regarding the sequels to come... but then that would be telling ;)

Final Score:  6/10

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Manchester by the Sea

Alternate Title:  Broken People Living Marginal Lives

One sentence synopsis:   A janitor moves home to the New England town he grew up in after his brother dies, and finds he must take care of his now-teenage nephew.

The Verdict:  Oh goody, another movie with universal critical acclaim! Surely this won't turn out to be an epochal disaster like Leviathan, Under the Skin, The Railway Man, White God, or Elysium!

One of the (few) bright spots at the movies this year was February's underrated crime flick Triple 9, a movie that aspired to be a modern-day version of the classic 1995 Michael Mann thriller Heat, and came closer than I, for one, thought it had any chance of. Triple 9 had a bunch of very good actors in it, including Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kate Winslet, Anthony Mackie, Michael K. Williams, and the reason we're here today, a fine actor whom I've been following for several years now, Casey Affleck, younger brother of Ben. Far from being a hanger-on riding the coattails of his more famous brother, Casey has spent the last decade or two proving that, if anything, he is the more talented of the two (at least when it comes to acting), in a host of recent movies including Out of the Furnace, Gone Baby Gone, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Affleck's signature has long been playing quiet men on the edge of a psychotic break, and thus we come to his character here, a janitor.

Somewhere in the less scenic parts of New England, Lee Chandler (Affleck) works as a custodian for an apartment complex, living alone with his beer and guilt following horrific events which destroyed his life, marriage, and family. Summoned back to his old hometown of Manchester-by-the-Sea (Title call!) by the death of his brother (King Kong and Argo's Kyle Chandler), he discovers that he's been named the custodian of his sixteen-year-old nephew Patrick (Lucas Hedges), and must now uproot his life to deal with the thousand-and-one things that must happen when a loved one dies, arranging a funeral, reading the will, settling probate, etc, while also somehow figuring out how to take care of a sixteen year old whose father is dead and whose mother is a recovering drug addict uninvolved in her son's life.

And that's... really all there is to Manchester by the Sea, a quiet movie about damaged people living out their lives that is almost militantly non-histrionic. Apart from the occasional snap of bar-and-beer-induced violence, nothing really "happens" in the film, no formulas, no character arcs, no dramatic speeches or fights in crashing thunderstorms (I'm looking at you, The Judge). Affleck plays the movie very close to the chest, walking through the film as though in a daze, a man whose fires for life burned out a long time ago and will not be rekindled by any Disney-esque magic of last-second reconciliation or forgiveness. Hedges, meanwhile, plays a very adult sort of teenager, who deals with his father's death by not dealing with it, by and large, continuing his life with his friends, multiple girlfriends, sports and school while only occasionally giving into the emotions that the sudden loss of his father are generating. The movie goes so far out of its way to avoid histrionics or any form of formula that it quite perversely begins to feel incredibly depressing and dour, as if the filmmakers thought Biutiful was a good movie, but needed more charmlessness and depression. It's a skilled production, drawing emotional resonance from minimalist performances and eschewing all of the conventional story beats we might expect with a film like this, but goddamn is it a downer. Not that I have anything against non-saccharine movies, but the relentless mundanity of these broken people's lives as they manage to cobble themselves together and continue on with their empty existences is not an experience I recommend for those looking to be taken away from their problems for a couple of hours at the movies.

Manchester by the Sea is one of those films whose quality is entirely divorced from my enjoyment of it, a well made film that I have absolutely no need to see again. Darling of the critical circuit as it has quickly become, it may well generate the Palme d'Or's and Golden Globes and other such awards it was obviously created to generate, but it has little to offer anyone who isn't an admirer of the technical qualities of filmmaking. And though I do indeed admire both it and Affleck for their evident skills in piecing a defiantly non-traditional movie like this one together at all, the film experience is simply not one I'm in any hurry to repeat.

Final Score:  6.5/10

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Rogue One:  A Star Wars Story

Alternate Title:  Sound and Fury

One sentence synopsis:   The daughter of the designer of the Death Star joins a high-risk rebel operation to locate him and stop the Empire from bringing the station online.

The Verdict:  *Sigh*

...

...

...

...

No, I'm sorry guys, I can't do it.

I love Star Wars. Everyone loves Star Wars for god's sake, and I love it right along side them. I love the originals, I love the games, the RPGs, the new Disney series and the fun that is to be had therewith. Forty years on and with countless imitators in its wake, and it's still the only science-fantasy franchise that's worth a damn, one that covers every style and every genre of storytelling from noir to high fantasy to space opera to classical tragedy across the board. I can even say some good things about the Prequels if you force me to. So of course, I went to see Rogue One, with high expectations. And of course in some regards those expectations were met. But... no, I just can't geek out over this one the way I really want to because the base fact is that the movie isn't very good.

Look, I see why everyone loves it. I'm not stupid. It has wonderful spectacle to it, something Star Wars even at its nadir has usually done quite well. The film takes place on half a dozen different wlldly-different planets, each with its own lush and rich cinematographic possibilities to offer, from a stony-desert world that looked chiselled out of Monument Valley, to a rainy riot of buttresses and adamantine cliffs, to a tropical paradise-world-turned military installation whose shot inspirations seem drawn from WWII's Pacific Front (and which was apparently filmed in the Maldive Islands). Certain shots come straight out of an epic war or fantasy movie, such as that of AT-AT walkers laboriously advancing through the dust and smoke of a battlefield, toppling palm trees as they crash through their cover. In a world where everything is shot either in the stark Bruckheimer/Bay contrasts of Blue-and-Orange, or in washed out, dust-impregnated brown, this film gives us vibrant colors and gorgeous setpieces to go with the lived-in feel that Star Wars has always excelled in. Battles, and there are several, are spectacular affairs, combined-arms showcases of space and air and land all rolled into one, to say nothing of a truly epic rendition of just what happens when a Death Star is used... sparingly. Die-hard aficionados of the originals will find piles of easter eggs, references, in-jokes, and subtle (and less subtle) callbacks to the original series, enough to keep the internet spinning for years, and all of this wrapped up in a story that is much more adult in feel than the movies of yesteryear, filled with rebels who not only shoot first but actively feel like the terrorists that they must be, in actuality, all without sacrificing the essential good-vs-evil dynamic that the Star Wars films are cored around.

