CTV ATLANTIC: RICHARD AND TODD BATTIS ON NEW MOVIES IN THEATRES!
I join CTV Atlantic anchor to talk about the family drama “Here,” the odd couple “A Real Pain” and the courtroom drama “Juror #2.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Posts Tagged ‘Robert Zemeckis’
YOU TUBE: THREE MOVIES/THIRTY SECONDS! FAST REVIEWS FOR BUSY PEOPLE!
Fast reviews for busy people! Watch as I review three movies in less time than it takes to tie a bowtie! Have a look as I race against the clock to tell you about the family drama “Here,” the odd couple “A Real Pain” and the courtroom drama “Juror #2.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
HERE: 1 ½ STARS. “technical prowess overwhelms the heart embedded in the story.”
SYNOPSIS: In “Here,” a new, experimental intergenerational family drama starring Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, and now playing in theatres, director Robert Zemeckis sets a century of love, loss and life in the living room of a one-hundred-year-old American home.
CAST: Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Paul Bettany, and Kelly Reilly. Directed by Robert Zemeckis.
REVIEW: At one point near the end of “Here,” Richard Young (Tom Hanks) says, “Time flies,” as he reflects on his daughter’s progress in life. In reply, his increasingly exasperated wife Margaret (Robin Wright) snaps, “You always say things that are kind of obvious.”
Richard is not alone in the expression of easy platitudes. Director Robert Zemeckis may be daring in his use of “Here’s” technology, but the story takes no chances.
Based on the 2014 graphic novel by Richard McGuire, the film chronicles thousands of years, on one piece of land, from rampaging dinosaurs to the building of a house in 1900 whose front room provides the location for 99.9% of the action. With the camera locked into position, Zemeckis ping pongs through history, focusing on three generations of the Young family in the one setting.
Major historical events are seen on television, or heard on the radio, but this isn’t a history lesson, it’s an “if these walls could talk” look at the lives lived in the cozy home. It’s a clever idea, but you can’t help but wish “Here” would narrow its focus. The constant transition from one era to the next prevents any one of the stories to work up a head of steam or make us care about the characters.
From a technical point of view, Zemeckis’s transition from one time frame to the next are sometimes clever—a Halloween party, with Richard dressed as Benjamin Franklin, that morphs into a colonial era scene works—and sometimes silly, as in the scene where a leaking roof, dripping puddles on the floor, transitions into Maragret’s water breaking on the same spot. It’s in those moments, and there are many of them, that the movie feels trapped, unable to cast off the restraints of its concept and truly come to life.
Most of the families on display are given a short shrift. The Harter’s (Michelle Dockery and Gwilym Lee) turn of the century story, for example, is meant to provide some emotional heft but falls short because of the film’s inability to make us care much about characters we hardly know. I would have liked more time with Leo and Stella Beekman (David Fynn and Ophelia Lovibond), the inventor and pin-up model who make the most of their vignettes, but the brief glimpses of their free-spirited time in the house are short lived.
It is nice to see Hanks and Wright together, but for much of the runtime they are rendered digitally de-aged and dead-eyed, which takes some of the fun out of the “Forrest Gump” reunion.
“Here” is ambitious, but its technical prowess overwhelms whatever heart is embedded in the story.
PINOCCHIO: 3 STARS. “adds new technology to the story, but no new ideas. “
Following the introduction of the indeterminate intonations of his Col Tom Parker character in “Elvis,” Tom Hanks now goes Tuscan, continuing his exploration of world accents with “Pinocchio,” a live-action CGI hybrid musical, now streaming on Disney+.
Hanks is Geppetto, an Italian woodworker who carves a puppet named Pinocchio out of a block of white pine. The elderly, lonely man treats the marionette like a son, and lo-and-behold, after he wishes on a star, Pinocchio (voice of Benjamin Evan Ainsworth), with a little help from The Blue Fairy (Cynthia Erivo), comes to life.
But is he a real boy? Nope. “To be really real,” says the Fairy, “he must pass an ordeal. He must prove that he is brave, truthful and unselfish.
To point the puppet in the right direction, the Fairy appoints the wisecracking Jiminy Cricket (voice of Joseph Gordon-Levitt) to be his moral guide. It’s his job to teach the newbie right and wrong, to be his conscience. “Conscience,” he says, “is that little voice that most people choose not to listen to… and that’s what wrong with today.”
With good intentions and endless curiosity, the pair set off but are sidelined when Jiminy is imprisoned in a glass jar. Left to fend for himself, Pinocchio experiences the ups-and-downs of life as a puppet cut loose in the world. He first falls under the control of a cruel puppeteer named Stromboli (Giuseppe Battiston), meets Lampwick (Lewin Lloyd), a mischievous boy with an eye for trouble, and even gets eaten by a sea monster called Monstro the Whale.
