Making Up For Lost Time - Six Reviews

As it is with most people, my summer has been busy. Teaching both spring and summer terms has presented its challenges, as usual, but I did that while fitting in a trip to Idaho, a 50th wedding anniversary party for my in-laws, countless day trips hither and thither, a trip to the emergency room and 22 stitches for my eleven year old, and a ton of other stuff. So, yes, it's been a great summer so far. However, all this busyness has kept me from reviewing the movies I've been watching - some great, some lamentable. So here, in a few hundred words each, are reviews of the six movies I've watched recently (as usual, there are some spoilers ahead. Most of these movies have been out for a while, so if you haven't seen them by now, I don't feel bad for you.):

Malefecent/Saving Mister Banks - I'm writing about these two together because, despite their seemingly different subject matter, they're actually about the same thing and have the same purpose. The Disney company has now been around for so long and has such a storied stable characters and narratives, it has finally entered an inevitable phase: self-cannibalism. It is now making movies about its own movies, stories about its own stories. No doubt, this move is partly in an attempt to find new relevance in films dangerously close to irrelevance for 21st century filmgoers (teenagers and young adults), but also it seems like these movies are apologies and politically correct revisions to cover up how things were in the middle of the last century.

Saving Mister Banks is a behind-the-scenes story of author P.L. Travers and her "collaboration" with Disney in making the film version of 1964's Mary Poppins. The film paints Travers as impossibly uptight, priggish, and repressed and unhappy to the point of what seems to being clinically depressed. Walt Disney, on the other hand, is jolly, down home, and so congenial he almost gives you a toothache. He tries to woo her for the rights to make the film and tries to help her see the joy in lightheartedness. She stubbornly resists, eventually leaving for England only to find that Walt booked the flight right behind her so they can have an intimate, late night one-on-one about their terrible childhoods. She relents, he makes the movie, she bawls like a baby at the premiere, and all is well. A lot of has been made of the fact that the movie is largely fiction. Travers was hardly a prude, and Disney carried razor blade business sense as sharp as his scrubby, little mustache. Disney already had the rights to the film and had no need to woo Travers. He never flew to England to persuade her of anything. Travers had to beg for an invite to the premiere, and, once there, she complained to Disney about the animated sequences in the film. Uncle Walt just strode away saying, "That ship has sailed, Pamela." Not exactly a heart-warmer, eh?

The point is, Disney wants to recast its own past and find psychological complexity in its movies (Mary Poppins, according this movie, isn't just about dancing penguins or Julie Andrews' ridiculously white teeth. Instead, it's a kind of veiled biographical revision of Travers' own life, her attempt to "save" her alcoholic dad who died of tuberculosis and was never able to be a proper father.) The movie essentially says, yes, Disney railroaded writers and creators into matching Walt's singular vision - but he did it for the kids, because he never got to be one himself. Awwww. Very little of the film's conflict is real in any way - so this raises the question of whether or not it matters that our "based on a true story" stories are actually accurate. Do we just want good stories and it doesn't matter if things "happened" that way, or does a movie company have some responsibility to tell the story of its own past with a little more than just a passing amount of accuracy. Personally, I finished the film feeling as though I had seen nice performances from Emma Thompson and Paul Giamatti (as usual) and some nice retro shots of Los Angeles and Disneyland but that ultimately the film was just trying to sell me a bill of goods and get me to buy into the hagiography of Saint Walt. I was not convinced.

