A most beautiful violence

Elle Fanning stars in The Neon Demon. Image courtesy Broad Green.

It’s rare to see a person walk out of a free film screening, yet the one I went to this week featured a fair number of people opting to do just about anything else than watch the rest of The Neon Demon. One woman directed a fair amount of vitriol toward the images on screen, muttering something along the lines that the film writer must be a sick person. On that end, she's absolutely correct in her assessment of director and co-writer Nicolas Winding Refn, a filmmaker whose unabashed love of retro visual artistry, violence and the peculiar make him a divisive figure in cinema. The assessment incorporates comparatively restrained pieces like Drive, Bronson and Only God Forgives; judging the man based solely on The Neon Demon would justify a diagnosis of some level of depravity or at least something amiss concerning the man's constitution.

Given all that, it is easy enough to sympathize with the woman as she left the theater in a huff, along with the others who trickled away as the film spiraled from the bizarrely obtuse into the oppressive macabre. The Neon Demon is a challenge to work through and an even more difficult film to stomach in its last 15 minutes. For those who can make it through, the experience is dizzying, dazzling and dense enough to perplex the smartest viewers. The Neon Demon is unforgettable in the most bonkers definition of the word.

The Neon Demon has the traditional trappings of a Grimm fairy tale taken to even more perverse levels. Elle Fanning stars as Jesse, an aspiring underage model who just arrived in Los Angeles to do something with her life. She’s effectively a fairy tale princess whose purity and beauty are coveted by the nefarious figures around her, most notably rival models Sarah (Abbey Lee) and Gigi (Bella Heathcote) and unseemly motel manager Hank (Keanu Reeves). The only pair of people seemingly on her side are quasi-boyfriend and good-enough guy Dean (Karl Glusman) and makeup artist Ruby (Jena Malone) who appear to serve as knights in shining armor if viewed from afar. Faith in these characters' valor diminishes once you peer in a little and realize one of the more notable lessons from fairy tales that trust is a dangerous thing to believe in.

There are a million places Refn could go with a premise like this. He could make it a morality tale, or about how simple it is to become disillusioned, or even a teen film about finding friendship through perseverance and goodwill. What he ends up doing is shocking and grotesque, worthy of the protestations of the woman leaving the theater. But this isn't necessarily a film built to forge an overabundance of disgust from the audience; Refn doesn't employ beautifully shot sex and violence and everything in between just because he can . He's making points with The Neon Demon about the unfairness of the modeling world, in particular the lengths women will go to retain, maintain or even steal beauty. Beauty is a fleeting thing in Refn’s world, an admirable trait that can neither be earned nor manipulated; in essence, you either are beautiful or you are not. Even those who do have it, like Fanning’s Jesse, are cursed to live in a constant state of danger from predators and jealous rivals. The Neon Demon is told through Jesse's perspective, but she's not the only one falling apart as she reaches for her dreams.

Los Angeles is a pretty perfect milieu for such a story, a place in which the divide between aesthetic perfection and blight is razor thin. Refn blurs the divide even more by twisting Los Angeles into a fun house of horrors. Mirrors capture many conversations and character interactions, sometimes portraying the more honest versions of the interactions than the ones not reflected off glass. All of those mirrors, along with Refn's love for pastel colors and otherwise intense lighting choices, utterly shakes viewers proper sense of perspective and sense of comfort. It serves as something of a mirror to the experience Jesse undergoes in her first few days in Los Angeles; a rush of emotions, sensations and overwhelming oddness crammed into a short window of existence. No matter how often Jesse protests against her innocent visage, she, like the audience, is not equipped to handle the cruel dream world Refn created.

Review: Four and a Half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 117 minutes

Genre: Drama

Ask Away

Target audience: Anyone who likes and can handle Nicolas Winding Refn films.

Take the whole family?: No. Just no.

Theater or Netflix?: This would make for a fabulous midnight film complete with a few friends and some strong spirits.

How well does Refn use the setting?: It's really a perfect fit for a man whose visual touch is his strongest talent as a director. The film is straight up gorgeous at times and always mesmerizing, with the glossy patina of the modeling world balancing perfectly against the grungy existence Elle Fanning's Jessie has before she joins the ranks of the elite. The visuals alone make this film worthwhile.

Watch this as well?: Two of Refn's more recent films, Bronson and Drive, are spectacular in their own rights and well worth checking out. The Neon Demon has a fairly similar vibe as another movie about woman being objectified in a niche industry, Black Swan.

