Beauty and the Beast (Review)

The live action Cinderella was better.

The 1991 animated classic Beauty and the Beast is one of my favorite animated films ever. When I heard that Disney was adapting the animated film into a live-action film, as they’ve been doing recently, I was excited but also skeptical. Previous live-action remakes of classic Disney films have been hit or miss for me. Maleficent was all kinds of bizarre though it had it’s moments and the same could be said about Cinderella. So I went in expecting the film to be average at best.

I was wrong. All this film did was appreciate how much of a masterpiece the original animated film was, which is saying something since this film is pretty much a shot for shot remake of that one.

Something positive first. Many of the casting choices were very enjoyable. Kevin Kline as Maurice brings something unique to the movie. While eccentric, there’s a sensitivity to him as well as a hidden sorrow that makes him a sympathetic and intriguing character. Though his French (?) accent is…questionable, Ewan McGregor really shines as Lumiere, the charismatic candlestick. In fact, my favorite characters in the film were all the side characters, who performed their roles splendidly, if underused.

Unfortunately, this is not enough to save the film from it’s main problem: it’s adherence to the original animated film. Everything that happens in the film happens because it happened in the animated film to the point that when they do change something, it no longer makes any sense as a whole. For instance, when Belle is singing about how she wants more in life, she’s sings the final part on a wide open hill behind her house. In the film, her house is within the town limits, so when she goes to the wide open hill, it’s literally looks like it’s 5 miles away from her home.

It got to the point where I honestly felt like I was just watching the original animated movie all over again. I didn’t pay money for a theater ticket just to watch a movie I own on blu-ray at home. For all it’s faults, at least Cinderella actually did something different with the film adaptation.

Speaking of, they even pulled the same stunt they did with Cinderella in a way. Whereas in Cinderella, the milked the dress shot for all it’s worth, in Beauty and the Beast, they milk the songs for all their worth to the point where I actually think they slowed down the beats of the song to really get their money’s worth and left me getting bored. Sure it’s the songs that I love but they’re sung so poorly that I just didn’t care. Plus, it didn’t help that the first song that Emma Watson sings was just so auto-tuned that I couldn’t not hear it throughout. And I knew that they were only singing/miming the songs because that’s what was in the original.

Which is a shame, because when the film deviates from the source material, it starts to become interesting. I will say that the brand new song, “Evermore” is by far the best and most heartwrenching song in the film. They added a small plotline talking about Belle and the Beast’s parents that I hoped would go somewhere. A shared experience is a great way to get two people to understand each other. Alas, it goes nowhere because they need to get to the dress (which reminded me of a plastic Barbie doll dress) and the dance.

I really wanted something new and different with this film. A different take on the classic story that I love. What I got was a shot-for-shot remake of the classic story that just left me sad. None of the scenes had any impact on me because I had seen it done better before in the original. I wasn’t singing along to any of the songs because they were all done better in the original. I know I should try to judge a film on it’s own merits, but it’s so hard to do so when this film relies so hard on nostalgia from the original. I know I’m in the minority (if Rotten Tomatoes is to be believed) and if you think you’ll enjoy this film, then go ahead and watch it. I hope you do enjoy it more than I did.

The Fate of the Furious (Review)

Binge watch The Fast and the Furious franchise and take a shot every time someone mentions “family.”

I haven’t been keeping up with the “Fast and the Furious” franchise. The last movie I actually watched all the way through was the first one back in 2001. I saw a few moments of 2 Fast 2 Furious and Tokyo Drift but had no real interest in continuing to watch the series. It seemed to be a generic popcorn franchise that studios continued to pop out for easy money.

Around the time the fifth one came out, I started hearing people say that the films were actually good. Still, I didn’t pay them any attention, even when Dwayne Johnson joined the franchise and they stopped being about street racing and started saving the world in elaborate ways involving cars. Eventually, my buddy Mason from ReelDudeReviews asked me to join him opening night and since I had no other plans, we went and watched it.

One thing I appreciated from the movie was it’s tongue in cheek nature. Nothing ever seems to be done with any real seriousness. Being chased by police? Send a wrecking ball through them. No reason how or why that happens, it just does. It’s one of those movies where cool things happen with a the slightest of reasons given as to why they happen. Normally this would be a criticism, but for this film, I have a hard time criticizing it for that. It’s a film that knows exactly why people came to watch it. They didn’t come for the logic, they came for cool action and set pieces.

