Homeward Bound Review

1993 was a good year.  Steven Spielberg released two of the best films ever, Jurassic Park and, especially, Schindler's List.  Harrison Ford starred in one of his best movies, The Fugitive.  Tim Burton directed presented The Nightmare Before Christmas.  Child friendly films like The Sandlot became classics.

And there's also this one, Homeward Bound, a Disney remake of their 1963 film The Incredible Journey.  I just watched it today, and nearly cried.  It's been...a long time.  What was I?  Five?  Four??  To my surprise, I remembered quite a bit.

It's very simple, and so it won't take me too long to review it.  It's a simple, feel-good film with a lot of heart.  It didn't take a lot of imagination to create, but it did require a personal sense of goodness.  I'd say that the film is filled with humanity, but that would be an ironic statement, because in many ways the film is about something that humanity is not.

Shadow, Chance, and Sassy (A Golden Retriever, an American Bulldog, and a Himalayan Cat, respectively), are left behind with a caretaker when their owners go on vacation.  The owners take much longer than expected, and after a couple of weeks Shadow gets worried.

You see, Shadow is a slightly older dog, older than the recently adopted Chance.  He's had time to develop a bond with his kid.  He understands the importance of the relationship between dogs and humans.  He is defined by his loyalty for his boy.

Chance, recognizably voiced by Michael J. Fox, is much less mature.  He's eager for fun, and impulsive.  He's definitely a dog, enjoying life moment by moment, and delighting in gross things like eating smelly old shoes, but he hasn't figured out his relationship with humans yet.  He liked it when they take him in, but the relationship has no deeper meaning to him like it does with Shadow.

Then there's Sassy, who lives up to her name.  She doesn't like getting dirty, and thinks that cats rule and dogs drool.  She's definitely family with the dogs, but her relationship dynamic with them is almost exactly what little kids would expect.

Following Shadow's lead, the three pets leave the farm where they're being kept to travel across the wilderness to find their family.  Chance and Sassy can get distracted, but they keep on going because of Shadow's simple love for his boy.  At one point, in the middle of a forest of pines, sitting before a river with a sunset reflecting off of it, Chance observes that "Looking at him that night, he seemed so wise, and ancient, like the first dog who ever walked the earth.  I just hope that one day I can be like him."

Shadow was always my favorite character.  I'm not sure if, when I was a kid, I was aware that he was older.  Watching this again in my twenties, that detail doesn't seem familiar to me.  When I was a kid, I'm sure that my reason for loving Shadow was that he was of that most beautiful breed, the Golden Retriever.  I still absolutely love him for that reason.  Rewatching the film, though, I admire his deep appreciation of the purpose of being a dog, and how he made found a home in this purpose.

On the way, they see many great beauties of nature, from river rapids, to waterfalls, to rocky cliffs, to mountains and valleys, panthers, bears, and so on.  The film takes no shame in being beautiful.  That sums up most of the film: authentic shots of nature at its best, and of dogs at their best.  And a cat.  Can't forget the cat.

That sums up the movie.  You know exactly what you're going to get.  It's one of those films that captures the old-fashioned Disney spirit quite well, and has a Normal Rockwellian quality.  It's Norman Rockwell for dogs.

Logan Review

This is probably the first time that the main draw for a superhero film (if you can call Logan such) has been its cinematography.  For those of you who saw the one-time-only black-and-white showing of Logan, congratulations; you saw something truly beautiful.  For the rest of you who missed out, too bad, but at least it will be available on blue ray.

Before I go into Logan itself, the subject of quality black and white cinematography demands some address of color photography.  They require two completely different mindsets.  It isn't simply a matter of one having color and one not having color.  They completely alter the way that a film is made.  They each require unique talents from a cinematographer.  When you compare amazing color cinematography to black and white cinematography, it's comparing apples to oranges.  To me, they are two distinct art forms.

