Showing posts with label Rebecca Hall. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rebecca Hall. Show all posts

Sunday, March 31, 2024

Crash of the Titans: GODZILLA X KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE

Each installment in the ongoing Hollywood Godzilla series is a little worse than the one before it. Ten years on, Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla looks all the better for its thundering portent and heavy sense of scale. He shoots with mystery and mass, letting the real terror of an enormous creature seep through each frame of its monster movie paces. Its direct sequel, Michael Dougherty’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters, is a little less realistic in its dimensions, but the overstuffed apocalyptic mood gives a fine pulp jolt to its escalating cast of kaiju overshadowing an efficient cast of scientists and soldiers. Both are about families caught in the wake of these creatures’ paths, which gives just enough emotionality to hang on the shattering potential of such a monster mash. That’s the main inspiration that keeps writer-director Adam Wingard’s contributions connected—aside from the set dressing and proper nouns that knit the cinematic universe together—to the character strengths of its predecessors. Though finding some sentimentally in King Kong expert Rebecca Hall adopting an adorable deaf Skull Island orphan (Kaylee Hottle), his Godzilla v. Kong was generally cartoony. It’s drifting toward the outsized and preposterous, but enough of a colorful smash-em-up to be diverting. Give me a giant ape and a giant lizard fighting a giant robot and fill it up with a neon sci-fi light show and I’m reasonably satisfied, I guess. 

Wingard leans into the dumb cartoon qualities even further for the new Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. We’ve lost whatever felt even tangentially real or threatening in the earlier entries. Now it’s CG animation for long stretches as Kong meanders through the Hollow Earth fighting big wolves and munching on enormous worms, and Godzilla plays the burly kaiju bouncer for the world’s major cities, cliff jumping off Gibraltar or curling up in the Coliseum. Hall and Hottle return to wander down in search of a distress call from deeper into the Earth’s core—taking comic relief conspiracy theorist Brian Tyree Henry and swaggering veterinarian Dan Stevens for the ride. And then, once everyone’s assembled amid the special effects of a Hollow Earth within the Hollow Earth, a rumbling wrestling tag-team erupts when an evil big monkey riding an evil big lizard take on our eponymous monsters. It’s basically an effects reel staged with reverse shots of actors reacting. That the movie is essentially passable nonetheless says something about the enduring appeal of these beasties. When Kong picks up a Mini Kong and uses it as a club to smash other monster apes, there’s a certain lizard-brained appeal. Ditto the appearances of Godzilla collecting radioactive power-ups to fuel his big finale fight. But there’s no suspense or intrigue or awe—or any believable thin genre characterization to care about—left when it’s all pitched at the most extremely broad Saturday Morning level, with nothing to provide us but cartoons collapsing through skyscrapers.

Thursday, April 1, 2021

Monkey's Business: GODZILLA VS. KONG

So what if Adam Wingard’s Godzilla vs. Kong is easily the least of these new Hollywood Godzilla flicks? Sometimes you just want what this thing delivers. It has giant monsters who fight each other three times throughout a relatively trim runtime that collapses into the credits before the two hour mark. It has a team of scientists (and a little deaf orphan) who think Kong can lead them to the Hollow Earth, and corporate stooges who think he’ll lead them to an ancient power source, too. They have to fly around in little spaceship tanks that zip along on neon blue jet trails to survive the pressure of the Earth’s Core. The vehicles make cool little bass-pumping Jetsons noises. There’s a rampaging Godzilla who doesn’t mean it—we know pretty quickly that the lizard’s being provoked by a glowing orb in the secret laboratories of a no-good tech company. A goofy podcaster teams up with a character from Godzilla: King of the Monsters to track down the truth. So we have two sets of characters, each following one half of the title bill around as they do their thing. It’s just a matter of time before the big critters come to blows by land and by sea. And, sure, Kong’s the underdog, but given how much more plot time is given over to him and his supporters, it’s pretty clear the movie’s out to make it an even match.

