Le Chef

Alternate Title:  The Professional (Chef)

One sentence synopsis:    A talented young chef tries to earn a place at a world-famous restaurant whose head chef is engaged in a heated battle with the owner.


Things Havoc liked: Three facts that none of you knew about Jean Réno:

1: Jean Réno's real name is Juan Moreno y Herrera-Jiménez.
2: Jean Réno is a Moroccan of Spanish descent.
3: In France, Jean Réno is best known for his comedies.

That's right, Jean Réno, one of the only French action stars ever accepted in the United States (Van Damme was Belgian, you plebeians), famous here for films such as The Professional, Ronin, Mission Impossible, or The Da Vinci Code, is well-known in France as a comedic actor (though to be sure his action work remains popular there too), generally playing a straight-man in comedies such as Les Visiteurs, Wasabi, Décalage Horaire, and Tais-Toi. I didn't even know this last one until recently, when it came time for me to venture into the wacky world of French comedy once more and see a movie with, distressingly enough, the same title as a Jon Favreau comedy I saw less than two months ago.

French cinema has a reputation for being impenetrable, and there are certainly movies that earn that designation (most things by Truffaut for instance), but then that's no different than if you go cherry-picking through American indie films (consider Mallick). The vast bulk of French films are like the vast bulk of films everywhere, common-denominator fare designed to appeal to the widest possible audience. This sort of thing, not the black and white films of women wearing roofing materials reciting Chinese poetry while strangling ducks, is more akin to France's standard, and proof of that is in the performances that Réno and his co-star, Michaël Youn. The two play a fairly standard game of straight man/funny man throughout the film, with a bit of traditional madcap French flair. Réno plays Alexandre Vauclair, a classical, Michelin-starred chef of a five-star haute-cuisine restaurant, whose inspiration is flagging under a conflict with his new-wave boss Stanislas Matter (Julien Boisselier). Youn, playing Jackie, is a talented young chef of the same school, in desperate need of a job and of greatness, who comes to the attention of Vauclair and is enlisted to help him ward off the conversion of the restaurant into a cutting edge Molecular Gastronomy house. This is the core of the film, and when the movie is concentrating on these elements, it's actually quite funny, particularly anything involving Jackie, Alexandre, and Jackie's three disciples from an old-folks home, Chang, Titi, and Moussa, all three of whom are terrible chefs dreaming of achieving excellence in at least some field. Along the way, various adventures and hijinx ensue, in the best broad-comedy traditions, including an interlude with Spanish molecular chef Juan, whose concoctions seem to resemble explosives more than lunch, and another, highly-non-PC incident where both chefs visit a competing molecular restaurant in... shall we say "disguise"? The very concept of molecular cuisine, with its infusions and foams and "ideas of" that resemble chemistry experiments more than they do food, lends itself well to broad comedy, and the movie's almost slapstick-y approach is nothing if not broad. If that's your thing, this movie should appeal just fine.

Things Havoc disliked: If it's not however...

French film comedy, like I mentioned above, is often broad, stock stuff, derived from commedia del'arte and traditional continental European comedic disciplines. I'd hesitate to call it unsophisticated, but films like this unavoidably start feeling that way when you compare them to the more modern types of British or American comedy. Part of that is the subtitles, which by necessity have to dampen down the complexity of what we're dealing with, but even if you speak French fluently, the exaggerated gestures, the slapstick, the broad one-stroke characters and their instantly-obvious plot complications, these things all speak to a moviegoing audience that simply does not see the breadth of film that others might.

Take Réno's daughter, for instance, a graduate student who is annoyed that her father does not consider her upcoming thesis defense to be sufficiently important. Réno is obsessed with his restaurant and his cooking, to the point where even he recognizes he is simply tired of it all, and wants to spend more time with his daughter in a lower stress environment. So when he encounters a lovely rustic restaurant in rural Bourgogne run by a beautiful (and single) hostess whom he immediately begins making eyes towards, and also a young, brilliant, up-and-coming chef in desperate need of a job, who enthusiastically worships him and his recipes and proposes helping him create a menu to retain the Michelin stars that he is in jeopardy of losing, there's not a lot of room for doubt as to how all this is going to be resolved. And yet the filmmakers seem to think there is, pouring vast amounts of, frankly, melodrama, into questions that anyone who has ever seen a movie before will already know the answers to. Youn has lied to his fiance about his job, and she is mad at him. Will they reconnect? The arrogant, smarmy owner of the restaurant waxes eloquently about how he can't wait for Réno to get his comeuppance so that he can fire him and all his staff and turn the restaurant into a chemistry lab. Will he succeed? It's the night of the big critics' taste test and the young phenom must lead the brigade to produce food like they've never done it before? Will he manage it? If you are burning to know the answers to these profound, unsolvable mysteries, then you must immediately see this film, for that is all it consists of. But if you've seen more than six films in the entirety of your life, then you may, like me, be left wondering how it is that the only people in the room unable to determine by the five-minute-mark the resolution to every problem in the film, were apparently the director, writers, and producers.

Final thoughts:   I've honestly not been trying to badmouth the entire genre of French comedies in this review, for they, like any genre, can be as layered and witty and complicated as anything you'll find in English. I could cite Les Visiteurs, Diner de Cons, Ridicule, Rabbi Jacob, or 2012's runner up for MOTY (Movie of the Year) Les Intouchables. But there is a strong subset of broad comedy at work in French films, and you've gotta like that in order to get anything out of Le Chef. I do, and so I found the movie charming and reasonably funny, if nothing more, but one of the masterpieces of the genre it ain't. If you're looking for a foreign film that isn't going to make you wish for the relative accessibility of a Jim Jarmush piece, or simply want to see Jean Réno do something other than kill people, this movie might do the trick. Otherwise, there's plenty of stupid comedies in English to be had this time of year. One of them is probably just as good as this one.

... probably.

Final Score:  6.5/10

Snowpiercer

Alternate Title:  Off the Rails

One sentence synopsis:    A perpetual-motion, class-segregated train experiences a working-class uprising following the end of the world.


Things Havoc liked:  Despite my best efforts, it was probably inevitable that I would go to see this movie, the product of a South Korean filmmaker (Bong Joon-Ho) and a French graphic novelist (Jacques Lob), two things that, if you'll forgive a stereotype, typically are completely insane. French graphic novels, for whatever reason, tend towards the surreal and the nonsensical, while Korean action films, particularly sci-fi ones, bend in the same direction. Throw in a whole pile of A-list western actors I love (and a couple I don't), and it was probably predictable that I would eventually make my way through the door.

