RECOMMENDED

It took a couple of days and an errant first draft after seeing “Star Trek Into Darkness” to realize that what I found most galling at first is in fact thrilling, glorious subversion by allegory. Sure, JJ Abrams liberally imposes his goofball digitally created lens flares; his action scenes aren’t exceptional at spatial coherence; and the reign of male-pattern bathos is interspersed with comic callbacks to touchstones from nearly fifty years of “canon” derived from Gene Roddenberry’s stories, as well as four television series and eleven feature films. There are bright colors, a camera style of no fixed address, and a pace that moment-to-moment is “fun,” aided immeasurably by a lovingly manic score by Michael Giacchino (“Alias,” “LOST,” “The Incredibles,” “Ratatouille,” “Up,” “Super 8,” “Star Trek”), capable of striking notes that range from fear to giddiness in the same passage and always capable of being bigger than the biggest CGI explosions aloud in space, but never bigger than the love that Spock has for Man, I mean, Jim. Read the rest of this entry »

Shane Carruth/Photo: Ray Pride

By Ray Pride

“Love, love Amy Seimetz’s pixie cut. Love,” I wrote on Twitter directly after the press and industry screening of Shane Carruth’s “Upstream Color” at Sundance 2013. I meant those words as a kind of high praise: the remarkable Seimetz is as central to the film as women in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s late films, like Irène Jacob in “Three Colors: Red” and ”The Double Life of Véronique”  or Juliette Binoche in ”Three Colors: Blue.” The Pole’s project was always to make the indelible prompt the ineffable. Carruth’s ambition, after a decade in the weeds unable to make his epic “A Topiary” script, rises to Kieslowskian ambition in its insistence on sensations of the body and eruptions of memory and the tactile artifacts of the material world: consciousness is broken apart for the viewer to reconstruct. Read the rest of this entry »

Instead of hot vampires and hotter werewolves we’ve come to expect from a project bearing Stephenie Meyer’s name, science-fiction adventure “The Host” looks skyward. Its world is at peace, in harmony with nature, with everyone working optimistically toward the advancement of humanity. This Utopian society would seem ideal, if not for the parasitic alien species behind it all. Director Andrew Niccol is an interesting choice to direct the first of this potential franchise, drawing on the interest in ideals of human perfections and inevitable frailty shown in movies like “Gattaca” and “In Time.” The “souls’” of “The Host” possess humans, mind, body and spirit, leaving only a bright blue, mirrored ring around the irises of the eye as a telltale sign of infestation. Only a few pockets of humans remain underground, near extinction. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Who was Professor Marvel, long before he met Dorothy in the sepia-toned opening of “The Wizard of Oz”? He is Oscar Diggs (James Franco) in “Oz The Great and Powerful,” directed by Sam Raimi (“Spider-Man,” “The Evil Dead”). Set in 1905, this delectable 3-D fantasy adventure starts in black-and-white. Oscar is a cad of a carnie magician who knows Dorothy’s future mother prior to her marrying Dorothy’s future father. To flee a furious circus strongman, Oscar boards a balloon and lands in a colorful widescreen Oz. (That’s the same balloon that Professor Marvel refurbished to leave Oz at the end of the 1939 film.) Three characters from Kansas are doubled in this new “Oz.” One is a girl in a wheelchair (Joey King) who implores Oscar: “Make me walk.” He cannot, blaming “a distemper in the ether tonight.” Later, in Oz he will succeed in gluing the broken leg of a plucky China doll voiced by King. Inhabitants see in Oscar’s name and descent from the sky a prophecy come true. “You are going to fix everything,” exclaim the oppressed of the kingdom. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

All the characters in “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” just want to get home. Me, too!

In the first installment of his three-part digital video adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s 95,000-word precursor to “The Lord of the Rings,” set sixty years earlier, co-writer-co-producer-director Peter Jackson makes it through six chapters of “The Hobbit: Or There and Back Again” in just under three hours. The final product, finished in 2014, then with extra footage added, as is Jackson’s custom, should amount to a ten-hour or so running time. (Has it ever taken anyone taller than an elf that long to read the 270 or so pages of the book?)