Invidentally, only a week and a half before Logan Noir was released, Marverl released Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.  This movie had many strong points that I must praise it on, and when I began writing a review on it, the very first thing that I had to mention was its cinematography.  I have nothing but praise for its cinematography.  It's a miracle, because this was not something to be expected from an MCU movie.  The MCU is notorious among cinematography nerds for being an ugly franchise.  The colors are bland and uninteresting, and there are rarely ever any solid black values onscreen.  It's still a step up from DC's Man of Steel, which went out of its way to put a lifeless filter on it, but it's still uninspired.  Basically, the MCU embodies every bad stereotype of digital cinematography.  While they take great care in their special effects department, they severely overlook their regular effects department, that is, making sure that every shot looks  special regardless of whether or not there's an effect in it.  That doesn't really come naturally, because you have to carefully light the scenes, and then adjust your cameras accordingly.  You also have to make sure that all of the colors in the scene are just right.

And you have to have those black values.  The camera must pick up actual contrast, and this must include shaded areas that are nearly completely black.  Especially if you're creating a comic book movie.  The DCU, for all its faults, figured this out after Man of Steel and didn't make that mistake again.  Batman v Superman looked like an actual comic-book movies, with actual shadows and contrasts that looked hand-crafted.  It was also shot on film, which helped.  Marvel, meanwhile, continued to shoot on Red cameras, which have some absolutely amazing capabilities, but they didn't seem to know what to do with them, and they basically used the Red series like they were any other digital camera, only with a higher pixel count.  Fans of cinematography had reason to be disappointed, because they know the potential that a superhero gives cinematographers.

Then Marvel finally released Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, and something changed.  The first Guardians film indicated what it could be, but its sequel took it to the extreme.  Vol. 2 is an example of a film that understands color photography down to its core.  Every single shot felt vibrant.  It used color to its fullest advantage, and without feeling like there was a filter.  Yes, there probably was a filter, but the beauty is that I didn't notice it.  It felt to me that the world simply was more colorful, and was alive.  It also balanced colors with great black values to guide your attention to the form of the colorful things.  Director James Gunn not only made sure that the cinematographer did his job right, but ensured that the production value matched this cinematographic vision, and that there was plenty of on-set color to work with.  It was everything that I wanted in a Marvel film, in glorious 8K.

I have a great deal more to say on Vol. 2's cinematography that goes beyond just the color, but the point I wish to emphasize is that it had the best cinematography I had ever seen of any superhero film.

Which means that I've been having a really good couple of weeks with cinematography.  A great year if you count all those times I watched La La Land in January and February, which is another amazing example of what can be accomplished with color photography, but that's a tangent.  I've been having a good week because right after watching Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, the comic book film with the greatest cinematography thus far, I drove down to the only Alamo Drafthouse theatre in the Midwest to watch an exclusive showing of Logan Noir, which then immediately replaced Vol. 2's spot at the top.  I have never seen cinematography this beautiful in a comic book movie.

First, I should say that you will not get the same experience that I did merely by turning down the color balance on your television set.  Director James Mangold publicly explained why that didn't work, because all that does is turn the film gray.  That's okay if you want a gray film, but if you want a black and white film, you need to see the version that Mangold and his crew carefully crafted.  They had to edit it frame by frame to ensure that they had the contrast in the scene exactly where they wanted it, to give it as classy of a look as possible, and to ensure the maximum emotional impact.  Every single frame of this film is a work of art.  When watching this movie, I wished I was capable of pausing after every third shot and taking a screenshot so that I could make what I saw onscreen my desktop background.  Logan looks that good in black and white.

In order for you to understand my appreciation of this, I'm familiar with what the film looks like in color.  The shapes and the features of the characters' faces didn't stand out at much, or carry as  much weight.  I can easily imagine how bland that would have looked if one had merely converted this film to black and white by removing the color.  It would have been just as bland, just blander.  On many occasions, I have taken a color photograph and dropped it into basic photo editing software, where I proceeded to take out the color, add some contrast, and then sometimes apply a filter.  The results usually aren't as amazing and as striking as I'd like.  In order to get what I want, I literally recreate the photograph in a lifelike charcoal drawing.  I used to use graphite, but have since found charcoal ten times superior.  Only after all that messy charcoaling, which takes hours and hours of labor over the course of a month, do I finally get a black-and-white picture that really does the subject matter justice.  No filter can match the results of that kind of work.