Seventeen years after an attempt to end global warming backfired disastrously and froze the entire planet, a train running on a perpetual motion machine circles the world once every year on an endless ride to nowhere. Locked within are literally all that's left of humanity and its works, from the upper class to the lower classes, strictly segregated by train car, with the rich living it up with their literally priceless luxuries and the poor crammed into the tail section to wither and die at the whim of their overlords. Among these poor have-nothings are Chris Evans, playing Curtiss, a rebel leader preparing the latest in a series of attempted uprisings to seize control of more of the train and force the front section group to equalize everything. I'm a big fan of Evans thanks to the Captain America/Avengers series, as you well know, and I've also been a fan of his in the non-Marvel stuff he's done, such as Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and Sunshine. His character here is nothing to write home about, and has the unenviable task of basically getting no characterization until the very end of the film, where we get it all in one heap, but Evans knows how to play with material like this, and gets across everything he needs to with a few understated gestures and expressions. It is nice, admittedly, to see him get a bit dirtier than his Captain America persona would allow, chopping people apart with hatchets or blowing them away deadpan with firearms. John Hurt meanwhile is playing the exact same character that John Hurt plays these days, a wise, bewhiskered leader who serves as the surrogate commander to Evans' field officer, while Jamie Bell and The Help's Octavia Spencer turn in better performances than I'm accustomed to from either of them as secondary characters supporting the revolution.

But the best of them all is unquestionably Tilda Swinton, an actress I've seen all over the place in the last year or so, and who seems to be desperately laboring to secure the title of "weirdest actor in the universe", (which given the competition she has for such a title, demands quite an effort). Swinton plays Mason, a loudspeaker-wielding martinet straight out of a Marx Brothers spoof, who marches imperiously into trian cars filled with filthy, starving families, and berates them like a whiny schoolteacher for being disorderly while soldiers steal their children and hack off their limbs. Her performance is so weird that it's almost fascinating, even by Tilda Swinton's admittedly elevated standards for this sort of thing, stitched up in a schoolmarm outfit with oversized sunglasses and a barely-functioning microphone. She adds, if nothing else, a modicum of interest to the generally basic workings of the film.

This is Bong Joon-Ho's first English language film, as well as the first one I've seen of his, but the man knows how to point cameras. The style of this movie is all its own, a strange, almost Burton-esque design for the varied and frankly absurd lineup of train cars that the heroes must battle their way through. Several sequences, including one where the two sides engage in a long-range gun battle between cars as the train goes round a large bend, are inventively enough done, and the frozen world beyond the train, only seen in brief glimpses through windows, has a stark, but colorful feel to it. The style carries over into the action sequences, particularly an early one which begins well lit, switches to night-vision, and then to torchlight, each transition accompanied by an interesting, and inventive series of visual devices. Say whatever you will about Bong's filmmaking, his visuals leave little to complain about.

Things Havoc disliked: But don't worry, there's plenty else for that.

This film is presently in the process of generating widespread critical acclaim, a fact I have literally no explanation for. Yes, the acting has high points, yes the visuals are inventive, but is that all that audiences nowadays require? A few nice images and a performance that manages to get beyond "mediocre"? Have standards slipped this low? Or am I just a curmudgeonly bastard who can't appreciate great art?

Snowpiercer is a profoundly stupid movie, this much is no surprise, but what is, or should be a surprise is that the stupidity is not merely in terms of its premise, nor even its story, but in the choices made by the director and writer of this mess. I alluded earlier to the fact that Chris Evans' characterization is left until the end of the film, whereupon it is all delivered to us in one big fat expo-dump, as if the writer realized four fifths of the way through his project that he had added no characterization whatsoever and so rather than back up, decided to simply devote five minutes to telling the audience what they were supposed to have been shown. I recognize that characterization is an afterthought in a movie like this, but given that the film actually dials the action back after the midway point of the film in order to focus on the "daring" social commentary at work here, I'm not entirely sure it was supposed to be one.

Oh and speaking of that daring social commentary, I recognize that a movie like this takes refuge in audacity by painting with a broad brush, but there's a difference between a broad brush and a steamroller. The villains are so evil as to be cartoonish, literally unable to perceive why someone might object to being forced to live in squalor, to surrender their children to lifetimes of drudgery, or to having their spouses beaten and crippled in front of their eyes. Again, nothing wrong with that in theory, except that the film tries to excuse the villains' myopia by painting them as some kind of cult dedicated to the worship of the train's leader, whose secret machinations are presented, the more things get surreal, as being set up for some kind of "big reveal". It's as if the movie is saying "Trust us, we're going somewhere with all this weirdness," trying to get us to buy into the fact that the villains are not as stupid as they're being characterized as.

What's the big reveal? Nothing. The villains are actually that stupid. In fact Ed Harris gets a lengthy, almost interminable scene wherein he monologues for ten minutes about the fact that he and the rest of the villains are precisely that stupid. Thanks for that.

That's the problem with the movie in a nutshell. The notion of all of humanity being locked on a perpetual train is one that is manifestly stupid and could be dealt with either by showing us how it is that this society is able to operate at all, or by dodging the question in favor of badass action sequences. This film basically decides to hint towards doing the former before pulling the rug out from under us at the last minute and revealing that they actually are doing the latter, except without any of the compensatory awesomeness that makes a movie like The Raid or The Lego Movie work despite the thinness of its plot. And when you take away a handful of decent action scenes or inventive shots, there's really nothing left except a handful of hints towards an actual explanation as to what the hell is going on that never comes. Action movies do not need a defense to exist, spectacle is its own justification after all, but this film omits most of the spectacle without replacing it with any sort of justification for its own existence. And so in the time-honored tradition of bad movies the world over, Snowpiercer, for all its promise and hype, becomes nothing more than a simple series of events which happen and then are over. Curtain up. Thanks for the money.

