Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

3.5 Stars (out of four)

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is an interesting departure for Tina Fey.  The former Saturday Night Live head writer has been branching into the movies with some success.  She is a very funny lady, but this movie is not particularly funny at all.  It is a very serious drama with a dash of comedy sprinkled in, and this is where comedians can often shine.  Since, for some reason, comedy doesn't usually bring home Oscar gold, a lot of comedians break out into drama, which is usually one of the smartest moves of their careers.  I think Tina Fey will be no different.  While this may not be her Oscar bait, it is a promising start to a great acting career.

The movie is based on the life of a real journalist, Kim Baker, and her experiences working in Afghanistan.  Tina plays Kim with wry humor but also a real pathos.  Basically, Baker gets to a point in her life and career where she is at a crossroads.  She is bored with her life and all the safe choices she has made, so she asks her news director to let her become a war correspondent in Afghanistan.  At first, she is a fish out of water, but quickly assimilates into her new job in both constructive and destructive ways.  She finds that she becomes an action junkie and takes too many risks that get her and her news crew in trouble or danger, sometimes fatally.  Add to that the fact that the journalists live like a Roman bacchanalian lifestyle full of drink, drugs and sex that further adds to the surrealism of her new life with disastrous personal effects for her.

This is one of those movies like Platoon that should not be watched by starry-eyed idealists.  It deals very unflinchingly with the reality of war (albeit from a civilian perspective) and the awful status of women in Afghanistan, particularly one who wants to be taken seriously.  At first, Baker abstains from the hedonistic lifestyle afforded to her, but she gradually gets sucked into the life on a downward spiral of self-destruction.  Now this isn't an anti-drug movie where the character hits rock bottom before there is a moment of clarity and she changes her life.  But the fact is that the war and the adrenaline highs she gets going into the field and then partying all night do take a toll on her and change her dramatically.  This film was advertised as a quasi-comedy, but that is a gross over-simplification of the plot.  It is a fascinating character study of someone who is irrevocably changed by war's circumstances, and it is a better movie because of it.

But what really works well in the movie is Fey herself.  She anchors this slightly surreal movie in an undeniable reality.  The horrors and pleasures she experiences are very real and relatable, despite how excessive they can get.  No one can understand the kind of changes you go through with experiences like these unless they have been there themselves.  Tina is just another example of why I think comedians make the best actors.  When you think of people like Tom Hanks, Steve Martin, Bill Murray, Jaime Foxx, Rosie O'Donnell, Albert Brooks, Michael Keaton, Dan Aykroyd, Garry Shandling, Rob Reiner, Billy Crystal, Roseanne Barr, the reason they are so good at acting is because they are masters at the craft of comedy.  People think comedy is easy, but it's not.  To be truly great in it, you have to be hyper-aware of timing, inflection, body language and facial gestures, just like actors.  But many times, comedy is just acting at an even keener state.  Get one word, gesture or pause wrong, a good joke may fall flat; this is the essence of comedy.  Comedians are doing the exact same things as actors, just more so.  Good ones tend to easily morph into serious acting because of the discipline necessary to make a good joke.  So I tend to like it when comedians branch into serious acting because if they are good, it tends to be a bit of a revelation, especially since most of them are not living, beautiful gods.  They tend to be just like us, and that makes them all the more relatable.

So this movie is a very good, adult movie to see without the younger kids.  It is funny and sad and everything in between.  I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Everybody Wants Some

1.5 Stars (out of four)

13 years ago, Richard Linklater released Dazed and Confused, an incredible movie about high-school teens in the late 1970s waiting to grow up.  It wasn't so much of a drama as a love letter to growing up in the 70s and the universal angst of what it is to be a teen, excited, bored and waiting for your life to start, even though you know nothing of the way ahead.  It caught an innocence, a feeling of what it was to be young.

Everybody Wants Some is a sort of companion piece.  It follows a young college freshman on a baseball scholarship to a great baseball school for the first three days before school starts.  It takes place at the beginning of the 80s, at the death of disco, the birth of urban country, punk and the New Wave.  It follows the bonding of the rookies to the new team, and frankly, how great life is when you are the popular superstar on campus.

