Tag Archives: Review

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

23 Nov

‘The Hunger Games: Catching Fire’: It hooks you, but Lawrence is still MVP

By Tom Meek
November 22, 2013

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The second time may be a charm, but hey, it’s all relative. The first “Hunger Games,” written and directed by Gary Ross (“Seabiscuit” and “Pleasantville”), felt paunchy, disingenuously deep and retro flimsy given the state of computer-enhanced filmmaking these days. That cinematic first chapter of Suzanne Collins’ runaway YA hit was a tad muddled, but then again it had the burden of informing newbies what they needed to know about the austere future world of Panem and its kid-against-kid death matches without boring the stuffing out of its loyal readership’s attention-challenged minds.

112213i The Hunger Games- Catching Fire

What made the first “Hunger Games” adaptation smolder, beyond its kinetic plot and high kitsch, was star Jennifer Lawrence, already revered for her work in “Winter’s Bone” and subsequently rewarded with an Oscar for her performance in “Silver Linings Playbook.” The actress, who possesses a wide, luminous face, aptly brought to the fore the deep disdain and skepticism imbedded in her can-do heroine, Katniss Everdeen. But living under the tyranny of a fattened plutocracy obsessed with power, control and hedonism while the masses slave and starve tends to do that to anyone possessing the faint embers of freedom and righteousness in their bellies.  Continue reading →

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The Book Thief

23 Nov

‘The Book Thief’: Stars and cinematography overcome cheapening of Holocaust setting

By Tom Meek
November 22, 2013

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Call me a curmudgeon about all these flimsy, quick-read books hitting on one or two hot issues and built around a slightly-more-than two-dimensional hero or heroine that become template fodder for profitable spins into film. “Twilight” may be the most egregious example, but “Fifty Shades of Grey,” itself notoriously birthed from the “Twilight” franchise, is in the making. Then there’s the “Hunger Games.”

112213i The Book Thief

Why is a book about the Holocaust lumped in with this phenomenon? Because Markus Zusak’s novel, which the movie “The Book Thief” is based on, is little more than a safe, PG-rated watering down of the horrific events that took place in Germany leading up to and during World War II. It’s more young adult than dramatic literature or historical record. And, as a matter of fact, it’s not history at all, but historical fiction, a genre that like YA is fertile ground for studio execs seeking a ready-made and willing-to-pay audience.  Continue reading →

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Blue is the Warmest Color

5 Nov

‘Blue is the Warmest Color’: Tantalizing and très French in its sensual complication

By Tom Meek
November 4, 2013

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Abdellatif Kechiche’s beguiling portrait of passion and betrayal received much ado at Cannes, where it won the top prize and garnered an NC-17 rating as it came ashore here in the states. At three hours in length, the French film, originally and more simply titled “The Life of Adèle,” is just that: the tale of a young woman coming of age and her sexual awakening. The big brouhaha whipped up is over Adèle’s true love being another woman. For the middle third of the film as their relationship blossoms, the girls, one in high school and one in college, have torrid couplings under the noses of their parents. It’s pretty graphic, with lip-to-labia contact, contorted scissoring and deep-tissue rump massages.

110413i Blue Is the Warmest Color

The first of these protracted scenes feels apt and genuine, as it’s fueled by ardor and emotion, but the following ones feel staged and exploitive by comparison. Still, it’s how the two women, Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and Emma (Léa Seydoux), meet and their journey that drives the film, not the over-the-top sexcapades. Adèle, fairly popular at school, has a quick, trivial interlude with a male classmate who, after achieving the conquest, becomes cold and aloof. Then, out at a gay club with male friends, Adèle wanders into the abutting lesbian meat-market where she’s instantaneous shark bait. Across the bar, she and the blue-haired Emma (perhaps the impetus for the American title – that and the fact Adèle is almost always wearing a blue dress or like-hued attire) lock eyes repeatedly. The sharks circle closer and take their exploratory nips. That’s when Emma steps in and pulls Adele from a persistent plier, offering a sprig of earnest camaraderie without pander or expectation. But clearly there’s desire.  Continue reading →

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Free Birds

1 Nov

‘Free Birds’: Taste of this Thanksgiving item is a bit off, even if you like it dark

By Tom Meek
November 1, 2013

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Poultry and tradition, that’s what’s on the menu in this animated butterball about America’s family holiday and the secret lives of turkeys. You can’t argue with the film’s angle about the big birds wanting to live – after all, how would you feel if all you did was gorge out on death row and pray that your number doesn’t get called as the calendar flips from October to November each year? But rescripting history and featuring death and violence prominently in nearly every frame, that’s a fairly big miscalculation for a kiddie flick.

