The Dark Tower

Alternate Title:  The Lord of the .45 ACPs

                                                                                                                                                            

One sentence synopsis:  The last of a legendary order of gunslingers and a boy from New York must stop an evil wizard from unmaking all creation.


Things Havoc liked:   "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."


Since it was first published in serial in 1978, people have been trying, off and on, to bring Stephen King's Dark Tower to the screen in some form or another. It wasn't until 2007 that active production began on what would become this film, with directors as varied as J.J. Abrams and Ron Howard being attached to the project, while the list of actors offered the role of the semi-titular gunslinger is too long to repeat here. One would have been forgiven for wondering if this Development Hell victim would ever wind up showing its face, but at long last it has arrived, a troubled production of a difficult property, but one with two excellent actors attached to play the leads.

Who am I speaking of? Why Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey of course, taking on respectively the roles of hero (Roland of Gillead) and villain (The Man in Black). Neither role is all that well fleshed out beyond the basic character archetypes of epic fantasy literature, but both actors are supremely fun to watch working even in bad films, and remain so here. Elba is in his element as a world-weary gunslinger of legendary skill, a cowboy crossed with a questing knight, who wields six shooters the way Legolas wields his bow (and with a lot less pretty-boy annoyance). It's nothing revolutionary here, in fact it's pretty much Idris Elba doing a Clint Eastwood impression crossed with a standard fish-out-of-water story when he heads to New York and starts tipping hospital nurses with gold coins, but I'll be damned if Elba doesn't make the most of it. He doesn't make as much as McConaughey though, who gets the juicier role of playing Walter Padick, the Man in Black. I wasn't exactly sure what to expect from McConaughey as a villain, but this is pretty much the exact scenario I should have been envisioning, as McConaughey takes the Angus Macfadyen approach to villainy, constantly grinning at his own delicious evilness, as he seeks to do nothing less than destroy the universe by... you know I'm not actually sure what the evil plan at work here is, but it scarcely matters. McConaughey's black magic takes the form not of fireballs and special effects, but of whispered commands that vary from "kill each other" to "stop breathing", and unlike a lot of villains in movies like this, he is given free reign to kill more than just random passers by, decimating everyone and everything that crosses his path all while chortling to himself about how gloriously wicked he is. It's not the most subtle thing in the world, but it works.

Indeed, subtlety isn't the strong suit of The Dark Tower in general, and believe it or not, that's a good thing. Most YA-style fantasy movies are quite pedestrian in their aims and ambitions, with the bad guys pushing the good guys through a hero's journey so standard that one can (and in the case of many a Hollywood film, has) write it all out by rote outline. It's not that Dark Tower is all that different in that regard, but that the film commits to its premise with more aplomb than most of its competitors do. Villains do not take people prisoner for no reason other than to grant the heroes a chance to save them, but instead outright murder everyone they come across, whether a traditional narrative would hold that character important or not. The backstory is not delivered in a massive narration dump, nor does the movie over-emphasize the one plot element that will turn out to be drastically important later on. Indeed, very little is actually established in this movie before it's actually used, which would be bad storytelling in any genre that was less formula-ridden than YA Fantasy, and which paradoxically actually turns this movie into a frankly surprising one at points. And if nothing else, it's the only movie I've ever seen which tries the old "buck up the hero at his lowest point with an inspiring speech routine" by means of giving an untrained teenager a gun to play with, as well as one of the very few whose moral is not that one should be content with the life one has, but that when one is given a chance to go do awesome fantastical things in another world, you say yes.

Things Havoc disliked: That all said, I don't want to give the impression that Dark Tower is some kind of fantasy masterpiece, re-inventing the genre for all time. Oddly enough for a movie called The Gunslinger, there's precious little action to it, and such action as there is is rather lackluster, as the Gunslinger simply shoots his enemies with unerring accuracy, while six thousand henchmen armed with machine guns fail to hurt him. I grant that guns are a fairly one-dimensional tool insofar as awesome action is concerned, but given the premise of a preternatural, divinely-gifted pistolier with weapons forged in crucibles of legend, surely anyone could come up with something a bit more exciting than "shoot a guy, then shoot another guy."