It’s all about the shallow spectacle. Gone is the majesty and awe of the perfectly proportioned 2014 Godzilla, with its trembling mortals staring up at the monsters spelling certain doom. Gone is the ecological pessimism of its 2019 sequel, a foolish-humanity-eclipsed-by-raw-power-of-nature parable wrapped up in terrifically overheated family drama. This thing’s just an empty go-go-go rock-‘em-sock-‘em effects picture with ramped up cartoony bouts of kaiju combat and long stretches of exposition and pokey CG light shows between. But at least it still has a host of fine character actors (this time Rebecca Hall, Alexander Skarsgård, Brian Tyree Henry and Demián Bechir join the mix) who don’t mind playing second fiddle to two famous monsters of filmland. They stare off at the digital chaos and say things like “Kong bows to no one” or “Those are Skullcrawlers” or “That podcast is filling your head with garbage!” It’s bright and colorful and dumb. And then a building will fall over or lasers will slice out of a shiny glass pyramid or a column of radioactive fire will drill a hole to the center of the earth. Then the roaring and fighting, and running and screaming. Wingard (hit and miss, but his The Guest is a rare Carpenter homage that hits and Death Note is a decent anime riff) is adept at recreating the genre pleasures we need to make it a passable lazy afternoon pleasure.

Friday, August 7, 2015

Give or Take: THE GIFT


Behind The Gift’s unassuming title is a tightly plotted thriller cannily hiding its darkest secrets until it’s too late to look away. It starts with cold trepidation and ends with upsetting nasty emotional wreckage. It lacks the complexity of superior thrillers, but maintains an admirable shiftiness throughout. Australian actor Joel Edgerton wrote and directed this, his first feature, and shows off fine dexterity in his filmmaking, sharp control over a devious slow build for an entirely non-supernatural horror film built on creepy uncertainties and scary implications inherent in human interactions. It traps three characters in a scenario of social awkwardness that grows icy and uncomfortable until there’s no way out that’ll spare all involved.

Edgerton, perhaps tired of the bland leading-ish man Hollywood has tried to force him to play (in forgotten roles in Warrior, The Odd Life of Timothy Green, or Exodus Gods and Kings, or even in good movies like The Great Gatsby or Zero Dark Thirty), here writes himself a choice supporting role as a real weirdo who makes life difficult for a married couple. They’ve just moved into a new town, the husband (Jason Bateman) taking a new job and the wife (Rebecca Hall) running her design business from their new home. It’s a shiny midcentury place with large glass windows forming an exterior wall, the better to be stalked in. When they run into one of the husband’s old high school classmates (Edgerton), he’s an overly ingratiating nice guy, welcoming them to the neighborhood and buying them housewarming gifts. There’s something off about him, the way he shows up unannounced and invites himself into their lives. He’s always around.

Soon details of the man’s story aren’t adding up and, freaked out, the couple breaks off contact. But then their dog goes missing, fish die, and mysterious messages appear. And of course those big glass windows aren’t helping calm fears of someone lurking on the margins of their lives, peeking in with who knows what thoughts running in his odd head. Edgerton makes smart decisions about when to cut into the perspective of which character, allowing us to watch Hall tremble into paranoia as their friendly stalker suddenly seems not so friendly, then Bateman as he blusteringly waves off his wife’s concerns. They’re frayed in ways revealing of their basest instincts, good and bad. We’re also eventually allowed a glimpse of the weirdo’s point of view, contextualizing his actions and directing attention to the sins so-called normal people get away with by using their averageness as cover.

Because the film approaches lurid subject matter with an eye toward the unsettling quotidian details of a person you’d rather not be around, Edgerton finds frightening ideas in simple things that can cause a person to freak out. There’s nothing quite so frightening as waking in the middle of the night to see a light on at the other end of the house, one you’d swear you’d switched off. Worse still, perhaps, is realizing someone’s been in your house, even though nothing appears to have been taken or destroyed. Edgerton’s camera finds typical suspense details like a glow at the end of a dark hall, a faucet running which wasn’t before, or a sudden appearance of an animal inside the frame, with a patient simmer. He lets the scares appear with a sense of effective rhythm, having slow cuts and precise focus pulls reveal dread.