Final thoughts:   I get the sense that I'm not making my case particularly well here, but Snowpiercer is a movie that is bad in a way all its own. I have seen plenty of films that did not leave up to the hype of their trailers, but this is perhaps the first film I've ever seen that did not live up to the hype of its own script. Implicitly promising depth that does not exist as a means of excusing the fact that we do not get the spectacle we were initially promised in the trailers, the movie winds up coming across, at least to me, as a shaggy dog story, so transparently a waste of time as to seem almost cynical. One should always assume good faith in the production of movies of course, so perhaps there's a cultural thing at work here, but the result, ultimately, is a movie I could not wait to see the end of in all the worst ways.

My neighbors in viewing this film made the decision to bring copious quantities of liquor into the theater (they offered me a bottle of whiskey partway through), and at the end of the film, asked me if it had actually been as bad as their drunken perceptions told them it was. When I assured them that it was, they expressed total mystification at the fact that friends of theirs had recommended this film to them. I told them that any friends that did so clearly did not like them very much.

In my case, it was fellow critics that informed me of this film's qualities, and whom I must consequently conclude are out to get me. But then that's not new information.

Final Score:  3.5/10

Life Itself

Alternate Title:  Plaudite, Amici. Comedia Finita Est.

One sentence synopsis:    A documentarian covers the last few months of Roger Ebert's life with retrospectives on his career, relationships, and personality.


Things Havoc liked:  When one thinks of movie critics, one thinks inevitably of Roger Ebert. A pulitzer-winning, populist movie critic without parallel, Ebert's influence on the state of film criticism, and for that matter film itself, is hard to sum up. Without Roger Ebert, I would probably not be writing this blog, but then that's true of a vast number of people. And for all the scorn I heaped upon several of his less-than-cogent opinions for movies like The Artist or The Flowers of War, there is a reason that it was his opinion, and not that of other critics, that I took to task. The most powerful movie critic in the world, the first, and to my knowledge, only one to ever win a Pulitzer, he shaped my tastes in ways I'm sure I cannot even begin to speak to. And now he is gone, and all we have are his reviews, and the memories of those who knew him.

Life Itself, by Prefontaine and Hoop Dreams' director Steve James, is a biographical documentary, nothing more, nothing less. Filmed in the main during the last four months of Ebert's life, as he was battling cancer, pneumonia, and the aftereffects of having his jaw amputated, it chronicles Ebert's career from college to the Chicago Sun-Times, from Cannes to Siskel & Ebert. Much of this stuff is standard biographical material, but the movie refrains from becoming nothing but a record of awards won and milestones achieved by relying heavily on the reminiscences of people who knew Ebert, his skills and his flaws, his giant ego and his manifest personability. We follow his career through thick and thin, from winning national awards and being courted by world-class newspapers such as the Washington Post or New York Times, to the travails associated with his alcoholism, to his ongoing love-hate feud/relationship with fellow critic Gene Siskel. All the while, there are intercut sequences with the Roger Ebert of "today", his face scarred by a series of terribly invasive cancer surgeries, and interviews with his wife and family, who are all putting on a brave front as they patiently await what they know to be the end.

And that's really all the movie is, and all it needs to be, as anyone who has the slightest interest in the subject of the life of Roger Ebert should find all manner of tidbits within this story to make them smile. One of the best sequences, in the midst of a discussion of their work together, involves several behind-the-scenes sequences of Ebert and Siskel trying to film a promo for their show, intercut after (and even during) every take with bitter, sarcastic sniping at one another that sounds like the sort of thing people tolerate only when they've grown so accustomed to such treatment that it's no longer worth fighting over. Yet a second clip, later on, has them embarking on a collective, extemporaneous rant about how Jews (like Siskel) and Catholics (like Ebert) are the only people who actually give a damn about their religion, and that protestantism and WASPs in particular are people who want "a little faith... maybe." In Ebert's own words, "we were killing each other for thousands of years before they showed up." Ebert remarked once that the answer to the question of whether he and Siskel hated each other and whether they were best friends were both Yes, and the hints of the greater relationship he had with his famous co-host are there to be seen for any fan of the great movie duo.

Things Havoc disliked: But only hints.

It was ludicrously hard to write this review (which is why it has been so delayed), partly because documentaries are always a difficult topic to write subjectively about, but also partly because there just wasn't that much to say, and that itself is the problem. The movie is billed as a biographical documentary on Roger Ebert's life and career, but what it actually winds up as is something extremely macabre, and the reason for that is that the film chooses, for reasons that I'm sure made sense at the time, to focus with almost laser-like exclusivity, on Roger Ebert's death.

I mean, I get it. Ebert died while the film was being made (we see his last, fleeting answers to the filmmakers' Emails as he was dying in the hospital), and his disability was so extreme as to exert an almost ghoulish fascination, and yet rather than resist this urge, the filmmakers decided for some reason to make Ebert's inevitable death from cancer and pneumonia the center of their film. Perhaps they thought they were replicating Citizen Kane, I don't know, but the movie, by the end, becomes almost morbid, as the filmmakers use all their considerable talents to try and wring pathos over the end of a great man. They succeed, of course, but the endless succession of sequences concerning Ebert's disability, his efforts to resume some fleeting fragment of his normal life, his decline and ultimately his death, accompanied by the tearful exclamations of his wife, led me, at least, to wonder if any of this was appropriate at all. Ebert, like all public figures, lived his life in the glare of spotlights, by his own choice as much as any, but to reduce half a film about a great man to the details of his final decrepitude seems almost voyeuristic, to say nothing of the notion that this is time that might be better spent regaling us with the stories of his works and deeds and thoughts and beliefs.

And part of the reason I am left wondering if we couldn't use more of those things is because, to be frank, we don't get all that much of it. Despite being produced by Martin Scorsese and featuring interviews from several major figures in cinema such as Werner Herzog, the movie is astonishingly light on details concerning a man who popularized film theory and film criticism for the mainstream audience. Precious little is heard from Ebert's actual reviews, the reviews that made him famous, won him a Pulitzer, changed the nature of American film, and serve as the reason we're watching the movie in the first place. We see him go to Cannes, go to Telluride, see movies and lead lectures about them, but we have no idea what his own personal theories were, what his perspective for criticism was, why he felt one movie was better than another. We are told that he was a fine lecturer and a witty storyteller, but not shown or given the opportunity to hear a single story or excerpt from a lecture of any sort, and when later in the film the filmmakers contrast his critical style with that of legendary New Yorker/New Republic critic Pauline Kael, we are presented the fact that his style and hers were different in a vacuum, without the slightest idea of what his style consisted of, or how it was different from hers. I appreciate that my tolerance for the ins and outs of film theory is probably higher than most people, but we are sitting in a documentary about one of the greatest film critics of all time, it's okay to talk shop. Worst of all though, not a single one of Ebert's biting, cutting negative quips, the ones so good that he compiled them into books, makes it into the film, denying us all the chance to admire the quality of the man's writing, even though we're watching a movie ostensibly about that very fact.