I reviewed Dazed and Confused and called it great art because it evoked a feeling.  As a child of the late 70s and 80s, it brought me back to that time in my life and opened a floodgate of great memories, which was what great art is supposed to do.  Since I wasn't a high schooler in the 70s, some of the message was lost on me, but it still brought back a warm feeling.  I had hoped Everybody Wants Some would have been the same type of experience as it was closer to my high school years, but sadly, lightning is captured in a bottle only once.  While it seems Linklater was trying to evoke that same nostalgic feeling again with this outing, it would only be nostalgic to people who were incredibly popular at the time.  It doesn't ring true as the experiences of a normal person as the guys in this film experience nothing but good times, adoration, non-stop partying and sex from several willing ladies. It comes across as a guy who is bragging about his exploits to make you feel small in comparison.  These guys are not relatable or admirable in any way, and I was really let down by the promise of a repeat experience from Linklater's last outing.  The best part of the movie was its soundtrack and that was about it.  Overall, a big disappointment.

The Witch (A New-England Folktale)

1.5 Stars (out of four)

It's not that The Witch was bad, it was set up for failure.  There has been a lot of hullabaloo regarding The Witch, that it was over-hyped and over-praised.  Critics are praising it's slow burn horror and some fans are saying it's boring.  In a ridiculous PR stunt, the producers gave a screening to the Satanic Temple who went on to host several screenings and praise it with their normal gobbledygook saying, "an impressive presentation of Satanic insight that will inform contemporary discussion of religious experience," whatever the hell that means.  But what is the movie, really.  Is it a diamond in the rough masterpiece as Stephen King said "it scared the hell out of" him, or is it a flash in the pan?  Is first time director/screenwriter Robert Eggars a genius or a hack?

The film opens in colonial New England, circa 1630.  A very religious family is expelled from their town for religious pride and sent into the wilderness.  One day, the eldest girl Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy who is the best thing about this film) is playing peekaboo with her infant brother.  The infant is stolen right under her nose by a witch living in the forest.  As the movie progresses, Thomasin's mother Katherine (played to William Shatner-esque levels of unhinged scenery chewing) is convinced Thomasin is possessed by the devil.  Her father William (Ralph Ineson), a very devout man tries to defend her.  Weirder and weirder things happen to the family with increasingly disastrous results until the whole family besides Thomasin is killed by malevolent forces.  Thomasin then talks to their goat, who is really the devil of course, and becomes a full-fledged witch, her soul damned to eternity.

This movie takes place almost 70 years before the Salem Witch Trials, an unlike movies that focus on that, this movie is sort of pro-witch.  But unlike today's Wicca-endorsed crap that witches were just misunderstood feminists and the trials were a patriarchal reaction against women standing up for themselves, this movie goes the full nine biblically; that witches are malevolent beings with Satanic powers and will do anything to increase their power. The story is totally based supposedly on true accounts that happened during that time.  Considering the hysteria of the witch trials, this movie sort of plays like a greatest hits of crazy crap that happened in the 15th century, so much so that it almost becomes a self-parody.  Robert Eggers had tried to get this movie made for years to no avail.  As a child, he was obsessed with witches and this movie is a result of that obsession.  But this movie is exhibit A on why it is not always a good idea to let the writer be the director or vice-versa.  The movie feels like a mishmash of several stories (which it is) with no logical connectors.  The only point to the movie is like Rob Zombie's Lords of Salem, to out-devil The Exorcist.

To be fair, though, the movie is beautifully shot with natural light, giving it a otherworldly ethereal feeling.  The story pace, while boring to younger horror fans who expect a Boo! film, is actually quite good.  The slow burn of paranoia that builds to a fever pitch at the end is captivating.  But the problem is that we have heard all this before with stories of witches and the ending is hackneyed when Thomasin joins the coven naked and howling in the forest around a fire at night.  The film essentially plays out like a hysterical melodrama with an unsatisfying payoff.  In the end, it rings hollow.  It feels as if the judges of Salem have come to the present to recall their most unbelievable accounts in lurid detail.  And what ultimately killed it, in my opinion, was the hype that surrounded it.  Essentially, it suffered the from the same issues that surrounded The Blair Witch Project.  Watch only if you are morbidly curious, but I would say skip this one.

The Jungle Book (2016)

3 Stars (out of four)

Full disclosure here, The Jungle Book animated film by Disney ranks not only my favorite Disney film, but quite possibly in my favorite films of all time. It was one of those movies and stories that captivated me as a child.  In the pre-VHS days (or at least when a VCR cost $1000 in 1978 dollars), all I had was the lp (for you younger folks, lp mean long playing record.  You now know them as "vinyl.") and I played it over and over again to be swept away with Mowgli, Bagheera and Baloo.  So, it is with more than a touch of sentiment that I went to see this new film.  I was really excited.  After all, "real" animals talking with Mowgli?  How awesome is that?  Pretty awesome it turns out...

