Kung Fu Panda 3

Kung Fu Panda was a gorgeous, funny, exciting action-adventure.  Kung Fu Panda 3 is a not-so-gorgeous, reasonably funny action-adventure.

I recall Kung Fu Panda as featuring a bright, vibrant color palette that seemed to make every frame a work of art.  Either it was a fault with my theater’s projection, or Kung Fu Panda 3 used a more muted palette, one that looked nice but didn’t dazzle in the way the first film had.

Palette choices aside, the film felt more like a remake of than a sequel to the original.  Both feature old foes, back from a time in (a) prison, or (b) the afterlife.  Both feature training montages, a climactic battle, and a victory founded in the principle of finding one’s true self.  Both have the power to entertain children, but I found myself growing restless during the second act of the latter entry, making a non-imperative trip to the restroom and taking the time to inspect the “coming attractions” posters on my way to and from.

Still, my kids rolled out of the theater energized, and they happily discussed the film over sundaes afterward.  And hey, if they’re happy, I’m happy.  I just don’t know that I’m going to be in a rush to see Kung Fu Panda 4.

Argo

Argo is funny and gripping and altogether successful.

Ben Affleck directed and starred in the thriller, a (reasonably) true story about the spiriting of six American diplomats out of Iran in the wake of the 1979 revolution.  It seems like the man hasn't taken a misstep since Hollywoodland, and his is becoming a name I increasingly associate with quality filmmaking.  With Argo, he assembles a top-notch cast and production team, hands them a solid screenplay, and polishes their work with the collaboration of editor William Goldenberg.

But wait - how can a movie about getting six Americans out of Iran be funny?  It's all in the writing.  While Argo is a thriller first, Screenwriter Chris Terrio wrote snappy, sharp dialogue for its Hollywood-based characters.  A cast including Alan Arkin and John Goodman bring that dialogue to life, and Affleck and editor Goldenberg make it pop with perfectly arranged compositions, perfectly timed reaction shots, and a sense of momentum that allows levity while keeping the audience keyed in on the seriousness of the situation [Side note: Goldenberg won the 2013 Academy Award for editing for his work on Argo.  Learning stuff like that while conducting basic research is part of the fun of writing this blog.].

That editing is also what makes the movie gripping.  How do you make watching a phone ring interesting?  By cutting footage of a lonesome phone in an empty room with footage of the man making the call, of the men racing to answer to the call, and the people whose lives depend on the outcome of that call.  Argo is filled with this kind of stuff, taking the mundane aspects of the operation at hand and lending them urgency through top-notch editing.

In short, Argo is a testament to the value of craft, to polishing a script and casting the right people and getting the hair and makeup just so and editing the footage with a perfect blade.  The result?  Another winner for Ben Affleck.  May he bring us many more.

Godzilla (2014)

I'm going to preface this review with a little personal background. It'll help if you know where I'm coming from.

Some of my earliest and fondest memories include spending Friday nights with my sister, camped out in our family VW Van in the driveway. Our father would run out a portable tv on an extension cord, and my sister and I would eat popcorn and watch Creature Feature in our own little world. On many of those Friday evenings, the creature of the week was Godzilla, another monster from Toho Studios' stable, or some combination thereof.

When I had kids, I made a family tradition of hanging out on the couch on Friday nights and watching Japanese monster movies. There was something about those artifacts of the '60s and '70s, that combination of giant monsters and visible costume-zippers, that spoke to children. We had a video game for the original X-Box that was basically Mortal Kombat, but with giant Japanese monsters. I can't imagine how many times I've heard an offscreen announcer intone something like, “Space Godzilla versus Mecha Gigan! Monsters, fight!”

When I was a C-130 pilot, I used to travel to Tokyo quite often. I'd always stop by the same toy store near Ueno Park to pick up some Bandai Godzilla dolls. By the time I'd made my last trip, our 3 boys had a collection including nearly every Godzilla monster, as well as quite a few creatures from the Gamera films. These are not carefully preserved collector's items. These are battered and worn everyday toys, the stuff of the imaginations of the next generation of Ellermanns.

