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Reviews
Don't Look Up (2021)
Great potential, terrible durection
A superstar cast and a timely topic about human ineptitude in handling a killer comet that's standing in as a metaphor for climate change - this chemistry could have generated a brilliant dark satire, skewering our politics, scientific denialism, MAGA populism and short-sighted corporate greed.
Alas, "Don't Look Up" is mortally wounded by slippage into outright, over-the-top farce and, more seriously, truly terrible direction. In farce, timing is vital and a director experienced with the genre is required. Yet this film lurches from the nimble jumps required to lugubrious, drawn-out scenes where the plot stops completely for minutes on end. (We sit through an entire entire concert song, for example, when 20 seconds of it was called for.)
As a result, what could have been the Dr. Strangelove of our time is a jolting experience, where viewer frustration with the uneven pace quickly replaces the frustration we're supposed to feel watching stupid, silly people fail to address an existential threat to the biosphere. The bizarre mid-credit conclusion emblemizes this confusion, suggesting that the writers and director never agreed on just what they were doing. It's a real shame. We badly needed this film to be good.
The Good Dinosaur (2015)
Beautiful film! Don't be deterred by the critics.
I don't understand the negative reviews of this movie. I thought it was a lovely, moving film, with a plot that was even surprising, and an unusual story of characters finding each other in a wonderfully creative imaginary landscape. It's even bold in some places. (Where do we have hallucinatory drugs and a bug's head being ripped off in a children's flick?) The conceptual rendering of the imagined world of an early dinosaur civilization, that developed millions of years after the famous asteroid did not hit Earth, was fun and engaging. So what if it had some logical glips that strained the concept? Many highly rated fantasy movies have worse.
As to not connecting emotionally, a common complaint of critics, they must brought strangely hard hearts to this film. A lot of reviewers have said they teared up over some scenes and so did I. It's a lovely coming-of-age tale. It helps also that the score is absolutely delightful. (The sound track in general - wind, thunder, crackling fire - is detailed and realistic.)
Whether or not you're engaged by the story, the animation is simply jaw-dropping and not to be missed. This Pixar at its most brilliant, doing miraculous things it's never done before or since. Leaves quiver; dew drops sparkle; river currents swirl; grasses sway gently in the breeze. The more you look the more you see.
Truly the only downside is the strange decision to depict the dinosaurs as green blow-up balloons, who, because of the naturalistic world around them, seem strangely disconnected from their environment. The lost opportunities there, for cool renderings of these fictional beings, are sad. I'm guessing this was either a marketing decision (easier to reproduce for merchandising) or just a holdover from an earlier stage in the production when the artistic aims weren't so very high.
I feel sorry for those at Pixar who poured such loving care and wonderful talent into this film only to suffer such grim production problems and ultimately such dismal reviews. It's well worth watching and, for the superb artistry if nothing else, even a must-see.
Dune (2021)
Enthralling
I first read the novel shortly after it came out and several times after that, engrossed by its fascinating world building including a poetic indigenous desert culture, mystical philosophy, allusions to a deep and traumatic history of several millennia and galactic political scheming that today suggests Game of Thrones. I was therefore dreading this film, expecting it would fail, due partly to the trailers that suggested gargantuan bang-pow CGI and partly to the catastrophic earlier attempt by Lynch.
What a joyful surprise to find this interpretation so faithful to the mood, characterizations and events described in the book. It's entrancing, absorbing, enthralling and a monumental success. Coupled to part two when that comes out - not making it is unimaginable - this is a near-revolutionary contribution to the sci fi film genre and a splendid monument to Herbert's work
Inevitably, much is cut out in this mostly expositional "part one." What suffers most are the conversations and meetings by which we come to appreciate the complex characters and relations among the Duke, Thufir Hawat, Gurney Halleck (no balliset here) and Yueh. Viewers who haven't read the book won't pick up here on the true identity and perspective of Liet Kynes or how the Bene Gesserit operate (e.g., they are certain to miss crucial moments such as Jessica's accidental discovery of the term "maker" while interviewing the Shadout Mapes). Characters other than Jessica and Paul are outlines to be filled in later. But the larger tone and mystique of events is beautifully conveyed, with generous help from Zimmerman's astonishing, mesmerizing score.
