Tagged: Charlize Theron

Box Office Democracy: Atomic Blonde

It’s hard coming here to review Atomic Blonde after ripping in to Valerian last week.  I said Valerian was a gorgeous movie with well-executed action sequences that didn’t click for me because the script was a genuine chore to think about.  Atomic Blonde has a lot of the same problems, and at times looks like someone’s aesthetic Tumblr came to life on the condition that it had to recite a tired spy story to stay alive.  I’m not sure why, but it works for Atomic Blonde.  Maybe an overdone spy story is just more fun than an underdone science fiction story.  Maybe Charlize Theron and James McAvoy are just that much better than Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne.  It could be as simple as grey and neon and the fall of the Berlin Wall is a better mood than the promise of a fantastic science fiction world if you get beyond the bland corridors.

Atomic Blonde has the kind of story you swear you’ve seen a hundred times but can’t quite place any of them.  It’s kind of Skyfall meets The Usual Suspects if you only pulled the worst bits from the latter and the best bits from the former.  It’s set in 1989 just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and a file containing the names of every agent from every country working in Berlin has fallen in to the wrong hands.  The list also contains the identity of a notorious double agent.  MI6 sends in Lorraine Broughton (Theron) to retrieve the list and rendezvous with David Percival (McAvoy) an agent who has been without supervision so long he has “gone native” which in this context seems to mean that he’s playing a Mad Max villain dialed down to 70%. The story has enough twists and turns to keep it interesting, but I never felt like anything made enough sense.  The combination of the unreliable narrator and the endless double crosses makes everything one or two degrees too muddled for me.  Not that this is a movie that wants to be remembered for its plot; it wants to be remembered for its action.

This is a movie directed by someone that started as a stunt coordinator who then hired a top notch crew of stunt and fight choreographers.  The action beats in this movie are completely nuts.  There’s a one-take continuous fight scene that travels through an entire building that is spellbinding.  Because movies have become so enamored with quick-cut action scenes this becomes instantly anti-cinematic and feels even more real.  A rejection of the Bourne model of fight scenes (ironically made by people who did work on fights in those movies) and a statement that this is a movie where fights are longer, more brutal, and have a more lasting effect. The other fights are also superb but they were also universally featured in the trailers, including the climactic fight scene, so it felt like I had seen everything else before I got there.  I know that the people who make the movie don’t cut the trailers but the marketing people did this movie a disservice by putting out so much of the good stuff for free.

I don’t tend to like movies that use grey as their primary color, and Atomic Blonde uses an awful lot of grey, but it works here because they use it exclusively to allow pops of other color.  Berlin is dreary and sedate in this film but none of the characters are.  Everyone has something about them that jumps off the screen be it hair, clothes, some kind of prop.  Lorraine gets all three.  The locations sometimes defy belief (there were neon pink lights in flop house hotels in 1989 Berlin?) but I like beyond belief if it lends itself to a better looking film.  Atomic Blonde is slick without being shiny and that’s worth a lot for a movie that’s supposed to be set in such a pivotal moment.  I would roll my eyes at any movie that wanted to end with the backdrop of fireworks, but if the Berlin Wall is falling and the fireworks look like the kind of thing you see from people in cities where fireworks are illegal it kind of makes it okay.

I would absolutely watch Atomic Blonde if I saw it on HBO, I might even buy the graphic novel to see if it makes the plot any easier to understand.  I appreciate that I seem like a hypocrite for praising this movie after slagging a movie with similar attributes a week ago, but I don’t care.  Cool counts.  Atomic Blonde is cool and catchy and sticks with you.  It pushes itself above mediocrity through grit, charisma, and gumption.

Box Office Democracy: The Fate of the Furious

Box Office Democracy: The Fate of the Furious

I don’t believe in objective reviews of media.  I think the personal subjectivity of the reviewer is impossible to remove and, honestly, that it would be boring if you could.  That said, I am not capable of being remotely objective when it comes to the Fast & Furious franchise.  I find the formula they have stumbled upon since Fast Five to be unbelievably charming and I can’t separate the movie from the joy they’ve brought in to my life and the friendships these movies have enriched.  If this bothers you, I can give you the low down on how I feel about this movie and you can be on your way: if you’ve liked any of the last three entries in the franchise you’ll like this one, and if you didn’t this will not change your mind.  If my F&F obsession does not bother you, come on and let me geek out a little bit.