110113i Free Birds

Not that “Free Birds” is all stuffing and no trimmings. The 3-D animation is crisp and vivid and there are some quirky touches wittily infused into the script by writer/director Jimmy Haywood (”Horton Hears a Who” and “Jonah Hex”), the most cheeky and rewarding of which is the inclusion of Facebook humor sensation and former Enterprise crew member George (Sulu) Takei as the voice of S.T.E.V.E., the Space Time Exploration Vehicle Envoy, a top-secret military time machine. Adding to the fun is the presidential first daughter as a willful and rambunctious tyke who suffers bouts of narcolepsy.  Continue reading →

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12 Years a Slave

27 Oct

‘12 Years a Slave’: Our shame gets visceral telling in the history of betrayed free man

By Tom Meek
October 25, 2013

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The stain of slavery on American history has seen many renderings on celluloid, from the misguided pro-South, silent 1915 masterpiece by D.W. Griffith, “Birth of a Nation” that embosses Klansmen in a heroic light, to Quentin Tarantino’s recent revisionist fantasy, “Django Unchained,” in which the Klan are little more than Keystone cops in hoodies and an emboldened slave, freed of shackles and armed, rains down wrath on skin-trading vermin. Both are cinematic achievements in their own right, but neither gets fully at the foul plight of rooting day-to-day under the duress of an overseer’s whip. Stanley Kubrick’s “Spartacus” came close, but that sweeping epic took place centuries ago, long before the pilgrims hit the shores of Massachusetts and our European forefathers began an unwritten policy of treating people of nonwhite pigmentation like pests and livestock.

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The good (or grim, as it may be) news is that director Steve McQueen, who is black, British and an auteur of recent reckoning, goes at the matter in “12 Years a Slave” in a fashion that gets under the viewer’s skin in unexpected ways. It’s uncomfortable and telling. What McQueen achieves is a visceral experience that, while not a history lesson in the factual sense, becomes the de facto moral rendering of an era that should be recalled only with remorse and shame.  Continue reading →

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The Counselor

27 Oct

‘The Counselor’: Good, grimy fun going over same ground of McCarthy ‘Country’

By Tom Meek
October 26, 2013

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Not so long ago the Coen brothers deviated from their usual quirky fare for a hardboiled yarn about lawmen and criminals playing it loose and lethal as they pursued an elusive satchel of money back and forth across the Southwest border. The basis for that masterpiece came from the laconic and acerbic prose of the Cormac McCarthy’s novel “No Country for Old Men.” And in an odd and intriguing first-time move, the scribe has delivered an original screenplay for iconic director Ridley Scott (”Alien” and “Blade Runner”). The result is full of pointed soliloquies, diatribes imbued with philosophy and poetry and even daubs of philosophy regarding poetry, but the mainstay, of course, are protracted dissertations on death and destiny, followed invariably by death.

102613i The Counselor

Just as in “No Country,” the plot is driven by an accidental anti-hero ensnared in a macabre web of underworld misdoings. In short, McCathy has cooked up an assured rearrangement of “No Country.” It’s not on par by any means, but it is entertaining. And if you haven’t gotten enough of him lately, Michael Fassbender tackles the eponymous role (“the counselor” is all he’s ever called), as a square-jawed, fashionably stoic defender, who, while very dapper and upper crust, has a long list of unsavory clients. One, an imprisoned mama kingpin (Rosie Perez, putting a lot of pizazz into a brief role), asks him to pay a fine for her son who’s in jail for a traffic violation (going over 200 mph). He complies reluctantly, but doesn’t know that the kid is involved in a scheme to highjack a $20 million drug shipment – which doesn’t matter, because by sheer association he’s now considered one of the brains behind the ever-expanding plot.  Continue reading →

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The Fifth Estate

19 Oct

‘The Fifth Estate’: WikiLeaks film redacts likability, any understanding of Assange

By Tom Meek
October 18, 2013

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WikiLeaks, a renegade news outlet, takes hacked secrets from government agencies and publishes them to the world sans redaction, protecting the identity of the whistleblower through an elaborate “submission platform” that’s so secure even the publisher doesn’t know the identity of the leaker. The site’s notoriety reached its apex when it published reports exposing U.S. intelligence assets abroad and snippy interoffice memos from State Department officials trashing world leaders. But that’s just the background and part of the denouement of “The Fifth Estate,” which is really more a character study of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his rise to international infamy.