The only real criticism I can even think of is that the film has about seven films worth of backstory that go right over my head. I had to guess that Paul Walker’s character’s name in the movie was Brian (again, I had only seen him in the film back in 2001) when they mention him in passing. I didn’t know who was who or how they related to each other. I didn’t know when Kurt Russel joined the franchise or why. I was really surprised with Nathalie Emmanuel showed up in the film as a hacker, having only seen her in Game of Thrones.

The film is so over the top at times that it almost takes away from the impact of the more serious scenes. The premise is that Vin Diesel’s character is being forced to work for Charlize Theron thus betraying his family (shot). It’s a emotional situation that lends itself to good drama but at the same time, it has a hard time reconciling itself with how ridiculous the action scenes become.

Again, I can’t really fault the movie too harshly. It’s a movie that did exactly what it set out to do. It’s an action movie that entertains with the bare minimum of effort given to plot, character development and scripting and the maximum of effort given to intense action sequences. All of this is held together with a cast that is surprisingly strong together even when I don’t have the experiences that I assume most people had watching all the movies previously.

Family (shot).

The Belko Experiment (Review)

For a film touted as being “Office Space meets Battle Royale,” I had trouble finding any amount of humor in this movie.

The Belko Experiment offers an interesting premise: 80 office workers are trapped in a building and told to kill each other or else the bombs implanted in their heads will explode. It’s a twist on the Battle Royale-type horror genre that’s found a niche within the market, probably made more famous to American audiences with The Hunger Games series. To it’s credit, the genre lends itself to interesting characterization. How would normal people react when put into this situation? Would they try to work together to survive or would they try to kill everyone? The philosophical questioning alone makes for interesting scenes where people try to discuss whether or not it’s moral to kill people so you can survive.

The setting also lends itself to interesting comedy. The typical office setting means people having to get creative with how they kill people. Lamps, scissors or even tape dispensers are used as potential weapons, with the humor coming from the creativity of the weapons. Unfortunately, the potential humor is never used. Instead, guns are introduced early on and with that, it becomes a fight between people with guns and people without.

There’s a lot to be said about hype and expectations. The trailers for the movie made it out to be a black comedy movie in the vein of The Cabin in the Woods. It was probably billed that way because of James Gunn’s success with Guardians of the Galaxy. Watching the movie, however, told a different story. While there are humorous moments, there aren’t enough of them and the moments aren’t funny enough that I would call this a horror-comedy at all.

I shouldn’t make this a point against the film, however. A film should be judged on it’s own merits and not on how it was sold to me through trailers. Drive taught me that much, a film billed as a The Fast and the Furious-style action film but was actually a character study of a getaway driver trying to be a good person. So, The Belko Experiment is not a comedy. What it is is a horror movie without thrills.

The downside of a Battle Royale style horror movie is that in the back of the audience’s mind, you know that eventually, people are going to start killing each other. No matter how much people try to work to save each other, when it comes down to the wire, they’re going to start killing each other. There’s a sense of inevitability when watching a movie like this and when watching a movie with a built-in expectation, nothing really surprises you. Instead, you spend the entire movie simply watching things happen.

The Belko Experiment is a movie where I watched things happen. People died and I sat there, a little tense and on edge, but never really shocked when people died. Only one death shocked me but instead of thrilling me, it angered me because of built up expectations that were dashed with an unfulfilling payoff. This is definitely a point in the movie’s favor, though, that I was actually invested in the characters.

Within the first ten-minutes of the film, we are introduced to a wide-variety of characters and instantly, we identify with them. We understand them and we like them. In fact, I’m not sure if there was one character that I didn’t like. It’s saddening then that I didn’t feel like any character had any sort of fulfilling character arc, except maybe John Gallagher Jr.’s character.

The Belko Experiment was a film of expectations that just aren’t met. I was expecting a comedy but I didn’t laugh. I was expecting a horror movie, but I wasn’t that thrilled by it. There wasn’t even a moment that I could call my favorite. I was simply sitting in the theater and things were happening before my eyes. When the movie was over, I went to a taco restaurant, sure that I had wasted my time.