But it's the writing, the Achilles' heel of these sorts of works, that really lets the side down, something which makes the decision not to give the writing much time to showcase its poverty a bit more context. Backstory elements that seem like they ought to merit an explanation or two are simply dropped onto us for no reason at all, particularly a sudden and baffling reference to Arthurian mythology that lands out of nowhere and is never mentioned again. More seriously though, the film commits the unfortunate (and commonplace) sin of having characters explain things to other characters that they already know for the benefit of the audience. Obviously, given a seven-book series famous for its labyrinthine, interconnected mythology, and the need to condense it into a workable two=hour film, certain liberties have to be taken, but there's never an excuse for clunky writing, no matter what the structural pressures the source material layers upon you. References to other Steven King works such as It or the Shining go well beyond the level of easter egg and are catapulted into major elements of the plot with no explanation, confusing what's actually going on for anyone who's seen a movie in the last thirty years, and the unevenness of the script combined with the aforementioned sparseness of detail gives the film a rather arbitrary feel, wherein we get the impression that things happen because the filmmakers made something up at lunch and shot it.

Final thoughts:   I have to admit that my original review of Dark Tower, the one I was formulating in my head as we walked out of the theater, was considerably more critical of the film's flaws, but over time, I've softened on it considerably, partly because all of my viewing companions liked it more than I did, and partly because I realized that the movie it reminds me of the most is 2012's epochal failure, John Carter, the greatest box office disaster in the history of Hollywood. Like Dark Tower, John Carter was a flawed movie, but one that had considerable virtues to it, mostly to do with the cast (Taylor Kitsch notwithstanding), and the overall pulp-irreverent feel of the thing. So many bad movies compound their mistakes by taking their source material over-seriously, while John Carter, and The Dark Tower like it, accepted the fundamental oddball nature of the story they were trying to tell, recognizing that epic fantasy has to be taken in its own terms, and doing just that. As such, while Dark Tower is no masterpiece, it's actually not a bad rendition of a legendarily un-filmable property. It's true that my native sympathy for actors like Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey probably slants my opinion somewhat, but then again the whole point of an exercise like this one is to identify actors and concepts you like, and then go see them.

And if nothing else, rest assured that at least this one's better than Maximum Overdrive.

Final Score:  6/10

Next Time:  Robbing NASCAR, a Steven Soderbergh story.

Beauty and the Beast

Alternate Title:  Hermione Granger and the Castle of Hallucinogenic Allergens

                                                                                                                                                            

One sentence synopsis:   A bookish girl from a parochial village in fairy tale France becomes the prisoner of a terrible beast locked in a castle until someone learns to love him.

Things Havoc liked:  Though it has its detractors, I stand by the notion that 1991's Beauty and the Beast is one of the finest works that Disney's Animation studio ever produced, a small step behind the Lion King as the best Disney film. A Golden Globe and Oscar-winning film, the first (and only) animated movie ever nominated for a Best Picture award at the Academy Awards, and a film selected for preservation by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant". And now, following the... success(?) of last year's Live Action Jungle Book remake, a film that has also been re-imagined in live action form, thanks to the unstinting efforts of the director of Twilight - Breaking Dawn (yipee...).

As you all know, I was rather lukewarm on the subject of the Jungle Book remake (my compatriot Corvidae went so far as to put on her list of worst films of the year), and did not actually intend to go see this one, unconvinced as I was that a live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast could be anything but an awkward mess, given the strength of the original. Cooler heads prevailed (mostly due to the fact that I owed several people after the Suicide Squad disaster), so the question thus became, having been dragged into the theater by main force, what did I think of the re-imagined live version of an all-time animated classic?

The answer? I loved it.

