Review: "Rampage"

Just a short review today; Manuel Fernandez is handling the main review at The Film Yap, so  head over there to check it out.

"Rampage" is the best based-on-a-video-game movie I've ever seen. Granted, that's not saying much.

The roll call of these flicks ranges from the merely boring to the tragically awful. These movies tend to be big, loud and dumb. "Rampage" is too, but there's enough genuine fun in between the silliness to recommend it.

Dwayne "Not The Rock; OK, You Can Call Me The Rock" Johnson has his shtick down pretty well these days. I describe it as Flex and Smirk, Smirk and Flex, Flex and SCOWL... and Flex.

His characters (Davis Okoye) may have some other job description -- he's a primatologist here -- but he's always the biggest, baddest dude around. Woefully inadequate T-shirts fail to contain all his muscley muscleness. He is accomplished at hand-to-hand combat, firing big guns and piloting helicopters, because isn't that a skillset everyone at the San Diego zoo has?

If you don't remember the 1986 arcade game, it allowed players to control one of three giant monsters -- an ape, George; a wolf, Ralph; or a lizard, Lizzie -- destroying the city. You got to smash buildings, punch fire engines to smithereens and eat distressed damsels. It was great fun.

"Rampage" gets us to this scenario by way of some convoluted mix of corporate greed and scientific mumbo-jump. A nasty company named EnerGyne was conducting illegal experiments in space, one got loose and exploded the place, but not before three samples of the genetic editing MacGuffin landed on Earth, turning normal creatures into gigantic, aggressive smash machines.

One of them was George, an albino gorilla at Davis' zoo with whom he has a special relationship. They communicate with each other via sign language, and even joke around and flip each other the bird. The CGI for George and the other critters is quite good, especially the expressions on George's face. Ralph has spikes and a few other tricks, while Lizzie seems to be part alligator, part boar.

Naomie Harris plays Kate Caldwell, the do-gooder scientist who's helping Davis save the day; Malin Akerman and Jake Lacy are the sneering sibling villains; Jeffrey Dean Morgan does his Negan thing in the guise of a Southern-fried FBI agent who apparently has the wherewithal to go anywhere, summon any resources, give lip to anybody he wants.

Once George gets infected and starts growing at a geometric rate, Davis tries to keep the authorities from going all bang-bang on him. But it doesn't work, and soon he's tracking the path of destruction Chicago, which is about to get a big bag of hurt.

"Rampage" isn't a great movie by any stretch, but it's a decent popcorn flick to kick off the summer movie season.

Review: "Miss Sloane"

Elizabeth Sloane is, by universal assent (including her own estimation), “a real piece of work.”

As played magnificently by Jessica Chastain, “Miss Sloane” is the ultimate Washington D.C. insider – a famed lobbyist who uses all the considerable skills at her disposal, along with a host of nefarious methods, to get what she wants for her clients. Bullying, (barely) legal bribery, non-profit fronts, toadying, outright espionage, bald-faced lying – Sloane sees these things as merely tools in her dark arsenal.

Sloane labels herself a “conviction lobbyist,” meaning she’ll only advocate on behalf of groups or causes she personally supports. But after years gleefully fighting in the trenches and corridors of power, all that really matters for her is getting the win.

At one point her boss, Rodolfo Schmidt (Mark Strong), just stands outside her office, stunned by Sloane’s latest act of brazen manipulation upon the body politic. I just want to know, he says, how somebody like you comes to be – how you grew up, what events shaped your personality, and so on. Because Sloane’s actions often seem to indicate the operation of a brilliant mind without even an ounce of conscience.

The story opens with a framing device of Sloane being grilled by a U.S. Senate committee chaired by a glowering politico (John Lithgow) demanding answers about her unseemly methods. So we assume her nefarious history has finally caught up with her.

But as the story goes deeper and we learn more about Sloane and her skillful machinations, we start to wonder whether she’s sitting in the hot seat by choice.

Sloane is the star player at the biggest lobbying firm in town, run by a patriarchal figure (Sam Waterson) who’s been dying to land the gun lobby as a client for years. A new bill is coming up for a vote that would require universal background checks, and they want Sloane to send it down in flames by appealing to women. Sloane literally laughs in their faces, and bolts to a much smaller company backing the measure.

