10 Cloverfield Lane (2016), The Incredible Hulk (2008), Bridge of Spies (2015)

Some mini-reviews

10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)

Billed as a "spiritual sequel" to J. J. Abrams 2008 'found footage' monster movie Cloverfield, this kind-a sort-a follow up is quite a bit different from its predecessor and I would say quite a bit better (though I did like the original film). 10 Cloverfield Lane is also a movie that benefits from going into it knowing as little about it as possible about it, so all I'll say is that a lot of it takes place in a bunker and its probably John Goodman's best role this century. This really exceeded my expectations and I highly recommend seeing it in the theater, I left the movie a little surprised and quite pleased. ***1/2


The Incredible Hulk (2008)

Born of the backlash against Ang Lee's "artsy" 2003 Hulk, The Incredible Hulk is the last of the films set in 'canonical' Marvel Cinematic Universe I had yet to see. Wisely dispensing with The Hulks origin story in opening sequence montage the film focuses on the efforts of General Ross (William Hurt) to hunt down on the run Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) the unfortunate victim of a government experiment gone wrong and former lover of Ross's scientist daughter Betty Ross (Liv Tyler, was her voice always this soft? Her performance felt like a bit of a throw back compared to the strong female love interests of other Marvel hero's). In course of the film bad guy Tim Roth becomes 'a Hulk' too, but on the whole the film is pretty mediocre and unmemorable, probably the weakest MCU movie save maybe Iron Man II. **


Bridge of Spies (2015)

When I first saw previews for this film I thought it looked really good, I love Cold War spy stuff and it seemed that kind of historical, true story, triumph of the human spirit movie that director Steven Spielberg cold make in his sleep, but the question is how much longer will that be enough? Well Bridge of Spies proves that it may well be the movie in which that classic Spielberg formula stops being impressive. That's not to say its not a good film, it is, the story its based on is interesting and Tom Hanks is good as always, but the movie's just not great. It doesn't break any new ground for anyone, and its not particularly effecting emotionally, its intriguing as a lesser known historical human interest piece (James B. Donovan is a legitimately impressive man) but little more then that. That being said when I was watching it I had the thought that it would be fun to show this movie to my 12 year old nephew. Also of note the capture of the spy Rudolf Abel at the beginning of this film, well I'm pretty sure it also served as the basis for one of the episodic vignette's in the 1959 Jimmy Stewart picture The FBI Story. ***

The Mermaid (2015)

I saw this movie was coming to the local art house cinema awhile back but didn't pay much attention to it because it didn't seem like the kind of film I would just naturally want to go and see. Then a week or two back I ran across on article on Vice stating that since its release last year The Mermaid has become the biggest success in the history of the Chinese box office, earning 2.7 billion Chinese yen or around $500,000,000 American dollars. Now I was curious, especially given that the films basic plot description, that it revolves around a businessman falling in love with a mermaid, made it sound essentially like a remake of the 1984 Tom Hanks/ Daryl Hannah comedy Splash. While having now seen the film I can tell that the plot is actually quite a bit different then that of Splash, leans heavily on themes of ecological destruction, and is in fact a Stephen Chow action comedy. Yes Stephen Chow, the same guy who made and stared in Kung Fu Hustle and Shaolin Soccer, now the films enormous success made more sense to me. Elaborate action set pieces, excellent comic timing, gages that often build to almost tear inducing levels of  comic absurdity, and special effects that I can only assume are intentionally meant to look bad. Chow's on his A game here and even manages to work in more self critical social commentary then you'd expect out of a film made in Red China, as well as give his film probably the most coherent emotional core of any of his pictures to date, though granted we are talking about a Stephen Chow picture here so its not anything too deep, its a man falling in love with a mermaid for central committees sake. Still if you like Chow you'll like this and if you've never seen a Chow picture before, well be prepared for a live action cartoon. ***

The Witch: A New England Folktale (2015)

The debut film of writer/director Robert Eggers, The Witch got good notices at Sundance last year and received widespread theatrical distribution this February. As its subtitle A  New England Folktale suggests The Witch is a story distilled from the witch hysteria of 17th century puritan New England. Writer/director Eggers hails from that part of the country and grew up fascinated with the period and its mythos, subjects that he stated in a recent Vice interview are a more central passion for him then even filmmaking.

