A captivating journey
By Colin Covert
FILM: Life of Pi
CAST: Suraj Sharma, Irrfan Khan, Tabu
DIRECTION: Ang Lee
Piscine Molitor Patel has a tiger by the tail. The zookeeper’s son has just survived the sinking of a freighter containing his family’s menagerie when another castaway struggles aboard the lifeboat. It’s a full-grown Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.
Can they follow the currents across the Pacific to land? Can 16-year-old Pi find the courage, intelligence and cunning to survive until they do? Life of Pi, the 2001 bestseller by Yann Martel, made this saga of loss, struggle, faith and self-discovery into a publishing phenomenon, but its wayward plot, grand themes and claustrophobic scope seemed to doom any efforts to put it onscreen.
Now it has been done, triumphantly. Ang Lee’s thrillingly audacious Oscar-winning film transforms this inconceivable premise into visual poetry, high adventure and sheer enchantment. With digital effects of unsurpassed brilliance, it compels us to believe that the tiger is a living, breathing beast.
The ocean scenes, sometimes computer-created, sometimes shot on an immense wave tank, merge seamlessly. The beautifully composed 3-D cinematography by Claudio Miranda (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) draws us into Pi’s world as if by magnetic force. Yet the production is never about film magic for its own sake. Each scene advances the story and deepens Pi’s character, building toward a climax of intellectual and spiritual elation.
Lee is one of our greatest humanist filmmakers, and this is the film he was born to make. The mystical/ theatrical exuberance of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the deep personal drama of The Ice Storm and the special-effects focus of Hulk were the ideal proving grounds for Pi, which must succeed on all three levels if it is to work at all. Lee directs with breathless ingenuity, guiding his star, first-time actor Suraj Sharma, to a performance of unaffected authenticity and charm.
The superb Irrfan Khan (Slumdog Millionaire) carries much of the film as the adult Pi. As he tells the fantastic tale to a nameless writer (Rafe Spall), he is utterly, properly, matter-of-fact. If he had narrated with a twinkle in his eye, this modern fairy tale would have drifted into whimsy.
The film was shot chronologically, so Sharma could shed weight throughout Pi’s ordeal. In the latter scenes where hunger, exhaustion, loneliness, lunacy and despair fill Pi’s head with surreal visions, Sharma looks genuinely ecstatic. Anyone who shares his journey will be equally captivated. — Star Tribune/MCT
A sentimental comedy
By Roger Moore
FILM: Robot & Frank
CAST: Frank Langella, Liv Tyler, James Marsden, Susan Sarandon
DIRECTION: Jake Schreier
Robot & Frank may be the oddest credit in Frank Langella’s almost 60 years on stage and screen.
It is, as its title declares, about a robot. And Frank.
This sentimental comedy traffics in old age, forgetfulness, family and a robot that “feels”. And it works better than it has any right to, largely through Langella’s way with a curmudgeon, his force of personality.
The Frank this Frank plays is an aged retiree in upstate New York, a man living out his golden years “in the near future”, when the cars have grown tinier, the phones even thinner and the local library has become an empty “museum” for books, in need of a hip makeover and young people who decide that it’s cool to want to read that way again.
Frank is a cranky loner who forgets that his favourite diner closed years before, that he’s been divorced for 30 years, what his kids’ names are, on occasion.
But he hasn’t forgotten how to pick a lock. He hasn’t forgotten that he did time for being “a second-story man”, a jewel thief. So he makes it a habit of shoplifting something every trek he makes into town.
His son (James Marsden) is tired of worrying about that, and about the clutter Frank lives in and the weekly trips he has to make to check on Dad. So he rents the guy a robot “helper”. Frank isn’t convinced.
“That thing is going to murder me in my sleep!”
Frank resists the healthier diet the robot prepares, the exercise the robot wants him to do. Until, that is, the robot makes him see it from his point of view.
“If you die eating cheese burgers, what happens to me?” the VGC 60L asks in Peter Sarsgaard’s soothing voice. He’s sort of a fussy HAL 9000 from 2001 with just a hint of needy C3PO (Star Wars) about him. The robot will be deemed a failure, shipped back to the factory and have its memory scrubbed. Frank’s humanity gets the better of him and he relents.
Besides, the robot can be his audience, hearing about Frank’s glorious past as a thief. Heck, the robot (basically a woman in a plastic suit) could be his apprentice.
“Any lock can be picked,” Frank teaches. When he breaks out the binoculars and floor plans, “This is what we call ‘casing’” the joint.
Christopher Ford’s script makes few demands for special effects and not many more demands of the players. Frank and the robot plan jobs and carry them out, and try to keep a low profile as they do. Frank re-connects with his globe-trotting daughter (Liv Tyler), who comes home to fuss over him at the worst possible time. He flirts with the soon-to-be-redundant librarian (Susan Sarandon) and crosses swords with a rude yuppie hipster (Jeremy Strong).
“You’re so square, you’re practically avante garde,” the young guy sneers.
More could have been done with the capers, more made of the town’s “pigeons” waiting for Frank and the robot to pluck their feathers — or jewels. And with the robot-human “relationship”.
