Movie Review: A Wrinkle in Time

A Wrinkle in Time *** / *****

Directed by: Ava DuVernay.

Written by: Jennifer Lee based on the novel by Madeleine L'Engle.

Starring: Storm Reid (Meg Murry), Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Dr. Kate Murry), Chris Pine (Dr. Alex Murry), Reese Witherspoon (Mrs. Whatsit), Oprah Winfrey (Mrs. Which), Mindy Kaling (Mrs. Who), Levi Miller (Calvin), Deric McCabe (Charles Wallace), Michael Peña (Red), Zach Galifianakis (The Happy Medium), Rowan Blanchard (Veronica), André Holland (Principal Jenkins).

 

It would be easy to nitpick Ava DuVernay’s film version of A Wrinkle in Time to death. The film is deeply flawed in ways that are immediately apparent when you watch it, and grow in your mind as you look back over it. A decade ago, I probably would have cynically written off the film as overly earnest and cheesy – and a decade from now, I may well do the same thing. But at this moment, I had the perfect way of viewing DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time – and that is through the eyes of my almost seven year old daughter, who sat next to me throughout the film, at times astonished by what she was watching, and at other times deeply relating to what was up there. It’s not enough for me to think that A Wrinkle in Time is a great movie – hell, it may not even be a very good movie. But watching her watch the film, and then talking about it after made me grateful that such a film exists.

 

The film stars newcomer Storm Reid as Meg Murry, an unpopular girl, somewhere in the 12-13 year old age range, who is still reeling from the disappearance of her physicist father Alex (Chris Pine) four years earlier. Along with her mother, the two had developed a theory about the ability to travel through space and time – using only your mind. And then, he vanished (gee, I wonder what happened?). One day, Meg meets three interesting women – Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon), who is cheerful and a little ditzy, in a lovable Glinda the Good Witch kind of way, Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling), who is very wise, but speaks almost entirely in quotes by geniuses, and Mrs. Which (Oprah Winfrey), who is basically Oprah spewing her brand of inspirational positivity. Along with her genius little brother Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe) and the boy she has a school girl crush on, Calvin (Levi Miller), she embarks on her own journey across space and time to find her father – going from one amazing planet to the next, meeting one amazing character after another.

 

Some of this works better than others. The special effects in the movie are hit and miss – I have a hard time believing it was a budgetary issue, since this is a Disney film – yet I think we can all agree that a sequence involving a character turning into a giant, floating lettuce leaf doesn’t really work. There are lots of special effects sequences that do however – especially when the movie finally reaches its last stop in the rescue mission. DuVernay relies perhaps too heavily on close-ups throughout the film – it can became distracting at times. The characters are mostly thinly written, and the talented cast isn’t always able to overcome that. Witherspoon mainly does – in part because it seems like Mrs. Whatsit is a role tailor made for her skillset, so she is mostly a delight. Poor Kaling cannot do much with a character than has to end every sentence with the name of a famous writer, and the country they are from. I’d be tempted to write off Winfrey as stunt casting – except because of the nature of what Mrs. Which says, I’m not sure anyone could make the role work better than Oprah does.

 

Besides, the movie stays grounded because of a really good performance by young Reid. It is a difficult role for her to play, one that requires elements of the fantastical, and yet grounded in real life insecurities and anxieties of little girls everywhere. I think this is what my daughter related to more than anything. She’s a sweet kid (and before you think I’m just looking at her through rose colored, parents glasses, let me say that my other daughter, who is 4, is a holy terror, who my wife and I joke we will one day have to visit in prison) who nervously applied to, and had to write an essay to get onto her school’s “Kindness Crew”. This film’s wholly, unironic embrace of kindness and goodness, as well as embracing every part of you – even your flaws – is something we don’t see very often – and we never see directed towards little girls (rarer still, to see it directed at African American girls – but I digress). This is a rare film that was made specifically for her. The elements that make it cheesy or easily laughed off by more cynical people, are exactly why she embraced it.

 

This doesn’t excuse the movie for its storytelling faults, or other mistakes along the way, but it goes a long way to mitigating them for me. When I looked around the movie – in the background – I also saw a world that DuVernay has created that perhaps is as fantastical as the other planets – an idealized vision of our world – perhaps the one created by Warriors like the film described. Yes, I can be cynical – but I find it impossible to be so with this film, which I got to see through the eyes of my daughter who saw something greater than herself up there on that screen – and wanted to be a part of it.

Read more »

Movie Review: Bright

Bright * / *****

Directed by: David Ayer.   

Written by: Max Landis.

Starring: Will Smith (Daryl Ward), Joel Edgerton (Nick Jakoby), Noomi Rapace (Leilah), Lucy Fry (Tikka), Édgar Ramírez (Kandomere), Ike Barinholtz (Gary Harmeyer), Happy Anderson (Montehugh), Kenneth Choi (Agent Coleman).

 

I’ve defended Netflix for most of 2017, as it certainly seems like the streaming service has taken its lumps from critics and cinephiles who wish that some of their films got theatrical releases, instead of showing up directly onto their website. Sure, films like Okja, Mudbound and The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) would not feel out of place in art house theaters around the country – but I understand that’s not really Netflix’s business model, and say that the problem isn’t that Netflix is putting these films on their site – but that no other studio in town would finance them in the first place. Any studio could have bought Mudbound for instance – but none of them did, except for Netflix. The site has also been a boon to documentaries as well. Sure, I have nits to pick with them – they still haven’t figured out how to make their original movies into events like they have with their TV shows. Sadly, the first real blockbuster Netflix has attempted – that has apparently gotten the views – is the worst Netflix original (of any kind) that I have seen so far. David Ayer’s Bright is a confused and confusing mess of a film, with big writing, bad acting and bad everything else bringing the film down to ridiculous levels.

