by BoB Grimm
b g ri m m @ne w s re v i e w . c o m
“Hey, baby. on a scale of one to America, how free are you tonight?”
The magic has gone
interacting with special effects. The creatures might look relatively cool, but none of them register as great characters that move the plot along. Dan Fogler delivers what turns out to be the film’s best performance as Kowalski, a wannabe baker who winds up crossing paths with Newt while trying to get a bank loan. He’s a “muggle” I was a little late to the Harry Potter party. I dabbling in a non-muggle universe, and some of the didn’t like the first movie (a bunch of kids who film’s better moments come from Fogler’s reactions didn’t know how to act participating in a big to crazy sights. He also has a little love story that’s costume pageant), thought the second was really sort of sweet. good, and then loved the third, Harry Potter and Ezra Miller, DC’s current The Flash in cinemas, the Prisoner of Azkaban (a masterpiece). plays Credence Barebone, a suspiciously worried The Harry movies got a little inconsistent after looking fellow who has a nasty secret. Colin Farrell Azkaban, but the character rose above any of the is on hand as an agent for a secret society seeking mediocre moments delivered by director David witches and wizards, and he also has a big secret. Yates, who helmed the final four movies. Of course, as the press has already announced, Yates returns to helm the next chapter in the Johnny Depp has a role in this new universe Potter universe, a prequel extension, one that will surely called Fantastic Beasts and get bigger than his two-line Where to Find Them, the title appearance in this film. of a textbook Harry studied at There’s definite joy in Hogwarts. The film takes place simply seeing the extended well before Harry’s time, as Potter universe come to life the world of wizardry comes to again on film, even if Harry New York City in the 1920s. isn’t present, and the film Director: David Yates Unfortunately, Beasts itself is somewhat of a dud. Starring: Eddie Redmayne, struggles with some of the same There are many more to come, Dan Fogler, Ezra Miller problems the first Harry Potter with Yates already announced had. It’s a sometimes goodas the director for four more looking movie with a screenplay that never takes chapters allegedly to be released in an every-otherhold. It’s all over the place, with no real sense of year cycle. So there will be more movie wizardry, purpose other than setting you up for future movies. more beasts and another big wizard showdown. It’s nothing but an overblown place-setter. This time, it looks to be a younger Dumbledore In place of Daniel Radcliffe’s Harry, we get facing off against Depp’s character, who is a Eddie Redmayne’s Newt, author of the infamous precursor to Voldemort. textbook and caretaker for a variety of “fantastic Wait a minute, talking about all that cool future beasts.” The film opens with him coming to New stuff is distracting. The matter at hand is the current York toting a suitcase with a variety of beasts film, which is an ultimate bore. See it knowing that bursting to get out. 1) things will probably get more exciting in future Some of them do, indeed, escape and wreak chapters and 2) Nifflers aren’t half as interesting as havoc. Most notably a little platypus-looking thing Hippogriffs. called Niffler. There’s a fun moment when Newt Also, maybe Yates should take a break from opens his case, and drops into it like it contains a directing these films and give somebody else a staircase. It reveals a vast home for the creatures shot. Bringing back Alfonso Cuaron, director of inside, where he feeds them and plays. Azkaban, would be a nice move. Yates has done And that’s it, really. The movie is a big setup well, but Beasts has proven that his approach might for the occasional sequences involving Redmayne be getting a little stale. Ω
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
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SHORT TAKES
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The Accountant
This plays out like a deranged Batmanwith-a-calculator action flick. Ben Affleck plays Christian Wolff, a high functioning autistic man who has managed to harness his extreme intelligence with numbers and physical tics down into the strangest of professions. By day, he’s your average accountant helping a farm owner find tax loopholes to save a few thousand bucks. At night, he’s some sort of accountant ninja who can take out a room full of mob guys with a dinner knife and some totally Batman forearm blasts to the face. Christian takes jobs laundering books for dirty folks all over the world and, while he does have a modest, sparsely decorated home, he also has a mobile man cave—or, should I say, Batcave— that keeps all the spoils of his riches—money, gold, Jackson Pollock paintings and, yes, collector’s items like Batman comic books. During one job, trying to find missing money for a prosthetics company led by John Lithgow, he takes a liking to fellow accountant Dana (the invaluable Anna Kendrick), and they conspire to find the missing money, which, of course, wasn’t really supposed to happen.
Richardson) starts dating her brother (Blake Jenner). Nadine is a practitioner of brutal honesty, which basically gets her ostracized at school and in trouble with her family. The only one who really stops to listen is her teacher (a hilarious Woody Harrelson) who actually has no choice given his profession. Craig’s screenplay is first rate, and her directing results in some great performances. Steinfeld is good enough here to be considered for her second Oscar nomination, while Jenner (who starred in this year’s Everybody Wants Some!!) is equally good. This one draws comparison to the best of John Hughes, and I would call the movie a good companion piece to The Breakfast Club. It’s good to see Steinfeld getting a role she very much deserves and exciting to see a new voice like Craig’s on the scene. Kyra Sedgwick is also very good in a supporting role as Nadine’s mother, while Hayden Szeto does excellent work as a high school boy who hasn’t mastered the art of properly asking somebody out. (His performance is all the more impressive because he’s over 30 playing 18.) This is one of the better family dramas of recent years, on top of being a solid, funny comedy.