That's how I feel looking at this film.  I'm reminded of those times that I've created charcoal drawings.  It's amazing.  No filter, no formula, was used in order to get these results.  The visual editors had to labor in love to create a custom-made frame each time that would deliver the maximum effect.  They do all of this while hardly being recognized, because in the end it all looks quite naturally like it was the image picked up by the camera, and that the scenes were originally lit this way.

There are many moments in the film's original release that don't look particularly visually stimulating, but after their Noir conversion, captivate the eyes.  One of them is of Daphne Keene looking out the window while its drizzling.  Other times, people are simply indoors, but the light hits their faces in such a way that you completely see their character.  Just about every shot of Patrick Stewart's aging countenance, and the deep lines running across it, speaks volumes.  When tears well up in his eyes, it looks so surreal.  In so many instances, Logan sits alone in the darkness, and you feel that you know what the character is all about.  Sometimes light will hit them in ways that give them a halo.  Sometimes the characters verge on becoming silhouettes.  Daphne Keene's simple features stand out the least of anyone's, but her smooth dark hair takes on a whole new texture when in black and white.

Again, as the film went on, there were so many moments that made me think "I wish I could take a screenshot and do a charcoal drawing of this!"

One thing that I noticed right away about Logan Noir, is that there's almost always somewhere in the shot that is nearly all-black.  In many indoor scenes, a lot of areas in the background are black, drawing your attention to the character.  It doesn't feel unnatural in the slightest, or that any visual tricks are being performed, but the trained eye notices it and appreciates it.  Good black values do something that many people usually try to accomplish through film editing.  Filmmakers often use editing to draw the audience's attention to something, to help set up a narrative.  I think that good black values often do that, but in an even subtler way, and often in an even more emotional way.

Perhaps where this conversion is at its weakest is when the characters are in the wide open, in broad daylight.  In those moments, briefly, there are no solid black values.  It isn't as visually expressive.  When I do charcoal drawings, I almost always choose a subject matter with dark values, such as hands playing on piano keys, or an ocean reflecting the Milky Way, or a woman casting a shadow as she's walking across the desert.  No matter what, I find a way to have fun with contrast.  However, while the scenes that I'm alluding to don't have these shadows, there's still a beauty to them.  Sometimes it's the scenery, and other times it's the context of the scene itself that makes it beautiful, without the help of black values whatsoever.

Many people went to Logan Noir for this reason, because the story enhanced the black and white images.  They might not have even been connoisseurs of black and white, or have even known the amount of artistry that went into this conversion, but went anyway because they thought that the story of Logan was well-suited for black and white.  The very fact that it was black and white, even if it hadn't been the best quality, seemed an appropriate and emotionally pleasing way of presenting the movie.  It made it more adult.  I concur.  This was an amazing decision that caught be serendipitously.  If there is one hero film that can pull off black and white, it's this one.  And I'll say it right here, that the black and white version of Logan is definitely the preferred one.  If you haven't seen the movie yet, but plan on buying it on Blu-ray, make sure to buy a version that has Noir on it, and watch that one.  James Mangold said that there is a preferred version, because he shot it in color and then retroactively made a black and white version after encouragement from the fans.  Perhaps due to his baises he can't come down and admit just how amazing Noir is, but I'll say it for him.  I'm free from the sentimental connection of having it shot in color first: black and white is the version to watch.  Not only is it beautiful, but it is truly befitting in Hugh Jackman's heartfelt and vulnerable sendoff for this beloved character.

In spite of my love of the color in La La Land and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, this was the real treat for me.  By now, the reader will have learned that I love black and white art, and almost by default choose to express reality through it.  It's one of my loves.  I love it so much that I'd rather have the option between seeing a movie in color and monochrome instead of seeing it in 2D and 3D.  This should be a more regular thing.  Perhaps, just maybe, Logan will win Best Cinematography, and directors will begin to seriously consider shooting films in both color and monochrome in the future.  The chances are small, but nothing would make me happier.  I can always hope that this art form which is so near to my heart will be rediscovered and resurrected.