'Dory' frolics in the kiddie pool

Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) and Hank (Ed O'Neill) in Finding Dory. Image courtesy Pixar.

The simplest way to evaluate a Pixar film is to see if it has at least one moment that breaks your heart asunder. Pixar as a studio is reliable enough to produce consistently entertaining films (a Cars or two aside), but the great ones it creates possess an emotional heft that cuts right into the soul resulting in uncontrollable weeping. It serves as a dividing line between the studio's best films – Toy Story series, Wall-E, Up, Finding Nemo and last year's tremendous Inside Out – and the still wicked to very good but not quite as emotionally charged movies like The Incredibles, Brave, Ratatouille, and A Bug's Life. There are a couple of moments in which Finding Dory flirts with the hurting, coming ever so close to breaking down the audience but never quite reaching its main objective. As a film, and pardon the pun,  Finding Dory stays much closer to the surface than its indelible predecessor; a lighter, simpler quest befitting the titular fish, Dory (voiced again by Ellen DeGeneres). The logic of the decision makes sense, yet the result is a less than stellar follow-up, a good enough film that can't come close to living up to the majesty of Finding Nemo.

Good enough feels a little mean of a descriptor for Finding Dory, which has a fair number of positives working in its favor. It retains much of the original's visual splendor and creates an incredible undersea world the audience can still get lost in. The film is also quite funny, especially a frantic slow-motion scene toward the end and a recurring gag concerning a very famous science fiction actress. For all intents and purposes, Finding Dory is a quality piece of children's entertainment that will keep the kids focused for almost two hours (including the short film in the beginning).

And yet the expectations for a Pixar film are much higher than the average animated flick, giving poor Finding Dory a precedent it isn't designed to meet. This is the safer version of Finding Nemo in which the characters aren't chased by a relapsing shark (there's a squid, but it's not the same) or swallowed by a whale or have to fake death to escape (just mild illness). Even the locale changes, moving out of the ocean and into a marine life institute with a heavier human presence than the original. Dory, Marlin (an underused Albert Brooks), and Nemo (Hayden Rolence) never face an insurmountable or even life threatening challenge beyond the aforementioned squid; it's as if the filmmakers, including franchise director Andrew Stanton, wanted to take the sting away and have a pleasant and nice film. Pleasant and nice is a very fine thing to aim for if you want to earn a profit; it's a terrible strategy for creating art.

The lightness of being is a little odd given the film’s rather bold and interesting premise, in which Dory searches through her scattered memory for her parents (Diane Keaton and Eugene Levy) she lost years ago. That's a hell of a premise to work from with the potential to ask questions about identity, family, and even the trustworthiness of memory in the first place; even the title hints at a rather solid self-examination of the soul. Finding Dory doesn't fall into the philosophical premise it sets up for itself; rather, it seems happier to peek into the abyss than to dive right into the moral ambiguity its presence sets up. What viewers get instead is a few new characters to know, like cantankerous octopus Hank (Ed O'Neill) who effectively replaces Marlin for much of the film, along with a pair of helpful whales (Kaitlin Olson and Ty Burrell) who are a bit fun to have around but lack distinction and their own agency. This isn't a situation like in the first film in which the secondary characters work along with some combination of Nemo, Marlin and Dory to attain their end goal. Instead, the side characters either barter for their objectives our assist for the sake of helping. They're used less as characters and more as plot points.

This is all a very long way of saying Finding Dory is missing the heart, charm and curiosity that defined Finding Nemo. It doesn't have the courage to invest in its characters at the same level and make audiences truly feel for their fates and hope they escape their quasi-imprisonment. Most troublesome is this film won't break you down and rip the soul out of your heart like it should; it's more content to offer an unenthusiastic friendly hug.

Review: Three and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG

Run time: 97 minute

Genre: Animated

Ask Away

Target audience: Families and people who have Pixar devotees.

Take the whole family?: This one's even tamer than the original, so feel free to take even the youngest kids along with you.

Theater or Netflix?: Even if the film itself isn't great, the animation is, as always, superb. That's enough in my book to warrant a theater trip, although don't pay for the 3D unless you go to a matinee screening.

How's the short film?: Pretty freaking adorable. Called Piper, the short focuses on a young sandpiper learning to fetch its own food with rather calamitous results. While it lacks the depth of last year's Sanjay's Super Team, Piper is a fun, cute little prelude to the main feature.

Watch this as well?: As if you won't buy, rent or dig out your copy of Finding Nemo and watch it again. Remember, fish are friends, not food.

