Plane films - Life, Gifted, La La Land and Beauty and the Beast

#1: Life

This was a mistake. I thought there were no movies worth watching but I was only looking at the magazine – there were actually a few I wanted to see much more than this. In fact, there were plenty of better choices in the magazine, but I wanted some light cheesy sci-fi to start the journey.

I guess it was indeed light, cheesy sci-fi, but it was also really not enjoyable. Essentially, it aimed for realism with a disaster on the international space station, but the conceit was the old cliché of hostile life from Mars.

With a soil sample comes a microorganism. The scientists revive it, and of course it soon gets out of their control. A poor imitation of Alien ensues, with a dreadful bait-and-switch ending.

Some big-name actors do their best with extremely basic material, though Ryan Reynolds phones it in, but the CG blob isn’t interesting enough and ultimately the film offers absolutely nothing new.

#2: In This Corner of the World

See animation blog review

#3: Gifted

Still not one of the must-see movies on offer from today, Gifted was nonetheless well worth a watch. Chris Pratt’s speciality is being an everyman who is nonetheless very attractive to those around him and really seems to care about his loved ones, and that makes him the perfect star for this movie.

It’s not wholly original material, but it’s done well. Pratt’s character Frank is raising his niece, who happens to be a maths prodigy. However, it’s a gift she inherited from her mother, whose life was extremely unstable as a result of her mathematics achievements. Frank is trying to give her a normal life, mostly keeping her in a trailer park with an incredibly cute one-eyed cat, but when he enrols her in school for the first time, things quickly slip out of his control.

Delicately acted with a very believable performance from young Mckenna Grace, balancing intelligence, brattiness and normal childish hopes and fears, it did the family drama, courtroom scenes and even romance well.

#4: Kubo and the Two Strings

See animation blog review

#5: La La Land

I guess I just didn’t get La La Land. Beloved of many on my social media and a critical darling highly lauded at the Oscars, I expected good things. I get that it’s been a while since there has been a high-impact original musical, but there’s been plenty of big-screen adaptations of musicals lately. This pushes some nostalgia buttons and has some good tunes, but much like Greece I just didn’t like the characters and didn’t think the moral messages were good here.

So the centre of La La Land is the celebration of failing artists doing their best and following their dreams. That’s fine, but in the end the main characters aren’t really struggling artists. He is a jazz pianist who happens to have an old contract who just hands him a major-label contract and $52k+ a year salary, and she lives in a la-la land where someone can put on a one-man play for a single night, attract an audience of about 5, yet still get a call that one of those audience members loves her and wants to put her into a major feature film in a starring role. Meanwhile, it has no consequence that he can’t pay the rent and bills, or that she apparently gets supported by her rich boyfriend only to cheat on him and move on. I’d rather hear a story about some actual struggling artists.

Then there’s the fact that those two main characters are just obnoxious and hard to like. Both are extremely self-centred and ultimately their relationship could easily have worked with or without professional success, but they just don’t bother. Unlike Whiplash, which was loads of fun, I found this follow-up pretty poor.

#6: Beauty and the Beast

Maybe the most successful of the recent Disney live-action remakes, I enjoyed watching Beauty and the Beast for the artistry, the effects and Emma Watson looking very pretty as usual, but I did end up wondering why this needed to be made. Sure, it will bring in money, again targeting nostalgia and piggybacking on the animated classic to make for easy feel-good watching, but it was pretty redundant creatively, and other than some more realistic designs and some modern quips from Josh Gad’s Lefou, whose homosexual feelings (which may or may not make him ‘gay’) are far less of an issue than it was suggested by headlines around this film’s release.

The adaptation really does nothing wrong and it is fun to enjoy it when familiar with the original, which I suppose is everything it needed to do in order to make money, but the redundancy of it all ultimately feels…pretty hollow. 

Logan

One more comic book movie to round things off – and it’s a pretty different kind of feature. Logan may be remembered as the most artistic and sophisticated of Marvel’s adaptations, if not the most enjoyable. This isn’t just gritty, it’s going for arty – and tragic.

I didn’t think this would be the tone of the movie, but I’m rather glad it was. I respect trying something different, and the thing about comic book movies with multiverses is that you can try this sort of thing without it being a definitive ending for these characters – just one possibility of many. From the snippets I saw, I thought it would be another action-backed movie with the adventures of Wolvie and X-23. It certainly wasn’t that.

Things are grim as we open. Logan’s healing factor is failing him – clearly not omega-level in this universe – and he’s scraping together a living working as a limo driver. Professor X is 90 and degenerating fast. Motor Neurone and Alzheimer’s have him not only seizing but causing hugely painful surges of psychic energy for all those around him. No other X-Men are about, though a version of Caliban very different from the one we saw in the Apocalypse movie – or the one from the comics - is also helping out.  They plan to get a boat and go out onto the ocean where Charles can’t harm anyone.

Into this tragic setting comes more tragedy. Laura, designated X-23, was made with Logan’s DNA, so he’s sought out by the nurse who helped her escape. Thus begins a road trip movie with a lot of remarkably brutal violence – far more realistic than in most other such adaptations, presumably because Deadpool cleared the way for the R-rated Marvel movies – some heavy-handed moments to show Logan what he should really have is the warmth of a family, and ultimately a big cartoonish showdown that’s much more like the previous Wolverine movies.

