THE GIFT: That Keeps on Giving

Director: Joel Edgerton
Writer: Joel Edgerton
Cast: Rebecca Hall, Jason Bateman, Joel Edgerton
Runtime: 108 mins.
2015

The Gift is an incredibly functional movie, accomplishing everything it set out to accomplish by using every tool at its disposal. Edgerton's directorial debut sees him attempting the triple crown--writing, directing, starring--and he nails each of those three roles. The Gift is lean and mean, with no wasted moment. So I can't say it's the movie's fault that it doesn't contain the spark necessary to vault into the pantheon of Instant Classic the way Nightcrawler did for me last year. I'm not the first to make that comparison, but it's a fruitful one; Nightcrawler may be messier than The Gift, but that movie's frequent high points court transcendence. The Gift is just more subdued, which is a choice rather than a flaw.

Perhaps a more generous comparison to establish is that The Gift is a far more subtle version of Fatal Attraction. The movie follows a loving couple who have just moved to a gorgeous hillside home in California. While out and about they encounter one of the husband's childhood acquaintances, Gordo (Joel Edgerton). Simon (Jason Bateman) doesn't recognize him right away, but later informs his wife Robyn (Rebecca Hall) that Gordo was something of a weirdo back in school. Thus it's no surprise that Simon rapidly becomes uneasy when Gordo keeps showing up at their house unprompted, butting in on meals and leaving gifts that eventually take a sinister turn.

FANTASTIC FOUR: Journey to Turdworld

Director: Josh Trank

Writers: Jeremy Slater, Simon Kinberg, Josh Trank
Cast: Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Bell, Toby Kebbell, Reg E. Cathey
Runtime: 100 mins.
2015

Nobody wants to hang around in Turdworld. A jaunt to Turdworld might be acceptable. Even a journey through it. But when your entire film is a journey, and the sole destination is Turdworld, the audience has a right to feel both robbed and insulted.

Turdworld is both a metaphor and my personal name for the other-dimensional planet which is the setting for the significant setpieces of Fantastic Four. Ever since his boy genius youth, Reed Richards (Miles Teller) has been pursuing experiments involving the transmission of matter to and from somewhere else. He's had the help of his blue collar buddy Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell), but it isn't until an older scientist (Reg E. Cathey) and his daughter (Kate Mara) stumble upon Richards' work that he receives the funding and support he needs to fully bring his dream to reality. The daughter, Sue Storm, helps out, as do her slacker brother, Johnny Storm (Michael B. Jordan), and the defunct former-boy-genius-attached-to-the-project, Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell). Some of them use the machine to transmit themselves to Turdworld, and as a result they are horribly mutated. Then they try to fix their mutation? I don't know, the movie functionally stops happening at that point.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - ROGUE NATION: Roguish Charm

Director: Christopher McQuarrie
Writers: Christopher McQuarrie, Drew Pearce
Cast: Tom Cruise, Rebecca Ferguson, Simon Pegg, Jeremy Renner, Ving Rhames, Alec Baldwin, Sean Harris
Runtime: 131 mins.
2015

Mission: Impossible is a minor miracle of a modern action franchise. Much like the Bond films, M:I has maintained a commitment to old fashioned stuntwork. Even more impressive is Tom Cruise's manic insistence that he perform these insane stunts himself. The fifty-three year old megastar has weathered the sands of time and the fickle whims of the viewing public by maintaining a pressing desire that you and I should enjoy his movies, no matter what. It's easy for an actor to become withered and cynical after years of being churned through the Hollywood system, but Cruise has a vitality only matched by a younger Tom Cruise.

The unquenchable enthusiasm of perennial producer and lead actor Tom Cruise is certainly one of the primary forces that has transformed Mission: Impossible from a series of convoluted spy capers that exist only for the setpieces into a series of engaging spy capers that exist only for the setpieces. That doesn't sound like as much of a compliment as I intend it to be.

MR. HOLMES: Elementary, My Dead Watson

Director: Bill Condon
Writers: Jeffrey Hatcher
Cast: Ian McKellen, Milo Parker, Laura Linney, Hiroyuki Sanada
Runtime: 104 mins.
2015

Mr. Holmes presents an aged Sherlock with decades standing between himself and many of the aspects of the character that we would typically consider mandatory, or at the least recognizable. Holmes (Ian McKellen), a once infamous detective, is now wiling away his life in the quiet English countryside with his caretaker (Laura Linney) and her child Roger (Milo Parker). He chafes at this lifestyle, yet has been resigned to it ever since his long distant Last Case and subsequent retirement. The trouble is, he can't remember why that final case drove him into retirement, and he doesn't trust the long-deceased Watson's fictionalized take on the matter. Sherlock Holmes is only interested in the hard truth, a difficult proposition when suffering from heavy bouts of memory loss and senility. Mr. Holmes is about an aging genius attempting to reconstruct his memories to understand an important decision he made many years ago, and he only manages to make progress with the insistent prodding of his new friend and protege, Roger.

