Gravity

3.5 Stars (out of four)

Gravity was not what I expected.  I had heard that it wasn't very good from a person who had seen it. I thought it was going to be like the 2003 film Open Water, a film where a shipwrecked couple ends up in shark-infested waters.  It gets more and more intense until SPOILER ALERT!!! they end up getting eaten at the end.  With the Gravity previews, the film had a similar feel.  But, to my surprise, it was something I did not expect.

Gravity starts with Dr. Ryan Stone, Sandra Bullock's character who is assigned to a space shuttle mission testing a new sensor foe the Hubble telescope.  During an EVA mission, the Russians destroyed one of their satellites which causes a storm of space debris that destroys the shuttle and sends Ryan hurtling off into space.  George Clooney's character, Matt Kowalsky, manages to save her and gets her back to the destroyed shuttle.  They decide to go to the International Space Station to use the Soyuz capsule to get back to Earth.  Bad situation follows bad situation.  Will she get back?  Will she die?  You have to see it.

I don't want to give away the ending, but I do have to give away some details.  Ryan ends up on her own fairly quickly.  So, like Tom Hanks in Cast Away, this is really an acting exercise.  Sandra must carry this film on her own, and she does it incredibly well.  But a good acting performance isn't enough.  The movie has to be compelling, it has to be entertaining, and this movie has both in spades.  It is equally exciting during the space scenes and emotional when events slow down.  The action scenes are incredible. They do, however, remind me a little of Armageddon, as thing after thing keeps going wrong, bouncing from worse to worse situation.  But the best, and most important part is, it is incredibly life-affirming.   Alfonse Cuáron is known for creating scenes of great majesty and beauty, and this film is no exception.  The only criticism I have with the film is that there really isn't a lot to it, the same as Cast Away.  There is only so much you can or can't do with only one character, so there tends to be a lot of wasted time on vistas rather than a story.  However, I would recommend that if anyone see it, see it in IMAX.  Like 2001: A Space Odyssey, it will lose a lot on a smaller screen.  Other than that, it is very tight, very watchable and worth the time.

Captain Phillips

3.5 Stars (out of four)

Captain Phillips is the first shot across the bow for this Oscar season.  It is truly a good film, and approaches great.  I am hoping we will be gretting some more shows like this during this season.  I was beginning to think that intelligence was dead in American cinema, but most times, the Christmas Oscar season restores my faith that Hollywood is still vital when it wants to be.  It may be gasping for breath, but quality still exists.

Captain Phillips' story is known to most people who have any inkling of recent events.  Phillips, ably played by Tom Hanks, was a captain of an American merchant container ship that was hijacked by Somali pirates in 2010 while it was transiting around the Horn of Africa.  After a brief standoff on the ship, he convinces the pirates off the ship, but they take him hostage in a lifeboat.  By this time, the US Navy caught up with them and he was rescued by a team of Navy Seal sharpshooters on the open seas.  The real events were a dramatic demonstration to most Americans of how bad the situation is around Somalia since it caught the news cycle as Phillips is an American. The film is a dramatic retelling of the events.

The crucial element about Captain Phillips that makes it so good is not only does it make the events nail-bitingly compelling, but it gives a human face to the pirates.  It does not make the pirates look like good guys, but it shows what a bad situation from which these men come.  They are not evil, merely incredibly desperate.  It makes the point that most of the pirates are not criminal masterminds; they are mostly unemployed fishermen who don't know how to do anything else.  They are also not particularly smart and are also not the recipients of the ransoms they demand.  They simply are pawns for gang lords who take the money from them.  The movie is not trying to make you feel sorry for them, rather trying to let you know how complicated the situation in Somalia is.  The main Somali pirate, Muse, seems out of his depth most of the time.  From trying to prove himself to his elders and tribe, to securing the ship, to keeping a particularly psychotic member of his crew calm, to dealing with the arrival of the Navy, to finally being sentenced to prison, he always seems to just be barely keeping his head above water.  He walks around bewildered, not prepared for how fluid the situation gets, and shows he is not particularly adaptable.  What he naïvely thinks should be simple! a snatch-and-grab with an easy payoff, rapidly spins out of his ability to control.  His situation is almost pitiful.  He is just not meant for this type of work.  In the end, it is just sad more than anything.