But as the title suggests, this is a much more humanised version, and seeing Logan suffer and fail to fight off X-24, the mindless clone of his younger self, helps make him more relatable. Laura is likeable too, and the frail, somewhat embittered but warm and paternal Professor Xavier is brilliantly realised by Patrick Stewart.

This gritty tone is backed up by a departure from the usual fun things found in Marvel movies. No post-credits scenes, no Stan Lee cameos, no hints at how things can tie in to sequels or other franchises in the Fox-Marvel universe. Just pain and regret and dirt and very, very bad people – especially the Reavers, led by Richard E. Grant doing the detestable character he seems to be typecast as just now.

Well worth seeing, and certainly moving, I’m not sure it’s one you’d want to see again and again. 

Doctor Strange

After watching Guardians of the Galaxy 2, I thought I’d better catch up with some other comics movies that I’ve missed, and since he’ll be in a few upcoming movies I decided I should get to Doctor Strange.

The movie isn’t the very best Marvel has to offer and I doubt it will get the comic many new fans, but it was a very solid entry for the MCU, boasted superb visual effects and had a little more emotional depth than most of the other origin stories.

The first act, as many have remarked, is basically Cumberbatch doing Doctor House. A brilliant but prickly doctor saves lives and infuriates colleagues with his arrogance. A life-changing accident leaves him searching for healing, and he eventually finds The Ancient One. There’s been criticism of the whitewashing of this role by casting Tilda Swinton as what was originally an old Tibetan man, but I can also see the director’s point that there was no way of escaping the far-left’s criticism here – cast an old Tibetan man and you get criticised for propagating a wise-old-venerable-master stereotype. Cast a young Tibetan and you get accused of simply using another culture like a tool. A woman? Fetishing. I guess he could have gone with a black star and probably gotten less flack, but that, too, is patronising and using a culture as a tool.

In the end, Tilda Swinton brought her usual ethereal spacyness to the character and I thought it worked rather well. Certainly she put in an engaging performance and showed all the different, conflicted sides of her rather simple character. Plus she facilitated the development of Chiwetel Ejiofor’s rather more interesting Baron Mordo character, who I look forward to seeing return in future.

Perhaps the main problem here is that Cumberbatch lacks a certain something. He’s not very likeable, by intention at first but really throughout the whole movie. Somehow he lacks the gravitas he’s had in other movies or his breakout TV show, and too often his character seems to be just Tony Stark lite – which is all wrong for Doctor Strange.

Still, him aside, there’s an excellent supporting cast, a bad guy made far more interesting than his comic counterpart (who I’d never heard of), a fairly clever conceit to defeat an extremely powerful being, incredible special effects that look like something Cyriak might make with a ridiculous budget – something people apparently keep asking him about.

I am interested to see how he and his infinity stone will tie into the larger universe, and I get the feeling I’ll enjoy the character more as a minor voice in an ensemble film than I did with him at the very centre, but this was by no means a bad movie. But certainly it wasn’t as fun as Guardians 2. 

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2

*Spoilers ahead*

Even if I don’t particularly love the comics, I have to say Guardians of the Galaxy so far has been the gem of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The Guardians may be peripheral compared to the big-hitters like Iron Man and Cap, but their movies don’t disappoint and are actually more fun to watch.

Guardians 2 matched up to the legacy of the first movie – and now that we have a gang fully assembled, it’s time to develop them, and this movie focuses on family. Do blood ties make a family? Could gruff father figures actually have acted with kindness all along? Should a gang of misfits start to consider one another a family?

The film does a lot, but ties the threads in well. There are three major storylines – the pursuit of the Guardians by the slighted Sovereign, Quill discovering his origins and Rocket’s escape from the rogue Ravagers who have mutinied against Yondu. All of them provide exciting scenes and all of them in some way build up the film’s conception of family bonds.  

The climax is a pretty standard battle of good vs evil and Ego’s plan for the universe seems a bit daft, as it seemed a bit strange he had to cover the worlds he’d visited in killer goop, but everything is wrapped up in satisfying style, with a touching self-sacrifice and final fireworks display that are classic tearjerker elements.

But what has become the signature of Guardians films is bathos, and here there are two superb examples centred on the idea of not focusing on what would seem to be the most important element. One is during the final battle, Quinn goes on a search for some tape. The other is the opening sequence, when the endlessly adorable mini-Groot dances his way past an epic battle, which is not only fun and entertaining but also a tour de force of CG. ELO provide the upbeat soundtrack to this scene in one of several masterful soundtrack choices, with other fantastic moments coming courtesy of Cat Stevens, George Harrison and especially Fleetwood Mac. Suddenly, songs friends might consider ‘dad rock’ are in vogue again!

