I join CTV Atlantic’s Todd Battis to talk about the epic “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” the absurd “The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants,” the feel-good divorce drama “Is This Thing On?” and the psychological thriller “The Housemaid.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
I sit in with CKTB morning show host Steph Vivier to have a look at movies in theatres including the epic “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” rthe absurd “The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants,” the feel-good divorce drama “Is This Thing On?” and the psychological thriller “The Housemaid.”
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
Fast reviews for busy people! Watch as I review three movies in less time than it takes to make the bed! Have a look as I race against the clock to tell you about the epic “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” the feel-good divorce drama “Is This Thing On?” and the psychological thriller “The Housemaid.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
SYNOPSIS: In the third installment of the “Avatar” film series, “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” ex-Marine Corporal Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and his Na’vi family’s peaceful way of life on their home planet of Pandora is threatened by the violent Ash People and returning baddie Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang).
CAST: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Stephen Lang, Sigourney Weaver, Joel David Moore, CCH Pounder, Giovanni Ribisi, Dileep Rao, Matt Gerald, Kate Winslet, Cliff Curtis, Edie Falco, Brendan Cowell, Jemaine Clement, Britain Dalton, Trinity Jo-Li Bliss, Jack Champion, Bailey Bass, Filip Geljo and Duane Evans, Jr. Directed by James Cameron.
REVIEW: “Avatar: Fire and Ash” does what cinema is meant to do; transport the audience to new worlds while reflecting and commenting on the reality of our world. An epic for the eyes, the visualization of Pandora is impressive and immersive, but the a-list visuals are let down by a b-movie story.
First, the look.
Rendered in eye popping 3D, Cameron’s concept for Pandora and her environs is spectacular will have your synapses firing on all cylinders. An ode to French impressionism by way of the sci fi landscapes of Frank Frazetta, whether his camera is gliding through the jungles of Pandora or swimming under the planet’s oceans or traipsing around gritty fire and ash biodomes or soaring though the sky on the back of a winged Great Leonopteryx, Cameron delivers a dopamine hit directly through the eyes.
It’s a whole lotta CGI, which is ironic, given that this is a story about the organic connection between nature and all of God’s creatures in which all the dazzling images were created in the least organic way possible. Still, the pictures, no matter how they were created, do come alive on the screen.
Less exciting is the story.
Cameron has spent the better part of two decades world building, creating the belief systems, language and traditions of the Na’vi people, only to hang them on the most generic of fantasy storytelling. His hot button pet themes of colonization, government overreach, community and environmentalism are very much in place, but the storytelling isn’t as passionate as the visual work.
Essentially picking up a few months after “Avatar: The Way of Water” left off, when “Fire and Ash” begins Jake (Sam Worthington), Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), and their children Lo’ak, Tuk, Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), and Spider (Jack Champion) are grieving the death of Neteyam, the family’s eldest son.
Their peaceful life amid the reef-dwelling Metkayina clan is disrupted when Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), the ruthless RDA colonel reborn as a Na’vi recombinant, teams with the aggressive, volcano dwelling Mangkwan, or “Ash People,” lead by the vicious Varang (a compelling Oona Chaplin).
As Jake fights for the survival of his family, the fate of all of Pandora hangs in the balance.
Packed with big action set pieces, smaller, more intimate family moments, and one, “I am Spartacus” scene, “Fire and Ash” has a new, unsettling villain in the form of Varang but otherwise recycles old ideas under a slick CGI veneer.
The mix of A-list tech and B-movie dialogue like Quaritch’s quip, “I guess I don’t die that easy,” feels like watching a Saturday morning serial with boffo, stare-of-the-art visuals that distract from the often-cheesy dialogue.
The familiar story beats and the worn-out dialogue quickly take a backseat to Cameron’s unique vison. He is the star of “Avatar: Fire and Ash.” Like the other films in the franchise the new one invites the viewer to exit the real world and enter his world of imagination of three hours, and, despite some déjà vu story wise, it’s a trip worth taking.
I review the highly anticipated “Avatar: Fire and Ash” for CTVNews.ca!
“‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ does what cinema is meant to do: transport the audience to new worlds, while reflecting and commenting on the reality of our world. An epic for the eyes, the visualization of Pandora is impressive and immersive, but the A-list visuals are let down by a B-movie story…” Read the whole thing HERE!
SYNOPSIS: “Elio,” a new Disney and Pixar animated adventure now playing in theatres, centers on Elio, a space-obsessed young boy who accidentally gets beamed up to the Communiverse, a cosmic hub where representatives from Earth meet with extraterrestrials. Mistaken for an ambassador from the blue planet, Elio learns about other civilizations and himself. “Back home I didn’t fit in,” he says. “I thought Earth was the problem, but what if it’s me?”
CAST: Yonas Kibreab, Zoe Saldaña, Remy Edgerly, Brad Garrett, Jameela Jamil, and Shirley Henderson. Directed by Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi, and Adrian Molina.
REVIEW: As empathetic as it is predictable, “Elio” treads familiar ground but packs a light emotional punch with its story of an outsider who learns he is not alone.