Tom Hanks is as brilliant as ever.  But what I liked about this film was that it, however briefly, dealt with the aftermath of the kidnapping, rather than ending immediately after the rescue.  You see that, because of the stress and worry, after Phillips was rescued, he breaks down sobbing and is almost incoherent.  This is something we do not usually see in these types of stories, yet is a very real outcome in hostage situations.  The only reason this movie does not get four stars is because the director keeps using the vomit-cam (the bouncing, hand-held camera style so popular these days).  Now, I realize the movie is shot on the high seas and that they are never still, but Jaws was also shot on the ocean, and there was not the bouncing as in this one.  I know filmmakers think it gives the film a touch of realism or edginess, but to me it just looks sloppy, and literally makes me sick.  Since I don't want to be nauseous when I watch a film, I really wish people would stop using this technique except sparingly.  The movie otherwise is great and worth the time.

Honeymoon In Vegas

1 Star (out of four)

First off, I must apologize to Hollywood for an earlier statement.  I said when did Hollywood just assume our IQs just dropped precipitously?  Rhenish I first wrote that, I thought it was recently, but it wasn't recently.  Turns out they have always believed we were incredibly stupid if they thought this stinkburger was comedy.  Google's dictionary defines the word comedy thusly,

"professional entertainment consisting of jokes and satirical sketches, intended to make an audience laugh."

Honeymoon In Vegas meets only one of these criteria.  It is professional (sort of).  It is not entertaining, there are no jokes that I could see except for a good one at the end (which is why this gets one star instead of being a bomb), it does have satirical situations, I guess.  But the key is the second part, "intended to make the audience laugh."  On this, it fails miserably.

Honeymoon In Vegas starts off innocently enough.  A man, played by Nicholas Cage, makes a promise to his domineering mother on her deathbed he will never marry, resulting in severe commitment issues.  He meets a wonderful girl (the pretty but oh so tragically horse-faced Sarah Jessica Parker) and they date for years.  Finally he relents and takes her to Las Vegas to get married.  While there, mobster James Caan sees them and instantly falls in love with her.  He cons Cage's character in a card game.  In order for Cage to settle the debt, the mobster asks to have Parker's character for the weekend, where Caan then tries to convince her to marry him.  Cage then bounces between Nevada and Hawaii and back to Nevada in a desperate attempt to get her back.

God, where do I start?  First, at the weekend in Vegas, there is an Elvis impersonator convention going on, so the soundtrack is all Elvis music and there are Elvi everywhere.  While this is mildly amusing (and a little surreal), it gets old real fast. You see thin Elvi, fat Elvi, old Elvi, young Elvi, short Elvis, REALLT tall Elvis, black Elvis, Indian (turban and all) Elvi, a kid Elvis, Elvis, Elvis, Elvis.  I like Elvis as much as the next person, but it is possible to get too much of a good thing.  I thought the Elvis thing was done to much better effect in the quirky (and surprisingly violent) 3000 Miles To Graceland with Kevin Costner and Kurt Russel.  The one actually funny joke is that to get back to Vegas from Hawaii, Cage hitches a ride with The Flying Elvises, a skydiving team.  Their cavalier attitude towards what they do and how they dress is pretty funny, but this cannot make up for 80 minutes of not-funny that precedes this joke.

Next, it is not the actors' fault they have to read such crap.  It is their fault for agreeing to be in such a stupid movie.  Nick Cage's performance is great, James Caan plays Sonny Corleone again.  But the sad waste is Sarah Jessica Parker.  She can do comedy (as we amply saw later in Sex And The City).  While she was the weakest link in that show, she is funny and there is a certain something about her.  But she and her talents are absolutely wasted in the dumb blonde role of this movie.  Granted, she is angry to be passed off as a prize in a bet (And I take it back.  There are two good jokes in the movie.  When she realizes and then loudly proclaims that Cage has made her a whore in the middle of a crowded room, the reactions of everyone is very funny), but are we honestly expected to believe that she would go from ready to marry a fiancé whom she has dated for 2+ years to move on and marry a much older man after four days in Hawaii?  I realize comedy expects us to suspend disbelief to swallow the absurdity of whatever situation we're watching, but this stretches the bounds of reality way too much.

I could go on and on tearing apart this big steaming mass, but suffice to say it is dumb, dumb, dumb, and pretty insulting as well, to women in particular.  I guess I am so vehement in this review because I have heard for years how funny film this was supposed to be.  Maybe it is a casualty of shifting comedic tastes through the years, but it sucks, and I feel betrayed.  It all comes back to story.  If you have a good script, the rest will follow.  If you have a bad one, well, you can keep a dung beetle as a pet, but you still have two problems.  It's a bug and it eats crap, which is exactly what the producers of this film make us do by watching it.

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.