Saturday, April 24, 2021

Soul (2020) directed by Peter Docter


Pixar is in top form with this film. Yes the animation is fantastic as it is with all Pixar films but I honestly barely noticed it as the story and characters rightfully took all my attention from start to finish. 

A musician (Joe) dies unexpectedly by falling into a manhole on the day of his big break to join a legendary jazz artist in her band and dies. That is the start of the story. On his way to the great beyond, he refuses to go there and leaps into space only to find himself in a place where souls are before they are born. He is mistaken for someone else and is charged with helping a reticent (to say the least) pre-born to find its purpose so it can go to earth. Joe uses them to sneak back to earth but he ends up n a cat while the other (22) ends up in his body. The film then turns to them trying to get Joe to his gig on time and back to his his own body. 

One thing I loved about this film was the design of the characters. There is often a tendency to try for "realism" in modern animations and this goes the opposite direction and avoid all the uncanny valley pitfalls and distraction "realism" can burden an animated film with.  Some compare this to another Pixar film "Inside Out" but it's truly it's own thing and a very mature project with problems dealt with a way anyone can understand. 

I don't think it's my favourite movie even in Pixar's history but I really appreciated the risks it took by making something so thought provoking and adult in nature. I really does not seem to be aimed at kids at all, in very good way. The end is open to interpretation, we are not sure what direction Joe is heading and that makes the film point... it's not what he ends up doing, it's how he ends up doing it and why. 

Thursday, April 22, 2021

Poster Project: The Man Who Fell to Earth

 

 I went through the film frame by frame to find interesting images to work from. I wanted this to be clean and simple and not give anything of the movie away. The image I picked took a lot of retouching to look ½ decent between the grain of the film and the fact it was a screen grab but it works,  I think. I often wonder if there is a remake in the works for this based closer to the book but I think it would be a long hard climb to get over Bowie's interpretation which makes this film. 

Saturday, April 17, 2021

The Man from Earth: Holocene (2017) directed by Richard Schenkman

 


This is the never asked for sequel to the 2007 film I reviewed a few years ago. Written by Emerson Bixby the son of the man who wrote the first film and who worked tirelessly to get that film produced when his father died. The film also had actors from Star Trek, (notably Michael Dorn who is really good, I wish he was in more things) and includes Vanessa Williams as the main character's new love interest. 

SPOILERS

The story is more complicated than the first film and it suffers from that in some ways. The immortal college professor is in another job and a group of his students put a series of dubious facts together and discover his secret, tell a character from the 1st film (William Katt) who wrote a book about that experience and lost his career as  result. John, the immortal who is also beginning to age and heal slower,  is about to leave and move on again when the students come to his house to delay him so the discredited professor can identify him with certainly. So they knock him out and tie him up, leaving him with the born again Christian of the group who decided he is not Jesus but the anti-christ, stabs him and then...  it sort of becomes a narrative mess. The other students arrive with his old friend and find blood everywhere and the student and John gone. They somehow get away with not calling the police. I guess the kid's mom never wondered where her son went or filed a missing persons claim The same goes for John's now ex girlfriend who lived there with him. She came home, finds blood and a chair covered in duct tape in the basement and never freaked out and called for an investigation? The worst part is the after titles sequence... back at the discredited professor's house the "FBI" comes in the form of one man who we never see and causes John of being an immortal serial killer... What? Is it Christian boy or the "other" immortal John mentioned forth first film or... ?

The adult actors are well played but the students are cardboard cutouts for the most part and needed more acting guidance to pull off their roles. The film seems more like a TV movie and was maybe a sort of pilot for a proposed series. The standoff between Christian boy and John is interesting in many ways but the result of that scene is just confusion all around. Apparently, John WAS Jesus in some sense who accidentally started a religion after a particularly good talk he had on a mount. He's been hiding ever since. This lacks the mystery and ambiguity that made the first movie work so well. Bixby, the son, does have a good handle on his father's characters but it would be impossible to get  job at any college without proper ID, a work history etc and the police would most likely find John and the missing kid in time. We live in a very different world these days and hiding from it in the present day United States is not really possible. 

There is a love of the subject that carries this film away from being just plain bad, it's not. It still held my attention but didn't affect me as the previous film did. I would have explained less, not more and spent more time on the plot... probably cutting the students out it completely and making more about the personal relationships John has left behind over the last few decades. If does deal with that here and there and those parts are the best parts to me. 

Would I see a third film or a TV show? Maybe. There is something good in here left over from the first film that still could be molded into something more than a made for TV followup. Please cast Michael Dorn for that one and I'm in. 

Monday, April 12, 2021

Godzilla VS. Kong (2021) directed by Adam Wingard


I thought the first Legendary Godzilla movie had a ton of flaws like killing the one engaging character 20 minutes in and showing most of the monster fight scenes on TV screens instead of giving us clear shots of the action but it wasn't unwatchable and the effects and cinematography was pretty good. The second gave us even less characters to get involved with but did have a ton of posters, including an awesome King Ghidorah with a fight between him and Godzilla in Boston's (my home town) Fenway Park which was enough to keep my attention for a goofy movie about giant monsters. Godzilla VS Kong continues the trend of making the humans not just uninteresting but somehow makes them so dull you feel like that might be sapping your own personality out you since nature abhors a void. 

To try and find a positive... it's colourful. That's it. The monsters fight for no good reason they story isn't one and every element seems to have been pulled out of hat and just inserted randomly. It manages to make less sense than any of the early Toho monster movies and introduces conspiracy theories like the hollow earth and fluoride in tap water! WTF? The characters are so dumb and unappealing cardboard cutups that there is suspense, not way to care about is going on even if you could decipher a plot line form this mess. You can't even figure which characters are where on the earth. There is no sense of time as they seem to go form the USA the Hong Kong without having to book a flight, pack or get a hotel room in more seconds. There is no sense of scale either. The giant monsters could be any size, they have no real sense of weight or how huge they are. There are not consequences you would care about to anyone or anything in the entire film. It just happens and they mix dull over tropes with confusing and incredibly dumb but not fun elements.  then the put in Mechagodzilla for 10 minutes.

No one wins this battle of the titans. We all lose.