Can you ever truly know anyone? That’s the age-old question The Gift confronts by shifting perspective subtly, revealing information to us only as certain characters discover it. As the plot heads away from what seemed in the opening scenes a predictable path, an evolving understanding of where the characters are coming from makes any chance for easy morality feel slippery. Who deserves comeuppance in this scenario? Who has done the most wrong? And do the ultimate victims deserve their fate? The questions remain tantalizingly unresolved. Ending on a note of slimy ambiguity, the movie questions the ultimate aims of any social interaction, especially in a world where so many may feel a little deception is reasonable to get what they want. It gets there through a disturbing twist, hinging on psychological damage (plus, most upsetting, the implication of even more depravity that may or may not have occurred, a nasty addition). Edgerton commits to seeing his chilling premise taken much further than you’d think it’d go.

Saturday, April 19, 2014

Flesh is Weak: TRANSCENDENCE


In Transcendence, Johnny Depp plays a brilliant computer scientist who, given only weeks to live, agrees to try to upload his consciousness into his artificial intelligence experiment, thus creating the world’s first truly self-aware computer. The primary side effect – immortality – is just a nice bonus. The movie uses that hook as a reason to grapple with fascinating thematic questions of the kind Ray Kurzweil might enjoy. If a person’s thoughts, feelings, memories, and cognitive abilities can be copied into a bank of hard drives, is that person still alive? The scientist’s wife (Rebecca Hall) would like to think so. An accomplished tech theorist in her own right, she was the one who came up with the designs to upload him in the first place. Their colleagues (Paul Bettany and Morgan Freeman) are a little more skeptical.

When the man is gone, all that’s left are the lines of code bleeping across monitors, digitally reconstructing the voice of the dead man. Give me more power, it pleads. Connect me to the Internet. Does that sound like something a person wants? What does it mean to be whatever that thing is? How integrated with tech can you be and still be yourself? If HAL 9000 had all the memories of and sounded like the love of your life, would you believe him? The film is best when it’s asking these questions, but it’s woefully unprepared to engage with them in any meaningful way. It’s primed for pulpy eggheaded pleasures and turns up only shrugs.

What is at times fun about Transcendence is watching the slow creation of an accidental supervillain. If you ever wondered how one of those cavernous lairs full of whirring computers and mindless worker bees gets started, look no further. Hall, full of mostly good intentions and racing to beat an anti-tech terrorist organization led by a bleach-blonde Kate Mara, connects the digital Depp to the Internet. Off he zooms – a goofily nifty visual zips through a literal web of information and screenshots – building in power and intelligence until he has his wife constructing a giant data center in the middle of the desert, the better to house his massive potential for good. Of course, if you’ve seen any movie about a supercomputer from Demon Seed to Smart House, you know he has a massive potential for evil and destruction as well. You can probably guess where it goes from there.

The movie is at once smarter than that sounds and dumber than it looks. It’s the directorial debut of Wally Pfister, the Academy Award-winning cinematographer behind such beautiful-looking filmic efforts as Inception, Moneyball, and The Dark Knight. He and Jess Hall, his director of photography, create handsome compositions that use stillness and simplicity to great effect. Clean, empty corridors seem so ominous. Shots of wide open spaces seem gorgeously, creepily vast. The spaces in which the technophobia parable plays out echo with dread and possibility. There’s a throwback appeal to the imagery, reminiscent of early Spielberg in its insistent energy, yet locked-down patience that represents a willingness to let the situation unfold crisply and inevitably. It’s a visual confidence that carries the picture far.