'Warcraft' loses its fight for adequacy

Orc clan chief Durotan in Warcraft. Image courtesy Universal Pictures,

Adapting a property like Warcraft to a film successfully requires appealing to the millions of people who have spent hours engaged in the online game while avoiding alienating a general audience that has a passing familiarity with it. Essentially, the filmmakers have to decide whether it’s worth serving those two masters or deciding to focus more heavily on one to maximize profits. Warcraft doesn’t have that problem; the filmmakers created a third decision to appeal to neither the fans nor the general audience, following in the footsteps of just about every video game adaptation.  

It’s remarkable the number of ways Warcraft outright fails as a piece of cinema, although it at least never descends to the realm of hateable and even ascends on occasion to risible. Take the unnecessarily convoluted yet still insufficient story that tells how a war between of marauding orcs and humans kicked off in some archaic civilization. To appropriate a somewhat tired but still effective cliché, even though you haven't seen Warcraft. It has nothing new to say within the confines of the fantasy genre. It's a lesser Lord of the Rings, to put it both mildly and kindly, a complete misfire that lessens the genre it inhabits. (That the film's view of women fits the most archaic fantasy stereotypes is right for every incorrect reason imaginable.)

Hell, the whole endeavor is a cluster-flunk, a hilariously out-of-sync film that pays no mind to basic storytelling requirements. Warcraft has little to no idea of what it wants to do with its just less than two hours of story time, opting to cram an immense amount of garbage upon the screen and let the audience sort it out. Good luck to those Warcraft viewers willing to give this challenge a shot; characters come and go as they please, as do their motivations for evil and any logic for every decisions made in this movie. Not that the case really helps all that much, as no one among the crew of unremarkables can lift the material more than a foot above the grave its story dug itself.

All of those are crazy problems made even more confusing by the presence of Duncan Jones as the film’s director and co-writer. Jones has proven himself a more than capable director and writer, as well as a capable wrangler of talent to boot. Yet Warcraft flops on all three fronts (among many other), almost as if Jones was overwhelmed by the size of the endeavor. Squinting hard enough reveals the possibility of an inkling of a pretty decent film somewhere between the bad dialogue and miserable pacing, perhaps a smaller film with fewer characters or a significantly longer run time.

That’s the issue with sticking so close to the game, as the theoretical need to present familiar characters from the franchise’s second game demolishes the narrative flow. And the game itself has a very deep story filled with complexities and sabotage and subterfuge within a magical world of humans, orcs, dwarves and elves. Yet Jones and fellow scribe Charles Leavitt slash the living hell out of it, maintaining a broad outline and removing key character motivations, plot turns, and interesting complexities, presenting what is more likely than not the worst case scenario. That Warcraft fails as a piece of cinema and as a service to the fans is a remarkable testament to a collection of bad ideas.

The strangest thing about Warcraft is through all the messiness, chaos and unintentional levity, the purpose of this film is to clearly set up a sequel. The entire final act, including a marvelously campy closing scene, exists to prepare audiences for the next entry for a possible film franchise. It's a bold, supremely arrogant decision that hurts the Warcraft that actually exists and is not just a glimmer of a possibility. Still, this could very well payoff even if the box office returns in the U. S. are less than robust. It's already broken box office records in China, and Warcraft is primed to pull a Pacific Rim and do well enough internationally to justify another go. It’s not exactly the most artistic filmmaking motivation, although there isn’t anything all that artistic about this film anyway.

Review: One and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 123 minutes

Genre: Fantasy

Ask Away

Target audience: The millions of people who have played the games.

Take the whole family?: I wouldn't bring kids along. The orcs get a little scary looking, and a ton of dudes get their faces smashed in pretty hard.

Theater or Netflix?: Don't pay out for the cinema experience.

Is there such a thing as a good video game movie?: The track record is dreadful for films based on video games: Depending on the metric, the best of the genre is either Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within or Mortal Kombat. It is possible to make a quality video game film though by using the video game nature to tell an engaging story in an innovating fashion, a good example being Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Attempting to copy the vibe of a game will lead to failure and/or Uwe Boll.

Watch this instead?: The Lord of the Rings trilogy of course. Watching Duncan Jones' film fail like this made me reminisce about his small, elegiac and wonderful film Moon.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles very dumb, not much fun

Stephen Amell and Megan Fox in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows. Image courtesy Paramount Pictures.