The Lego Batman Movie (Review)

This could very well be the best Batman movie to come out in recent history.

The best thing that The Lego Movie franchise (universe?) does well is being able to understand how ridiculous the premise is. The creators of the The Lego Movie knew full well that people would hear about the premise and just go “what?” I know several people who didn’t see the movie because to them, it was a blatant cash-in of a product. This actually worked in the movie’s favor because it allowed the movie to completely subvert the audience’s expectations and blow everyone away with its off-beat humor and surprising heart.

The Lego Batman Movie does all of this and more. There is literally a joke every two minutes whether its in the dialogue or in the background. It is so jam-packed that I was afraid to go to the bathroom for fear of actually missing important plot-points. Which seems odd because it’s a cartoon about a Lego Batman but that is the other strength of this movie. You find yourself caring about the characters and about the story. They are all characters that you feel connected to not only because they are all incredibly brought to life by the voice actors because it all fits together with the overall theme.

The best movies tend to be the ones whose story is actually different than the premise. In this one, the premise is just about Batman being Batman. The story is actually about Batman (through a series of funny events) finds himself against his most feared enemy – being by himself.

The movie is about relationships and how important it is to not cut yourself off from others. Everything that happens in the movie is all tied around this one theme and it’s all married beautifully into one brilliantly hilarious movie that left me content that I had watched another great movie from the Lego Universe.

The Space Between Us (Review)

Prepare for the feel good movie of the…month. Too early to say year and its only one out this month. Also prepare to hear why it’s not really good.

The first thing I noticed about this film is that it spends so much time setting up the premise that I spent what felt like an hour waiting for the movie to actually get to the plot. We spend the prologue (not even the first act!) just watching events unfold, not even feeling a connection with any of the characters because we know from the trailers and the poster that they’re not the characters we’re supposed to be paying attention to. The only one that’s even worth our attention is Gary Oldman playing visionary behind the endeavor to live on Mars and the man who decides that Asa Butterfield’s birth on Mars must be kept a secret from the entire world.

Then the movie suddenly jumps forward 16 years, leaving us all confused as to why? Whatever happened to the age old maxim “show, don’t tell?” You tell us how Asa’s character is trapped on Mars and wants to actually go to Earth, but you don’t ever show us why? What was growing up on Mars surrounded by scientists like for him? How did he handle scientists coming and going through his life as he is trapped on Mars? These were the questions that I felt needed to be answered in order for us to fully understand and appreciate this character, who is played well by Asa but the audience never really gets a chance to empathize with his struggle and root for him as our protagonist.

This movie is an example of a movie that really should have given us a different protagonist because Britt Robertson as the rebellious and quick-witted Tulsa, Asa’s pen-pal on Earth, proved to be a much more interesting character than Asa’s. In fact, I believe that she is character that actually has an arc with a beginning, a middle and an end. Asa’s arc sort of ends once he actually gets to Earth. And once Asa and Britt actually meet, that’s the moment that Britt’s character starts to change and grow. It was sad to see the most interesting character in the movie to regulated to the love-interest character, when it’s obvious that the story could have been written to be about her struggle to trust someone again.

In fact, the movie for me didn’t start until the second act, which is never a good sign. Seeing Asa interact with the world with wonder and a lust to experience everything there was to experience was actually quite enjoyable. I wished there were more moments where Asa jumps in surprise as he beholds a horse for the first time or experiences rain.

By the end of the movie, though, I was left feeling perplexed. That’s how they decided to end the movie? Like that? I won’t spoil but it left me feeling almost betrayed but mostly confused. There were so many plot holes in this movie and emotions weren’t strong enough for me to ignore them. The premise was interesting enough and there are elements in this movie that, by themselves, I could enjoy; but there was nothing in this movie that fulfilled me or made me feel like I didn’t just waste my time.

Hidden Figures (Review)

History is often unpleasant. So unpleasant, even, that sometimes we would rather overlook or omit the bad parts of it. To do so, however, would mean to omit the important parts of those bad times.