What’s less satisfying by far is the way the film drops the thematic juggling act by letting the characters remain fuzzy, defined only by the dictates of the plot. That’s not necessarily a problem, but when the climactic resolution hinges on our investment in the characters it’d be nice to know them a little better. We don’t, and the plot isn’t cold or tight enough to work without them. There are terrific actors in every role – like Cillian Murphy, who does what he can with a one-note FBI agent – but no one ever rings true. Hall is the stand out, doing solid work playing a woman who is mourning her husband by obeying his simulacrum. It’s like an amped-up gender-swapped thriller version of Spike Jonze’s Her, steering forcefully into the creep factor. But her character is made to bend so fully to the will of the plotting that she hardly registers as a person let alone a genre archetype. The idea she inhabits is provocative, but her character is a shambles, able to shift from totally devoted to skeptical and back again in the span of a scene.

Jack Paglen’s screenplay feels like a Michael Crichton novel, full of jargon that sounds half-plausible to an amateur ear and futurist paranoia convinced tech evolutions will inevitably end disastrously for humanity. Pfister directs it capably, finding the thrills where it counts and finding some nice shots – like a sun-dappled window in which hangs a circuit chip in the center of a dreamcatcher – to cut into the flow of mood and contemplation. It’s a sci-fi thriller that’s moseying around, overtly turning over ideas with great care and wonder without getting much below the surface of it all. Transcendence transcends nothing. Without humor or personality to speak of, it feels inert and underdeveloped, content to throw out provocative questions and let them dissipate before resolving, let alone following, those lines of inquiry.

Friday, May 3, 2013

Heavy Metal: IRON MAN 3


Marvel has these Iron Man movies down to a formula that works for them. Going into one, we know we’ll meet Tony Stark, he’ll quip while introductions to this installment’s rouges’ gallery are made, and then things will get real serious for a time until everyone hops into metal suits, robots and weaponry activates, and the big showdown lasts until the pyrotechnics run out and the credits roll. After the overwhelming success of The Avengers, which put Stark in with a bunch of other Marvel heroes and let them rumble around for a while, there was some question if this old formula would still hold. To this I say, why not? Robert Downey Jr. is Iron Man, the sarcastic rich jerk jokester who can manage to hold that down long enough to save the day. He was instantly iconic when he first put on the armor back in 2008 and by now the role is inseparable from his inhabitation of it. He’s more than engaging enough to hold an entire movie, even one as perfunctory and mechanical as this one is.

The first Iron Man was an introduction, the second a total delight of a screwball actioner. In both cases, the charm came from the way director Jon Favreau pitched it all at the pace of a comedy, keeping the focus squarely on the performers and their interactions without letting the explosions weigh things down too heavily or distract from the personal stakes of it all. With Iron Man 3, Favreau handed the reigns to Shane Black, the screenwriter behind such muscular, sarcastic action efforts as Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout and who made his directorial debut in 2005 with the Downey-starring meta-genre goof Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. Black knows his way around a quip but, unlike Favreau, doesn’t keep things frothy. He brings the pain. The threat here isn’t as strictly personal, unlike the first two installments, which had baddies (Jeff Bridges, Mickey Rourke, Sam Rockwell) out for Tony Stark more or less individually. Here, a theatrical international terrorist known only as The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) is broadcasting threatening messages and setting off explosions in public places. He’s not after Iron Man; he’s after us, or so it seems.

It’s Tony Stark who makes it personal, arrogantly giving the address of his Malibu beach house to news cameras, daring the villain to come to him. Bad move. He does. This sets off a chain of events that leaves Stark out of his suit fending for himself, giving Downey plenty of screen time before he's put back into his inexpressive digital cocoon. The plot soon involves two scientists from Stark’s past, one (Guy Pearce) who runs and one (Rebecca Hall) who works for a mysterious organization that’s clearly up to no good. There’s also a flammable, repairable thug (James Badge Dale) and a cute little boy (Ty Simpkins) who factor into the proceedings when convenient, as well as returning characters like Stark’s long-suffering girlfriend and business associate Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) and the helpful, professional Colonel James Rhodes (Don Cheadle). All of these actors are clearly having a fun time, which helps to keep a movie with wall-to-wall special effects, danger and anxiety from becoming oppressively dour. Kingsley, especially, is having such a ball with his purposely over-the-top villainy that I found myself chuckling at his grave threats even as I vaguely registered the escalating stakes to which the film required me to respond.