 

The film is directed by David Ayer – who before he made last year’s horrible Suicide Squad, had made any number of films about the tough cops of the LAPD – some great (he wrote Training Day and Dark Blue, and wrote and directed End of Watch), some not so great (Sabotage, Harsh Times). With Bright, he has essentially returned to the genre – except in some sort of weird alternate universe, which humans lives alongside orcs and fairies, and other strange creatures. The screenplay, by Max Landis, tries very, very hard to draw racial parallels to the way orcs are treated in this world, and how African Americans are treated in ours (a rather insulting comparison, if you think about it) – none of it really works.

 

In the film, Will Smith stars as Daryl Ward, a veteran beat cop who has been teamed up with Nick Jakoby (Joel Edgerton) – the first ever Orc cop on the LAPD. The opening scene sees Daryl get shot, and Nick failing to capture the criminal who did it – everyone thinks that he let the shooter get away because it was another orc, and orcs cannot be trusted. Everyone wants Nick out – and go to Daryl to try and help them do it. Then, through a series of events too complicated to comprehend, the two partners essentially have to go on the run together – they have a wand, and everyone wants the wand, and everyone will kill for the wand – including their own fellow cops.

 

I wish I could work up much hatred for Bright – hatred at least makes things interesting – but I really can’t. To be honest, I was pretty much bored from beginning to end of the film. The cast is full of talented stars – not least of which is Smith, who you could normally count on to deliver great amounts of charm in his roles, but now just seems to be coasting. The rest of the cast is wasted – with not even the great Edgerton being able to leave an impact on the film.

 

Up until Bright, I could defend the choices Netflix was making by saying that were funding the kind of films no one else would – they were daring, and edgy – and even if they didn’t all work, you admire them for going for it. Bright is the exact opposite of those films in pretty much every way.  

Read more »

Movie Review: The Shape of Water

The Shape of Water **** ½ / *****

Directed by: Guillermo del Toro.

Written by: Guillermo del Toro & Vanessa Taylor.

Starring: Sally Hawkins (Eliza Esposito), Michael Shannon (Strickland), Richard Jenkins (Giles), Octavia Spencer (Zelda), Doug Jones (The Asset), Michael Stuhlbarg (Hoffstetler).

 

Since his debut film Cronos – was back in 1993, it has been very clear that Guillermo del Toro loves monsters. There is not a feature film of his that doesn’t include some monster or another – often ones with large teeth that bite into you and don’t let go. Del Toro was inspired by the monster movies he saw in his youth, but has spent most of his career creating new kinds of monsters – even when he’s making a sequel about vampires (the wonderful Blade II) – they aren’t the type of vampires you’ve seen before – they are somehow worse, grosser and strangely sexual. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before del Toro made a film like The Shape of Water – where the lead character is a woman who literally loves a monsters, in every way that means. This is one of del Toro’s best films – and inarguably his most whimsical – more fantasy than horror this time out, but with his same eye for detail.

 

Set in the 1950s, the film stars the wonderful Sally Hawkins as Eliza – a mute, cleaning lady who works at a secret government facility, and because of her condition, is pretty much able to blend into the background. She does everything on a set schedule (including, um, her bath tube masturbation ritual with an egg timer) – and only has two friends – her gay artist neighbor, Giles (Richard Jenkins) and her cleaning partner at the facility, Zelda (Octavia Spencer) – she gets along with both so well probably, because neither of them will shut up. One day, into her facility arrives a man from the army – Strickland (Michael Shannon) with a large tube, full of water – and something else – that is place behind a locked door in a larger pool. Eliza is drawn to whatever it is that in that tub (which the trailer reveals far too much of – it was better to see it like I did at TIFF, without that knowledge).

 

As with all of his films, del Toro’s cinephilia is on full display during The Shape of Water – from his love of old musicals he shares with Giles (and Eliza, who has a couple of charming, solitary dance sequences) – to the old school, large movie houses that they live above –even if they are largely empty (the film was shot at the Elgin theater in Toronto – and I saw it in the same theater, a surreal experience to be sure). The creature – or The Asset as it’s called in the film – is like something out of those old movies, and as is often the case, is misunderstood by all except the woman who loves him. This movie takes that love to its logical conclusion – albeit in a scene that wisely doesn’t get graphic at all.

 

The real monster in the movie is of course man – in this case, Strickland himself. Shannon is perfectly cast as the violent, stubborn, sexist Strickland – a man who treats his own wife with contempt, so you can tell what he thinks of a pair like Eliza and Zelda. The role doesn’t give much nuance for Shannon to play, but he’s great anyway- even if in this film, his performance still trails behind the delightfully droll and comic one delivered by Richard Jenkins and of course Hawkins, who says so much without speaking.

 

This is one of del Toro’s best films. As much as I always like his work, for the most part, I think the style trumps the substance of his films – which at times, can ring hollow. His most recent film before this for example – Crimson Peak – was an absolute masterpiece of production design, costumes, cinematography and music, but wasn’t nearly as good on a storytelling or character level. He seems to work best with a little bit less money, and a little bit more freedom (his two other best films are probably The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth – films he made in his native Spanish, with Mexican money – here, he says he was essentially making a Canadian film – so you can guess he had less funds that on something like Pacific Rim). The Shape of Water represents a perfect marriage between his influences, and his own point-of-view – and while the craftsmanship remains high, it’s not at the sacrifices of the story or its characters (there are so many legitimately great, small character beats, that I normally do not see in del Toro’s work). The film takes a strange premise, and ends up making one of the best romantic fantasies in recent memory. It’s easier to make Beauty and the Beast when the best is furry and cuddly – much hard to do what del Toro pulls off here.

Read more »