Humans have always gazed at the stars and wondered, “Are we alone?” That includes Elio (voiced by Yonas Kibreab) an eleven-year-old boy being raised by his Aunt Olga (Zoe Saldaña) after the death of his parents. Despite Olga’s best efforts, Elio feels abandoned and alone. “There’s 500 million inhabitable planets out there,” he says to her, “and maybe one of them will want me because you don’t.”
When his efforts to be abducted by aliens lead to trouble, he’s sent to a military school where his ham radio helps connect him to the stars and he is beamed up to a colorful world whose aliens think he is an ambassador from Earth who will save their “Communiverse” from the evil Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett).
“Elio” is a kid’s film, with imaginative, vibrantly colored characters and fanciful new worlds, that looks to what Carl Sagan (whose voice appears briefly near the film’s end) called “the deepest of human concerns: Are we alone?” It’s a big concept for a film aimed at the little ones, but it’s presented with a sense of childlike wonder that makes it accessible for all ages.
Beautifully animated in Pixar’s signature style, it looks great but doesn’t have the nuance or deeply felt emotion of the company’s classics. Films like “Up” and “WALL-E” masterfully wove story and sentiment together to form soulful movies that hit the head and heart in equal measure. “Elio” reaches for the stars but remains earthbound in terms of finding the texture that once made Pixar so special.
Still, while “Elio” isn’t a gushing firehose of authentic emotion, it is an imaginative journey into empathy, community and self-acceptance.
SYNOPSIS: “Emilia Pérez,” a new Spanish-language musical crime drama starring Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez and now playing in theatres, is a subversive story about the search for happiness and affirmation of identity. Zoe Saldaña plays a burned-out Mexico City lawyer tired of defending drug related clients. When she is offered the biggest fee of her life by a fearsome cartel leader, who hires her to facilitate his “retirement” (i.e.: disappearance) and transition into an authentic self, she can’t say no. “What do I risk?” she asks. “Becoming rich, “replies the cartel leader.
CAST: Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz, Mark Ivanir, and Édgar Ramírez. Written and directed by Jacques Audiard.
REVIEW: “Emilia Pérez” mixes-and-matches Broadway style production numbers with telenovela melodrama and pulpy crime drama to create a genre-bending, emotionally authentic story about the possibility of erasing the past to create a new future.
A full-blown musical, with three lead performances—Saldaña, Selena Gomez and Karla Sofía Gascón—characters who burst into song and inventive and enthusiastic choreography, the story may seem overstuffed, but director Jacques Audiard’s pedal-the-the-metal staging ensures the various story threads weave together.
Gascón (the first openly trans actor to win a major prize at the Cannes Film Festival when she shared the Best Actress Award with her “Emilia Pérez” co-stars) provides the film’s heart. As Emilia, she is as benevolent as she was vicious when she was a cartel boss. On her path she not only learns to love herself, but also the people around her, and in return, be worthy of love. The scenes with her kids—particularly a song in which her young son, who thinks his dad is dead, remembers his father—are tender and coloured with a bittersweet quality.
If all the action revolves around the title character, it is Saldaña, in a career best performance, who takes command. She has sung and danced on screen before—in “Vivo” and “Center Stage”—but never with this kind of passion, ferocity and fearlessness. Her character Rita is the audience surrogate, a guide through the increasing labyrinthine story.
She is aided by composers Clément Ducol and Camille Dalmais whose score and show tunes provide the emotional underpinnings of scene after scene, but also forward the story with songs that jump styles as often as the movie cycles through genre.
Gomez is given less to do but delivers the film’s strongest vocals and hands in a fine dramatic performance.
Ultimately, Emilia’s journey to happiness begs the question, Can the sins of the past be remedied by the actions of the present? Audiard, who also wrote the script, clearly has ideas on the subject, but no spoilers here. Suffice to say, the film’s dramatic final third keeps with Audiard’s penchant for envelope pushing.
“Emilia Pérez” is quite simply, unlike any other film that will be released this year. Is it a musical, a cartel story, a musical soap opera or a eulogy to those lost to cartel violence? The truth is it is all those things, banged together in a form that feels fresh and exciting.
“Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” the new sci fi action comedy from director James Gunn, brings the hip needle drops, off-kilter humor and mismatched, misfit superheroes you expect, but adds in unexpectedly heart tugging sentiments about family, second chances and personal growth.
The action begins on a downbeat note. Rocket (Bradley Cooper), the smart mouthed genetically engineered racoon, is feeling down, wallowing in the maudlin sounds of Radiohead’s “Creep.”
Star-Lord, a.k.a. Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) is using booze to grapple with the change in his girlfriend Gamora (Zoe Saldaña). She was killed by Thanos, but, courtesy of an alternate timeline, a version of her returned, but different, with no memory of her adventures with the Guardians or her love affair with Quill. “I’ll tell you something,” he says. “I’m Star-Lord. I formed the Guardians. Met a girl, fell in love, and that girl died. But then she came back. Came back a total d**k.”
