Less than Magical: Magic in the Moonlight Review

If this looks like the poster of a bad romantic comedy, I have bad news.

There is no mystery about this being a Woody Allen film: opening titles are nearly identical to the ones I saw at the beginning of Midnight in Paris, and given that both films are set in France and deal with the fantastic almost makes Magic in the Moonlight a companion piece to Allen’s 2011 work. In a way, Magic is a love letter to the French Riviera as many shots focus on the view of the sea from the verdant countryside. This will please the Francophile, but I did not fall in love with the shots. In the end, Magic in the Moonlight ends up an inferior iteration in Allen’s film catalog.

An ideal critic will no doubt cast this film in the context of Allen’s career as a whole; unfortunately, I can’t really do that. There are only three Woody Allen films that I’ve seen in their entireties: Annie Hall, Midnight in Paris, and Magic in the Moonlight. Ranking them in such a small selection is meritless since it ignores a nearly fifty years in filmmaking. And yet, I can’t help but put Magic against the other two. Annie Hall is the beloved masterpiece, Midnight is the work that reinforces audiences’ confidence in Allen’s abilities in his later years, but Magic seems to reveal a moment of weakness.

Magic is well-acted, especially with the two leads, Colin Firth and Emma Stone. Firth’s ardent skeptic Stanley plays inquisitor for Stone’s young mystic Sophie. Despite their fine performances, the chemistry between their characters feels forced in that Sophie seems to fall for the grumpy Stanley all too easily. It was as if Allen wanted us to find Stanley more charming than he truly comes across. What makes it even more infuriating is that Stanley is assuredly the Allen stand-in, giving the character a sort of Gary Stu problem in that he’s super intelligent and has a strange yet strong animal magnetism that draws in the young and naïve Sophie. Thankfully, Stanley is not depicted in such a way that he’s perfect in every aspect, but his negative qualities almost seem as they’re supposed to be overlooked.

I found myself restless throughout many moments in the movie, which is a rare thing. There’s some tension about whether or not Sophie’s truly a psychic, but never was I captivated by scenery or performances, instead wondering what would make this more than a whodunit with a love story. But it’s a bad whodunit with a weak love story. Amusing at times, but never once enthralling.

I Laughed at a Sentient Sapling Dancing to the Jackson 5: Guardians of the Galaxy Review

Needs more Peter Serafinowicz.

By all means, it should not have succeeded. Andy Dwyer of Parks and Rec should not be a roguish space hero. The guy who made Super should not do a comic book movie. Vin Diesel should not be a tree. A talking, gun-toting raccoon should not work. And yet, in spite of all these and many other factors, this movie works even better than the rest of the Marvel catalogue. Yes, even The Avengers.

Guardians of the Galaxy is and isn’t a superhero movie. It’s an epic space opera that makes for a better Star Wars movie than the Star Wars prequels. Our Han Solo-type is out to make a buck and look what happens—he gets embroiled in a desperate attempt to save the galaxy from certain destruction. He even makes a few buddies along the way. And yet, somehow, all of this is happening in the same universe in which an eccentric arms manufacturer teams up with a Norse god, an irradiated strong man with rage problems, a thawed out WWII super soldier—maybe it’s not so crazy.

But the film itself is insane, or at the very least weird. A lot of effort went in to making this alien and spacy. We don’t need to be told this is in a galaxy far, far away. The images do it for us. Humanoids of varying shades and hues walk in the backgrounds and foregrounds, and the locales are peppered with utopian futuristic architecture and gritty spacer aesthetics. There’s an entire sequence that takes place in a dead giant being’s head that’s being mined out for its riches. It’s reminiscent of the magazine Heavy Metal if its content was toned down for PG13 audiences. It’s very much a comic book movie, and it’s perhaps the best at being that.

The movie serves as a further evidence that the Marvel film brand is stronger than ever and almost certainly stronger than D.C.’s. Marvel was willing to take a risk on an unproven intellectual property, knowing full well that if it fails they’ve got the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to fall back on. Meanwhile, D.C. struggles to slap together a Batman and Superman movie without doing anything to string them together beyond keeping the same Superman actor. It’s this brazen confidence in Marvel’s property that no doubt supports Guardians’ success.

