It appears I have an Astro Boy sized hole in my pop culture knowledge. The character dates back to 1952 when Manga God Osamu Tezuka created the robot boy character in print before spinning him off to a successful Japanese television program in the 1960s. Since then he’s been featured in several more television shows, was listed on Empire magazine’s 50 Greatest Comic Characters list and was named Japan’s envoy for overseas safety. I didn’t know any of that, and after spending a grueling ninety minutes with the new Astro Boy film, I’m not interested in learning any more.
The new film is one of those dreaded North American reworkings of Asian pop culture. In it a brilliant scientist, Dr. Tenma (voiced by Nicolas Cage), loses his son to a tragic accident. Unable to cope with his loss he builds a robot in the image of his late son. Tenma doesn’t realize how creepy an idea this is until it is too late and the young robot feelings of his own. Unable to please his creator / father Astro Boy (Freddie Highmore)—complete with an astounding array of robot abilities—sets off to make his own mark on the world. Searching for acceptance he falls in with a crowd of teenage anti-robot mercenaries led by Cora (Kristen Bell), does battle with Ham Egg (Nathan Lane), a PT Barnum type who forces bots to battle one another, before returning home to save the day and hopefully earn the respect of his father.
I was paid to watch Astro Boy and as such had to stay through to the end. If not, however, for the pay cheque and professional ethics it would have taken a seat belt to keep me in my chair through to the closing credits. Astro Boy’s deadly mix of bad writing, tepid action and uninspired voice work sinks the film despite the character’s long and storied history.
Voices for animated features are taped individually and then, through the magic of editing and sound design, spliced together to sound seamless—except in the case of Astro Boy. The voices seem like individual components and even when they do meld together there is no spark. Nicolas Cage, in particular, seems to be doing some pay cheque acting here, sounding as though he is reading from a telephone book and not a script.
The visuals follow suit. Dull video game-esque renderings may amuse the eye of very young viewers, but anyone who laid eyeballs on Up, Kung Fu Panda or any of the other more recent interesting animated films will be under whelmed.
Astro Boy is a disappointment. It may entertain tots but older fans of the character—and fans of good animated films—beware.
The best way to describe “Amelia”, the new Hilary Swank film about the highflying life of aviatrix Amelia Earhart, is to call it old fashioned. Set in the decade leading up to her fateful rendezvous with destiny in 1937 on her failed attempt to circumnavigate the globe, the movie seems to pay homage not only to Earhart but also to the films of that era.
The film lifts off with a meeting between publisher George Putnam (Richard Gere) and the then unknown Amelia (Swank). He’s looking for the next Lindberg, only this time a woman, to make a transatlantic flight and then reap the rewards of the fame that will follow. The first flight is a public relations success, but for Earhart, who didn’t actually fly the plane it’s a hollow victory. She becomes America’s Sweetheart of the Skies, famous for something she didn’t do—she didn’t actually pilot the plane—and becomes determined to stand up for female pilots and make the journey across the ocean again, solo. In time she makes the flight, becomes the world’s most famous woman and navigates not one, but two romances. The film ends with her doomed flight.
“Amelia” is a big, handsome picture with some great aerial photography and a couple of dramatic moments, but does little more than skim over the life of one of the more interesting characters of the twentieth century. Both personally and professionally Earhart was a rebel and a groundbreaker in a man’s world, but the film is content to serve up clichéd motivational successories instead of real insight.
“Amelia” could have been many things. It could have been a study of the feminist ideal. It could have been a look at the beginnings of public relations and media celebrity. It could have been an exciting films about those magnificent women in their flying machines, but instead it a snoozy look at a woman forced to utter platitudes like, “I want to fly that beautiful bird as far as it will take me.”
This will not be Hilary Swank’s third Oscar win.
