Concussion (2015)

Director: Peter Landesman

IMDB Page

Score: 4/10

Is This The Real Life?  I Wish It Was Fantasy

You know something; maybe I was too harsh on The Imitation Game.  For all the little ways (and big ways) it played fast and loose with the truth of the history, at least it was an entertaining movie.  Thankfully, there are movies like Concussion to show us why we have fiction in the first place.

Concussion is the story of Ugandan-born physician Dr. Bennet Omalu (Will Smith), who is a forensic pathologist.  He is quirky (in that Hollywood sense of “we need him to be quirky so give him a strange trait”) because he talks to his dead patients.  He is misunderstood, especially by his co-workers, who think he wastes time and doesn’t just do the job as written.  And he doesn’t play by the rules, because he follows his gut and digs beneath the surface to find the true cause of death.  Frankly, it’s absurd and so trite it almost hurts to see.  In ten minutes of intro, the movie hits so many cliches with Omalu’s character that you can almost see the associate producer standing off-set with a checklist.  In any case, Omalu ends up trying to solve the mystery of a former football star’s self-destructive death, and ends up uncovering what we all now know as Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (that thing the NFL got sued over a little while back).  The story is largely true, but that’s sort of the point of this review, and why this movie seems to have a disconnect with cinema itself.

Reality is frequently bizarre, unbelievable, and outlandish—and doubly so when sports are involved.  The extraordinary become commonplace around sporting events, which is why we never give up on our teams.  But for all the twists and turns, reality generally isn’t very good at making stories.  All those best experiences you remember from your childhood pale in comparison when told back to someone else.  This is why so much of historically-based cinema is embellished (if not outright fabricated).  We expect certain things in our stories; tropes are used time and time again because we recognize them, and because we understand their place (and our own places) in the story when they are used.  The 2nd Act Swerve, the Heel-Face Turn, and the Noble Sacrifice all make for great storytelling, even if they’re unrealistic to expect in our actual lives.

To make a historically-accurate movie work, you have to be a good director and a good writer.  It’s a balancing act.  It’s very easy to skew too far towards entertainment or accuracy, and many a good story idea has been lost to poor execution.  Concussion is an adaptation of a story that’s good, but it’s not interesting, and that’s a pretty grievous sin to commit in a movie.  Sure, Will Smith’s acting isn’t bad by any stretch (not Oscar-worthy though, sorry social justice crowd), but there’s just so little to work with.  All the drama is forced (mostly by the overbearing soundtrack), and all the tense periods are so blatantly invented and forcefully inserted they stand out like a children’s nativity play.  The whole movie feels like a series of ten-minute-long scenes all cut up and pasted together with no sense of flow, and in the end I’m left with a movie that makes me care so little about the characters that I feel like any scene involving Omalu not in someone’s office is an utter waste of time.  I just don’t care that you found a girl, I don’t care that you’re married now; I just want you to get on with remembering what the movie is supposed to be about (and let’s be honest, 97% of that story is literally just people standing around and talking, and that does not good cinema make).

Concussion is one of the worst kinds of movies to review, mostly because that means I had to sit through all of it.  It’s not awful, but it’s not good.  It’s completely blown away by the likes of The Big Short, simply because that movie makes us care about its impact.  Concussion is just lukewarm, watered-down, and flavorless.  It’s a bowl of tepid oatmeal, and it’s all the more unpalatable for how completely bland it is.

If this is real life, I prefer to stay in the fantasy world, thanks.

Scores (out of 10)

Acting: 6

Story: 3

Visuals: 5

Sound: 4

Enjoyment: 4

Overall Score: 4/10

The Good Dinosaur (2015)

Director: Peter Sohn

IMDB Page

Score: 2/10

You Tried

Once upon a time, a Disney-owned animation studio grew to the point where they wanted to put out two movies in a year instead of their normal single production.  With most of the sure money, budget, and talent focused on the A-team flick, the second-tier squad was free to make a movie free of the typical constraints of oversight, committee design, and fear of the unknown.  In the end, that movie turned out to be one of the greatest animated classics of all time.

But guess what; it’s not 1994, and this ain’t The Lion King.  In fact, it’s about as polar opposite as you could possibly get.

Let’s not beat around the bush, here: The Good Dinosaur is bad.  Dyed-in-the-wool, from-the-core-out bad, in a way I haven't seen in years.  Anything and everything that could have gone wrong with this movie did, at every level of production.  The creation was plagued with issues, including mass layoffs, directorial spats, and conflicts over story and art direction.  The film languished in an interminable six year void before finally being released, presumably because these days you could throw your vacation photo slideshow on a film screen and make your money back.  I kind of feel bad for Peter Sohn, because he ended up with his name attached to it as the leader.  Sure, maybe he got a wounded bird out the door and into the air; but that bird then was hit by a rock, burst into flames, and crashed on the shoreline where it exploded.  Suffice to say, there’s a reason the “Alan Smithee” credit was invented.