For those of you who have not seen or read The Jungle Book, (or have lived under a rock for over 100 years since its publication), Mowgli (great newcomer Neel Sethi) is a young orphan who was adopted by wolves in an Indian jungle.  He grows in the jungle like a wolf, talking to and living amongst the wolf pack.  When Shere Khan (Idris Elba) the tiger, who hates all men including Mowgli, threatens to kill him before he can grow to be a man, Bagheera the panther (Ben Kingsley) volunteers to take him to the man village for Mowgli's (and the rest of the jungle's) protection.  What follows is a colorful series of adventures with different animals including Baloo the bear (Bill Murray), Kaa the boa constrictor (Scarlet Johansson) and King Louie the orangutan (Christopher Walken).  Mowgli doesn't want to leave the comfort of the jungle and eventually must stand up to Shere Khan to protect the wolf pack and all of his friends.

The movie is an absolute delight.  The effects are amazing and for the most part, pretty convincing.  The story is a little more modern, with new takes on some old songs like "Trust In Me" and "The Bare Necessities."  Neel Sethi is great as Mowgli.  If he keeps up with this, he will become a great actor.  It is so nice when a child actor can actually act and not just be a cute face.  The movie walks a tightrope on being true to its source material (both the book AND the Disney movie) while staying relevant to today's audiences.

And that's where the movie goes off the rails.  I had a big issue with the central theme of the movie.  There are some stories that despite they were written in periods with different mores and ideas, the themes are universal across the ages.  When you thrust modern ideas into very classical motifs, it causes a weird dissonance that doesn't ring true.  So what do I mean?  The Jungle Book is an allegory to growing into adulthood.  The jungle is the carefree and sunny existence of childhood, filled with delights, discoveries and the occasional danger.  We use these experiences to learn and grow.  The man village is adulthood, the thing all people should eventually reach.  In this movie, Mowgli's talents of reasoning and being able to do things other animals can't seems like an endorsement for, dare I say, a colonial mindset.  While he may lack the strength or cunning of some of the animals, he is clearly superior to their limited faculties.  He is already the "adult," so to speak.  In addition, he eventually stays in the jungle, rather than continuing on to manhood.  While this is clearly a wonderful message to children and stoners, the rest of us have to put aside those childish ways and assume the responsibility of being an adult.  So, in essence, this movie totally misses the point of the original story in the first place.  It endorses the idea of perpetual childhood, which, in the end, is a horrible message to send to kids.

But, the movie is quite fun and will be a great lark to take the kids.  It has gusto, thrills and chills.  Don't bother with the 3D.  It is another money grab and doesn't really add anything to the experience.

Eye In The Sky

3.5 Stars (out of four)

Eye In The Sky was a bit of a quandary for me.  I thought it was going to annoy me or inflame me as a ham-handed liberal screed against the military from people who have never worn a uniform and just love to point fingers.  In a time with a President who increasingly prefers to use targeted attacks with drones, this movie and its implications are quite relevant to the current environment.

The movie seeks to explore the morality of push-button wars, where people can be killed by remote control thousands of miles away.  It opens up with a family living in a terrorist-controlled neighborhood in Kenya.  There is a joint US/UK drone mission to kill a known terrorist with a combat drone circling overhead.  At first, we see the family life of a mother, father and daughter and the father's attempt to raise and teach his daughter against the conservative Muslim terrorists that occupy the neighborhood.  The joint mission finds a particular terrorist in a building with suicide vests and bombers that are being prepared for an imminent attack.  Just before the house is to be leveled by the drone, the little girl shows up selling bread in front of the house and will surely be killed in the blast.  What follows is a discussion on whether the strike should proceed that leads to the highest levels of the US and UK governments:  Do you blow up a building, surely killing men that will kill scores of others as well as an innocent girl, or do you hold off?