Pinocchio is getting loads of life lessons, but is he learning life’s most important lesson? “The most important part of being real, isn’t what you’re made of,” said the Blue Fairy. “It’s about what’s in your heart.”
“Pinocchio,” directed by Robert Zemeckis, is a respectful retelling of Disney’s 1940 animated classic. The edgy details from that movie and the 1883 book by Carlo Collodi have been smoothed over—Pinocchio does not, for instance, smoke a cigar in this version—but visually, Zemeckis takes his lead from the classic Walt Disney Animation style. From the puppet’s yellow hat, blue tie and red lederhosen, this Pinocchio is strictly traditional.
It’s a vibrantly colored romp, an action adventure that, despite the up-to-the-minute technology involved, feels old fashioned, dare I say wooden, in its approach. Good messages about the importance of family and learning from your mistakes abound, the peril is kept to a family-friendly minimum and, like its main character, the movie is just a little naïve.
Following in the footsteps of other Disney live-action remakes like “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Lion King” and “The Jungle Book,” the latest version of “Pinocchio” adds new technology to the story, but no new ideas.
ALLIED: 3 ½ STARS. “despite the bullets and bombs this is a love story.”
Showbiz old timers believed any publicity was good publicity. Song-and-dance man George M. Cohan once famously bragged, “I don’t care what you say about me, as long as you say something about me, and as long as you spell my name right.” Brad Pitt is a pretty easy name to spell and the press has been using it a lot lately but will the news surrounding his break up with Angelina Jolie and subsequent stories of FBI investigations (no charges were ever filed) have any effect on the box office appeal of his new movie “Allied.”
Casablanca, 1942. Pitt plays Canadian intelligence officer Max Vatan, a deadly spy paired with French Resistance fighter Marianne Beausejour (Marion Cotillard). They are to pose as husband and wife, infiltrate a high level Nazi gathering and assassinate the German ambassador. “Odds of surviving are 60 to 40%,” he says, “against.” They survive (not a spoiler: if they didn’t make it there’d be no movie), fall in love and are soon sharing the same next of kin in London as Max takes on a less rigorous and much safer desk job. Despite Max’s boss’s (Jared Harris) warning that “marriage made in the field don’t work,” the couple settle in, the very model of a nuclear family until a high ranking official (Simon McBurney), who calls himself “a rat catcher,” confronts Max with the words, “We believe your wife is a German spy.”
Pitt and Cotillard like they just walked out a 1942 issue of Silver Screen magazine. Add to that high end period details in the costumes and sets and you have a handsome movie, almost as good-looking as its two leads. That being said, it’s a shame the first hour doesn’t have the pop it needs to really make us care about the characters when the story swerves from wartime romance to personal espionage thriller.
Director Robert Zemeckis keep things interesting with several memorable action scenes. He may be making a war film that frequently feels like a homage to the classic movies of yore but he’s done it with a modern flair, including rougher language and sexuality. Marianne giving birth on a London street as bombs drop around her has the melodrama of an old time picture but a contemporary sensibility.
Anchoring all this beauty are strong performances from Pitt and Cotillard.
At its heart “Allied” a love story despite the bullets and bombs. Pitt plays Max as a stoic but lethal—watch him choke someone to death then shove a biscuit down his throat to make it look like and accident—but most importantly, he’s a man in love. When he is told his wife may be a spy he says, “It’ll be OK because it’s not true,” but the moments of self doubt that wash across his face tell the real story. In his third war flick (following “Inglourious Basterds” and “Fury”) he’s torn between love and duty and Pitt infuses the performance with an appropriate amount of pathos.
Cotillard has the less flashy role, particularly in the second half but gives this femme fatale a real live beating heart that elevates her from stereotype to thoroughly current and exciting character.
“Allied” is really two movies—a “Casablanca” style romance and a spy thriller—bound together by Zemeckis’s adherence to classic filmmaking and the love story that provides the heart.
THE WALK: 3 ½ STARS. “HIGH WIRE ACT PACKS SOME VERTIGINOUS THRILLS.”
“The Walk,” a new film starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as French high-wire artist Philippe Petit, harkens back to an era when Evel Knievel was a superstar and human achievement wasn’t measured by how many Instagram followers you have. Even though we know how it ends—it’s a matter of historical record in the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary—the last half hour packs some vertiginous thrills.
