San Andreas
Dir. Brad Peyton
It's kind of funny that San Andreas, a big-budget, massive-destruction disaster flick, is released the week after Tomorrowland, a film that explicitly preaches against this kind of tragedy-turned-entertainment. While it's true that turning something like a city-leveling earthquake, an event that could actually happen, into a popcorn thrill ride may be a little distasteful to victims of real natural disasters, I was able to shut my brain off just enough to brush all that off. You can call it the desensitization of modern society, I just call it a "blockbuster." All that stuff aside, San Andreas is your standard disaster movie fare - it has literally every cliche you could possibly think of - but its cast and over-the-top campiness somehow made it work for me.
The film follows Ray Gaines (Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson), an LA helicopter rescue pilot, who's in the midst of a divorce with his wife Emma (Carla Gugino), while his daughter (Alexandra Daddario) is caught between her real dad and her new stepdad Daniel (Ioan Gruffudd), a real estate mogul whose only other "children" are his precious skyskrapers. All the while, a seismologist from Caltech (Paul Giamatti) uses new earthquake prediction techniques to warn all of San Francisco to get their asses out of Dodge. This movie, if anything, proved to me the charismatic star quality of The Rock. He's very good here, and adds a surprising amount of emotional heft to his performance. Same goes for Gugino, who, without necessarily spoiling anything, gives a heart-wrenching performance towards the end of the film (even though the scene logically makes no sense). With The Rock, Gugino, and Giamatti delivering their cheesy lines with such complete dedication and earnestness, I can't believe that they weren't "in on the joke."
San Andreas has the subtlety of a metal chair slammed in your face. The dialogue is hilariously overblown ("Who should we call?" - dramatic pause - "Everyone."), and the effects are totally go-big-or-go-home. Some of the action here is great; I particularly liked one section that felt as though it was one long shot - it's so CGI heavy it clearly wasn't, but still, I appreciated that it wasn't all just shaky-cam. My biggest problem with this movie, and modern blockbusters in general, is the overabundance of CGI; it really makes everything feel so disposable and not dangerous at all. In not even ten years this movie will have dated worse than Earthquake from 1974. In fact, in the brief moments where the film leaves CGI-land - like during a particular "MacGyver-y" moment in a parking garage - I felt the stakes rise considerably, even though way less destruction was shown. Seeing one single person struggling to get out of a physically real car is 100 times more intense than seeing a giant CGI fault line erupt through a city, killing hundreds of thousands of nameless, faceless people.
Although it's silly and easily mockable (I think it's great make-fun-of-with-friends material), I truly believe buried under the rubble of giant collapsing CGI buildings and 80 foot cresting waves is something that could have actually been great. If the filmmakers had chosen to take the material a little more seriously, and have The Rock truly play out how a real search and rescue crew member would react in this situation, it could have been this generation's Cliffhanger. But alas, what we get in its place is a big, loud, dumb, by-the-numbers, albeit watchable, earthquake picture that puts all its money on the screen and is worth its weight in unintentional chuckles.
Rating: B-
(By no means does this movie deserve this high a rating, but on a pure entertainment level - even an ironic one - I enjoyed watching it!)
Dir. Gil Kenan
I'm not one of those people totally averse to remakes, especially horror remakes. The Hills Have Eyes, Dawn of the Dead, heck, even John Carpenter's The Thing are all examples of how to take an already great concept and make it fresh, new, and even more intense for a modern audience. Poltergeist (2015), attempts to do just this. As producer Sam Raimi has stated in interviews: this is the Poltergeist for THIS generation! Everything is updated! However, while it's true that the TVs have gone plasma, and there's a scene with an iPod picking up some kind of inter-dimensional evil frequency, Poltergeist '15 is more or less the same exact movie as the 1982 original, only nearly every single changed aspect is for the worse.
If you didn't already know - Poltergeist is about a typical suburban family -mommy, daddy, and three kids - moving into a new home. And the new home was built on a graveyard. And ghosts suck poor little Madison into another dimension through her closet. So right away, when Madison goes missing the family calls in paranormal experts (going to the police first apparently never occurred to them), and they manage to convince a famous TV "Ghost Hunter," Carrigan Burke (Jared Harris), to also help them out. Carrigan helps them for no money or even a TV crew to document the event, and we never find out why. There are a lot of logical dead ends in this movie.
The actors (and screenwriters for that matter) all seem to be sleepwalking through this. The film is beyond lazy: one of the few characteristics we learn about the father character is that he's an alcoholic. But that plot thread is solved in two seconds, when he abruptly decides to stop and pours his booze down the drain. Also: one second your child is sucked into a netherworld dimension - the next you're cracking jokes with the paranormal team. Nice parenting. Then there's the "psychic" character Carrigan; his motivation remains unclear throughout the entire movie, like a really half-assed version of Peter Vincent from Fright Night. Especially compared to Zelda Rubinstein from the original, whose voice alone gave me nightmares as a kid (anyone else remember Scariest Places on Earth?), Harris is just nowhere near as compelling. And get ready for some annoying kids.
