Film

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Ender’s Game

Author Orson Scott Card appears to be some sort of pigheaded loser, as some of his recent publicized statements have indicated. That doesn’t keep his novel Ender’s Game and its sequels from being somewhat prophetic and intuitive when it comes to modern technology. It just makes him a big dick now. Hey Orson, go have an asshole tea party with Mel Gibson and Woody Allen. OK, back to the film review. The story has a protagonist named Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfield), a genius boy and master of futuristic videogames and strategies. He’s targeted by a military leader (crusty and craggy Harrison Ford) as the savior of the human race, somebody who can save Earth from a second attack by an alien insect species called the Formics. Ender enters into a training program where he is fast tracked to the point of commanding his own ragtag group of teens, including True Grit’s Hailee Steinfeld, through elaborate exercises. One involves a zero gravity room where they get to play laser tag with paralyzing rays, and the other being a large video game where they perform alien species annihilation scenarios. The movie has some impressive special effects, and some great ideas at its core. What it doesn’t have is an engaging performance by its central actor. Butterfield just doesn’t cut it as Ender, opting for a mostly quiet intensity that results in boring stretches. Steinfeld acts circles around him, and he is clearly outmatched. Also, something about this movie feels vastly abbreviated. I can’t help but think this franchise would’ve fared better as an HBO series, or some other network miniseries. The finale feels tacked on, super condensed and rushed. The character of Ender is required to switch emotional modes in a way that is too quick, and it feels false.

Card’s “One who can save us all!” premise, besides its biblical ramifications, also acted as a definitive prelude to such current phenomena as the Harry Potter series and The Matrix. The master gamer aspect of Ender was conceptualized when modern man was just saying goodbye to Colecovision and ushering in the age of Nintendo. The first Playstation was nearly a by Bob Grimm decade away. So, I’m not denying that Ender’s Game bgrimm@ was a masterfully intuitive notion as a novel. newsreview.com I’m just not impressed with the muddled effort director Gavin Hood hath wrought. 2 The movie, although visually breathtaking at times, is a flat, joyless affair. I couldn’t help but think of Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, another avenue for bug-like aliens attacking Earth, and how much fun that was. Ender’s Game has a lot of moping and routine teen angst in it. Ford is actually my favorite thing in the movie. He manages to mix in an occasionally warm, even funny moment as the determined engineer of Ender’s fate. There’s plenty of that old, raspy Ford of his later career, but just a touch of Han Solo. Watching him in Ender’s, I found myself rooting for a deal with J.J. Abrams soon to have Ford reprise his Star Wars role. His work here would act as a nice bridge back to that franchise. On the more confusing side, Viola Davis is on hand as Major Gwen Anderson, some sort of counselor/protector of Ender, constantly at Ford’s side and telling him his plan sucks. I got the feeling Hood and even Davis weren’t quite sure on the arc for this character, and she virtually disappears for long stretches of the film. There’s some typical army barracks bullying involving a character named Bonzo (Moises Arias) that doesn’t feel fully realized. I got the impression that there should’ve been more to this character’s story, but given the feature-length running time, certain aspects of that story have been jettisoned. Ender’s Game is not a bad movie. It has many respectable aspects, but it’s a movie marbled with dullness. It’s supposed to be the start of a franchise, but I have a sinking feeling the franchise ends here for now. Ω

“Stop! Let your mind go blank. Forget this movie ever existed.”

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excellent 3 Bad Grandpa Johnny Knoxville has tried to parlay his Jackass fame into an acting career, and he hasn’t exactly been setting the world on fire. So, because huge paychecks are tempting, he has returned to the Jackass well numerous times with three official movies, and his body has paid a tremendous toll. The man has thrown himself into the path of buffalos and bulls to score good laughs and, oh man, has he gotten those good laughs. As big as those checks can be, internal bleeding and broken limbs lose their luster after a while. So now we get this, a sort of Jackass movie that has a narrative mixed into hidden camera stunts. It’s very much in the tradition of Borat. Knoxville gets to play one part for the film, that of Irving Zisman, an over-80 letch of an old man that has shown up in past Jackass skits. He’s taking his grandson (Jackson Nicoll) across country, leading to some funny stunts that manage to shock a few. The highlight would be Nicoll dressed in drag and dancing to “Cherry Pie” at a beauty pageant, a moment when he basically steals the movie from Knoxville. Not as outrageous as the other Jackass films, but a nice way to keep the franchise going without destroying Knoxville’s body.

4Birth of the Living Dead This isn’t your typical horror documentary. It has George A. Romero as its subject, with his enthusiastic participation, and it examines the significance of his landmark zombie film Night of the Living Dead. The movie focuses on the tumultuous period in which the film was made, its almost accidental emergence as a civil rights film, the business people in Pittsburgh who put the movie together, and more. Romero makes so many revelations, you’ll want to go back and watch Dead again for the hundredth time. Many of the actors in the movie, including the doomed brother at the film’s beginning, were part of the film crew. After the credits, there’s a wonderful little 2007 interview with Bill Hinzman, who died in 2012. Hinzman played the legendary graveyard zombie at the beginning of the movie. He reveals that his zombie was initially just part of the ensemble, and his appearance near the end of the film (that wonderful walkingaround-in-a-circle moment) was initially his only involvement. Romero liked Hinzman’s zombie act in the mass attack scene so much that he asked him to play the very first zombie in the film. That’s the sort of info that makes this doc so cool. (This is available for rent on iTunes and Amazon.com, and not playing in local theaters).