If you’ve seen the trailer you know the hook for The Fate of the Furious: Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) has turned against his crew, his family, and is now working for the super hacker Cipher (Charlize Theron).  That’s sort of the whole film.  Cipher has a nefarious plan but it’s very nebulous.  She wants nuclear weapons and she wants to launch one, but I’m not sure what she wants to do after that.  It all feels hastily thrown together so we can get the shots of Dom in his evil black jumpsuit driving a more evil-looking black Challenger.  That’s all fine, the plot is only there to hold top the action sequences— but this feels less substantial than usual.  There’s also the idea that Cipher would blackmail someone who has pulled off some of the zaniest heists and car chases in history but only uses him as a glorified bag man that rubbed me the wrong way— but again it’s all about big action sequences and meaningful glances, so whatever.

There are two signature action pieces in The Fate of the Furious and they’re the most important thing to judge the movie by.  There’s a big second act set piece in New York where Cipher hacks a bunch of cars and controls them remotely as a big swarm to take out a motorcade.  This is a visually interesting bit but it might finally be the moment where a Fast & Furious movie got too far out there for me.  I know cars don’t work like that.  More importantly, it doesn’t feature any characters we care about so it’s literally just cars smashing in to each other with no purpose.  The sequence picks up a lot when it becomes about Dom and the rest of the crew, but by that point you’re kind of tired of action.  The movie’s climax is a race across a frozen bay to stop a submarine while being chased by cars firing missiles.  I know I said self-driving cars were straining my suspension of disbelief earlier in this very paragraph, but I loved every ridiculous second of this sequence.  It feels a little like they’re trying to top the tank sequence from Fast & Furious 6 by using a bigger more menacing piece of military hardware and it doesn’t live up to it, maybe nothing ever could, but it’s great in its own right.

Fast Five was a heist movie with all the wonderful twists and turns inherent in the genre, and in the two films since they’ve abandoned that to make straight-up action movies.  While they haven’t gone back to stealing giant safes, they have returned to meaningful third act twists and I’m so thankful for it.  There’s so many things we find out were slightly different than the first time we saw them, and it’s what these movies need to not just be an endless parade of flashy car tricks.  It needs characters, it needs stakes, and it needs to be just a little bit surprising.

Reading this back, I can see how much I’m grading The Fate of the Furious on a curve.  If this was any other movie with the flaws this one has I would probably be here tearing it apart and begging you not to see it.  I love this franchise, I love these characters, and I can’t set that aside.  There are so many little things to appreciate from an eight movie franchise that can’t be replicated.  It’s nice just to hang out with these characters and exist in their world for another couple hours.  It’s fun to pick up on the callbacks and see them pick up threads that were set down years and years ago.  I still find The Fate of the Furious as refreshing as a Corona on a hot LA afternoon— and as long as that’s true, I’ll carry water for these movies.

Box Office Democracy: Kubo and the Two Strings

Kubo and the Two Strings fills a void I didn’t realize had grown in the movie landscape until I was watching it— it’s an earnest adventure movie for all ages without a trace of camp. There’s very little winking at the audience, there are no topical references, and the celebrity voice actors even try not to sound like themselves. It is refreshingly straight-laced and serious about the mythology in a way that seems lost sometimes even among supposedly serious films. It’s easy to get lost in the wonder of the story because everything is pushing you to do exactly that. I’ve scarcely been so happy to be lost in a film.

Kubo is like a fairy tale that you forgot. It combines a litany of familiar tropes like evil elders, a bumbling but noble sidekick, and the enduring magical power of parental love and combines it in to something that feels timeless, more a Monet than a paint-by-number. It’s a fairly basic hero’s journey story— Kubo has his life destroyed and must flee with only a few magical artifacts to protect him, and must gather legendary items to defeat the evil moon king. The artifacts in question don’t actually seem super helpful in defeating the villain, but that’s never what these things are really about. If I want to nitpick the metaphor gets a little clunky at times and might completely break down in the film’s climax, but I was consistently entertained and the last shot is killer so the rest is meaningless details.

There’s a level of base discomfort one can get from watching a movie so clearly trying to be Japanese but with no Japanese people in anywhere in the writing or directing credits. This is further compounded when white people voice all of the principal characters. It didn’t feel disrespectful to me, it felt tone consistent with the fables and myths I was familiar with from taking a few East Asian literature classes in college, but it isn’t my place to tell other people what is or is not over their boundaries for a piece of media like this. In a perfect world I would like to see movies like these, love letters to legitimate cultural artifacts, have more people from that culture playing the roles, but I understand that that isn’t where Hollywood is right now. I can’t find any Japanese people criticizing the film on these grounds, so I’m content to enjoy the movie and hope for the time when representation is a little better.

