Philomena Review

Here are my cursory thoughts: it's good, and I liked it.  It doesn't stand out, but it's a solid movie that made sense as a Best Picture nominee.  Judi Dench also delivered a solid performance and got nominated for Best Actress, although there were a couple of performances in this movie that I was more impressed by.  First, there were the flashback scenes of Philomena as a teenager, and the actress cast in that role genuinely felt like a younger Judi Dench.  The performance that really stands out, though, is Steve Coogan as Sixsmith, the journalist tasked with covering Philomena's human interest story.  He didn't get nominated for an Academy Award, but his acting deserves some recognition.  Philomena also got nominated for Best Original Score, which is the Academy Award that I probably pay the most attention to, so the score was pleasing, although I can't say that it was hypnotizingly good.

The big thing that I didn't realize until the credits started rolling was that it was based off of a true story.  Given the content of the movie, that's really upsetting.  Basically, Philomena deals with the phenomenon of forced adoptions in Ireland, and how nuns would go out of their way to make sure that adopted children were never reunited with their parents.  The nuns were definitely the "bad guys" in this story, so I can think of a number of Catholics who would be upset by this film (my grandmother wasn't one of the, but I can see my sister having a fit over this), but it's not like the movie made up anything, since the nuns really did do this in real life.  The movie makes sure to point out that they were bad examples of Catholics, though, and make Philomena out to be a good example.  Sixsmith, meanwhile, was an agnostic, and overall the movie doesn't really take sides when it comes to religion, choosing to represent both worldviews sympatheticalkly.  Politics are also lightly evoked, briefly, and the movie also does a good job of not taking sides in this arena as well.

One of the major characters was gay, and he was in real life.  No big deal is made out of it, but it does affect the plot very slightly, so it's not as though it's completely ignored.  I did my research, and the name of his lover was apparently changed, I'm guessing to keep his privacy.  Overall, the movie is actually fairly close to real life.

So anyway, I'd recommend Philomena if you're in the mood for a decent true story, especially if you want something with a BBC atmosphere to it, since it definitely shows that this has a British director.

Storks Review

A couple of friends of mine got married recently, and they called me today with news.  Since I've been living sans Facebook these last several months, I'm late to the party: they're having a baby.  Not only that, but he/she's due in three weeks.  That was pretty big news to suddenly dump on me.

Anyway, so I saw this movie called Storks.  Mind you, not a masterpiece of a movie.  It starts off with stupid slapstick humor, and is abrasive in its pacing.  A lot of stuff gets thrown at you, and it just isn't very elegant.  You're introduced to Junior, a stork, who seems like a fairly normal stork, but apparently he's in line for an incredibly big promotion.  He's about to become BOSS.  I don't know what qualified him for a promotion, and there wasn't any buildup to it, but that's the information that suddenly comes out of nowhere, and it literally (I'm not misusing the word "literally," because there's slapstick, remember) blows his mind.  Apparently he doesn't know what qualifies him, either.  Too bad, you'll never find out.  He's also unlikable, which can be said about pretty much every obnoxious bird in this movie.

There's a human girl called Orphan Tulip who lives with the storks because the homing beacon that was supposed to lead her personal stork to her family got destroyed.  The storks detest her, because she's a quirky person, thinks outside of the box, causes a lot of mayhem with her crazy experiments, and has a heart of gold.  It's a cheap two-dollar characterization, but hey, I found her adorable.  Part of me wonders if I've been manipulated by her adorableness like all of the people who love the Minions, but I'll defend myself here.  The writers seemed to actually have good intentions when creating her character.  She may be the result of sloppy writing, but that's not the same thing as greedy by-the-number writing.  I feel like the writers actually enjoyed writing her character, which brings me to the second thing that distinguishes her from the Minions: her dialogue is good.

The dialogue is probably the best thing about this movie.  It fires off like a machine gun, keeps on going at a rapid pace, and rarely stops.  People often talk over each other, interrupt each other, and quickly backtrack on the things that they were saying in order to adjust to shifts in the conversation.  It's the type of dialogue that I would probably write, actually.  It reminds me a little of British humor in that it doesn't stop to give you time to laugh, but it's still very American in its energy and over-the-top nature.  Something about the humor makes me believe that this story was written by very sarcastic personalities.

