Catch Up Time

I’ve joined the AMC Stubs program, which allows me to see three movies a week for a monthly charge. Considering the charge is about what I paid to see three movies in a month, it’s a great deal for me. But the volume makes it hard to keep up with reviews for them all, and, frankly, some of the movies aren’t worth a full review. So from time to time I’ll do short reviews to share my thoughts and cover all I’ve seen. Here are four.

The House with a Clock in its Walls

For the adaptation of a children’s story to the big screen, Eli Roth isn’t the first director you’d think of for the project. Roth’s first feature was the horror film Cabin Fever, and he followed it with Hostel (the original & Part II) and The Green Inferno, none of them even close to family fare. But the best children’s stories have an element of fear within them, and The House with a Clock in Its Walls certainly has that. It’s based on a book written in 1973 by John Bellairs and illustrated by Edward Gorey, known for his macabre works. Roth brings a sense of danger to the production, but he also seems to be having an immensely fun time as well.

The story was adapted by Eric Kripke, who created the long-running “Supernatural” TV show as well as “Timeless.” Set in 1955, Clock tells the story of Lewis (Owen Vaccaro) who comes to live with his uncle Jonathan (Jack Black) following his parents’ death in a car accident. He soon discovers his uncle is a warlock and Jonathan’s friend and neighbor, Florence Zimmerman (Cate Blanchett), is a powerful witch who doesn’t like to do magic anymore. The house where Jonathan lives was owned by a dark wizard who hid a clock in the walls. Jonathan isn’t sure why, but he knows it’s a harbinger of nothing good.

Vaccaro is quite good in the role of Lewis. He’d been in the two Daddy’s Home comedies in a supporting role, but here he carries the movie as the central character. Pairing Black and Blanchett seems like mixing beer with Dom Perignon, but they have surprisingly good chemistry. The story suffers in comparison to the Potterverse, but Roth captures both a sense of wonder and menace so it keeps your attention.

Hunter Killer
Gerard Butler has settled into the action/adventure genre, not just starring in films but also producing them. The results have been uneven. Olympus Has Fallen and its sequel London Has Fallen were decent and diverting, but his venture into science fiction, Geostorm, was drivel. Hunter Killer is more former than later.

Butler plays the new skipper of an attack submarine who’s sent into Russian waters when the Navy loses contact with another of their subs. He discovers the sinking of the US boat, along with a Russian sub, is the first move in a coup against the Russian President by the Minister of Defense. With the help of a Seal team, Butler must thwart the Defense Minister’s plans while walking a fine line so he doesn’t start World War Three.

This doesn’t rise to the level of The Hunt For Red October, Das Boat, or the older classic, Run Silent Run Deep. Hunter Killer has more in common with the sub movies popular during World War II, though the special effects are a hundred times better. The film also stars Common as the rear admiral in charge of the sub fleet, and he does a decent job, but Gary Oldman is wasted as a shrill, two-dimensional Navy Chief of Staff.

It’s a fast-paced two hours that tells a pedestrian story in an exciting way, but once the lights come up it quickly fades from your memory.

To see the trailer, please click here.

Disney’s The Nutcracker and the Four Realms

I was looking forward to a movie version of Tchaikovsky’s marvelous ballet. I’m still looking forward to that, since Four Realms is not a dance movie despite the presence of Misty Copeland. Two directors whose work I’ve enjoyed in the past share the directing credit. Lassa Hallstrom (Chocolat, The Cider House Rules) did the principle photography, but was unavailable for a month of reshoots. Instead, Joe Johnston (October Sky, Captain America: The First Avenger) finished the film. But you need something to work from, and the script by first-time screenwriter Ashleigh Powell is more like a retread of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland.

There are some good parts. Mackenzie Foy (no relation to First Man’s Claire Foy), is exceptionally watchable. (She’d also played the child Murph in Interstellar) Foy has just turned 18, and I look forward to her transitioning into adult roles. The extended ballet/modern dance hybrid by Copeland fills in the backstory of the four realms. It’s incredibly beautiful and the high point of the film, but it ends too soon. And then there’s the Rat King, which is the stuff of nightmares.

But the rest of the film suffers in comparison to those parts. There are cameo-size roles for Morgan Freeman and Helen Mirren that add little. Kiera Knightley is fun at first as the Sugar Plum Fairy, but the performance becomes wearing as it goes on. Worse for me, though, was the relegation of Tchaikovsky’s wonderful music to mood music. The main themes keep coming up, but there’s no rhyme or reason to their use. Frankly, you’d get much more enjoyment out of listening to Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite than watching this mishmash.

To see the trailer, please click here.

Nobody’s Fool

There’s been a trend recently to R-rated comedy, with Girl’s Trip and Bridesmaids among others. The R doesn’t always mean really funny, though. Nobody’s Fool is another entry in that trend, with Tiffany Hadish as a woman recently released from prison who moves in with her successful career woman sister, played by Tika Sumpter. Hadish’s character, Tanya, discovers her sister is being catfished by an on-line suitor, to the point that she ignores the owner of a coffee shop who’s sweet on her.