About half her team defects with her, including protégé Jane Molloy (Alison Pill), who regards Sloane as both mentor and cautionary tale. Meanwhile, she’s facing off with her conniving old partner Pat Connors, played by Michael Stuhlbarg. Gugu Mbatha-Raw plays key new ally Esme Manucharian, a passionate gun control advocate with a personal history.

It all plays out in the high-stakes world of the media, as various forces and circumstances align themselves to help or hurt the cause.

Director John Madden (“Shakespeare in Love”), working with rookie screenwriter Jonathan Perera, give us an intricately plotted political thriller, a drawn-out game of cat and mouse, with a character study in the middle.

Sloane is so busy training her high-powered vision upon her adversaries and allies, there’s not much time for self-exploration of the person behind the façade. She literally doesn’t sleep, subsisting on pills and food from the same Korean BBQ place every night. Sloane even arranges trysts with male escorts to satisfy her basic primal urges; when an urban cowboy type (Jake Lacy) shows up in place of her usual faux beau, it leaves her both miffed and intrigued.

The film touches on the current debate about gun rights vs. control, and there’s certainly a bit of Hollywood moralizing, but it isn’t really about that. It’s just the backdrop for a larger tale about the rot in our political system, and a portrait of one of its chief schemers.

Can one have a noble heart but wallow in corruption? Just how bad do the ends have to get before they cease justifying the means? “Miss Sloane” explores these questions in a slick but probing way.

Review: "How to Be Single"

"How to Be Single" is part raunchy sex comedy, and that part's fun, at least for awhile. But it also wants its moments of tenderness and wisdom, and that stuff is just pure death, man.

In addition, it sets up a female protagonist and her off-the-hook wingwoman, and then just as we're settling in with them and their man troubles, it introduces a whole other heroine, and throws in a sister for the first woman to boot. Suddenly we're dickering around with these two new ladies and their romantic contretemps, plus the main gal, and there are so many storylines and random hook-ups with dudes we lose track of who's on first.

The end result is a confused mash-up of "Love, Actually" and "The Hangover." If that sounds like an impossible mix of mutually exclusive tones, that's because it is.

"Single" is based on the debut novel of Liz Tuccillo, adapted for the screen by Abby Kohn, Marc Silverstein and Dana Fox. Christian Ditter directed, and while normally I'm not much of a player in the identity politics game, the use of a male director for a story on dating from a decidedly feminine perspective feels wrongheaded.

The women wind up as feminized versions of male characters, carousing and partying and waking up in bed with people they don't recognize. Except sometimes they show a little regret afterward, whereas the guys wouldn't.

(And considering how much sex these characters have with random strangers, a more credible title would've been, "How to Deal with a Tsunami of STDs.")

Dakota Johnson plays Alice, a sweet girl from Wesleyan University who spent all four years in a relationship with Josh (Nicholas Braun), who's tall and nice and cute but not, y'know, vroom! So she kicks him to the curb when she moves to New York City for a new start. Officially it's a "break," not a break-up, so they can try life as singles to see if they really want to be together.

Alice gets a job in a posh law firm as a paralegal, where she meets Robin, played by the incomparable Rebel Wilson. Wilson always seems to play the same role, yet we never tire of it: the audacious party girl whose orbital confidence wows the boys and divides the girls, who either dismiss her or become her bestie. Alice opts for the latter.

Segue to a bunch of scenes of the pair dancing, drinking, sexing. Alice's first conquest is Tom (Anders Holm), an agreeable bartender whom Robin introduces as the training wheels runway to a new life of debauchery. After their coupling, Tom offers his own pointers on how to avoid emotional entanglements, such as keeping no food or running water in his apartment, so overnight guests have to leave for sustenance.

Then into Tom's bar walks Lucy (Alison Brie), using the free WiFi to maintain her 10 dating site profiles. She thinks she's got this whole mate selection thing down to a science, feeding potential dates into a spreadsheet. Meanwhile, the scruffy pourer across the bar from her might just be her ideal match after all. (When he's not screwing Alice, that is.)