Unsurprisingly of the story of a man who became famous for staging a 1974 tight rope walk between the world’s tallest buildings is unabashedly theatrical. When we first see Petit he’s setting up the story perched atop the Statue of Liberty with the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center looming in the background.
His narration is as straight and taut as a tightrope strung between two poles, walking through the narrative step-by-step. The story begins with the young Petit learning his trade at the feet of high wire maestro Papa Rudy (Ben Kingsley), through to meeting his beautiful muse Annie (Charlotte Le Bon) and hatching a plan to illegally string a wire between the two towers and perform a walk on “the most spectacular stage in the world.”
“It’s impossible,” he says, “but I’ll do it,” and he does, with the aid of several accomplices, in spectacular fashion.
“The Walk” is based on a true story but presented as an urban fairy tale, the story of a man determined to show the world that anything is possible. It’s a tall but true tale. Gordon-Levitt swings for the fences with a big, exuberant performance. He’s high strung, charming and arrogant, the kind of guy who says, “For me to walk on the wire is life. C’est la vie.” He’s also a dreamer, a man whose passions demonstrate for the rest of us that art still has the power to instil wonder. It’s a lovely message told in a shambling way.
Director Robert Zemeckis takes his time getting to the walk. He treats the story as a procedural, although a whimsical one, that tries to slide by on charm for two thirds of it’s running time. It’s certainly the first major movie of the year to future mime, and just to make sure we get the dreamy, mischievous feel he’s trying to portray, lilting snippets of the “La Dolce Vita” soundtrack can be heard in an early sequence.
When he gets to the end, the ascent to the top of the tower and the walk itself, the film becomes a thriller with 3D visuals that should come with a vertigo trigger alert. Anyone with a fear of heights be warned, “The Walk” has a ‘You are there’ feel as soon as Petit takes his first step on the rope. It’s a beautiful, lyrical and visually stunning sequence that is worth the wait through the film’s slow start.
“The Walk” takes too many tentative steps in it’s first hour and is a bit on the money in its storytelling—for instance “I Want to Take You Higher” blares on the soundtrack when Petit sees the Towers in person for the first time—but Gordon-Levitt’s relentless charm offensive, Le Bon’s charisma and a breathless climax provide a tribute not only to the power of art to elate but also the to the buildings that set the stage for Petit’s feat.
FLIGHT: 3 STARS
Nervous flyers will not enjoy the first half hour of “Flight,” the new film from “Castaway” director Robert Zemeckis and star Denzel Washington. If the nervous nellies can make it through the highflying plane crash that serves as the catalyst for the personal story of a troubled pilot (Washington), however, they are in a more earthbound tale of excess and expectation.
When we first meet Whip (Washington) it’s 7:14 in the am and he is hours away from piloting short haul flight Southjet 227 from Orlando to Atlanta. He’s also simultaneously arguing with his ex-wife on the phone, drinking beer, snorting cocaine and watching his girlfriend, a flight attendant get dressed after a wild night in a generic hotel room.
Hours later he’s behind the wheel of a jet, piloting it and the 102 on-board souls. After successfully navigating around a patch of brutal turbulence a mechanical malfunction threatens to down the plane. It is Whit’s expertise, and the audacious move of inverting the plane so it can glide to relative safety, that saves 96 of the 102 passengers and crew.
Hailed as a hero at first, soon his unsavory personal habits bring him under suspicion. Was it a malfunction of a mechanical or personal nature that brought the plane down?
Is there another a-list leading man who explores the dark sides of their characters as often as Washington? Will Smith and Tom Cruise will occasionally let the heroic side of their on-screen personas take a back seat, but Washington revels in mucking around in the mud. From “Training Day” to “American Gangster” and “Safe House” he crafts complex characters you wouldn’t want to sit next to on the bus.
Whit is a different take on this theme, however. This time around the anti-hero is functional in day-to-day life despite his predilection for wine, woman and cocaine. He’s charming one minute, enraged the next and passed out on the floor the minute after that.
Denzel manages to subtly capture the ego and hubris that allows Whit to present a sober face to the public, even though the film’s visual language is frequently not as refined. A close-up of Washington’s hand grasping a mini bottle of vodka and the accompanying swoosh sound looks like something that should be in a commercial not in a film about the effects of alcoholism.
“Flight” is a quiet movie about troubled people, acts of god, ethical questions about accepting responsibility and the callousness of business in the wake of tragedy. It’s about a lot of things, many of which Zemeckis simply flits around before moving on, but at its core is Washington, who despite an unnecessary redemptive ending, effectively brings us into the messy world of addiction.
A CHRISTMAS CAROL: 2 STARS
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.