Evaluating a film like,Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, requires the use of a rather generous bell curve to result in a passing grade. In every conceivable way excluding its tone – perhaps the one saving grace – Out of the Shadows falls short. This film is a tremendous compilation of failure, something that isn't quite bad enough to be memorable, but still several steps below passably mediocre. This film wishes it were risible; at least it would evoke a positive reaction unrelated to the frustration and annoyance it leaves viewers feeling after just shy of two hours of crap.

How can a film like Out of the Shadows fail, considering how low the expectations are in the first place? This is, after all, a sequel to a film based on an almost three-decade old cartoon rooted in an underground graphic novel series, which has already inspired a separate film franchise, a one-off animated film, and additional television opportunities. Possibly the most notable aspect to this franchise is the legendarily catchy theme song co-written by CBS archangel Chuck Lorre. All of this is about four beings that are mutated turtles who are indeed teenage and have ninja training and are also named after Renaissance painters (Leonardo, Donatello, Michelangelo, Raphael). Should there be any expectations of quality for a movie with that kind of a background?

Technically yes – there's a great movie about the LEGOs – but realistically going into it the standards were pretty low. All one could really ask for from Out of the Shadows was for a decent nostalgia trip for those of us who grew up watching the original series and some dumb fun. The premise is terrible enough on the surface to possibly work as dumb fun, and there's potential for a little silliness with the four turtles (voiced by Noel Fisher, Jeremy Howard, Pete Ploszek and Alan Ritchson) fighting an anthropomorphic rhino (Rocksteady, voiced by WWE performer Sheamus) and his warthog buddy (Bebop, voiced by Gary Anthony Williams), alongside a hockey masked vigilante (Stephen Amell as Casey Jones), all of which leads to a  battle with a tentacled talking brain Krang (reliable character actor Brad Garrett voices this one). The filmmakers pulled heavily from the television series this time around, even highlighting the return of Rocksteady, Bebop, Krang and Casey Jones in one of the ad spots. While Out of the Shadows doesn't quite embrace the ridiculousness, the filmmakers keep the tone light and avoid the pretentiousness that plagued “Batman v. Superman.” The aforementioned villains serve that purpose well enough, and the Great Laura Linney, as an incredulous police chief who of course becomes an ally, doesn't coast as much as she could. Also, Will Arnett, who played a cameraman in the first film, pops in for a spell to do Will Arnett things to some mild success.

The looser tone indicates the filmmakers' aim for dumb fun, but the film has much higher levels of incompetence and stupidity than enjoyment. The plot, in which the turtles fight to collect pieces of a portal to prevent master villain Shredder (Brian Tee) from unleashing Krang, is rote and uninspired, as is the internal group drama between the four turtles. The pacing is off, creating a rushed flow to a film that’s still nearly two hours. The dialogue in general is dreadful and repetitive filled with bad one liners and pointless sciencetician caliber babble. Megan Fox, as turtle fan April O'Neil, remains a less than remarkable screen presence, while Tyler Perry is around to be terrible. And man do the special effects leave much to be desired for a movie with seven computer generated characters.

All of that is ancillary really for Out of the Shadow's main purpose; to appeal to the millennials like me. This is where the film truly fails, as its haggard plotting steals opportunities to give the fans what they really want like more fights between the turtles and Rocksteady and Bebop. The opposing parties have one rather lackluster brawl because the film waits to establish their existence before sending them off to do things not related directly to the turtles. That an additional fight amongst the anthropomorphized creatures is usurped by a meeting by Casey Jones and an uninspired finale with Krang that just sort of ends fits this movie perfectly; it teases the audience with the possibility of ludicrous fun only to pull it away.

Review: One and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 112 minutes

Genre: Action

Ask Away

Target audience: Nostalgia nerds and kids.

Take the whole family?: It's a tame enough PG-13 to bring kids a bit younger than that without too many issues. That is, aside from the scarring one gets from looking at these freaking poorly designed turtles.

Theater or Netflix?: Or, you know, don't watch it at all.

Which Ninja Turtle are you?: As a kid my favorite was Michelangelo, mostly because his headband is yellow adjacent and because he seemed cool to an 8-year-old. He is the worst Ninja Turtle, offering little beyond token catchphrases and an unhealthy obsession with pizza, so it is fitting the quiz I took before writing this matched me up with Michelangelo. So, cowabunga?

Watch this instead?: That original “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” film from 1990 is fine enough, or at least a step up from this thing. The sequel, “The Secret of the Ooze,” is ridiculously terrible excluding one cameo that remains gold for all the wrong reasons.