Hidden Figures is about a group of African-American women who work at NASA during the Mercury Program and also during the time of segregation. It stars Taraji P. Henson (Empire) as Katherine Goble, a brilliant mathematician tasked with calculating the trajectories of the flight of the Mercury program. Though she may be the main character, the film doesn’t leave out the other people who also struggled during this time. Octavia Spencer plays Dorothy Vaughan, a mathematician who does the work of a supervisor but is not paid or treated as one, while Janelle Monáe plays Mary Jackson, an engineer who can’t obtain a degree due to the school being segregated. All three of these women are simply brilliant. Brilliantly acted and also brilliantly characterized, often being smarter and better than their white counterparts, but due to color of their skin, are never recognized as being such.

This is Hidden Figures greatest strength. It would be easy to paint the casual racism of the times as being altogether evil (which they were, make no mistake about that), but director Theodore Melfi (St. Vincent), takes a more objective view of the situation, taking a step back and leaving personal views out of the movie. Instead, he simply shows what the time was like with simple shots of segregated water fountains, segregated bathrooms and even segregated coffee machines. Without condoning or condemning, Melfi simply lets the shots speak for themselves and allows the audience to make up their own minds about how they feel about that.

That’s not to say that the characters within the film are passive to the struggle. Far from it. The struggle exists and permeates throughout every aspect of their daily lives. No one, not even the white characters, are exempt from it. Though many of them can claim that they’re not racist, they are still completely unaware of the struggles that the black characters go through on a daily basis, such as having to walk 40 min across campus just to go to a bathroom that they are allowed to use.

The most important thing this movie has done, though, is taught you who these women were. History often ignores the accomplishments of people that are deemed “unimportant.” Hidden Figures proves that these women were not only important but essential to the struggle of getting an American into space. It proves that their story is a story worth telling. And it proves that their story is also a story about America.

La La Land (Review)

This movie might very well be the first film that can be described as a modern musical.

La La Land is a film by director Damien Chazelle (Whiplash), starring Emma Stone as Mia Dolan, an aspiring actress and Ryan Gosling as Sebastian Wilder, an aspiring jazz musician, who meet and fall in love in Los Angeles. To say anything more would ruin the experience. All I can say is that it is, unabashedly, a musical.

Like the jazz music that Ryan Gosling’s character loves so much, the movie musical is a dying art. The golden age of the movie musical came and went back in the 50s and 60s, and the only musicals that come out nowadays are musicals that were made famous on the stage first, like Rent and Les Miserables. While these musicals are great in their own respects, these musicals made for the stage should be listed separate from musicals made specifically for film, something that hasn’t been made in nearly fourty years.

La La Land is a movie musical that both follows typical musical tropes but does not feel beholden to them. Like the vaudeville that movie musicals were taken from, the songs and dance numbers act more as expression of the emotions of the characters than an advancement of the story. The first dance number between Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling serves more to illustrate that though they keep saying they don’t like each other, there is an undeniable attraction between them that can only be described through dance.

That said, La La Land also breaks certain tropes with the musical by also portraying a relationship that has it’s own ups and downs. Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling’s characters both have dreams that they work hard to achieve, but the harder they work, the more they begin to realize that they may have to compromise on those dreams as the realities of world sets in. Wanting to be an actress is a good dream, but what happens when you are rejected over and over again? Wanting to open your own night club is all well and good, but until you get there, how do you pay for food and rent? These are all questions this couple finds itself asking as life continues onward and it is questions that can only be asked by this generation.

La La Land is a rare film that manages to both look backwards and forwards at the same time. A touching love letter to a previously thought dead genre, it manages to bring this genre back to the world with renewed vigor. In a generation learning that their dreams may not come true no matter how hard you work for it, this film proves that you should never stop dreaming.

Assassin’s Creed (Review)

Wow, there was a lot of smoke in this movie.

After being rescued by Abstergo Industries from his own execution, Callum Lynch (Michael Fassbender) is forced to go into a device called the Animus by Dr. Sophia Rikkin (Marion Cotillard) and her father, Alan Rikkin (Jeremy irons), CEO of Abstergo. They are members of the Templar Order, a secret society with the goal of subjugating all of mankind for their own good. They are at war with the Assassin Brotherhood, who Callum has ancestry with. In the Animus, Callum relives the memories of his ancestor, Aguilar de Nerha, who fought the templars during the Spanish Inquisition.

