Beasts Of The Southern Wild

At Sundance this year, first-time filmmaker Benh Zeitlin won praise for his imaginative fantasy tale set against the backdrop of a Post-Katrina New Orleans, while his 6-year-old ing?nue Quvenzhan? Wallis was the talk of the festival. The accolades carried on through Cannes, where the feisty feature was heralded in particular for its majestic cinematography. Unfortunately, outside of the rarified air of these prestigious festivals, Beasts of the Southern Wild maintains its eerie beauty, but feels frustratingly thin in story and character.

Off the coast of Louisiana lays a forgotten island community that is lovingly called the Bathtub by its residents, because of its tendency to flood. Deemed too dangerous by modern society, the Bathtub is filled with miscreants and misfits. Among them is a scrappy and wild-haired little girl called Hushpuppy (Wallis) who knows well the dangers of this life. She's schooled about the importance of being self-sufficient, a lesson hammered home by tales of massive horned beasts called aurochs, which long ago roamed the land, ruled the Earth, and gobbled up children in front of their helpless parents.

To live in the Bathtub, you must be a survivor, able to find food and high ground when the going gets rough. Raised by her alcoholic and tormented father Wink (Dwight Henry), things are often rough for Hushpuppy, who soothes herself by imagining the mother she never knew cooing advice and lullabies. But even this tenuous stability is threatened when Wink returns home after days of being MIA, and carries with him troubling signs of sickness. Before Hushpuppy can find a cure for what ails him, a terrible storm brews that forces the pair to hunker down. As the rain falls heavy and hard, and the floodwaters rise, Hushpuppy is forced to face her father's impending demise.

Established as a place where people revel in their freedom from convention, drinking, dancing and celebrating with a reckless abandon, the world of the Bathtub is totally enchanting. With its ram-shackled shacks, flocks of dirt-smudged children, free-range fauna, and wild-eyed adults it's a Never Land with an expiration date, threatened by a levy constructed by mainlanders that assures the Bathtub will one day be sunk for good. But in the meantime, it's the perfect backdrop for a story of feral childhood. Unfortunately, the intoxicating wonder of Bathtub is repeatedly abandoned for less intriguing territories, and so Beasts of the Southern Wild is brought low by a meandering plotline and plodding pacing.

Part of the problem is that Hushpuppy and her quest are never quite clear. A lonely child who yearns for parental affection, she wanders from one source to the next without any apparent logic. As he attempts to prepare Hushpuppy to be her own father, Wink sneers at all things girly. So to impress him she dutifully obeys his commands to growl, "beast" a crab, noodle a catfish, and display her "guns." But as his health worsens, Hushpuppy sets off on an impromptu search for her long-missing mother along with a fleet of orphaned Bathtub girls who follow her without question or explanation. Because her tie to her father is so conflicted, it's difficult to follow her reasoning here. Then comes a string of unbelievable plot points that lead to a final confrontation where Hushpuppy's fantasy becomes a visually striking but confounding and unearned reality.

Sadly, most of Hushpuppy's character is forged through her overwrought voiceover that pervades much of the film. It's a screenwriting crutch which attempts to infuse this child protagonist with a rich inner life. But the more it's used, the more it's clear how dependent the film and Wallis's performance are on its laborious explanations. Much of Wallis's screentime is made up of lingering close-ups of her blank countenance, which viewers must project emotion or motive onto, as Wallis displays none. In moments of rage, panic and despair, her performance is strong, beautifully capturing the feral and fickle nature of youth with a fittingly wild and raw energy. But neither Zeitlin's overzealous romanticizing of the young girl's almost other worldly beauty nor the mystical voiceover monologues make for a character as compelling as I'd expected from such a celebrated Sundance selection.

Ultimately, Beasts of the Southern Wild creates a fascinating world on the brink of elimination, yet lacks any sort of suspense because of a grim atmosphere and aimless plotting. To Zeitlin's credit, he makes glorious use of his locations and shows a lyrical sense of imagination blending the devastation of flooded Louisiana with the intimidating beasts of Bathtub legend. However, with such inventive visuals, it was distracting and disappointing to have so much depends on aggressively poetic voiceover. On top of that, putting so much of the film's success on the shoulders of a young non-actor is a big gamble that I don't feel paid off. In the end, as the waters receded, and the brass instruments blared out a triumphant final track, I was left feeling Beasts of the Southern Wild was shallow, offering little beyond they gritty-pretty style that made the battered fringe of New Orleans an exotic wild zone.

