The Grand Budapest Hotel - Movie Review

The Grand Budapest Hotel  

Directed Wes Anderson

Starring Ralph Fiennes, Tony Revolori, Saoirse Ronan, Jeff Goldblum, Willem Dafoe and Bill Murray

From 20th Century Fox

Rated R

99 minutes

Fiennes leads the charge in Anderson's Budapest assualt

by Michael Clawson of Terminal Volume

Few things are more blissful at a movie theater than a Wes Anderson film. Even amid death, his depression-laden heroes and some of his more morbid curiosities, you can’t help but smile at his films’ intoxicating presentation and their cheerful precociousness.

Anderson’s body of work, astoundingly unique and inventive beyond all reason, exists in a strange world somewhere between cinema and stage play. And not like a Broadway play either; more like a low-budget children’s theater, one overrun by adult actors, even prestige adult actors. He frames these actors with deep affection amid tableaus of artifice, living dioramas in make-believe tangents of the real world.

His new film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, seems to exist even further outside our plane of existence, in an implausibly quirky Eastern European country in the 1930s. Previous films were shot in schools (Rushmore), trains (The Darjeeling Limited) and oceans (A Life Aquatic), but Budapest exists in sprawling interiors, hilariously simple effects shots and in stylized graphical animations. I hope a hotel like this exists, but then again it works better as fantasy untouched by reality. The movie has an interesting framing device: a woman is reading a book by an author who was told a story by a guy who knew a rather famous hotel concierge. It's somewhat confusing, but made clear in the final shot.

In flashbacks, we're shown the Grand Budapest Hotel and its star concierge, Gustav H. (Ralph Fiennes), a man of impeccable taste in everything except ethics, which he abuses to no end by wooing and sleeping with the hotel's older guests. His scorecard of nonagenarian conquests is shown in a montage that is purely and energetically Andersonian in spirit and delivery.

Gustav is thrown under the microscope when one of his mistresses dies as unexpectedly as a 97-year-old woman can and after changing her will so that Gustav H. gets an expensive painting the rest of her miserable family had been hoping to inherit. With the help of a talented lobby boy named Zero (Tony Revolori), a baker's apprentice (Saoirse Ronan), a hotel owner (Jeff Goldblum) and a fleet of other smaller characters, Gustav H. fights the mistress' family, a vampiric assassin (Nosferatu himself, Willem Dafoe), local police and thinly veiled Nazi stand-ins known as the Zig Zag.

Of course, that's the plot, but that's only a small portion of any Wes Anderson movie. Much of the movie exists in its wacky presentation, its dryly written humor, its adorable sense of time and place, and its ever-expanding cast of characters — Bill Murray and Bob Balaban turn up, and I think George Clooney had a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo. And in an Anderson first, the director jumps genres mid-film. What starts as a fairly standard indie-comedy eventually plays with other motifs: a whodunit, a slasher thriller, a romance and a prison movie.

The prison material takes up a large chunk of film, but it's likely to be a highlight for many viewers, with Gustav H. serving as the prison concierge to a bunch of murderers and cutthroats — “How bout some mush, old chaps?” This is the kind of movie that has prison cakes filled with hacksaws and hammers and it totally gets away with it. The tools serve a prison breakout that lovingly winks at The Great Escape. Anderson is prone to homage, and he does it several times here. In one scene, Anderson re-enacts a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain almost verbatim, but with a terrifyingly sudden climax.

And when it's not re-imagining classics, it's becoming one: there’s an extended chase sequence that leads high up into the Alps on a cable car and then into a monastery, where Gustav H. tracks down his only alibi. The scene ends with the most understated and absurd chase scenes of recent memory as Zero and Gustav sled through every winter Olympic event possible. The special effects are bogus and cheeseball, but that’s precisely the point of this whimsical movie and its outlandish examination of Europe.

One other curiosity: the film switches aspect ratios depending on which time period the movie is in. Some of the picture is told, presumably, in the 1980s, as Jude Law plays a hotel guest listening to another guest (F. Murray Abraham) talk about Gustav H. In these scenes, the film fills the whole canvas of the screen, but then in the 1930s the edges are cropped, as if watching an old movie, its squarish aspect ratio curtained by blackness on its side.

Everything about this movie is just lovely: the clothing, dialogue, every character, Fiennes, Fiennes, Fiennes, the pastel coloring, meticulously designed props, lavish sets, obviously fake sets, sets that seem to be made of paper … each scene is rich with tiny detail. Notice how Gustav H. steps in the elevator and flips a switch to turn the elevator light on, or Zero’s penciled-in mustache, or how Saoirse Ronan has a birthmark in the exact shape of Mexico on her cheek, or that obscene painting Gustav hangs on his mistress’ wall. The movie careens forward with presence and determination.

That being said, let me offer this: this is not Wes Anderson’s best work, a spot I still reserve for The Royal Tenenbaums. I wanted Grand Budapest Hotel to be funnier and more mischievous, but also more grounded. It’s still very good, but as an admirer of Anderson’s previous films, I wanted this one to ring with more truth. At times it gets so big and so comically wacky that it feels empty in places. Let me be clear, though, about my brief complaints: some unevenness aside, this is still lovely filmmaking of the highest order and yet another shining achievement from Wes Anderson.

300:Rise of an Empire - Movie Review

300: Rise of an Empire  

Directed by Noam Murro

Starring Sullivan Stapleton, Lena Headey, Eva Green and Rodrigo Santoro

From Warner Bros. Pictures

Rated R

102 minutes

Same ol’, same ol’ with 300 sequel

by Michael Clawson of Terminal Volume

In 300: Rise of Empire’s world, there is no honor in life; only in death. That theme finds its way to the screen, where bodies are disemboweled, hacked into pieces, impaled, smooshed, drowned, lit on fire, raped, sliced, diced, and tenderized into an organic hamburger meat. If this is the code of Sparta, then maybe it’s good the civilization never made it out of the BCs.

When Zach Snyder made the first 300, way back in 2006, what he had created was an inventive bonanza of hard-boiled mayhem. Yes, the first film had just as much violence, but the filmmaking was fresh, the style inventive, the visuals iconic. We had never seen anything like it, aside from maybe Sin City, which was its own brand of neo-comic anarchy. Since then, though, a glut of copycats have emerged: The Immortals and The Spirit, both aping (terribly) the graphic novel bandwagon. Many of the most obvious rip-offs were by Snyder himself, including The Watchmen and Sucker Punch, hyper-fantasies of 300’s overt simplicity in style and design.

Now here we are with 300: Rise of an Empire, another nail in this visual style’s lowering coffin. The sequel isn’t by Snyder — though, he produced and co-wrote the screenplay — and is instead directed by Noam Murro, who manages to make a 2014 movie look exactly like a 2006 movie. Give him a medal. Here he strips 300 of all its novelty and discovers that all he’s created is this stupendously awful sequel. What a difference 8 years makes.

It begins where the last one left off: after the 300 Spartans, including Leonidas (Gerard Butler), are massacred at the Hot Gates, the Persian armies pour into Greece with Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) leading the charge atop his Fenway-sized throne nestled on the shoulders of the most resilient slaves. Early parts of the movie focus on Xerxes, who is then abandoned altogether. Other early scenes also contain prequel elements that flesh out miniscule details of the original film, details no one on the planet was curious about, like the name of that guy who’s kicked into that bottomless pit.

Eventually we get to Themistokles (Sullivan Stapleton), a Greek general who decides to help Sparta only after its bravest warriors have been ground into a crimson toothpaste. Themistokles groups an army and tries to button up the Greek coast to prevent a separate Persian army, one that seems to exist outside of Xerxes’ universe, from storming into Athens. This movie’s spatial awareness is difficult to follow, throughout. Locations seem to have large expanses between them, but then they’re on top of each other. The choppy editing magnifies this weird sense of place and distance.

I could tell you about other characters that float through the plot, but it would be needless punctuation to Rise of the Empire’s dyslexic grammar. Everyone looks alike, acts alike and dies alike. Even Lena Headey, so chillingly mad in Game of Thrones, seems bored here. If watching nondescript six-packed men in metal underwear clobber each other into pulpy stumps, the wounds spraying goopy chocolate syrup, then here’s a movie for you.The violence these men perpetrate is so constant that it turns into a steady drone of meaningless background noise. I mean, how many times can you really see a man get slashed by a sword? “A bzillion times,” Murro says from his fanboy pulpit.

Much of the dialogue is that over-emphasized, self-important chest-beating of the first movie: “An honorable death is all that we can ask for,” “We choose to die on our feet rather than live on our knees,” “There will be death and destruction,” and enough Braveheart “freedom” speeches to make even William Wallace beg for mercy. The dialogue gets worse when Eva Green, playing the seductive warrior Artemisia, turns up and takes it all to a whole new level. Green, bless her heart, plays the role like it’s Shakespeare and it’s oddly beautiful, if only because it’s the most garish, over-the-top bad performance of the year. Artemisia, who wears a breastplate with nipples stamped right into the bronze, seduces Themistokles and they engage in a sexual olympics that deserves the gold, silver and bronze medals to be smelted together into one big awesome trophy. At one point in the movie, Artemisia slices off a man’s head, holds up the severed noggin and makes out with it.