Final thoughts:  The irony of me reviewing a film about the greatest film critic in history is not lost on me, and yet I still have a job to do here. This movie is not badly made, nor is it an unfitting tribute to a great man, and yet is was, to me, deeply unsatisfying. It is arguable that the reason I found it so was because I have particular interests that weren't met, but I regard it as eminently reasonable to assume that a movie lionizing the life of a famous film critic might have a thing or two to say about film criticism. And while the material that IS here is valuable, there simply isn't enough of it to sustain my interest through the two hours that the movie runs. The obvious point of comparison here is last year's Iron Lady, a biopic that was so busy displaying the life of a great woman in her decline that it forgot to show her to us while she was actually in her prime.

For all that we did not agree, Roger Ebert was a great man, and a great critic. I can only hope to one day match the breadth of his skill, wit, and love of films. He deserved a better tribute than this. And the nature of film being what it is, God willing, he may one day receive it.

Final Score:  5.5/10

How to Train Your Dragon 2

Alternate Title:  How to Make More Money

One sentence synopsis:    Hiccup and Toothless must stop a megalomaniacal warlord from destroying Burk and enslaving its dragons.


Things Havoc liked:  It was, in retrospect, inevitable that Pixar's run of amazing films would eventually come to an end. No studio, not Pixar, not Disney, not even Marvel can keep up the quality level forever. And yet what annoyed me about Pixar's decline over the last few years wasn't that they simply didn't keep to their high standards with disappointing films like Brave, but because having had a slip up, they decided to switch over to nothing but sequels of low quality and high marketability. I can think of no other reason why movies like Cars 2, Planes, and Monsters University came to exist. Yet as Pixar has slipped, it has provided an opportunity for their earstwhile rivals to shine, be they parent company Disney with Frozen (their best movie since Lion King), or their Speilbergian arch-rivals Dreamworks. And how better to showcase their talent with a highly marketable sequel?

... wait.

I kid. How to Train Your Dragon 2, a film I initially had made no plans on seeing due to a couple of fairly poor trailers, is not a sequel conceived of solely to sell toys, but a sequel conceived of for the much more acceptable reason of desiring to make vast amounts of money by replicating the success of a previous critical and box office smash. 2010's How to Train Your Dragon was just such a smash, of course, a massive, sprawling animated adventure flick in the best traditions of its predecessors, a movie kids adored, and I respected a great deal. It had world-class animation, wonderful art design, excellent voice-work, a beautiful score, superb writing, and wicked timing, and without giving the game away too early, the sequel has all six of the above in spades, so how bad do you really think it can be? Flight sequences, though perhaps not quite as groundbreaking as the last time round (the first film was the only movie I've ever seen to out-do Avatar in 3D) are still breathtaking exercises in joyous freedom, complete with (I'm assured of this by my local ornithologist) proper physical movement and wing construction to lend the entire thing an air of verisimilitude. The animation is gorgeous and varied, from bright, colorful sequences of adventure and battle, to burnt forests and somber funerals. The original film's art style was what I called "detailed caricature" and it remains intact for this film, alternating incredible texture and depth with broad-canvas splashes of deep-field color. The dragons themselves remain as adorable as ever, their behavior some absurd mishmash of cats and dogs sized upwards for gigantic lizards, and the film's habit of placing their antics in the background of every scene, regardless of content, makes for all manner of hillarity. The score, by returning composer John Powell, is more of the first movie's, with period and region-appropriate instruments turning out a Disney-style orchestral overture, studded with actual songs at proper moments.  All of this is supported by a top-tier voice cast, mostly returned from the first movie, with standouts being Jay Baruchel (whom I last saw in last year's This is the End), and Gerard Butler, (who for once is using an accent that's appropriate). New additions include Kate Blanchett, doing a spot-perfect Emma Thompson impression (seriously, I thought it was Thompson) as Hiccup's mother Valka, and Djimon Hounsou, of Amistad and Gladiator, as raving psychotic Drago Bludvist.

Animated sequels have a bad reputation for a number of reasons, and one is that such films (especially anything Disney) tend to be nothing but the same film done over again, either with the children of the original cast or some contrivance to force things back to square one. As such I was surprised that for this one, the filmmakers decided to skip the lessons of the last movie entirely and set us on a new path. Five years have passed since the previous movie, and vikings and dragons are now fully integrated together, with viking warriors sailing into battle on the backs of assorted flying lizards. Far from being the outcast nerd of the previous film, only grudgingly listened to by his father and ignored by the macho warrior vikings, Hiccup (Baruchel) commences this film as something of a village hero, the prospective successor to his father Stoick the Vast (Butler), whose words are given weight by those around him and who has been given license to indulge in his love of contraptions and inventions, including several actually inventive designs (it's hard to go wrong with a flaming sword). Rather than having to relearn the same lessons as the last movie and once more embark on proving his worth to the community at large, this film deals with Hiccup's actual limits, be they of his ideals or of his ability to improvise his way out of bad scrapes. As in Brave, I do occasionally find it refreshing in a film when a hotheaded young protagonist defies all convention and goes off on his own to set things right only to discover that the conventions in question existed for a reason, and while this movie certainly isn't about the death of ambition or anything so weighty, it does recognize that hopes and dreams are not always enough in the face of determined, fanatical violence. But what struck me the most was simply that the characters have been permitted to grow, to age even, up from teenagers to young adults for the majority of the cast, and their behavior to change to match. There's a tad bit less awkwardness, a bit more maturity even to the absurd adventuring, just hints of alterations from the last time, all without falling into the trap of sitting down and explaining to the audience just why people are acting differently. Even Stoick, the villain (sort of) of the last film, has been permitted permanent change, and one of the better character moments of the entire affair is a sequence halfway through when, confronted with an earth-shattering revelation, the entire cast waits for him to explode with viking outrage, only for him to do nothing of the sort.