LEON THE PROFESSIONAL: She's Always Buzzing Just Like Leon

Director: Luc Besson
Writer: Luc Besson
Cast: Jean Reno, Natalie Portman, Gary Oldman, Danny Aiello
Runtime: 110 mins.
1994

Never before has my enjoyment of a movie been so utterly depleted by a soundtrack. Starting with the second or third scene, I began to notice how much the impact of every moment was thwarted by the music propping it up. It's like a sociopathic nine year old watched the movie, was forced to write down four word descriptions of every scene, and that was all the information composer Eric Serra had with which to score this film. We are treated to a buffet of saccharine strings, balanced by a healthy dose of cliche Italian music, rounded out by a sprinkle of cliche Asian music for no particular reason. The score repeatedly made me feel bad any time I considered investing in a scene. The movie wants to be a slick thriller with heart, but the soundtrack belongs to a bargain bin knock-off of The Sopranos.

The rest of the movie is not all that bad. We have professional immigrant hitman Leon (Jean Reno) who primarily kills his quarries by being somewhere above them when they think he is somewhere in front of them. We have young Mathilda (Natalie Portman*) who has lost her family and is hellbent on revenge, so she tries to learn the business from Leon. And we have career dirty cop Stansfield (Gary Oldman), the perpetrator of the killings, who is really more of an explicit mobster than a crooked enforcer of the law. When dead bodies pile up around him, he gets interrogated by fellow officers, but then he just screams that he's busy and goes away.

TRAINWRECK: Sliding Softly into the Station

Director: Judd Apatow
Writer: Amy Schumer
Cast: Amy Schumer, Bill Hader, Brie Larson, Vanessa Bayer, Tilda Swinton, Mike Birbiglia, John Cena, LeBron James
Runtime: 125 mins.
2015

Lord knows a female-led, female-written comedy that involves a heaping helping of sex positivity is de facto refreshing. Let's keep that in mind moving forward.

The opening scene of Trainwreck is a sepia-tinted portrayal of a father informing his two daughters that he and their mother will be getting a divorce. The joke is that he tries to explain to the children that he got caught sleeping around both in a language they can understand, and in a way that makes them sympathetic to him. The staging of the scene--the driveway in front of the house, dusk, what looks like heat lightning in the distance--deepens the humor with a sense of melancholy. The scene is funny, weighty, and a perfect prologue to the boozy devil-may-care attitude of our main character, Amy (Amy Schumer), while also providing context for the more conservative settled-down behavior of her sister Kim (Brie Larson).

The rest of the film never matches the jokey melancholy of that first scene.

ANT-MAN: Smalling with Style

Director: Peyton Reed
Writers: Adam McKay, Paul Rudd, Edgar Wright, Joe Cornish
Cast: Paul Rudd, Michael Douglas, Evangeline Lilly, Corey Stoll, Michael Pena, David Dastmalchian, T.I.
Runtime: 117 mins.
2015

[Ant-Man is notorious for its behind the scenes history and drama. I'm not going to tackle any of that right now because it's overdone, and because I want to treat the movie well enough to criticize it based on its own merits and pitfalls--what is on the screen above all else.]

Ant-Man is not an especially well-written movie. I want to set this notion on the table and dine upon it first, because I'll have nicer things to say later on.

The story mostly follows charming everyman Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) who also happens to be a cat burglar and father to a small girl. His daughter Cassie (Abby Ryder Fortson) is in the custody of Lang's ex-wife Maggie (Judy Greer) and her policeman boyfriend Paxton (Bobby Cannavale). Scott isn't a lost cause; everybody loves him, even the bosses who fire him, but Maggie forbids him from seeing his daughter until he pulls his act together and starts ponying up on child support.

Meanwhile, Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) is trying really hard to keep the technology he secretly invented many years ago--a suit that allows you to shrink to the size of an ant--out of the wrong hands. Those oh so wrong hands belong to Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) who is about to have his own breakthrough with a weaponized shrinking mass producible suit he calls the Yellowjacket. So it is that Pym sets the pieces in motion for a heist, and he knows the perfect guy for the job.

