Category Archives: Reviews

Reviews of books, movies, music, and maybe even games.

Reviews

The Good Dinosaur

I love dinosaurs as much as the next person, but I was concerned about the concept for this film. Admittedly, this is mostly because to my mind any alternate history that’s missing the Chixulub impactor will also be missing any mammals larger than a rat, and certainly won’t feature sapient hominids, but the concern is there nonetheless, even if it’s just me.

The movie did just fine for me in spite of this. It wasn’t amazing, or even particularly surprising, and my son said that he felt like he’d seen this movie before, except in live action (a good indication that the formula is showing,) but I had a good time.

Plot formula aside, the film was beautiful. The ultra-defined realism of the environment balanced the caricatured forms of the sophonts, and those caricatures were pretty brilliant. Especially the T-Rex, voiced by Sam Elliot. We’ve all seen a T-Rex run by now, but Pixar did it differently, and with delightful effect.

The Good Dinosaur enters my 2015 list at #17, below the Threshold of Awesome, but still worth catching in 3D at the theaters. I wish I could get some screen-grabs of the environments to use as desktop wallpapers… so beautiful.

 

 

Reviews

The Peanuts Movie

PeanutsMovieThe Peanuts Movie is weird, and I’m conflicted about it. I’ll lead with this: it enters my list at #16, just a hair shy of the Threshold of Awesome.

I doubt very many of you will feel the same way I do.

I was ready to walk out of the film 20 minutes in. We were getting perfectly executed Peanuts jokes in 3D, and I found that so incredibly boring it was almost physically painful. But I stuck around, and at the 40-ish minute mark something different happened, and I was interested again.

By the end of the film I was quite happy with it. I’ve never had that happen before. I’ve never gone from “I may walk out” to “I am SO GLAD I STAYED.”

Let’s get technical for a bit.

I love Charles Schultz’s work ethic, and his economy of line. I can stare at his line work for hours studying the way a nonsense squiggle becomes, in context, the delivery mechanism for a content-rich payload.  I was very concerned that this film would lose that.

I was happy to be wrong. The animators used the computer graphics to provide the context (heads, shoulders, doghouses, kites) and then used what I swear are digitized versions of actual Schultz-squiggles as mouths, eyebrows, and worry-lines. It was a brilliant melding of line-art and computer animation. I was mesmerized.

Most people won’t be. Lines aren’t really all that interesting unless they’re at the beating heart of your career.

Charlie Brown’s try-fail cycle is always kind of depressing. His best efforts are either wrong for the problem, or will be rendered irrelevant by something outside his control. The best kite-flyer in the world cannot compete with a kite-eating tree. Hours of practice kicking footballs mean nothing if the person holding the ball plans to betray you.

A story in which the protagonist continues to try in spite of this has power, and is worth telling. But Charlie Brown is always the punchline. Even his successes are ironic, and outside his control. I can only take so much of this. It’s depressing.

Well, The Peanuts Movie gives us an Act II Twist in which Charlie Brown gets the success he always wanted. This was surprising, and fresh, and even though I knew it couldn’t last, I was interested to see how a triumphant ending could be delivered.

Most folks don’t watch movies this way, deconstructing them on the fly. Again, this was something I really enjoyed doing, but that experience might not be there for you. Especially not now that I’ve told you it’s there. Umm… spoiler alert? Sorry.

The Peanuts Movie is a film for children under the age of ten, and it seeks to keep adults happy with nostalgia. Based on the reactions of the young children in the audience, it worked just fine. I heard a tiny voice exclaim “OH NO CHARLIE BROWN” in dismay, and you know what? That was kind of awesome.

Reviews

Spectre

SpectreI’m trying to put my finger on why Spectre didn’t work for me. The salient point is that I spent much of the film being bored, so obviously there was a problem.

In Casino Royale we were shown a young James Bond who was unmade and remade by betrayal. In Quantum of Solace we were shown that the brilliance of Casino Royale may have been accidental. In Skyfall, we were given a deconstruction and un-making of Bond as a nice capstone for a trilogy of Daniel Craig installments in the series. It was the perfect book-end opposite Casino Royale. The two films deserved better stuff between them.