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Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Midway through Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter our hero-- yes, the very same 16th President-- goes in pursuit of the man he's wanted to kill since he was a child, a vampire (played by Marton Csokas) who killed young Abe's mother. The vampire flees to a field where, for whatever reason, a band of wild horses begin to stampede; Abe chases the super-powered vampire, who flings a horse at him at one point, and the chase eventually has them running across the backs of horses until they tumble over a cliff (in central Illinois, mind you) and Abe has his vengeance at last.

This scene, filmed in the CGI-created golden light of magic hour and conceived by Russian director Timur Bekmambetov, may be the most American thing I've ever seen in my life. It's loud, it's crass, it's faux-reverent of the past, and it's complete confident in its utter ridiculousness. It's a shallow simulacrum of the actual peaks of bombastic American filmmaking-- your Michael Bays, your James Camerons-- but in a way that only makes it more amusing. Abraham Lincoln is a folly from top to bottom, a dead-serious retelling of an utterly preposterous story, with action scenes so choppy and inauthentic they make Michael Bay look like John Cassavetes. But it is also, in its brassy American way, endearing, like the guy who shows up to the Fourth of July picnic in the American flag shirt and somehow becomes the life of the party anyway.

Your mileage, as with any movie crammed with unintentional laughter, may vary, but there are performances and some spectacular fight choreography that ought to keep anyone's interest. Benjamin Walker, who electrified audiences in Broadway's Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, is toned down to a fault as Abraham Lincoln, but he commits with a real gravitas, and looks perfectly the part in the old age makeup later in the film (Greg Cannom, who won an Oscar for the makeup in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, does similarly excellent work here). Walker is surrounded by a laundry list of welcome supporting players from Anthony Mackie and Dominic Cooper as his partners in various anti-vampire crimes to Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Mary Todd (girls, as is usually the case with these kinds of movies, don't get to have much fun). Alan Tudyk pops up briefly as Stephen Douglas, which is hilarious, and Jimmi Simpson is appealingly shifty as another pal, Joshua Speed, who gives Abe his first job working as a store clerk.

Outshining all of them, Walker included, is Rufus Sewell as the vampire plantation owner Adam, with a Southern drawl and evil gleam that screams for its own Anne Rice movie. You see, in the version of the Civil War envisioned by Seth Grahame-Smith in the original novel (he adapted the screenplay as well), the South was run by vicious slave-owning vampires, and only Abraham Lincoln and a select group of vampire hunters knew the truth. The screenplay only hints at the obvious reasons vampires would be invested in slavery-- i.e., a food source-- and the film is pretty unconvincing as a revision of Civil War-era politics, or as anything but an excuse to send Abe swinging his silver-tipped axe through undead hordes.

The action scenes are the film's entire selling point, and while Walker, Mackie and Sewell all get impressively physical, Bekmambetov swings the camera around them so quickly you often can't see them at all. The film is drowning in CGI effects, which are fun in a ridiculous way sometimes-- a big final scene set on a flaming train, for instance-- and merely exhausting in most scenes. There's nothing in the action here that feels special, or not done better in Bekmambetov's own Wanted, and the movie never has a convincing answer for exactly why we needed to put Honest Abe through all this. But you know what? This is America, where massively expensive Hollywood follies were invented. Only one country could have created Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, and dammit, that's a country I'm proud to be part of. USA! USA!

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The Amazing Spider-Man

Even if you don't automatically recoil at the words "reboot," "sequel" or "franchise," it's hard not to roll your eyes a little at The Amazing Spider-Man, which revives the cinematic saga of Peter Parker exactly 10 years after Sam Raimi's Spider-Man started telling it the first time around. In the comics they've managed to move on to a whole new Spider-Man with Miles Morales, but onscreen we're back again to Peter and Uncle Ben and Aunt May, to a bite from a genetically modified spider and a villain who's also a family friend. A few of the details have changed, but for the first hour of The Amazing Spider-Man, you'll be forgiven for feeling serious deja vu.