Black’s script features a few nice twists, fun banter, a rapid pace, and some finely tuned comic lines of dialogue that sail in unexpectedly now and then and provide a welcome relief to the string of bloodless violence and collateral damage that makes up the villains’ plots. It’s all in good fun, evoking real-world menace and politics only to quash it under the metallic CGI boot of a billionaire engineer who is there to fix things as he can. It makes for an awkward fit, sliding between joking and deadly serious, cruel and almost sweet. The action set pieces are perfunctory at times, but end up mostly satisfying, like in a well-photographed air disaster and in one standoff that ends with a surprising bit of honesty on the part of a henchman. The finale may drone on for far too long and the explosions grow exhausting after a time, but that’s all part of the deal. There’s something to be said for a movie that sticks to its formula and serves up exactly what’s promised with some amount of skill. It’s rather inconsequential fun, the work of talented people simply giving us the usual skillful empty thrills.

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Not a Happy Drunk: EVERYTHING MUST GO

Will Ferrell’s doughy features are most often seen twisted into caricature like his exaggerated masculinity in Anchorman and his endearing naïve innocence in Elf, his best comedies to date. When not seen in such embellished ways, he can take on a glum, locked-in quality. This is precisely what made his performance in 2006’s Stranger Than Fiction his best acting to date. In that film, he played a man stuck in a rut that slowly opens up though meta-fictional devices and allows him to learn how to better live life to the fullest. That film succeeds as much as it does through Ferrell’s endearing nature that allows an audience to see the possibility filtering through a sad-sack exterior.

There’s a similar quality to the performance in Everything Must Go, a film in which he plays an on-again off-again alcoholic who gets fired from his job and arrives home to discover that his wife has left him, changed the locks, and left most of his possessions on the front lawn. It just keeps getting worse from there. His bank account is frozen, his cell phone service is shut off, and his car is repossessed. Naturally, he decides to sit out on the front lawn and drink while stewing in his sadness.

His Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor (Michael Peña) is a police officer who gets him a permit for a yard sale, which gives him five consecutive days to pick up his life (and his stuff) and get moving again. While he gets this unexpected chance to reexamine his life, he chats with a neighbor kid (Christopher Jordan Wallace) and a woman moving in across the street (Rebecca Hall) with a brief sojourn to reconnect with an old high school acquaintance (Laura Dern).

The cast is given the chance to do some nice acting and writer-director Dan Rush, making his filmmaking debut, can craft a nice looking frame from time to time. This is a film that has its focus on small character detail, the way a glass of beer becomes a temptation, the way a gift of a used camera becomes a small spark of connection between neighbors, and the way people grow apart or get closer in the tiniest of ways. But with all of the focus on small details, Rush completely misses the big picture.

This is a frustratingly schematic film that clunks from point A to point B in unconvincing ways. I believed the characters but I didn’t necessarily believe their emotional journeys. This may have grown out of the unbelievable nature of the central premise. If Ferrell’s wife moved out, why leave behind a trail of traps and catch-22s that leave him on the brink of disaster? This makes her a cruel, one-dimensional villain painted in broad, ugly strokes. The fact that she has nary a second of screen time only enhances the one-dimensionality of her character which stands in stark contrast to the more nuanced female roles from the likes of Hall and Dern.