Mostly, though, 300: Rise of an Empire is all heroic posturing and lots of talking of dying. Isn’t getting killed in battle counterproductive to the cause? Remember that quote from Patton: “I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor bastard die for his.” Yeah, Gen. Patton would have hated these warriors, who obsess over their eventual defeat like it’s some sort of rite of passage.

Now, all of this negativity I’m blasting out doesn’t mean the movie doesn’t look great, because it really does. It just mostly looks like its predecessor, with very little advancement since then. That being said, some images are magnificent, including one of the utterly bland Stapleton sinking in an ocean filled with floating ship debris, and another of a tradesman carving the bark off a tree trunk, bits of tree and dust shooting up into the air and choking the frame with cloud of organic matter. The slow motion effects, overused by a factor of three, can also be quite thrilling, if only because the pictures are so overloaded with spectacle.

The 300 true believers will adore this movie. But that’s not saying much; they’d adore anything with shirtless men butchering other shirtless men. Everyone else, keep clear of this clunky behemoth and its violent swing.

Elaine Strich: Shoot Me movie review

Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me Directed by Chiemi Karasawa

Starring Elaine Stritch, Rob Bowman, John Turturro, Tina Fey, Nathan Lane and James Gandolfini

From Sundance Selects

Not rated

98 minutes

Broadway star hides nothing in tell-all documentary

by Michael Clawson of Terminal Volume

It’s winter in New York and Elaine Stritch is prancing down Park Avenue without pants. This is the norm for the 87-year-old actress and Broadway star, and by the end of the movie you’ll be very familiar with those sexy — yes, sexy! — legs.

Stritch is the subject of Chiemi Karasawa’s lovely documentary Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me. Karasawa seems to have unlimited access with Stritch as she bops around Manhattan greeting well-wishers on the street, rehearsing for her new solo show and struggling with her health. The film begins with Stritch as she scoots around the city, possibly to a 30 Rock rehearsal, during which her caustic wit and flamboyant edge are on full display. “This business sucks,” she says, not a hint of irony as she grasps for her next role.

Stritch is not shy. And that gravel-flecked voice, untouched by grace, is still very sharp. She has quite a mouth; her candor leads to many F words and other delicious curses that sound entirely different when said by an octogenarian. In the 30 Rock rehearsal, in which she plays Alec Baldwin’s character’s mother, Baldwin has had enough of her diva behaviour. “You bitch,” he shouts as he walks out of the room. Baldwin might have been serious, but Stritch throws her head back and laughs heartily, as if to say, “Bring it.”

Cameras follow Stritch as she rehearses her one-woman show of Stephen Sondheim songs, a sequel of sorts to a similar show that was a hit many years before. We also see her flipping through her vast library of photographs, memorabilia and Playbills. She was in everything on Broadway, and has a story for each. When an assistant digs up an old photo of her and JFK, Stritch shares the story: Long before he was president, John Kennedy asked Stritch out. After the date, he invited himself up. Stritch turned him down, but always admired him for saying what he meant and not mincing words.

Later, the actress, birdlike and frail, nearly falls into a diabetic coma. She allows herself to be filmed mid-crisis and later in the hospital, where her pantsless hospital gown is a fitting tribute to her wardrobe. She’s gotta stop drinking, she grumbles. Levity fills the room, though, as her unmistakable voice and personality cut through the stillness of the moment. “Dying’s easy. Comedy is hard,” she blurts outs. In many scenes her accompanist Rob Bowman, who should be knighted for his patience and compassion, cares for her as she goes through her health scares.

Besides her performances, which are rather wonderful in their spontaneity and occasional crudeness, the film is filled with humorous little oddities, including one scene in which Stritch grows angry with Karasawa for not documenting the unpacking of a package of English muffins. “Now I have to do it again,” Stritch seethes. In another scene she refers to the hit Broadway play The Book of Norman, seemingly unaware of the actual title. Many actors make appearances, including John Turturro, Tina Fey, Nathan Lane and the late James Gandolfini — he and Stritch were pals, and the movie is dedicated to him.

Mostly, though, Shoot Me just stand backs and ponders Stritch as a landmark to New York, a curiosity that has joyfully refused to stop working. She certainly dresses the park of a cultural institution: she’s often hidden under huge fur coats, her black-stocking’d legs extending from below her long button-ups with big broaches and wide ties. She often hides her eyes behind hats and these big aquarium-sized glasses. She’s the Cruella de Vil of comedy, but somehow much more sophisticatedly trashy. The world is better for her.

The Bag Man - Movie Review

The Bag Man  

Directed by David Grovic

Starring John Cusack, Robert De Niro, Crispin Glover and Rebecca Da Costa

From Cinedigm

Rated R

108 minutes

Cusack, De Niro star in crime stinker

by Michael Clawson of Terminal Volume

The Bag Man is propelled forward on the strength of one lingering question: What’s in that damn bag? Spoiler alert — nothing.

Not literally nothing. Something’s in there, but by the time the movie ends you’ll wish it contained stacks of cash, "nogotiable bearer bonds" or Walter Sobchak’s dirty undies, just not what was in there. Making matters worse, the contents of the bag have absolutely nothing to do with anything that happens in The Bag Man; if anything, the bag’s contents relate more to some never-to-be-made prequel that hints at the bag’s origins, implications and all the other tedium that can fit into a leather carry-on.

The movie stars John Cusack as an unnamed mafia go-to guy, who has the bag from almost the very beginning. In the first scene, he’s given instructions about the bag by crime underlord Dragna (Robert De Niro). Dragna, spitting and sputtering over dinner, illustrates the importance of the bag using his steak and potatoes. “This is you. This is the bag. This is me,” he says partitioning off his meal, “so get me the bag.” This scene made me realize that I would have preferred the entirety of The Bag Man to be performed by actual steak and potatoes over Cusack and De Niro.

Anyway, cut to the very next scene and Cusack’s Bag Man has the bag. Poof, like that. There’s also a dead man in the backseat, a bullet through his hand and a phone booth clearly rented from some third-rate Hollywood prop vendor — when was the last time you saw a payphone, let alone a full-on glass-walled phone booth? Bag Man is given specific instructions to go to a hotel and wait until Dragna can board a plane, fly to Bag Man’s location and retrieve the bag. Here’s a thought, Dragna: maybe don’t leave the state when someone is retrieving your goods.

This is an idiotic movie, one that seems to have been inspired by better films, ones made by much better directors. It has Quentin Tarantino’s dialogue, Guy Ritchie’s criminal oddballs and Michael Mann’s unnerving obsession with the night. But director David Grovic, who also co-wrote the screenplay, can’t turn any this hackneyed drivel into anything other than crumpled love letter to better movies.

It’s a shame because the movie had a brief window about a third of the way through that had potential. As Bag Man arrives at the hotel, he slowly spirals into a dream-like world of wacky characters, each more surreal than the one before them. For starters, the hotel is stuck in some kind of time warp, with a wheelchair-riding Crispin Glover serving as its de-facto Norman Bates. Other characters include two good ol’ boy cops, some trigger-happy federal agents and two pimps, one them a little person with a bladder that he empties on Bag Man’s head. I also liked how every guy Bag Man killed had an 8-by-10 glossy picture of the bag on them, revealing a wider bag conspiracy. All of this nuttiness threatens to spin the film into a unique, albeit odd, place, but then it settles on being a by-the-numbers crime thriller, and a dopey one at that.

Most of Bag Man is just downright cruel, especially to women. In an early scene, Dragna wallops a woman in the nose so hard she requires plastic surgery. Dragna, ever the gentleman, gives her a referral to a surgeon. In another scene, someone says flatly and with no irony whatsoever, "All women are whores." He was talking about women in general, and also prostitute Rivka (Rebecca Da Costa), a Fifth Element extra with blue hair, red leather miniskirt and theeck Russian accent. Not much on Da Costa looks real, which gives Grovic plenty of excuses to longingly slobber over her curvy frame.

This is not a good movie, nor is it even a commendable bad one. It just hurtles forward with its joyless action and grinding momentum. And that bag, its contents do not make anything better. If you must know what's in it, give it a week or two and the synopsis will be up on Wikipedia — spoil away.

Divergent Red Carpet hits Tempe

by Michael Clawson of Terminal Volume  

Screaming teen girls, many clutching thick books with dog-eared pages and worn covers, were on the fast track to lost voices and sore throats last night at the Tempe red carpet premiere of Divergent, the latest young adult novel turned film.

“It’s just that I love these books so much,” Hailey Sumtner, 17, said from the packed pavilion, screams bursting behind. “And to see the stars is a chance I couldn’t miss.”

Actors Miles Teller and Jai Courtney, who play antagonists in the Neil Burger-directed movie, made appearances, along with several local celebrities, to mark the film’s premiere in the Phoenix area. The dystopian science fiction movie, based on the hit Veronica Roth book, opens nationwide March 21.

Signing autographs, posing for photographs and working the red carpet, Teller and Courtney brought some Hollywood glamour to the Valley, the likes of which are only rarely seen in a state that shares a border with Hollywood’s home of California. Other than the annual Celebrity Fight Night and the Phoenix Film Festival, the last red-carpet event was in 2009 when X-Men Origins: Wolverine was chosen to host the worldwide premiere, an event that brought out several big names, including Hugh Jackman.