Luckily, it gets better from there, and the second hour of the movie contains some well-wrought action scenes, a believable and affectionate romance between Peter (Andrew Garfield) and his girl Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone), and eventually the requisite shots of Spidey swinging through the skyscraper canyons of midtown Manhattan that alone justify the existence of CGI. But director Marc Webb, making a huge leap from his directorial debut (500) Days of Summer, never gives the movie a point of view, or a fresh enough gloss on the familiar story to justify revisiting it. The world he establishes for Spider-Man, and especially the performances from Garfield and Stone, are appealing and full of promise; so why couldn't we give all these new players something actually fresh to do?

It must be said, over and over again, how good Andrew Garfield is as Peter Parker, to the point that you wish you could wipe Tobey Maguire's portrayal from your brain. At 28 Garfield is hilariously too old for the high-school character, but he brings to Peter both an adolescent angst and a grounded appeal-- his scenes with Stone have real hormonal heat, and in the skintight Spidey suit his whippet-thin body captures both Peter's tentative steps toward his superpowers and the confidence that eventually emerges. Garfield manages to play Peter as a sensitive soul-- he sticks up for a bullied kid in the opening scene-- but a wiseacre, a do-gooder spurred to help others but also taunt his nemesis (Chris Zylka) with his newfound powers. Paired with Stone, whose Gwen Stacy is capable and courageous, Garfield is the perfect balance of superhero and believable kid, and his takeover of the character is the single best thing The Amazing Spider-Man has to offer.

It's everything that surrounds Peter and Gwen, unfortunately, that constantly drags the film down. As the geneticist Dr. Curt Connors, who experiments on himself and eventually transforms into the monstrous Lizard, Rhys Ifans is largely on autopilot, a villain who provides occasional obstacles for our hero and not much more. Campbell Scott and Embeth Davidtz appear in flashbacks as Peter's parents, in roles that seem to be much more important to the future Amazing Spider-Man sequel, and though Sally Field makes a perfectly good Aunt May, it's Martin Sheen who makes the stronger impression as Uncle Ben-- and, as you surely know by now, he doesn't stick around the movie too long.

About an hour in Connors transforms into the Lizard for the first time, and with a villain for Spider-Man to face and action set pieces to breeze through, the movie picks up considerable steam. Only one fight-- set at Peter's Midtown Science High School, and featuring a charming Stan Lee cameo-- is truly unique, but the others work just fine, and the much-promoted sequence atop a skyscraper carries a nice vertiginous thrill. But there's also no strong connection between the Lizard and Spider-Man, despite all that back story about Connors working with Peter's father, and as far as CGI beasts go, the Lizard is nothing groundbreaking or special. That goes for just about all the big-screen theatrics of The Amazing Spider-Man-- it jumps every required hurdle for a superhero blockbuster, but just barely, and with no flair.

But even after all that, it's exciting to think of where Spider-Man might go next, reinvigorated with a strong new cast and a deeper back story that hopefully won't need too many villains (hello, Spider-Man 3!) to raise the stakes next time. The Amazing Spider-Man isn't the bold curtain-raiser they needed to justify a reboot such a short time later, but it earns its keep. Spider-Man lives to see another franchise-- maybe next time they'll make it a clear victory.

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The Chronicle [Blu-Ray]

Chronicle has one of the best trailers I?ve ever seen in my entire life. Unfortunately, the movie itself isn?t even a fraction as good as the trailer. I wanted this movie to be so much better.

The Movie:

If you could have any super power in the world, what would it be? It would be to fly, right? Well, I would have picked magnetism, but flying is cool too, I guess (plus, Magneto can also fly). Chronicle poses just that question to a trio of high school students in a film that could have been astounding, but instead ends up mediocre at best. I guess we?ll always have the trailer.

The biggest problem with this movie is that it?s another found-footage film. While it being a super-hero found-footage movie might have been its original appeal, all I can see is limitations now that I've watched it a second time. The conceit gets in the way of the story, especially towards the end. That said, I don?t think the movie would be anything at all without the whole found-footage thing. So it?s like a catch-22, really. It doesn?t work either way.