Chris Pratt does a fine job as Peter Quill, earth boy raised by space scavengers. He’s as hilarious as we’ve come to expect given his performances on Parks and Recreation and in The Lego Movie. Bradley Cooper plays the mouthy anthropomorphic raccoon Rocket who was not as annoying as I had expected. For a tree, Groot is surprisingly emotive, though more of that is owed to the animators and not necessarily Vin Diesel’s performance, though that’s not to say he did terribly. He did fine for a talking tree. Dave Batista plays our psychopathic strong man bent on vengeance, and for as angry and serious as he was, he chimed in with some great comedic moments for himself. The weakest performance here seemed to be Zoe Saldana as Gamora, due in part to her noticeably less frequent comedic timing than the rest of the characters. She plays the vengeful assassin lady admirably, but she doesn’t seem to have as much fun as the rest of the actors.

At the end, I’m left wondering how this film will merge with the rest of the MCU or if it even has to. Word is we have a sequel in the works for Guardians already, and while I’m happy to hear it, I’d be even happier if they keep it on that end of the galaxy and not ours. There’s so much more to see in Guardians’ self-contained universe. We could use a good space opera franchise right now, especially when we’ve been burned by other space opera franchises in the past. 

Unconventional and Improvised Weapons, The Sequel: A Review of The Raid 2

Now with less subtitle!

I was at friend’s apartment when his roommate emerged from his room with a face of satisfied exasperation. “What did you watch?” my friend asked. “The Raid,” the roommate said. Only a couple months later, the movie showed up in the Redbox near my apartment. I rented it, and then never returned it. They charged me full price for the movie. I was okay with that.

The Raid 2 I will be returning to the Redbox, but I hope to buy it later. As a sequel, it does everything it should: expands the scope of the film by upping the blood, multiplying the cast, and leaving the setting of the original. There are moments in the first movie that might make you cringe, but there are scenes that could make you outright queasy. And there’s a lot of them. For instance, in the The Raid, there’s a part where our protagonist Rama hides behind a wall from a machete-wielding thug. Suspicious of what might hide behind the wall, the thug stabs randomly. One stab grazes Rama’s cheek, and Rama must then wipe the blood off the blade as it’s retracted not to give away his presence. It’s a scene that works on multiple levels, but most importantly the fact that this is a wound that people can relate to. It’s not a terribly deep cut, and the pain is familiar enough that it might recall a memory to a previous cut. Cue the cringe.

None of that occurs in The Raid 2. The violence here is gritty but borderline fantastical compared to that of the original. It seems outrageous at times, but it’s mesmerizing to watch. There’s a scene in which a woman wearing sunglasses armed with two claw hammers takes out at least six men with Japanese daggers. The camerawork is intimidate since we’re on a subway train, and the woman makes liberal use of the claw side of the hammer. As you can guess, blood comes out in buckets during this scene, and it lasts all of about a couple minutes. The sounds, the close-ups of hammer claws buried into necks are harder to watch than in the first movie. Then again, The Raid 2 is more dangerous. The stakes are higher.

The Raid 2 is an immediate continuation of the first film. The traitor of the first film is seen at its beginning, and Rama is convinced to assist a cop with infiltrating a mob. His only qualifications for this are that he can kick a metric ton of asses and that he came out mostly unharmed from the titular raid of the first film. Of course, the cop makes a deal Rama can’t refuse: he’ll protect Rama’s wife and son. The wife is pregnant at the beginning of the first film. Rama is established as a family man both in trying to retrieve his gangster brother and saying reserved goodbyes to his pregnant wife. The family man angle is turned against him in The Raid 2, which makes Rama’s plight all the more engaging.