The Good Dinosaur is (I assume) the story of a cowardly young dinosaur coming of age.  Right from the beginning, though, I’m just hauled out of the moment by the insane incongruity of the film’s premise.  Why are dinosaurs somehow more evolved than mammals, to the point where they are capable of forming an agrarian society?  Why does the human... uh... cub wear clothing but is unable to do anything remotely like a human (like walking)?  Why is half the dialogue in this stupid movie made up of giggles, screams, and unintelligible grunting?!

The plot, if you can call it that, is a loosely-strung-together collection of set pieces copied from other movies (and not very well).  They even blatantly ripped off the patriarchal death scene from The Lion King in the most ham-fisted way possible, which is a shame, because as I alluded to in my opening paragraph, there’s plenty of much more useful lessons they could have gotten from that movie instead.  Everything is contrived, nothing is original, and the entire movie actually undermines itself with its own art direction.  Literally, this is alternate prehistory FANFICTION, with every negative connotation that may imply.  If it had a narrative adaptation, it would have an "and then" in between every sentence.

The sole point of any praise whatsoever I can grant The Mediocre Reptile is that the CG on the backgrounds is stunning.  Like, photo-realistic in a way I’ve never seen before.  It seriously looks like they animated cells over actual video footage of backdrops and water.  So, with that in mind and that technology in the bank, why for the love of film are all the characters so cartoony?!  It doesn’t match at all.  I actually found my mind rejecting it altogether because I couldn’t reconcile how great the scenery looked with how utterly average the actual character models and animation are.

In a way, I’m glad The Terrible Fossil came out.  First off, it gives me the chance to really rip into a movie that deserves it.  Sometimes, it’s relaxing as a critic to just shoot some mostly-dead fish in a particularly small barrel.  But beyond that, I hope this movie is the proof we finally need to get past the “But Pixar” argument.  Pixar isn’t sacrosanct; they’re just as capable of making soulless pap as any other studio is (Cars 2 neatly demonstrated that, but people like to forget that movie existed, now don’t they?)  What makes Pixar great is their approach to creating movies, starting from the very first premise.  If you make the mistake of forgetting about that approach, of approaching a movie as an obligation instead of a craft, you get—

Well, you get this, actually.

Scores (out of 10)

Acting: 4

Story: 1

Visuals: 6

Sound: 4

Enjoyment: 1

Overall Score: 2/10

Risen (2016)

Director: Kevin Reynolds

IMDB Page

Score: 6/10

The Rising Tide: Revival In Cinema

“I think Christian is a wonderful noun, but a terrible adjective.”

  - Lecrae, in an interview with the Miami New Times

I’ve had a rather strong love-hate relationship with religious cinema.  Once upon a time, a Biblical epic was a sure-fire hit for a studio, back when Charleton Heston ruled the screen and you could cast 10,000 extras into your film.  The religious movie boom seemed to coincide with the revivals that swept and defined the Bible Belt, but aside from that small window, the religious film genre has been a seemingly bottomless black hole of poor efforts, hack acting, and generally laughable passes at “films”.

The thing is, though, there’s been a resurgence of late.  Beginning (arguably) with The Passion of the Christ, there’s been a groundswell effort to breathe life back into the genre.  The various films have had wildly varying effectiveness, from oppressively heavy-handed to thrilling, but overall filmmakers have been pouring time, effort, and (more importantly) budgets into their work.  Most of all, though, the recent successes (from the Bible movie and TV series to this very film) have attempted to step back and evaluate why their subject matter—well, matters.

I chose to lead off this review with the above quote because I truly believe it, and it sums up my idea of the religious cinema genre far more poetically than I ever have on my own.  When you go into making a film from the stance that you’re trying to fulfill a certain ideological mandate, it’s almost impossible to keep from making a billboard instead of a movie.  I’ve said for many years that I wish that people could give up on trying to make better Christian art and just try to make better art.  To my utter shock, it actually appears to be happening.