I must sound like a broken record at this point, but the CGI pretty much ruined any sense of suspense here. Although it's not like the original was subtle (a tree coming to life, some weird puppet demon thing, etc), at least it felt tangible. One key example of why the original was great, while this one pales in comparison, is when the characters first see the world being manipulated by the poltergeist. In the original, in one unbroken shot we see the mother leave the kitchen normally, then return and all the chairs have been stacked up on the table. It's a striking image and one that all these years later has stuck with me [watch it here]. On the other hand, the remake takes the same concept, only it's the son who turns around and sees a big CGI stack of cards in a doorway, which blows every which way when he screams. You can see right through it: they tried so hard to "top" themselves by making it a busy, 3D "thrill ride," but it has none of the tangible creepiness found from the 1982 version. You simply can't picture the card trick happening in real life.
There is no reason this movie should exist. It changes almost nothing from the story of the original, it only implants different technology and characters where necessary. While it's not a completely incompetently made movie (Gil Kenan made a slickly made film, even if it is lifeless), it simply is a waste of cinema. Everyone involved in this project did it for the paycheck. I can think of no reason anyone should ever watch this movie!
If you didn't already know - Poltergeist is about a typical suburban family -mommy, daddy, and three kids - moving into a new home. And the new home was built on a graveyard. And ghosts suck poor little Madison into another dimension through her closet. So right away, when Madison goes missing the family calls in paranormal experts (going to the police first apparently never occurred to them), and they manage to convince a famous TV "Ghost Hunter," Carrigan Burke (Jared Harris), to also help them out. Carrigan helps them for no money or even a TV crew to document the event, and we never find out why. There are a lot of logical dead ends in this movie.
The actors (and screenwriters for that matter) all seem to be sleepwalking through this. The film is beyond lazy: one of the few characteristics we learn about the father character is that he's an alcoholic. But that plot thread is solved in two seconds, when he abruptly decides to stop and pours his booze down the drain. Also: one second your child is sucked into a netherworld dimension - the next you're cracking jokes with the paranormal team. Nice parenting. Then there's the "psychic" character Carrigan; his motivation remains unclear throughout the entire movie, like a really half-assed version of Peter Vincent from Fright Night. Especially compared to Zelda Rubinstein from the original, whose voice alone gave me nightmares as a kid (anyone else remember Scariest Places on Earth?), Harris is just nowhere near as compelling. And get ready for some annoying kids.
I must sound like a broken record at this point, but the CGI pretty much ruined any sense of suspense here. Although it's not like the original was subtle (a tree coming to life, some weird puppet demon thing, etc), at least it felt tangible. One key example of why the original was great, while this one pales in comparison, is when the characters first see the world being manipulated by the poltergeist. In the original, in one unbroken shot we see the mother leave the kitchen normally, then return and all the chairs have been stacked up on the table. It's a striking image and one that all these years later has stuck with me [watch it here]. On the other hand, the remake takes the same concept, only it's the son who turns around and sees a big CGI stack of cards in a doorway, which blows every which way when he screams. You can see right through it: they tried so hard to "top" themselves by making it a busy, 3D "thrill ride," but it has none of the tangible creepiness found from the 1982 version. You simply can't picture the card trick happening in real life.
There is no reason this movie should exist. It changes almost nothing from the story of the original, it only implants different technology and characters where necessary. While it's not a completely incompetently made movie (Gil Kenan made a slickly made film, even if it is lifeless), it simply is a waste of cinema. Everyone involved in this project did it for the paycheck. I can think of no reason anyone should ever watch this movie!
Rating: D-
Aloha
Dir. Cameron Crowe
Watch Trailer
Aloha has Cameron Crowe more or less retreading similar water to Jerry Maguire from 1996: it's about a professional male who bottoms out, and is "rescued" by the love of a woman. Only this time around that simple formula is used for one of the most bafflingly incomprehensible rom-com plots I've ever seen. Aloha - from what I gathered - is about a military man, Brian Gilcrest (Bradley Cooper), who returns to his home in Hawaii after something vaguely went wrong in his past. He now works for billionaire Carson Welch (Bill Murray), looking to take advantage of the privatization of space. Welch sends Gilcrest to the mountains of Hawaii to get the blessing of a respected tribal leader to build a new space base, and accompanying him is the energetic fighter pilot Allison Ng (Emma Stone). Meanwhile Gilcrest's ex (Rachel McAdams) and her new husband (John Krasinski) are floating around the picture as well. It's all just a really lame melodrama that hints at intriguing ideas of Hawaiian politics, space politics, and moving on with relationships, but the screenplay is just so uninteresting, on-the-nose ("You're cynical, I get it!" is an actual line in the film), and weirdly hard to understand that my brain no longer cared to absorb what was in front of me.