So what's missing? character.

Rogue One is a movie with an enormous, almost labyrinthine plot, involving multiple rebel groups and cells, political maneuvering on several levels, reunions, betrayals, battle plans and lengthy engagements, and to its credit it handles all of those things quite well, even when it has to spend the first ten minutes of the film establishing about half a dozen different planets that we will eventually be visiting. The problem isn't the plot, it's that it has to do all of those things while also establishing nine different major characters, none of whom we know anything about going in (save for those who have been watching the cartoon series), all in a runtime of less than two-and-a-quarter hours. It's not that the movie fails in its attempts to characterize these people, it's that characterizing that many people and that much plot in that short a run-time is impossible. As such, we get the briefest introduction to each character before plunging them into another battle or plot point, with the predictable effect that almost all of them are complete cyphers, robbing the film of the emotional core that the best Star Wars movies have. As always, a lack of characterization throws the job of generating interest onto the actors themselves, who accomplish their impossible task to varying degrees of effectiveness.

Veteran character actor Ben Mendelsohn, of whom I have always been a great fan, pulls it off, playing Death Star project director Orson Krennic as a driven man who's life's work is finally approaching fruition and who is stymied on all sides by incompetence, political underhandedness, and the rebels (in that order), who does not understand why things can never go smoothly, and why the disasters that befall his pet project must continuously happen to him. Nightcrawler-alum Riz Ahmed pulls it off as well, playing a defecting Imperial pilot caught up in the larger chaos of the war between Empire and Rebellion, a man trying to do the right thing unable to understand what is happening around him. Mads Mikkelsen, Diego Luna, and Chinese director Jiang Wen all also manage to pull at least something out of their characters, respectively a broken man struggling to redeem a lifetime of failure and deception, a committed rebel terrorist attempting to ensure that the horrors he has perpetrated have meaning, and a stoic badass with a gigantic machinegun (this is Star Wars), as does Alan Tudyk, as the voice of the comic-relief droid, a world-weary cynic who does what he must. But unfortunately, one who does not pull it off is Felicity Jones, star of the movie, whose character of Jyn Erso has no character whatsoever, a plot device at best who goes along with the flow of the movie until it's time for the script-demanded "big rousing speech" that the movie has entirely failed to earn. Forest Whitaker, meanwhile, tries to escape into weirdness, playing a gasping, throaty lunatic of a rebel fighter. One is reminded, with this character, of Episode III's General Grevious, a villain that popped up out of nowhere to command a central role that had not been established, due to the character having been first created in one of the TV shows. Leaving aside the question of this sort of practice, the character is a complete non-entity, who plays no role but exposition before being summarily dumped in favor of more plot.

Rogue One is not a terrible movie, nor a bad one, but in defiance of all those saying otherwise, it is my solemn duty to report that it is a fairly mediocre one, certainly not a disaster on the scale of the Prequels, but nowhere near the equal of the originals, nor of last year's Episode VII. It is, to me at least, proof positive that Star Wars' strengths, particularly in the modern day, do not rely solely on Empty Spectacle, as some overly-serious critics might imply. Here, after all, is a movie that is largely nothing except Empty Spectacle, and it does not equal the warmth and glory of the predecessors, not even with a bevy of decent-to-good actors at its service.

But then, surely the Prequels already told us that much.

Final Score:  5.5/10

o-o-o-o-o

La La Land

Alternate Title:  Streetlight People

One sentence synopsis:   An aspiring actress and a frustrated jazz piano player find love and follow their dreams in Los Angeles.

The Verdict:  I feel like I've done you guys a disservice this year. I'm not talking about the irregular schedule I've had, for that was unavoidable given my other commitments. I'm talking instead about my selection of movies for 2016. All year I've been beating the drum of the fact that 2016's movies have been godawful, on average and in summation, and it's true that if you look over the reviews I've laid down this year, that's certainly reflected in the score. However, it wasn't until a number of other critics started releasing their year-end best lists (mine are coming, don't worry), that I began to realize that what was wrong with this year might not have been the movies, but my taste in them. Most of the films people were citing as the best of the year, movies like The Handmaiden, The Nice Guys, or Neon Demons, were movies that I had, for one reason or another, decided to skip in favor of more mainstream fare, which turned out, generally speaking, to be utter crap. I pick the movies I'm going to see based on purely arbitrary readings of trailers and my own mood, but it's true that after the disaster that was 2015's Indie cinema (Leviathan, anyone?), I turned back to Hollywood's mainstream offerings, in the hope that I would not be subjected to a movie as bad as any of those I saw in 2015.

Well that didn't quite work the way I had anticipated, as the rest of my reviews from this year can tell you. But as a final parting gift from 2016, I decided to do something about this unpleasant trend from the year now fondly departed. And so, bypassing more mainstream movies like Passengers and Collateral Beauty (the vibes of which were becoming quite toxic), I decided to go see a classic-style musical starring a sexy, sexy man.