Beauty and the Beast, in its modern, live-action form, has lost absolutely nothing of the charm it evidenced some 26 years ago, and has, in fact, layered considerable additions on top of it. Despite all of my misgivings, despite the evident awkwardness that a live-action musical generally involves, despite the middling results the last time Disney tried this, this time, in this year, this movie is just wonderful, though whether this is because of careful production, the underlying strength of the source material, or both is somewhat difficult to say. But if we're going to discuss the virtues of this film, the best place to begin is, as is often the case, the cast. The film stars Emma Watson and Dan Stevens, the former of Harry Potter fame, the latter of Downton Abbey and little else, as the titular Beauty and Beast, and both are excellent, with Watson affecting the same sort of bookish charm she brought to the Potter series , while Stevens cuts the bestial rage with the pomposity of an over-educated aristocrat, which is not the worst decision ever. Both actors are called upon to sing quite a lot (naturally) and both do very well at it, particularly Stevens, whose big solo number Evermore (a new song written specifically for the film) is probably the strongest of the lot overall, no small feet given the songs that the rest of the movie is replete with. The big surprise though is neither Watson nor Stevens but Luke Evans of all people, the quasi-useless doofus from the Hobbit films and last year's High-Rise, who is almost perfect as the swaggering asshole non-hero Gaston. Though Evans lacks Gaston's oversized physicality (as would anyone not named The Rock), he lacks pretty much nothing else, delivering a performance that is melodramatic and over-the-top in all the right ways, the sort of performance that will make me forget an actor's flaws and embrace their strengths, strengths which appear to involve being campy as hell, something I've noticed before with actors I don't much care for (Jessica Chastain comes to mind).

But the real strength of the cast comes from the supporting cast, either on-screen or off, which includes Ewan McGregor taking on the role of Lumiere, a role previously played by the late, great, Jerry Orbach, using one of the most outrageous French accents that film records. McGregor, following in Orbach's footsteps, matches that accent with an awful one of his own, which is the manifestly correct move. The rest of the castle cast involves luminaries such as Ian McKellan as Cogsworth (bringing all his Gandalfian grumpiness to the role), Emma Thompson as Mrs. Potts (the CG face of whom will give you nightmares), Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Plumette (upgraded to a talking character), and several entirely new servants/furnitures including the irreplaceable Stanley Tucci as the irascible Maestro Cadenza, a harpsichord, and husband to the operatic Madame de Garderobe (Audra McDonald). Though these performers mostly serve as voice actors, their work is unformly excellent, and complements well the surreal rococo stylings of the various characters, from the over-elaborate brass finishings on Lumiere to the intricate arms and gears comprising Cogsworth's face, to an animate wardrobe that could only have cost the lives of fifty keyframe animators. But lest we all drown in computer-generated tchotchkes (that's a real word, people), we also receive the services of Kevin Kline, one of my favorite actors working, playing Belle's father Maurice in a more subdued role than the mad scientist of the previous version, and Josh Gad, an actor who continues to surprise me, playing Le Fou, in the 1991 version, a simple comic relief character from the original film who here is... well still a comic relief character, certainly, but with a very different slant, being portrayed as a screamingly gay sidekick whose unrequited love for Gaston is invariably interpreted as platonic admiration (to truly hilarious effect several times). This attribute got the movie banned in several regressive places like Malaysia, Kuwait, Russia (momentarily), and portions of northeastern Alabama. It's statistics like these that I must rely upon when making my weekly decisions as to which movies will make the cut around here.