Having gotten my rant out of the way, I’ll say that Risen is a quite well-made film.  It follows the story of the resurrection of Christ from the position of a skeptic rather than a devotee, and is actually both well-acted and surprisingly accurate to the source material.  Clavius (Joseph Fiennes) is a Roman tribune tasked with uncovering the conspiracy of the fake re-animation of Yeshua (Jesus, in the original Hebrew), and ends up uncovering that it wasn’t actually faked (I’d call spoiler warning, but it’s been spoiled for almost 2000 years now).  His fictionalized account follows the days between Christ’s rising and his ascension, and to be fair, nothing in the Bible says this story couldn’t have happened.  At the very least, it gives us the chance to see the varied and stunningly gorgeous landscape that this film displays.

The reason this film stands out and above the rest in my mind is that it not only handles a skeptic’s transformation with aplomb, but it also shows a character who isn’t overwhelmed with passionate zealotry.  It’s so hard to show something as genuine as faith without giving in to some sort of mysticism, but Clavius’ portrayal is one of a staunchy logical man who has to reconcile impossible things he’s seen with what he’s always known to be true.  It’s a character portrayal that resonates with me much more than one who just feels something so deeply that they can’t explain it.  In my mind, true faith isn’t just some sort of blind leap into something that can’t be known; it’s the bridge that lets you move between knowing something and doing something about it.  In the end, I saw that in Clavius’ character.

I doubt that Risen will stand the test of time the way The Ten Commandments did, but it shows a highly encouraging trend in the way faith is portrayed in cinema.  The directing is a bit over-the-top at times, and there is the odd hammy moment, but I’d like to see more from this studio.

Scores (out of 10)

Acting: 7

Story: 6

Visuals: 8

Sound: 5

Enjoyment: 6

Overall Score: 6/10

Zootopia (2016)

Directors: Byron Howard, Rich Moore

IMDB Page

Score: 7/10

There’s Something About Disney and Foxes...

It’s not often I’m able to get to a new movie on opening night.  In fact, it might happen once every year or two.  I don’t often have the desire to fight through the crowds, spend top dollar for theaters where I won’t feel cramped by a packed house, and stalk online ticket vendors in hopes of the worst seat in the house still being available.  For Zootopia, though, I felt like it was worth it to make the effort.  I even felt like it was worth the effort of breaking my hiatus to return to reviewing altogether.

This movie had me intrigued from the word “go”.  The minimalist previews, the colorful world, even the idea that Disney would go back to their roots with a story utilizing anthropomorphized mammals; I liked it all.  So, I have to admit that I was probably more excited for this movie than the nine-year-old I ended up seated next to in the theater was.  Honestly, it felt like I was a kid again.

On the surface, Zootopia is a carbon-copy buddy cop comedy, in which the obligatory unlikely pair is made up of disparate animals instead of racial caricatures.  The primary protagonist, a female rabbit named Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) wants desperately to be taken seriously as a cop, despite being vastly undersized and a token prey species in a work field dominated by hulking predators.  Her trial-by-fire is to solve a missing persons mammals case (seriously though, no scalies or birds or anything?), but to do so she requires the help of a streetwise huckster fox named Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) who wants nothing more than to be left alone and unthreatened to live on his wits.  Yes, the puns almost do write themselves.  The case gets solved, but solving it opens a much larger threat; one that almost drives the civilized society apart and pits prey against predator in a surreal reversal of the normal order.

The plot is bog-standard fare, right down to the see-it-coming-from-a-mile-away plot twist at the end, but we’re not here for the story.  Zootopia sells itself in many other ways; from the vibrant art style and animation that cannily straddles the line between realistic and cartoony, to the voice acting that is both unexpected and engaging, to the vast worldbuilding that riffs on our world and the Disney canon at large in the same breath.  Oh, and it lends itself to limitless puns, of course.  It isn’t all just saccharides and light, either: Zootopia actually goes to some honestly dark places with some intense dramatic scenes.  Honestly, the world of Zootopia is an almost perfect canvas: it’s open and offers total narrative freedom, and is familiar enough to our own world to be able to show itself as a mirror when necessary.

This last point might be where I pulled out the real meat of the story that exists.  I’ve heard reviews that thought Zootopia was heavy-handed with an over-wrought “tolerance” metaphor, but I didn’t get anything like that.  To be sure, the cast of characters is vibrant and varied, but they tend more toward archetypes rather than cliches, and none of the characters act or are viewed as anything outside of their species.  Frankly, I think a metaphor that tried to pry open the doors of anything as nuanced as sexuality would have completely imploded (where it didn’t sail totally over the intended audience’s head entirely), so I’m glad the writers didn’t even try.  Instead, I thought the movie alternated between a critique of gender norms in society and a look at the police/public tension that’s grown to endemic levels today.  The prey tend towards the feminine aspects of personality (non-conflictory, passive, emotive, etc), and are expected to hold to their place in the world behind the predator species, who are the masculine jock archetype.  But the predators are shown in turn to be equally sympathetic, and we see that a predator who tries to buck the societal expectations is mocked or outright bullied, so they’re  forced into a norm-defined role.  It’s actually a pretty good deconstruction of how our society often views the dichotomy between the feminine and the masculine, and how we can put people into boxes that don’t really define them very fully.