This film also stands out as perhaps the best use of CGI I've ever seen. The giant ships, rather than providing eye-popping action, instead convey merely by their stark, gravity-defying grandeur that we are indeed eight millennia on the future (a history only suggested in the book by opaque lines such as the religious injunction that "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind"). The worms, thankfully, are depicted with a beauty that makes sense of their Fremen deification as Shai-hulud. If the CGI desert doesn't convey the magic of the desert cinematography in Lean's immortal Lawrence of Arabia, the loss isn't serious.
I had just one quibble about something few are likely to notice, and that was Timothée Chalamet's spoken lines. No artificial British accents in this film, but the actors have a range of mostly non-American accents and all have the diction that these roles call for. The character of Paul, the ducal heir, is multi-lingual and hyper-educated by our standards. Yet Chalamet's accent is unvarnished US-high-school, a bit slurred, a bit nasal, and, crucially, not matching the accents of those playing Paul's family. I was pulled out of the illusion every time he opened his mouth. Hopefully someone will work with him to improve this in part two.
Black Widow (2021)
Strange failure
I really shouldn't write a review for a movie I fast-forwarded through as much as I did this one. But something this strange warrants noting.
First, the pacing. The pacing of the earlier films was mostly impeccable. Fight scenes didn't last too long and were broken up by cool CGI and character turns. Here? Endless chase/fight sequences, glazed-eyed-boring to everyone other than 11 year old boys who are truly jazzed up by cars flipping through the air. Bang, pow, screech, crash, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, my god it's 30 minutes now .... After a while I muted it and started skimming the news on my phone. Missed nothing. Why abandon a famously winning formula for a juvenile hackneyed one? Strange.
Second, characters. The Black Widow was fascinating in the earlier films for her combination of uncanny fighting skill and a complex personality that's almost completely missing here. After waiting for this film with great anticipation, I found myself not caring about her at all. I don't recall the last time I so completely lost interest in a character; I never want to see her again. Wiping out interest in an Avenger ... have to credit the director and writers with that strange achievement.
Finally, and worst, there's no fun here! The Marvel movies have been marvelous fun in combining real suspense with wit, originality with splashes of satire, danger with warmth. You laughed moments before you held your breath. Here I did neither. If that bit about a chopped up uterus was supposed to be comic relief, jeez, no. If dad congratulating his daughters on all their murders was supposed to be funny, jeez, no. Black Widow is more like a gritty cold war film from the 1960s: brooding, dark, depressed, gruesome, grim. Maybe it's partly the unrelentingly gloomy score.
What a strange turn... take a great party and pour dirty ice water over the whole thing.
La Brea (2021)
Bad CGI drags this down
Crummy CGI cheapens this show, despite some decent acting. The draw, obviously, is the chance to see renditions of now-extinct megafauna of the Mesazoic (sabor-toothed tigers, dire wolves, giant sloths, the era of the La Brea tarpit animals. So why didn't the CGI techs bother to observe real animals to get a hint of how these creatures would likely have moved and hunted? I guess millions of bucks don't warrant watching an afternoon of nature shows.
Otherwise this is one of those group dramas with the predictable heroes and irritating bad guys (a twist is that the selfish jerk is a police woman) trying to survive a mysterious time warp. Maybe the characterizations, which offer some originality, will develop some real chemistry in a "Lost" ensemble way. But with snarling fake animals roaring unrealistically out of the bushes every 15 minutes, it's likely to be too cruddy to tolerate.
The Midnight Sky (2020)
Beautiful, thoughtful, pensive film
I'm surprised by negative or middling reviews of this movie. I found it a moving, intelligent film that I was glad, on a cold and quiet Christmas Day, to take at its own thoughtful pace. Those who want bang-up sci fi should go elsewhere. Directed by George Clooney with strong allusions to The Revenant and Silent Running, this is more an art film than a disaster movie, a character study rather than a space drama.