My point is that I didn't come to this movie as a casual consumer of summer fare. I came to this movie as a guy who has seen every single Godzilla movie, even the really bad ones. I came to this movie ready to see it as part of a long, long series of sequels, reboots, and reimaginings. I came to this movie ready to be entertained.

I got my money's worth.

The first two major players Godzilla presents are Sally Hawkins (Made in Dagenham, Happy-Go-Lucky) and Ken Watanabe (Letters from Iwo Jima). Next, we see Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad) and Juliette Binoche (Trois couleurs: Bleu). Later, we get Elizabeth Olsen (Martha Marcy May Marlene) and David Strathairn (Temple Grandin). 'All right,' I thought. 'Even if this movie is terrible, a whole bunch of legitimately excellent actors are getting big, blockbuster paydays out of it. That's a win, right there.' Eventually, we learn that the hero is a Navy EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) lieutenant. 'Hey,' I thought, 'I have a buddy who wrote a book based on his timeas an EOD bubba. This is cool!' Basically, the movie got me onboard pretty early.

Having done that, Godzilla works hard to keep me, the fan, on board. Its secondary monsters (called MUTOs, a marginally more creative moniker than, say Mechagodzilla) leave trails similar to those of the larval giant-moth creatures of Mothra. Godzillla himself gets his first reveal at sea, thoughtlessly making naval vessels bob in the ocean like so many rubber duckies. At one point, our hero rescues a little Japanese boy who looks straight out of Godzilla vs. Megalon. Ken Watanabe gets to pretend he's Takashi Shimura and intone classic Godzilla movie lines like, “Man believes he controls nature, but he is stupid, proud, and wrong. Nature always restores balance.” Jet fighters fly ridiculously low to the ground, only to get swatted out of the sky (as opposed to shooting from a safe altitude and distance). Cities get leveled, flooded, and irradiated. A good time is had by all.

And Godzilla, man, this Godzilla is great. The film retains the classic roar. Godzy dispatches one of his enemies with a move cribbed directly from Godzilla: Final Wars. The reveal of his atomic fire breath is so awesome that it had my now - 14-yr-old son bouncing in his chair with delight. Perhaps best of all, this Godzilla takes a page from the later Showa era, when the King of Monsters served mainly as a defender of the natural order (and, by extension, humanity). I walked into Godzilla expecting a standard rehash of the original Gojira. I got something like that, but with a heaping helping of Invasion of the Astro Monster. What a pleasant surprise.

'All right,' you're thinking, 'this guy likes Godzilla movies. Godzilla is, obviously a Godzilla movie, so he likes it. But will I like it? Is it actually, y'know, good?'

Well, taken in the broader context of contemporary American popular film, Godzilla's just ok. It has a terrible score, wastes the talented Elizabeth Olsen in an underwritten part, and takes a mighty long time to get to the rompin' stompin' giant monster action. Taken in the context of the mostly-terrible (beloved, but terrible) films that preceded it, however, it's marvelous. It looks gorgeous, it respects its unique filmic tradition, and it sets up a world in which we can look forward to continued sequels. It's everything you could ask for from a Godzilla movie.

I (and my progeny) approve.

PS You may enjoy the Godzilla movie reviews I've written since starting this blog in 2006:

Godzilla vs. Megalon

Gojira 

Son of Godzilla 

Godzilla: Final Wars 

Godzilla vs. Gigan 

Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla 

Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster 

Terror of Mechagodzilla 

Invasion of the Astro-Monster 

Ghidorah:The Three-Headed Monster 

Godzilla 1998 (written by my then – 10-yr-old) 

Godzilla vs. Gigan (written by my then - 11-yr-old) 

Godzilla vs. Megaguirus (written by my then – 12-yr-old) 

John Carter

I was all set to give John Carter a fair shot.  I like and respect the previous work of its director, Andrew Stanton, I’m always up for a science fiction adventure, and the love interest is pretty.  For its part, John Carter did its best to wow me.  It had all the elements of an exciting story, it introduced cool creatures and civilizations, and it ended in a rousing battle of good vs. evil.  Unfortunately, the film felt flat.  It put me off right at the beginning, and I never could bring myself to invest in what was happening onscreen.