Talking with reporters, Teller, who most recently starred in the comedy That Awkward Moment, spoke about working with Shailene Woodley again after their 2013 film The Spectacular Now. In Divergent, Woodley plays a talented young warrior in a ruined world ruled by competing class-like factions. Teller plays a competitor in the physical and, at times, violent movie.

“Shailene and I are just so comfortable that it was easy to do the fight scenes. We just knew each other so well that it was natural to get in there and do it … where Spectacular Now was more about the relationship, Divergent is more physical,” Teller said. A young girl on the receiving line asked Teller if he thought of Woodley like a sister. “Yeah, but with moments of sexual tension,” Teller added.

Courtney, who previously had a large role alongside Tom Cruise in Jack Reacher and he played John McClane’s son in A Good Day to Die Hard, said much of the first film is introducing audiences to the world of Divergent and its large cast of characters and that some of the plot might deviate slightly from the books.

“You’re never going to be able to please everyone,” Courtney said. “Fans have certain expectations. I certainly hope they like it, and I think they will love it, but these books have huge followings so of course some people will complain about something that isn’t exactly like it was in the book.”

Courtney said he hadn’t even heard of the book when he was offered his role, one that involved him being especially cruel to Woodley’s character. “Mostly I was a fan of Burger’s work, so I got online and read up about everything. After some digging I knew I wanted to do it. It was all very new to me … young adult novels.”

Also at the event were the Arizona Cardinals cheerleaders, several Cardinals players, a silver-medalist womens hockey player, Harkins Theatres owner Dan Harkins and Marvin Young, Valley resident and a prominent face at local press screenings. Young is more widely known by his stage name, Young MC, whose early rap hits, including “Bust a Move,” are considered vital pieces in hip-hop’s history.

“I was excited when I heard this was happening. It’s a big deal that we’re here tonight celebrating this movie,” Young -- whose own movie, Justice is Served is likely to be released within a year -- said from the red carpet. “I’ve read the first book already. I hope the movie lives up to the book.”

Judging by the screams of fans after the packed screening, that’s likely to be the case. Stay tuned here for a review of Divergent and full interviews with Teller and Courtney on the movie’s official release date, March 21.

Movie Review for The Wind Rises

  The Wind Rises

Featuring the voices of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, John Krasinski, Emily Blunt, Martin Short and Stanley Tucci

Directed by Hayao Miyazaki

From Studio Ghibli and Walt Disney Studios

Rated PG-13

126 minutes

Riding with the Wind

by Michael Clawson of Terminal Volume

If there was ever an animated film that was ready to burst out of its cells to inhabit our live-action world, as if by osmosis, then here it is: The Wind Rises, the supposed last film — “Eh, nevermind” — of Japanese cultural heavyweight Hayao Miyazaki.

Miyazaki is the creator of Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro and many other films from Studio Ghibli, the Japanese Pixar. He’s 73 and the world recoiled when he said he was retiring, and then exhaled rapidly when he said retirement wasn’t really for him. Of course not. Imagination doesn’t store well; it needs to be released into the world.

In past films the Japanese director used whimsy and fantasy to construct his elaborate visions, but The Wind Rises has a streak of realism that runs through it that may stir boredom in younger viewers, though their eyes will often grow wide and still at some of the magnificent animation. The film opens on Jirô, a serious young boy who is lost in his own head. We meet him first in his dream, where fantastical airplanes, hulking zeppelins and squid-like missiles fill the sky in a symphony of aerodynamic movement. Jirô awakes and decides right then he wants to build airplanes.

Many years later, an older Jirô finds himself working for Mitsubishi, where he and a team of engineers are trying to create the next great Japanese fighter plane. The fruits of their labor will eventually go on to wreak havok throughout the Pacific — including at Pearl Harbor, where many Americans died — but The Wind Rises is uninterested in war because Jirô is uninterested in war. He only wants to create something that will soar brilliantly and effortlessly through the sky.

On his journey are a competitive friend, various engineering partners, an Italian inventor he shares dreams with, a bespectacled little man with eyes no bigger than dimes, and Nahoko, a woman whose love and health are somehow inversely proportionate within the plot. Nahoko and Jirô, the film’s tragic core, have shared a traumatic event together, the Kantō earthquake of 1923. The sequence is animated with terrifying realism: waves of earth rise and fall, buildings crumble into heaps, fires spread from one wood-and-paper city to another and, in a haunting visual, bits of glowing embers fill the skies where Jirô’s dream-planes once zoomed.

Aside from several dream sequences and the earthquake scenes, The Wind Rises mostly dotes on Jirô’s quest to aviation greatness. His first assignment is a wing strut; his design reinvents the part. Later there’s new building materials, recessed riveting, bigger planes, faster engines and more majestic lines. He eventually designs a plane with inverted gull-shaped wings, and then the Japanese Zero, the fighter syonymous with the Japanese air force during World War II.

One of the more unique aspects of the film are the sound effects — almost all of them are created using mouth noises, from engines sputtering to life to dirigibles idling through the clouds to the low-rumble of a tectonic plates grinding together. I couldn’t help but smile thinking of sound technicians spitting raspberries into microphones, blowing into empty jugs or contorting their mouths as they give life to steam engines and twirling propellors. And since we’re on the topic of sounds, I highly encourage you to see the movie in Japanese with English subtitles if at all possible. Joseph Gordon-Levitt does a fine job voicing Jirô, but Hideaki Anno’s voice is much richer, with a slightly muffled timbre — it’s worth hearing.

Mostly, though, The Wind Rises is simply gorgeous to behold. The imagery is just astounding in every way. The hand-drawn backgrounds, scenes filled with indivudually animated people, the bits of Japanese culture painted into the edges of frames, the panning shots of trains chugging forward and carts being pulled through busy markets … almost every frame of this movie is breathtaking. I was especially impressed by the small details: Jirô bowing to woman on the platform between traincars, oxen pulling a new plane prototype onto a runway, and a scene with Jirô’s new boss pointing at a hat stand and then a desk, “Hat goes here. Data goes here. Got it?”

The Wind Rises has two companion pieces. The first is Isao Takahata’s watershed anime Grave of the Fireflies, another film in which realistic horrors are visited upon delightful hand-drawn animation. Takahata and Miyazaki were colleagues at Studio Ghibli, and they both understood then that animation wasn’t confining their mature themes, it was liberating them. The other companion piece is Steven Spielberg’s vastly underrated Empire of the Sun, in which a young Christian Bale plays a resilient English lad whose eyes are drawn to the skies and to the Japanese Zeros that have conquered it. The character seemed unaware of “sides” in a war, as does Jirô, whose dreams are gauged by altimeter.

This is a stunningly beautiful movie, and deeply moving. It’s also a departure for Miyazaki, who had previously turned fantastical creatures and plots into modern fairy tales. This is more biopic, but it’s still overflowing with imagination and incredible imagery. It's a must-see.

Non-Stop Movie Review

Non-Stop  

Starring Liam Neeson, Julianne, Moore, Michelle Dockery and Lupita Nyong’o

Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

From Universal Picture and Studio Canal

Rated PG-13

106minutes

Phone-heavy thriller has lots of turbulence

by Michael Clawson of Terminal Volume

I liked Non-Stop better when it was called Liam Neeson Texting.

And boy does he text a lot. In the terminal, at the gate, in his seat, in the bathroom, standing in the aisle while other people are trying to get by … he’s like a teenage girl, except that instead of spam-tweeting “follow me” messages to Justin Beiber he’s negotiating with the world’s most overworked terrorist.

In this dopey air-thriller, Neeson plays Bill Marks, a federal air marshall who’s fallen on hard times and off the wagon. But ask yourself: wouldn’t you need a steady stream of scotch, and smokes in the airplane bathroom (violation!), to get you through a job that requires you to ride airplanes for a living?

Bill gets on a plane headed over the Pacific and almost immediately starts getting threatening texts, including this one: “A passenger will die every 20 minutes until I get what I want.” What he wants is $150 million transferred into a bank account set up in Bill’s name, which does not please Bill or the emergency responders on the ground who actually think Bill’s dumb enough to set up a criminal enterprise in his own name. Bill’s not that stupid, although the other people on this plane certainly are.

There’s a hot-headed New York cop, a British flight attendant, Lupita Nyong’o in her first post-12 Years a Slave role, a computer programmer who looks like a discount Jamie Foxx, and a spazzy airplane woman (Julianne Moore) because every flight needs at least one, usually in the seat right next to you. These people are the worst. They step on Bill’s toes, they act all pouty and wounded when he makes them sit down, and they seem to ignore evidence right in front of them so they can jump to all the wrong conclusions. At one point, the passengers are watching CNN footage that suggests Bill is the terrorist of the hijacked flight and all they can do is … wait for it … continue to watch TV on their hijacked plane. Nevermind that they can watch it happen live! And when they do finally rise up to stop Bill, it’s at the exact moment he needs the most help to apprehend the real terrorist. And later in the movie, Bill offers everyone free air travel, because that’s much better than dying in a hijacking. You’ve heard of Snakes on a Plane; let me present you Flakes on a Plane.