But Langella, interacting with that short, helmeted thing, never lets on that this is anything but real, never lets us see that forgetful Frank sees anything less than a golden opportunity for golden age scores in this new partnership.
It’s more humourous than funny, more charming than truly entertaining. But Robot & Frank can still be savoured for its human assets, especially the 74-year-old who finally gets to play a character who shares his first name.— MCT
Too dark for holiday fare
By Rick Bentley
FILM: Rise of the Guardians (animation)
VOICE-OVER CAST: Chris Pine, Alec Baldwin, Hugh Jackman, Isla Fisher, Jude Law
DIRECTION: Peter Ramsey
Animated movies like Arthur Christmas or The Polar Express are designed to spark holiday cheer either through slapstick comedy or the marvels of the season. They have some tense moments to create drama — but never to the point of distraction.
There are too many distractions in Rise of the Guardians to make this a holiday treat for the entire family.
It’s a dark tale that is too intense for young viewers and maybe even a few older moviegoers.
The film, based on The Guardians of Childhood books by William Joyce, reveals that North (Alec Baldwin), better known as Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny (Hugh Jackman), The Tooth Fairy (Isla Fisher) and the Sandman (no voice actor; he never speaks) have a bigger calling than just providing gifts, eggs, quarters and sweet dreams. They’ve been charged by the Man in the Moon with the task of watching over all of the children of the world.
They need help when Pitch (Jude Law) — better known as the Bogeyman — shows up to bring misery to children everywhere. The impetuous Jack Frost (Chris Pine) is recruited to fight the evil darkness that’s trying to children non-believers.
Director Peter Ramsey created a film with two distinct halves.
Parts of the movie are light and funny, especially those scenes with a group of goofy elves. There’s a silliness to this part of the story that makes it the kind of fun entertainment people search for during the hustle of the holidays.
Then there’s the efforts of Pitch to ruin some of the major things that makes childhood bearable. Each foreboding moment — from death to despair — drags the movie further away from the holiday spirit. That darkness eventually eclipses the fun aspects of the story.
The film is beautifully shot, but it fails to find the right story tone to fit the gorgeous look.
And the film is all over when it comes to voice talent. Jackman’s perfect as the Rambo-like Easter Bunny and Law brings the perfect sinister tone to Pitch. But the casting of Pine as the young Jack Frost is a nightmare. His voice sounds far too old for Frost, which is jarring each time he speaks.
Ramsey also has trouble with pacing. There are several sequences — including the efforts of the Guardians to replace lost teeth, placed under pillows, with coins — that run past the point of entertainment to tedium. It would have been better use of time to spend a few more scenes with the elves — a wasted comic relief element.
Rise of the Guardians has its moments — both good and bad. It’s like getting a pair of socks on a special day. It could be worse. It could be better. — The Fresno Bee/MCT
(DVDs courtesy:
Saqr Entertainment Stores, Doha)
Doozy finale
By Roger Moore
FILM: The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2
CAST: Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Ashley Greene
DIRECTION: Bill Condon
Whatever happens before it, the finale is a doozy, almost certain to be satisfying to fans and impressive even to the casual Twilight viewer.
But so much of what comes before that payoff in Breaking Dawn — Part 2, the conclusion to The Twilight Saga, is mundane, dull, all talk and no action.
It’s a made-for-TV movie about teen vampires, with talk-talk-talking leads muttering romance novel lines, a vast clutter of late-to-the-saga new characters, that same blue-grey production design, more digital wolves and incessant, insipid music.
In other words, pretty much what we’ve come to expect from this finally-ending never-ending saga.
Director Bill Condon (Kinsey, Gods and Monsters) never quite overcomes the sense that he feels this is all beneath him with this second half of the book he got to film to finish Twilight off.
He’s still too-quick to look for the joke, none-too-subtle when looking for excuses to have Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner strip. But the barely-concealed contempt of Breaking Dawn — Part 1 doesn’t show.
Bella’s baby, Renesmee, is growing up fast, but mostly outside of her grasp. A “newborn” vampire herself, Bella (Kristen Stewart) doesn’t know her own strength, so others nurse the child. Bella revels in her heightened awareness of nature, her sharper senses. She can toss hubby Edward (Robert Pattinson) around and have her way with him any time she wants.
“I was born to be a vampire,” she narrates. Then, she kicks the brawny Emmett’s butt (Kellan Lutz) at arm wrestling to show she’s wholly Cullen-ised.
Bella’s clueless dad (Billy Burke) has to be clued in. Sort of. The third corner of the love triangle, werewolf Jacob (Taylor Lautner), must be placated and insulted. He calls the fast-growing tyke “Nessie”. (“You nicknamed my baby after the Loch Ness Monster?”)
And the Volturi, the ruling coven of vampires, must be convinced that this child of human-and-vampire desire with the absurd name and silly nickname is no threat.
