Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom Review

I really wanted to like this movie.  I had every reason to look forward to it.  Idris Elbe received a Golden Globe nomination, and if nothing else the subject matter deserved my respect.  Mandela was a great man.  Normally biographical dramas about great people make for good films.

Unfortunately, there isn't much to say for this movie.  While I can agree that Idris Elba's performance was good, that's about the only good thing that I have to say for this movie.  It was pretty easy to put my finger on what ruined everything else, too.  Long Walk to Freedom didn't feel long at all, because it had quite possibly the worst editing that I've ever seen.  I've had to think for a bit about whether or not it deserves that exclusive spot at the very bottom, but it was bad enough to be in the running.

This goes above most people's heads.  Editing?  What makes for "good" and "bad" editing?  Good editing is something that most of us take for granted, and we rarely ever complain about bad editing.  I'm not sure many of us know what bad editing even looks like.  Watch Long Walk to Freedom, and you'll understand what bad editing is, and why editing makes such a big difference in a movie.

Imagine this: you're watching a scene, and you're not sure where it's going, and before it has a chance to go anywhere, it ends.  It just...ends.  Next scene.  Scenes are generally meant to built up on themselves and come to some sort of conclusion before transitioning into the next scene.  In this movie, that rarely happens.  The scenes in this movie are all way too short.  For the first hour of the film, all of the scenes were less than a minute long.  I say this without exaggeration.  It wasn't until an hour into the film that there was even one scene that lasted for more than a minute.  In the second half of the movie, the scenes get a little longer, but not much.  The movie runs on an uneasy staccato of short spurts, and the scenes rarely transition into each other, so it's not like there was a rhythm anywhere in that staccato.

In the beginning of the movie, you get a brief glimpse at Nelson as a child roaming the planes.  Then it ends.  You see him living in the city, and he meets a girl.  Before I'm even aware that there's chemistry between them, they're dating, and by the time I realized that they were dating, they were married.  Interspersed throughout all of this were scenes of the injustices of South African society, which makes it difficult to follow exactly what's happening in Mandela's life.  I don't have a good sense of time.  Meanwhile, Mandela suddenly has grown children already.  This comes out of nowhere.  I had no idea that the story had already progressed to much.  Mandela then has an affair, engages in more revolutionary activity, gets sent to jail, gets a divorce, and then remarries, all within the first half hour of the film.

Throughout all of this, you don't get a good long look at Mandela.  None of the scenes linger enough for you to develop a feel for Mandela, or any of the people that he associated himself with.  Every detail of the film feels like it's part of an opening exposition, and not part of the actual story.  I kept on waiting for the actual story to start and for the movie to start flowing.  That never happened.  Nothing seems important, because the

Because of the editing, there was never a nice long scene that fully illustrated the injustices of apartheid and let it all just sink in, so the movie fails as a period piece.  Because of the editing, the movie is poorly paced, and you don't have a good grasp on the titular long walk to freedom.  Time is very confusing.  I also care a lot about music, and this movie's score got nominated for a Golden Globe, but the editing really ruined the score, since it didn't have the chance to really build up over any scenes.  The music was always rushed, and felt awkwardly shoehorned into scenes.  Finally, and most egregiously, the editing does Idris Elba's acting injustice.  I feel like he was delivering his performance one small burst at a time, and it's like you're only getting small glimpses of him.  The performance should be good enough that you should be drawn into it, and the editing should allow for that to happen.

I can only assume that there will someday be a much better film about Mendela, one that's edited like a normal movie.  Until then, this is the main film about him.  That's unfortunate, especially since I watched this with my sister who knew nothing about Mandela and didn't feel that she learned anything about him in this one.  A film about him should be enlightening and educational, and some director with a love of history is going to want to make Mandela's story truly come alive someday.  That's something that I look forward to.

Sully Review

With most movies — even predictable ones — there's some basic level of suspense keeping you at the edge of your seat.  Since most of us know the outcome of the miracle on the Hudson, though, this film is a little different.  This is one of those movies that you hold up as an example of why you don't need suspense to keep a movie interesting.  The focus of Sully lies more in educating the viewer on this historic plane crash and what happened afterward.  The story is known to us; the exact details are not.  One should go into this looking forward to learning more about the miracle on the Hudson.

So what Clint Eastwood presents us with is an experience that's meticulously researched.  He does everything to be realistic, and to capture the technical aspects of the airline industry.   It's not uncommon for films based on true events to embellish things, or change some details for the sake of making things work better on camera, but going from the general feeling that I get, a lot of the details here feel more like they were put in out of loyalty to real-life rather than out of need for added drama.  Very little in this film — save for one exception that I'll get to later — feels like it came from a film-maker's imagination.  I really felt like I was watching airline pilots, and not some romanticized version of them.

It should be noted that the title of this film is Sully, and not The Miracle on the Hudson, and the film isn't strictly about the plane crash itself.  The plane crash itself is a very simple story that can't take up a whole film.  Rather, the main story of Sully is that of the aftermath, and the investigation from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) to figure out for the record what went wrong, and what could have been done differently.  The stakes for Sully are very personal — his job is on the line if its proven that he put his passengers at a greater risk by landing in the Hudson instead of trying to make it to a nearby runway.

Of course, we know that the investigation comes out in Sully's favor, otherwise this movie wouldn't exist, and Clint Eastwood would have cast the villainous Ralph Fiennes to play Sully instead of the noble persona of Tom Hanks.  Like I said, this film doesn't have much suspense, but it manages to stay dramatic.  Perhaps that drama is a little bit of a problem, though, because this is the one area of the film that's dramatized.  In order to give this film conflict, the NTSB is cast in a negative light.  Their routine investigation is depicted as though it were a prosecution, determined to blame Sully for endangering the passengers and strip him of his career and dignity.  They were way too willing to assume negative things about him, and their arguments against his heroism were weak and very obviously overlooked certain details, which the film mentions.  It was bad enough that the real Chesley Sullenberger, who otherwise really liked the film, asked for the names of those heading the NTSB investigation to be changed so as not to defame them.

