Forest Whitaker – People Talking

Quick Thoughts – July Mega-Post – ‘Mission: Impossible – Fallout’ ‘Sorry to Bother You’ ‘Skyscraper’ ‘The Equalizer 2’

My affinity for these movies is fairly well-documented, from the first one to the last one.

And why not? After all, when the consensus “worst film” in your franchise is a John Woo guns-motorcycles-doves-knives spectacular, you know you’re doing something right.

A lot of that credit belongs to J.J. Abrams for resurrecting things in 2006 (and staying on as a producer ever since), which was perfect timing, because when the James Bond franchise zigged to more gritty and grounded, Mission: Impossible zagged to what classic Bond always was: a globetrotting, fun, high action, insane stunt-filled series. The key difference is that where the Bond actors would step aside for a stuntman (or stunt driver, or stunt pilot), Tom Cruise, more often than not, gets in there and does these amazing feats himself, and Fallout is no different; so much so in fact that to me the movie played more like a Bond Greatest Hits album than a Mission: Impossible film, which is fine by me.

Hate him all you want for whatever reason you want, I choose to respect Tom Cruise for this: he was an action star at 27, and is still an action star at 57, and while this may be the last Mission: Impossible movie with him in the lead, it looks like he’ll be an action star for at least a few more years.

All that said, and it’s hard to put my finger on exactly why, the script for Fallout feels like a step back compared to the last two films (not to mention my boy Jeremy Renner feels conspicuously absent). However, I will still give it four stars because the action and stunts are more than big-screen worthy, and because the movie does reward long-time fans (making reference all the way back to the first, and yes, second one).

Rating: ★★★★☆

Sorry to Bother You

Often times, when I find myself having to sit through a movie’s trailer dozens upon dozens of times (*COUGH*EighthGrade*COUGH*), I become resentful and refuse to see it on the principle of how annoyed I am, but in the case of Sorry to Bother You, I was always looking forward to it, just because it looked so refreshingly original, which it most definitely is.

In fact, not only is it an original script from writer/director Boots Riley, he also contributed a number of songs to the film’s soundtrack with his band, The Coup, so the whole project has a real homegrown vibe to it (but in a good way, not a crappy student film way).

Fair warning, the third act goes off the rails, which will divide people, but in terms of comedies with social commentary and satire, it’s the best I’ve seen since Ingrid Goes West (though the style of much of the satire is akin to the original Robocop, which, again, is a good thing).

It’s definitely not a movie for kids, and I’m sure it’ll piss some people off, but I enjoyed it and would absolutely recommend it to adults with brains.

Rating: ★★★★☆

Skyscraper

I know I’m not making a revelatory statement when I say that this movie is like if Die Hard and The Towering Inferno had a baby in Hong Kong.

In fact, it’s safe to say that not only do most people going to see this already know that, but the movie knows that they know that, and therefore delivers exactly that.

What I’m trying to say here is that the movie knows what it is: a fairly mindless yet relatively satisfying piece of popcorn entertainment. Is it dumb? Yes. Is it as dumb as it could be? No, and I appreciate that.

It’s nothing special, and you’re either on board or you’re not, but if you are, you’ll have a good time (and I even noticed and liked some of the music, which feels so rare these days).

Rating: ★★★½

The Equalizer 2

Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m starting to get the sense that Antoine Fuqua is not a great action director, because though I think these movies are okay (largely because Denzel is Denzel), I have issues with both that hold me back from enjoying them as much as I theoretically think I should.

My major problem with the first one was I felt the “badassness” was way overwrought, and I thought the movie would have been better served by underplaying it a bit; but I guess be careful what I wish for, because the sequel swings the pendulum hard the other way, but overall I didn’t find the story as interesting as its predecessor, so, I don’t know.

There are some satisfying moments and plotlines, and I really can’t hate on the slower pace (and the James Bond-esque cold open was kind of nice), but, I can’t say I’ll be all that disappointed if they never announce an Equalizer 3.

Rating: ★★★☆☆

Movie Review – ‘Black Panther’ – Rising Like Olympus

Directed by Ryan Coogler
Written by Ryan Coogler & Joe Robert Cole, based on the comics by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby
Cast: Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong’o, Danai Gurira, Martin Freeman, Daniel Kaluuya, Letitia Wright, Winston Duke, Sterling K. Brown, Angela Bassett, Forest Whitaker, Andy Serkis, Florence Kasumba, John Kani, David S. Lee, Nabiyah Be, Isaach De Bankolé, Connie Chiume, Dorothy Steel, Danny Sapani, Atandwa Kani, Ashton Tyler, Denzel Whitaker, Seth Carr, Alexis Rhee
Soundtrack: Ludwig Göransson

I don’t know if anybody had the vision in 1998 that in twenty years time Marvel would be eighteen movies deep into a run of who-knows-how-many dozens of connected films grossing billions-upon-billions of dollars at the box office, but I do know that it all started with Blade.