Alice briefly lives with her (implausibly) older sister Meg, an Ob/Gyn doctor played by Leslie Mann who secretly hates babies but even more secretly wants one of her own. She eventually gets pregnant via an anonymous sperm donor but then attracts the eye of a much younger man (Jake Lacy), leading to some predictable prevaricating about the source of her burgeoning belly.

Occasionally the movie remembers to go back to Alice, who's tempted to reunite with Josh, then gets in deep with a slightly older widower (Damon Wayans Jr.) with a young daughter. There's one scene where the guy shows his kid pictures of her mommy for the very first time. It's genuinely moving, but a completely head-whipping changeup from what comes before and after.

I haven't read Tuccillo's book, but to my understanding its protagonist is a publicist pushing 40 who sets off to write a book about what it's like being a single woman in different parts of the world. Which makes "How to Be Single" the latest movie to buy the rights to a book just because somebody liked the title, and throw everything between the covers into the trash.

Review: "Obvious Child"

There's a new style of serio-comic storytelling centered around the disheveled lives of twentysomething New York City women. Movies like "Frances Ha" and "Obvious Child," and the HBO show "Girls," revel in the wretched squalor of their stunted careers and the hapless hopelessness of their romantic entanglements.

The fact that these tales usually feature female directors and/or writers only adds to their sense of neurotic authenticity. As is also common with young women singer/songwriters these days, they make use of their messy real lives as fodder for creativity.

I was underwhelmed by "Girls" and "Frances Ha," but "Obvious Child" is the charming best of the lot, mostly due to the vibrant presence of Jenny Slate. You may know her from being on "Saturday Night Live" for about a minute and a half, and punch-funny turns on TV shows like "Parks and Recreation."

But for most people she's a new face and voice, and my guess is it's one they'll want to see more of. She's pitiable and yet admirable, a born screw-up who we end up rooting for.

She plays Donna Stern, a not-much disguised version of her younger status as a rising stand-up comedienne. By day she works/sleeps in the tiny Unoppressive Non-Imperialist Bargain Book Store -- "it's a Manhattan institution," she insists -- and at night plows through drinks and stage sets with her fellow workaday comics.

Her shtick is embarrassingly honest appraisals of her own life, including the opening monologue where describes the spectacularly drone-like sex she has with her current boyfriend -- who happens to be in the audience, and she knows it. He promptly dumps her, and Donna quickly rebounds with an impossibly WASP-y fellow named Max (Jake Lacy) she drunkenly picks up at the bar.

If you've heard anything about "Obvious Child," it's probably in some vague terms about it being an "abortion comedy." This is true, and also not. It's accurate that Donna gets pregnant from her one night stand and speedily decides that she's not ready to be a mother. She schedules an abortion at the earliest convenience, which happens to be Valentine's Day.

Needless to say, this is not a plot designed to elicit warm feelings from the right-to-life crowd.
"You're going to kill it," her best pal Nellie (Gaby Hoffman) offers as encouragement as Donna prepares to do a set the night before the procedure. "Tomorrow I am!" she responds chirpily.

But I don't get the sense writer/director Gillian Robespierre set out to antagonize anyone, and certainly doesn't foist any lectures about 'my body, my choices.' Rather, it's an honest, funny and brave portrait of a young woman trying to navigate her way through life, and often hitting the icebergs. This is Robespierre's first feature film, based on a short movie she made a few years ago with a different cast.

Slate and Lacy have real sparks between them, a magical coupling between the loudmouthed Jewess and the uptight New Englander. They each represent something exotic to the other, and despite the strained circumstances of their situation -- she doesn't share the news with him at first -- they manage some genuine romance, or at least the modern facsimile of it.

A montage dance scene set to the Paul Simon song that gives the film its title is carefree and breathtakingly sexy, despite the fact it doesn't really show much flesh.

The film has a few other drop-in performances from more recognizable actors -- Polly Draper and Richard Kind play Donna's parents, who each love her in their own way, and David Cross turns up as a more successful comedian.

But it's Jenny Slate who gives "Obvious Child" its heart and soul, a silly but satisfying heroine for this day and age.