Which sexy man? Why, Ryan Gosling, of course, who stars in La La Land as a jazz pianist struggling to follow his dream of opening a classic jazz nightclub somewhere in Los Angeles, while dating the equally adorable Emma Stone, who is that most common of all Los Angelenos, an aspiring actress. I could tell you more about their particular characters, but honestly, they're not really playing characters as much as they're playing the ur-representations of Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, two movie stars caught up in a glorious musical ode to love and life and dreams and the quest for all three, and god damn are they good at it. Granted, Gosling is not much of a singer, but in all other respects the two of them are just radiant, playing modern day incarnations of the featherweight characters that used to be portrayed by people like Gene Kelly and Judy Garland and Fred Astaire. Stone even tries her hand at tap dancing. And given that this is Ryan Gosling, who as I mentioned before is a sexy, sexy man, and Emma Stone, one of the most effortlessly charming actresses working today (and who is also possessed of some of the most gorgeous eyes I've ever seen), the result is a wonderful little movie, thin on plot (though perhaps not quite thin enough) and long on song and dance and heartwarming, occasionally bittersweet, modern fantasy. The musical numbers range from old-style dance escapades that would not be out of place in a Ginger Rogers movie, to more modern ensemble pieces, including a wonderful opening sequence set, of all places, in the middle of rush hour traffic on a highway. It rambles from big band ensembles to jazz numbers to marching-band-and-samba pieces with cameos by John Legend and J.K. Simmons. It's a wonderful movie, in the sense of being full of wonderous things. I enjoyed it more than I have most anything else this year.

La La Land isn't perfect of course, the middle section drags fairly heavily, due to the baffling decision to drop the music for a while and focus on a fairly formulaic plot, but it scarcely matters when dealing with a movie like this. La La Land is a charming movie in every sense, one that is the perfect way to see out the calendar year of 2016, and usher in a year full of, hopefully, better things.

Final Score:  7.5/10

Next Time:  We begin the January cleanup of last year's Oscar season with a stage-to-screen adaptation starring two of my favorite actors.

Kubo and the Two Strings

Alternate Title:  The Cold Facts

                                                                                                                                                            

One sentence synopsis:   A young boy with powerful origami magic sets out to retrieve the magical artifacts that will enable him to defeat his grandfather, the Moon King.


Things Havoc liked: Laika Studios is an interesting anachronism in Hollywood today, a stop motion animated film studio founded by Nike chairman Phil Knight, whose specialty is the sorts of children's' movies that have never really existed beyond early 70s Christmas specials and big budget epics from the mid-1930s. Beginning with Coraline in 2009, Laika has carved quite a nice little niche for itself in the realm of studio animation dominated by giants like Pixar-Disney, and Dreamworks. The last film of theirs that I saw was 2012's Paranorman, a very good movie that showed a lot of promise, and following one or two short or lesser-reviewed films, they have returned four years later with a movie that got so much hype, I was frankly worried.

Set in mythological Japan, Kubo and the two strings is a fairly standard hero's journey tale with a style that is entirely non-standard, a stop-motion and practical-effect-laden aesthetic that is simply gobsmacking in its richness and style. Animation can do wonders, this we would all know even if we weren't smack in the middle of the Third Golden Age of Disney, but Laika's greatest strength has always been the way that their laborious, hand-crafted art style and stop motion design produces a truly unique effect on-screen, and Kubo may be their magnum opus insofar as such things are concerned. Every frame of the film is drenched in art, from the earthy sequences of Kubo's local village, to the truly fantastical designs of his aunts, or of the strange and horrible creatures that inhabit the world. How Laika contrived to produce all of this, I have no earthly idea, only that the labor must have been immense,and the result is apparent to all. Whatever faults it may have, Kubo is a gorgeous film, and those who go simply to drink in its richness will not be wasting their time.

It's always hard to criticize a movie that tells a simple tale, as this one does, because the sheer familiarity of a story is not a flaw, especially not in a children's movie, whose target audience will not be as jaded by a hundred thousand retellings of Joseph Campbell. In this case Kubo, a boy with the power to animate origami paper and produce living, moving figurines, lives with his mother by the sea and works as a storyteller in the local village, before the hero's journey inevitably whisks him away. This is the kind of simple story that is used as an excuse to provide other delights, such as visuals or memorable setpieces, one where the stakes and the direction are fairly obvious, and yet that's no slur. Pursued by a group of evil spirits, tasked with retrieving the magical artifacts once wielded by his warrior-father, protected by a group of magical creatures including a Japanese macaque with a distinctly martial bent, and a larger-than-man-sized beetle, it is a story of adventure and danger and family and lessons learned. Kubo himself, voiced by Art Parkinson (Game of Thrones' Rickon Stark), is a perfectly compelling protagonist, brave and kind and sly in his own way, and the movie's recurring theme of metaf-iction, drawn out through Kubo's own profession telling stories with inanimate objects brought to life, complements the main plot perfectly. The rest of the voice cast is provided by other stalwarts, including Charlize Theron, whose role as a swordfighting monkey is actually fairly badass for a G-rated kids movie, while the ever-reliable Ralph Fiennes gets to play an evil god (again). Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa , Rooney Mara, and George Takei also lend their voices to more minor roles, all doing a fine job. For those interested in nothing more than a quality children's film, Kubo has everything you are looking for.

Things Havoc disliked: I really hate to do this.

People accuse me on occasion of being contrary, of hating movies simply because they are popular, and while I won't deny that there is definitely a correlation between a movie receiving universal critical acclaim, and said movie being a piece of crap, I do not go out of my way to bash movies that are popular just to be different. I want movies to be good, that's why I do this in the first place, and when a movie comes out with a 96% score on Rotten Tomatoes, I still expect, despite the Leviathans and Under the Skins and Beasts of the Southern Wild, that I'm going to get something special from seeing it. And if I don't, then I am not going to sit here and blow smoke at everyone just to pretend that I have some kind of non-existent credibility. And so it is in the interests of honesty for my readers and myself that I report that there are two major problems with Kubo and the Two Strings. One of these problems is survivable. One of them is not.