In its present incarnation, “The Hobbit” is exhibited in a numbing number of 3-D formats, including an accelerated frame-rate (HFR) double that of regular projection. (Reportedly, that fashion looks a lot like events shown on badly adjusted flat-screen TVs in sports bars; I’ve only seen the “Real 3-D” version.) “All good stories deserve embellishment,” we’re told. And while to this non-initiate, the relentlessly eventful pageantry, crammed with protean design elements, feels erratic and overinflated, leaning all too heavily on the reverent invocation of names of places, battles, weapons and off-screen characters, “The Hobbit” should bring pleasure to those predisposed to follow those who fear the dragon “Smaug.”  (Yes, you know who you are.) Read the rest of this entry »

If you count the five prior movies that feed into the “mythologies” of “Marvel’s The Avengers,” it must be the most expensive, if not the most accomplished, feature film of all time. (At least until James Cameron surfaces a couple more “Avatar”s in the next decade.) To take ten or eleven hours to build up to writer-director Joss Whedon’s new movie follows the pattern of quality television series since the past decade or so, that the two-to-two-and-a-half-hour theatrical feature format can’t fit all the chewy goodness of the amazing and beautiful and literary and emotional imagination at hand. That, of course, refers to “Breaking Bad,” “The Wire,” “Mad Men” and “The Sopranos” and should not in any way be attached to “Marvel’s The Avengers,” which is more like a plastic pumpkin at the front door filled with bite-sized, slightly mooshed and maybe a little melted candies that children would never eat unless there were a big plastic pumpkin filled with them at the front door. It will make a mint—it will buy the mint, tear the mint down, and fill it up all over again—which will help pay down Disney’s $4 billion-plus acquisition of Marvel, but which will only encourage them to make more meshuggah mayhem with an ever-attenuated attention span. Read the rest of this entry »

Johnny Reb finds he belongs on Planet Red. Andrew Stanton’s most peculiar “John Carter,” which was produced as “John Carter of Mars,” and appears as the film’s end title, is a boy’s dream story come true, if you’re Andrew Stanton grown tall. Adapted from a novel in an Edgar Rice Burroughs’ series about a Confederate soldier transported to Mars, “John Carter” makes a mix of live action and animation into something deluxe but dinky, neither “Cowboys & Aliens” nor the original “Star Wars.” Read the rest of this entry »

All Michael Bay’s “Transformers” in 3D is missing is a 40. (Take a 40, please.) Robustly cynical, “Transformers: Dark Of The Moon,” credited to screenwriter Ehren Kruger (“Scream 3,” “The Ring Two,” “Transformers 2″), serves up generous lashings of counterfactual pulp, including an Autobot-Decepticons-NASA-JFK-Nixon conspiracy with a soupcon of Chernobyl for spice. It’s like a Bizarro World Warren Report reduced to postage-stamp size. (The briefly seen JFK stand-in resembles someone who took second place in a Donald Trump look-alike contest.) “TDOTM” premiered at the Moscow Film Festival, and some of the most jazzed-up (yet largely incomprehensible) passages resemble the winningly cheesy special effects of local mogul Timur Bekmambetov’s “Night Watch” and “Day Watch,” but with less rude charm. Hope for keenly choreographed mayhem quickly fades. If not on the level of Michael Kidd and Vincente Minnelli’s work on “The Band Wagon,” say at least a few bars of “Collateral Damage,” the musical? When you’re working with Decepticons, a sentient race of mechanical beings that preceded film executives, you can hope to be the biggest and the best, but at best, you could only ever be ne plus Ultraman. (Or “Cars 3,” with eager-school-leaver Shia LaBeouf in the role of “Mater.”) Read the rest of this entry »