Mama

3 Stars (out of four)

So, Guilermo del Toro has done it again.  Even though he is the producer for this film, he nevertheless keeps finding creepy and scary subjects.  Mama is the story about two little girls with a very strange guardian.  The movie starts when they, Victoria and Lily, are 3 and 1 years old, respectively.  After their father becomes unhinged and kills his business partners and wife, he kidnaps his girls and runs away during a snow storm.  The car they are in crashes off an icy mountain road, and he and his girls limp away and find a deserted cabin.  Inside, he almost kills his daughters before something grabs him and kills him.  Five years later, the girls are found in the cabin still alive, but almost feral.  They are taken in by their artist uncle and his rocker girlfriend Annabelle (Jessica Chastaine, before her Oscar-nominated turn in Zero Dark Thirty.)  But it seems an unwanted guest came with them, a malevolent ghost the girls call Mama who had taken care of them in the cabin and is not happy the couple has taken Victoria and Lily into their home.  Mama apparently gets jealous, and reacts violently when people take what she has claimed as hers.

Mama is creepy and dark, but unfortunately can't stand among better horror films.  It's too bad, too, because it is actually probes interesting subject matter.  With the feral girls adjusting back into society, it's all compelling.  It also doesn't hurt that Jessica Chastaine can actually act, which raises this film above its lesser contemporaries.  Unfortunately, while her role is well-played, I can't really care about her.  She is a twenty-something tatooed rebel who plays in a rock band.  The uncle, competently played by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister from HBO's amazing series Game of Thrones), is actually the one with the greater motivation to help the girls (they are his nieces, after all, and he truly loves them) but he is relegated to a back story.  I think his story may have extensively suffered in post-production editing, because he doesn't really do anything.  Annabelle is thrust into the role of the girls' guardian after Mama attacks the uncle and puts him in the hospital, a role which she doesn't really want and actually resents a bit.  But she does it for her man.  The problem is the story is clumsily written.  I don't see a believable evolution of the relationship between Annabelle and the girls.  They understandably don't trust each other to begin, but we don't see a gradual change in the relationship.  It just abruptly changes because the script says so.  This is where the movie could have excelled.  The writers were obviously trying to do something.  This change in the trust in their relationship could have had so much outstanding drama, but it is ultimately fumbled in their hands.  

Also, I don't see a lot of chemistry between Chastaine and Coster-Waldau.  They don't act like a couple head over heels in love, or at least it doesn't come across that way.  So Annabelle's desire to help her man's nieces despite the fact she resents doing it is unbelievable, or at least stretches credibility.  There is also another discarded subplot where the girls' aunt wants to take them away because she doesn't like her brother and Annabelle's lifestyle.  But she just comes across as bitchy, with no real desire to help the girls, or even any indication she may love them. It feels like it's there simply because movies with orphans being taken in has to have a mean, other party who wants to take them away from the loving protagonists.  Unfortunately, this also could have been another good subplot, but just feels shoehorned in for no particular reason.  

The movie is genuinely creepy, as most Boo! films are, but the PG-13 rating keeps it away from any truly horrifying aspects, which again, makes the movie fall short of greatness.  That is a bit frustrating because it could have been great.  I'll repeat it again here.  Why does Hollywood feel the need to make watered-down, family sorta-acceptable PG-13 horror flicks?  A horror movie is not exactly a family outing, so Hollywood, PLEASE for the love of God, STOP trying to make them as such.  Concentrate instead on real scares, and you just might reap some real rewards (Silence of the Lambs and Se7en, anyone?)

Riddick

2.5 Stars (out of four)

Riddick is fun.  Riddick is dumb.  That's all there really is to say about it.

Riddick opens up with him buried alive and narrating that too many people have written him off for dead.  He has ended up near dead on a very inhospitable planet.  When we last left him, he was in charge of a world and at a constant threat of assassination.  So he leaves that world in search of his  homeworld.  He is betrayed and is marooned on the planet.  He finds a bounty hunters' outpost and puts out a beacon to let the hunters know he is there so he will be able to get off the planet.  Some very unsavory ones come looking for him and begin to hunt him.  Then a second set of much more professional hunters land.  It turns out the leader was the father of the bounty hunter in the original (and much more superior) film Pitch Black.  Like Pitch Black, it turns out there are some horrible animals that live on the world.  Riddick sabotages the ships so he can bargain his way off world.  Various bad guys die and Riddick gets away in an open-ended finish.  The end.