The movie is directed and written by Tyler Perry, who usually stays in the PG realm. Nobody’s Fool doesn’t wear its R comfortably, as it veers from farce to sex comedy to woman empowerment story to syrupy love story over and over again. The wide fluctuations of tone has been an aspect of his Madea comedies, but here is seems mechanical.

Some may enjoy it more, but I found I didn’t care for the characters, and there were few real laughs in the picture.

To see the trailer, please click here. 

Odyssey

It’s pretty much a given that Christopher Nolan’s new film Interstellar will be compared with Stanley Kubick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey from 46 years ago. It’s about the only film that comes close to Interstellar’s vision and scale. Nolan himself gives the earlier film a nod when he has a robot on the spaceship use its humor setting to make a wisecrack about how the astronaut can get back in through the pod door after being ejected into space. But the movie actually harkens back to Homer’s Odyssey, where Odysseus must make his long trip home to save his family and his kingdom.

Nolan sets Interstellar in an all-too-possible future. Overpopulation has caused countries to focus almost solely on growing food. They tell themselves they’re a caretaker generation, to get through the crisis, and then things will be better. At the same time the climate has turned toxic. Blight has destroyed wheat as a crop, and sorghum is dying off. Corn remains resilient, but drought threatens it. Dust storms even worse than the 1930s are now common enough that communities have installed warning sirens for when the clouds approach. To keep the people focused on farming, the government has re-written history and science textbooks to negate accomplishments – they now say that the Apollo landings were faked – while NASA is officially disbanded. They can’t afford to dream big dreams anymore.

Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) was a test-pilot engineer at the end for NASA, but now he too is a farmer, living with his father-in-law Donald (John Lithgow) and his two children, Tom (Timothy Chalamet) and Murph (MacKenzie Foy). Tom looks forward to being a farmer, but Murph is already showing she may eclipse her father’s brilliance at science. But it seems Murph is going through a phase because she claims there are ghosts in her room push books off her shelves. Rather than being scared, she analyzes the dropped books to find a pattern, believing the ghosts are trying to communicate with her.

Then in the aftermath of a dust storm, Cooper and Murph find an anomaly that sends them on a journey. They discover the remnants of NASA hidden in an old NORAD bunker. It’s now under the direction of Professor Brand (Michael Caine) and his daughter (Anne Hathaway), who just goes by Brand. The professor gives Cooper a doomsday scenario for the planet that will happen within Murph’s generation. The only chance humanity has is to leave the Earth behind, and Cooper is the best pilot for the mission to find humanity a new home.

In 2001, the science is fairly bland and not really spelled out – just a cool light show at the end. Interstellar, on the other hand, is an illustrated primer on quantum physics, relativity, and holes of the worm or black variety. For instance, in the course of the mission Cooper hardly ages for a couple of reasons while back on earth Murph grows older than her father was when he left (the adult Murph is played by Jessica Chastain).

Also different than 2001, the humans in Interstellar are just that – human, with all our foibles and pettiness, even as we dream great dreams. It is one of the more emotionally resonant science fiction films. There are lies and weakness and cowardice – the stuff that drama is made of – rather than the antiseptic world of the earlier film. It’s not just science fiction; it’s science friction, as all the elements collide.

The special effects look top-notch, though it’s interesting that Nolan kept much of the movie old school. He used actual film rather than digital cameras, and for the robot TARS (voiced by Bill Irwin) many of its scenes are done with puppetry. Nolan collaborated with his brother Jonathan on the script, as he has in the past for Momento, The Prestige, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises. They were assisted by Kip Thorne (who has Executive Producer credit on the film) who is a famed astrophysicist who teaches at Cal Tech and is currently the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics. Thorne collaborated with the special effects crew on visualizing a worm hole.

The score by Hans Zimmer is effective, especially since Nolan told him he’d have to strip down the orchestration. He also didn’t provide Zimmer with the script, just a page of notes. However, Zimmer’s score underlines the emotional element of the scenes and increases the impact of the film.

The focus of the movie is Cooper and Murph, and the father-daughter relationship between McConaughey and Foy, then Chastain, has an emotional resonance and validity. Caine has done excellent work with Nolan through, and with their fifth film together that excellence continues. The rest of the cast – Hathaway, Lithgow, William Devane, Wes Bentley, David Gyasi, Casey Affleck, Topher Grace, and another major actor in a surprise appearance – inhabit their roles beautifully.

This is a major movie dealing with complex issues (it’s also 9 minutes longer than the original cut of 2001) but it is also a movie with heart and soul. 2001: A Space Odyssey played in some theaters for almost three years, supported by repeat visitors, some of whom enjoyed watching the special effects with the help of some chemical augmentation. Movie distribution has changed radically since those days, but this is a movie that deserves to be seen more than once, and then reflected upon.

It may only be science fiction for a few years.