The first problem is Matthew McConaughey. Anyone who's spent any time reading my reviews knows how big a fan I am of McConaughey ever since he stopped playing vapid action leads, but here he's a voice actor, and voice acting is not the same thing as regular acting and never will be. It's not that McConaughey is awful, it's that his voice, his cadence, his vocal presence is so strong that it knocks you right out of the movie you're watching. Some actors, no matter how good they are, have such a strong persona as actors that it's entirely impossible to picture them as anyone else once you hear their voice. Asking McConaughey to play a Samurai warrior (who is also a giant beetle), while giving him the sorts of snarky lines that he would get in a traditional McConaughey movie, and then expecting the audience to see anything but Matthew McConaughey wandering onto the set of a Japanese children's show, is like asking people to hear Nicholas Cage or Joe Pesci or Tommy Lee Jones and not instantly think of the iconography around Nicholas Cage, Joe Pesci, or Tommy Lee Jones. McConaughey is flat-out distracting, there's no other way to put it, and while that's certainly something that probably afflicts adults more than children, even absent the baggage, the introduction of McConaughey as McConaughey is totally anachronistic to the fantastical magical world that the filmmakers have laboriously created. The effect is rather like Robin Williams' performance in Fern Gully, a performance that, irrespective of the quality of the voice work or the pedigree of the actor, simply takes you out of the film every time you encounter it.

But distracting as McConaughey is, he's not a lethal blow to the film. Recasting him would have solved everything, after all. The biggest problem with Kubo and the Two Strings, and the one that cannot so easily be resolved isn't McConaughey. It's Laika.

Kubo and the Two Strings is a movie that wants to be a rousing adventure, a trip through mythological Japan complete with monsters, magic, swordfights, action, and all the good things that fun animated kids movies have nowadays. But it also wants to do all of those things purely with practical effects, miniatures and stop motion and the like, and unfortunately what Laika has discovered and inadvertently revealed to all of us is that these two goals are antithetical, because Laika just can't do it. You cannot make a full-speed action-adventure feature film using nothing but stop motion, not without taking sixteen years and $200,000,000 to do it, neither of which Laika can feasibly take. When one must re-arrange every frame of a 100+ minute film by hand, it means that every frame of animation takes longer to produce than it would being drawn on cell paper, let alone rendered on a computer. And because of this, with a limited budget of money and time, Laika has been forced to cut corners, in the time-honored method of budget-crunched animators everywhere. Action sequences are stilted and slow, lacking the explosive movement that we've come to expect from animated films nowadays. Scenes designed to generate energy grind to a halt so that minutes can be taken up with pace-shattering filler material, throwing off the balance of the entire movie and rendering several long sections flat boring to watch. To save frames, the animators even resort to the old anime trick of moving the background while the characters stay motionless, a staple of Saturday morning anime, unworthy of the feature film that it is used within. Even the plot is harnessed to push the required frame count down, tieing itself into knots to avoid having to show any more action than is absolutely necessary, and leading unavoidably to the conclusion that despite the gorgeous look and style of the film, this is a movie that should have been made by Disney or Pixar or Dreamworks. Laika is simply not up to the task of realizing it.

Final thoughts:  Kubo and the Two Strings has a universally-sterling reputation, and I do see why, but the film is not the masterpiece that it is being made out to be. I would never begrudge someone from enjoying themselves insofar as a movie is concerned, of course, nor do I wish to pretend that literally everyone else is obviously wrong and I am clearly right. But pacing is not an afterthought when one is crafting a story, and it is equally not a place one should cut corners just to make the movie come together. Laika's insistence that their methodology was the right one to bring this story to life is commendable, certainly, but also completely wrong-headed, as a brief credit sequence done with traditional animation proves more lively than the entire movie it follows. And while I hate to denigrate the tremendous work that a great many skilled professionals put into the movie, I cannot pretend that the result was the untrammeled success that I was promised. After all, if I did, then what praise would I have left for the next time Laika does pull it off?

Final Score:  5.5/10

Next Time:  Comedy is hard.

Zootopia

Alternate Title:  Hop Fuzz

One sentence synopsis:    A rabbit police officer and fox con-man team up to solve a mysterious series of violent assaults by the "predator" minority of the animal metropolis Zootopia.


Things Havoc liked: Disney has been on something of a tear in recent years, a full on third Renaissance for a studio which seems unable to do wrong either in whole or in part. The recent burst of quality includes a whole host of top quality animated films such as Tangled, Frozen, and Big Hero 6, all the of which were excellent films worthy of being considered alongside the best work of their counterparts at DreamWorks and Pixar. And so it is that this year, during a period generally bereft of quality for film in general, Disney has graced us with another would-be masterpiece, a light-hearted children's animated romp involving such fun, wacky subjects as racism, police brutality, and the ways in which politicians can use the media to engender fear and hatred.

Yeah...

Zootopia, a fun animated film in the traditional style of modern Disney movies, is a film with a whole lot going on, a mish-mash of styles, themes, and genres including everything from 80s caper flicks to classical Disney fare like The Fox and The Hound. It's a towering edifice of a film, packed with in-jokes and subtext, thematic complexity and high-velocity situational gags. Directed by Rich Moore (of Wreck-it Ralph) and Byron Howard (of nothing in particular), it is, without mincing words, a staggeringly good movie, one that tackles a whole series of complex issues in all their glorious complexity and makes an engaging, funny, compelling story out of them, all without simplifying the situation down for the kids in the audience or preaching dogmatically to the adults. It's not unusual to see animated movies tackle difficult subjects these days, nor is it some kind of revelation, in a post-Pixar world, to discover that kids movies can have something to say to adults. What is both unusual and revelatory, is a movie by a major studio that manages to do these things this well, and wrap it all together in a Disney-style animated romp full of humor, adventure, wonder, and engaging characters.

The premise, familiar to anyone who's seen the trailers, is relatively simple. Mammalian species of every type are, sentient, bipedal creatures, who live in and around a gigantic, modern metropolis known as Zootopia, a fully modern city with assorted amenities to cater to the vastly different sizes and preferred climates of its denizens. Arriving in this megalopolis of purported peace and tolerance is Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) a newly-minted ZPD police officer, the first rabbit to become a cop in the history of the city. Struggling against prejudice against a rabbit as a policeman, she winds up embroiled in a complex missing persons (animals?) case, roping a con-artist fox named Nick (Jason Bateman) into the investigation through threats and blackmail. If this story sounds familiar to you, it may be because you remember the 1982 Eddie Murphy/Nick Nolte action-comedy 48 Hrs, the movie that essentially invented the "buddy cop" genre as we know it today, and which Zootopia takes, of all things, as its clear plot inspiration. Given the purpose the movie puts this plot to, which is to explore the dynamics of prejudice and racism in more or less explicit detail, this is an odd place to draw from, but then Zootopia is an odd movie, part screwball comedy, part crime mystery, and part somber message movie on the need for tolerance.