Riddick is entertaining, but is not very substantial.  It's too bad, too, because the original, Pitch Black, showed such promise.  Pitch Black is Exhibit A on how to make a low budget movie look much bigger.  It uses clever tricks to make the most of sparse terrain.  Since most of it takes place at night, it also covers a multitude of sins with bad special effects.  Riddick is also an interesting character, a vicious killer with an honor streak a mile wide.  The second film, The Chronicles of Riddick, suffers from what I call sequelitis, the tendency of the film industry to make the second film bigger in every way.  Pitch Black is a good, intimate little film.  The Chronicles of Riddick becomes ridiculously overblown.  Riddick tries to reboot the franchise at that smaller level.  Unfortunately, it is not particularly great.  It is fun to watch, totally predictable and a little confusing and anticlimactic.  The high point of the film is that Katee Sackoff (Starbuck on the new Battlestar Galactica series) does a totally gratuitous topless scene, so this should give you an idea of its quality.  So if you want a turn-brain-off film, it's worth the time.  It is unfortunate, though, that a good Riddick film, for some reason, eludes the capability of most filmmakers.  Riddick is a very interesting character, and it is almost criminal that so many opportunities have been wasted, especially since Fast and the Furious has five bad sequels to a bad movie.

Flight

3 Stars (out of four)

Flight snuck up on me.  I have been wanting to see this movie for awhile, but the trailers do not do the movie justice. What seems like it will be a fairly good courtroom investigation movie, turns out to be a pretty darn good movie about the issues of alcoholism.

Denzel Washington plays airlines captain Whip Whittaker, who spends a long night of boozing and drugging with one of the flight attendants.  With little sleep, and using cocaine to wake up, he pilots a flight from Orlando to Atlanta in bad weather.  The airline suffers a mechanical malfunction and begins a nose dive.  Whip brings the plane down safely, more or less, by rolling the plane to arrest he dive and glides it into a field.  During the investigation, it is found out he was intoxicated and he will have to appear in an NTSB hearing with the probability he would go to jail for criminal negligence.  We follow him around for most of the movie as he struggles with his alcoholism and the damage it has left in the wake of his life.

As I said earlier, the movie is advertised as a courtroom investigation movie, but it is really about the damage alcohol can do to someone.  It is also about the people who try to help and the enablers who abet the alcoholic along the way.  The movie is like Leaving Las Vegas meets Clean and Sober.  It points out that hard-core alcoholics rarely become that way on their own; but others, especially "friends," enable them with their aid or silence.  It also shows the damage that alcoholism can do to people's lives and those around them.  We see that Whip is estranged from his divorced wife and son.  After the crash, he meets a woman in the hospital who was a junkie who OD'ed.  She takes us through the present as she tries to help him and he pushes her away.  While the movie is not as dramatic as Clean And Sober or contains as much pathos as Leaving Las Vegas, it is still quite good and worth a look, particularly since it is not quite the story as advertised.  My only complaint is that the end is a little too Hollywood-ish with an unforeseen change of heart during the hearing and wraps up a tad too neatly.  However, this is a movie that is supposed to entertain, so there has to be some crowd-pleaser in it somewhere.  Denzel is amazing as ever, with a welcome understated performance compared to his usual bombastic portrayals.

Lee Daniel's The Butler

3 Stars (out of four)

Lee Daniels' The Butler has been ballyhooed as the first leading contender for Oscar this year, and unless something great comes out, it will probably clean up.  The movie is pretty good, and has the capability to be great in certain parts, but falls short of the mark.  Those tantalizing glimpses of greatness are what frustrate me.  What could have been a great movie, and has the capability to be one, just doesn't quite make it.

The Butler is ostensibly about Cecil Gaines (another understated, but incredible performance by Forest Whitaker), a one-time son of a southern sharecropper in Georgia whose father was murdered by one of the white owners.  He is brought into the house and is taught to be a house servant.  He leaves there to go north and ends up working in upscale hotels until he is discovered by the White House staff at a hotel in Washington.  He is then hired to be a butler at the White House from the Eisenhower through Reagan Administrations.  In a parallel story, we watch the development of his eldest son, Louis Gaines, as he goes from Freedom Rider, to MLK marcher, to Black Panther Party member, to a failed run for the House of Representatives  to anti-Apartheid and community activist.  Finally, we see a story of the Gaines' family and the ups and downs of their life.