Hidden Figures Review

Last summer, I saw the trailer for Hidden Figures and thought that it looked like one of those simple, feel-good, family-friendly Disney films.  You know, like Queen of Katwe, which also had advertisements out at about the same time.  Then this movie got nominated for Best Picture, and I wondered if there was something more to it, that it was a serious drama that rose to the level of high art.  I was going to watch this regardless of the nominations it received, because it looked like a good non-action, non-franchise film that would nonetheless be entertaining.  Also, various people at my workplace had watched it and strongly recommended it.  So I wondered, with all of the buzz, what sort of artistic masterpiece I would be walking in on.

As it turns out, my impressions from the trailers were right, and I'm a bit surprised that it got nominated for Best Picture.  Not that I'm complaining, because I liked it.  It was fun, family friendly, wholesome, and had a good heart.  It's just that it's comes off as so modest, and films like this usually aren't nominated.  It wasn't particularly ambitious, wasn't directed with much prestige, and mainly succeeded in being a family-friendly drama.  I keep on saying that word, "family friendly," since perhaps that's the best way of describing this film.

The type of film that this is reminds me a bit of Miracle, by the way, which was also one of those wholesome, feel-good films about real events produced by Disney.  Of all the films that fit into this vaguely defined category that I'm dealing with right now, that one's easily my favorite, and definitely my favorite sports film.  It never got nominated for anything, though, and now with Hidden Figures's nomination, I realize that it might have actually had a chance of having academy recognition.  Who knows, maybe more films like this will get nominated in the future, but I doubt it.

So yeah, asides from knowing that that it's like "one of those simple, feel-good, family-friendly Disney films," the only other two things that people might be interested in knowing, which is how accurately it depicts real-life stories, and how it treats racial issues.

Let me start with the real-life stuff: the film is set in 1961, but a lot of the advances that the main characters made actually happened a lot sooner than that.  Dorothy Vaughan, played by Octavia Spencer, was even promoted to supervisor as early as the Forties.  That's pretty impressive.  Katherine Johnson and Mary Jackson achieved their goals in the film in the Fifties, which isn't quite as impressive, but should still be mentioned.  It seems that the director didn't want to make a movie that spanned across several periods, however, and wanted to set the film in the 60's, since there were a lot of famous things going on during that period to add to the atmosphere of the film, most significantly of which was the launching of John Glenn into space.  It makes for more of a feel-good movie if the advancement of the black women and John Glenn's history-making flight coincided.

Some of the people in this film were composite characters, based off of multiple real-life people and depicted as one person for the sake of simplicity.  For example, the management of the Space Task Group was a bit complicated in real life, and for the sake of the film the whole thing was personified through Kevin Costner.  Multiple engineers were represented through Jim Parsons.  What was important here was that the ideas behind the true story were represented, and not so much the strict literal truth, which would have been a bit more cumbersome and made for a much longer, much more serious film.

As for the racial issues, Hidden Figures doesn't provide much commentary on contemporary race relations, and it doesn't have much to preach.  It definitely has an interest in the racism of its setting, but even then, though it's a central theme of the movie, it doesn't dive into that theme as much as other recent films have, instead choosing to focus mainly on its characters.  The director wasn't interested in the broader implications of racism so much as its specific impacts on the main characters.  He doesn't paint the social constructs as vividly as some other recent films have, and this movie is hardly avant-garde.  However, it doesn't have to be, and in the meantime it isn't like it's whitewashing history.  It seems to me that the director was aware that many of the more profound and definitive films about race during that time period had already been made, and that it was redundant to try to be just as profound as them, especially since that wasn't the focus and the feeling that the film was going for.  Hidden Figured isn't gut-wrenching, but feel-good.  It isn't trying to reinvent the wheel, and instead assumes that people already have seen some of the more provocative material on the subject of race, and that forms the background for this film, which has the luxury of being feel-good and family-friendly.

Finally, I would be amiss if I didn't confess to finding Janelle Monae, who played Mary Jackson, is incredibly attractive and likable and talented, and on her own made this film worth watching.  I might be developing a celebrity crush.