And now Spectre comes along and undercuts Skyfall. It is set shortly thereafter, and it tells us that these other Bond adventures were all connected to a single underlying conspiracy, a massive confederacy of hitherto undetected mega-miscreants whose nefarious plans and dastardly schemes are finally coming to fruition.

That’s a hard sell, and they tried to close the deal by giving us something just shy of a clip show.

It didn’t work for me.

Most Bond films are a series of Green-Eggs-And-Ham set-pieces. “Would you, could you, on a boat? Would you, could you, in the throat? Would you could you on a train? Would you hey we’re now in Spain.” And so on. The best Bond films mask this by tying everything together with a multi-layered mystery, with reveal after reveal drawing us into the new locations. The worst ones find us coming to our senses in the middle of an action scene and asking ourselves why we’re in Austria.

On to the good stuff:

  • Q gets the best line of the film. It’s such a good line that I can’t believe I’ve never heard it before. I wish I’d thought of it.
  • Dave Bautista is scary. He’s even bigger and scarier in well-tailored suits.
  • The two big explosions were cool.
  • The set pieces were quite pretty, especially the Día de Muertos costumed crowd scenes.
  • SpectreOSTThe music. (I bought the soundtrack, which I think I’ll enjoy much more than I enjoyed the film itself.)
  • If you love James Bond films, hey, look! This is a James Bond film!

Spectre enters my 2015 list at #21. Not awesome, not disappointing, and unfortunately not particularly memorable.

 

Journal, Reviews

The Last Witch Hunter

As direct-to-DVD movies go, The Last Witch Hunter is surprisingly oh wait I saw this in the theater.

TheLastWitchHunterI had fun, but here I am a day later trying to write a review, and the movie has already faded into the meld-haze of urban fantasy “hidden world” films in which a badass protagonist fights ultimate evil. Why did this even get made?

Maybe because Vin Diesel is a giant nerd, and wanted to make a sci-fi/fantasy/horror genre movie that he got to be in?

Look, I had fun during the film. It cleared my Threshold of Disappointment (unlike the OTHER Vin Diesel film I saw this year) and was interesting enough that I did not finish my popcorn or my soda.

But it was predictable, and sloppy, and took shortcuts, and could have been a truly memorable, outstanding addition to a crowded field full of similar things. Here’s a bulleted list of sins which, had they not been committed, could have allowed this film over my Threshold of Awesome.

  • Shaky-cam during cool action
  • Shaky-cam as a “oh no we’re getting slaughtered” device
  • Shaky-cam
  • Cliché dialog as a shortcut for selling us an emotional state.
  • Immortality as a boon/curse, which (gasp) can be taken away.
  • Betrayal we all saw coming.
  • Why didn’t you just lead with that?
  • If you have little vials of “detect magic,” you should be using them all the time, or you should be explaining that they are expensive/rare.
  • Man of few words who seldom shows emotion
  • Because he’s tortured by memories
  • Which we are going to have to sit through
  • But it’s okay because they’re central to the plot.

It’s a long list, I know. A great many genre movies commit these same sins, and are mediocre-to-bad as a result. It’s a good thing I like Vin Diesel, and an even better thing that Rose Leslie (who I’d never seen in a film before) shone the way she did in a cast full of bigger names.

(Note: If there is a sequel that has ZERO Vin Diesel, and is all about Rose Leslie’s character Chloe taking up the Witch Hunter mantle despite being herself a witch, I would pay opening night fancy-seat money. No, wait… just give her a franchise of her own, without the baggage of this film.)

That reminds me:

  • A non-immortal character who is interesting, and who we care about, who can be threatened with death to make us feel tension

The Last Witch Hunter enters my list at #20 out of #30. Do I recommend it? When it hits Netflix it might make for a great excuse to have the TV on while you knit something. If you’ve got movie money to spend, though, there are many much better options.