Poor Neeson, he’s doing too many of these thrillers. He’s great in almost everything, even in mediocre dreck like this. But really, how many times can you do Taken? This movie makes him do some idiotic stuff, like test the purity of cocaine by breaking out a chemistry set and examining the powder’s atomic structure. No, I’m kidding — he pokes a knife in the bag, dabs at some coke and rubs in on his tongue because that worked in every movie from the ’80s. He also has the most erotic bathroom fight that has ever been attempted at 30,000 feet. Neeson also has an awful yawn. He’s just sitting there and — boom! — his head tilts back, his eyes squint and his mouth opens and seems to suck in the entire Eastern seaboard. Why would director Jaume Collet-Serra (Unknown) allow such an ugly moment from his star? The camera even zooms in a little like it’s trying to get a close-up of his tonsils.

Another ugly moment involves a Muslim doctor on the plane. When it’s revealed there might be a hijacker on board, everyone looks at this air traveler wearing a traditional headcovering and beard. Because, LOL, apparently racism is funny. Now, maybe this was a cultural critique of stereotypes and air travel. But I don’t think Non-Stop is that smart, a point that’s validated later again and again as the Muslim character is made the butt of several jokes, including one after a “random” carry-on search. “What?! You didn’t find anything in his bag?” one of the other passengers screeches.

There is a market for these types of frustratingly dumb thrillers, so it’s unlikely I’ll dissuade anyone from seeing it. If you’ve seen any of the Taken movies, then you’ll likely find Non-Stop acceptable, if only because Neeson has perfected this character. Although, judging by that yawn, I would say he might be getting a little bored with it.

Join us for Amica Insurance Kids' Day!

Join us on Saturday, April 5th, 2013 from 9am to 2pm for Amica Insurance Kids' Day!

Kids' Day at the Phoenix Film Festival is a great way for kids of all ages to come out and experience the festival. They can select from a series of hands-on activity stations focusing on different aspects of film production and geared to various age and ability levels. Stations are age-appropriate and run the full gamut of the filmmaking process. And best yet, it's FREE! Check out just some of the cool things to do:

• Walk the red carpet and get your paparazzi photo taken from our friends at Bookmans.

• Miss Katie from the Musical Instrument Museum will help kids explore different sounds as they create a musical soundtrack to a fun film.

• Mr. Jesse from the Phoenix Public Library is back to read stories, talk about books that are made into movies and have fun with the littler festival fans.

• Write the next best-selling screenplay "Mad Lib" style.

• Test out your acting chops against a green screen.

• Older kids will create their own short film!

$5 Family Friendly Films

Saturday also has two family-friendly screenings of films at the Harkins 101 -- only $5 for our Kids' Day participants:

9:20 AM

The Pirate Fairy

When a misunderstood dust-keeper fairy named Zarina steals Pixie Hollow's all-important Blue Pixie Dust, and flies away to join forces with the pirates of Skull Rock, Tinker Bell and her fairy friends must embark on the adventure of a lifetime to return it to its rightful place. However, in the midst of their pursuit of Zarina, Tink's world is turned upside down. She and her friends find that their respective talents have been switched and they have to race against time to retrieve the Blue Pixie Dust and return home to save Pixie Hollow.

1:20 PM

Disneynature Bears.

In an epic story of breathtaking scale, Disneynature's new True Life Adventure "Bears" showcases a year in the life of a bear family as two impressionable young cubs are taught life's most important lessons. Set against a majestic Alaskan backdrop teeming with life, their journey begins as winter comes to an end and the bears emerge from hibernation to face the bitter cold. The world outside is excitingbut riskyas the cubs' playful descent down the mountain carries with it a looming threat of avalanches. As the season changes from spring to summer, the brown bears must work hard to find foodultimately feasting at a plentiful salmon runwhile staying safe from rival male bears and predators, including an ever-present wolf pack. "Bears" captures the fast-moving action and suspense of life in one of the planet's last great wildernessesAlaska! Directed by Alastair Fothergill ("Earth," "African Cats" and "Chimpanzee") and Keith Scholey ("African Cats"), "Bears" arrives in theaters April 18, 2014, to celebrate Earth Day. 

In Secret - Movie Review

by Michael Clawson of Terminal Volume In Secret

Starring Elizabeth Olsen, Jessica Lange, Tom Felton and Oscar Isaac

Directed by Charlie Stratton

From Roadside Attractions

Rated R

101 minutes

In Secret sent me careening backward through time to the tragic loser-hero Walter Neff, the star of Billy Wilder's intensely serious film noir Double Indemnity: "Yes, I killed him. I killed him for money — and a woman — and I didn't get the money and I didn't get the woman. Pretty isn't it?"

Though it's far removed from James M. Cain's crime novel and the movie it spawned, In Secret pulses with their passionate energies. Where Double Indemnity was an insurance scam in 1940s Los Angeles, In Secret is a love affair in Victorian-era France. Its central figures suffer similar ailments: marriage has shrunk their worlds, and murder has imprisoned them in it..

In Secret opens in the 1850s with young Thérèse as her father abandons her with her aunt, Madame Raquin (Jessica Lange), who is not pleased with the addition to her sleepy farmhouse, where her only child has a rather serious lung ailment. Many years pass and the Madame marries Thérèse, now played by Elizabeth Olsen, to her cousin, the runtish, sickly Camille (Tom Felton, Draco Malfoy from the Harry Potter movies), who seems unable to discern the features of a woman from those of a travel trunk. Poor kid, he just seems constantly aloof.

The three move to Paris to take work: the women in a linen shop they own and Camille in some kind of financial institution, where papers are shuffled from desk to desk with little else getting done. At work, Camille runs into a childhood friend, Laurent (Oscar Isaac), who is everything Camille is not, including handsome and unabashedly sexual. When Laurent visits the home on Thursday game night, Thérèse can only gasp and swoon. They begin a steamy affair that is difficult to keep hidden — in one episode Laurent hides under Thérèse's billowy skirt while the Madame skulks around her bedroom.

These affairs can never last, not without spilling over the edges of their own containment. Sure enough, Laurent hatches a plan that will forever destroy the balance of the house, their jobs and their love. Thérèse is mostly bullied into the scheme, aside from one moment of serious reflection that is interrupted by Camille, the boy who unknowingly sealed his fate with a missplaced joke.

The movie is the directorial debut for Charlie Stratton, who does a commendable job bringing the 1867 Émile Zola novel to the screen. The first and second acts are more solidly constructed than the third and final act, where the film staggers against the emotional weight that bears down on Thérèse. She has visions of dead bodies, she mopes around the house, sleeps in the store window and basically gives up on life. Much of the final act is spent dealing with Madame Raquin, who has had a stroke, her eyes trapped in a lifeless body.

The acting is superb all the way around. Isaac, fresh off Inside Llewyn Davis, is fantastic, as is Felton, who brings a boyish innocence to his tragic Camille. The movie really belongs to the women, though — Lange and Olsen are hypnotic in their tormented deliveries. Generations apart, the two actresses somehow occupy the same devastating groove within In Secret’s anguished turmoil. When they face off late in the film, Olsen lets defeat wash over her character’s face while Lange, frozen in place, lets her eyes fill with terror and hate.

I must also commend the cinematography by Florian Hoffmeister, who uses mostly natural light — or candle or fire light — to paint his images. Much of the film takes place in shadows, in sunless corridors and dimly lit parlors, where dominos are slapped on tables and lies are further manipulated onto unsuspecting witnesses. A scene early in the movie struck me as especially remarkable: Olsen sitting at a window, beams of sunlight shooting through in long horizontal bars and, back in the shadows, a bed with a sick boy stirring in the darkness. The movie holds the shot long enough for you to appreciate its composition.

If you’ll recall how Double Indemnity ended, then you’ll know some of the paths In Secret will be traveling. It’s not a pretty route. In fact, it’s terrifyingly dark and morose. But it’s an interesting period piece, one full of remarkable performances, finely detailed costumes, exquisite lighting and a finale that will suck the wind from your chest.

3 Days to Kill - Movie Review

by Michael Clawson of Terminal Volume 3 Days to Kill

Starring Kevin Costner, Connie Nielsen, Hailee Steinfeld and Amber Heard

Directed by McG

From Relativity Media and EuropaCorp

Rated PG-13

113 minutes

3 Days to Kill might be 2014’s first guilty pleasure. It begins as an impossibly mundane action thriller, but somewhere along the way it blossoms into a film with an absurd amount of charm and quirky likability.

The turn happens about 15 minutes in: CIA super-spy Ethan (Kevin Costner) returns to his Paris flat to find that a rather large family of squatters, all of them impeccably polite, have remodeled his house and appropriated his space as their own. He goes to the French police, but they tell him to wait until April to file a formal complaint — “Wait for spring like birds and bees and boys and girls.” Ethan calls them “turds,” which is a confusing word for French police. “I think he’s calling us shit,” one cop says. Ethan, defeated, returns home, where his squatters try to comfort him in his new bedroom.

At this point, I’m realizing I have no idea what this movie is anymore. This is re-confirmed several minutes later when Ethan, post-shootout, argues with another CIA agent about the difference between a mustache and a goatee. The prop in the scene is an injured, bullet-riddled bad guy with a goatee, who’s kicked and rolled over again and again to prove a point about the merits of facial hair. These comedic bursts are far departures from the high-octane spy thrills of the movie’s first 10 minutes, thrills that only make cameo appearances through the remainder of 3 Days to Kill.