This movie is surprisingly egalitarian in its treatment of both the military and civilian leadership.  It explores the motives behind all decisions that are made, including, but not limited to:  legal authority to launch, legal culpability of the operation, public backlash, idealism versus pragmatism; and none of them are treated flippantly.  All are given equal measure, and depending on what side of the argument you fall on, you will be at times furious and others cheering.  But for me personally, the central question is this:  All war is horrible.  Why should it make a difference whether you know the victim or not?  By focusing on the little girl, the movie does an amazing thing which often gets whitewashed even today.  It makes you look at the tragedy of war up close by personalizing it with the little girl.  You now have a stake in this, and it makes you sick to contemplate her fate.  But this is the problem with how we are fed war and violence in today's media.  Too often we are presented sanitized versions of war, from Hollywood showing bloodless battles to CNN blurring out beheaded or blown apart bodies.  War becomes vainglorious, even fun with this depiction, and it does the public a great disservice.  War is gruesome, bloody, horrible and destroys everything it touches.  That is why it should be considered a last resort, not the first, second or third. Lest one think I am a peacenik dove, I'm not.  There are things worth fighting for, killing for, and dying for.  But war is not an endeavor to be entered lightly, and when it is, it must be swift and brutal.  This movie leaves you with this question:  In the end, is it worth it?

Every performance in this movie is stellar, and the movie is a fitting coda to Alan Rickman's career, who died not long after this film was made.  This movie will make you think, and will challenge you.  A truly adult film that can be savored and debated for days after.

Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice

2 Stars (out of four)

This was a tough one.  Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (henceforth to be known as BVS) has me at an impasse.  There is a good movie in here somewhere.  But the movie is deeply flawed and needs a lot of work.

This movie takes up in the immediate aftermath of Man of Steel.  Metropolis is leveled after Supes (Henry Cavill) had his big dustup with General Zod.  With all the destruction, an older and meaner Batman (Ben Affleck in a GREAT turn as the Caped Crusader) is horrified at the power Superman could wield if left unchecked.  He teams up with Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg, in the worst take on any character ever, including Lord Dark Helmet in Spaceballs) to create Kryptonite or get some or something, to kill Superman.  They fight.  And Wonder Woman shows up.  And Doomsday.  And the rest of the Justice League. And...

If this sounds like a cobbled together summary, it is only reflecting the cobbled together plot, if you want to call it that, this movie has.  I usually don't do this, but I am going to have to geek out a lot for this review, because that's who this movie was made for, die-hard geeks.  The biggest problem with this movie (indicative with its 5+ screenwriters), is that it is a Batman/Superman greatest hits movie.  The movie borrows elements from no less than 8 different good story lines in the comics.  Chief among these include, but are not limited to: The Dark Knight Returns, Kingdom Come, The Death of Superman, Batman: A Death In The Family, Batman: Year One, Crisis on Infinite Earths, Final Crisis, and Flash: Rebirth.  These all are good stories in themselves, but when you try to combine them into a cohesive whole with no context, the movie fails miserably.  It jumps from point to point to point with no logical connectors anywhere.  I have read most of these stories and I was lost multiple times in the movie.  The movie jumps through time, has extended dream sequences, and nothing is explained.  Unless you are a literati of the comics, you will be utterly baffled by a lot of what this movie has to offer.  Worse, the whole purpose of the movie seems to be a setup for the upcoming Justice League of America movie.  Way too many elements are in this movie in a cynical, hubris-filled expectation that you will come to the next movie.  Marvel has done a fantastic job at slowly building their movies, methodically building a universe for over eight years so that their large event movies naturally flow. Outside of Christopher Nolan's awful Dark Knight trilogy, every DC movie has been made separately with no lines tying them together, and now BVS is rushing to catch up to sew up a unified universe.  Because of this ad hoc storytelling, BVS seems forced and doesn't really work.

Now, let's move on to characters.  Zack Snyder, apart from ruining the movie aesthetic with his slo-mo/ramp up/explosion style so evident in Watchmen and 300, should be sentenced to 300 lashes for allowing Jesse Eisenberg to experiment with the character of Lex Luthor.  Luthor is an iconographic villain whose personality is very established.  Eisenberg plays him as a cross between Ledger's unhinged Joker in The Dark Knight with his super-quirky and super-annoying portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network; the end result of which is a hot mess that comes off as incredibly annoying and unbelievable for one of the most intelligent and conniving villains ever written.  He's an evil buffoon here, and it's horrifying that anyone thought this experiment was a good idea during filming.  Also, both Bats and Supes have major personality changes as well.  They kill several people, and despite both of their methods, that was a sacrosanct line they never crossed in the comics.  It's as jarring as if Mother Teresa deciding to put on a miniskirt and becoming a streetwalker.  Amy Adams, much as I absolutely love her, is totally miscast as Lois Lane, and doesn't even do anything except be a damsel in distress for Supes to save over and over again.

