Oz the Great and Powerful

Plot: A 1890 circus show magician Oz (James Franco) is swept away in a gas balloon by a tornado to Oz. This portion is shown in black and white in a squarish screen shape. When he gets to Oz, the movie is in color and in full width. He meets the witch Theodora (Mila Tunis) who he flirts with as they journey the Emerald City, where he meets Evanora (Rachel Weisz) her sister witch, whom he also flirts with. Evanora sends him to Glinda (Michelle Williams) who is their enemy.  Glinda beguiles him, and Oz switches sides. The sisters figure out that he has been romancing both of them and now Glinda, and suddenly hate him. Oz is not actually a wizard but he uses his showman tricks to defend himself, and then in the final battle. [imdb]    [photos]

Review: Wonderful. This is a clever retelling of the classic story that is both fresh and comforting. It is something between a remake and sequel in that it copies so many elements from the original. Notably how people in Kansas show up in Oz.

The tone of the movie is just a little bit comedic, and this distracts from dramatic elements. I wonder what it would be like as a straight drama, darker, stronger and more adult, but probably less magical and less interesting to the whole family audience. In the end, this is a family movie and some of the comic elements need to be seen in that light, for example, Finley the talking monkey.

In the end the Wizard gives gifts to his friends. I thought this was sweet, charming and affecting. It verged on too saccharin, but this is family movie. The end also tied up the story of China Girl (Joey King) which is important thematically.

The movie is built on the excellent performance of James Franco, who I had not seen before, but I am sure that I'll see again. Rachel Weisz was strong too; Mila Kunis was good, but Michelle Williams was only OK. The Danny Elfman sound track was the best orchestral soundtrack recently. 

The photography, aside from the black & white gimmick, shows an other world reality in a theatrical way where the scenery represents the real Oz, and the audience is to suspend disbelief. In the 1939 Wizard of Oz, the journey to Oz is really Dorothy's dream, and she was actually sleeping at Aunt May's house the whole time. It is possible that director Raimi was trying to show that through set design and photography. 

All in all, this was a great piece of filmmaking. I liked it, and I want to see it again. It may become a cult classic, but I am not sure mass audiences will go for it. 

Cast: James Franco, Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz, Michelle Willams, Joey King

Directed by: Sam Raimi

Rating: 3.25 stars: Not as good as some more serious films. It is fun to watch most of the time. 

  +1/4

More: Being a Disney movie, I am pretty sure that there will be another Oz movie someday. I wonder if the dreaminess of the world will continue to play into it. Will Oz someday take his balloon back to Kansas and wake to find his Anne and Frank?

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Jack Reacher

Plot: Five people are shot by a sniper and quickly the police arrest Charlie. He tells the police to call Jack Reacher, and then he gets beat up and spends the rest of the movie in a coma. Immediately Jack Reacher (Tom Cruise) shows up at the police station, and meets with the detective Emerson (David Oyelowo) and the defense attorney Helen (Rosamund Pike.) Reacher is a tough-guy, former Army investigator who lives off-the-grid. 

Reacher checks into the evidence and finds it too neat, and suspects the Charlie is being set up. Soon someone tries to murder Reacher, and then witnesses start to die. Reacher just gets mad, leading to chase scenes, fist fights and a showdown at a quarry.  [imdb]    [photos]

Review: I saw Jack Reacher at a $1 matinee since I did not like the first-run movies this weekend. Jack Reacher had a lot to like, and plenty of imperfections too. Not a bad popcorn movie -- better if you don't think about it. A few of the characters are well developed, and there are some clever plot twists.

I never really bought the idea of a drifter, tough-guy super cop like Jack Reacher -- why would someone live this way. Taking the bus everywhere? No cell phone?  Really? 

Rosamund Pike does a adequate job, but a better performance in the female lead would have really helped. Despite the fact that she might be double-crossed by people she trusts, we don't see much emotion. Tom Cruise does a nice job acting, but since Jack Reacher is such an enigma, it is hard to say what he is acting for. 

I liked the scene where he jumps out of the car curing a chase scene, and walks over to the bus stop to hide from the police. Then a guy loans him a ball cap as a disguise -- pretty funny. 

Cast: Tom Cruise, Rosamund Pike, David Oyelowo, Vladimir Sizov

Directed by:  Christopher McQuarrie, based on the book series by Lee Child (Lee Child can't be his real name, can it?)