Later, Ethan is forced to retire from the CIA after they find out he has inoperable brain cancer. In Paris, while he tries to regain lost trust with his ex-wife (Connie Nielsen) and his teen daughter Zoey (Hailee Steinfeld), the CIA needs him for one more mission: to hunt down and kill a man known only as The Wolf, whose henchmen include The Albino and The Accountant. His government handler, a sexy vixen with a limitless budget, offers him money and an experimental cancer drug that comes in couture leather pouches. Ethan agrees, which means he spends the rest of the movie alternating between father-daughter dates to CIA-sanctioned murder.

The movie reminds me a great deal of last year’s mafia-comedy The Family, in which Robert De Niro, playing a mob boss, goes to a film club to critique Goodfellas. I wasn’t sure then, and am less sure now, whether The Family was a comedy, crime caper or something else entirely. 3 Days to Kill bops around with generally the same attitude, like when Ethan puts his Italian hostage on the phone with his daughter to explain how to make a perfect batch of spaghetti sauce. Or when he barges into another suspect’s house to talk to his teen daughters about what makes teens tick. The two movies, besides sharing their bizarre comedy timing, share writers — French filmmaker Luc Besson. Now, Besson’s movies have always had quirky streaks in them; think of the lighter moments in Léon, the fantasy-comedy of the Fifth Element, or the utter battiness of the Transporter movies. 3 Days to Kill taps into similar veins and you can sense the film smiling at you from behind the screen.

The movie has several comedic themes that return again and again, including a recurring gag about a purple bike, Ethan’s daughter-approved ringtone featuring Swedish electro-punk, and one of the squatter kids who insists Ethan give him high fives, even as the CIA spy escorts criminals to his bathroom for torture sessions. The McG-directed movie simply marches to the beat of its own drum.

Now, I did say this was a guilty pleasure so don’t go in expecting all the pieces to fit. They don’t. The movie is uneven and awkwardly paced, but it’s consistently entertaining. And Kevin Costner seems to be having a lot of fun, proving that he might not be the most bankable star, but he’s still a dependable and likable one.

Winter's Tale - Review

Winter's Tale  

Starring Colin Farrell, Jessica Brown Findlay, Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly

Directed by Akiva Goldsman

From Village Roadshow and Warner Bros. Pictures

Rated PG-13

118 minutes

Angels and demons collide in vapid fantasy romance

by Michael Clawson of Terminal Volume

A Winter’s Tale is undiluted romance. Cut it with some sugar and water and you’re likely to get a quadrilogy of sappy love stories.

This movie knows its audience and preach-panders directly to it. I don’t want to generalize and say the audience is women, but it’s mostly women. They’ll adore this movie. They’ll cherish every innocuous detail, every pretentious prop, every whispered stanza of romance. It will live on in their spongy lovelorn hearts as the ultimate personification of emotional tenderness, sacrifice and redemption.

Listen, I’m going to complain about this, but please understand this is the way it goes: men get dragged to these movies and, after a brief window of whiny complacency, they shrug their shoulders and admit the movie wasn’t made for them. This is my window to complain.

A Winter’s Tale plunges headfirst into lady culture. It’s about a girl effortlessly playing the piano, the exchanging of miracles, flying magical horses, princess kisses, charcoal drawings of feminine figures, cute little girls in overly large woolen mittens, beds of roses, an abundance of star metaphors, boxes full of sentimental mementos, cancer scares and eternal love sprinkled in the cosmos. This laundry list might sound exaggerated, but I promise you it’s entirely accurate.

It begins in the 19th century when an immigrant family is turned away from America at Ellis Island because the husband has some sort of contagious disease. In the New York harbor, before a boat takes them back to their home country, the couple stuffs their baby in a wooden model boat and sends it sailing toward Manhattan — because pulling a Moses on your infant is better than, oh I don’t know, being a parent. The baby grows up to be Peter Lake (Colin Farrell), a masterclass thief whose special move is using a comically large grappling hook to shimmy up the front of Brownstones in broad daylight.

After running afoul with henchman Pearly (Russell Crowe), Peter prepares to leave the city on an especially agile horse that won’t gallop away until Peter makes one more score. This horse is a bad influence, but nevertheless Peter Bat-grapples into the home of Beverly Penn (Jessica Brown Findlay), who is home sick with “consumption,” which means she has to stay icy cold like a comic villain. They meet in the parlor, her at her piano banging out Brahms and he with his pistol unholstered and his burglar bag empty. She invites him in for tea. Of course, they fall in love.

What happens next I wasn’t prepared for: angels and demons reveal themselves as vital players in this otherwise sleepy game of romance. And when I say angels and demons, that’s not allegory or metaphor, but actual angels and demons. Pearly plays the demon, and he has a scene where he ventures to meet Lucifer, who turns out to be Will Smith in a cameo so nutty it felt like a product placement for Planters. Lucifer and God have an agreement that neither angels or demons will interfere too much in the lives of humans. “Lou” has to tell Pearly to back off a little, which makes him even more sinister.

Meanwhile, Peter, who might be an angel, has to escape from Pearly without endangering Beverly and without using his “miracle,” which is apparently something he can just give away to anyone, although I first thought it was Beverly’s virginity which also figures into the plot. Before he knows it, though, Peter is waking up in modern-day New York City and trying to right more than a century of wrongs. And Pearly, his crime den now filled with flat screens instead of blackboards, still has a chip on his shoulder for the one who got away.

Yeesh, this movie. It just keeps going and going. And as the dialogue gets blander and blander (“You are my distant star bright and special … blah, blah, blah”) the acting grows more and more frustrating. Beverly is interesting, if only because her medical condition is so laughably odd. She has to sleep in tents in the winter, walk through the snow in nightgowns, and take icy baths when her hand can fog a mirror. If only they had a refrigerator they could stuff her into like that baby and the boat. Farrell is also intriguing, even though I never thought he knew what was happening. I can picture him on the set asking questions and then shrugging, “Nevermind, it’s easier when I don’t know.”

The movie is directed, written and produced by screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, who worked tirelessly for many years to bring Mark Helprin’s novel to the screen. While I thought A Winter’s Tale was tirelessly self-involved and plotted, I must acknowledge that fans of these types of movies will likely adore all that transpires. Two women sitting near me were unabashed by their infatuation for Peter, Beverly and their magical tale; when the movie ended, they were in puddles. I also must admit that his movie makes much more sense than anything in the Twilight series — not a difficult feat, though.

And a quick word on women and Valentine’s Day movies: I’ve made some cheap jokes here about how A Winter’s Tale is a woman’s movie, but we live in a changing world, where a woman might soon be in the White House, a gay man might soon be in the NFL and the pictures on bathrooms doors are merely suggestions for bathroom users. The gender landscapes are ever changing. Women will appreciate this movie, but they won’t be the only ones. If a movie brings joy into your life, then it has succeeded at something.

My heart does go out to spouses and dates, no matter the gender, though — grumble silently without ruining it for anyone else. It'll be over soon enough.

RoboCop Movie Review

RoboCop  

Starring Joel Kinneman, Gary Oldman, Michael Keaton, Jackie Earle Haley, Abbie Cornish and Michael K. Williams

Directed by José Padilha

From MGM and Columbia Pictures

Rated PG-13

118 minutes

This is why films should not be remade

by Michael Clawson of Terminal Volume

Everything that takes place in the RoboCop remake could have, hypothetically, been gleaned from the poster of the original RoboCop or perhaps the Netflix synopsis, which begs the question: did anyone actually watch the original?

I ask because the remake is a misfire in every conceivable way. Where the original was inventive with its science fiction and laced with social commentary, this one is tone deaf to its own existence, blasting through all the subtlety and nuance that made the original so wickedly prescient.

My heart goes out to RoboCop’s director José Padilha, who expressed publicly that the studio was meddling and refused him the latitude to create a film with any semblance of personality, or even just some nervous tics. At the same time, Padilha wasn’t even able to pull off a mediocre hit — he blew right past “mediocre” on the freefall into oblivion — which says a lot for his work, studio meddling or not.

In fairness to all parties, though, Paul Verhoeven’s work is often misunderstood. Starship Troopers is a great example. Ask the fanboys why they love it and they’ll say two things: space marines killing bugs and co-ed showers. But the film was richer than that, with its layers of pre-Internet “Want to know more?” infotainment and its fascist regard for the military, like a science fiction version of Triumph of the Will. Starship Troopers was an idea movie pretending to be a dumb genre picture, the same of which could be said, in varying degrees, to Verhoeven's Basic Instinct, about icepicks and underwear-free interrogations; Totall Recall, about a talking head prosthetic and three-boobed women; and even the reprehensibly bad Showgirls, about gratuitous nudity and bad acting, the subtext of which was gratuitous nudity and bad acting.

This RoboCop, though, has no big ideas, or thoughtful subtext, or social commentary. It’s essentially exactly what the title suggests: a robotic man becomes a police officer. It stars Joel Kinnaman as Alex Murphy, a detective in Detroit’s embattled police department. Murphy is nearly killed in a bomb blast that leaves him with nothing but a hand, head, heart and lungs. His metallic body is brought together in one of those Iron Man chambers, where all the pieces come up from the floor to assemble. He’s created by OmniCorp, a drone manufacturer that is sending tactical unmanned robots and tanks into Afghanistan to obliterate every 10-year-old holding a kitchen knife.