Despite all of that, there is material to like here that is genuinely good.  Both Cavill and Affleck are great in their respective roles.  Affleck, in particular, is amazing as an older, more bitter Batman/Bruce Wayne.  I dare say he is the best Batman, I liked him that much.  I was worried about the Doomsday character, but it was very well-realized, but doesn't make a lot of sense being in this movie.  And kudos to the much-awaited and overdue Wonder Woman.  Gail Godot was incredible as our Amazonian warrior, and her character was put to very good use at the end.  The only complaint I have is that she is a bit cold, while the comics Wonder Woman is actually a very warm person.  I hope her upcoming movie will delve into the born warrior/ambassador of peace dichotomy.  Finally, the big fight between Supes and Bats lives up to the hype.  It was exciting and fun.  Unfortunately, all this good stuff gets overshadowed by its flaws.  This is an imperfect movie, but is worth a watch.  Keep your expectations low.

Captain America: Civil War

3 Stars (out of four)

Are you on Team Cap or Team Stark?  That is the question for this year since the godawful Twilight series is hopefully dead, dismembered, embalmed, mummified, and buried 12-feet deep in a cement and lead-lined mortuary with a 20-foot steel vault door with seven time dial locks, three different electromagnetic locks, banded in titanium and surrounded by a triple 39-foot tall electrified fence with concertina wire, guard towers with shoot to kill orders, dog patrols with an AWACS, satellite AND AC-130 gunship in constant hover so the series will NEVER be spoken of again.

Whew!  But I digress...

Captain America: Civil War, the throwdown we have been waiting for for three years is finally here!  And it's lots of big, dumb fun.  We pick up where last year's Avengers: Age of Ultron ends, and a small digression with Ant-Man.  The Avengers are still a dysfunctional family to say the least, Nick Fury is missing, SHIELD is in ruins, Thor is in his magic jacuzzi cave somewhere, and the Hulk (i.e. the most expensive special effect of the series) is gone and everyone secretly hopes he is dead.  The movie opens with the Avengers taking down some bad dudes who want to do something that will kill a lot of people for some reason.  During the fight, an explosion kills a lot of innocent bystanders.  The world is horrified because since the Avengers have now essentially leveled New York, Washington DC, Sekovia and now Lagos, the UN feels it must pass some accords to put a leash on them.  They must be now registered, give up their identities, and do what the UN says.  Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) is all for this because it reins them in and makes them answerable for their actions (i.e. sell-out stooge).  Steve Rogers/Captain America (Chris Evans) is against this because it robs them of their freedom and being subservient to political whim does not sit well with him (i.e. whiny brat).  The heroes take sides (look at the poster) and whoop some ass.

As I said earlier, this is actually a pretty fun romp.  Unlike Iron Man or Captain America: Winter Soldier that actually try to give poignant and relevant messages for today's environment, this is basically just a big fight movie.  I am not saying that's a bad thing, but the intellectual rigor of this film doesn't really pass a 12-year-old's.  That's too bad, because many Marvel movies, Winter Soldier in particular, work because they actually have something to say beyond a big fight.  Marvel Comics, in general, work for the same reason.  The secret to Marvel's success was that back in the 60's when it started, all the stories had heroes with fatal flaws; they were like us with relatable and understandable problems in contrast to the living iconography of DC heroes Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman.  And while it is fun to take a break and just revel in some fun every now and then like Civil War, I hope this is not a trend.

A big problem with this movie for newbies is that you will be pretty lost. Marvel has done a masterful job at weaving together all of their movies and TV shows into a large, cohesive whole while being able to tell individual stories as well.  The problem though, is that if you don't follow them, you will be a little lost.  Each movie feeds the next, and this one in particular has a lot of allusions to the older movies.  Try as it might to summarize in exposition, there is a lot of material to cover in this film, and if you haven't been keeping up, you will be a little lost.  Heck, I've seen all of them and even I would get lost occasionally trying to remember things that happened in previous films.  That caution aside, I say go see this. It's all big, dumb spectacle, but it is a fun ride.  There are some new guys thrown in the mix, too, Black Panther and Spider-man, both handled well, but also seem to be a little gratuitous.  It is exciting to see them both, though, and they will make fine additions to new movies in the Marvel Universe.

Go see it, have fun, bring the kids (if you must) and enjoy!  Just don't expect too much, and you will have a great time.