Malefecent rebrands the title character turning her from the villainous witch of Sleeping Beauty into a wounded heroine, a metaphorical date rape survivor, and a redemptive character in the end. As classic Disney cartoons go, let's face it, Sleeping Beauty is an absolute snooze. The only exciting part of the whole thing is when Malefecent turns into a giant black dragon and tries to kill the utterly lame Prince Phillip. With all the lead-up to this film, I tried to figure out how they were going to make Malefecent, I don't know, NOT EVIL? And frankly, the solution was clever - take a character from the original film, one that nobody has any investment in whatsoever, and turn him into the villain who drives Malefecent to her dark ways. So, we find out that M was a good fairy, the protector of an enchanted forest, who befriends a poor human boy named Stefan. They learn each other's secrets and fall in love. Later, the boy grows to a man who craves power and prestige. In return for being named successor to the throne of a nearby kingdom, Stefan drugs Malefecent and cuts her powerful wings off while she's asleep. Creepy and date-rapey? You bet. But since no one ever cared about King Stefan, father of Aurora in the 1959 cartoon, who cares if we turn him into the worst possible kind of person? So that's why M curses Stefan's daughter. She's a fairy scorned, right? But then her wrath subsides as she watches Aurora grow and become a loving, charming person. In fact, we see that M protects her and watches over her repeatedly throughout her life. So Malefecent, like businessman Walt, is recast into something more accessible, more complicated, and more heroic. She vanquishes Stefan the greedy, regains her wings, and takes Aurora as her protege in ruling the fairy kingdom. (There's a whole other review in here comparing this movie to Frozen and talking about the removal of men as anything other than villains and comic relief in recent Disney movies. But I don't have that kind of time right now.) Angelina Jolie is an engaging actress, it's true. She gets more attention for being Mother Earth these days, but she is an Oscar winner and can make you care about what happens to her, even if it's in a movie you don't necessarily care about. Like this one. The other thing I noticed about this film is how the special effects looked like the special effects in just about every other fantasy movie from the last five years. Tree men? Sure. Rock creatures? You bet? Aslan? No, wait, that's a different movie that looked just like this.

Looper was written and directed by Rian Johnson who made the excellent, high school-set neo noir Brick a few years back. It was clear then that Johnson was smart and talented but also that he had a knack for being original with well-trodden genre conventions.Recently, it was announced that he was one of two directors hired to take on the new Star Wars spin-off movies. (One is Boba Fett, the other is young Han Solo. It hasn't been announced when one Johnson is doing but we can't go wrong either way as near as I can tell.) That job came to him, I think, on the strength of Looper, Johnson's time travel sci fi movie with Joseph Gordon-Leavitt and Bruce Willis. Gordon-Leavitt plays Joe, a looper which is a hitman hired to kill people that the mob sends back in time from the future. Eventually, these hitmen are sent back themselves and are killed by their younger versions. Joe's future self comes back and manages to escape because he wants to change the past in order to make a better future for himself. It sounds pretty standard, I know, but it's all in the execution, and Johnson makes every plot twist, every special effect, and every performance unique. It's a very smart film that doesn't bother over-explaining everything or trying to wow viewers with the latest CGI. The narrative and the dialogue are both really smart and show respect for the audience. The effects are almost entirely practical rather than computer generated. Johnson got more tactility and reality out of this sci fi movie for 30 million dollars than George Lucas got with over 300 million and three Star Wars prequels. It is a dark movie. There's plenty of cursing and some unsettling violence. Watching another escaped looper disappear bit by bit as the mob tortures his younger self is a marvel of filmmaking but also really gross and creepy. But darker still, is old Joe's mission. He's out to stop an all-powerful mobster in the future called The Rainmaker. How do you best stop a man? Stop him from ever becoming a man. So Joe's mission is to hunt down the child who will eventually become the Rainmaker. So yeah, it's pretty dark, but it's never gratuitous or exploitive and the film handles its difficult moments with enough edge for you to feel them but enough restraint so you can finish watching. It's not a film for everyone, but I thought it was one of the best written, best produced, most engaging and exciting movies I've seen in years.

Looper seems tiny compared to, say, Star Wars, but it's gigantic compared to In A World, an independent film written and directed by Lake Bell. Bell is primarily known as an actress and model who had roles in super forgettable projects like Over Her Dead Body and What Happens In Vegas. Turns out, despite her involvement in lame fests like that, she's a razor sharp writer and a canny director too. In A World borrows its title from movie trailers voices by good ol' Don LaFontaine. You may think, who? But you know exactly who I'm talking about. This guy.

