File "Pan" under biggest flops of the year that deserved much better. This delightful, rousing adventure is the Peter Pan origin story, how a spirited English orphan first found his way to Neverland and learned how to never grow up.
Levi Miller plays Peter, who gets kidnapped from his London orphanage by some henchmen of the dread pirate Blackbeard (Hugh Jackman) to slave away in his mines, searching for lost fits of faerie dust. It seems Blackbeard, who looks like he was dug up out of the ground 10 minutes ago, defeated Tinkerbell & Co. and is now ruling Neverland as a semi-sane despot.
With the help of an incorrigible rogue names James Hook (!), Peter manages to escape from the pirate's clutches and falls in with Princess Tiger Lily (Rooney Mara) and the Indians, leading to yet more adventures.
It's a mishmash of wildly disparate story elements -- part J.M. Barrie, part Indiana Jones, and even something of a musical with a couple of interludes put to modern tunes like "Blitzkrieg Bop" and "Smells Like Teen Spirit."
If all this sounds loopy and unhinged, that's because it is. Director Joe Wright ("Atonement") and script man Jason Fuchs have essentially used Barrie's novels as a mere jumping-off point for their own industrious imaginations. They've essentially "retconned" one of the most enduring fantasy tales of all time, stealing inspiration and turning it to their own purposes.
Somehow, I think Peter Pan's rascally heart would approve of the appropriation. This is one flight of fancy worth booking.
Bonus features are decent, though not expansive. The DVD comes with only one making of featurette, "The Boy Who Would Be Pan."
Upgrade to the Blu-ray combo pack and you add three more featurettes: "Wondrous Realms," "The Scoundrels of Neverland" and "Never Grow Up: The Legend of Pan." Director Wright also provides a feature-length commentary track.
The latest big-screen iteration of the Peter Pan legend is rather a mess, but it’s an exhilarating mess. “Pan” mixes astonishing CG action, plucky kids, goofy musical interludes with modern pop songs, and Hugh Jackman as a fey villain who looks like he got kicked out of a “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” audition.
The result is a thrill ride of a movie by parts giddy and scary, a joyful exercise in prodigious imagineering. It’s the rare kids’ movie that parents may actually prefer.
The story – screenplay by Jason Fuchs, based on the J.M. Barrie characters -- is essentially a prequel/retcon of the Peter Pan mythology. We’re pre-Wendy & Co. here, focusing instead on how a cheeky British orphan first became the tights-wearing, flying, smirking never-grow-upper.
Most of the familiar gang is here: Smee, Tinkerbell, Lost Boys, Princess Tiger Lily, etc. But they’re living in a despoiled Neverland much grimmer than what we’re used to. The biggest curveball is James Hook, still young and unhooked, who throws off the shackles of his innate cynicism to become Peter’s ally and best friend.
(No hint as to how their relationship and his hand came to be, uh, detached.)
It’s a corker of a performance by Garrett Hedlund, who manages to suggest some of the verbal idiosyncrasies and vanity of Captain Hook, but with a cowboy American bent. He wears a long duster coat and an Indiana Jones hat, flirts shamelessly with Tiger Lily (Rooney Mara) and regards Peter as a wayward kid brother.
Levi Miller plays Peter, and he’s solid in the role, blue eyes perpetually wide, though the character as written is a bit generic and bland. He’s the window through which we experience this fantastical world, and -- as is so often the case with this kind of moviemaking -- the frame is not meant to draw the eye.
The real head-turner – and scratcher, as some will see it – is Jackman’s pirate Blackbeard. He’s just… well, his own thing. He wears extravagant Renaissance-style costumes, has a ghostly pallor and feral teeth, and the dark circles around his eyes are so deep it seems like he’s staring at you from out of a graveyard hole. He’s part tyrant, part fop, all wicked.
Blackbeard, having defeated the faeries of Neverland in a war, is mining every speck of the island for remnants of their dust, or pixin, which he uses for his secret and nefarious purposes. He dispatches his flying pirate ships into the “real world” – England during WWII – to nab orphan boys to be used as laborers in his mines. Peter, who was left as a babe on the steps of the Lambeth Home for Boys by his mum along with a pan flute locket, is one such snatchee.