If that all seems a bit too deep for a kids’ movie, I wouldn’t worry too much.  Much like Pixar’s prior (much under-loved, in my opinion) movie Monsters U, there’s a subtle aesop that’s both encouraging and refreshingly realistic at the same time.  In Monsters U, the indirect message at the end of the movie is that your dream might end up requiring some hard work to come true, and that’s okay.  In Zootopia, it’s the unexpectedly honest way Judy tells the audience that some dreams really are unreasonable in the specific details (not everyone can actually grow up to be an astronaut, after all), but your goals and passions can still be realized if you don’t give up on them—maybe even in a form you didn’t expect them to be fulfilled in.

In the long run, Zootopia won’t win any major awards, I’m sure.  It might not even be remembered for long by its target audience—but I hope it isn’t.  For me, who grew up on classic Disney fare, it seems like a blend of the old storytelling of Disney’s anthropomorphized movies of yore with the more rapid-fire storytelling and editing style of the modern cinema.  It made me remember why I love talking-animal movies in the first place: because of the approachable style and shorthand characterization animal archetypes afford.  It’s modern Disney, without being weighed down by Oscar-bait songs and multi-billion dollar advertising bonanzas trying desperately to disguise hack writing held together with nothing but duct tape and hope.

It’s just an enjoyable movie, and I love that.  I’m actually looking forward to Zootopia becoming a bit of a franchise, because this world could explore just about any type of story that exists.

Scores (out of 10)

Acting: 8

Story: 6

Visuals: 8

Sound: 5

Enjoyment: 9

Overall Score: 7/10

Hector and the Search for Happiness (2014)

Director: Peter Chelsom

IMDB Page

Score: 9/10

In Which The Public Doesn’t Enjoy Thoughtfulness

Wow.  I’m just stunned, to be honest.  Normally, my instincts say that any movie with under a 40 metacritic score should not just be put down, but hurled away with great force as you flee in the opposite direction.  There’s no reason whatsoever that I would have expected this movie to work, outside of one personal recommendation from a co-worker.  So, on the blind faith of his opinion alone, I set out to watch Hector and the Search for Happiness.

On the surface, it’s about as trite as plots get.  Comparisons to Eat, Pray, Love for the story are inevitable (and a go-to crutch for reviewers who almost universally panned this film), and comparisons to The Secret Life of Walter Mitty for the style and feel are just as obligatory.  In our film, we follow Hector (Simon Pegg), a psychiatrist (as it’s implied that he has an MD to go with his profession) who straight up burns out on his job of listening to the endless parade of #FirstWorldProblems that his patients bring to him.  After a screaming fit at a particularly self-absorbed patient, Hector decides that he has to get away and travel the world.  His goal: find out if happiness is actually something attainable or not, and what makes one happy.

No matter how you slice it, this movie really is a good one.  The visuals are well-crafted, the plot is engaging and deceptively realistic, and the acting is top-notch.  Seriously, this movie is made on the acting performances.  Simon Pegg is (for the first time in my experience) both serious and intense, and he plays such a wide range of extremely convincing and human emotions with an openness that defies any attempt to label this film as “trite”.  Stellan Skarsgård plays a businessman with means so great that money has no meaning, and even while he insists that his life is the one everything should aspire to, his subtle performance shows the viewer just how hollow he truly is inside, even as his every action and line of dialogue insists the opposite.  Every character is just so... real.  Nobody feels like a performance.

Essentially, this plot is act-for-act up against Walter Mitty, but with several poignant difference.  First off, Walter Mitty gave its protagonist a clear-cut goal that just happened to intersect with a personal growth narrative—Hector’s story is the personal growth narrative.  Walter Mitty largely was absorbed with experiences instead of relationships, and Hector’s journey is exactly the opposite.  In essence, this idea and those key differences led me to a theory that’s as uncomfortable as it might be insightful, and one that may just explain why this movie was reviewed so harshly by so many critics.

The key thought in Walter Mitty is that you can improve your life and yourself if you really want to, all you have to do is try new things (even if they are insane flights of fancy that only the wealthy and unfettered could reasonably attempt), and it’s really not that important who you attach yourself to or why.  It’s a very un-engaged philosophy, and one that frankly doesn’t demand all that much of the dreamer.  It’s simple, because it asks us to think about ourselves, and we enjoy that.  Hector, on the other hand, goes much deeper.