She’s working it here, putting on a clipped Kansas accent and trying to inhabit the character, but the script (and an unfortunate hairdo that makes her face look three feet long) aren’t doing here any favors. Her performance is a throwback to the kind of performances given by Rosalind Russell and Ginger Rogers in Amelia’s day. To use the vernacular of the time she’s “spunky.” Spunky, but not that interesting.
She’s playing opposite Richard Gere and honestly, is there a less interesting leading man working today? He rocks the 1930s clothes and doesn’t bump into the furniture but he and Swank have zero chemistry.
There is an interesting movie to be made from Amelia Earhart’s life. In fact a few interesting movies have already been made about her life, but “Amelia” isn’t one of them. It’s well made, reverential to it’s subject and perhaps, most excitingly, is possibly the best cure for insomnia since the discovery of St. John’s Wart.
Before I saw the Jim Carrey version of “A Christmas Carol” I wondered why remake a story that has been done so often and so well in the past. I’ve seen it and I’m still wondering.
There have been at least 21 versions of the story made for the big screen and dozens more for television. Director Robert Zemeckis and his high tech bag of motion capture tricks don’t add anything to the story, in fact, occasionally his CGI actually gets in the way.
Zemeckis wisely hasn’t toyed around with the 166-year-old story. Ebenezer Scrooge (Jim Carrey) is a miserly bah humbugger who doesn’t believe in the spirit of Christmas until he is visited by three spirits—the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future—and finds salvation in their terrifying visions.
“A Christmas Carol” is Zemeckis’s third attempt at creating a film using motion capture—filming the actors and using their motions as a template to create a computer generated film—following “Polar Express” and “Beowulf.” “Polar Express” was meant to be a heart warming Christmas tale but exposed the problem with Zemeckis’s technique—dead CGI eyes. The weirdly lifeless animation was creepy, akin to a Christmas story performed by zombies. “Beowulf” was an improvement but like “A Christmas Carol” there are still kinks to be worked out. Chief among them is: Why bother with this at all?
On the plus side the CGI allows for camera moves that would otherwise be impossible—endless dolly shots through a Dickensian cityscape for example—and the Ghost of Christmas Present death scene is a spectacular scene of gothic creepiness, and is actually enhanced by the use of computer animation. On the minus side the Ghost of Christmas Future, a stand-out in the 1951 Alastair Sim version, is reduced to a show-offy platform for Zemeckis’s 3-D CGI magic.
My main complaint though, is the medium itself. Much of the animation looks great—the texture of Scrooge’s leather chair for instance—but there are enough artificial looking things—the flame in the fireplace or the steam from people’s mouths—that remind us that we’re watching flashing binary code and little else. Some of the characters are well animated but the work is inconsistent, occasionally looking photo realistic, but often not. Unlike live action or even hand drawn animation, there’s nothing that feels organic about motion capture, so the moments that are supposed to strike an emotional chord—like young Ebenezer dancing with his beautiful bride to be, or old Scrooge watching Bob Cratchit’s family deal with the loss of Tiny Tim—have little resonance.
Whatever impact the movie has, and it does have the occasional moment that engages not only the eye but the heart, could have just as easily achieved with a live action cast.
Perhaps Zemeckis should have taken the lead from one of the more famous lines from the story, “Mankind was my business,” and made the movie’s business more about mankind and less about technology.
Tom Ford, ex-designer for Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent, founder of his own eponymous menswear line, makes his debut as a director with “A Single Man,” an adaptation of the 1964 Christopher Isherwood novel of the same name, and, as you might have guessed given his pedigree, this is a great looking film. The former fashionista hasn’t art directed it with Joel Schumacher style bombast, but with elegant good taste. He has steeped the film in beautiful people, places and things. Even an off camera voice over is done by Jon Hamm, who “People” called one of the “sexiest men of the year.” But don’t think “A Single Man” is all style and no substance. Ford paid attention to the pictures, but like another film sensualist, Pedro Almodovar, he also got the emotion of the piece right.