As you can tell by the description, this is undoubtedly a movie based on a video game, and one of my favorite video game series from developer Ubisoft. This is a video game that I played a lot and enjoy quite a bit (when it’s not as convoluted as the above paragraph). I feel I can speak for all gamers when I say that I really wanted this movie to be good. Fans have been due a good video game movie. That one movie that paves the way for other movies and finally shows that video game adaptations can work and can be as good or even better than other movies. I am saddened to say that Assassin’s Creed is not that movie. Though it is also not a bad movie either.

It is a strange movie to say the least. The beginning is pretty weak, going for an opening crawl that explains the war between the Templars and the Assassins that’s just plain boring. Show don’t tell. Star Wars gets away with it because it’s against a star field background and John Williams rocks the music. The only music in this scene comes right at the end and it’s a really dated and tacky rock number that completely clashes with the period scene they just set up. The only reason they put that explanation at the beginning is probably the same reason any one makes any decision when making a video game movie: they’re ashamed of the source material. They need to quickly explain this “silly” plot so people can get over the fact it’s silly and then show them the awesome stuff. I’m sorry. It doesn’t work like that.

People seem to have the impression that anything video games do is just silly, even when it’s not. It’s almost like these people don’t realize that people spent a lot of time and effort making these worlds and crafting these stories so they could be the best that they could be. If you’re going to make a movie based on their efforts, take their efforts seriously.

It’s not all bad, though. Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard are the duo that really carries this movie. It’s a rare thing to watch an action movie and realize that you care more about these two’s relationship and it’s growth than the actual action. I was surprised to find that these two people are actually three-dimensional characters. I wasn’t watching Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard; I was watching Callum Lynch and Sophia Rikkin.

This movie also makes the mistake that the video games have been making for a while: taking place primarily in the present day. About 70% of the movie takes place in the present day, whereas only the action scenes take place in the past. While it makes more sense in the movie than in the video games, the past scenes serve only as action set pieces. While they are amazing set pieces, it’s marred by the fact that a good chunk of it is CGI. How do I know it’s CGI? Because they try their hardest to cover it up with smoke. Like, a lot of smoke. It’s a good technique, really. Use smoke in the foreground to cover up the CGI and make it look realistic. The problem with that is that there’s smoke in the foreground. Meaning you can’t see any of the action happening.

I really wanted this movie to be good. It should have been good. It’s definitely not the worst video game adaptation I’ve seen, but it is not the video game adaptation that proves that video game adaptations have a place in serious film. All it does is solidify video game adaptations as the B-Movies of Hollywood.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (Review)

Ah, Star Wars. One of two iconic sci-fi properties to ever grace our cultural mind. Regardless of how you view the Prequels or the changes made to originals, you can’t deny that Star Wars, as a phenomenon, is here to say. And now with the return of Star Wars last year with Episode VII: The Force Awakens, it seems we are going to be getting more and more Star Wars in the years to come. This year, we got Rogue One, the first of the Anthology series of Star Wars films, covering side stories and the backgrounds of famous characters.

Rogue One is the story of Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), a career criminal who is taken and forced to join the Rebel Alliance to find her father, the unwilling architect for the Death Star. She is forced to accompany career Rebel Alliance Soldier Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and repurposed Imperial droid, K-2SO. Along their journey, they are joined by recently defected Imperial Pilot, Bodhi Rook (Riz Ahmed), blind warrior and believer in the Force, Chirrut Imwe, (Donnie Yen) and his partner, Baze Malbus (Jiang Wen).

The first thing I have to give props for is the diversity of the cast. Not just diverse in the sense of their racial background (I’m still very happy about their casting choices), but also in how different the characters are. Although I was not able to remember their names (not because they were unmemorable but because they were in no ways as easy to remember as Han, Luke or Leia, this being set in a galaxy far, far away), I could instantly recognize each character. When the camera flashed to a shot of one of the characters, there was no way I was going to confuse who it was. I knew exactly who it was.