Perhaps these problems arise from the act of expansion. Rush’s script is an adaptation of the short story “Why Don’t You Dance?” by Raymond Carver. In that story, a young couple comes across a drunken middle-aged man sitting amongst his belongings sprawled out on his front lawn. They spend some brief moments with him and move on. It’s short, evocative, and emotional. But it’s also believable in the way that it’s framed through the eyes of someone who see this curious sight. We’re left to wonder how the man ended up on his lawn under these circumstances. Rush’s film tries to show us how a person could get to this place and fails to convince, tries to expand a one-note character and instead gives us a half-believable protagonist antagonized by a one-note character. I appreciated the nice acting (especially from Hall and Dern, but Ferrell’s quite good as well), but I had a hard time caring.

Monday, September 20, 2010

Take the Money and Run: THE TOWN

The Town, the second directorial effort from Ben Affleck, is more or less a standard cops-and-robbers thriller, albeit one tilted in favor of the robbers. Though it’s nothing revelatory, and riddled with plot holes, it’s the kind of movie that totally works as it unspools. Affleck stages some nice action, the performances are mostly stellar, and the cinematography from the great Robert Elswit is pristinely handsome.

The centerpiece of the film is a broad-daylight armored car robbery that is a crescendo into a symphony of squealing tires and bursts of gunfire. It’s not quite as good as a similar sequence in Michael Mann’s Heat, still the benchmark for modern urban shootouts, but it works well and ends not with a blast of senseless action but a quiet shot of a neighborhood cop, having stumbled upon the robbers just when they thought they were safe. He stares at them, and then, after a beat, slowly turns his head to literally look the other way.

This is a movie set amongst men with strong fraternal and filial loyalty in the Charlestown neighborhood of Boston, an area that the opening text informs us produces more bank robbers per capita than anywhere else in the country. Our antihero is Ben Affleck, the son of a now-imprisoned bank robber (Chris Cooper) who is now a career criminal in his own right. He’s the mastermind of a team of robbers that works for a menacing florist (Pete Postlethwaite).

Affleck’s best friend and partner in crime is Jeremy Renner. They have an intense, long time bond. Renner spent nine years in prison for a murder committed in Affleck’s defense. Affleck has had an on-again-off-again relationship with Renner’s sister (Blake Lively). Renner’s the type of loose cannon criminal who enjoys his work a little too much. When Affleck shows up at his house and asks him for no-questions-asked help beating up some local thugs, Renner responds with one line: “Whose car are we taking?”

This occurs after Affleck returns from his date with a new girl in Charlestown (Rebecca Hall), a pretty assistant bank manager left shaken by a recent robbery in which she was kidnapped and left blindfolded on the beach. This very robbery opens the film and we immediately see how fraught with potential danger this budding romance is, since Affleck’s crew was responsible for the robbery. Because the guys wore creepy Skeletor masks for the duration, Hall doesn’t know how she actually first met her new beau. For all she knows, they met at the Laundromat. A suspicious FBI agent (Jon Hamm, in a slightly underwritten role) will learn more about this relationship, making the danger greater than mere potential for a broken heart.

There are narrative and emotional questions that could be raised, picking away at the film’s slick veneer, but the presentation is so glossily enjoyable it doesn’t quite matter in the moment. It works through the requirements of its genre with style and speed, making the rusty old formulas squeak to life once more. The fine cast works to bring this life, with Renner, especially, imbuing his character with such vibrancy that he nearly becomes the kind of supporting actor who carries the whole picture. He has a scene at an outdoor café where he stops and chats with Affleck and Hall without knowing that Hall could identify the tattoo on the back of his neck and reveal their criminal secret. It’s a scene of great tension, partially because of the way Affleck, as director, blocks the shots, but even more so from the way Renner is so convincingly dangerous, so lively in his menacing unpredictability.

It is scenes like that, along with the fine action and solid performances, which allow the movie to add up to a reasonably enjoyable experience. It doesn’t break new ground, but Affleck’s confident, sturdy craftsmanship and Elswit’s images proving his greatness once again, help make the movie a little bit more than adequate. This is an entertaining two hours that goes by more or less painlessly.