The film is really a character study of isolation, challenged by a future debacle that brings it under strain. The time is 2049, three weeks after an unexplained global "event." The debacle is an atmospheric disaster that is poisoning all life on earth. The main character is an aged, terminally ill physicist with the Dickensian name Augustine Lofthouse, played wonderfully by a white-bearded Clooney, who stays behind at an Arctic space observatory when the rest of the staff are evacuated to some dubious sanctuary unknown. As all earth communications go silent, Lofthouse is in the psychologically dangerous situation of being completely alone. Administering himself chemotherapy (and periodically vomiting), stooped and numb, he spends his days trying urgently but without success to reach a distant space ship returning from Jupiter and tell them not to land.
Through cutaways to the ship's crew, we find they are not hearing him. They are returning from exploring a newly discovered habitable moon around Jupiter (called K-23) and trying with increasing concern to reach a now-silent earth. The characterizations here pleasantly avoid that irritating plot device, too frequent in space dramas lately, of having immature, dysfunctional personalities somehow put on a long-haul spaceship by NASA. Instead, we see mature, intelligent, thoughtful people, tired of their journey but handling pretty well their years of isolation in space and now the uncertainty of earth's silence. A meteor storm, which wreaks damage to their communication equipment that they must fix alone, provides the circumstances for trouble.
As Lofthouse is completely alone, strange things happening around him can seem, to him and us, like he's losing his grip on reality. But they soon crystallize as a young girl accidentally left behind in the evacuation, played beautifully by Caoilinn Springall. Mute but able to hear him, she communicates only with drawings and her eyes, lending her an otherworldly quality. When she draws one, he finds her name is Iris. We become convinced that she is really there, and it makes sense when he bundles her up and they set off on snowmobiles across the vast frozen landscape to reach a distant weather station with a stronger transmitter. (Spoilers follow.)
The story then fixes on the communication problem: can he reach the weather station and warn the approaching spaceship in time for the crew to abandon plans to land and slingshot back to K-23 where they can survive? Some technical plot wobbles mar the flow here. That an earth-sized habitable moon with lovely foliage and breathable air was discovered orbiting Jupiter calls for simply a shrugging suspension of disbelief. The atmospheric poison of one "event" is mapped on a computer screen as expanding circles from multiple locations, which makes no sense. Wolves appear threateningly, which for Arctic wolves is a stretch. Most brow-furrowing is that Lofthouse falls through the ice and is submerged in subfreezing water for about a minute, yet somehow survives, rewrapped in a coat by Iris. In a film that mostly and refreshingly avoids trite plot ploys, the first successful communication is cut off just before the crucial sentence can be pronounced, a pointless way to prolong the communication suspense, and a space walk on the ship to repair a broken receptor leads too predictably to a death. It's as though someone told Clooney that he had to spice up the action somehow.
Still, the study remains powerful, mainly in the acting. Clooney, in this craggy, bearded, aged version, is magnificent. It emerges that Lofthouse is isolated not only by circumstances but by his character. In flashback memories, he recalls standing impassively as his lover sadly leaves him. He is alone by personality and not just cataclysmic fate. That he has, with age, grown sorrowful about this eventually explains his motivation: in those younger days, his lover took with her their daughter, revealed in final scenes to be Iris, who he knows is now one of the spaceship's crew. The little girl traveling with him across the ice was indeed a hallucination, which he knew before we did. He plunged into a solo struggle across the Arctic ice to save the daughter he could never connect with before. She recalls him, too, but doesn't know he's her father. The tender ending, as their brief satellite communication fails for the last time as she is describing the beauty of the alien moon, is moving.
The film is unusual also in offering a quiet acceptance that humanity will not be saved. A wrecked plane holding a mangled art collection suggests even humanity's art will not survive. Nor is K-23 the salvation. Two of the space ship's crew decide to take a one of the ship's two shuttles and rejoin family on the doomed earth. The last shots show the remaining two crew members (played convincingly by Felicity Jones and an excellent David Oyelowo), who have agreed to return to the habitable moon, quietly making the control adjustments required, but two people will not recolonize another world. This inevitability is not presented as tragic. In this sense, the film finishes as a peaceful if pensive meditation on age, death and endings, with much to say about our times.