La La Land Review

Right off the bat, there was something that I loved about this film: a long dance number done in a single take.  I absolutely love it when films do complicated stuff like this in one take.  It's a dying art.  On the subject of cinematography, La La Land also had a painter's eye for lighting, and filled its scenes with the most wonderful colors.  So as it happens, I'm really rooting for this film to win Best Cinematography.

The other conspicuously obvious Academy Award that it's up for is Best Original Score, and this is the aspect of La La Land that I'll pay the most attention to, seeing as it's a musical, which makes it a special kind of film that's subject to a different kind of critique than the average film.  A musical is to be judged as a musical, and has different standards for quality than everything else you'll be seeing in theatres.  Yes, characters and story are important, but that's only a part of the whole.  It should be worth noting that I think that the characters and story for Oklahoma! are terrible, but it's still a good musical.

Yes, it does emulate a classical musical from the 40's and 50's, set in the modern era.  It has a familiar storyline about two performers who are trying to land their dream careers, which very much fits this genre.  The artistry in the editing does a lot to evoke these old films.  There's spontaneous dancing, including tap dancing, and people wearing flamboyantly colorful outfits that make me think of the old days when Technicolor was a huge gimmick that every director wanted to take advantage of.  All these things are wonderful.

However, at the same time I should note that La La Land focuses more on its characters than its music at times.  That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I do think that since this is a musical, the characters should have expressed themselves through singing and dancing on a few more occasions than they ultimately did.  Near the end of the film, they didn't have as many dance routines, and ultimately, they didn't use as many songs as they could have.  There's an upside and a downside to this, and I'll get to the upside later.  The downside is that this movie doesn't take full advantage of its medium to express the stories and feelings of its characters.  It's a musical, but only part-time.  It isn't as immersed in its genre as Singin' in the Rain was back in the day.  There are times when it feels just like any other film that you might see, using the same contemporary storytelling techniques, albeit with much better cinematography.  I'm personally not sold on the balance in-between the musical portions of the film and the "normal" segments, although this got nominated for Best Editing, so it definitely warrants a second watching before I really make up my mind on that.

Let's look at the upside to this, though: because there are only about five or six original songs, they're much more memorable.  They actually reuse much of the music from some of these songs, a lot, so certain key songs really stick in your mind after leaving the theatre.  And it's not as if songs are the only things that make this a musical: there are several segments where there's just instruments playing, without any lyrics.  Because La La Land makes frequent use of not just its songs, but its score, I'm willing to believe that it will take home the Oscar in that category.

Two of my favorite pleasures in a film, when done right, are its cinematography and its score, and La La Land definitely did them right.  It was an experience for me.  Unfortunately, since my expectations were subconsciously very high, it let me down somewhat, but not too much.  It is indeed the favorite nominee for Best Picture that everyone has been talking about.

Night Review

Quick show of hands: who hasn't read this book?  I'm just curious.  Where I come from, this Nobel Prize winning book was required reading in my freshman year of high school, but maybe that isn't so in other states and other countries.  Of course, even if it is required reading, perhaps you haven't got to high school yet, so you haven't read it.

In my opinions, everyone should read this historic book, and they shouldn't wait until high school to do so.  Parents should read it to their children when they're still in elementary school.  I don't think someone should withhold Night from someone just because "they aren't old enough."  It's an important book to be familiar with.  It affects your worldview when you immerse yourself in its contents.

As someone who appreciates literature, I also should note that on top of this being a moving true story about one of the most significant events in the twentieth century, but it is also written by a master of storytelling.  Elie Wiesel tells his story not just as an historian, but as an artist.  He speaks with a rare and special voice that one can only have if one has gone through and been permanently affected by his experiences.  He manages to succeed in expressing his suffering through his words, which is very hard to do.  It is quite fortunate that of the few Jews who survived the Holocaust, at least one of them should have his ability to speak as clearly as he does on the subject of that long, long night.

Was God On Vacation? Review

A while back, an Iowa state representative by the name of John Kooiker gave me a book after church.  He was an old friend of mine, an elder I looked up to and regularly talked with after services had convened.  I meant to read it right away.