Because of this sense of humor, I would say that Storks is tailored toward teenagers and young adults who will find this sort of bantering dialogue funny.  After the credits were done rolling, I remember commenting that it had a lot of adult humor.  That is to say, this humor feels like it was written by adults who didn't bother tailoring their humor for children.  The humorous arguments about what it means to advance in the stork business, for example, and the jokes on parenthood, won't entertain children in the same way that it will entertain more mature audiences.  And by mature audience, I don't mean that it's R rated.  This film is solid PG.  In order for children to really appreciate this film, they need parental guidance.

The concessions made for kids in this film are in its slapstick humor, of which there is a lot, especially if you count the animation style as being "slapstick."  I don't particularly enjoy it.  Most of it was stupid, but that's just me.  It's like like it redeems the film like the dialogue.

The one other redeeming feature of the movie is that it actually has a nice moral.  Getting promoted isn't the most important thing in life.  It's also important, when you're a parent, not to become a workaholic and to be able to spend a little bit more time with your kid while he/she's still young.  It's not profound or anything, but in a world where Minions is the second highest-grossing animated film of all time, I appreciate it for what it is.  Like the dialogue, this moral is for adults.  That isn't a bad thing, so long as you go into the movie looking for a more mature experience.

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.

Joy Review

Before watching this movie, I heard it described as a "modern feminist fairytale." That's good. David O. Russell has a talent for creating modern stories about real life and making fiction feel remarkably real and resonant. However, as I found out while at the end of this movie, Joy is actuallynonfiction, and based off of the story of Joy Mangano, inventor of the Miracle Mop. I wish I had known that beforehand, because I watched this movie when I was in the mood for a modern feminist fairytale. In my mind, something can't really be a fairytale when it's real life. That's just me. Anyway, it didn't ruin the experience for me, because Joy is a darn good film that has nothing to be ashamed of.

With just about every nonfiction film, I wonder how closely it sticks to real life. Perhaps the most true-to-life movie I've ever seen was 1992 television film Stalin, a masterpiece of meticulous research put to screen. One of the less reliable movies that I've seen recently was Eddie the Eagle, which took massive creative liberties for a story that didn't need them. As far as I can tell, Joy sticks to the facts. I did some quick research on Joy Mangano, and most of the details line up with the film, save for the number of children. In real life, Joy had three children with her husband Tony; in this movie, she has two. Overall, there isn't a whole lot about Joy Mangago on Wikipedia to help me in corroborating the story presented by David O. Russell, and the main thing that tells me that the film gets it right is the fact that Joy herself was one of its executive producers. I'm going out on a limb here and assuming that she didn't let them butcher her life story.

Jennifer Lawrence's performance was, of course, solid. It wasn't as exciting and many-splendor'd as the trailers had me expecting, but she was still fairly immersed in the role, and I think that it's the type of performance that many aspiring actors would kill for. Robert De Niro, meanwhile, had a ton of charisma playing the her dysfunctional father, and is by far the most entertaining part of the film. Perhaps the one person who didn't deliver a great performance was Bradley Cooper. He's a remarkably talented actor, and he didn't do anything wrong in this role — however, he was shoehorned into this movie, and his presence was distracting. With Jennifer Lawrence and Robert De Niro, I saw their roles. With Bradley Cooper, I didn't see his role.

Although edited together to feel like a drama, it also has some of the fast pacing that I've associated with David O. Russell, so even though these actors are cast to add some gravitas to these roles, the film also makes them feel just zany enough to remind viewers that it's okay to be entertained. It fits the emotional state of the main character, whose life is hectic and very unstable. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Jennifer Lawrence, as famous as she is, blends into her role, because David O. Russell has a very strong feeling for Joy Mangano.

Well, I guess I do have a few slight criticisms. For the first act of the film, I wasn't sure what its focus was or where the story was going. Once I realized that it was a story about the invention of the Miracle Mop, though, it became very interesting.

And then that very interesting story ends, and I feel it happened a little too quickly. Maybe "quickly" isn't the right word; I just feel that the scene that it ended on was an odd final scene. I think I can see how it looks good on paper, but I just felt that the movie had a few scenes left. I felt that I was getting near the end of the film, but not that I was actually at the end.