4Captain Phillips Tom Hanks plays Richard Phillips, captain of the MV Maersk Alabama cargo ship. While delivering relief goods in 2009, his ship encounters Somali pirates who could give a rat’s ass about charity and try multiple times to board his ship. They eventually succeed, putting into play a crazy hostage drama that results in Phillips being taken aboard a space capsule-sized lifeboat with his captors. Hanks gives an expert performance that is just another notch in a great career. Fortifying the story with a terrifying yet somehow oddly sympathetic performance would be Barkhad Abdi as Muse, the pirate leader. One of the major strengths of this film is the relationship between Phillips and Muse, one that basically starts with Muse informing Phillips that he is no longer the captain of his own ship. Director Paul Greengrass mellows out on his shaky cam a bit, and delivers one of his best efforts yet.

2Carrie If you see this new 2013 version of Carrie starring Chloe Grace Moretz in the role that netted original star Sissy Spacek an Oscar nomination, you’ll probably walk away feeling it has more in common with Brian De Palma’s 1976 film than Stephen King’s sloppy first novel. While Moretz gives it her best shot, and Julianne Moore is delightfully nasty as Carrie’s crazed mother, director Kimberly Pierce (Boys Don’t Cry) provides very little reason for remaking the movie. And don’t go to the film hoping for a faithful retelling of King’s novel because, other than a few plot elements thrown back in that were excised from the original film, this is a straightup remake of the De Palma movie. While some of the supporting cast is OK, the presence of Nancy Allen and John Travolta is sorely missed. The Black Prom, a sequence so terrifying in the original film, is reduced to a glossy, silly mess in this version. Don’t waste your time. 1 Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 This is animation done with all the style and grace of a spastic colon saturated with hot sauce. While the first film in this series had a reasonable amount of charm, this one goes haywire from its start right until the finish line. Bill Hader returns as the voice of Flint, the overly excited inventor who, in the first movie, managed to use a crazy invention to inundate his hometown with giant food. Now, the machine has gone nuts, creating a race of living food including cheeseburger spiders and dolphin bananas. The film boasts an intolerably frantic pace, with a plotline that’s scattered beyond reasonability. It’s hard to follow, but it does have the occasional fart and poop joke to make the kids laugh. The only character I managed to enjoy was a jittery monkey trying to put out a sparkler, and that accounts for about 30 seconds of the film. Don’t waste your time and, trust me, your kids won’t like it either.

2The Counselor You would think a movie written by Cormac McCarthy (No Country For Old Men, The Road) and directed by Ridley Scott (Alien) would be amazing, but that is not the case with this bore-fest. Michael Fassbender, so good in Scott’s Prometheus, plays a character simply named Counselor, a lawyer who gets involved in drug trafficking and puts himself and others in jeopardy. Cameron Diaz plays the girlfriend of his partner in crime (a wild-haired Javier Bardem), and she’s just a terrible actress in this movie. She’s required to be bad, and you can feel her trying to be bad at every turn. Let’s just say she’s very bad at being bad. Scott puts together some intense, violent scenes that feel like they belong in a movie where the actors aren’t required to deliver long, boring, unrealistic monologues. Brad Pitt is OK as some sort of drug dealer sage, but he’s starting to look a lot like Mickey Rourke. (He actually references him during one of his speeches.) Scott almost manages a good movie out of this mess, but Diaz and the preachy script prevail in badness.

2Escape From Tomorrow Writer-director Randy Moore took a film crew and performers into multiple Disney parks and managed to film a fairly cohesive movie without permission to shoot, and without getting caught. Jim (Roy Abramsohn) finds out that he has lost his job during the movie’s opening scene on a Disney hotel balcony. Rather than tell the wife (Elena Schuber) he takes his family on one last day of park hopping that includes It’s a Small World, monorail rides and Epcot Center. Jim notices people coughing as he enters the park, and two French teens that seem strangely interested in him. Hallucinations, blackouts and eventual health issues ensue, leading to a lot of sequences that make no sense and an ending that is just strange. Watching the movie, I couldn’t help but be impressed by the scenes shot in the actual parks. Some green screen shots are obvious, but, for many scenes, Moore and his crew managed to get usable shots using the video functions in standard handheld cameras, making the crew look like tourists. In this way, the movie is a marvel. As for the plotting, it suffers a bit from the guerilla format and has a lot of holes and inconsistencies. This is one of those movies where the history of the way the movie was made is far more interesting than the movie itself. (This is available for rent on iTunes and Amazon.com, and not playing in local theaters).

5Gravity Finally, we get a big event movie that delivers the sort of thrills absent from too many large-scale movies promising big things this year. If you see this movie, you’re going to have a cinematic trip like no other. This is what going to the movies is supposed to be about. I sound like a movie critic quote machine, and I don’t care. In her first true blue science fiction role since Demolition Man, Sandra Bullock puts herself through the ringer as Ryan Stone, an astronaut on her first space shuttle flight. Her mission commander, played by a charismatic and calming George Clooney, ribs her about her upset tummy as he flies around space in a jet pack while she works tirelessly on the Hubble. Space debris comes their way, and an incredible survival story/adventure is underway. Director Alfonso Cuaron has put together something here that will always be remembered and talked about. This is truly a landmark film.