That’s right. The financial success of Blade was enough to convince Marvel that this whole movie thing was worth getting into (after some, shall we say, false starts in the 80s and early 90s). Ten years later, bing-bang-boom, we’ve got Iron Man, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe is off to the races. Ten years on from there, enter Black Panther. In a way, you could say it’s all come full circle.

But enough about that. Is the movie any good?

Yes, very much so.

Black Panther is decidedly among the better MCU films thus far, is refreshingly story-driven, and has the most stand-alone feel of its peers since the original Guardians of the Galaxy in 2014.

More than that though, it’s got a lot of meat to it.

For one thing, the basic story is downright Shakespearean (King dies, Prince ascends the throne, and so on and so forth), but the film also delves into such real-world issues as the African vs. African-American experience, political isolationism, and violent vs. non-violent revolution, all naturally worked into the script without feeling like they were tacked on by some committee.

Of course, Black Panther is also a superhero movie, and a pretty good one at that. I wouldn’t call it entirely perfect (some of the visuals felt a little lacking, and a few creative choices felt a bit off), but I liked that it was something of an origin story without starting all the way back at square one, and I particularly enjoyed the array of enjoyable characters (unlike some other movie).

If I have a couple of nitpicks, for one, it bums me out that seemingly everybody can put on an effective accent except for Chadwick Boseman as the titular character (although Forest Whitaker for some reason decided to sound like an Afrikaner…weird), and, second, I felt like Michael B. Jordan’s performance was a little too “I’m from the streets!” I thought a little subtlety could have gone a long way there, but, like I said, these are nitpicks.

Overall, I have to hand it to Ryan Coogler for making yet another quality film that’s undoubtedly part of a larger franchise but also has enough legs to stand on its own, and credit to Marvel for letting him do it his way. I was feeling pretty superhero-fatigued heading in, and I was worried there wouldn’t be enough to overcome that, but, in that respect, the movie triumphed.

Hail to the King, baby.

Rating: ★★★★☆

P.S.
Of course stingers, duh.

P.P.S.
As usual, thanks to Alamo Drafthouse for the glass.

Movie Review – ‘Rogue One’ – A Star Wars Problem

You may be wondering why this review is two weeks late. Well, frankly, I needed to see the movie a couple of times in order to get a proper handle on how I really feel about it; not to mention I am bending (if not out-and-out breaking) certain core People Talking principles, because this isn’t going to be very positive, and it’ll likely be more spoiler-y than I’m accustomed to writing (with proper warning).

Also, I haven’t published anything new in over a month, so I’m a bit out of practice to begin with.

Anyway, here we go…

Directed by Gareth Edwards
Written by Chris Weitz & Tony Gilroy (screenplay), John Knoll & Gary Whitta (story), based on characters created by George Lucas
Cast: Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Alan Tudyk (voice/motion capture), Donnie Yen, Wen Jiang, Ben Mendelsohn, Forest Whitaker, Riz Ahmed, Mads Mikkelsen, Jimmy Smits, Alistair Petrie, Genevieve O’Reilly, Ben Daniels, Ian McElhinney, Jonathan Aris
Soundtrack: Michael Giacchino

Let me get this off my chest right away.

Rogue One is a boring, miserable mess, and the fact that so many “Star Wars Nerds” love it is evidence that fanboys in general lack critical discernment.

Whoa.

Now, I wouldn’t say this movie is as big of a disaster as, say, The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, or Revenge of the Sith. Nor would I call it “entirely joyless” (there are a few good laughs sprinkled in). But, there’s a lot wrong with it.

First of all, and I brought this up when discussing X-Men: Days of Future Past a couple years ago, every movie, regardless if it’s a sequel, prequel, remake, re-imagining, soft reboot, or whatever, needs to work as its own movie, at least to a certain degree. I can tell you straight away that somebody who knows nothing about Star Wars would be utterly baffled by Rogue One. I love Star Wars and I’m still confused about certain elements (but we’ll get to that later).

Secondly, good characters, and, by extension, good performances, are few and far between.