This film is highly recommended for those with the patience to go where it takes us.
The Mandalorian: Chapter 2: The Child (2019)
Another disappointment
Another mediocre episode, adding to my depression about this once-engrossing series. A rubber-headed character that looks like it was used in the 1960s version of Lost in Space. A silly plot, full of nonsense, as the Mandalorian undertakes a ludicrously reckless sublight trip and gets into trouble when Duck Head finds a hot pool in the middle of a glacier. Regurgitated monster tropes, lifted from Alien and Harry Potter, that make no sense. (Ice spiders? Come on!) No character building, no plot advancement, just yet another crash scene on a pointless side trip. If his brief contact with the Republic comes back later, maybe something worthwhile will develop from that. Otherwise, this series is, sadly, sagging into the drink.
The Mandalorian: Chapter 9: The Marshal (2020)
Cheesy
I'm baffled by all the positive reviews of this episode. It's one cliche after another, as though the writers just stirred a basket of stereotypes and then laid them out in a string. Poor direction, too. What a disappointment.
There's the thuggish mob boss at the fights scene; the obligatory punch-em-up scene; the motorbike scene; the decrepit Western town scene; the dusty bar with scruffy characters scene; something from Dune; the cool white guy drinking native hooch with the natives scene; something from a 1950s Tarzan movie with the natives stumbling around screaming and getting munched up by the monster; a flamboyant final blow by the hero scene that eclipses everyone else.
It's also strikingly unoriginal with the series itself, regurgitating last season's material with all the unique twists taken out. The enigmatic Child is reduced to cute sight gags, and Oliphant's character is cut and pasted from Deadwood with none of Bullock's originality and charm. The giant heaving CGI monster coming out of the dark cave gets everything wrong that the mudhorn scene got right.
The direction is, off, too, more rushed and mechanical, and making dumb mistakes, like having two men conduct a conversation in living-room tones while hurtling along 20 feet apart on two motorbikes at what looks like 60 mph.
Add to this a plot that makes no sense whatever (why would the Mandalorian strike any kind of deal for the armor?) and you have a silly episode that strips away all the mystique so carefully developed in the first seadon. Even the beautiful, haunting tenor-recorder theme music, so original that numerous articles were written about it, nearly disappears here, being larded up with orchestral bilge.
If the rest of the season is this bad, this series is toast, which would be a real shame.
The Last Ice (2020)
Beautiful portrait of a vanishing world
This beautifully filmed documentary offers a compelling portrait of an indigenous Inuit people confronting the disappearance of the environment where they have lived for millennia, the section of oceanic ice that stretches between Greenland and Canada.
We encounter this ice realm mostly through the eyes of a young man who left it as a child to live in Denmark through his youth and returned as a young adult. He finds himself having to relearn the hunting culture of the Nunavut, which captivates him for the deep knowledge and skills the older men still retain. He is dedicated to learning the ways and insights of these experienced hunters, who have unique knowledge of the ice and its wildlife. But with global warming, their skills and wisdom are faltering in a melting world. As the ice thins and disappears, open ocean cuts off coastal communities from each other, makes some traditional hunting grounds unreachable and creates dangerously thin ice where they risk losing sleds and dogs.
Vintage footage from the 1950s is spliced in to fill out the modern history of the Nunavut, including their forced settlement by white authorities that ended their nomadic life, and that common horror - the forced removal of their children to the bleak and abusive Catholic schools that were established to strip them of their language and culture. Without any heavy handed preaching, the connection is clearly made to the threat they face now from the global impact of that same "white" culture. The connection is further illuminated by the experience of a young woman who also left and returned and is beginning to realize how alienation from her people left her feeling lost as a person.
In portraying all this, the film is pensive and somber. But it is illuminated by the stunning beauty of the ice, which sensitive film direction and exquisite cinematography shows as having a poetic, transcendental quality, and by the Nunavut people, who are moving and inspiring in their efforts to retain, and personally regain, their culture while facing an uncertain future.
In chronicling this pivotal period, as global forces literally dissolve an ancient landscape forever, this film is one of the must-see nature films of recent years.