Things Havoc disliked: It's a kids' film guys, you have to accept certain things as given. One of these things is that the climax is going to be a bit rushed, as kids do not have the patience for lingering on dark and dour cruelties for as long as us jaded adults do. I don't mind, really, as I think some movies (the Batman films for instance) go way too far to the other direction, but it's true that things get awful convenient by the end when it comes time to claw back from the inevitable nadir to the inevitable triumph. This was true of Frozen and it's true of this film as well, so perhaps it's just an element of the genre.

What is not an element of the genre though is an unfocused script, and How to Train Your Dragon 2 (god that title is long) has one, while its predecessor did not. Part of the problem is that the plot is more central to this film than it was to the last one. The first film had a plot, of sorts, but the plot was really kept in the background, as the focus of the film was Hiccup and Toothless (and to an extent Astrid), which allowed the movie to focus quite closely on these characters and their relationship as it evolved. I understand changing that this time, as said relationship has been established, but the problem really is that those elements brought in to replace that laser-like focus are not, by themselves, that compelling. Characters such as Velka (Blanchett) are the occasion for several striking images and set-pieces, but don't actually have a lot to do with anything, nor are their relationships with our main characters explored all that much. A similar problem bedevils Eret, played by Jon Snow himself, Kit Harington, who, and I hope you'll forgive me, knows nothing, particularly not what his role in the film is supposed to be. Yes, the movie does play around a bit with his "stern brooding young badass" archetype, mostly by turning him into eye candy for the female supporting cast (why not), but nobody, probably not even the little kids whom this film is intended for, can possibly fail to realize what his character arc is likely to be within minutes of encountering him, nor is that obligatory character arc actually important insofar as the film goes. Not every character in every film needs to be plot-critical of course, but there has to be some reason to have them in it, and the reasoning for several of these additions is specious to the point of invisibility. They're not bad characters, nor are they badly voiced or animated, nor do they interact badly with the rest of the cast. But they just seem to... sit there. And every moment the movie spends with them is a moment they're not spending with the characters we came here to see.

Final thoughts:  I don't want to make this sound like a bigger problem than it is, because the base fact is that How to Train Your Dragon 2 is an excellent film, funny, high-tempo, well-written, and gorgeous to look upon and hear. Is it as good as its predecessor? No, but then what sequel ever is (besides Godfather and Hunger Games and Hobbit and Captain America and oh shut up!)? The original film was a masterpiece, and if this movie is slightly off the mark insofar as those things go, it's not the end of the world, nor is it a reason to skip a film that is, in almost every way, a superbly-crafted animated piece. With Pixar having fallen off the wagon, it's good to see the other players in the realm of animation stepping in to compensate, but then that should be no surprise, as the nature of major American film, irrespective of genre, has always been thus. If Pixar returns to the superb-quality work that they were famous for even three or four years ago, then so much the better. And if not, there is always someone else. One studio falls. Another steps forth and takes its place.

Such is Hollywood.

Final Score:  8/10

The Rover

Alternate Title:  Madder Max

One sentence synopsis:    A violent, dangerous drifter pursues the men who stole his car through the post-collapse Australian outback.


Things Havoc liked:  A year before I started doing these reviews, I saw an Australian gangster film called "Animal Kingdom" by a first-time director named David Michod. It was a wonderful little film, sparse and twisted and intensely realistic, and more than that, it managed to star several actors I don't like (Joel Edgerton, Guy Pierce) and make me like them despite our history. As such, when I learned that Michod had returned to the screen with another movie about bad people doing very bad things in the middle of Australia starring a pair of actors I couldn't possibly care less about, I knew I had to be there.

I've made no secret of my distaste for Guy Pierce in these reviews. He nearly ruined Iron Man 3. He wore terrible old-person makeup in Prometheus. He made The Time Machine, Lockout, and Two Brothers. And while obviously there are roles of his I have liked (Memento, LA Confidential, The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert), my distaste for his smug leading man schtick remains firmly intact. This role, however, is like nothing I've ever seen from Pierce. Eric, the main character of the film, is a murderous, violent demon, quiet and barely controlled, a sociopathic monster whose inclinations towards summary action are given free reign by the dire circumstances that society has fallen into. Yet Pierce does not play the character as a screaming maniac, but rather like a villain from one of Ralph Fiennes' better performances, Coriolanus perhaps, or even Schindler's List. Quiet, monosyllabic, and yet deeply disturbing, Pierce evidences a raging ferocity through nothing more than expression and eye movement, staring into the depths of people's souls like a drilling augur before killing them with ruthless, entirely non-cinematic efficiency. A scene early on where he attempts to buy a gun from a group of carnies, only to remorselessly murder them at the first sign of difficulties, cements the tone of the character nicely. Protagonist or not, this character, and men like him, are not victims of the fall of civilization, but the reason for it. And in the absence of the law, they are let loose to do as they would in pursuit of objectives that may well make sense only to themselves.

But Pierce, for all that I hate him, has been good in films before. His co-star, Robert Pattinson, of Twilight, has not. And yet moreso even than Kirsten Stewart, I wanted to give Pattinson another shot, as there were hints, I felt, that Twilight was not a fair means to judge his actual abilities. And while Stewart was simply not up to the task of headlining her second chance (Snow White and the Huntsman), Pattinson is on a completely different plane of existence here. Unrecognizable from his chaste pretty-boy persona in the Twilight series, Pattinson plays Reynolds, a redneck miner with a southern accent captured early on by Pierce's character and forced to take him to the hideout of his brother and their gang of car thieves. Lisping and confused, Pattinson plays the character like a victim of some kind of mild retardation, a damaged, naive, unfocussed loser, so dependent on others for direction that he willingly becomes Pierce's accomplice, despite the fact that Pierce himself seems to want little or nothing to do with him. Stuttering, limping, and simpering like a whining dog, Pattinson's performance is, astonishingly enough, the best thing in the entire movie, reminding me somewhat of Leonardo DiCaprio's turn in What's Eating Gilbert Grape, which is not a comparison I make lightly. Indeed, I must admit that it occurred to me while watching this movie, that before he became the well-known and well-respected actor that we know today, DiCaprio had to make such teenage masterworks as Titanic and Romeo+Juliet.