And this is precisely the problem.  The movie cannot make up its mind what exactly it is trying to be.  The story, while quite good, never adapts a continuous tone or direction.  The ads, and a few remarks by MLK seem to suggest that the movie is about a man who quietly tries to change attitudes from the inside.  The opening scene, with two young black men lynched underneath a waving American flag seems to suggest something more militant and outspoken, along the lines of Malcolm X or Do The Right Thing.  Indeed, the most intense, affecting and effective scenes are those "on the front lines" of the young civil rights protesters during the sit-ins and the marches.  In fact, it usually contrasts the violent goings-on of these scenes to the stolid state dinners at the White House.  In fact, the film's narrative seems to be condemning Cecil for taking a "subservient" role; that he sells out time after time until he stands up for his fellow workers demanding equal pay and opportunity and when he finally protests and is arrested in an anti-Apartheid demonstration.  At times, it threatens to become an engaging history of the civil rights struggle, but then maddeningly swerves into other territory.  At times, it seems to be an ad for the Democratic Party by portraying Kennedy, and to a lesser extent, Johnson, in favorable terms and depicting Nixon as a drunk bastard and Reagan as a hypocritical charlatan.  At times, it is a statement about Vietnam, especially when the Gaines' other son is killed in action.  At other times it is an engaging family drama about the consequences of Cecil's long hours with his relationship with his wife (played well by Oprah Winfrey).  His time away, their other son's death, and Cecil's extended estrangement from Louis, drive her to adultery and hard-core alcoholism.  And finally, the film also works in the separation and then reconciliation of Cecil and his son, and the way they look at life.

All of these are fascinating.  All are well-told in the time they are allotted.  And all of them are criminally undone by the time they are allotted.  This is too big a story to tell in the 2 plus hour length of the film.  Too many elements are dropped.  Too many situations are tied up and solved a little too neatly.  I felt as if I was getting a Cliff's Notes version of each story.  No one is examined in enough detail to really resonate, although Louis comes tantalizingly close.  Ultimately, Louis' story is the more compelling, and I think Lee Daniels' would rather have made that story.  At least that what shows up on screen.  The movie wildly changes tone again and again.  Who am I to sympathize with?  Condemn?  The movie is obviously trying to make a point, but it gets lost in the several byways it takes.  Obviously, it is trying to say that no seemingly two-sided issue is ever that simple, that there are always shades of gray, variants that each side has and that each possess parts of the truth, and that all events, good or bad, can serve a purpose for the greater good.

Two final thoughts.  Why has the definitive Martin Luther King movie not yet been made?  Maybe it is because the story is also too big.  Malcolm X, the criminally unheralded movie by Oscar, told a fascinating and complex story of a complex man with changing views that had reverberating consequences on our nation as a whole.  It told the real story of the real man, warts and all.  Now, that could be because he was so candid about his own life in The Autobiography of Malcolm X on which the movie was based.  The problem with making movies about such influential people is we start believing the myths that surround them and present them as historical fact.  Usually they come off as Messiahs that were paragons of virtue on Earth that did no wrong, not as flawed men or women who struggled with their times and decisions.  Think of the portrayals of Lincoln, Washington, Gandhi, Elizabeth I, and yes, Martin Luther King.  The only three biopics of non-entertainment figures of substance I have seen that dealt with their subjects honestly and openly were Patton, Schindler's List and Malcolm X.  I would like to see a similar movie about MLK, a man who wrestled with great issues and became, I feel, one of the greatest Americans ever.  Second, why is Lee Daniels getting top billing in the title?  I realize he directed Precious, but he didn't write this movie.  And while many people thought Precious was great (as of this writing in September 2013, I have not seen it), he hardly has amassed the portfolio that other great directors have like Steven Spielberg, Alfred Hitchcock, or even Spike Lee have obtained.  It just seems a little haughty, like he is trying to overshadow his film.  Usually, when I see a Directed By mention in ads, even if it is a proven director like a Scorsese or Hitchcock, it is a warning sign this film may not be that good and the producers are grasping at straws to get you in to see it.