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Movie Review

Wonder (2017)

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<strong class="MovieTitle">Wonder</strong> (2017)

(On Cable TV, October 2018) Frankly, I expected much worse from Wonder after seeing its rather misleading trailer. To believe the coming attraction, we have to brace ourselves for an entire film’s worth of seeing a facially disfigured boy trying to fit at a new school. But, as we know, trailers lie—or at least misdirect, because even if the film is about a facially disfigured boy’s adventures in fitting at his new school, it’s also quite a bit more than that, and in this case the subplots are what keeps the film interesting beyond its predictable premise. Wonder soon becomes about the boy’s entire family as they, too, experience that first year in school in their own way. There’s nothing truly earth-shattering here, and one of the mildest surprises of the film is how easy it goes on the inevitable scenes of cruelty and abuse by the boy’s schoolmates. The result is one of relief, as the film remains rather gentle and sympathetic in its approach. Jacob Tremblay continues to impress in the lead role, while other notables such as Owen Wilson, Mandy Patinkin and Julia Roberts take supporting roles in a youth-focused film. As a result, Wonder remains an enjoyable film … even for jaded curmudgeonly critics such as myself.

Movie Review

Hook (1991)

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<strong class="MovieTitle">Hook</strong> (1991)

(Second viewing, On TV, December 2016) I remember two or three jokes from my first viewing of Hook more than twenty years ago, but not a whole lot more. I have noted a certain polarization of opinion about the film—a lot of regular people like it, while critics don’t. I watched the film in regular-person mode, and wasn’t displeased from the experience: Despite claims of this being a sequel to the original Pan, Hook is very much a retelling … so closely so that it gives rise to some vexing issues (as in: “why bother?”) There is a very late-eighties quality to the way the action is staged in Neverland, prisoner of limited soundstage sets and the special effects technology of the time. As a take on the Peter Pan mythos, it’s decent without being exceptional or revolutionary—it’s still miles better than the 2016 Pan, although not quite as successful as 2003’s Peter Pan. Julia Roberts isn’t bad as Tinkerbell, although her unrequited romance is good for a few raised eyebrows. Robin Williams is OK as Peter, but it’s hard to avoid thinking that another actor may have been better-suited for the role. Meanwhile, Dustin Hoffman seems as if he’s having a lot of fun in the titular role. While Steven Spielberg directs, there is little here to reflect his legendary touch. It does strike me that Hook fits almost perfectly with the latest Disney craze of remaking its classic animated movies as live action. Perhaps contemporary opinion about the film will be more forgiving than the critical roasting it got at the time. Until that reconsecration, the result is perfectly watchable and squarely in the middle of the various takes on Peter Pan.

Movie Review

Secret in their Eyes (2015)

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<strong class="MovieTitle">Secret in their Eyes</strong> (2015)

(On Cable TV, September 2016) Not every good foreign movie has to be remade by Hollywood, and the latest piece of evidence for this assertion is Secret in their Eyes, the somewhat forgettable remake of the acclaimed Argentinian thriller El secreto de sus ojos. It’s not as if this Hollywood version is completely worthless: If nothing else, here are Chiwetel Ejiofor, Nicole Kidman and a surprisingly unglamorous Julia Roberts doing their best in their given roles. I also found a provocative parallel in equating the original’s “Pinochet years” with this remake’s “post-9/11 era”. The plot is also partially streamlined, getting rid of a lot of non-essential material even though the result is still a bit too contrived and verbose to qualify as fast paced. Otherwise, though, there isn’t much here worth noticing for fans of the original, and one or two things have been taken away from the original, such as the incredible one-shot sequence that is limply made ordinary in this remake. If you haven’t seen the original and if you are in the mood for a leisurely-paced thriller, Secret in their Eyes will do the trick. For everyone else, though, it’s a mediocre film that will never earn (nor deserve) even a tenth of the attention given to the original Oscar-winning film.