The score of Beauty and the Beast has never been in question, as it's one of the finest musical scores to come from an animated film in history, a fact proven when Alan Menken and the late Howard Ashman were nominated for three separate songs at the Academy Awards and won one of them. Most of the songs from the original film had a fairly rough style to them, sung as they were by actors who did not have a background in song, and who were occasionally saddled with ludicrous accents to boot. The new film retains those attributes, rough edges and all, supplementing them with new songs either taken from the Broadway musical or written specifically for the film itself, all of which fit in perfectly to the general symphonic aesthetic of the show as a whole. The world is visualized in absurd splendor, with the Beast's Castle being re-imagined into an elaborate riot of baroque artistry that could easily have been taken from the palatial estates of Louis XIV, while the pastoral bustle of Belle's village and the spooky atmosphere of the haunted woods surrounding the castle retain the sense of semi-animated artificiality that plays well with timeless tales like this. As to the plot, it obviously runs the same route as the original film, but with additions that tighten or expand on the story just a bit here and there. We get a renewed focus on the servants themselves, on their desperation to return to human form, and on what it was that caused the enchantress to curse them all in the first place alongside their noble lords. Belle's own backstory (and that of her father) is embellished upon to give her a bit more depth than 'the nerdy daughter of a lunatic'. But the biggest shifts come in the conversations and scenes between Belle and the Beast directly. Beauty and the Beast has long been subject to criticisms that it portrayed an abusive, perhaps Stockholm-syndrome-style relationship, and while the dynamic between the two is still strained, a great effort is made by the film to show why the two might fall in love, and what attributes they share, playing up the fact that, curse or no curse, the Beast was once a Prince, and thus well-educated and erudite, something which would naturally appeal to a bookish girl desperate to escape the limited intellectual horizons of her provincial town. A scene in which Belle mentions that she would like to see Paris results in the Beast reminiscing about the times he spent there, presenting (rather paradoxically) a wider world trapped within his castle than she was experiencing outside of it. I'm not going to pretend that the subtext isn't still awkward, it is, and unavoidably so in all likelihood. But the effort to update the story and polish it further with a narrative that fits a more modern conception of the fairy tale strikes just the right chord, and really serves to push the film into a truly superb work in its own right.

Things Havoc disliked: Fair or unfair, a movie like a live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast is going to be saddled with comparisons, generally unflattering, with the original, and while it stands quite well against the best that the original has to offer in many cases, there are obvious areas where more could perhaps have been done. A couple of the songs, particularly Gaston's number, Be Our Guest, and the Mob song are mixed quite poorly (this afflicted the Mob song in the original film as well), rendering it actually quite difficult to figure out what people are singing about, even if one knows the lyrics by heart, as I do. This tends to afflict the earthy ensemble pieces more than the grandiose ballads for which the movie is more famous, but it does spoil some of the charm of the numbers in question. Moreover the action in the movie, which was energetic, frantic, and frightening in the animated film, is here somewhat muted. Gaston looks almost bored as he calmly shoots at the Beast during his ultimate scene, the wolf attacks seem rather perfunctory, like the dogs-attacking-the-Hulk scene from Ang Lee's Hulk, and many of the human characters seem occasionally perplexed as to what sort of emotion they should be emoting at a particular moment. And while the makeup for the Beast is excellent (sharing even a few notes from the Ron Pearlman TV series of the late 80s), and the blend between CG and real life is all but seamless, there is nevertheless a certain loss of freedom when it comes to a movie that was once animated and is no longer. The Beast is less feral, the fight scenes less violent, the slapstick comedy less hilarious, and the camera work less unconstrained, thanks to the basic, unavoidable fact that real people are acting in a real location, even if it's a location covered with green-screens, with a bevy of computers on-hand to assist in producing the necessary magic.

Final thoughts:   One is tempted, at this stage, to ask the inevitable question of whether the new Beauty and the Beast is better or worse than its illustrious predecessor from the Silver Age of Disney Animation. I have thought much on that question in the weeks since I saw the movie, and have no answer for it, but I do know that the new film is worthy of the old, and that alone places it in rare company. Maybe it's simply the material itself that's so strong, the Menchin songs and timeless nature of the tale itself, which does indeed date back to the mid-1700s if not before. Maybe it's the quality of the cast or the new additions to plot and soundtrack. Or maybe I'm just a sucker for the right sort of fairy tale. But for whatever reason, I truly loved Beauty and the Beast, just as I once loved the original, and for a remake to induce anything like that to its audience is unheard of, even in these remake-obsessed days that we live in. But even if the film does not have the same impact upon you, either because you never much liked the original in the first place, or because you find that the deviations made from the original's template are simply not acceptable, we are still left with a charming, wonderful, and warm rendition of a timeless story.

Ultimately, Beauty and the Beast is a fantastic movie, one of the finest if not the finest that I have seen so far this year. Whether you take that statement in the context of its predecessor or not, all that really matters, in the end, is whether you will enjoy the act of watching the film. And to that, my only suggestion is to go forth and determine for yourself.