Around ten years later, I finally got around to it.  It's a shame that it took me this long.  I should be far more eager to complete a book when someone gives it to me.  It's the polite thing to do.  And anyway, I didn't read it because I remembered John Kooiker.  I read it because my father read it in my stead when I first took it home.  All these years, my old man has been asking me if I've gotten around to reading that book.  He really wanted me to read it, because he loved it, which is no surprise.  The book is about a Dutchman who did amazing things during World War II.  My father's a Dutchman, so the story was relevant to him.

Like the judge giving in to the persistent widow, I listened to him after a while.  A decade later, I finally picked the book up and put my nose to it from start to finish.

Overall, it was an interesting account.  It's the true story of Jakobus "Jack" van der Geest, who was a teenager when the Germans first invaded the Netherlands.  That much I knew from what John Kooiker had told me when he handed me the book.  The first few chapters is about how he fought in the Dutch underground, got reported on by his neighbor named Reita, ended up being shipped to Buchenwald, was mistaken for a doctor and forced to help the Nazi doctors with their experiments, became so thin that eventually he got away with faking death, being thrown into a pile of dead bodies, and eventually crawled out at night and killed the Nazi officer patrolling the pile, at which point he took the officer's clothes and sneaked out of the concentration camp.

This is non-fiction, so I don't think that it's a big deal to give away spoilers.  However, I'm not going to write up a summary of Jack van der Geest's story in this review.  I very well could.  After all, I knew most of the things that were going to happen in this book because my father told me about several of Jack's stories.  However, perhaps you want to read this for yourself instead of just getting a brief description of his adventures from me.  I don't want to take away your reason for going out and buying this book.

What I will say is that Carol Ordemann, who transcribed the story for Jack, didn't necessarily do the best job.  I noticed several typos, among other things, which is an objective flaw in its writing.  A published book shouldn't have any typos.  It's extremely unprofessional to have them.  That's the other complaint that I have about Ordemann's writing, that it isn't very professional.  The story is in the first person, which makes me wish that van der Geest didn't seek out someone else to write the book for him.  I'm not expecting him to have the writing ability of Elie Wiesel, but I still would imagine that he'd have enough of a knack for storytelling to write this book himself.  As it stands, Ordemann's first-person writing doesn't feel very personal and doesn't put me in his skin.  It feels emotionally distanced.  Also egregiously, there are times then Carol writes a person as having said something "while smiling" or some other expression, and it's really frustrating because it sounded to my ear like she was creatively filling in the blanks of various scenes in order to make them feel more like first-person recollections and not like they were actual memories of van der Geest.  This book could have felt a lot more reliable, but I didn't trust the illustrator when actual scenes were being illustrated.  Did I trust the overall story and the events therein?  Yes, but not the details of the conversations, which in the meantime were flat.

Another problem that this book has is the title.  van der Geest briefly implores if God is on vatation while in Buchenwald, but but he then figures that God is on his side when he escapes, and the subject isn't explored again.  Once more, I bring up Elie Wiesel, author of Night and God On Trial, who brought up the death of one's faith beautifully, poignantly, and personally in his memoirs, and does a good job of making the reader feel very invested in the question of God's goodness.  Was God On Vacation? doesn't explore this question and give a lot of insight into just what van der Geest was going through spiritually, or if he thought that much about his spirituality at all.  There are brief mentions of God throughout the book, but they aren't brought up with a lot of conviction, or a sense of urgency that says that says that the Divine is an important subject for conversation.  It isn't thematic of the book.  It's just a small detail, which makes me think that it doesn't belong in the title, especially when Jack van der Geest only struggles with the question in one of the early chapters.

It's frustrating, because the story truly is a good one.  However, I think I'd rather retell it myself in my own way, as a folk tale, to my children.  It's a story that's better told than read.

Doctor Strange Review

On the same day that I watched Doctor Strange, I also treated myself to As Good As It Gets, a 1998 comedy that got nominated for Best Original Screenplay.  As you can imagine, this heightened my awareness of how so many superhero movies can be generic.  That's exactly what the plot of Doctor Strange is: a retread of everything we've seen before, just with a new set of superpowers.