This just makes it even more of a shame that character development really took a back seat to the plot. There is a lot of pathos going on for these characters that doesn’t really seem to go anywhere. Things do come to a head in the film between two characters, but it never really feels resolved. It just happens and then you’re off to the next set piece. This happens to Forest Whitaker as Saw Gerrera, an extremist who has been broken by the war. His whole character appears to be to show just what a war can do to a person but in the end, we can’t spend too much time on this without sacrificing the rest of the movie so what we’re left with is a character with a weird rasping voice.

Speaking of, there are quite a lot of references to previous films. Either characters that appeared in previous films (like Grand Moff Tarkin in a CGI role that is a little hard to get used to for the first few minutes), or places that are revisited (one location actually made me go “oh, hey, we’re back here again” in the theater). There are so many references that I started to wonder if any of them were actually necessary. Where do you draw the line between a reference that is there because it would make sense story-wise for them to be there, and a reference that is there just for the sake of a reference?

One thing that I will appreciate is that this film is by far the darkest Star Wars film of the franchise, because this is absolutely a war film. People die, sometimes not for victory but for the chance of victory. This is not the time frame of A New Hope because in this time frame, hope doesn’t exist yet. This is the edgier side of Star Wars that hasn’t really been seen in a while, and I appreciate that. It makes the franchise feel more alive.

I truly enjoyed the film. From start to finish, I really did enjoy it. With that said, I can’t help the more I think about it, the more problems I find. The characters aren’t as developed as I would have liked, though this is a much larger cast than in previous films. Everything just moves from set piece to next set piece. Having said all of that, at the end of the day, it was truly a story worth telling and I’m still glad I went to see it. Plus, the final scene with Darth Vader (it’s not a spoiler to know that Darth Vader is in this movie, the trailers showed that he was) was well worth the price of admission.

Moana (Review)

Directed by Disney duo Ron Clements and Jon Musker (The Little Mermaid, Aladdin), Moana follows the titular Moana (Auli’i Cravalho), the daughter of the chief of a Polynesian tribe, who is chosen by the ocean itself to reunite a mystical relic with a goddess. She sets sail in search of the demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson) as she hopes to save her people.

I was really excited for this movie, mainly because the Polynesian culture is a culture that is very rarely seen in films. And the film did not disappoint. Right from the start, the film immerses you in Polynesian culture, to the point that I am still humming and listening to “We Know the Way” even days after watching it. Though, I guess I could say that of every song in the film as each song is catchy and powerful, and the soundtrack as a whole is more focused and thematically linked than Frozen, which suffered from a soundtrack and sounded like it was written by fifteen different people.

Everything from the music to the design of the characters instantly makes the film stand out from other similarly animated films such as Frozen and Tangled. I make those comparisons mainly because the animation style (or at least the style of the characters) reminds me a lot of them. Though I guess it’s no surprise considering that they are all animated by the same team. It’s by no means a problem nor is it a distraction, though I almost wish the art style was different in order to differentiate the movies from each other artistically. I remember how Mulan was animated to almost appear like a Chinese painting and I wish Moana was more Polynesian in style as well as story.

That issue is just a minor one for me, however. While I was watching I didn’t care about the style because I was wrapped up in the story, the characters and the music. While the story suffers in certain places (the beginning sort of drags and meanders while a character’s return at the end feels abrupt), it is the characters that sell it. Moana is strong-willed but also unsure of herself. In fact, it is her internal struggle that ends up being more interesting than her external struggle and I will always love movies like that. It gives the film it’s center, it’s heart and it’s how we latch on to a character. I don’t care who you are, at some point in your life you struggled with the age old question of “who you are.”

This theme of identity also extends to Maui, who at first appears to a somewhat charming yet brutish and selfish warrior, changes towards the end as we explore where he came from and why he is the way it is. His struggles never overshadows Moana’s struggles, however, and the focus always remains on Moana and her adventure. I say ‘adventure’ and not ‘story’ because this film really is an adventure form start to finish. The common sentiment with this film is that Moana is Disney’s first action princess and they are absolutely correct. She knows what she needs to do and she rarely hesitates.

Moana was an absolute joy from start to finish. It’s funny, it’s endearing and I found myself enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would. You should absolutely watch this movie.

Tim Lilly

Film Aficionado, Gamer, Book Lover

Category: Film Review