Anyway, it's about Carol Solomon, a vocal coach in Los Angeles who is the daughter of a LaFontaine-esque movie trailer voiceover artist. She essentially stumbles into voiceover work and ends up competing with her dad and his chosen (idiotic) successor to be the voice of a new Hunger Games-esque series. Whoever gets the job will get the honor of reviving LaFontaine's well-known catchphrase (you guessed it), "In a world..." The film is a funny character study, a clever satire of Hollywood insiderism, and a charming romance. There's a subplot with Carol's sister and brother-in-law that is resolved far too quickly and a couple of characters that appear and never really develop beyond their immediate plot purpose, but the overall success of the movie as a whole makes those problems pretty easy to overlook. As a character, Carol is smart, funny, and utterly human while managing to avoid so many of the garbagy cliches this film might have featured had it starred Katherine Heigl, Rachel McAdams, or Kate Hudson in a younger day. Carol is not uptight nor is she an airhead. She's not a driven careerist who has no time for love nor is she a lovelorn romantic who just can't catch a break. She's a daughter, a sister, a friend, and a professional. Strangely, because I wasn't busy being distracted by romcom cliches, I had way more time to laugh and enjoy myself. The romance between Carol and one-time comedy it-boy Demetri Martin is charming and fun without being twee or obnoxious.

I have always recognized the power of disembodied voices - the radio, movie trailers, etc. and so this film focusing on this weird little sub-industry of Hollywood is right up my alley. Again, it's not everybody's cup of satire because there's some pretty harsh language in spots, but I enjoyed it as much as any comedy I've seen this year.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes - The successful reboot of the Apes franchise has been surprising, especially after the debacle of Tim Burton's monumentally sucky 2001 attempt. But this and its predecessor, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, despite their talky titles, have been smart and well-produced. Everything in them depends on two things: Andy Serkis's compassionate, complex performance as the alpha ape, Ceasar, and the freaking miracle of the latest CGI technology that effectively conveys that performance only with Serkis as, you know, AN APE. With special-effects heavy movies, performances that make audiences care about the characters is what draws the line between something like DOTPOTA and something like cold, boring SFX bonanzas like, say, any of the Transformers movies.

The movie takes place ten years after the events of the first film and the human population has been decimated by the same pathogen that caused a group of apes to gain human-level intelligence. The apes, led by Ceasar, have formed their own civilization in the forest outside San Francisco and are pretty happy. Everything is fine until the pesky humans show up, looking to restart a hydroelectric dam in the woods in order to provide power to the city below. The worst elements in both the human and ape societies come out and despite the best efforts of Ceasar and his human counterpart, Malcolm, (played by the unending blue steel stare that is actor Jason Clarke) war erupts between the two cultures. Though the film is mostly subtle and thoughtful, there is definitely a giddy, you-only-get-this-at-the-movies thrill of seeing Koba, the ape villain, galloping through the streets of San Francisco atop a black horse, with two machine guns blazing as he goes. It's delerious imagery and a fun, exploitive counterpoint to the thoughtful, almost elegiac tone of the rest of the film.

Gary Oldman is wasted here as an extremist human willing to do whatever it takes to survive. His role could have been played by almost anybody with the same effect. Ah well, even Sirius Black has to pay the bills, right? The film does a decent job of wrapping up its central conflict but leaving enough of a tail for another film to follow. No doubt in a couple of years, we'll have another sequel - maybe just plain ol' Planet of the Apes this time. If it's as well-made as the last two have been, I'll totally welcome a third.

Jobs - Let's be short and sweet here, shall we? It's a biopic hagiography of Apple Computers founder, Steve Jobs. It stars Ashton Kutcher in his bid to transition from idiot boy actor to serious actor ala Jim Carey in Man on the Moon. He fails. The movie sucks. Don't bother seeing it. Any questions?