4
Arrival
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3
Doctor Strange
Director Denis Villeneuve has made one of the year’s best science fiction films. Amy Adams stars as Dr. Louise Banks, a linguistics teacher crippled by visions of a daughter who died of a rare illness. She lives a life of seclusion, where the only thing she really does is teach her class and mope around her lakefront home. (Man, that must be one abnormally high paying teacher’s gig.) During class, a bunch of phones go off, a student instructs her to turn on the TV, and, bam, that’s how she discovers the planet seems to be getting a visit from an alien force. Strange giant pods have parked themselves all over the planet, and nobody knows their intent. A solemn military man (Forest Whitaker) shows up in Louise’s office and informs her the world needs her. She has a sense of purpose again. It isn’t long before she’s inside an alien ship trying to talk to the “Heptapods,” large elephant looking aliens with seven legs. She’s joined by a science officer played by a surprisingly low-key Jeremy Renner. The movie is drawing comparisons to Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It’s a very different type of film from that one. If you’re looking for some sort of action pic, you will not find that here. This is a sci-fi movie that gives itself time to breathe, and while it does have a few action scenes, for the most part, it’s intellectual fare.
The latest Marvel movie is certainly one of the weirder ones, with Benedict Cumberbatch starring as the title character, a sorcerer who can cast spells and slip through passageways in time. It’s an origin story, showing how Strange loses his surgeon’s hands in an accident, travels to India, and learns about the mystical arts from The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton). I have to admit, I didn’t always follow exactly what was going on in this movie, and I found some stretches a little convoluted and boring. When the movie soars, it soars high, and Cumberbatch winds up being a decent choice for the role, even with his weird American accent. Director Scott Derrickson (Sinister), who looked like an odd choice for a Marvel movie with his horror film pedigree, acquits himself nicely. The movie often plays like a Matrix-Inception mashup with a little bit of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon thrown in for good measure. The special effects are first rate. Doctor Strange is a bit of an oddball character, and he’s supposed to factor into future Avengers movies. I’ll be curious to see how he fits into the mix with the likes of AntMan and Hawkeye.
4
The Edge of Seventeen
Writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig makes an impressive debut with this darkly funny take on the life of a modern day high school outcast. Hailee Steinfeld gives her best performance since True Grit as Nadine, a highly intelligent teen going through an awkward stage when her best friend (Haley Lu
Hacksaw Ridge
Mel Gibson directs his first movie in a decade and—surprise—the sucker bleeds. It bleeds a lot. As a director, Gibson stands alongside the likes of Sam Raimi, David Cronenberg and Peter Jackson as a master of body horror. Yes, I will go so far as to say his latest, Hacksaw Ridge, is an all out horror film in parts. His depiction of a World War II battle makes George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead look like Zootopia. The movie tells the true story of Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield), a battlefield medic and the first of three conscientious objectors in U.S. warfare history to receive the Medal of Honor. The dude refused to pick up a gun, or any weapon for that matter, during his time served in Okinawa. That didn’t stop him from braving the battlefields with comrades, eventually saving the lives of 75 men during horrendously bloody battles. Much of the film’s first half is devoted to Doss’ backstory, a troubled childhood with his alcoholic World War I veteran father (a good Hugo Weaving) and an eventual romance with future wife Dorothy Schutte (Teresa Palmer). The early goings in the film are handled well, although schmaltzy at times. When Doss goes to boot camp and faces off against commanding officers like Captain Glover (Sam Worthington) and Sgt. Howell (Vince Vaughn), the film starts to get very interesting. Due to his Seventh Day Adventist beliefs, Doss refuses to pick up a rifle, and this gets him into all sorts of jams on the training field and in the barracks. After a detour for a court-martial hearing, Doss and his infantry mates are deployed to Japan. When the action switches to the scaling of the Maeda Escarpment a.k.a. Hacksaw Ridge, the movie becomes perhaps the most grueling war movie experience ever made.
1
Inferno
This is easily the worst of the Robert Langdon series, a series that was already pretty terrible in that both The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons blew ass. Ron Howard once again directs Tom Hanks as Langdon. When Langdon wakes up in a hospital room, with a bullet scratch on his head and loss of memory, Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones) is there to help out. Then, somebody starts toward Langdon’s hospital room guns blazing, and the so-called adventure begins. Langdon is having hallucinations about something akin to Dante’s “Inferno” while trying to work his way through amnesia. He’s in Italy, and he doesn’t know why, but Sienna, for reasons unknown, is going to stay by his side until he works things out. Langdon must race against time (and solve puzzles!) in order to save the world. The main “puzzle” Langdon has to solve this time is where a doomsday bomb containing a virus that will wipe out the majority of the Earth’s population has been planted. If he doesn’t find the Make Everybody Sick bomb, it will be an apocalypse like no other. Gee, I wonder if the whole world will die in a Ron Howard movie?
11.23.16 | RN&R | 19