Another problem is the whole high school setting and characters. While The Wire's Michael B. Jordan does play a convincing cool-kid-at-school, the other two super-powered characters just feel like they?re missing something. They?re either too angst-ridden or too laid back. They also look like they?re acting, which is never a good sign. I had a hard time relating to these characters. Sure, I was in high school many moons ago, but placing this film in that setting makes it harder for me to connect to the events that follow. Again, it?s a catch-22. The best parts of the film are when the characters are just goofing off or playing football in the air like high school students would do, but then again, I found these characters annoying because of their reckless youth. This film really can?t win in my eyes.

Chronicle isn?t all bad, however. The airborne football scene is enthralling, and the gee-whiz-we-have-powers parts are really enjoyable the first time you see it, but the rest kind of falls apart, especially the ending, which is too much like Akira for its own good, and gets there too quickly, so it feels like a rush job.

Overall, the trailer for Chronicle was so much better than the final product. I really wanted to like this movie, but it was mediocre and leaning toward crummy. But hey, you might like it. It?s not for everybody, but for who it?s for, those people might really get a real kick out of it. It will find its audience. I just don?t happen to be it.

The Disc:

Chronicle?s special features aren?t bad, they?re just nothing special, much like the movie itself. This disc?s main special feature is an extended director?s cut, but, alas, like most ?director?s cuts? (excluding Blade Runner?s, of course), it isn't very different from the theatrical version. There are some extra scenes of the boys just talking about their powers, but it doesn?t add much to the film. Next up is the deleted scene. That?s right, ?scene,? not scenes. It?s only a few seconds long (I don?t even think it?s an entire minute), and it?s of that one moment with the blonde girl in the kid?s house that you can see in the trailer, but that was excluded from the theatrical version. The back of the box calls this scene, ?incredible.? Well, it?s certainly not incredible, I can tell you that much.

There?s also something called, ?Pre-Viz,? which I?ve come to learn is the term for showing scenes that are pre-rendered before the actual action is put in the movie. Think storyboarding, but moving, and all blocky. That?s actually pretty cool. It allows you to see just how the scenes were put together, and it reminds me of a first-generation Playstation game. I liked it. There?s also a ?Camera Test,? which features scenes from the movie but with different actors playing the roles. And while I?m not too fond of the actors they eventually found for the picture, I?m glad they got rid of these guys. They pretty much suck. The excellent trailer rounds out the rest of the special features.

The Chronicle [Blu-Ray] DetailsDistributor: 20th Century Fox Home EntertainmentStarring: Dane DeHaan, Michael B. Jordan, Michael Kelly, Alex RussellProduced by: John Davis, Adam Schroeder

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Magic Mike

Florida, no matter how old you are, is where you go to feel younger, whether it's retirees recreating summer camp with long days full of games or twenty-somethings reliving the days of spring break with all-nighters at the club. With no seasons and acres of startlingly identical architecture, Florida-- or more specifically Tampa, the setting of Magic Mike-- is a place where the good life is also a holding pattern, where you start doing one thing that feels great and suddenly find yourself there 10 years later, 30 years old and stripping for hordes of women who all, alarmingly, start looking the same.

That's the situation, at least, for the titular Mike (Channing Tatum), a hunky guy who strips for the money but keeps up with a number of side businesses, like car detailing or construction, that he plans to one day add up and make him rich. Like The Wire's Stringer Bell, he's neck-deep in his industry but thinks he can see past it, harboring dreams of building custom furniture while also negotiating with the club's owner Dallas (a marvelously slimy Matthew McConaughey) for equity in a planned expansion to Miami. Mike's wearing the kind of blinders you need when your life just is meeting women in clubs, convincing them to come see you strip, and bedding them, but a chance encounter with 19-year-old Adam (Alex Pettyfer), whom Mike sets up with a job at the club, starts to change how Mike sees his long-delayed plans for the future.

You can probably tell by now that Magic Mike isn't exactly the glitter-caked bachelorette party romp promised in the trailers, at least not entirely. But what's probably most impressive about the work Steven Soderbergh does, directing from Reid Carolin's script, is that it's got the glitz and the heavy character study, without sacrificing either. The stripping scenes, in which Tatum and Pettyfer are joined onstage by the likes of Matthew Bomer, Adam Rodriguez, Joe Manganiello and Kevin Nash (hunks, all of 'em), are a genuine blast, with sharp choreography and elaborate costumes better than any real-life strip club I've seen. All of the guys are at their best onstage, and Soderbergh gives us their elation-- and all the promised male flesh-- while making every dance part of the story, and a step on Mike's road to figuring out how to make a change.