By now, I'm sure everyone is aware that I have very little tolerance for message films, particularly polemical ones raging about some worldview that is proper and showcasing the various ogreish personality flaws of those who do not abide by it. It therefore comes as a surprise to me as much as anyone that Zootopia, the animated Disney film about bunnies and foxes, is one of the most rational, nuanced, and even-handed movies on the subject of prejudice that I have ever seen. In a film that, for all its weird premises, is clearly based around our modern society, the movie dispenses with cheap villains, mustache-twirling racists, and even the easy lure of simple allegory, wherein elephants would equate to black people or whatnot. The primary dynamic at work in Zootopia is one of Predator and Prey animals, with intersecting elements of prejudice based around size or species, and yet nowhere in the movie can one draw a direct parallel, though references to the real world abound. At one point it seems like the dynamic is that of the larger and more powerful Predators exerting societal dominance over their Prey counterparts, only for the film to shift subtly around to where the majority Prey population exhibits fear and hate towards the Predator minority, all while the film navigates a blisteringly complex web of interconnected stereotypes, prejudices, and racial (speci-al?) hangups. Yet unlike a movie like Crash, whose message was that everyone is an equally noxious racist who should be condemned for their lack of enlightenment, Zootopia's position is far more nuanced, recognizing that everyone is capable of judgmental, even prejudiced actions, particularly when there exist people willing to suborn our baser fears so as to generate division, mistrust, and power vacuums.

But if all of the above sounds like a particularly well-made after-school-special about racism, then don't worry on that account, for despite all of the social complexity that the film carries, at its core, it is a superlative Disney adventure-mystery film. Both of the leads are sharp, well-drawn characters, wickedly funny in their own right, with spot-on voice acting and perfect character design, giving them unparalleled expressiveness, whether in a layered dialogue scene or a frenetic chase. The film is layered with puns (*groan*), in-jokes, and background gags, most of them too funny to spoil here, and further comes with a superb supporting cast, including the incomparable Idris Elba playing the "stern black police chief" as a Cape Buffalo and the immortal J.K. Simmons bringing his J. Jonah Jameson best to the role of Zootopia's mayor, while lesser parts go to everyone from Alan Tudyk and Maurice LaMarche (playing a Vito Corleone-style crime lord who is also a shrew), to Bonnie Hunt and Tommy Freaking Chong. The film's animation is spotless, with the animals' movements a perfect blend of actual animals and Disney archetypes, with the shots of even the most action-packed sequences easy to follow, while the style of the metropolis of Zootopia itself is dazzling in its futuristic-utopian grandeur. Even if you care nothing about the societal value of a particular movie, Zootopia can be enjoyed as nothing more than another classic Disney comedy, and that, most likely, is the secret to its success.

Things Havoc disliked: Of course, some bits of the film work better than others. The addition of Shakira, embodied as a pop-singer gazelle named (creatively) "Gazelle" isn't used for much beyond a cheap joke or two, and the cutaways to her benefit concerts and protest sit-ins regarding prejudice and racism are far more on the nose than the movie requires. Without spoiling too much, the entire coda to the movie is taken up by one of the aforementioned concerts, and while I usually refrain from criticizing a film for its credits sequence, the song in question isn't that good, and the entire affair feels like stunt casting to appease a performer's ego, rather than something derived from the movie internally.

Final thoughts:     In an age full of polemic, Zootopia is a marvel, a movie that neither sells out the seriousness of its allegorical premise, nor weights itself down with sermonizing. I cannot possibly do it more justice than the Daily Telegraph, which described it as "the most existentially probing talking animal cartoon of the year," albeit in a review that managed to fall all over itself in missing the point by declaring that Zootopia somehow "proved" that girls who like frilly dresses or girly things should be publicly shamed for being everything that is wrong with society. Indeed, despite my minor nitpick above, the main thing I would complain about with Zootopia is the reaction it seems to have engendered from the rest of the critical set, with large numbers of critics managing to read it as a full-throated endorsement of every noxious, divisive, stereotyping opinion that they choose to slather onto their review pages, from a claim that it will "finally put the PC-thought police set in their place", to arguments that it represents a call to "sterilize the brainless zombie-hordes of Trump supporters" (though admittedly, the Chinese Army's declaration that the movie represents a Western plot to overthrow traditional society is kind of amazing, as is the Globe & Mail's claim that the movie is sexually perverted because it doesn't explicitly address cross-species romance). Only in Hollywood could a movie about the complexities inherent in our quest for equality and tolerance be interpreted as an excuse to air the most vile assumptions about millions of people we don't know, but I cannot, in all good conscience, hold the film responsible for that. The world is, as the film reminds us, imperfect, as are we all, and yet it keeps on spinning.

Ultimately, Zootopia is a fine movie, a worthy successor to the many other fine movies that Disney has graced us with. And whatever the reactions of the rest of the world, a timely, well-crafted, and entertaining reminder that it is everyone's responsibility to try and get along is no bad thing.

 

Final Score:  8/10

Next Time:  Maggie Smith as a Bag Lady?  Sign me up!

The Good Dinosaur

Alternate Title:  Young-Earth Creationism

One sentence synopsis:     In a world where dinosaurs never went extinct, a young dinosaur, separated from his family, tries to find a way home with the assistance of a feral caveboy.