There’s even a running theme of distant fathers throughout the movie, as Uco vies desperately for his gangster father’s approval, a shabby hitman wants to reconnect with his son, and Rama stays in quiet contact with his wife. Due to this desire to introduce more plot and conflict, the film suffers at time in its pacing. At nearly two and a half hours, it’s a gamble to increase the exposition in a film that about dudes beating up other dudes, and the moments of downtime takes away that breakneck pace that we get in the original film. Also, dad conflicts are too convenient for a movie like this, but it helps to emphasize Rama’s concerns about staying alive long enough to be a dad.

Beyond fatherhood, Rama also evolves in fighting style. He takes on the persona of Yuda, a young hood who ends up in prison kicking the crap out of someone. He then befriends Uco, the heir of a crime family in Jakarta, in an attempt to infiltrate Uco’s syndicate. When not fighting, Rama comes across as an earnest worker doing the best that he can. However, when locked in combat, he becomes more brutal, nearly sadistic, than we see in the first film. In The Raid, he’s fighting for survival. In The Raid 2, there’s something else. It’s never clear if this propensity to violence is merely him maintaining his façade of Yuda, but it’s clear that we have a different Rama than in the first movie.

In spite of the film’s iffy pacing, The Raid 2 must be praised for its cinematography. Color palettes are played with in a noticeable and intriguing way. One setting in particular is saturated with red, giving the impression that the film is culminating to a bloody conclusion, which is accurate. That camera work has its moments of shakiness but it’s never in a nauseating way. There is, however, a car chase that does some bold moves with camera work in which the camera seems to fly into the passenger seat of a car but from a great distance in front of that car. A moment like that car chase reminds me why I was excited about the movie. The Raid 2 is the bigger, badder sequel that we thought we wanted. It’s still immensely fun to watch, but in trying to make more plot, it loses the charming relentlessness of the original. 

Zach Braff and His Cannibalized Kickstarted Movie Clone

Sheldon skips a couple centuries for this one.

I rented Garden State during a lonely period in my life. It got me into the Shins and indie comedies that weren’t 100% ha-ha. I connected with Andrew Largeman, Zach Braff’s emotionally numbed protagonist, or at least envied his medically induced serenity. At the time, I counted it among my favorite movies, somewhere between any Tarantino movie and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I haven’t watched it since.

I remember the trailers for it. The goofy daydreaming doctor on Scrubs made a movie and it was quirkfest with Natalie Portman as MPDG. It had a quiet quirkiness that made it alluring to the misfit who wants nothing more than to seal their ears in headphones, listening to acoustic rock from the Pacific Northwest.

A little over a year ago, Braff caused an uproar by coming out and asking fans to fund his next movie via Kickstarter. The beef most people had about it was, “Why’s Hollywood coming in and asking for some money for a movie?” The assumption was that, if the movie needed to be made, Braff himself had the connections to ring in Hollywood or indie investors and make it happen. The way it looks, he did but he needed some extra scratch to boost the production up. It looks like he succeeded. Enter the trailer for the movie.


When I first saw it, I had forgotten it had existed. Seeing Braff’s mug yelling “Dammit!” at the beginning of the trailer gave me hope. And slowly that hope slipped from my fingers. The Shins jangling on acoustic with some melodic woo-wooing immediately evoked Braff’s last effort; indeed, many credit him for growing the Shins’ audience, so it’s understandable that he’d throw them a bone again—or they’d throw him one. It’s not clear just yet. And then we get a slow motion shot of children running down a road while James Mercer’s singing confirms any suspicions you might’ve had that the Shins were doing the soundtrack. Not a terrible thing to hear, mind you.

But then half of the spoken lines in the trailer hit the rim but never quite make it through the basket. As Braff’s character learns that his father’s going to be “laid up” for a while and needs someone to watch his dog, he laments, “There’s so much bad news, all at once.” It could be his delivery or the maudlin importance of the words themselves, but comes in like a speed bump. And then Braff tells his daughter to pick a wig that is “unique and amazing—like you,” as if he wants us to remember weirdo Natalie Portman with a fetish for the unique in Garden State.