Weirdly enough, narcissism actually doesn’t enjoy the spotlight when it’s really shown on it.  We like others to look at us, but can’t stand to look at ourselves.  The most painful thing you can do is force someone like that to really look inward and evaluate, and HatSfH implicitly demands that certain something of the viewer.  As Hector goes around the world copying down insights and thoughts as to the nature of happiness, the viewer is confronted several times with the question “are you a happy person?”, which is uncomfortably followed with “why not?”  The meta-narrative within Hector is that we’re all responsible for our own happiness, and that also means dealing with unpleasant truths, enduring uncomfortable hardships, denying childish desires, and committing to something meaningful outside of your own experience.  Unlike Walter Mitty’s flights of childlike wonder and idly fancy that offer cotton-candy-thin versions of temporary joy, Hector gives us the rock-solid truth that a narcissistic commitment to self is the key to an unhappy and unfulfilled life.

And that’s something that most of us just don’t want to hear.

Scores (out of 10)

Acting: 10

Story: 6

Visuals: 7

Sound: 5

Enjoyment: 9

Overall Score: 9/10

Inside Out (2015)

Directors: Pete Docter, Ronaldo Del Carmen

IMDB Page

Score: 10/10

Please Do a Sequel Where You Try To Explain A First Crush, Please?

There’s a joke image going around the internet lately regarding Pixar’s brainstorming methods.  It starts with PIxar posing the thought “What if toys had feelings” in 1995, and working their way through “What if bugs had feelings” and “What if monsters had feelings”, all the way through fish, superheros, cars, rats, robots, and so on.  Well, we’ve finally come in the full-meta circle all the way to “What if feelings had feelings?”

At this point, it’s extremely tempting to point at the 94/100 metacritic score, say “It’s Pixar, how bad could it possibly be?” and knock off for dinner—but I’d like to think I’m a bit more professional than that.  Honestly, though, there’s only so many words I can use to talk directly about the movie before I start treading water.  Instead, I’d like to talk a little bit about animation.

There’s a certain sort of truth that I’ve started really noticing and putting a lot of thought into of late, and it’s the notion that animation will always be better than live action at evoking emotion and living deeply in your memories.  Toy Story was TWENTY years ago, and most of us can still remember that movie, if not exactly when we first saw it and how we felt at the time.  Can you remember a live-action movie from the same year?  Did it make you feel anything like Toy Story did?  I wasn’t even in middle school at the time, and that movie is still quite fresh in my mind, when I’ve forgotten most of the names of the people I knew back then.

That’s the power of animation, and that’s what Pixar has done a masterful job of grasping: animation is the stuff of emotions.  Aspects of characters can be selectively diminished or enhanced with subtle graphical differences.  The drawings become caricatures without being forced into cliche or stereotype.  Everyone instinctively knows something about the character when you draw them as short and squat, or wispy beyond realism, or as an anthropomorphized object.  It’s storytelling shorthand.

So why does Pixar seem to have this formula down to a science?  Why do Disney/Pixar creations account for four of the only six movies I’ve ever cried at, or even come close to crying at?  What do they know that the rest don’t?

Inside Out is a prime example of what makes Pixar great: every element serves to drive the story’s central idea.  Their central writing tenants almost dictate it.  Heck, look up their “22 Rules of Story” sometime—it’s almost my personal Bible for writing fiction.  There’s no fat, no wasted energy on joke characters or throwaway “humor” in a misguided attempt to hold a child’s attention.  That sort of audience-degrading thought is what drug down something like Frozen.  Kids aren’t stupid.  They have deep feelings that they can’t always put words to.  Kids are complex, perhaps even more complex than adults are sometimes.  Inside Out captures all of these truths and more.  It handles something as utterly abstract and indescribable as depression, and never takes its audience for granted.  It’s smart enough for the adults, and accessible enough for anyone.

Does it have the utter staying power of something like the original Toy Story or (one of my personal favorites) How to Train Your Dragon 2?  I don’t know.  I think that might rely more on where you are and how old you are when you see it.  Personally, I don’t know if I’d promote Inside Out to my personal best-ever list, but by my own description of what the scores I give mean, there’s just nothing else to give it but a 10/10.  I left the theater with all the feels, and I bet you might, too.

Scores (out of 10)

Acting: 10

Story: 9

Visuals: 9

Sound: 8

Enjoyment: 10

Overall Score: 10/10