The Australian outback is a punishing, unforgiving place, as anyone who has seen Mad Max can tell you, and consequently needs little to transform it into a perfect setting for a gritty, brutal movie of violence and death. Yet aware of this as he is, Michod decides against the usual tropes of post-apocalyptia, of souped-up cars worn by men in gimp masks and famous landmarks crumbling amidst the open waste. What exactly happened to render things so bad is not stated outright, but seems to have been less nuclear war and more stock market crash. Some facets of society still exist, the Australian military, the mining industry, precisely those you would expect to continue on in the aftermath of anything short of total annihilation, hardened and sharpened to a brutal edge. Money still circulates, though the Australian dollar is hinted as having become worthless, and shopkeepers will take nothing but US from behind their armored, gun-covered storefronts. Revealing comments, like one of Pattinson's that travel times are longer thanks to the lack of road maintenance putting a limit on people's effective speeds, or the doctor who takes care of dozens of dogs abandoned by their presumably-deceased owners, are the stuff of the collapse here, not lurid Emmerichian images of the Opera House in ruins. The shots are long and desolate, as much a western as an apocalypse film, as characters walk across barren plains into sharp sunrises, or loom menacingly before dark corridors in buildings full of armed men. The violence, when it erupts (and it does erupt) is fast and brutal and entirely uncinematic. People simply are shot and die and are then dead and the movie goes on, in the best traditions of any society-breakdown film.

Things Havoc disliked: I've got nothing against a movie that doesn't stop every five seconds to explain itself, but unfortunately, that only works if the movie doesn't leave major questions in its wake, and this one unfortunately does. Early on, after Guy Pierce has confronted the men who stole his car and is beaten unconscious for his trouble, he awakens on the side of the road, alive, and lying next to the thieves' original car, fueled and intact, with his money and his guns still on his person. Given the general tenor of this film, the question begs itself, why is Pierce still alive, let alone in possession of all the tools necessary for him to enact his crusade for revenge? It's not like the men who subdued him have been established as being possessed of particularly strong moral codes against killing, and the question as to why they have left him in this state is simply never answered, not even with a throwaway comment about how it would be 'wrong' to kill him out of hand or something. Similarly, characters find one another in the midst of the outback via methods that are never established, tracking them effortlessly over trackless desert to precisely the right locations, all without any indication as to how. I understand the desire to do away with the obligatory establishing material in favor of simply telling the story and implying the rest, but some establishment is required in order for the film to make sense. Another sequence early on had Pierce carrying an automatic pistol in one shot, and in the next, prominently carrying a revolver instead. After a minute's confusion and whispered conversation with my neighbor, I managed to construct a reasonable explanation for why Pierce suddenly had a different gun, but the fact that it was necessary for me to effectively stop watching the film for a minute and consult with friends in order to follow what was happening is not a good sign insofar as the film's editing is concerned.

There's also a simple question of pacing. The Rover is a slow, deliberate film, allowing tension to build out of empty spaces and unspoken lines, which is fine, but the tendency here is to push it a bit too far. Characters can never actually say anything without hemming and hawing for five minutes, and have to spend at least ten seconds of pregnant silence between every single short or monosyllabic line they pronounce. Used sparingly, this is an efficient technique, as evidenced by dozens of films including Unforgiven. But used constantly, all it serves to do is make most of the movie feel like padding as nobody, not even brooding loners staring into the campfire with rage-laden eyes, speaks like this constantly, and anyone who does would be so unsettling as to rapidly put anyone else off of their attempts to engage them in conversation. As it stands though, characters react to an wild-eyed, armed psychotic, visibly on the verge of a breakdown, whose words are clipped and quivering with rage, by smiling sweetly as though nothing is the matter and permitting him to walk about their homes armed and unsupervised. Given the state of society and the fact that everyone is so constantly on-edge against the predators that roam the roads, this is like making a Godzilla film wherein soldiers have been battling giant monsters for the better part of a decade, and then making everyone dismiss loud booming footsteps which shake the very walls as nothing but thunder, while stacking their weapons in another building and going back to sleep.

Final thoughts:  The Rover is a stark, well-acted thriller of a movie, an attempt to do Mad Max without the camp, but it's problems like these that really hold it back. Taken by themselves, the performances on offer here from Guy Pierce and Robert Pattinson are worth seeing in any context, but unfortunately the context in question is just not good enough for a full-throated recommendation. Michod's first film, Animal Kingdom, was damn near a masterpiece. It garnered Jackie Weaver a deserved Oscar nod for her turn as the matriarch of an Australian crime family after all, and yet this time round, Michod's lack of experience at the rest of the business of moviemaking is unfortunately on display. I will continue to watch this man's career with interest, as Rover was at least good enough to prove that the first film was not a fluke, but the systemic flaws of script, editing, and general pacing (something that seems to bedevil an awful lot of the films I see, Hollywood and otherwise) keep this from being anything but a niche recommendation.

But then, if all you're looking for is the exploits of a crazy man in the Australian outback killing people, you might still want to check this film out. It's not like that genre is overflowing with examples.

Final Score:  6/10

Chef

Alternate Title:  This is Why You're Fat

One sentence synopsis:    The head chef of a gourmet Los Angeles restaurant looks for creative inspiration by opening a food truck with his son and best friend.


Things Havoc liked:  Jon Favreau, Executive Producer of The Avengers, the first two Iron Man movies (which he also directed), and Cowboys and Aliens, is not the man I would have anticipated personally creating in an indie flick about food, but then he also wrote Swingers, so what do I know?  In Chef, a movie he stars in, wrote, directed, and produced, he plays Carl Casper, head chef of a fine dining Los Angeles restaurant, where he works alongside Sous-chef Martin (John Leguizamo), Maitre-d' Molly (Scarlett Johanssen), and owner Riva (Dustin Hoffman).  The track record for actors who write and direct themselves is not a good one, to say the least, and I've only seen Favreau before in bit roles in Iron Man or Rudy, but to my surprise he does a fine job, wisely eschewing anything too demanding in favor of a portrayal of a real chef with real skill and real problems.  Right from the start, we see him preparing, testing, refining, and producing his food with expert precision, commanding his kitchen brigade with easy familiarity, and generally convincing us that he is, at least, what he appears to be.  He also, wisely, decides against writing a character for himself that is a stand-in for Jesus.  Carl is not an asshole, but he is a distant, divorced father, whose relationship with his ex-wife Inez (Sofia Vergara) and son Percy (EmJay Anthony) is cordial but disconnected.  No (or at least few) raging explosions or histrionics here, Carl is just a guy who happens to be an excellent chef, and given that Favreau's other roles have been those of "guys who happen to be ____", sticking to his strengths is the best plan here.