Movie Review

Money Monster (2016)

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<strong class="MovieTitle">Money Monster</strong> (2016)

(Video on-Demand, September 2016) Given how I’ve been screeching about the disappearance of medium-budget Hollywood thrillers, I should at least take a moment to acknowledge the very existence of Money Monster, which not only provides two A-list actors with an original script, but also returns to the kind of contemporary issues-driven film that has also disappeared from the timid studio slates. Money Monster is about corporate malfeasance in financial matters, and the uneasy relationship between industry and the media. It’s also a bit of a cry against the exploitation of workers, but that’s easy to forget as the film moves into a thriller narrative in which a downtrodden worker takes a celebrity financial commentator hostage while live on the air. Cue the efforts of the show’s producer to try the resolve the situation without bloodshed … and maybe piece together the piece of a financial scandal along the way. Directed with some energy by Jodie Foster, Money Monster also turns out to be a mid-list showcase for the kind of role that George Clooney (as a borderline-sleazy TV pundit who learns better) and Julia Roberts (as a competent show producer) can do purely on the strength of their persona. As the complications pile up, Money Monster remains engrossing throughout—although there’s a temporary lull when the action moves outside the studio. Perhaps more interestingly, it ends up satisfying a scratch for almost exactly that kind of perfectly serviceable thriller, dabbling in social issues while showcasing good actors. (If you were wondering about how Money Monster existed, bet something on Foster’s ability to attract A-listers.) It may not be a film that will remain at the top of the year-best rankings, but it’s good, it’s entertaining, it’s got morals at the right place and it’s the kind of film I’d like to see more often.

Movie Review

Pretty Woman (1990)

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<strong class="MovieTitle">Pretty Woman</strong> (1990)

(On TV, June 2016) As twenty-five years of commentary has it, Pretty Woman is a feel-good romantic comedy featuring a corporate raider and a Hollywood hooker. Any serious look at the film will highlight the differences between the original, somewhat darker script and the one that ended on screens. But what’s amazing is that it actually works: Largely based on the charm of Richard Gere and Julia Roberts (whose star-making turn here eerily echoes her character), Pretty Woman manages to take a biting premise and transform it into a fairytale in which everyone ends up happy, rich and vindicated. Business dealings are innocuous, drugs are avoided, and uncomfortable issues of sex and power relationship are avoided or nullified by even worse behaviour by the film’s antagonists. (Who’s worse? An attempted rapist or a snooty shopgirl?) On some level, Pretty Woman is a case study of Hollywood techniques for disarming anything that may disturb a large audience. On another, it’s a romantic comedy that packages Pigmalion into a set of tropes fit to be absorbed in a Hollywood subgenre (which it did, the film arguably revitalizing the romantic comedy subgenre for more than a decade). Much of it remains timeless, even though Gere’s character still belongs in the eighties, and sharp-eyed viewers will spot newspapers harkening back to 1989’s Panamanian invasion. Despite the film’s darker edges, Pretty Woman still works well as a crowd pleaser. Stranger things have happened between a daring script and a box-office success.

Movie Review

Mona Lisa Smile (2003)

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<strong class="MovieTitle">Mona Lisa Smile</strong> (2003)

(Netflix Streaming, February 2016) I wouldn’t call Mona Lisa Smile unpleasant or unsuccessful, but there is something easy and obvious nowadays in showing how a free-spirited teacher could liberate the mind of her students in a 1950s college for young women. We’ve seen this story many times before, and even acknowledging that this was a real social environment doesn’t do much to excuse a film that runs on autopilot most of the time. But, of course, Mona Lisa Smile is more interesting as a showcase for actresses than for anything else. Beyond Julia Roberts (who frankly doesn’t do much in the lead role), the cast includes half a dozen other actresses would either were, or would become recognizable names. Seeing them interact (often in spectacularly bitchy fashion) is its own brand of fun. The conventional nature of the film shouldn’t take away from the comfort offered by a film in which enemies turn friendly, contemporary values are upheld, every actress gets a small moment to shine and we get to spend some time in a past which, for all of its oppressiveness, was simple and understandable. All of this may sound demeaning without meaning to—even as far away from the target audience of the film that I can be, I still smiled and nodded at the film’s broad strokes. The final tiny twists mean that Mona Lisa Smile isn’t quite as obvious as it could have been, but let’s face it: this is a kind of film made for people who like that kind of film and it’s unlikely to meet more than a muted response from anyone who’s not already looking forward to what it has to offer.

Movie Review

Stepmom (1998)

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<strong class="MovieTitle">Stepmom</strong> (1998)

(On Cable TV, January 2016) Prepare your hankies, because Stepmom is determined to make you cry as hard as you can. The narrative threads are set up early, as the younger second wife of a sympathetic but featureless man (Ed Harris) can’t quite get the respect she wants from her stepchildren. Real mom is best mom, and so Susan Sarandon puts Julia Roberts in her place a few times to establish the narrative tension right before her cancer diagnosis is revealed. The rest is by-the-number sentimental filmmaking by director Chris Columbus, made fitfully interesting by a few hilariously unrealistic looks at fashion photography and adequate performances. Harris, Sarandon and Roberts can’t disguise that this is a very specific kind of movie. Everything plays exactly like we expect, and the result defies any attempts at deeper analysis or even sustained interest. Stepmom will appeal to its target audience and leave large groups indifferent. It is well made, but it is not worth more than a moment’s attention.