John Carter begins with two false starts.  They make sense by the time the closing credits roll, but they made me hesitate to commit once the main story got underway.  Once the story does get moving, we’re introduced to the eponymous Carter, realize it’s a year or two after the close of the Civil War, and learn that Carter was a Confederate cavalry officer in that war.  Judging by his conduct toward the U.S. Army officer who wants his help for something, we gather that he has a deep hatred for the Union and the soldiers who fought for it.

Ok, you lost me right there.  The Confederate cause, which they labeled “states’ rights,” was actually the right of states not only to choose to enslave human beings, but to extend the Peculiar Institution to newly chartered states and territories.  Screw anyone and everyone who was on board with that program.  [Personal aside #1: I have children in Florida public schools.  The Ellermann family position on the Civil War does not go over well.]  [Personal aside #2: I can’t wait to leave.]  John Carter didn’t bother to give its protagonist exculpatory dialogue, so I began the story in opposition to him.  When he finds himself on Mars and clapped into chains, I thought, “Serves him right.”

Dominic West, whom everyone who has seen ‘The Wire’ thinks is a great guy, plays the antagonist.  He’s a Martian warlord who’s supposed to be really evil, but is no more evil than any number of other conquerors in history.  Had John Carter allowed him to Rickman it up and have some fun, we might have enjoyed him.  He plays the material straight, however, which made our only grounds for opposition the fact that he meant to unify his planet. 

Unfortunately, I never had a reason to oppose his conquest beyond a general sense of “conquest is bad.”  The “good guy” city-state, led by the great Ciaran Hinds and represented by the remarkably attractive Lynn Collins, didn’t show me why it was better than Westville.  In fact, it was led by a moron and had a princess who was willing to sacrifice untold numbers of her subjects’ lives to avoid marrying someone she didn’t like because “that’s no way to live.”  Sure thing, lady.  Tell it to the widows and orphans of the men you sacrificed on the altar of your quality of life.  The other sentient race we met, which also feared Western domination, was brutish and nasty and could have used a little Baltimore justice.

And away we go, I guess.  John Carter does a fish-out-of water thing when Carter first arrives on the planet, then kicks over to a reluctant hero narrative with space monsters and a princess whose costume design could have used a little more Frazetta and little less drapery.  It has sword fights and laser beams and betrayals and heroics and all the hallmarks of a grand adventure, but I never had a dog in the fight.

I’ve seen Stanton run rings around stories like this in Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and WALL-E. Next time around, here’s hoping he returns to form and gives us heroes we can root for, villains we can love to hate, an adventure we can get into, and some depth of meaning.  Unfortunately, John Carter simply does not deliver.

Drive

Drive is confused.  Nevertheless, it works on the surface and provides an engrossing hour and a half at the movies.

Drive’s core story purports to be the parable of the turtle and the scorpion.  You know the story: Scorpion asks Turtle for a ride across the river.  Turtle says, “No.  When we’re halfway across, you’ll sting me.”  Scorpion replies, “Think about it: if I sting you, we both die.  What would be the point of that?”  Turtle sees Scorpion’s logic and tell him to climb aboard.  Halfway across the river, Scorpion stings Turtle.  As they’re both drowning, Turtle says, “Why did you sting me?”  Scorpion replies, “You knew what I was when you agreed to carry me.”