Another good plan is, when introducing yourself to cinema in a major way, surround yourself with talent.  And while I had not anticipated in this little exercise associating John Leguizamo's name with talent, here we are.  His character, Martin serves little purpose except to follow Carl around and help him as he goes from his stultifying restaurant job to a food truck serving Cuban Sandwiches (which look both delicious, and like they'd make you fat just glancing at them), but Leguizamo is just so damn... well [i]entertaining[/i] as he does it, running his mouth constantly in a slew of in-jokes and references and schtick in the manner that resembles his earlier (annoying) work, but does not emulate it to the point of aggravation.  Hoffman meanwhile, as a restaurant owner desperate to fill his restaurant, is as smarmy as ever, though you can't help but feel for him when it's his money on the line every time his chef decides that there is a "creative rut" being dug and that it's time to introduce people to the merits of vacuum-boiled organ meat or some damn thing.  But best of the supporting characters is actually Percy, Carl's ten-year-old son, who clearly is looking for some way to get closer to his father, be it through cooking or anything else.  Child actors are always a danger in any film, but this one does a wonderful job, playing not some precocious little genius, nor an enfant terrible, nor any other stock thing, but just a normal kid whose reactions to the situations the movie puts him in are entirely realistic, avoiding the designated "wise statements from the angelic child" scenes, in favor of just concentrating on him and his father.  Simpler is better in this case.

And that's really all there is to it.  Indeed this is the sort of movie that almost defies reviewing, so simple and easy-going that there just isn't much to say about it.  And yet despite that, the film is never boring.  Moving along at an brisk pace and never repeating itself, it is simply a series of slice-of-life vignettes, as Favreau's character is dissatisfied with his job, quits it, finds inspiration, and returns to glory.  There are no villains to defeat, no checklist of lessons to be learned, just characters trying to do the best they can by one another and living their lives.  In it's own weird little way, it's almost refreshing to encounter a movie that doesn't have ambitions of being the successor to Hamlet.

Things Havoc disliked: And having said that, I shall now complain about the fact that the movie is not ambitious enough.

There's nothing wrong with simple films, nor with simple stories done right, and I don't think every movie has to lead its characters on a torturous journey of challenge, redemption, and triumph.  But there does need to be something there to keep our attention, and while Chef certainly isn't boring, it just doesn't have all that much going for it beyond the fact that these characters do exist and they do engage in the actions I described above.  There are hints of more, with Favreau's other sous-chef Tony (Bobby Cannavale) being conflicted over taking his place at the restaurant, his rivalry with his boss or with food critic Ramsay Michel (Oliver Platt), or his relationship with hostess Molly, but nothing is really developed, as the characters enter or fall out of the scene entirely based on their proximity to the main character, and while that's pretty accurate to real life, realism is a poor defense for a narrative medium like film.

And the case for realism isn't helped by several, strange elements that seem to pop up almost at random.  For one thing, while I'm not the kind of guy who objects to product placement as a rule, the social media apps that this movie features prominently (Favreau's son is, of course, a computer wiz, and popularizes his father's new business on twitter, vine, etc...) gets to the point of an extended advertisement.  The reason product placement annoys people is because it pulls them out of the story, like a commercial break in the middle of a movie on network television.  By the thirtieth time that the movie shows Favreau's son placing a "cool" tweet (with appropriate hashtags, of course), represented by a cute little graphic of a bird flying off to spread the word, even I was starting to wonder just how much the filmmakers had funded the movie out of Twitter's marketing budget.  Leaving that aside, there are also a couple of characters that seem to be inserted as padding, such as Favreau's father-in-law, a cuban big-band style performer in Miami who seems to be in the film largely to humor the performer, or a cameo by Robert Downey Jr, acting like a weirdo, who seems to be there to give the character a truck.  Obviously real life is composed of such vignettes, but as always, film does not reward hemming and hawing with characters or plotlines that aren't intended to go anywhere.  Chekov's Gun is a principle of storytelling for a reason.

Final thoughts:  Simple films are always hard to review, as there isn't anything particularly wrong with them, but their horizons are limited enough to restrict the options insofar as the loftier scores are concerned.  Any movie can, in theory, be spectacular of course, but a movie like Chef is probably about as good as it possibly could be, a nice, charming little slice of life about characters acting as normal people do in a situation that could certainly exist.  It does not seek to exceed these bounds, nor does it do so, but if these sorts of films are up your alley, then by all means go see it, as you're not likely to encounter one done as well as this.

My tastes of course lie towards things a bit more daring than this, of course.  But even I can recognize a simple story done well when I see it.

Final Score:  6.5/10

Edge of Tomorrow

Alternate Title:  Groundhog D-Day

One sentence synopsis:    A rear-echelon soldier must find a way to single-handedly defeat an alien menace when he gains the ability to relive the same day over and over again.


Things Havoc liked:  Make all the Scientology jokes you like, I've always liked Tom Cruise, ever since I first watched Top Gun as a kid.  He may actually be insane, but he knows how to carry a Hollywood film better than almost anyone else active today.  What issues lead most people to dislike Cruise I can only guess at, but that guess revolves around an aura of smugness, warranted or otherwise, that he often projects through his roles.  Fair enough.  But bear in mind that Edge of Tomorrow is a movie where the filmmakers decided to deal with that problem by simply spending the entire movie killing him off in brutal, cathartic ways.