Their world is given a shake and bake by caped supervillain Adam Warlock (Will Poulter). He is a powerful cosmic entity, with a third eye jewel embedded in his forehead, working with the man responsible for creating Rocket’s unique genetic makeup, a Dr. Moreau type known as the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji). The ultimate plan is to kidnap and study Rocket to use the chatty racoon as the basis to sidestep the evolutionary process and create more hybrid species. “My sacred mission is to create the perfect society,” he says.
During the invasion, Rocket is severely injured, revealing to his co-Guardians—Star-Lord, Nebula (Karen Gillen), Mantis (Pom Klementieff) Drax (Dave Bautista), Groot (the voice of Vin Diesel) and Gamora—the extent of his genetic modifications.
As the racoon wavers between life and death, the film cleaves into two parts, Rocket’s origin story and the rescue mission to save his life. “Are you ready for one last ride?” asks Peter.
“Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” succumbs to the usual superhero movie pitfalls. By the time the end credits roll, it has become a loud, slightly over-long orgy of CGI, but James Gunn brings something most other superhero movies don’t have.
Within the wham-bam action overload is a genuine sweetness that overrides the bombastic action. Under his watch the movies provide the expected wild ride while grounding the otherworldly action with poignant relationship drama. These movies are about logical, not necessarily biological, families, and that connection, above all else, is what makes these movies so effective.
If Gunn (and Bautista) can make a character named Drax the Destroyer loveable, then anything is possible.
“Avatar: The Way of Water” harkens back to a time when Hollywood bigshots thought, “If a picture is worth a thousand words, a 3D picture is worth a million words.” The original film, 2009’s “Avatar” was director James Cameron’s grand experiment in the audience’s tolerance for 2 hours 42 minutes of images popping off the screen.
Thirteen years ago, the million words theory worked. “Avatar” was a massive hit, grossing almost 3 billion dollars worldwide, as rumors of a series of sequels hung in the air. Delay after delay kept the blue people off screens for so long, four presidents came and went while Cameron tinkered with the story and the technology to bring his vision to life.
The tinkering is finally over. Cameron returns to theatres with the first of four planned sequels, “Avatar: The Way of Water,” an epic 3D sequel that mixes astonishing visuals with eye-rolling teenagers, a character with the b-movie name Z-Dog and a 3 hour and 12-minute tale of colonialism.
Set on Pandora, an Earth-like habitable extrasolar moon from the Alpha Centauri System populated by the Na’vi, the 9 to 10 feet tall Indigenous peoples, the movie picks up the action more than a decade after the events of the first film. Former Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), who left his human body behind to permanently become Na’vi, lives on the peaceful planet with wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) and children.
Their idyll is interrupted with the return of the Sky People, humans who want to“pacify the hostiles” and takeover Pandora.
“Earth is dying,” says General Frances Ardmore (Edie Falco). “Pandora is the new frontier.”
Despite having been killed off in the original, the Pandora-bound team is led by the ruthless Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), a genetically engineered “recombinant” or avatar version of the late Marine, implanted with his mind and emotions. “We have been brought back in the form of our enemy,” he says of he and his team. He plans on taking Pandora at any cost, and getting revenge on Sully, who he sees as a traitor.
Forced into hiding with Tonowari (Cliff Curtis), Ronal (Kate Winslet) and the reef people clan of Metkayina, Sully and his family learn the way of water—”no beginning and no end”—and fight to defend their world.
So, the big question is: Was “Avatar: The Way of Water” worth the wait?
As a technical achievement, yes, unquestionably. The visuals are stunning, particularly in the underwater scenes. Cameron’s camera has a nimbleness often missing in 3D films, which often feel locked-down. His fluid camera roams, on land and sea, capturing some of the most eye-popping, breathtaking scenes of this, or any other, season. Each and every frame is carefully considered, and most could be cut out, framed and hung on the wall to great effect.
The visuals facilitate Cameron’s world building, providing tantalizing views of the forest land of Pandora and the wet ‘n wild world of Metkayina, complete with giant whale-like creatures that could have sprung from the imagination of Ray Harryhausen, and lush, colorful flora and fauna.
It does not look like any other 3D film—even the original “Avatar”—and will engage the eye and stimulate the brain.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about the story, which is as simple as the images are complex. Essentially, Cameron continues the colonialization themes of the first film, while adding in mysticism, traditional medicine, poachers and even a nod to Jonah and the Whale.
Most of all, it is a story of family, of parents and children. Apparently, Pandorian kids behave sort of like Earth teens, eye rolls, attitude and all. The family relationships add an intimate element to the epic story, but the visuals often get in the way of the storytelling.
Long action sequences, like a spectacular sea creature attack, take away from the movie’s main thrust, pushing the running time upwards, but not advancing the story. Perhaps they are scheduled in to accommodate bathroom breaks. Whatever the reason, they showcase Cameron’s mastery of the form but often feel spectacular simply for the sake of spectacle.
Loud and proud, “Avatar: The Way of Water” can be, by times, overwhelming, but it’s also the kind of grand scale movie that demands to be seen on the biggest, most immersive screen possible. Cameron shoots for the moon, but goes even further, to a place called Pandora.