Perhaps the most eggregious part of this dramatization is that Sully depicts the investigation as being hasty, lasting for only a few days, when in real life the NTSB was much more cautious and objective, taking eighteen months to investigate the plane crash.  For the life of me, I don't understand why the screenwriter changed this.  Sully is a short movie, and there isn't much space to give Sullenberger a character arc.  It would have made more sense to show how this investigation affected him over the course of a year and a half.  It would have even been more dramatic to watch the tension build up in the titular character over time.  For whatever reason, Clint Eastwood didn't throw the script back at Todd Komarnicki and tell him to make the investigation longer and meatier, not to mention more accurate.  He didn't, and I don't understand that.

Aside from that major flaw, I also had mixed feelings about the flashbacks.  There were a couple of flashbacks from Sullenberger's younger years that didn't feel necessary at all, and his PTSD hallucinations of the plane crashing felt like they were put in there just to appeal to the visual medium, and hallucinations are a pet peeve of mine.  If Captain Sullenberger really did have PTSD, though, which is likely enough, I'd be okay with the latter of these two minor issues.

Overall, it's a fairly good drama that I didn't regret watching.  While the screenplay has some faults, Clint Eastwood makes a lot out of it, and his directing is easily the best part of this movie.  Do I think that Sully is as good as American Sniper?  Not so much.  I definitely like the longer time frame for that story, but of course that movie had its faults, too, so I can't say that it's objectively better.  Besides, there's something unique and refreshing about watching a drama that's so short and to-the-point, which makes it a perfectly paced film.  Certainly, Sully is a well-edited film, and it's easy enough to watch that I might very well watch it again when it comes out on DVD.

Kubo and the Two Strings Review

2016 has seen the release of several outstanding animated movies.  Disney has been hitting things full throttle and has been making outstanding advancements in animation.  Just look at Zootopia, where not a single background character stands motionless, and they manage to fill the frame with millions of subtle details.  You could also look at Finding Dory, where Pixar has been pushing the limits in what they can do with lighting, and they also managed to animate a a boneless octopus.  If you pay close attention animation, you know that these achievements are spectacular, and that it isn't at all easy to do what these animation companies are doing.  On top of it all, Disney and Pixar have crafted great stories that challenge the viewer, either to look at stereotypes in a reasonable light or to relate to a fish with short-term memory loss.  These are great stories.  These are great movies.

Which is why my sisters were a little offended when advertisements claimed that Kubo was the greatest animated movie of the year.  "Really?  Haven't they ever heard of Disney?"  Their presumption was, apparently, that only Disney-style animated movies can be great.

I will stand by what those critics were saying.  It's all subjective, but I simply can't put it behind what Disney and Pixar have accomplished this year.  It's good; it stands out; and it's memorable.  It made the lasting impression that I like to see in an animated movie.

If you're like my sisters and have trust issues when it comes to animated films outside of the Disney domain, since they can often be cynical, crude, Shrek-like, and exploitative, take comfort in knowing that this film is PG and has a strong storytelling spirit.  It wasn't conjured up just to earn a cheap buck, like Minions or The Secret Life of Pets.  It's a film for the family, and yet is distinct from Disney and has an identity of its own.

Most especially, the animation is beautiful.  Technically, Disney and Pixar's animation is the best there is in the world, but it still isn't as beautiful as Kubo's.  In this movie, every other frame puts me in awe.  This movie is simply wonderful to look at.  I don't know what the technical demands of this animation were, and if Kubo made any innovations, but the end result is too stunning to discount.  The director Travis Knight made sure that everything about this film was filled with elegance and played to the strengths of animation.  He has an eye for beauty and employs it constantly, turning Kubo and the Two Strings into a mystical series of idyllic paintings.  Some people have a good sense of rhythm, others have a good sense of humor, and Travis knight has a great sense of beauty.  On the simplicity of its beauty alone, the movie was worth the price of admission.

The visuals weren't the only thing to be simple and beautiful, though.  Kubo is a somewhat short film, and keeps its story to the important stuff.  This shortness really helps with the pacing, since the story arrives at each of its stages in relatively short order.  The scenes last long enough for you to be satisfied with them, but they don't go on so long that they make you impatient for the next big thing to happen.

Perhaps the story could have have been filled with a few more events during the rising action, but Kubo is a straightforward Hero's Journey that doesn't need much more than a few basic plot points, and it also proves that a story can be one of those without ripping off Star Wars (I'm looking at you, Eragon).  The details of this journey might sound a bit familiar.  At the beginning of the film, Kubo is a kid living a life in a normal community, until adventure calls and he's thrown into an epic quest to find three important artifacts in order to confront the big villain.  Does that sound familiar?  It could be because these are the elements of classic myths and epic poems, and this movie tells them in a fresh way.  It's simple and primal enough that a child can watch it regularly without it getting old, just as I did with my old Disney VHS tapes back in the day.

Finally, I appreciate that this movie is willing to treat death as very real and offers its two cents on the subject, as well as what it means to be human, and it says it in language that I think that kids can understand and that adults can appreciate.  There are a few scenes that might scare younger children, hence why its rating suggests parental guidance, but they play well into the Kubo's themes.  In many ways, this animated film is pretty serious once you actually think about it, much as Zootopia was.  So if you liked the one, I see no reason why you wouldn't like the other.  Kubo has quite a bit to offer.