Final Score:  8/10

Next Time:  Time for some Monkey Business.

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

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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.

Doctor Strange

Alternate Title:  Mage: The Inception

                                                                                                                                                            

One sentence synopsis:   A talented, arrogant neurosurgeon suffers a terrible accident, which robs him of his skills, and leads him to seek a mystical cult in the hopes of being healed.


Things Havoc liked: So here we are, fourteen movies into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and we're still waiting for the bad one to hit.

Seriously think about it for a moment. There are fourteen of these movies. More than Star Trek. More than Harry Potter. More than X-Men, and Friday the 13th, and National Lampoon. More than freaking Godzilla! Somewhere between six and nine more are still in the pipe, and more to be announced, I have every faith. Fourteen movies over eight years, and we are still waiting for "the bad one" to come along, despite the fact that several (Hulk, Iron Man 2) already did! Every time one of these damned movies comes out I go creeping to the theater, unsure if the magic will finally collapse this time, if this is finally the one where it will all fall apart, and have described this sort of nervousness in my reviews for movies as varied as Guardians of the Galaxy, Avengers, and Winter Soldier. So yes, I went to see Doctor Strange. And yes, I thought it might suck. And yes, I'm an idiot, because of course it's amazing.

Doctor Strange, in fact, is an amazing movie in the literal sense of the word, and if anybody wasn't expecting that, at this point, then they haven't been paying any attention. Based on one of Marvel's trippiest properties, it is a stirringly-weird, rapid-fire case study in the power of modern special effects and vocal coaching. One of the few films to warrant the 3D treatment, it is eye-watering in its inventive complexity, but as always with Marvel, it's not about the showcase, but the characters, and who better to portray the central figure of this most-American tale, than the most British man in the world?

Hell, it worked for Christian Bale.

Benedict Cumberbatch, he of the name that launched a thousand polite stares, plays Doctor Steven Strange, a brilliant/arrogant neurosurgeon (are there any other sorts?) who loses his ability to practice his craft in a split-second's bad decision. Washed up and desperate, he seeks out a mystical cult (relocated to Nepal from the original comic's Tibet to avoid offending the Chinese censors), and receives training in arcane and mystic arts. This is the kind of story that would be completely insufferable if the main character was played by a lesser actor, but Cumberbatch is not a lesser actor, and is absolutely perfect here (as is his mid-Atlantic accent, frankly). The movie rides the line carefully between a character arrogant enough to warrant comeuppance and a character arrogant enough to make the audience want him dead. At moments, Cumberbatch seems to be channeling Sherlock, but just traces of him. keeping the character grounded enough that he doesn't become annoying, even as the movie punishes and purges his arrogance with revelation after mind-bending revelation. Even with my usual hesitations, I knew that Cumberbatch would be absolutely perfect for this role, the way I knew that Robert Downey Jr. Was the only man who could possibly play Tony Stark, and it's nice, once in a while, to be proven right.

But then Cumberbatch is only one element of a larger group here. The rest of the cast includes luminaries such as Chiwetel Ejiofor, playing Karl Mordo, a villain from the comics who is taken in a completely different direction here, the calm, conservative superego to Strange's impulsive arrogant id. I adore Ejiofor and always have, and he excels in a role that feeds him a couple of the best lines, and allows him to do what he does best, which is slightly detached calm amidst chaos and absurdity. Of course, Ejiofor's casting prompted the usual barking of stupid people who were angry about a black man playing a character who was white in the comics, but then I have the same response to that as I do to those angry about Idris Elba's Heimdall, one far too scatological to include here. Additional roles go to the ever-villainous Mads Mikkelsen, whose Kaecilius (that's not how you spell Caecilius, dammit!) is a twisted, evil dark-mage (the best representation of a Nephandi I have ever seen on screen), and who was seemingly born able to play roles like this one. The reliable Benedict Wong (of The Martian) takes on... well... Wong, a character re-written away from racist caricature and into something of a magic drill sergeant (this is an improvement), while Rachel McAdams takes on the love interest role of Strange's surgical colleague, plunged into the middle of a mystical world she doesn't understand. I'm not wild about characters like this, but fortunately McAdams is a better actress than most who are thrown at this material, and sells it well. The best supporter however is Tilda Swinton, who portrays the nameless "Ancient One", head of the magical order endeavoring to protect the Earth against all threats. I jump at any chance to see Tilda Swinton, and while I'm not unaware of the firestorm that erupted surrounding her casting (the original character was asian), I understand the dilemna that the filmmakers found themselves in. Best then to leave it at the fact that Swinton, in the typical old-mentor role, is just perfect, her own natural oddness lending the character a timelessness that it requires.