Set in early-’60s Los Angeles, “A Single Man,” is a slice of gay English professor George’s (Colin Firth) life. “I’m having a serious day,” he says on a smoggy LA afternoon as he makes preparations for his suicide following the sudden death of his longtime partner Jim (Matthew Goode). As he meticulously tidies up the odds and ends of his life he takes time to have dinner with Charlotte (Julianne Moore), an old friend and chat with a curious student.
“A Single Man” is a study of grief. Ford portrays the scale of George’s loss through carefully rendered flashbacks and dream sequences, alternating between a cold color pallet for the post-Jim scenes and vibrant, lively hues for when he was still alive. It’s an old trick, but the subdued look of George’s sad life packs an emotional wallop. This is a man who, after losing his love and not being allowed to go to the funeral—it’s for “family only” he’s told—has lost the will to live. “For the first time in my life,” he says, “I can’t see my future.” His outlook is as murky and grey as the film stock.
Firth oozes repression and sadness as George. He’s low key, a shadow of the man George was before Jim’s death, but Firth adds small details that add color to his character. When he spots a dog like the one he used to share with Jim the random sense memory catapults him back to a different place and time, a happier place and time. Firth and the film do a good job at portraying the small things that keep the memory of a lost loved one alive.
“A Single Man” isn’t a feel good movie, it’s an art house picture about loss and sadness, but as one character says, “Sometimes awful things have their own kind of beauty.”
I wonder if Tim Burton has a monkey butler at home. I ask this because I think anyone who can come up with the kind of flights of fancy he puts on screen probably has a monkey butler and other strange and wonderful things kicking around the house to feed his imagination. His latest film, a retelling of “Alice in Wonderland,” benefits from his rich visual style.
Using the original Lewis Carroll stories as a stepping stone, in this reimagined version of the classic tale Alice Kingsley (Mia Wasikowska) is 19 years old. She’s a dreamer in a world of pragmatists who, on the advice of her late father, tries to imagine six impossible things before breakfast each day. This sets her at odds with almost everyone, including her family who think marrying her off to the churlish and haughty Lord Hamish will settle her down. At their engagement party she flees his very public proposal, disappearing into the garden and falling down a rabbit hole into Underland. It’s her second trip to the place she calls Wonderland. Ten years previous she been there but has no memory of it. On this visit she meets an odd assortment of characters including the Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry), the White Rabbit (Michael Sheen), Absolem, the Caterpillar (Alan Rickman) and the strangest one of all, the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp). They convince her she needs to help them overthrow the evil Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) by slaying the terrifying Jabberwock (Christopher Lee).
Burton has always made films about outsiders—think Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood Jr. and Willy Wonka—and in Alice he has found another one to focus his camera on. As a headstrong young woman who doesn’t quite fit the mold of Victorian England she a perfect character for Burton. Like his most famous characters she lives in a world of dreams but unlike his best realized characters she isn’t nearly as interesting. As a result, despite the beautiful visuals and the eye popping 3-D, “Alice in Wonderland” is a bit of a flat line.
Sadly much of the problem lies with Wasikowska. She is delicately beautiful in a way that would very likely leave Lewis Carroll weak in the knees and after her stint on the television show “In Treatment,” we know she can act, but she rarely looks really engaged with the character. Perhaps it is that she spent the entire time acting against a green screen and didn’t get to actually interact with her co-stars very often, but she’s a little too low key to be at the center of a large, fanciful film.
It’s not a complete wash, however. Burton overloads the screen with eccentric and interesting visuals and has succeeded in creating a dream-like version of “Alice in Wonderland.” Unfortunately, like most dreams, when it’s over it’s quickly forgotten.
Near the end of “The A-Team,” the big screen adaptation of the inexplicably popular 1980s television show, Col. John ‘Hannibal’ Smith (Liam Neeson) intones through clenched teeth, “Overkill is underrated.” That could be the mantra for the whole movie and not just its bombastic (emphasis there on the “bomb”) climax. Overkill indeed. The explosion budget alone for “The A-Team” could probably fund ten other, less fiery movies.