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Assange is played by Benedict Cumberbatch (Khan in the last “Star Trek” chapter) who in long white locks and with piercing blue eyes looks somewhat ethereal or otherworldly, like the fair-haired elves in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy or the calmly maniacal Julian Sands in the “Warlock” films. Cumberbatch’s Assange is a hard beast to wrap your hands around. He’s gruff, arrogant, but at the same time an idealist who spends time in Africa trying to expose corrupt governments stealing money from the people and killing anyone who questions their brutish entitlements. The film’s window of insight into Assange’s mystifying persona is his early collaborator Daniel Berg (Daniel Brühl, who played Niki Lauda in “Rush”), who at first idolizes Assange and his mission but later has ideological differences over what to do with the military papers the then-Bradley Manning leaked to them (it was Manning who exposed himself in a chatroom).  Continue reading →

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We Are What We Are

12 Oct

‘We Are What We Are’: Family secret eats away at a town where people go missing

By Tom Meek
October 11, 2013

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Human consumption (as in flesh of, not spending habits) onscreen isn’t so disturbing when it’s a vampire or a werewolf gnawing on a fellow being as an hors d’oeuvre, but bring that in a little tighter to where man’s dining on man for sustenance and it becomes downright creepy. Even the understandable plight of the “Alive” survivors, who chomped on frozen stiffs to keep themselves going while stranded in the high Andes, educes a shudder, like lingering reports of ritual cannibalism among remote tribes in Borneo. But what if it were next door, not something perverse from a sick mind such as Jeffery Dahmer, but a long-standing family tradition executed in the name of God?

101113i We Are What We Are

Meet the Parker family. They feel like lost cast members from “Little House on the Prairie,” yet live in the modern suburban remotes of upstate New York. Mom (Kassie DePaiva) handles everything culinary, from the ritualistic harvesting to the careful trimming and lengthy rendering  process, that results in a savory stew. But right off the bat mom has a seizure in the middle of a flash storm, heaves up blood and is gone. Her grisly duties fall to daughters Iris (Ambyr Childers) and Rose (Julia Garner), though after the death their father (Bill Sage) declares a period of abstinence that allows for the macabre outer sheen of the film to fade and the edgy backstory of how the Parkers came to their generations-old practice to come to the fore. The girls struggle to come of age (a time of sexual awakening for Iris) and dad goes through maniacal mood swings and Parkinson’s-like fits.  Continue reading →

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Captain Phillips

11 Oct

‘Captain Phillips’: True-life pirate drama never hits dramatic depths you’d expect

By Tom Meek
October 11, 2013

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Back in 2009 the world watched rapt as a U.S. cargo ship was seized by pirates off the coast of Africa. To save his crew, the captain offered himself up as hostage and was subsequently cordoned off in a lifeboat pod with a posse of armed and anxious pirates looking for a multimillion-dollar ransom. Eventually the Navy and SEAL Team 6 got involved and brought about a quick resolution. It made for great drama then and would seem a natural fit for film, but as harrowing as “Captain Philips” is, it never quite gets below the surface of the whole ordeal.

101113 Captain Phillips

All of this might come as a bit of a surprise, because “Phillips” is directed by Paul Greengrass, who so adroitly chronicled the intrepid doings of doomed 9/11 passengers in “United 93.” His insight and meticulous care for every passenger and their story and plight rang through cleanly and with genuine earnestness. Here that acumen feels lost or, at best, severely muted.  Continue reading →

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Gravity

4 Oct

‘Gravity’: Amazing visuals, hairbreadth escapes but a story that never quite soars

By Tom Meek
October 4, 2013

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Some might wonder how the director of “Y Tu Mamá También” and “Great Expectations” (bet you forgot about that 1998 foray starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Ethan Hawke) arrived at a space odyssey such as this. Likely the international success of “Y Tu Mamá También” opened a few doors for director Alfonso Cuarón, and his follow-on, “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” which was the best segment of the overheated wizard series, enabled the Latin auteur to play freely with special FX and blockbuster-aimed gadgetry. Two films later he capitalized on that and wowed critics and audiences alike with the bleak future-scape thriller, “Children of Men,” registering perhaps the first perfect fusion of grand vision and epic scale in the new world order of digital filmmaking.

100413i GravityDevelopment of “Gravity” began shortly after “Children of Men” (in 2006) and took nearly six years to complete because of the need to invent technology to make the film possible and the degree of complexity and time required for some of the special effects, which are far beyond typical green-screen chicanery. For what’s onscreen and the $80 million budget spent, it looks like every minute and every penny was poured into every scene. The film is nothing short of a miracle in filmmaking and should be held as such.   Continue reading →

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