Directed by Doug Liman, a director I have had strictly no use for in any context previous to this one, Edge of Tomorrow is, by one measure, probably the best possible film that could be made out of its premise.  That premise, for those nine of you who have missed the trailers, is that aliens have invaded the Earth, and Cruise is tasked with slaying them, thanks to his (nearly) unique ability to "replay" the day of his own death every time he dies, going back with perfect foreknowledge of what is to transpire and changing his actions to do things differently.  We've seen Cruise save the world many times, in various, violent ways, but this movie, by nature of its premise, deals in no small part with repeated, horrific violence enacted against Cruise's person for the majority of its runtime.  His character, Major William Cage, is a marketing director pressed into military propaganda service, who manages through mischance and his own big mouth to wind up on the front lines of a D-day style assault on the beaches of Northern France to take continental Europe back from the alien foe.  Explicitly not an action hero of any sort, Cage spends his time on the beaches of France screaming in incoherent terror before being violently murdered by an alien monstrosity, and waking up once more to do it all over again.  It is only through many repeated attempts (and deaths) that he begins to learn the rudiments of the combat he is forced to undergo over and over again, while overcoming his terror of the enemy through sheer, bloody-minded familiarity.  The effect is like that of a video-game player who must reload from a checkpoint every time he dies, and the film showcases the sheer frustration that soon replaces the terror of his surroundings, and the exhilaration that comes with having gotten further than he did before.  In consequence, unlike so many other action films where the hero is simply assumed to either possess lethal combat skills or manifest hidden ones when the occasion becomes sufficiently dire, when by the end Cruise is facing down alien hell-beasts with aplomb and skill, we actually believe that this schlub is perfectly capable of doing so, due only to sheer, bloody-minded repetition.

Cruise is excellent in this role, a cocky, slick bastard who transitions to a panicked rookie and then to a hardened veteran over the course of the film.  And yet Cruise himself is not alone in this regard.  Emily Blunt, of The Adjustment Bureau and Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, plays Sgt Vrataski, a veteran in her own right, hero of the war effort (the propaganda stills make her look like a Warhammer Space Marine), who owes her success to having once experienced the same sort of abilities that Cruise is manifesting.  Given that Blunt's job is to play the exact same day over and over again without any knowledge of what's coming, she does a fantastic job, laying out rather than spelling out the terrible trauma that actually comes with being brutally murdered three hundred times in succession, or for seeing those around you killed repeatedly with equal aplomb.  Brendan Gleeson (of a thousand things including Braveheart) plays the iron-faced General Brigham, with whom Cruise must deal repeatedly (of course) like a pastiche of Lord Mountbatten, rigid and unbending, even when confronted with some of the strangest evidence ever laid before anyone.  But the best of the lot is unquestionably Bill Paxton, playing Master Sergeant Farrell Bartolome like a cross between Full Metal Jacket's Gunnery Sgt. Hartmann and Aliens' Sgt. Apone.  Filled with marine corps (and southern) aphorisms about the purity of armed combat and its capacity to work redemptive miracles on the characters of fallen souls, Paxton here might as well be playing some thirty-year-older version of Private Hudson, and is plainly having the time of his life in a role that is truly riotously funny.

Indeed, one of the great surprises (to me) of Edge of Tomorrow was just how funny the film actually is.  The repeated deaths of Tom Cruise become so over the top and ludicrous that they actually become flat out hilarious, with orchestra stings (and misdirection) that left me, at least, nearly falling out of my chair.  Groundhog Day, the obvious point of comparison for any "live the same day over and over again" movies, was a comedy after all, and while Edge of Tomorrow is not, it does understand the absurd side of Cruise's situation very well.  It also understands the human touches that underlie the best action films (I cite Aliens once again).  Cruise's squad of misbegotten lowlifes is drawn in a beautifully human way, with each character feeling just right for the task at hand, be it the gruff delinquent or the imbecilic sad-sack.  Despite the seriousness of the situation, the film understands the limits of anyone's attention or endurance, including for instance a sequence midway through where, tired of being eviscerated repeatedly, Cruise spends one "cycle" by stealing a motorcycle, driving to London, and having a beer.  The aliens, meanwhile, though their motivations and characters are not exactly well established, do at least serve to present a credible threat to an army armed with powered exoskeletons and automatic grenade launchers.  They are frenetic, violent tornadoes of death, so fast as to present difficulties for even the audience to keep up with, with the result that when they attack and slaughter entire squads of troops, our reaction is not to laugh (as it was in Starship Troopers).  This allows the action to actually do what it is intended to do, showcase the hero's skill and bravery by putting him up against something that the audience believes to be a credible threat.  All in all, the film is simply well made from start to finish, understanding precisely the sort of story it is telling.  After all, Cruise, by virtue of his reset button, is physically invulnerable.  The alien army is therefore less of a threat to be feared than a puzzle to be solved.  This too the filmmakers' understand, and they do not bore us with over-repetition of the same horrific points but move on with alacrity to the next attempt to solve the puzzle.

Things Havoc disliked: There are very few things that Edge of Tomorrow actually does wrong, and most of them, unfortunately, come near the end of the film, involving revelations and plot events that I would not dream of revealing to you, my valued readers.  Suffice to say that the film's style and production was so engaging that I will confess to a bit of disappointment when, for the last half hour or so, it decided to shift somewhat into a more conventional sort of action movie.  Not that this shift is done poorly, it isn't, but the world does not lack for standard hero-against-aliens action films, nor even for ones starring Tom Cruise.  I reviewed one just last year after all.  I won't pretend that this undoes all of the good work that the film had previously undertaken, but it is simply disappointing that instead of finishing out with the creative premise that they had previously been using, the film decided to pull such a switch on us.

That said, there's not much else for me to say against the movie here.  Oh I could get pedantic about military tactics and equipment (the wonderful Osprey seems to have become the primary military conveyance of the future, and the navy is conspicuously absent for an amphibious assault on France), or about the exactitudes of the plot (it's time travel, holes happen), but the only real issue the film has besides the one I cited above is that the need to tell a story like this limits its horizons somewhat.  This is not a film destined to become some kind of cross-genre classic remembered throughout the ages, like The Wild Bunch or Godfather.  It was not intended to be.

Final thoughts:  And that, really, is it.  Edge of Tomorrow is not a classic of the silver screen but it is basically everything else that one could ask for, funny, inventive, well-characterized, well-acted, well-written, and thoroughly, thoroughly entertaining.  As popcorn summer blockbuster action flicks go, indeed, this is one of the best I've seen in years.  I had my doubts coming into the film that it was going to be of any use at all, exoskeletons with alien-fighting badasses in them do not have a brilliant track record at the movies after all, but this film is pretty much the best possible result you could get from a movie with this premise and this cast.  It is significantly better than I expected it to be, and considerably better than basically every non-comic-book action film of its sort for the last decade.

And if that isn't enough to get you to go see it, then I suggest you simply wait for my next review, because plainly the entire genre is wasted on you.

Final Score:  7.5/10