Except these superpowers aren't clearly defined.  Even though there's a bit of exposition explaining how his powers work, it isn't enough.  I still don't understand what he technically can and can't do.  Therefore, I can only conclude that he can and can't do whatever is convenient for the writers.  If the writers want a scene to play out a certain way, then his powers are written one way for that scene.  They will be written another way for another scene.  I don't know how many people will notice this about the movie, but I did, because I like to get nerdy and try and think of the possibilities of what I would do if I had the hero's powers.  When I watch a Spiderman movie, I definitely like to imagine what all I could do with his very specific power set.  However, with Doctor Strange, I can't quite imagine what it would be like to get creative with his powers, because I don't understand what his powers are, or why they work the way that they do.  They get a little bit into the metaphysics of it, but it isn't nearly enough, and this is one of those situations where I feel that the story could have benefited from more exposition.  However, this is a Marvel blockbuster, so I know not to expect that.

Meanwhile, Strange isn't the most original character.  He definitely has a variant of the Tony Stark vibe going on, and he doesn't quite stand out as an original character.  He's a brilliant genius with an abundance of natural talent and technical know-how, who gets a bit cocky and can be a bit of a dirtbag while still being the kind of guy that you can root for.  Doesn't that sound a little bit familiar?  He even has the same goatee as Tony.  His powers are new and unique, but his personality isn't.

The venerable doctor still has more of a personality than Mads Mikkelsen's villain, though.  Like just about all Marvel villains outside of Loki and Kilgrave, this villain is thinner than paper and doesn't leave much of a lasting impression.  Someone maybe got paid a couple of dollars to write him up, and everyone else paid an eight dollar entry fee so that they could watch this movie and totally not notice him.  The only thing that this villain has going for him is that he's played by Mads Mikkelsen, who does villains quite well, but even then I'm conspicuously aware of how he's a million times better as Hannibal Lecter, arguably the greatest villain of all time.  This new guy is a serious downgrade for him.  He's not even that intimidating.  He defeats a bunch of people off screen, and he's as competent as he needs to be in order to pose a serious threat to the world, but he's remarkably average in other scenes when the writers need Strange to survive a fight.  Why is Mads so unstoppable when he's up against the armies of other wizards?  Why does he conveniently possess that level of competency?  Why is it that the villain is a better wizard than all of the other wizards?  Because the movie needs someone to be just enough of a threat to keep the plot going, but I'm still not entirely sold that he could have been such a huge threat in the first place.  Top that off with his lack of any reeal features as a character beyond being a simple plot device, and I just don't like him.  In fact, I distinctly remember my first impression of him being how vague of an impression he made.  His name is Kaecilius?  What's the ethnic origins of that name?  Is that Latin?  Except he looks really German.  Although his hair looks oriental.  If you want someone to make a strong impression, you have to pick traits that make sense together and compound on each other.  It's like his different characteristics are canceling each other out, creating an un-character.

Chiwetel Ejiofer's character is a bit more developed, although not by much.  I see huge similarities to the Operative from Serenity, in part because it's the same actor.  However, his motivations aren't quite as well-defined or thematically prevalent as the Operative's.  I mostly took to thinking of him as the Operative, Jr.  Still, it isn't bad to have a character like that in this movie.

Overall, Doctor Strange is exactly what thee trailer shows it to be.  It's exactly the story you'd expect, and it has all the visual effects that it's marketing team has been boasting of and more.  Truly, the visuals are the best part of this film, and I do regret not seeing this in 3D.  It was definitely designed to look good in that format.  So, if you're planning on on watching this movie because it looks like it will blow Inception out of the water, by all means go ahead.  In spite of how harsh this review sounds, I actually did enjoy the film, because like all Marvel movies, it's packed with fun.  It just doesn't hold up to a more serious artistic inspection.

Seriously, see this in 3D.  I watched it in 2D so that I could tell you to watch it in 3D, you got that?  You will not be disappointed.