Things Havoc liked: Pixar, Pixar, Pixar, what am I supposed to do with Pixar? The great movies of Pixar's oeuvre stand out as some of the finest things ever animated, but the result for them has been that every Pixar movie is now judged in the context of Up or Wall-E or Finding Nemo, which has lead to complaints (with some justification), that if anyone besides Pixar had released Inside Out or Brave, it would have found considerably more acclaim. That may be so, but Pixar themselves are the ones that set the bar this high, so they really have nobody but themselves to complain to when we get an unreasonable expectation upon seeing their name pop up in the opening credits. All of this, of course, is nothing but a clumsy attempt to explain why it was that in the midst of a Holiday season that gave us Star Wars, Tarantino westerns, a glut of Oscar bait, and the new David O. Russel movie, I decided it was time to sit down and watch an animated children's movie about dinosaurs.

Don't judge me.

The Good Dinosaur, Pixar's second (and far less-prominent) feature film of 2015, is a very old story told via a twist that leads to more speculation than a G-rated kids movie usually allows for. The premise is that the Chixulub Impactor, the 6-mile-wide asteroid that obliterated the Dinosaurs some 65,000,000 years ago, missed Earth rather than colliding with it, allowing dinosaurs to continue to evolve right alongside mammals and birds. Alternate History (Alternate Pre-History?) is one of my personal passions, and the hints of the society that the now-evolved, albeit still primitive intelligent dinosaurs are piecing together were enough to sell me. Saurians and other plant-eating dinosaurs seem to have developed into agricultural farmers, while meat-eating dinos such as the therapods and raptors have become herders and animal husbanders, a nice shift from the typical "meat-eaters = evil" that you see in films like The Land Before Time. Obviously this film isn't about the anthropological implications of pastoral-agricultural relations among stone-age reptiles (we hope to publish next year), but an excuse to allow for cavemen and dinosaurs to co-exist without having to ban Evolution from the schools.

So what is the movie about then, if not a mediation on social structures that never were? Well, strangely enough, the story that all this weird ahistorical trapping is draped around is a kid-alone-in-the-wilderness-style adventure movie, a genre of film that used to be very popular on the direct-to-video circuit, and may still be for all I know, and had titles like Into the Wild, Far From Home, or A Cry in the Wild, which made them very hard to distinguish one from the other. Pixar crosses this genre with a more straightforward adventure movie, in which audience-surrogate protagonists travel through exotic lands and meet strange and interesting people while learning and using life lessons (the examples are too many to cite). The audience-surrogate protagonist in question is Arlo, the youngest son of a family of little-house-on-the-prairie-style pioneer Apatosaurs (Jeffrey Wright and an unrecognizable Frances McDormand), whose problem to be overcome (there's always one in these sorts of films) is constant, overwhelming fear at his surroundings. What Saurians capable of plowing furrows with their faces and chopping down trees with a single tail-swipe have to be afraid of is never really stated, but then fear is not rational by definition, especially in kids. Separated from his family thanks to a flash flood and some contrived circumstances, Arlo meets a mute human cave-boy whose role, oddly enough, is that of the dog (Arlo even names him "Spot") in this boy-and-his-dog-style genre. Having a five or six year old kid take on the role of the fearless animal companion who challenges venomous pit vipers and pterodactyls eight times his size while the dinosaur protagonist cowers in fear behind him is... an interesting state of affairs, but then this is all kids' parable stuff anyway, and it's handled reasonably well, to be honest. The messages aren't too obvious and the two protagonists are well-animated, well-voice-acted, and done up in Pixar's trademark sentimental style.

So what else is there to say for this film? Well for one thing it's gorgeous. Pixar's films are always gorgeous, even the mediocre ones, and The Good Dinosaur has a lovely, nearly photorealistic style for its backgrounds and landscapes. The film takes place (I'm guessing) somewhere in the American West (fitting the pioneer theme, I suppose), and sports a John-Ford-style eye for the impressive, rugged landscapes that the area naturally affords (I swear, I thought I saw Monument Valley). The water effects in particular deserve praise, be they placid, still rivers rippling down their banks, or the surging, muddy tide of a landslide-induced flash flood. Beyond the visuals though, I would be remiss if I failed to mention the existence of the legendary Sam Elliot (the man, the legend, the mustache), playing a cowboy tyrannosaur driving a herd of buffalo across the open ranges of the American West. I try to respect the breadth of opinions that exist within the world of film criticism, but frankly, anyone who fails to get excited at the prospect of Sam Freaking Elliot playing a Tyrannosaurus Rex who is also a cowboy needs to either stop watching movies (because they have become far too cynical) or start watching them (because they've clearly never seen one).

Things Havoc disliked: I said that The Good Dinosaur is gorgeous, and it really, really is, but for some reason Pixar chose a hyper-realistic animation style for the landscapes and backgrounds of the movie, and an extremely stylized, cartoony style for the characters themselves, which fits together kind of awkwardly. I recognize that a hell of a lot goes into animated character design, and realism is not necessarily one of the most important factors, but there's a visible clash this time between the characters themselves and the world they inhabit that simply wasn't there for most of Pixar's previous work. Finding Nemo for instance, managed to make its fish characters highly expressive and cartoony without making them stand out too egregiously from the underwater tropical world that existed around them. More to the point, Brave, whose software was refined to produce this movie, managed to use subtle shifts in how the characters were animated and how stylized they were to portray the changing mental and emotional states of their human or ursine cast. Maybe the more alien/up-to-date designs of some of the dinosaurs here (the filmmakers give us raptors which look a lot more like the semi-reptilian chickens they more or less were than Jurassic Park ever did) threw me off, or maybe it's a facet of the intended audience, but while neither the characters nor the background work is bad, the combination of the two is a bit... distracting.