It doesn’t stop there. Kate Hudson drops the truth bomb about how “Your boys will remember this time for the rest of their lives. It will shape who they are as men.” Braff serves up a truth taco to younger bro Josh Gad: “We both spent our entire lives wishing we could be something great. And now we’re finally called upon to do something that requires some actual bravery.” And then, to ice the truth cake, Braff says, “When we were kids, by brother and I used to pretend that we were heroes—the only ones who could save the day. But maybe we’re just the regular people, the ones who get saved.” Again, it may all just be the way the lines are delivered—with more gravitas than the words deserve. But it’s ham-fisted.

Finally, it hit me: I’ve seen a lot of this before. The Shins soundtrack, “unique and amazing” people, Zach Braff as a struggling actor with dad issues, people shouting at the elements, Jim Parsons in period garb—he’s done recycled his first movie. It’s one thing to say that Zach Braff has a distinctive flavor to his work, but from what it looks like just from the trailer, it’s all he’s got. I don’t think I’ve got the taste for it anymore.

It’s unfair to dismiss the film as a Garden State for the West Coast, trading suburban New Jersey for glitzy LA, based solely on the trailer. But for a moment, I wondered if there might be merit to the tired Hollywood method of film production. Could the fact that the script is fifty shades of meh be the reason why he couldn’t secure more funds in Hollywood? They churn out crap by the shovelful, but they know their audience. They’re not targeting the art house crowd with a Katherine Heigl flick. Who’s Zach Braff’s audience? Maybe it's not me anymore. His fans gave him money, so surely them at least. But others? Maybe it will be crap. But to those who funded it, it will be unique and awesome crap.

Fixin' for Netflixin': Room 23

Recently, we sat down for Room 237, a documentary from Rodney Ascher about the impressive amount of outrageous theories surrounding Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Some theories covered include the film being a critique of the American government's systematic war on Native Americans to a confession by Kubrick for having taken part in the staging of the moon landing. Some of what's presented is not entirely far-fetched, but the way some presenters explain their interpretations feels disjointed and ultimately subverts the credence of their work.

Full disclosure: I still haven't seen all of The Shining in one sitting. Like many movies on TV, I've seen it piecemeal as I flip to it halfway through or ten minutes from the end. Never did I see the beginning of the movie on TV. I believe it was on Netflix for a while but that dead lady that Jack macks on still gives me the heebie-jeebies.

In the same way that The Shining is an unconventional horror movie, Ascher's documentary feels unorthodox. The film simultaneously is and isn't a talking head documentary: on the whole, its a series of disembodied voices. Occasionally, we get a credit at the bottom of the screen when a new voice takes over but beyond that we don't know who these people are. They all sound like they're film critics or literary critics, but for all we know they're just die-hard fans of Kubrick. They appear educated enough and credible enough, but due to Ascher's choice of footage, they're just voices leaking from the ether.

Most of the footage is pulled from not only The Shining, but some of Kubrick's other work like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Barry Lyndon, A Clockwork Orange, and Eyes Wide Shut. There are other clips of teenagers in a movie theater that appears like it's from some 1980's flick, but its source is unclear. I'm not sure why clips from other Kubrick films were chosen as most of them are just incidental. There are times when non-Shining clips are brought in for comparative analysis, and those illustrate the elements that make a film distinctly Kubrick. But others leave you scratching your head, like a clip of Tom Cruise's character walking past a movie theater. It's purpose just apparently mimics an anecdote from one the speakers.

In a way, however, it fully immerses us into Kubrick's universe. We're not given a chance to surface from the flood of his work, so it forces us to see through that lens. It might be so you can make the connections easier. Or it could be to give a sense of cohesion where so many theories take away such a sense.

Given that so many of the theories are visually based, it's logical that the director chose to eschew standard talking head footage for clips from the movie. It's one thing to see a bearded man with glasses tell the audience about the significance of the Calumet baking powder can, but it's quite another to see all of the can's appearances while the significance is explained. That being said, it was hard to separate theories from their parents, and at times I wasn't sure if multiple interpretations were coming from the same authors. But in the end, the focus isn't on those who interpret but the interpretations themselves. They are the cast of this movie.