The plot (from Wikipeida): "In the 17th century, a man named William is excommunicated from a Puritan Christian plantation in New England alongside his family—wife Katherine, daughter Thomasin, son Caleb, and fraternal twins Mercy and Jonas—due to the crime of “prideful conceit." The family is exiled and build their new farm by a large forest. After several months, Katherine gives birth to her fifth child, Samuel. One day, while Thomasin is playing with Samuel, the baby vanishes."
Baby Samuel is in fact stolen by a witch living in the nearby woods who murders him as part of an occult ritual, or so it would appear but The Witch is far from a straightforward film. Even when the movie tells you something there is room for doubt, it is a hodge podge, a mix taken from actual period dialogue, folk traditions, and various other often conflicting sources mushed together to where your not really sure what's happening.

The movie is well cast and acted, the sets and costuming beautiful and seemingly authentic, it's a cinematic slow burn drenched in atmosphere and a unsettling sense of mood, yet at the end I wasn't completely sure what it was trying to tell me about witchcraft and the period. When I think about it now I don't think it was trying to say much of anything beyond 'isn't this a bunch of interesting stuff', and it is. Lead actress Anya Taylor-Joy who plays Thomasin ably anchors the piece, she's kind of haunting looking and watching the movie I thought she was quite a bit younger then she actually is, I think she has a real future in film. The rest of the cast is quite good as well, and cast no doubt in part because there faces really look like you'd expect 17th century puritans to look. This is certainly a different kind of horror movie then most that get released now days, its more scary by implication then anything, though there are a few good scares including a sequence early on that was uncomfortable to sit through. Obviously not for everybody its the most 'different' and moody period horror piece I've seen since probably The White Ribbon. ***

The Boy and the Best (2015)

I've been in the mood to watch the kinds of films I don't have much experience with lately, and anime is one such genera. Other then the films of Hayao Miyazaki I don't know if I've ever seen an anime film, and my experience with anime TV shows is hearing my nephews talk about Pokémon and watching Voltron when I was in kindergarten. The Boy and the Best confirms some of the stereotypes I hold of the genera, that they contain dense unfamiliar  mythologies and relies on a lot of exposition to approach making sense and that they have a strange obsession with one on one fighting. This makes for at times a plodding and juvenile picture, though of course its aimed mostly at kids. However The Boy and the Best grew on me as it progressed, it has some interesting and I think relevant things to say to its target younger audience about controlling rage. The film is about a young boy named Ren who runs away from his relatives after his mothers death, the boys father long being out of the picture, and ends up in the care of a anthropomorphic bear like creature name Kumatetsu who he follows into a parallel dimension and to whom he becomes an apprentice/suraget child. Eventually Ren finds that he can pass back and forth between dimensions, reconnects with his human father and starts to pursue an education with the help of a teenage girl he meets in a library (Ren ages around 10 years or so over the course of the movie).  This all leads up to a beautifully animated and poignant climax that is quite well done and surprisingly literary. The Boy and the Best in the end had a substance to it that I hadn't expected and which really elevated it, even if it wasn't quite my cup of tea. ***

One Generation Away: The Erosion of Religious Liberty (2015)

It's title taken for a Ronald Reagan quote about how "Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction." One Generation Away is a Christian documentary about threats (real or perceived) to religious liberty in America. The film talks about a number of well known cases such as controversy over the cross at the San Diego War Memorial, the Hobby Lobby decent over contraceptive provisions of Obamacare, a cake maker who refused to make a cake for a gay marriage and subsequently went out of business etc. While for the most part I tend to take claims of the persecution of Christians for their beliefs in overwhelming Christian America as more then a little overstated, I can recognize the conflicting values and legal guarantee's/ protections involved in most of the cases here presented. The one case where I would have had little trouble passing judgment is the one where the cheerleaders at a high school in Texas put bible quotes on banners displayed at games, it one thing for banners like these to appear in the stands displayed by parents and other students, but when cheerleaders in uniform representing the school display these there is an implied school sanction of a particular faith to which me crosses a line. There are some ACLU types shown to present the other side, but the film has an obvious agenda from the get go, which is fine, and most of the talking heads are the likes of Mike Huckabee, Rick Sanatorium and other figures who straddle the religious political line in a partisan manner. I thought this was kind of bland documentary but it gets its point across. **