In the film, Ryan Gosling’s driver wears a satin jacket with a scorpion embroidered on the back.  Toward the end of the narrative, he tells one of his adversaries, “If you carry a scorpion, you’re going to get stung” (or something to that effect).  Problem is, his adversaries don’t even know who he is until it’s too late.  The parable doesn’t hold, because Drive’s real point is “don’t mess with scorpions.”

Ok, so something got lost between drafts.  Nevertheless, Drive succeeds because it features an interesting lead, supporting characters with surprising subtlety, and a sufficiently complex plot to keep us on our toes until the closing credits.

Ryan Gosling plays Driver, a character similar to Alain Delon’s Jef Costello in Le Samourai and George Clooney’s Jack in The American.  An introvert with a gift and a passion for his work, he says little and controls his face and body language.  This makes him a cool, yet blank, slate: a projection screen for the aspirations and/or desires of the audience.  When he notices the disturbingly skinny Carey Mulligan, he toys with making the single greatest mistake a character like him can make: he connects.  You probably think you know where this is going, and you may well be right.  However, it still works because Mulligan’s character isn’t just another damsel to distress.  She’s a fully realized human being, perhaps more fully realized than our protagonist; and so are the people to whom she’s connected, and to whom they’re connected.  Even the villains fascinate us with their back stories and their agendas, a fascination facilitated by remarkably unique, yet effective, casting.

Soon enough, these characters find themselves embroiled in a well-executed story of trust, doubt, and revelation that engages our imagination and helps us forget that we’ve seen this protagonist’s character arc before and we know how it’s going to end. 

The result? Though it’s little mixed up on its central parable, Drive delivers a tale well told in an immersive world.  You could do much, much worse.

Contagion

I used to work at a place that did professional wargaming.  Not the kind with little paper chits and 20-sided dice, but the kind in which we got a bunch of smart and capable people in a room, threw them a scenario, and analyzed how they did (or didn’t) work together to deal with the situation.  Contagion feels like a dramatization of one of those wargames.

The scenario: a highly contagious, deadly virus comes out of Macau, borne abroad by several of the thousands of international travelers who pass through in a given week.  It propagates around the world exponentially.  Player #1: you’re an epidemiologist with the World Health Organization.  Player #2: you’re the head of the CDC.  Player #3: Homeland security.  Player #4: a suburban city councilwoman at the American center of the epidemic.  Go.

Does it work in the film?  Yeah.  Likeable stars like Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, and Lawrence Fishburne put faces to dilemmas, helping us humanize the scope of the epidemic and empathize with their respective ethical and professional challenges.  The stories weave together fluidly, each informing the others and catching us up in their combined narrative.  The film rockets along and never feels like the dull procedural it could have become.  Contagion challenged and fascinated me, making me feel like I was back in the room of one of those wargames, moving things along and learning from the process.

Grim as the film’s subject matter surely is, I found it to be intellectually and emotionally satisfying.  I walked out thinking, “That’s how it could really play out.  Nice work.”  I haven’t changed my mind, even if I have changed my habits: I’m washing my hands more.

The Lincoln Lawyer

In The Lincoln Lawyer, Matthew McConaughey plays a (mostly) shirt-wearing defense attorney of what we’d call the worst kind.  He rips off his clients, finds ways to get scumbags off the hook, and makes a lot of money.  This guy thinks he’s got it all figured out, until he takes a murder case with unexpected wrinkles.  Away we go.

I know what you’re thinking.  “Sounds like a disposable dime-store thriller.”  I won’t argue with you: The Lincoln Lawyer is a dime-store thriller.  Thing is, it’s a really good dime-store thriller.  The hero seems like a scumbag, but reveals hidden quality.  Marisa Tomei plays the love interest and, well, she’s Marisa Tomei.  The villain’s villainous, the plot twists and twists again, and at one point I genuinely couldn’t imagine how McConaughey was going to get out of his jam.  This film entertained and surprised me, and it wrapped up in a most satisfying way.  The Lincoln Lawyer shows what happens when a thriller’s done right.  I hope they make a sequel.