Omnicorp wants to bring drones to the United States, but they need a test case to woo Congress to throw out a law banning artificially intelligent drones. Murphy, his meaty stumps still simmering from the bomb blast, is that test case. If you’ll recall in the original, Alex Murphy had his brain wiped clean before becoming the cyborg cop. Here, though, this Murphy is aware of who he is, which requires all sorts of family drama with his wife and his son, whose only identifying characteristic seems to be that he likes hockey. (Screenwriter 1: “How do we make this kid less two-dimensional?” Screenwriter 2: “Give him a hobby he obsesses over. Brilliant.”)

For a brief spell right in the middle of the movie, RoboCop does exactly what he’s programmed to do — he arrests bad guys. He does this by using a huge database that crosschecks mugshots with surveillance footage, which leads me to ask an obvious question: Why haven't the regular cops done this?

The movie can’t decide what state Murphy's brain is in. He begins with all his memories intact, and an obvious case of post-traumatic stress disorder, but then the plot requires changes to his brain chemistry: too much dopamine, not enough, microchips are removed, then they’re put back and the whole time Murphy bounces from one emotional state to none at all. One day he can recognize his partner (the great Michael K. Williams in a wasted role) and the next he’s dodging around his weepy wife in a Tron lightcycle. Recall the original film and how neat this was all handled: Murphy’s memories slowly creeped into RoboCop’s programming, suggesting that the human parts of a brain could never be overwritten. Now contrast that with this mess. The difference is night and day.

Mostly, though, the RoboCop reboot is just stupid moviemaking. It takes close to 65 minutes to get RoboCop on the street, and even then he has to go through the most mindless training program, some of it while listening to yodel-sampled dance music (Google “Hocus Pocus” by Focus). The film frequently teases bigger ideas (drones in Afghanistan, the ethics of robotic people, the wackiness of Congress, FOX News' wacky slant) but all lead to dead ends and hollow payoffs. This movie is so stupid that when it pans across the dome of the US Capitol, the Washington Monument piercing the sky in the background, the bottom of the screen reads “Washington D.C.” because apparently it needed to be stated. And there’s poor Kinnaman, stuck in that ghastly suit, his career’s metal-plated albatross.

All those memorable scenes of Verhoeven's RoboCop shooting through skirts, wrestling through drywall and making those awful speeches quoting the police code to victims have been replaced with mindless shootouts and vapid action sequences that your brain will forget, delete and write over as they’re happening in real time.

Many films have been questionably remade: Psycho, Godzilla, Willy Wonka. Each is their own brand of awful, but RoboCop might be the new gold standard for remakes that just don’t get it.

Review for The LEGO Movie

The LEGO Movie  

Featuring the voices of Chris Pratt, Elizabeth Banks, Morgan Freeman, Will Ferrell, Liam Neeson, Will Arnett and Charlie Day

Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller

From Warner Bros. Pictures

Rated PG

100 minutes

Let your imagination run wild with lovely LEGOs movie

by Michael Clawson of Terminal Volume

The LEGO Movie will crash on you like a ton of bricks — swiftly and unexpectedly and in an explosion of color. And a ton of LEGO bricks, that’s like a billion pieces, right? Get a broom before you’re mom comes in and impales her heel on one of those 2x4s with the sharp corners.

This is the zaniest, most joyfully plucky movie you’ll see this year, a Pixar movie if not in name then in spirit. It arrives on the screen with herky-jerky stop-motion-like animation — it’s actually all CGI — that is warmly nostalgic yet wonderfully alien and foreign. The movie quickly wraps around you, folding you into its charm and whimsy and its nutty hopscotch through pop-culture. In what other movie would it make complete sense for Gandalf, Batman, Shaquille O’Neill and Abe Lincoln in a rocket chair to be chilling out together? And then out of nowhere, Millennium Falcon!

The movie takes place in a LEGO world populated by little minifigures, their skin Simpson yellow and their legs two scissoring hunks of plastic. Their world, overflowing with mindless consumption and the worshiping of all things mainstream, is basically a satire of capitalism (or communism depending on your slant) told in a way a child could understand. Everyone has a job they love, a song they all sing together (“Everything is Awesome!”), inane TV shows they all watch in mass (Where Are My Pants?) and mass-market trends they all follow. When someone is asked what their favorite restaurant is the only response seems to be “any chain restaurant.” The commentary is quite sharp, which is odd considering the nice people at LEGO probably made this movie hoping that LEGO sales would shoot through the roof (and they will), which is itself some kind of twisted satire.

We begin with Emmet Brickowski, a construction worker who builds sparkling new Lego buildings using the most helpful instructions imaginable, IKEA plans for those averse to words. Construction in a LEGO world is exactly how you might imagine: old buildings are demolished so their pieces can be scooped up and used on the next building project. The detail in the world is remarkable: everything is LEGO. And I mean everything: streets, oceans, fire, smoke, suds in a shower … the animators never cheat by using other materials.

What happens next is basically the plot of The Matrix: Emmet (Chris Pratt) learns he might be the subject of a prophecy foretelling of The One, a LEGO man who could essentially reboot the universe into a more open and accepting utopia. He learns he’s the mythical One when he falls down a deep shaft and climbs out with some foreign body — literally, the Piece of Resistance — stuck to his back.

With Emmet playing the Neo role, the Trinity character is WildStyle (Elizabeth Banks), a high-flying action heroine who can, in a nanosecond, flash her eyes over her surroundings and design, on the fly, a schematic for inventive new LEGO creations like double decker motorcycles, submarine RVs or Old West flying contraptions. The Morpheus character is Vitruvius (Morgan Freeman), a wise old wizard with glowing eyes and, yes, Morgan Freeman’s voice. They’re all fighting President Business (Will Ferrell), who despises free thinking and not following the instructions. His secret weapon is the Kragle, a device so devilishly obvious that I will let you discover it.

The movies takes place in a sprawling metropolis, Western frontier lands, a pink-tinted dreamscape in the clouds and in other various LEGO playsets. Some of the imagery is suitably bonkers, including a horse riding a giant horse, a mechanized pirate, ridiculous security systems (“Sharks. Lasers. Sharks with lasers.”) and doomsday devices that count down from “100 Mississippi, 99 Mississippi, 98 …” Human objects turn up later in the movie, including the Polish Remover of Nye-eel and the Sword of Exact-Zero, which drew giddy chuckles from the adults. The movie also has one of the most gloriously glib presentations of Batman that is likely to ever exist.

If you admired the wackiness of the lovely stop-motion movie A Town Called Panic, then you’re likely to be thoroughly charmed by this witty children’s comedy. The voice cast is endearingly goofy, and the animation is endlessly inventive. And the story, bless its plastic heart, has a powerful message about imaginations and tossing out rulebooks and instruction manuals. Now, I can’t say that I like this trend of toys becoming movies to sell more toys. I certainly prefer The LEGO Movie to any of Hasbro’s Transformers movies, but that doesn’t diminish my concern. Along time ago, movies were made to be movies. The merchandise was an afterthought. Now, the toys are the movies.

That being said, LEGOs might be the only movie that can get away with this without much backlash. It helps tremendously that the movie is delightful in nearly every way. It also helps that the nature of LEGOs is to use your imagination to invent your own stories, which is exactly what the creators of The LEGO Movie seem to have done for a sustained and enchanting 100 minutes.

The Monuments Men review

The Monuments Men  

Starring George Clooney, Bill Murray, Matt Damon, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban, Hugh Bonneville and Cate Blanchett

Directed by George Clooney

From Columbia Pictures

Rated PG-13

118 minutes

Great scenes and performances save an otherwise clunky war drama

by Michael Clawson of Terminal Volume

There are many things The Monuments Men fumbles, including its stop-and-go pacing and fragmented plotlines, but what it gets right is rewarding enough to forgive many of its failures. The movie’s ultimate success is that it understands art on a profoundly deep level.

And not just knowledge of art — “here’s a Rembrandt, here’s a Monet, here’s a Renoir” — the film truly gets the concept of art and its importance to a people. In World War II, Hitler didn’t just want the world as a piece of real estate, he wanted every fiber, every micron of dust, every spinning electron. He wanted it all. That included all the art. “How do you erase a people? You not only kill them, but you erase their achievements,” someone says early in Monuments Men. After all, what is art but a collection of visualized hopes and dreams, fears and desires? Art isn’t canvas or marble or bronze, it’s an impassioned plea for immortality. Hitler, himself a failed artist, knew this and set out to sabotage it.

Pushing back are the Monuments Men, FDR’s super-team of art historians, dealers, architects, sculptors and painters. They’re captained by Frank Stokes (George Clooney), whose first order of business seems to be a movie montage as he recruits his team. I won’t bog you down with character names, because there are many, but the cast is top-notch: Bill Murray, Matt Damon, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban and Hugh Bonneville. Before they can go to Europe and save art, they have to go through basic training, which goes about as well as you would expect with this all-star team of actors. Murray shrugs over the obstacle course wall like a sack of potatoes. In a scene that drew big laughs, Goodman walks through a firing range not knowing the soldiers were using live rounds.