Rating:  2.0 stars: good but with weaknesses. Enjoyable but not super fun. 

More: Nice scenes of Pittsburgh

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Beasts of the Southern Wild

Plot: Six year old Hushpuppy (Quvenzhane Wallis) lives in a rural southern Louisiana swamp called The Bathtub with her father Wink (Dwight Henry) who is poor, sick and often drunk. Hushpuppy takes care of  herself and the neighbors watchover her. Her father gets sick; there is a storm with terrible flooding; there are dream sequences of monsters; and  Hushpuppy looks for her mother. [imdb]    [photos]

Review: This is two movies at once: on one level it is a story of poor people with a "It Takes A Village to Raise a Child" message, and it is also about the monsters of life, the horrors of civilization, global environmental breakdown. 

The enjoyable part is how Hushpuppy overcomes problems and how the poor people of the Bathtub take care of each other. The sobering part is poor and dysfunctional it all is, and how it could be better. Films need evil to be overcome so I should not complain about how dreary it is, but the bad parts are pretty unpleasant.

The dreary parts in the middle are redeemed by the relatively optimistic ending, so I finished watching in a good mood. 

Cast: Quvenzhane Wallis, Dwight Henry, Levy Easterly

Directed by: Benh Zeitlin; based on a play by Lucy Alibar

Rating: 2.75 stars: I saw this on a plane, so it might have been rated higher in the theater. It was enjoyable. 

 

More: Poverty porn is showing photos extreme poverty to produce emotions in the audience perhaps made worse by not aiding the subject of the photography. There is melodramatic manipulation in this movie, but that is what moviemaking and storytelling generally is. In a modern US movie, none of the actors are mistreated. In a documentary, perhaps there could be moral liability. 

The ethics of poverty porn are distant from the ethics of journalism which hold that a journalist cannot objectively tell a story if s/he is involved in the story. Of course, there is no journalism here. On the other hand sometimes the best thing a photographer can do is take pictures and show them. 

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Side Effects

Plot: Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara) is depressed and Dr Jonathan Banks (Jude Law)  prescribed a new anti-depressant -- whose side effect is sleepwalking. One night Emily is sleepwalking and she stabs her husband Martin (Channing Tatum) to death in her sleep.  It looks like Emily will plead insanity but then the plot starts to twist and twist again. [imdb]    [photos]

Review: Side Effects hinges on the photography and acting from Rooney Mara. It isn't what she says as much as the way she holds herself -- reacting to the action. Jude Law is just as good especially later in the film as the tension turns up on his character Dr. Banks. 

You might think that Soderbergh is making a film about over-medication or the prescription culture -- but actually not. It is an suspenseful psychological thriller -- very smart writing with clever plot twists. 

The music by Thomas Newman was always interesting and appropriate. I liked the interesting interior photography and actually the set decoration. Several of the paintings were interesting. 

I liked the ending, because once we figure out what is happening, the evil doers pay. 

Cast: Rooney Mara, Jude Law, Catherine Zeta-Jones

Directed by: Steven Soderbergh

Rating: 4.0 stars: a well-crafted film with a clever story and great acting; Why not 4 stars? 

 

More: I hate to give a movie 4 stars too early in the year, but it is as good as a lot of last year's favorites like End of Watch, but not as good as LIncoln or Cloud Atlas. Better than The Impossible, The Avengers, and Perks of Being a Wallflower. It does not have a message though.

Even More: By the end of the movie, we see that one of the characters is purely evil: fully disassociated from humanity kind of evil. Way past super villain evil into shoot up a room full of 1st graders kind of evil. 

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Zero Dark Thirty

Plot:  Dan (Jason Clarke)  and Maya (Jessica Chastain) are CIA analysts assigned to catching Ussama bin Laden in Pakistan. Early on, they are questioning and torturing prisoners. Later Maya begins to track a courier for bin Laden, Abu Ahmed. This takes years, but eventually she goes to Washington to convince higher-ups to make a military attack. The movie concludes with action scenes of the raid and bin Laden's death. 

[imdb]    [photos]

Review: Zero Dark Thirty is a gritty movie about messy, dirty, ugly parts of counter-terrorism. One of the ugliest parts is the torture of al Qaida prisoners, which takes up the first third of the movie. In the middle, Jessica Chastain gets tough to jump start the hunt bin Laden. She has a few powerful scenes that seemed realistic. The final raid is suspenseful and fast-paced.