Representation issues aside the cast is uniformly fantastic. Charlize Theron is tiptoeing this line between loving maternal figure and fierce protector and absolutely nails it. Matthew McConaughey gives his strongest performance since winning an Oscar, and it’s probably not even worth looking up what those movies are to figure out how much of a compliment this is. Art Parkinson does most of the heavy lifting in the movie and might finally be moving away from being “that kid who plays Rickon Stark”, if he can keep doing work like this (or any work where he gets actual lines). Ralph Fiennes is such an unexpected delight and is wonderfully understated, but I couldn’t help but think that David Carradine would have 100% gotten that role if he were alive. Rooney Mara is going to be in my nightmares for her exquisitely creepy work. I’ve already mentioned this, but the greatest part of all of this work is the actors are willing to disappear in to the role instead of just sounding like themselves and cashing a big paycheck. I’m especially impressed with McConaughey, who even in his best work sounds an awful lot like himself but manages to fall away in to the part here.

Kubo and the Two Strings was a movie I wasn’t excited to see, it didn’t grab me from the trailer and it was put in a week that just seemed to scream “we’re done putting out the big movies this summer, here’s what’s left over” and I was so pleasantly surprised. Kubo is a strong contender for best animated movie of the year and could probably make a run at best action movie. I loved how it had a childlike sense of adventure built-in, but didn’t feel childish in the way a lot of kids movies can. It seems to be cursed to never find an audience, perhaps because it wasn’t willing to pitch itself as young as possible but it deserves to be a bigger hit. Kubo and the Two Strings is the best movie I’ve ever seen from Laika, and I hope it’s a sign of things to come and that the soft opening numbers don’t scare them back to The Boxtrolls or similar fare.

Box Office Democracy: “The Huntsman: Winter’s War”

In my first year of reviewing movies I ranked Snow White and the Huntsman as the ninth worst movie of 2012 and by that time news had come out that neither star Kristen Stewart nor director Rupert Shane would be returning for the sequel, and I predicted that it would probably be a better movie. I was right, The Huntsman: Winter’s War is a better movie, and it still isn’t a very good movie.   Freed from trying to retell a more famous story, there are some interesting choices made in the script— but it’s all overwhelmed by the crushing clichés of high fantasy. At its lowest points Huntsman is the slickest Lord of the Rings fan-film you’ve ever seen; at its highest it’s a kind of cute romantic comedy starring Nick Frost.

The Huntsman: Winter’s War wraps around the first movie with a little bit of an origin story and then the kind of sequel where you barely need to bring any of the cast back. The story now revolves around a previously unmentioned northern kingdom ruled by Freya (Emily Blunt) the ice witch sister of the evil queen Ravenna (Charlize Theron) from the first film. Freya has a plotline so similar to Elsa in Frozen that it feels like the script was written by lawyers, everything feels just distinct enough while still constantly threatening to break in to a chorus of “Let it Go” at any moment. Freya, it conveniently turns out, raised and trained a whole army of Huntsmen (and Huntswomen) and her sociologically fascinating but completely implausible ban on the very concept of love ends up driving away Eric (Chris Hemsworth) and starting him on his journey that leads him to the first movie. We then skip ahead to after and Eric with one of the eight dwarfs from the first movie (Nick Frost) plus a new dwarf (Rob Brydon) end up on a convoluted quest to rescue the evil magic mirror to save the completely absent Snow White and save the world, I guess. Sara (Jessica Chastain) is Eric’s presumed dead wife who saves his life at a miraculous moment, and then just a bunch of fantasy junk happens until they have to wrap it up.

I feel like a crazy person typing all that up. There’s just an insane amount of idea bloat in this film and it struggles to find a focus.

Some of that struggle for focus is the result of not having a clear protagonist. Going strictly by the screenplay writing books it’s Freya, because it is the change in her attitude that allows the climax of the movie to happen, but she’s practically a Bond villain in terms of her scheming for the rest of the film and it’s hard to feel particularly invested in the well-being of someone who keeps a room full of people turned into ice sculptures. In terms of screen time (and billing) it’s Eric, but he doesn’t change his attitude one iota through the film— he’s right about pretty much everything all the time and is super capable and has no need to improve, he’s Aragorn with an axe. It’s probably supposed to be Sara, she has a clear narrative arc and she has the biggest impact on the events of the film but they try so hard to obfuscate her actions and intentions that it’s hard to connect with her. That along with the stilted narrative structure leaves the movie feeling like a series of vignettes and not like a cohesive narrative.