In Europe after D-Day, the Monuments Men quickly begin tracing down missing and stolen artwork, be it big museum pieces or smaller works ransacked from Jewish collectors’ homes. The Nazis used Paris, and much of Europe, like a shopping mall: they’d invade a country and top officials would pop in to get something to hang in their parlors. Several particular pieces are doted on, including Michelangelo’s marble Madonna and Child, Rembrandt’s self-portrait, several pieces by Johannes Vermeer, and the striking Ghent altarpiece, a magnificent 15th-century painting on a set of elaborate shutters. The team is also tasked with telling Allied soldiers what they can and can’t bomb, which is punctuated by a sequence showing Italian villagers shoring up the walls of the bombed-out church housing Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. I looked this piece of history up after the movie; Monuments Men did not embellish how close the famous mural came to crumbling.

The narrative structure of the movie is put together sloppily. Scenes just sorta happen, often times with little leading up to them and little leading after. It all feels disjointed and frenzied. The acting is terrific, as is the insightful and historically relevant dialogue, and the individual scenes are spectacular, including one of Damon returning a painting to an empty apartment, its Jewish occupants long since carted off to gas chambers. But looking at the film as a whole, its scenes forming its central mass, it needs work. Having so many plotlines — the Madonna, the Ghent altarpiece, a weasely Nazi named Stahl and Cate Blanchett playing a museum record keeper — gave us too much to follow and, making matters worse, all the pieces were assembled with little regard to each other.

One other peculiarity, one that might have been intentional: no one really takes the war that serious. When they arrive in Europe, around D-Day+30, the Normandy beaches are mostly calm. As the team works its way inland, they rarely encounter any hostile Germans so it all feels rather tranquil and serene — just a couple armed guys out for a Sunday drive in matching outfits. Murray’s character wears an ascot under his soldier getup. Later he and Ballaban encounter a German soldier and rather than starting a gunfight, they all sit down and have a cigarette. These two share another scene later when Ballaban’s grumpy curmudgeon plays a record from the Murray characters’ grandkids. It’s tender and heartbreaking as a single sequence, but as a smaller piece of a bigger movie it rings hollow since the movie hasn’t established how violent and terrible the war was. Men don’t cry and weep for their families when their safety has barely been threatened. Like I said earlier, though, some of this might have been intentional to punctuate two things: first, the deaths that do occur in the movie, and to show that these guys were not doing the heroic work of real soldiering. After all, they were there to save fabric stretched over wood frames, not save the world from a madman and his armies.

The Monuments Men is directed by Clooney, his fifth feature, and it’s not his sharpest achievement, although it's never dull. It needed more polish and a little more finesse with its script. This isn’t to say I disliked it; quite the contrary, I thought the acting and subject matter to be riveting. I especially loved some of the payoff: great big chambers full of looted artwork, the reclaimed spoils of a terrible war. We've seen heroic survivor movies before, but here's one where the survivor is the culture of an entire continent.

Hot off the presses, check out the new trailer for Divergent

Catching up with Gary King, the director of "How Do You Write A Joe Schermann Song"

Hey, What Happened to that Film?

How Do You Write A Joe Schermann Song? An interview with Gary King, Director, Writer, Producer

Phoenix FiIm Festival Audience Award, 2012

Dan Harkins Breakthrough Filmmaker Award

By Laurie Smith

As independent film lovers, we owe a debt of gratitude to Gary King’s parents. Because of them, King was brought up with a great love of film at an early age. It wasn’t until later in life, however, that he realized that he also had a great love of making film.

Fortunately, after studying psychology and then joining the corporate world in a human resources position, King realized that he had a serious need to be fulfilled creatively. So, he high-tailed it out of the corporate bowels of Silicon Valley and fled to New York City to pursue his dream … and he hasn’t looked back since.

Two years ago, How Do You Write a Joe Schermann Song celebrated its World Premier at the Phoenix Film Festival, easily winning over the discerningly enthusiastic Phoenix audience – snagging both the Audience Award and the Dan Harkins Breakthrough Filmmaker Award.  It was just the beginning of a rather lengthy string of accolades for the film … and for Gary.

Independent film is not exactly overflowing with musicals, and are considered a bit daring … so why a musical?

“Growing up, my parents showed me The Music Man, My Fair Lady and other classics, said King.

I found it totally fascinating that films could tell stories through songs and lyrics.  As I got older I discovered West Side Story and All That Jazz, which weren't the sunny song and dance films that I was familiar with, so that intrigued and excited me — in that musicals could be also be serious and heavy in tone.  As a filmmaker I love to challenge myself, so I set out to make a musical film that blends the classic and contemporary.”

King says that the main goal was to play as many festivals as possible, in order to gain as much exposure as possible. Regarding premiering at PFF, King said, “We were spoiled.  We won two awards and had so many amazing fans supporting us while we were there – it was an experience we will never forget.

“The screenings validated that we had a film that audiences really enjoyed.  It was such a gratifying feeling to sit in the dark room and hear people laugh and cry.  After all our showings, I loved connecting with people who let me know that my take on a musical was unique and a joy to watch.  You never know how your film will play until you see it with others – playing at Phoenix was a great start to see what kind of film we had on our hands.”

Winning the Breakthrough Filmmaker and Audience Award was an exceptionally fond memory for King.

The wonderful support and response we were getting from everyone was very humbling – and after we'd won our awards, there was an after party at the Tilted Kilt.  When I walked in with my wife and Christina Rose (who played “Evey” in Joe Schermann Song), the whole pub full of filmmakers and friends cheered.  There was a big celebration with people who shared in our happiness.  Richard Botto (founder of Stage 32) even bought everyone there a round of drinks.  I'll never forget that night.

Inspired by many films and filmmakers, King feels that one of the filmmakers who has played a role in revolutionizing film is Steven Soderbergh.

“I really enjoy his work,” King shared. “The thing about him is that he's able to make both artistic and commercial films -- often times blurring the lines.” Certainly no easy task.

“Soderbergh is in a great position now where he can pretty much create whatever projects he'd like to, and will find the funding for it. His earlier works in the late 90s (particularly Out of Sight and The Limey) continue to inspire me to this day.”

Genuinely humble, when asked what he might be able to contribute to the evolution of film, King smiled and quickly said it was a tough question. His true hope is, “that my work resonates with people, and that it may last for a long time.  Beyond that, it would be too much pressure.”

King, collaborating with his brother Michael, just finished filming his latest project – a horror/thriller feature guaranteed to fulfill his dream of scaring the crap out of audiences. UNNERVED, currently in postproduction, is scheduled to be completed this year.

The UNNERVED Logline:

After the mysterious death of their young son, a couple desperately flees to a remote lake house to escape the unrelenting haunting that is following them only to discover that this mysterious entity is still very much a part of their lives. Check it out here: http://www.hauntmenomore.com/

Hey! Become a film backer! You can help give UNNERVED the final elements of sound, visuals and music … the better to scare you with. Go to the film’s KICKSTARTER site and make it happen: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/grking/unnerved-one-boys-dream-of-scaring-the-crap-out-of

Check out the Big Game spot for "Noah"

Here's the spot for "Noah" that will be running during this weekend's Big Game......

At Middleton - Movie Review

At Middleton  

Starring Andy Garcia, Vera Farmiga, Spencer Lofranco, Taissa Farmiga, Peter Riegert and Tom Skerritt

Directed by Adam Rodgers

From Anchor Bay Films

Rated R

99 minutes

by Michael Clawson of Terminal Volume

Perceptive truths revealed in witty college comedy

At Middleton isn't really about college. It's about a parent's perception of college, then funneled into fantasy and dreams, then boiled back to reality. It's a complicated formula, but one that is well worth all the chemistry.

The movie is about heart surgeon George and upscale furniture store owner Edith. They're married, but not to each other. They're taking their children — George's son Conrad and Edith's daughter Audrey — to Middleton University for a guided tour of the campus. They meet in the parking lot when George, nerdy and obsessive — “He probably irons his underwear,” Edith says — decides to be that guy who must back into his parking space. Edith steals the spot, sparking a lovable little feud.

Their tour group is led by Justin, who has witty little wisecracks for everything including how the school statue was stolen, where the bathrooms in the library are located ("Ironically, just past the Ps.") and a rather sinister joke about campus rape. This actor is playing this role like his career depends on it. I hope he lands another movie.

As the tour progresses, George and Edith, still in their catty feud, are separated from the group. As they bicker and trade barbs, they come to appreciate their similar predicaments: they’re both without their spouses touring a college with children who mostly hate them. The rest plays like a movie-length version of a Meet Cute, a phrase Roger Ebert pioneered and championed, a phrase that describes that charming set of circumstances that brings adorable couples together.

At Middleton works because the dialogue is snappy and smart — and brutally honest — and George and Edith are played by a bowtied Andy Gracia and a free-wheeling Vera Farmiga, both of whom can retire from romantic comedies now that they they've nailed this one. The people they play are mostly dopey and written as if they were on a Disney sitcom, but by the end of the movie I was cherishing them.

The movie follows them around Middleton as they skip from adventure to adventure, including when they steal two unchained bikes, break into classrooms, smoke pot in a dorm and bare their personal wounds in heartbreaking sequences that are so unique I found myself wondering how they ended up in this small movie of all places. It's like finding the Hope Diamond at the Walmart jewelry counter.