The best part is the documentary value of learning about the search and the raid. Now, this is a Hollywood movie, and I know director Bigelow was going for suspense, drama, and reasonable running time, and that therefore many details are inaccurate.  The worst part is that it is not that fun to watch.

After I left the theater, I kept thinking about the morality of the torture and the midnight raid. Did so many people need to die in the early morning raid on the bin Laden compound? It seemed like one woman was killed accidentally. Given that no one was sure who lived there, why was there such a strong bias toward killing the occupants?

As a film, the photography was OK, and the soundtrack was not memorable. The helicopter assault scenes were good. 

Cast: Jessica Chastain, Joel Edgerton, Chris Pratt 

Directed by: Kathryn Bigelow

Rating: 3.0 stars: educational, thought provoking, not fun

More: .I continue to wonder how accurate Zero Dark Thirty was. I think it is an artist's impression of the facts with a bias to making the story dramatic.  It makes me want to read a book on it. 

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Silver Linings Playbook

Plot: Teacher Pat Solitano (Bradley Cooper) gets out of mental hospital and moves in with his parents Dolores (Jacki Weaver) and Eagles Football super fan Pat Sr (Robert De Niro.) Pat got committed to the hospital for a fist fight with his wife Niki's lover. Pat is determined to get Niki back by getting his life together. However Niki has a restraining order on him, and he can't get near her. His mom sets him up with Tiffany, (Jennifer Lawrence,) who is/was also mental ill. 

In the hospital Pat has adopted a positive thinking philosophy that concentrates on finding silver linings for bad things that happen. That is where the title comes from.

Pat and Tiffany flirt, and soon Tiffany signs Pat up for a dance contest. They start practicing modern dance moves while Tiffany sneaks letters to Niki. 

Meanwhile Pat Senior is deep into magical thinking  superstitions to get the Eagles to win, and he is gambling big money. 

In the end, the dance contest and a pivotal Eagles playoff game happen on the same night leading to the inevitable end.  [imdb]    [photos]

Review: Silver Linings Playbook is a black romantic-comedy with the twist being mental illness of the characters. Silver Linings doesn't probe the meaning of mental illness: more  that everyone is more or less neurotic. Most of the humor comes from the strange compulsions and maladaptions of Pat and his family. 

I liked the movie because Pat and Tiffany are quirky and good-hearted, and that Pat Sr's goofy football antics provide levity. 

The script delivers clever lines for the whole cast and De Niro, Cooper and Lawrence are up to the challenge with a full range of emotion delivered though the window of altered mental states. 

Cast: Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro

Directed by: David Russell, based on the novel by Matthew Quick

Rating: 3.5 stars

 

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The Impossible

Plot: During the Indian Ocean Tsunami in Thailand, a family is caught up in the wave, separated and beaten up. The movie is about their impossible survival. After set up scenes of family life, there is the disaster, splashing in the water, finding the way to help on dry land, and then finding each other.  [imdb]    [photos]

Review: An emotional ride though a real life disaster with good actors and a skillful director. A good ride that I enjoyed. 

Highlights are the disaster footage. All the scenes of water splashing over the hotel and landscape are great. The scenes of Maria (Naomi Watts) getting battered by debris on the way to the air surface are exceptional. Most of Watts and McGregor's scenes are great. All three child actors are good -- not wooden at all. 

It was not as melodramatic as I feared that it would be. There are some tear-jerker scenes -- no mistake about that.  The story has is more tangible, realistic, and less manipulative -- or at least less manipulative than it could have been -- it is still a major movie after all. Being a true story helps credibility too.

Besides being about the disaster, it is also about taking care of each other, and taking care of other people. The movie evokes charitable human feelings. 

Cast: Naomi Watts, Ewan McGregor

Directed by: Juan Antonio Bayona

Rating:  3.5 stars: not as fun-to-watch as my other top picks, but it is a disaster movie. It moves up due to the acting and the rapid pace. About as good as Hunger Games and Avengers. 

 

More: The Impossible is a dumb title because nearly every action movie plot could be called The Impossible. 

Even More No one in Thailand seems to have a sponge to clean the dried blood off our heroes. Seems they could have managed to clean up a little by end of the movie. 

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