The pop music soundtrack tries so hard to evoke certain emotions, and characters smile and interact with each other with unearned sincerity. It seriously made me cringe! This is basically The Descendants if the script were written by an orangutan with a crayon. Plus, the location of Hawaii isn't particularly well shot or beautiful - which seems almost impossible to pull off. Any schmuck with a camcorder could just point and shoot something in Hawaii and it might look great. Aloha is simply painful to sit through. None of the jokes work, and all of the "heartwarming" relationships felt so passionless and constructed. I honestly can't think of a single redeeming thing about it, other than Emma Stone, whose spunkiness here would have been great in a better movie.
Rating: D-
Aloha
Dir. Cameron Crowe
Watch Trailer
Aloha has Cameron Crowe more or less retreading similar water to Jerry Maguire from 1996: it's about a professional male who bottoms out, and is "rescued" by the love of a woman. Only this time around that simple formula is used for one of the most bafflingly incomprehensible rom-com plots I've ever seen. Aloha - from what I gathered - is about a military man, Brian Gilcrest (Bradley Cooper), who returns to his home in Hawaii after something vaguely went wrong in his past. He now works for billionaire Carson Welch (Bill Murray), looking to take advantage of the privatization of space. Welch sends Gilcrest to the mountains of Hawaii to get the blessing of a respected tribal leader to build a new space base, and accompanying him is the energetic fighter pilot Allison Ng (Emma Stone). Meanwhile Gilcrest's ex (Rachel McAdams) and her new husband (John Krasinski) are floating around the picture as well. It's all just a really lame melodrama that hints at intriguing ideas of Hawaiian politics, space politics, and moving on with relationships, but the screenplay is just so uninteresting, on-the-nose ("You're cynical, I get it!" is an actual line in the film), and weirdly hard to understand that my brain no longer cared to absorb what was in front of me.
The pop music soundtrack tries so hard to evoke certain emotions, and characters smile and interact with each other with unearned sincerity. It seriously made me cringe! This is basically The Descendants if the script were written by an orangutan with a crayon. Plus, the location of Hawaii isn't particularly well shot or beautiful - which seems almost impossible to pull off. Any schmuck with a camcorder could just point and shoot something in Hawaii and it might look great. Aloha is simply painful to sit through. None of the jokes work, and all of the "heartwarming" relationships felt so passionless and constructed. I honestly can't think of a single redeeming thing about it, other than Emma Stone, whose spunkiness here would have been great in a better movie.
Rating: D-
Welcome to Me
Dir. Shira Piven
Watch Trailer
SNL alum Kristen Wiig has recently been extending out of her comedy "comfort zone" to act in some dramatic roles (like The Skeleton Twins and Hateship Loveship). Welcome to Me is another dramedy in a similar vein to those movies, and I feel this performance really shows her potential in a way we haven't seen before. Wiig plays Alice Kleig, a mentally unbalanced lottery winner who decides the best way to spend her newfound fortune is to produce, and star in, her own talk show a la Oprah (the past episodes of which she creepily re-watches and memorizes). Alice promises a struggling TV studio a ton of dough, and they reluctantly agree to her every bizarre request as a last resort to stay financially afloat - everything from a cooking show with meatloaf cake to uncomfortable re-enactments of Alice's personal life.
The tone of this film is a very slippery one indeed, juggling high dramatic moments regarding Alice's mental state with silly Andy Kaufman/Tim and Eric-type humor during the TV segments, but Wiig and director Shira Piven, for the most part, pull it off. Alice is a really interesting character, even though she can be tough to sympathize with and her awkwardness sometimes extends beyond the point where it's funny anymore. The film doesn't have a ton of momentum, and gets somewhat lost along the way (side characters like Jennifer Jason Leigh get lost in the shuffle), but overall, I found this to be an odd little film, worth seeing if the concept appeals to you.
Rating: B-
SNL alum Kristen Wiig has recently been extending out of her comedy "comfort zone" to act in some dramatic roles (like The Skeleton Twins and Hateship Loveship). Welcome to Me is another dramedy in a similar vein to those movies, and I feel this performance really shows her potential in a way we haven't seen before. Wiig plays Alice Kleig, a mentally unbalanced lottery winner who decides the best way to spend her newfound fortune is to produce, and star in, her own talk show a la Oprah (the past episodes of which she creepily re-watches and memorizes). Alice promises a struggling TV studio a ton of dough, and they reluctantly agree to her every bizarre request as a last resort to stay financially afloat - everything from a cooking show with meatloaf cake to uncomfortable re-enactments of Alice's personal life.
The tone of this film is a very slippery one indeed, juggling high dramatic moments regarding Alice's mental state with silly Andy Kaufman/Tim and Eric-type humor during the TV segments, but Wiig and director Shira Piven, for the most part, pull it off. Alice is a really interesting character, even though she can be tough to sympathize with and her awkwardness sometimes extends beyond the point where it's funny anymore. The film doesn't have a ton of momentum, and gets somewhat lost along the way (side characters like Jennifer Jason Leigh get lost in the shuffle), but overall, I found this to be an odd little film, worth seeing if the concept appeals to you.
Rating: B-
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