Some of it is silly and fun: they sneak into a music classroom and play a dazzlingly manic version of “Chopsticks.” Other scenes are brutally honest: after infiltrating an acting class they're asked to perform an improvisational husband-and-wife scene. As they role play the scenario, they project their own spouses onto each other. And for the first time in maybe their whole lives, these two people are honest with themselves about love, relationships and marriage. It's one of the finest scenes of the new year, and it certainly would have ranked high even if At Middleton had opened in the frenzy of awards season last year.

Some of the acting is rather awful, and college is portrayed as if the screenwriters had never actually been to one — at one point a kid wearing a football helmet on a unicycle rides past! They do manage to get Peter Riegert, an Animal House alumni, in there as the campus radio DJ. Mostly, though, college is shown as a fantasy, a place teens go to escape their parents, a place parents regretfully send their teens to grow up.

As the college-bound picture progresses it becomes abundantly clear that this isn't just a romantic comedy, but also a family drama as the two parents begin to contemplate their lives without their children in the home or, as Edith sees it, to be alone with her husband after 18 years, which terrifies her. The kids, played by Spencer Lofranco and Taissa Farmiga (Vera’s youngest sister), aren’t doing their parents any favors by rubbing salt in their expanding wounds. At one point, fed up, Edith turns to another parent and shrieks: “You want to know about Middleton? It doesn’t include you.” All George sees is flashes of parenting memories: “Sleepovers, soccer games, slamming doors. Where did the last 17 years go?”

At Middleton is a gloriously mediocre movie wrapped around some very perceptive ideas about parenting and love. It plays fast and loose with its mid-life quirkiness, and some of the neurotic banter will have you looking for Woody Allen cameos, but the film is filled with kernels of truth. And those truths resonate with surprising clarity. That's all I ask from my movies, and this one goes above and beyond.

Gimme Shelter - Movie Review

Gimme Shelter  

Directed by Ron Krause

Starring Vanessa Hudgens, Brendan Fraser, Rosario Dawson, Ann Dowd and James Earl Jones

From Day 28 Films and Roadside Attractions

Rated PG-13

Hudgens excels in wish-washy drama

by Michael Clawson of Terminal Volume

Gimme Shelter has noble intentions that get lost in all the thematic clutter.

It’s a message movie with so many conflicting messages that its core feels hallow and quiet, like the eye of a hurricane. The ultimate victim here is Vanessa Hudgens, who turns in a performance that shows her acting has depth, or at least the potential for it. The former Disney star has given interesting performances before, including in last year’s bombastic Spring Breakers, a movie that she didn’t so much act in, but rather desperately clung to as it rocketed away to another planet.

Hudgens plays Agnes, an edgy teen with five facial piercings living in troublesome conditions with her drug-addicted mother, June (Rosario Dawson). In the first scene, Agnes has had enough and flees in a cab ride she can’t afford. She eventually ends up at the home of her father (Brendan Fraser), whom she has never met except in a letter he wrote to her before she was born. He has a family and significant wealth — “Real estate?” Agnes asks; “No, Wall Street,” he tells her. During dinner Agnes throws up unexpectedly, which is secret movie code for cancer or pregnancy. For Agnes it’s pregnancy.

The stepmother, who resents her existence, offers to take her to get an abortion, but Agnes can’t go through with it so she ditches the procedure and starts living on the streets and sleeping in parked cars. The movie mostly wanders with Agnes, who aimlessly bounces from one place to another. Eventually she ends up a shelter for young pregnant mothers, where the other girls accept her as one of their own.

Gimme Shelter plays like a Republican fever dream: minorities eating up all the welfare, abortion not being a valid solution, the Wall Street executive and his form of trickle-down economics, the public sector (not big government) and its role in society’s problems, and a rather prominent Ronald Reagan namedrop. The whole thing smacks of GOP ideology. The movie is probably non-partisan at its core, but I couldn’t help but think of Rush Limbaugh giddily smiling at all the plot points.

Mostly though, Gimme Shelter seems confused about what it actually is. I wasn’t sure if this was a commentary on single mothers, absent fathers, druggie mothers, the sad state of teen shelters, or some sort of Frankenstein mish-mash of all of it. And then, in the credits, photos of the real characters are shown next to the actors playing them suggesting this is a bio-pic, but of who: Agnes, the Wall Street father, the shelter worker? The movie mostly focuses on Agnes, but it can’t seem to agree on what’s best for her.

The movie mixes its messages because no one is shown in a sympathetic light. Fraser’s father figure, wearing the most Donald Trump of hairstyles, flip flops several times. One moment he’s an arrogant jerk and the next he’s lavishing gifts on his daughter and his first grandbaby. The shelter worker (played by Ann Dowd) is even more perplexing: at times she seems to have a heart of gold, and then she crashes churches to use her shelter girls to beg for money. Even Agnes seems confused, especially in her final choices, which are beyond aggravating. Without giving too much away, let me say she takes permanent advantage of a temporary program.

The only two characters who exhibit any consistency are a kind-hearted pastor played by James Earl Jones and the despicable mother. June, whose yellow teeth could serve as the inspiration for all those old “yo momma” dentistry jokes, is one vile monster. Two women sitting behind me at my screening seemed to hiss every time she appeared on the screen. Late in the movie I was pondering where the nearest portable defibrillator might be when June shows up with a razor in her mouth — the two women survived.

Hudgens deserves some recognition for her engrossing, if also uneven, performance. She plays Agnes as a scrappy little fighter conflicted by her past and her increasingly sorrowful plight. I liked the way Hudgens refused to glamourize the role; Agnes is the ugly duckling right until the end. It’s not going to be her greatest acting job, but hopefully it will be the first in a string of dramatic roles that mark her presence as a serious actress.

If only Gimme Shelter had a clearer message. By the end of the movie, all I had gleaned was teen pregnancy was good and bad, shelters were confining and liberating, estranged fathers were absent and present, and charity was a despicable handout and a gracious necessity. The movie needs to commit to something. Anything.

Movie Review for Ride Along

  Ride Along

Starring Kevin Hart, Ice Cube, Tika Sumpter, Bruce McGill and John Leguizamo Directed by Tim Story

From Universal Pictures Rated PG-13 100 min.

Ride Along has some serious Hart

by Michael Clawson of Terminal Volume

Through the haze of cliché and absurdity that is Ride Along, comes an endearing performance by Kevin Hart, an actor I’m growing increasingly fond of with each new movie.

Hart, who stands just a smidge over 5 feet — a physical characteristic that plays right into his shtick of misplaced cockiness and faux swagger — is not a terrific actor. Nor is he the funniest or the most versatile. But he’s likable, and that quality goes a long way to smooth out some of the other wrinkles.

Hart takes this likability and laminates it to the soul of Ben Barber, a hapless geek with a big heart and quick wit. Ben is dating Angela (Tika Sumpter), who is a whole head taller than him, but nevermind that — they’re so cute together that their height difference is a testament to their oddball chemistry. Before he can pop the big question to her, Ben feels obligated to ask her brother for permission first. The brother, James (Ice Cube), a hard-boiled police detective on a tough organized crime beat, wants nothing to do with the “pipsqueak,” so he hatches a plan to get Ben on a police ride along, where he’ll prove to him he’s not man enough to marry his sister.

James rigs the ride along from the beginning, including their first call to stop a biker gang from parking in front of a business. Ben strides up to the bikers and makes a valiant effort, but the deck is stacked against him. Some of these scenarios are tirelessly rote; think of every Kevin James performance and reduce the stupidity by a fifth. I did like a bit in the police station, where James makes Ben fill out a release form — “This says that if you take a blow to the chest, get stuck by a Hep-C needle or eat a bullet from the stress that the department is not liable for your dumb ass.” Ice Cube, ironically playing against his miscreant gangbanger Doughboy in Boyz N the Hood, is a reliable comedy force, but not an exceptional one. I did get a laugh when he said late in the movie, “It was a good day,” a call back to his biggest music hit.

The movie is mostly about James and Ben coming to trust and rely on each other, if not for their common interest, Angela, then for their survival on the mean streets. But the film introduces a plot point at the beginning that actually has a worthwhile payoff: James is tracking an elusive criminal mastermind named Omar, a man no one has actually seen. This, of course, leads to a scene later when Ben has to pretend to be Omar to get James out of a deadly trap. And then the real kingpin shows up — I’ll let you discover who plays Omar.

Mostly, though, the movie serves as vehicle for Hart, who frequently feigns a wacky tough-guy persona to hype up his own sense of bravery, which usually ends with him falling down or taking a bullet to the shin. He has this curious habit of making rubbery faces as he mimes profound exasperation, like he smelled something foul. His humor is rooted in too much slapstick — think of the black-and-white “before” scenes in TV infomercials — but it’s also occasionally witty and smart. I have no excuse for the film’s overreliance on Ben’s video game that he plays early in the movie. It serves as the backbone to many of the jokes, including one where he wanders through a gunfight looking for ammo on the ground because that’s what happens in his video game. It’s one of the dopier Mall Cop-like moments, but it comes and goes fairly quickly.

By no means is Ride Along the movie you should be seeing this weekend. It’s a forgettable comedy filled with many disposable performances and one rather silly one. If you do happen to catch it, you’re likely to come out thinking what I did: “Kevin Hart just made a mediocre movie sorta charming"