Here’s a list of primary actors who acquit themselves well in this movie:

Ben Mendelsohn

I do need to throw in some caveats. For one, Mads Mikkelsen is fine, but he has so little to do it doesn’t really warrant grading. Alan Tudyk is adequately charming as the Droid du Jour, but it’s a voice over/motion capture performance, so that’s something of an incomplete grade as well. I’ll also positively mention Donnie Yen and Wen Jiang, who do okay with what they’re given, but it’s not much to write home about either.

Other than those folks, however…

Felicity Jones? Flat.
Diego Luna? Completely miscast.
Riz Ahmed? Aimless.
Forest Whitaker? I have no idea.

Again, I don’t necessarily blame these people individually for their underwhelming performances, because they are determined in large part by the script and direction (and editing), but the point is this: If I don’t care about the characters (because they’re boring), and I don’t care about the story, then I really don’t care about the action, no matter how “gritty” it is.

(Honestly, people defending this movie as “gritty” reminds me of people defending Revenge of the Sith as “dark.” The second time I saw Rogue One, I was ready to leave halfway through the finale, because I just didn’t care anymore. It’s Star Wars, people; give me interesting characters and go from there.)

But let’s talk about that story, and how it’s wrong.

I was about to try to give a brief, but thorough, plot synopsis, but it’s so much more convoluted than it needs to be that I doubt a single paragraph would suffice, so I’ll just say the Rebels need to steal the plans to the Death Star, which was designed by one of their fathers, and there’s an extremist guy who’s causing problems for the Rebellion. Allegedly, this father/daughter relationship is important, but there’s no appreciable backstory, so we don’t really care. For crying out loud, does everybody in the Star Wars universe need to be related?

For reference sake, let’s pull up most of the opening title crawl from Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, which Rogue One is intended to lead into:

“It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire.
During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire’s ultimate weapon, the DEATH STAR, an armored space station with enough power to destroy an entire planet.”

I guess you could say Rogue One matches this description, at least the third act of it does, but let’s break it down.

“It is a period of civil war.”
True, but I wouldn’t say you get an explicit sense of this outside of the end battle.

“Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base,”
True, but it’s not really planned out like you think it would be.

“have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire”
You call that a victory? Maybe a Pyrrhic victory, but I don’t know that I’d even go that far.

“During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans…”
True, but it’s more like one actual spy and a ragtag group of people who mostly do commando-type stuff.

Maybe I’m quibbling, but from what I can gather, this movie needed to have a space battle and an espionage element of stealing plans, which it does, but the whole father/daughter/other Rebel extremist plot preceding it is so boring and pointless that I can’t not look at this movie as a huge missed opportunity.

If you ask me, Rogue One would have been much better off in one of three ways:

A. Essentially a Star Wars version of Mission: Impossible, where it’s like a fun spy movie with the end battle serving as a diversion to allow our protagonists to finish the job.

B. Essentially a Star Wars version of The Dirty Dozen (or Inglourious Basterds, which I think they may have been trying to go for a little bit), where you intentionally assemble a specialized squad to steal the plans during the end space battle.

or…

C. More generically, follow a group of soldiers. Show them in a battle or two where they get their butts kicked, and they start to become disillusioned, but then they get an opportunity to do something special. “This is your moment to strike back.” Something like that.

Point is, keep the story simple and beef up the characters, which, in turn, strengthens the emotions, and allow the film to be strong enough to truly work as a “standalone movie” without relying on embarrassing fan service and nostalgic cameos to maintain the audience’s interest. I’ve had people tell me that Rogue One relies less on nostalgia than The Force Awakens and I couldn’t disagree more. Yes, The Force Awakens is a soft reboot of A New Hope, and, yes, it has the key original cast back, but, by-and-large, the nostalgic elements and characters are actually worked into the story, rather than being mere distractions.

***THE NEXT PARAGRAPH CONTAIN EXPLICIT SPOILERS***

Here’s a list of things in Rogue One that shouldn’t have been in it: the actual Death Star (should be a looming threat, not a real threat yet), Mon Mothma (superfluous), CGI Grand Moff Tarkin and Princess Leia (I mean, do I really need to explain this?), Darth Vader (superfluous), Darth Vader using a red lightsaber and the Force to kill Rebel guys (fanboy schlock), Ponda Baba and Dr. Evazan (aka “You’ll be dead” guy) (superfluous), C-3PO and R2-D2 (unnecessary), and Red Leader and Gold Leader (see: Tarkin and Leia). Also, why does Director Krennic visit Darth Vader to go over Tarkin’s head when Vader clearly reports to Tarkin in A New Hope? That’s Prequel-level character inconsistency.