Movie Review

Mirror Mirror (2012)

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<strong class="MovieTitle">Mirror Mirror</strong> (2012)

(On-demand, August 2012) What a strange film this is. Playing off the elements of the Snow White fairytale, it teeters between fantasy archetypes subversion, camp humor, beautiful visuals and oddly stilted locations.  In the hands of director Tarsem Singh, Mirror Mirror is, at the very least, beautiful to look at: Nearly every frame looks polished to perfection, and imaginative visuals are featured throughout.  There is some inventive costuming, the actors all seem to have some fun (Armie Hammer’s take on puppy-love is hilarious, while Julia Roberts seems to relish the antagonist role) and some of the funny moments are, in fact, pretty funny.  Unfortunately, the flashes of cleverness and humor are intermittent: the script seems to lurch from one mode to another without coherency, and the humor seems sprinkled randomly rather than coming from a unified approach.  (As it is, a significant portion of the gags embarrassingly fall flat.)  Mirror Mirror remains amiable throughout, but it seems to be trying a lot of things without understanding how they fit together.  For a big-budget film, it does seem to take place in a mere handful of locations.  The inclusion of modern idiom and hipper-than-thou cynicism seem particularly out of place in a fantasy setting.  Thematically, I’m not sure that the stated feminist ideals of the film are actually upheld, especially once the antagonist seems dispatched with a superfluous amount of cruelty.  Mirror Mirror’s lack of tonal unity makes it hard to really get into the groove of the film, and easier to notice its flaws.  There have been plenty of similar and far more successful takes on such material (Enchanted springs to mind) and what sets them apart is cohesion, not scattered cleverness.  [September 2012 Update: This review is a bit too harsh.  At least Mirror Mirror is better than Snow White and the Huntsman.]

Movie Review

Flatliners (1990)

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<strong class="MovieTitle">Flatliners</strong> (1990)

(On Cable TV, April 2012) For years, I wondered missing out on Flatliners had led to an embarrassing omission in my movie-going culture.  Hadn’t this film earned some interest as a science-fiction film?  Didn’t it star a bunch of actors who went on to bigger things?  Wasn’t this one of Joel Shumacher’s best-known movies from his earlier, better period?  The answer to these questions is yes… but the film itself seems a bit of a letdown after viewing.  Oh, some things still work well, and may even work better than expected.  Of the five main actors, Kiefer Sutherland, Julia Roberts, Kevin Bacon and Oliver Platt have all gone on to big careers –with poor William Baldwin being left behind.  Schumacher’s direction is backed-up with Jan de Bont’s impressive cinematography: the visuals of the film may not make much sense, but they evoke a modern-gothic atmosphere that remains distinctive even today.  The high-concept of the film remains potent, with genius-level medical students voluntarily defying death to investigate the mysteries of the afterlife.  Unfortunately, all of these elements don’t quite add up satisfyingly.  The jump from the high concept to the characters’ personification of those concepts is weak, and the contrivances become almost too big to ignore.  The idea of atonement being closely linked to death is powerful, but the way this variously follows the character is more difficult to accept.  (As Platt’s character knowingly remarks, those without deep-seated traumas will end up with some fairly silly phantoms.)  There is quite a bit of repetitive one-upmanship in the way the plotting unfolds, and Flatliners sadly goes too quickly from provocative idea to ordinary morality.  Still, it’s easy to argue that the film is worth a look: Roberts, Sutherland and Bacon look really good in early roles, and the visual style of the film is still an achievement twenty years later.  There are some good ideas in the mix (witness the visual motif of “construction” -reconstruction, deconstruction- underlying nearly each scene), the portrait of intelligent characters interacting is charming and some of the suspense still works surprisingly well when it doesn’t descend in silliness.  There are a few films that qualify as “minor classics” of their era in time.  While Flatliners certainly won’t climb year’s-best lists retroactively, it’s a film that remains more remarkable than many of its contemporaries.  I don’t regret seeing it… and I may even have liked to see it a bit earlier.