Visually, there are few movies as impressive as this one. The makeup is amazing again, not only on returning characters like Nebula and Gamora, but on new characters like Mantis and Ayesha and briefly-glimpsed Ravagers like Charlie-27 and Aleta. The worlds visited are superb, and there are a number of amusing cameos, my favourite of which being the Watchers alongside a familiar face. References abound to the first movie, from a cybernetic eye to a certain duck, and the name ‘Adam’ is uttered for a possible future antagonist – scrapping the concept of an Easter egg I didn’t get in the first movie, the cocoon of Adam Warlock.

 This was a great sci-fi movie in its own regard, as well as a highly satisfying sequel and, most excitingly, piece of the large MCU puzzle. I can’t wait to see the clash of worlds in the next Avengers movie. I’m certain that it will be much enhanced by the presence of the Guardians. 

X-Men: Apocalypse

Another of the superhero movies I didn’t manage to see on the big screen and never got to see on a plane, I’ve now managed to catch up on X-Men: Apocalypse. 

Days of Future Past was a very tough movie to follow up. I really enjoyed that movie, which I thought clever, affecting, well-paced and of course very fan-friendly. So I had high hopes for Apocalypse, with one of my favourite villains.

Ultimately, I’d say this is a decent addition to the franchise, but certainly not the high point of it. I had my doubts about Oscar Isaac as Apocalypse, mostly because instead of a huge menacing half-cyborg, he looked like a frail older man – though in the film he actually looks more formidable than he did in early stills.

He brings with him a credible threat, in the classic vein of washing the whole world clean – though probably spends a little too much time gathering his acolytes so that the film sags somewhat in the middle. Unfortunately he doesn’t really get enough of his own character on top of this, and his powers are very ill-defined within the context of the film.

On the other hand, the film’s re-introduction of many of the key players of the franchise is very satisfying. While it takes a while, the gathering of the Horsemen allows for some nice scenes of Ororo and Betsy to get them into this new continuity, plus a slightly shoehorned-in Warren, while on the good side we get the new, more vulnerable and likeable Scott, cute emo-kid Nightcrawler, Sophie Turner’s hard-to-define gravitas for Jean and even a small appearance for Jubilee. The professor gets his iconic appearance by the end, Magneto rather takes a few steps back in development but gets some great emotional scenes, Raven is the true protagonist and there’s even a nice moment with Weapon X and a tiny cameo for The Blob.

One thing I disliked here was the casual attitude to death, especially amongst the younger crew – who seem amused at the wholesale slaughter of the bad guy henchmen and make wisecracks. I’d think they’d be horrified. The death toll for the damage Apocalypse manages to wreak on the whole world must have been extremely high, too, but there’s no mention of that. The final showdown is a bit of a random series of powers but the final force that’s able to reign supreme makes sense.

Overall, this film was not what I hoped. There were some amazing scenes, and once again Quicksilver’s part in it all steals the show, but I was left unsatisfied by the whole piece and especially with En Sabah Nur himself. But this leaves me optimistic for the future. I’m keen to see how Mister Sinister is treated, always a much cooler bad guy than his name suggests, and while I’m not that interested in Dark Phoenix Adaptation #10,000,000, at least there’s a more likeable and compelling cast in place now.

What I really want to see, though, is rights issues resolved, special contracts written and X-Men being incorporated into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. May be a bit late now, though. 

Captain America: Civil War

I still maintain that this would have been a far better choice for Avengers 2. The Civil War storyline was a very good one in the comics, with the two factions really feeling like they belonged in their respective camps, plus the whole thing was built up on top of the House of M and then Decimation. 

The movie adaptation wasn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but once it got rolling it was a strong addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. While the pacing was a bit off, taking far too much time to get rolling, the eventual pay-off was enjoyable. If anything, we could have had less set-up of the Winter Soldier storyline and more focus on the divide caused by the 'accords' and a lot more discussion of what they actually were and how much they would control the team members. 

Another major problem was the lack of a serious antagonist. Bucky of course has two sides and is being controlled, so what's left is a rather uninteresting puppetmaster and a wild goose chase about other Winter Soldiers that ends up the film's biggest anticlimax and disappointment. 

Still, the film brings in some new Avengers members, chiefly Ant-Man (who gets a bit more of the decent powers of the Pym Particles this time) and Spider-Man, whose introduction is brief but workable, and whose motormouth is perhaps better-rendered here than in other recent representations. 

There are a few laughs and a few neat references, and probably the best Stan Lee cameo yet, but overall the film felt less impressive than I expected. It was great to see a split between heroes and the expected climactic duel, but overall, after so many adventures that seem likely to destroy cities, worlds or universes, catching Bucky or not doesn't fuel the story all that well. Indeed, in the middle, the film commits the cardinal offence of a comic book story and gets boring. 

But it doesn't stop me being engaged with these characters or wanting more. I'm very keen to continue with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2, and also want to watch the Apocalypse movie, so my enthusiasm hasn't waned overall! 

The Conjuring 2

We’ve been laughing at archive footage of the event for a while, so it was nice to see it dramatized, and they actually did a very good job of making it compelling, and an Enfield council house a formidable setting. The film would have been better-off without the CG and less than terrifying monsters and sticking with the creepy goings-on and ordinary human beings, dead or otherwise, but it was better than expected and flowed well.