***END OF SPOILER PARAGRAPH***

On the other side though, if this movie takes place in the Star Wars universe right before A New Hope, then why are there so many smaller spaceship models we’ve never seen before? Keeping things consistent in that regard wouldn’t be needlessly nostalgic at all; it would just be maintaining visual consistency, which would be laudable.

Anyway, I’ll be honest, I had doubts about this movie from the moment I heard that Gareth Edwards (director of that giant turd of an American Godzilla movie) was at the helm. I hoped I would be wrong, but I ended up being more disappointed than I could have imagined. And not that it’s all on Edwards’ shoulders. After The Force Awakens, I thought the Star Wars franchise was in good hands with Disney, especially given how they handle the Marvel universe. But, in light of Rogue One, my faith has been shaken. Hopefully this will be an aberration; perhaps merely an experiment gone wrong, but given how well it’s already doing at the box office, I doubt critical opinions will be given much thought by the studio.

Again, I love Star Wars. It’s an indelible part of my life, and I wish everybody loved it as much as I do, but I care more about whether these movies work as movies and whether or not they’ll hold up decades from now than whether or not we ever get to see Darth Vader’s residence.

In the end though, does Rogue One deserve your hard-earned money to see it theatrically? At first, I thought so, despite my internal conflict, but now, I’m saying no. Rent it in a few months from now if you want; if you’re a Star Wars fan you’ll get a little something out of it. As for me, I’m never watching it again, that’s for sure.

ADDENDUM (01/01/17):
One thing I forgot to mention: In a movie full of issues, the music is another problem. Flat out, Michael Giacchino’s score for Rogue One is unsatisfactory (especially compared to The Force Awakens), and emblematic of the film itself, paradoxically being safe and risky at the same time and ending up a middle-of-the-road mess. I can’t imagine what it must be like to stand in John Williams’ shadow, but given how this movie was supposed to be a standalone adventure, I think it would have been appropriate to take the music in a whole different direction, perhaps something more electronic/synth based rather than a traditional orchestra.

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

P.S.
As usual, thanks to Alamo Drafthouse [Yonkers] and Mondo for the swag and for getting into the spirit of the thing, even if the movie was a disappointment (honestly, it was all about the pint glass this time anyway).

Movie Review – ‘Southpaw’ – I AM PREDICTABLE

Southpaw

Directed by Antoine Fuqua
Written by Kurt Sutter
Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Rachel McAdams, Oona Laurence, Forest Whitaker, 50 Cent, Naomie Harris, Beau Knapp
Soundtrack: James Horner (God rest him)

What a disappointing week.

First, the USMNT gets knocked out of the Gold Cup by Jamaica, and now I have to talk about this movie.

Let me say this first: if, for some reason, you have not seen the trailer for ‘Southpaw’, but still want to see it, do it; you have my blessing, but do not, not, not watch the trailer before paying to see it.

Because, for whatever reason, the people marketing this film decided to put all of us moviegoers in a Catch 22. They wanted to draw us in by capturing our attention with the trailer, but, unfortunately, seeing this movie after seeing the trailer is a largely futile, and, dare I say, boring experience. I hate using the word ‘boring’. I like to think my attention span is better than the vast majority of people out there, but ‘Southpaw’ forced my hand on this.

I hope I’m making myself clear here.

I desperately wanted to like this movie, I really did, and it almost, kind of, sort of won me over in the end, but not enough to recommend it; because right off the bat I spent more than 55% of the running time feeling my buttocks go numb, because no matter how hard the movie tried to grab me by the heartstrings, it just couldn’t, because I almost always knew what came next, because the trailer had already told me.

And it really is a waste, because, by and large, ‘Southpaw’ is well done. It’s competently shot, the performances are pretty good all around, and they did a great job of getting the real world of pay-per-view boxing (including HBO’s Jim Lampley and Roy Jones, Jr.) into the film, but there’s nothing special enough to transcend the predictability of the script. To be sure, it starts to get better in the second half, and eventually it did tug on my heartstrings, but it took way too long to get there, and for that reason I can’t recommend people seeing this theatrically if they’ve already seen the trailer.

The production values are certainly better than most direct-to-video garbage out there, but, unfortunately, ‘Southpaw’ is barely worth a rental.

Rating: ★★½ out of five

P.S.
Despite being a movie about a boxer, I would not call this a “sports movie”. It’s more of a straight drama that happens to be about an athlete. Just to be clear.