The lasting impression that Joy will leave me is that it's tough to start a business. And risky. That's what this film is all about, and it's put me off from some of my more optimistic aspirations to do something businesslike. While Joy doesn't bog bog the viewer down in the paperwork and all of the technical details, it does do a good job depicting the uncertainty of such ventures, and that there can be many unforeseen complications, and most especially — that it will probably feel like the whole world has turned against you. Not everyone is going to have the second chances that she received, and not everyone is going to get a generous lone to kick-start their business. Even though Joy succeeds at the end, the end result of this film is still discouraging. It's odd saying that about a film that overall has a fairly positive outlook, but that's the conclusion that I've come to. I guess I'll have to make my millions some other way.

Pete's Dragon Review

In case you couldn't tell by the trailers, there isn't much connecting this movie to the original 1977 movie asides from an invisible green dragon named Elliot and a boy named Pete. If you think about it, there are some other basic similarities, such as a woman who adopts Pete, whose father swears he saw a dragon. But there's no conniving Dr. Terminus, no adorable town named Passamaquoddy (yes, I got that right on my first try), no abusive foster parents, no lighthouse, and no songs. The trailers quotes a critic who said that this is a new Disney classic, which may or may not be true, but assuming that it is true, I should go out of my way to clarify that I prefer the original, and as a colorful musical it will always be the greater classic.

That having been said, this year's Pete's Dragon is good. While it doesn't quite match The Good Dinosaur's landscapes, it's visually arresting. Elliot is a graceful creature that's enjoyable to watch, and this movie gives you plenty of him. It has good senses of music and pacing that work well together, and scenes end where they're naturally supposed to end. If you watch enough films, you know that that's hard to do, so I applaud Pete's Dragon for having a good feel for its scenes and the progression of its story. It doesn't move too fast or too slow, so by the end of the movie you feel that you've watch a really solid, complete final product.

The actors - and their characters - have good chemistry with each other, and there's nobody in this film that I really dislike. Perhaps it's because this movie doesn't villainize anyone, or perhaps it's because it has the just the right amount of characters. However, I might point that Bryce Dallas Howard's character, Grace, does compete with Pete as the film's main protagonist. It's a minor flaw, since here character is likable, and her chemistry with Pete is believable, but it's worth pointing out in a critical response to the film. It isn't bad that her character commands the audience's sympathy and takes up screen time, since her equivalent in the original movie had her own scenes and even a musical number, but it's worth pointing out that I connected with her character more than Pete, whose name is in the title. In the original film, I could relate to Pete more, since he had clear, strong desires. In this movie, I understood Bryce Dallas Howard's desires, Karl Urban's desires, and even the nonspeaking dragon's desires, but Elliot's desires weren't as clear, or at least they weren't as easy to get behind. He simply wants to stay in the woods with Elliot, but I as the moviegoer know that he needs to have a family, so I'm not invested in his goals. After all, what is he going to do once he gets back into the woods to stay with Elliot? In the grand scheme of things, what does he want out of life that he'll get by being a hermit? Those aren't motives that I can root for in quite the same way as I did for the original Pete, who wanted to get away from his abusive foster family.

None of this means that Pete is an unlikable character. He is likable. He's an adorable kid. Like Bryce Dallas Howard, you really care for him. It's just that you relate more to the woman who loves the kid than you do the kid himself. It's possible to love someone without relating to them, and that's how I'd describe Pete, which created a minor issue when he was the main character of this movie.

All that having been said, Pete makes sense. I don't relate to his desire to stay alone in the woods, but I understand it. He was orphaned at an early age, and that's all he knows. Furthermore, his relationship with Elliot is believable, and I completely buy into it. The film gives us plenty of time to show us the bond between these two characters, and you do get invested in them. It gives this movie a lot of heart.

And maybe that's why there's a trailer saying that this is a new Disney classic. It might not be a musical, but it still has heart. It's good for families, because it speaks to adults and children alike. It's incredibly simple and doesn't get bogged down in details that distract from the core story. If you're okay with a simply movie, then I think that you'll enjoy it. So long as you don't go in expecting it to be as classic as the original and judge it on its own merits, there shouldn't be any problem. I don't think that anyone's going into Pete's Dragon with inflated expectations, so not too many people are going to be disappointed by it. It's a solid film that lives up to its advertising, so if you were a little interested in this film, it's a safe bet. That's more than can be said for some other movies that had excellent trailers.