Steve Ditko, the legendary comic artist that created Doctor Strange with Stan Lee back in 1963, infused the comics in question with a surrealist art style inspired by the paintings of Salvador Dali and Theosophic philosophy (and probably a whole lot of drugs). There's a limit to just how trippy that a conventional movie can typically get (especially if it wants a PG-13 rating), but Dr. Strange pushes against that limit with extremely trippy imagery. The movie's director, Scott Derrickson has a rather skimpy pedigree, having mostly made undistinguished horror and middling sci-fi movies before this one (he was the guy behind the re-make of Day the Earth Stood Still), but it's cinematographer, Ben Davis, is one of the best working, a twenty-year veteran of action, sci-fi, and fantasy movies (among other things), who also served this role for Guardians of the Galaxy and Age of Ultron, which as you all remember, were terrible films without any redeeming visuals :). The magic in Doctor Strange is a hodgepodge of a thousand different ideas, kabbalistic sephirot, Inception-style folding space, traditional sparks and fireballs, mandalas, everything you can imagine, and comes complete with a Lovecraftian nightmare for everyone to match themselves against. It's no Tarsem film, but it does carry a lot more mind-bending alienness than most of the Marvel works, which have always fallen over themselves to keep everything as grounded as the subject matter allows. The better to differentiate, I assume.

Things Havoc disliked: I enjoyed Doctor Strange quite a bit, for those who haven't caught on, but of course there are things I would have changed. The film's pacing is incredibly fast, to the point of being rushed. Marvel may have the origin-story-movie format down to an art form, but there are better and worse examples of the art, and this one, particularly given the visuals on display, leaves our heads spinning as we pinwheel from one obligatory sequence to the next. Moments of character-building feel a bit underdeveloped, particularly ones that afflict McAdams' character, who seems to wind up forgiving Strange his trespasses less because he has earned it, and more because that is what this character does at this point in these stories. At 115 minutes, Doctor Strange is not a long movie, and could perhaps have used ten more minutes of screentime to flesh everything out.

There's also way too much action in the movie. I know, it's a Superhero movie, which in turn is a derivation of the classic Action film, but the better Superhero movies recently have thought outside the box where that is concerned. Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-man still had plenty of action but were clearly part of a different genre (Space Opera and Heist films, respectively), and if Strange had been allowed to be something more like a travelogue or a character study, without the need to push quite so many fight scenes into the already-squeezed runtime, then I think we could have had something truly special. Don't get me wrong, such action as we get is excellent, varied, interesting, and (reasonably) coherent, and the final five minutes are among the more inventive things that Marvel has ever put together when it comes to final confrontations. But one gets the sense watching it that Derrickson and Davis never really got the chance to make a great movie with the material on-hand, hamstrung by the requirements to make a good one instead.

Final thoughts:   But, that said, they went ahead and made a good movie, in fact a very good movie, all things considered, so who am I to really complain. Doctor Strange is not the best that Marvel has ever done, but it is certainly a worthy addition to the universe at large, and a fine means of keeping the lights on as we gear up for the massive Infinity War explosion due to happen the year after next. Cumberbatch, Ejiofor, and all the rest will no doubt be returning in subsequent films, and I, personally, am looking forward to seeing what they can do once they are no longer stuck in the necessary structure of an origin story.

And in the meanwhile, those of my players asking what a Mage game looked like? Yeah...

Final Score:  7.5/10

Next Time:  Best Bird...

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.