And as is the way of Twilight, the Volturi (Michael Sheen, Dakota Fanning) aren’t listening. Thus, the Cullen clan reach out — north to south, east to Middle East — for “witnesses” to the child’s true nature. These vampy vampires — Brazilian rainforest folk, Arabs, Russians — each have their own “special” powers, according to the needs of the always slight but increasingly unwieldy plot. It’s as if novelist Stephenie Meyer was using the growing, evolving Harry Potter bag of tricks and trick characters as her model.
Lee Pace and Rami Malek are standouts among the legion of newcomers hurled into the saga. And I have to say, after four films and untold tonnes of heavily made-up heavy-breathing close-ups, the casting of that original corps of Cullens and humans has worked out wonderfully. The gorgeous supporting players, from Peter Facinelli and Nikki Reed to Ashley Greene and Jackson Rathbone, never treated this teen romance as anything less than War and Peace.
The movies around them, however, have veered from tepid to time-stands-still tedious. The passionate panting first-love of the first films has settled into an embattled but lusty couple setting up housekeeping, the effects have improved marginally and, as said at the outset, the ending and the epilogue pack a punch. — MCT
Remake a bust from the past
By Steven Rea
FILM: Red Dawn
CAST: Chris Hemsworth, Josh Peck, Josh Hutcherson, Adrianne Palicki
DIRECTION: Dan Bradley
Do armies still invade by parachute? Wouldn’t it make more sense to just book a flight to Seattle and take the country over, starting with that guy elbowing travellers at the baggage carousel?
Parachutes are more cinematic, I guess. In the early going of Red Dawn — the unnecessary, un-fun remake of John Milius’ 1984 Russians-invade-America cult fave — hundreds of CG-rendered North Korean paratroopers descend on Spokane, ready to kill any Americans who get in the way.
Shot more than three years ago and only now making its way to the multiplexes, Red Dawn is a movie with a Red state of mind. A TV news montage of the world going kablooey — Europe in crisis, cyberhackers shutting down power grids, Asian conflagrations and Middle East attacks, and Obama and Biden and Hillary Clinton trying to calm a nation’s frayed nerves — lets us know that things are not going swimmingly. And then Kim Jong-un’s army arrives.
Luckily, a bunch of defiant Washington teens jump in a pickup truck, crash through some barricades, and make for a cabin in the woods, where they plot a guerrilla campaign against Captain Cho (a villainous Will Yun Lee) and his tanks and armoured vehicles.
Well-stocked with guns and ammo, and armed with a good nickname — the Wolverines, after the school football team — the boys make sorties into town to blow up occupied buildings and generally make a patriotic nuisance of themselves.
The resistance fighters are led by Iraq War veteran Jed Eckert (Chris Hemsworth, pre-Thor) and his smug kid brother, Matt (Josh Peck), the star quarterback. There’s a techie guy (Josh Hutcherson), the mayor’s son (Connor Cruise), a cheerleader (Isabel Lucas), and the girl (Adrianne Palicki) with a crush on Jed. After a while, three ex-Marines show up, too.
Milius’ Red Dawn starred Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, Lea Thompson and Jennifer Grey (and grizzled character actors Ben Johnson and Harry Dean Stanton), and had a goofy, far-fetched, empowered-youth macho appeal.
The Red Dawn reboot, directed by Dan Bradley, a stunt co-ordinator and second unit director (action! action! action!), is hobbled by a laughably bad script and a uniformly uncharismatic cast. Peck, for one, wouldn’t be convincing if he was filmed sitting on a couch, working his Call of Duty game controls. — The Philadelphia Inquirer/MCT
Preposterous narrative
FILM: Transit
CAST: Jim Caviezel, Elisabeth Rohm
DIRECTION: Antonio Negret
This fast-paced, choppily edited thriller doesn’t waste any time on character complexity or plot development. But its increasingly preposterous narrative and hysterically over-violent action makes it something of a guilty pleasure.
Ex-con Nate (Jim Caviezel) is trying to reconnect with his wife Robyn (Elisabeth Rohm) and sons (on a camping trip in Louisiana. But their paths cross with a gang of armoured-car thieves, who hide their stash in the family’s camping gear.
Getting it back is trickier than they expect, especially after Nate has a run-in with the law in a backwoods Louisiana town, and Robyn leaves him to fend for himself. And the gang doesn’t care who they kill to get their cash.
Everyone in this film is a mess, from Nate and Robyn’s dysfunctional marriage to the bickering gang. So like crocodiles lurking in the bayous, danger threatens from every side. And no one has all the information, which leaves them rather vulnerable. The script piles on the melodramatic wrinkles, as each character shows his or her own feisty spirit in the face of danger. But it stays so resolutely simplistic that we don’t believe a minute of it.
Director Negret shoots and edits it like a vintage exploitation film, with menacing glances, overwrought gunplay and gratuitous grisliness. Camerawork is close and intrusive, often drenched in shadows while Negret wallows in the messy, hyper-violent desperation of the outlaws, who are so disorganised that it’s hard to believe they actually robbed an armoured truck. And being one of those blunt, basic movies, the filmmakers don’t waste time letting the characters do anything remotely rational.— WS
(DVDs courtesy: King’s Electronics, Doha)