Deadpool (2016)

In Deadpool Marvel's surreal, sarcastic, fourth wall breaking cult character gets his own movie through the agency of star Ryan Reynolds. Much has been made of the fact that this is an R rated comic book movie, and it earned that R, but such films have been done before such as The Watchman , Blade and Sin City. Perhaps more interesting and surprising to me is that fact that Deadpool is not part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, no instead its part of the 20th Century Fox X-Men Universe, or a variation thereof. Thought the move plays off the fact that its a movie so much that its essentially in it own universe and any inconsistencies or oddities in plot can just be chocked up to the fact that its a movie and knows it. The cast assembled is fun, this a passion project from Reynolds, Morena Baccarin is kind of mold breaking for a superhero love interest, and to me T.J. Miller is just one of the funniest guys working in films right now. Also shout out to the fact that Leslie Uggams is in this film, I think this is the first film made in my lifetime that I've seen Leslie Uggams in. The film is very juvenile in most ways, I appreciated its irreverence but it did not resonate for me the way I hoped it might, so in the end for me the film experience was surprisingly middling, though maybe I'd enjoy it more on a second viewing. **1/2

What If...(2010)

What if... is essentially an overtly Christen re-make of the 2000 Nicolas Cage movie The Family Man. In fact I'd say this movie is so like The Family Man that there may be legitimate grounds for a lawsuit. Directed by Dallas Jenkins, the son of Left Behind series co-author Jerry B. Jenkins, the film stars Kevin Sorbo (who seems to have replaced Kirk Cameron as the preferred leading man of Evangelical nitch market films) as Ben Walker, a man who in his twenties turned his back on a calling from God to preach to enter the cutthroat world of business. Fifteen years after making this life altering decision which broke his college girlfriends heart, Ben has just been promoted to a partner in his firm and become engaged to a shallow but superficially beautiful woman, when he receives an invite from his old love to a fundraiser at their former church. Ben decides he is going to skip out on this event but God has other plans for him, in a road to Damascus moment (which takes place on an actual road) he sends an angel in the form of John Ratzenberger to transport him to an alternate timeline where Ben heeded God's call, became a preacher (and divinity school graduate) married his sweetheart (Kristy Swanson), produced two daughters (including Disney Channel star Debby Ryan) and has just taken over as pastor at his finically struggling old church.

In predictable fashion Ben is at first flummoxed and disbelieving, then tries unsuccessfully to run back to his old life and job, where of course no one remembers him, before deciding to try and go with the flow, embrace his new life, learn the folly of his ways and what really matters, before (spoiler) being returned to his old worldly life to see if he has really become a changed man, which (spoiler) of course he has. I've been listing to a podcast recently called God Awful Movies in which a group of atheist comedians watch Christen movies and then proceed to riff on them, I decided to see this movie because I wanted to see one of the movies they were going to be talking about before listing to the episode and this one sounded amongst the most fun (I'm looking forward to listing to the episode soon). For a 'Christian' movie you can do a lot worse then this, I actually must confess I enjoyed it. I don't think kitsch is the precise word for this but there is something about watching a film that just takes for granted a world view and assumptions so different from what you encounter in most movie that is just kind of fascinating. It's a glimpse into a subculture that is all around us but into which I seldom venture, I mean I don't even eat at Chick-fil-a. I'm actually thinking of watching a number of Christian films in the near future just for a change of pace, and because it will be kind of fun writing about them. So I'm going to go ahead and give What If... **1/2