Tatum, who worked briefly as a male stripper and has retained every bit of the dance skills he had for his breakout role in Step Up, has never been better suited to a part, and his naturalistic, easy charm suffuses every frame of the movie, so that when Magic Mike becomes more of a character study in its second half, it remains gripping. The other guys at the club all make their impact as essentially background players-- and McConaughey, quite seriously, is Oscar-worthy with his oily performance-- but though Pettyfer is leagues better than he was in something like I Am Number Four, he's essentially overrun by Tatum's boundless appeal. That goes double for Cody Horn as Brooke, Adam's sister and Mike's love interest, whose sourpuss attitude is meant to serve as the "normal" contrast to Mike's high-flying world. She's the kind of untrained actor Soderbergh frequently hires (think Sasha Grey in The Girlfriend Experience), but Horn is a charisma-free flatline in a movie with so many other interesting people to watch-- it's hard not to think of 100 other actresses who could have matched Tatum's down-home appeal with actual talent.

Shot by Soderbergh, serving as his own cinematographer, through a dingy yellow filter that makes everything feel like it's been left in the sun too long, Magic Mike is about dreams that curdle and get deferred, about how you need more money than what's stuffed in a G-string to make it in this world, but how those $1 bills can make it easier to wait-- for a little while, at least. It's also about Channing Tatum being a crazy good dancer, about how fun it would be to party all day on a sandbar, and how a male stripper really can make a woman's night with a good lap dance. These things might be mutually exclusive in the hands of another director, or disastrous when combined, but as usual, Soderbergh makes it look easy.

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That's My Boy

While we may never be able to pinpoint when or why it happened, at some point Adam Sandler simply gave up. The movies he made at the start of his career weren?t high art, but they had fun characters and stories to tell and the star actually seemed emotionally invested in his work. But over the last decade, for the most part, Sandler?s name no longer brings about thoughts of the word ?comedian,? bur rather ?label that specializes in mass-producing immature, poorly-written schlock.? And now the latest in that line, director Sean Anders? That?s My Boy, is being shoveled into theaters.

The film begins with a young boy named Donny Berger (Justin Weaver) who becomes famous in the mid-1980s for having sex with and impregnating his school teacher. Thirty years later, however, Donny (Sandler) finds that his life has completely bottomed out and that he faces a three year prison sentence for tax evasion. While trying to figure out a way to pay the money that owes, he discovers that his son, Todd (Andy Samberg) ? who emancipated himself when he turned 18 ? is actually a big success who is about to get married. Donnie then works out a deal with a sleazy TV show host (Dan Patrick) promising that he can get his son to reunite with both him and his mother for a special episode, but as Donny gets closer to his son he begins to have second thoughts about his plan.

Sandler has played some awful, grating characters over the course of his career, but few have been as bad as Donny. Sporting an accent that makes him sound like he replaced his vocal cords with a meat grinder, the star spends the entire movie acting like a self-obsessed asshole, but rather than coming across as funny it?s just obnoxious. The script tries to compensate by having Todd be the only person resistant to Donny?s ?charms,? but it reads false and simply makes you just as aggravated with the supporting cast as you are with Sandler.?

In a way That?s My Boy is new territory for Sandler, as it?s the first R-rated film that he has made under his Happy Madison banner, but the rating only shines a light on just how lazy Sandler and his crew have become. Instead of testing their comedic skills with wit and well-crafted lines and situations, the film is plastered with excessive raunchiness and garish characters that fail to muster even a giggle. There are some moments that are actually clever and interesting ? particularly a crafty cameo that comes towards the end ? but it?s all drowned out by Sandler quoting decade-old beer commercials, fat strippers and Leighton Meester licking semen off of a wedding dress.