In an echo of the original series, the movie follows the adventures of the Alpha Team—A-Team for short—four highly trained but unorthodox U.S. Army Special Forces soldiers framed for a crime involving the illegal importation of counterfeiting printer plates. Branded war criminals and sentenced to jail time, they hatch an elaborate escape, involving the CIA and branches of the military. Then, as federal fugitives-turned-mercenaries, seek their revenge on the men responsible for their imprisonment. Cue the explosions.
“The A-Team” is a testosterone fest that can’t even be neutralized by the presence of the comely Jessica Biel. It is about boys and their toys—which in this case happen to be rocket launchers, motorcycles and Mohawk haircuts. It’s the first real action movie of the summer. Notice I didn’t say first great action film of the summer. It’s not great, but it is a fun summer popcorn flick jam packed with the kind of pedal to the metal action that makes guys go “Whoa!” every time something blows up in an extravagant mushroom cloud of flame and smoke.
The action sequences are rather spectacular. In one crazy scene the team “flies” a tank through the air. It’s obviously a bit of CGI trickery, and as such has less real impact than say the stunts in “The Dark Knight” which were (mostly) done without the aid of computer imagery, but the sheer “wowness” of it all will make you gobble your popcorn a bit faster.
Of course all the action in the world doesn’t mean much if the characters aren’t interesting. Luckily the cast is, well, if not exactly Oscar caliber, enthusiastic in their renderings of the familiar television characters. As “Hannibal” Smith Liam Neeson is slumming it a bit, but is a solid presence and a believable hard man. Bradley Cooper as “Face,” a specialist in that most oxymoronic of military oxymorons—military intelligence—brings the same kind of charm to the movie as he displayed in “The Hangover,” and “District 9’s” Sharlto Copley as “Howling Mad” Murdock seems to be having some off the hook fun. Ironically only UFC superstar Quinton “Rampage” Jackson as Bosco B.A. Baracus (the role Mr. T made famous) struggles to be heard above the clatter of the action, but don’t tell him I said that. He’s the only real-life bruiser in the bunch.
“The A-Team” is not just a remake of the television show but also an entertaining love letter to the cartoon violence, the wild action, the one-liners and cardboard characters of guy oriented 80s action movies.
George Clooney likes to flip flop between commercial fare like “Oceans Eleven” and edgier, more artistically satisfying work like “The Good German.” I suppose the interesting pay cheques from the less interesting movies are balanced by the artistic satisfaction he gets from the artier films. His new film, “The American,” is firmly in artistic satisfaction category… except that it is unlikely to truly satisfy an audience.
Clooney is in anti-hero mode, playing a gun doctor, a man who makes specialized weapons for assassins. Holed up in a small Italian town he’s hiding from Swedish hit men as he builds a gun for a mysterious killer. He’s a loner by nature and necessity but a spiritual crisis and his weakness for women are giving him second thoughts about his life.
“The American” isn’t the usual kind of assassin movie. This isn’t like the 1995 Sylvester Stallone / Antonio Banderas cheesefest “Assassins”—Stallone hid a gun in arm cast!—or the heart pumpingly tense “Day of the Jackal.” No, this is a sleek and introspective Euro flavored thriller. Actually thriller is too strong a word. This is one long slow burn. To suggest that “The American” has a slow build, story wise, is an understatement along the lines of saying that Justin Bieber has pretty hair. Simple words like “slow build” and “pretty” don’t do it justice.
This is a longish, leisurely paced look at the isolated life of someone who trades in death for a living. It’s more about the character than the action, and while Clooney hands in a controlled performance, for the movie to really work you have to care about the main character, but even in Clooney’s ultra charismatic hands the ruthless, troubled man is not likeable. The film’s cold, detached style—for instance director Anton Corbijn uses lots of landscape and wide shots to accentuate Clooney’s isolation—may have something to do with us never warming to the situation or the characters, but I think it has more to do with the movie’s lack of momentum.