Overall though, the issue with The Good Dinosaur isn't so much what it does wrong as what it doesn't do at all. Yes, this is a kids' film, and in consequence is going to have big, broad themes mixed with slapstick comedy, and a few winks to the audience for the adults, except that that's really not been true of Pixar's other work, or at least their best work. The Good Dinosaur is about a little dinosaur trying to find his way home with the help of strange people he meets along the way, and while that's fine, it's also... all that the movie is about. Compare that to Up or Wall-E or The Incredibles, which were about a great many things, some of them fairly subtle, or even to Inside Out, which was about some pretty heavy and abstract stuff (depression, epistemology, and even gender roles). There's nothing wrong with a simple film, certainly, but The Good Dinosaur feels like material that Disney might have put out in between one of their multiple golden ages, a time-filler movie that is designed to look nice and entertain the kids for a while, and then be over with.

Final thoughts:  Maybe I'm being too harsh, and maybe "just" making a good kids' film that isn't stupid is harder than it sounds (in fact I'm certain it is), but while it's always unfair to criticize a film for not being another film, it's almost impossible not to judge the Good Dinosaur in the context of what we've come to expect from Pixar. It's a fine, family movie overall, written well and animated gorgeously, with a number of strong elements that make it worth a watch if you happen to be looking for good kids' movies. But the previous entries in Pixar's oeuvre were masterpieces that transcended the label of "kids" film or any other genre for that matter, movies that had to be seen by everybody, regardless of their circumstances or background, speaking to people on a number of levels at once. The Good Dinosaur is not one such movie, but then that's not so terrible a sin either. After all, if every movie transcended the genre they were written into, then there'd be nothing special about Pixar's best work at all.

And hell, any movie that gives me Sam Elliot, Tyrannosaur-Cowboy, has to be doing something right.
 

Final Score:  6.5/10

Next Time:  We've seen the kids' film.  Now let's see what Tarantino has to offer us...

Inside Out

Alternate Title:  Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy

One sentence synopsis:     The personified emotions within a young girl's head struggle to regain control of the situation after her family's traumatic move to San Francisco.


Things Havoc liked:  Pixar has had a rough decade so far. Since the release of their twin-masterpieces WALL-E and Up in 2008/9, and the conclusion of the Toy Story series in 2010, the shining giants of modern animation have looked a lot less shiny and a lot less giant. Cars 2 and Monsters University were both decidedly-underwhelming sequels to already mid-grade properties, at least by Pixar's normal standards, and their one attempt to try something new since then resulted in the decent-but-fragmented Brave. The flames of children's animation have been well-tended in Pixar's absence of course, with both Dreamworks (How to Train Your Dragon) and Disney (Frozen, Big Hero 6) stepping in to fill the absence, but the film landscape has missed Pixar at its best, and I, at least, was hopeful that this new film of theirs, based on a brand new concept, might well re-invigorate a studio whose masterpieces I have missed.

As I'm sure everyone knows by now, Inside Out's conceit is that of anthropomorphized emotions residing within all of us, most specifically Joy, Anger, Disgust, Sadness, and Fear. Voiced variously by assorted stars of television comedies such as The Office, Parks and Recreation, Saturday Night Live, and shows from Comedy Central, these five oversee the internal mental landscape of an eleven-year-old girl named Riley, one that is presented with almost dizzying complexity. There's Headquarters, the center of cognitive thought, whose control board is operated by various emotions in turn, and who can call upon everything from memory storage units to idea crystals. There are personality islands, each one representing large-scale elements of one's core personality, projected off of Long Term Memory storage, a labyrinthine archive of crystal-ball-incarnated memories in varying states of repair. There are thought trains, recall tubes, a literal subconscious prison, and all of them tended to by assiduous armies of mental workers (neurons?), who tend, prune, demolish, rebuild, and otherwise maintain the extravagant machinery of mental functioning that keeps Riley (and apparently everyone else) going. Much of the film consists of several of these prime emotions traveling through the landscape of Riley's mind, and they allow for Pixar to get creative with just what they find in there. Everything is realized beautifully, from an abstract thought forge, which atomizes its contents down to constituent epistemological components (represented as ever-more abstract variations on Pixar's art theme), to a dream studio imagined as a Hollywood backlot, complete with casts and crews, directors and producers, all attempting to put cohesive dreams together on command, sipping their coffee and muttering under their breath about someone calling for the same old nightmare all over again.

But the focus is on the five primary emotions and the girl they comprise, and it's here that Director Pete Doctor (of Up, among other things) does some of the more interesting work. One would imagine that with Joy, Anger, Sadness and Fear all cooped up together, the result would be chaos, but the film posits that all five of them work carefully together to try and do what's best by their charge, readily yielding the floor to one another whenever a situation calls for their compatriots' expertise. All five emotions, even the antithetical ones, seem quite willing to defer to Joy as their natural leader, struggling in her absence not to seize power but to somehow figure out how to do her job properly. All five emotions have their natural roles (indeed that's something of the thesis of the movie), with everything from Fear keeping Riley safe, to Anger asserting her rights to fair treatment, to Disgust preventing her from being poisoned ("physically or socially", Joy puts it). Easy as the temptation would be to place all of these emotions at war with one another, the film probably models much more accurately just how people's emotional responses actually interact with one another. Though Joy and Sadness, our primary characters, do not understand in the least how each other functions, there's no sense of them wishing the other gone, beyond the typical frustration that people with opposed personalities can engender in one another. One does not get the sense that Sadness, for instance, would rather replace Joy as the primary emotional state of Riley, for all five of them want her to be happy, even the ones whose job is quite the opposite.