There?s also the matter of comedic timing, which seems lost on Anders, Sandler, and writer David Caspe. ?More than just the fact that the film reuses every lame joke you?ve ever heard (aren?t we tired of the dirty old lady and angry priest tropes by this point?), every gag is set up so that you can see it coming from a mile away. When we first meet Samberg?s character he is shown always carrying an emergency pair of underwear and you want to shed a tear because you just know that before the end of the movie the young talent will be shitting his pants. Every little wink-wink might as well be explained by a narrator that pops up at the top of the screen. The punchlines don?t work because the audience not only has time to figure out what is going to happen, but also find 10 ways that it could have been done better. By the end of the film you?re waiting to not laugh at the jokes the characters are tossing out and that?s not exactly conducive to a good time at the cinema.

There is real talent somewhere inside Adam Sandler. An actor can?t put on performances like he did in Punch Drunk Love, Funny People or even The Wedding Singer without having some sort of spark within them. What?s sad is that Sander has the spark, but he?s been suppressing it for years, instead being content flipping off audiences and raking in cash. That?s the only way that movies like That?s My Boy get made.

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Perfect Sense [Blu-Ray]

The idea that an epidemic might swarm through the world, cutting off people?s sensory perceptions, could explore a lot of potential angles. How will people react? Will they get used to the changes? Will there be exceptions to the disease? We?ve seen big-budget movies try to present the panic and bewildering emotions related to broad-spectrum disease, but director David Mackenzie takes a different route in Perfect Sense, a story about disease, but more about two young lovers navigating a new world.

The Movie:

There is a lot of rushing in the first few minutes of Perfect Sense. People are living frenzied lives. Michael (Ewan McGregor), for instance, runs a busy kitchen and Susan (Eva Green) works in a laboratory focusing on epidemiology. I?d guess that latter job might generally be less stressful, but with an impending virus cutting off people?s ability to smell around the world, things in the lab are moving forward with a bit more fervor. Just when the smell epidemic reaches the area, Susan and Michael have a meet-cute moment. They end up extremely nude, later, and when they wake up together, they find their olfactory senses are entirely gone.

What follows is not the continued panic one might expect to see. There is a lot of sobering talk, even amidst some laughter, a lot of shots meant to belie introspection, handed to us by an incredibly annoying but necessary narrative device. What Mackenzie seems to be trying to show is that humanity will be able to move beyond an epidemic, even if that epidemic affects each and every one of us, and assuming that epidemic does not kill us off. Even with a loss of smell, life will move on.

While the aftermath of Perfect Sense is quite heartfelt, its actual plotline is unbelievable, a story that becomes even more preposterous when humanity begins to lose its other senses as well. During this time, we are bamboozled by the camera and never given even half a chance to see the world over during this time of trepidation and disease. Instead, we are asked to focus on Michael and Susan as they begin to explore their love for one another in ?new? and ?interesting? ways as the disease robs them of their senses one by one.

The notion of two people clinging through hardship together is a theme we?ve seen before, but in Perfect Sense it is overly sentimental, driven by Susan?s narration of the event and its maudlin declaration that love must triumph, even in times of turmoil. Without love, there is nothing. Perfect Sense spends a lot of time making this declaration clear, but without it, we might have been privy to more shots of the devastating effects of the disease and fewer shots of Eva Green?s wasted nudity throughout.

Perfect Sense began with the bud of an idea, but then took a wrong turn somewhere between loss of taste and loss of sight. If you?re into dwelling in harrowing emotional states, this movie might strike in your lane, but for everyone else, Perfect Sense, despite its intense focus on the serious, will be a laughably flawed production.

The Disc:

The extras section is pretty Spartan, with the main feature taking a short look at the film by juxtaposing some of the trailer with interviews from Green and Mackenzie. I was really hoping we?d get a chance to hear more from the cast and crew about the making of the film, or maybe even from Max Richter, the Blue Notebooks composer whose music is one of the better parts of Perfect Sense.

The disc is set up pretty well and the previews at the beginning can be skipped, which is a nice bonus. One of the strangest things with the set is the scene selection, which is set up vertically rather than in the usual horizontal frame. Overall, even if you liked the film, I?m not certain the set is a necessary buy, but with no noticeable film-color or film-technique problems, there may be enough there to add the flick to your collection, especially if you are a sucker for romance (or nudity).

Perfect Sense [Blu-Ray] DetailsStarring: Eva Green, Ewan McGregor, Connie NielsenProduced by: Gillian Berrie, Malte Grunert

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