The movie plods along, and when there is an action scene, which isn’t very often, they aren’t nearly as breathless as they should be. Corbijn, who hit a home run with his last film, the Joy Division biopic “Control,” has made a stylish movie—great attention has been paid to the look of every frame—the problem is, often there is nothing happening in the frame. It’s a movie about introspection, and so the choice not to include the usual assassin movie chase scenes etc was possibly the right one, but the pay off isn’t big enough to justify the running time.
“The American” is a beautiful movie to look at, but like a lovely vase, it is empty inside.
“Another Year,” the new kitchen-sink drama from British director Mike Leigh should more accurately be titled “Look at All the Lonely People.” A nicely rendered portrait of forlorn folks, it’s as if Leigh tried to make a film as dour as his last movie, “Happy-Go-Lucky,” was effervescent.
Much of the action in “Another Year” revolves around the home of Tom and Gerri (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen), a happy couple just a few years shy of retirement. With open arms and open hearts they welcome a diverse cast of characters — people as unstable as they are stable — into their home, including Gerri’s desperately unhappy co-worker Mary (Lesley Manville) and Tom’s old friend Ken (Peter Wight). Stirred into the mix are the couple’s geeky son (Oliver Maltman), his girlfriend (Karina Fernandez) and Tom’s recently widowed brother (“Harry Potter’s” David Bradley).
As the title suggests, “Another Year” takes place over the course of a year, divided into four sections, each representing a season. Presented as a slice-of-life look at this group of people — very light on plot but heavy on character — it has little to do with the passing of time, except to imply that time doesn’t really heal all wounds, but the loose structure gives form to the otherwise shapeless, although entertaining, story.
Performances rich in nuance abound — Broadbent is his usually effortless self and Sheen is warm and watchable — but it is Lesley Manville who steals the show. Her take on Mary is the personification of dissatisfaction and distress and dominates the movie.
“Another Year” isn’t a traditional narrative but like the best of Leigh’s films it is unflinching in its portrayal of real — not reel — life.
“The Adjustment Bureau,” a new film starring Matt Damon and Emily Blunt as star crossed lovers, is a hard film to categorize. It’s a sci fi movie, with some action, romance and even a bit of metaphysical drama about two people who run afoul of The Adjustment Bureau, a shadowy group of men whose job it is to tweak or adjust people’s lives to make sure the overall plan for their life stays on track.
“The Adjustment Bureau’s” story exists at the intersection of chance and fate, exploring the nature of destiny and the role that free will plays in people’s lives. Key concepts imported the from Phillip K. Dick short story that forms the backbone of the movie include questions about humanity’s ability to truly do the right thing for themselves and the planet and whether or not we have free will or simply the appearance of free will.
Heady stuff. But like the best sci fi it’s not simply about the ideas, it puts a human face on its theories. Matt Damon and Emily Blunt are David and Elsie. He’s a charismatic but impulsive politician whose frat boy behaviour just cost him an election. She’s an up-and-coming ballerina with a wild side. It’s love at first sight for both of them, but somehow, for years, they are kept apart. When they have a second chance meeting David is determined not to let her go, but the mysterious men from the Adjustment Bureau are just as determined to keep them apart. Will David be able to accept his predestined path and let her go, or will he try and create his own free will?
Much of the success of “The Adjustment Bureau” is due to its cast. Damon and Blunt have great chemistry and are completely believable as a couple. The sparks that fly off the pair as they meet for the second time on a New York City bus light up the screen and provide a very human edge to a weird but quite wonderful story. Without that the idea of a group of fedora-wearing men who control every aspect of humanity’s interactions would feel overreaching, but put a human face—well, two faces as appealing as Damon and Blunt’s—on it and you get a story that transcends genre.
Add to that some situational humor, some interesting supporting actors like John “Mad Men” Slattery, Anthony Mackie and Zod… er, I mean Terence Stamp in full-on metaphysical mode and you have a strange, but strangely appealing look at humanity