JAWS: Ocean Craft

Director: Steven Spielberg
Writers: Peter Benchley, Carl Gottlieb
Actors: Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss, Lorraine Gary, Murray Hamilton
Runtime: 124 mins.
1975

Spielberg was the Trojan Horse through which the studios began to reassert their power.
-Peter Biskind

Scene: a watercraft, floating in the ocean. Despite Brody's warnings, Hooper dons his scuba equipment and dives into the water to investigate an abandoned fishing boat. This vessel without a captain must have been attacked by the great white shark that has been causing trouble in the small island community of Amity. As Hooper sinks beneath the waves and approaches the boat, the audience also has a sinking feeling. Surely this would be the ideal time for the shark to attack? Hooper is totally vulnerable in the water. We mentally berate him for attempting this investigation while the boat's hull comes into view. A large chunk twice as big as a human head is missing. Hooper stares into the blackness for a while, sees nothing... but discovers an enormous tooth lodged at the edge of the hole. He examines this tooth and begins spinning about in the water, looking over both shoulders, making sure nothing unsavory is approaching. We become nervous, but we see nothing. Nothing but a close-up of that black gaping hole, the only place from which the shark surely cannot emerge. We hold the shot for a few moments... and a waterlogged human head bursts into frame, accompanied by a drastic musical sting. Hooper panics and lets the tooth drop into the depths of the ocean.

I've just described one of the most sublime jump scares I have ever encountered. If you haven't seen the movie, I hope That doesn't ruin anything for you, but the truth is even folks who have seen Jaws countless times can't help but jump out of their shoes when they see this part. I describe it so minutely not because I think I can recreate the experience in any meaningful way, but because I wanted to illustrate all of the tiny details that contribute to making this scare work. Everything in this scene is constructed to play our expectations like a fiddle. We know something scary is going to happen in the water. We have a precise series of expectations during the scene, each of which is foiled in turn. We think the shark will show up? It doesn't. We think something will pop out of the hole? It doesn't... yet. The discovery of the tooth puts us off the scent. Hooper's flailing puts us off the scent. The pacing puts us off the scent. Then, finally, much like the cold-blooded titular menace itself, the film pounces on us when we are most vulnerable. This is superb genre filmmaking at its crackling best. This is vintage Spielberg.

INSIDE OUT: Sweet Emotions

Twenty years ago Pixar Animation Studios revolutionized cinema with the first full length completely computer-generated film. Two decades later and Pixar is still one of the most consistently groundbreaking studios in the business. Inside Out provided a great opportunity for Pixar to reinvent itself in the wake of a slough of mediocrity.

Other Reviews in this Series.

Directors: Pete Docter, Ronaldo Del Carmen (co-director)

Writers: Pete Docter, Ronaldo Del Carmen, Meg LeFauve, Josh Cooley

Cast: Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Bill Hader, Lewis Black, Mindy Kaling, Richard Kind, Kaitlyn Dias, Diane Lane, Kyle MacLachlan

Runtime: 94 mins.

2015

A scientist believes if you pick a lie to pieces, the pieces are the truth!

-Eugene O'Neill

The idea that your body is one whole and complete object is a lie. The idea that you govern yourself by a unified rational consciousness is a lie. The idea that you are in control is a lie. Inside Out picks this lie to pieces and represents the pieces anthropomorphically. They are Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, Disgust, and any number of other little blobby brain workers skittering through your mind. The five primary emotions live out their lives in the control center (Headquarters). They are literally in control.

Pixar's latest film feels like a discovery. There's a whole world inside of us--more than that, a whole social system. That system is responsible for all the functions of the brain (emotions, dreams, memories, abstract thought...), and when the system is broken, the person is broken. This is the world of Inside Out, where the stakes are of the utmost magnitude: a little girl's happiness.

LEFT BEHIND: An Open Letter

Director: Vic Armstrong
Writers: Paul Lalonde, John Patus
Cast: Nicolas Cage
Runtime: 110 mins.
2014

Dear Nicolas Cage,

I write to you as a longtime examiner of your livelihood. I currently hold the unique position of one who has seen your most recent attempt to shrug off crushing debt, Left Behind. I found it mostly to be a movie. That being said, I have a few questions that I believe you, and only you, Nicolas Cage, can answer.

I want to start with something real. Are you a religious man? I know that you were raised Catholic and that you staunchly refuse to comment upon your faith in interviews. I know your brother is a Christian pastor. But what about you? In interviews you suggest that taking this role was not just about the money, that you connected with the script and its themes. If that is really true, why do you sleepwalk through this movie like it's a PSA for fire safety? You're more invested in this library poster.