I did genuinely enjoy the love story between Nick Frost’s dwarf and Alexandra Roach’s. It was cute, and it felt clever, and most importantly… it didn’t feel like it was shaken out of the fantasy magic eight ball like every other piece of Winter’s War. It was the only thing that felt genuine or surprising. This was a movie full of twists and every one of them was telegraphed so far in advance and the one that might have been surprising was shown in its entirety in the trailer for the movie. That simple, silly love story was the only thing I liked, the only thing I will remember fondly in this overplotted mess, but it deserves to be recognized. If the next movie just takes those two characters I’d be first in line for more; otherwise, please put this series out of its misery.

Box Office Democracy: Mad Max: Fury Road

In 2009 my parents visited me in Los Angeles for the first time and I needed to show them a movie as the Arclight chain of theaters because I wouldn’t shut up about how great they were. There wasn’t anything out that we were dying to see so we saw the latest movie from Jason Statham more because we liked him than because we thought we would see a fantastic movie. That was the first time I saw Crank: High Voltage and it changed what I wanted from an action movie: pace above all other things. I want a movie to move as fast and damn the audience if they can’t keep up. Mad Max: Fury Road is the first movie since that feels like it is genuinely pushing at the limits of the genre and it makes for a truly impactful filmgoing experience.

Mad Max: Fury Road is a 120-minute movie that has well over 110 minutes of action. Fast action at that, breakneck paced, innovative fire-belching action that constantly threatens to overwhelm the senses of the audience. Chase sequences so far above and beyond the norm that it feels like the cinematic equivalent of the invention of the steam engine and it’s like we skipped a thousand steps and went from farming to factories in no time at all. That they could do these choreographed ballets of explosions, high speeds, and flying bodies almost exclusively with practical effects defies belief. It all simultaneously looks like it would take a million takes to get right but would only really ever accommodate one. (more…)

Mike Gold: Mad Max – Back In The Desert Again!

Today’s Zen question: Can a movie be called a sequel even if it has a cast that hadn’t been in the earlier three movies but it stars the same lead character and the worldview remains consistent with those movies and all four movies have the same director, but the last one was released 30 years ago?

Today’s Zen answer: Who the hell cares? Mad Max: Fury Road is an absolutely terrific movie.

I saw this epic with my ComicMix comrade Martha Thomases and our mutual pal, Michigan’s own Penelope Ruchman. It was the beginning of an amazingly astonishing pop entertainment day; I’d give you those details but you know how I absolutely hate to name-drop. I won’t speak for Martha or Penny except to say that Martha enjoyed the movie at least as much as I did and I believe Penny liked it even more. Yes, it really is the Gone With The Wind of action movies, except instead of torching Atlanta they trashed several megatons of George Metzger-esque decrepit vehicles traveling across the desert to… well, to nowhere. Action ensues.

And that’s about it for the plot. Usually, that is not a good sign. Here, somehow, it works. If somebody pitched this to me as a graphic novel I’d have rejected it – but on the screen, in George Miller’s more-than-capable hands, it soars. I did not notice one person in the crowded Manhattan theater leaving for food or a bathroom break. That’s better than “two thumbs up,” particularly when damn near the entire movie was set in the desert. You’d think people would need some water or soda or a Slurpee or something.

Tom Hardy is fine as Max. The role isn’t overwhelmingly dependent upon acting chops, but when needed Tom delivers. The true star of this movie, in every conceivable way, is Charlize Theron. She plays the other title character, Imperator Furiosa. She is the heart and the soul of the movie but, to the regret of a few morons, she and her women companions also carry the brunt of the action. They carry it right to your lap.

There’s a bit of a controversy contrived by these aforementioned morons about how Mad Max: Fury Road emasculates men. There is a phrase for this attitude: neurotic bullshit. If this movie made their balls shrivel up and fall to the ground, trust me: society is better off.

There’s a long-standing meme in Hollywood about how women can’t carry an action movie. Executives point to truly shitty movies such as Catwoman, Elektra, and Supergirl. It doesn’t occur to the cigar-chompers that if you rewrote these movies for a male lead, they would be just as shitty and only marginally more income-active. I have three things to say to these people:

  • Lucy
  • Mad Max: Fury Road
  • Greenlight the fucking Black Widow movie already.

Mad Max: Fury Road was co-written by comics great Brendan McCarthy, of 2000 AD fame. Particularly of Judge Dredd fame. The parallels between the Mad Max series and Dredd are, well, overwhelming. Jus’ sayin’. I thought Mick McMahon should have received royalties for The Road Warrior, but it is a great movie. Just like Road Fury.

This movie was so relentless and so compelling that even George Eastman’s parents should be proud.

Go see it. But first, stop by the ridiculously overpriced candy counter and buy vast quantities of consumable liquid. This time, it’s actually worth the money.

 

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