But enough plot, the focus with Pixar is often the subtext and the details, and this film is filled with them to an extent we haven't seen in quite some time. The best sequences in the film, bar none, are those in which the camera zooms not just into Riley's head, but those of her parents, schoolmates, teachers, and others, giving us a glimpse of their particular mental machinery. In each case, the same five basic emotions are present, albeit subtlely shifted to instantly customize the dynamic in their favor, be it a boy Riley's age going into mental meltdown at the very sight of a girl, to the military precision of her father's emotional direction, to sight gags with a half dozen other characters I would not dream of spoiling here. When not buried within Riley's mind, the film is set in my, and Pixar's, hometown of San Francisco, and while I'm becoming used to seeing my fair city on screen, this film shows off a much deeper understanding of Baghdad by the Bay (look it up), with non-famous landmarks front-and-center such as Lick Middle School, Arizmendi Pizza (a locally famous "worker's collective"), and even the freaking Warming Hut down at Chrissie Field, things you're unlikely to find in a tourist guidebook. Indeed, par for the course with Pixar, the film's subtext is incredibly rich, with a great deal of solid psychological theory being presented in a visual, non-explicative manner, including representations of fairly heavy concepts such as depression, memory loss, suppressed fears, moral compromises, and even the pressures put upon kids (particularly girls) to bury their real feelings and remain superficially happy, so that their parents can safely pretend that everything is all right with them. It's heavy stuff, when you sit down and think about it, and the film does a very good job of getting it across without hitting you over the head with the proverbial hammer.

Things Havoc disliked: But the problem is that you do have to sit down and think about it. Because the movie is entirely subtext.

Now this isn't a bad thing, frankly. More movies could stand to be all about the background at the expense of the foreground. But we're not dealing with Franchise Pictures or The Asylum here, we're dealing with Pixar, whose masterpieces of animated storytelling are some of the most poignant works of art ever committed to digital film. Not everything is gonna be Up or Toy Story 3, I realize, movies that I've seen reduce grown men to tears merely through recollecting them. But for all the wonderfully nuanced ground that this movie core, the emotional core of the picture is just... not really there.

Okay, that's not really fair. The core is there, it's just not very well developed. Pixar's best films struck emotional chords that were universal and poignant and heartfelt and true, and while theoretically all of the above is still the case here, the base fact is that the stakes in Inside Out just aren't immense enough to force the audience to empathize. Riley has moved from Minnesota to San Francisco, leaving all her friends behind and starting a new life. Tough, yes, and traumatic, and we do sympathize with her, particularly as her parents seem utterly unable to realize that the transition is rougher on their daughter than they are permitting her to let on. But while most of us have gone through experiences like this in the past, losing our stability in childhood and having to re-create it, the majority of us are perfectly able to do just that, ultimately, and we see no particular reason why Riley can't. The chaos and hijinx pile up inside Riley's head, certainly, but the actual effects in the real world are limited to her getting frustrated, crying occasionally, and finally opting to do foolish, but perfectly survivable things. Wall-E, by contrast, was a devastating film, utterly ruthless in its emotional manipulation of its viewers, using a Woobie-ish (look it up) character to drive wedges into people's souls. Toy Story 3 reduced entire theaters to blubbering ruin with a ten-minute evocation of childhood things put finally aside, while Up casually obliterated its audience with a silent intro sequence cataloging the full life and bitter loss of a character we had not yet even met. Contrasted with these nuclear emotional weapons, the plot of Inside Out seems almost pedestrian, universal though it might be. We have all been through and survived what Riley is going through, and more importantly, we all recognize that no matter how hard it may seem at the time, it proves, ultimately, to be no great matter.

So what do we get if not a trip down Tissue and Dust-Excuses lane? We have our main characters, and this is where we run into another problem. The dynamic duo of the film are the emotions of Joy and Sadness, and while Joy (Amy Poehler) is an excellent character, whose flaws are well-meaning and whose strengths are invigorating to watch, Sadness (Phyllis Smith), on the other hand... is not. Maybe the filmmakers could not understand what might make a character like this tick, but while Joy is allowed a full rounding, including the options of occasionally just getting sick of everyone else's mopey shit, Sadness meanwhile is one of those characters you just want to strangle, a one-note litany of woe and misery, who does nothing but complain, predict doom and pessimism, and flat out refuse to listen to anyone, lest they be required in doing so to somehow leave the blue funk they are mired in. I get that this is literally a personification of Sadness, I'm not looking for Sandra Dee here. But the other four emotions, particularly Joy, manage to embody their characters fully while still retaining a certain degree of professional competence to them. They know, at the very least, what they're doing when they pull the strings, while Sadness, on the other hand, does not. To an extent this is clearly intentional, as the plot of the film is in no small part, everyone figuring out what Sadness is actually useful for. But implicit in such a plot is the fact that we're going to be spending most of the film not knowing what she's useful for, and movies that spend their entire run-time dragging useless characters around do not have the most sterling reputations in my reviews. I know that a movie like this could not have been easy to put together, but it's not like the Sadness-cognates in everyone else's head are moaning wrecks with no redeeming value. Was there no other way to tell this story than by annoying the characters and audience both with a main character who just. Won't. Listen?

Final thoughts:   Honestly, maybe there wasn't. And lest I sound overly critical, the effect of all this isn't so much as to make them film bad as it is to cap the film at merely "good", which is hardly a damning flaw. Inside Out is presently engaged in earning rapturous acclaim from every critic in existence, all of whom I assume are allowing their gratitude at having Pixar back in any capacity overwrite their good judgment. But then perhaps a little excitement is called for here. Inside Out is not some epochal animated masterpiece on the level of Up or Wall-E or Finding Nemo or even The Incredibles, but it is a solid, interesting, funny, and well-produced film, one which fits fairly easily into Pixar's "second tier" offerings, alongside such movies as Ratatouille, A Bug's Life, or Monsters Inc. It may seem unfair to judge the film by the standards of its betters, but Pixar were the ones who created these high expectations, and they have only themselves to blame if people continuously bring up the old classics and wail and gnash their teeth whenever their modern films don't meet that high standard.

As for me? A good film is all I've ever asked for. Inside Out is indeed a good movie, if not more. In a year half-complete that already gave us Leviathan, Jupiter Ascending, and Ballet 422, one could do so much worse.  And for those who demand only the best from their animated studios, there's always November's pending prequel to Theodore Rex...

... Oh just look it up!

Final Score:  7/10

Next Time:  We've had a good run with Hollywood recently, but it may be time to try the waters overseas again...