His introduction to Neverland is ostentatious, and odd. In a vast mining pit where boys toil with pickaxes, they pause in their labors to exalt Blackbeard with an a capella rendition of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” with the great pirate joining in himself. The Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop” gets similar use for a battle scene.
Usually in movie musical scenes people sing to address somebody else, or narrate their own actions, but here Blackbeard and crew are essentially serenading themselves for its own sake. Maybe it would’ve worked better if it was more consistent, but just those two tunes are employed.
To paraphrase Robert Downey Jr.’s character in “Tropic Thunder,” you should either go full musical, or not bother.
Peter bumps into James, who possibly has been mining there since he was a boy himself, and is rather sour about it. They soon bust out together, with perennial sidekick Smee (Adeel Akhtar) tagging along, fall in with Tiger Lily and the Indians, who here are a full multicultural gamut of castoffs. Peter, who has demonstrated nascent flying abilities, is embraced as their Chosen One who will free the banished faeries from the secret hidey place.
Director Joe Wright is best known for costume dramas like “Atonement,” “Pride & Prejudice” and “Anna Karenina.” But he seems to have found his inner child with this film, relishing high adventure and fantasy without reservation.
I don’t doubt some will find “Pan” weird and off-putting. But if you’re willing to view Barrie’s writings as inspiration rather than sacred text, you’ll find a delightful spree that captures the quintessence of childlike wonder.
“Unbroken” is the sort of story that if it weren’t true, people would dismiss it as Hollywood hoo-ha. But Louis “Louie” Zamperini really lived this life: Olympic athlete who competed at the 1936 games in Berlin, WWII bombardier whose plane crashed into the Pacific, surviving 47 days at sea before being captured and subjected to two years of torment as a prisoner of war.
This movie, which I think one of the most powerful of the year, hasn’t received much love from other critics, and I find that puzzling. Is it the presence of Anjelina Jolie as director, and a certain snootiness towards glamorous movie stars stepping behind the camera? If so, I’ll just remind them people said the same thing about Clint Eastwood and Mike Nichols … and they didn’t turn out too bad.
To my mind, Jolie acquits herself splendidly, hitting the emotional high and low notes just right, as well as staging a few daring action scenes. Clearly, she’s got a future behind the camera if she carries out her threat to abandon acting.
Chiding of the screenplay seems more well-placed. The script has some big names on it – Joel and Ethan Coen, Richard LaGravenese, William Nicholson – as well as being based on a book by Laura Hillenbrand, who also penned the splendid “Seabiscuit.”
But it is a fairly conventional narrative presentation. And, as others have pointed it, it almost seems to combine elements of three famous Oscar-winning films into one: the Olympics sequence from “Chariots of Fire,” the lifeboat part from “Life of Pi” and the POW stuff from “The Bridge on the River Kwai.”
Oh well. The historical record is what it is. The movie also truncates the latter portion of Hillenbrand’s book, which deals with Zamperini’s (unsurprisingly) difficult transition to civilian life and religious awakening.
Jack O’Connell is solid as Zamperini, but I do think this sort of movie might have been better served by having a more recognizable actor in the main role. Since the screenplay doesn’t really attempt to get inside the character’s head, but observes his trials and tribulations from without, audiences might have a harder time connecting emotionally with him. We need more of a touchstone.
The supporting cast is terrific. I especially liked Domhnall Gleeson as Phillips, the pilot of the bomber that crashes into the ocean, who has a sort of reserved grace, and Jai Courtney and Garrett Hedlund as fellow POWs, who know they can’t help him directly when the guards are beating him to a pulp, but cheer on silently.
If I have one serious complaint with the movie, it’s Japanese singer/actor Miyavi as the sadistic head guard the prisoners refer to as “The Bird,” because he sees everything. Most of what’s depicted really happened – the Bird was sent into hiding as a war criminal after Japan’s surrender.
OK, so he’s a bad guy. But the film turns him into a cloying, effeminate monster who sidles up to his charges and whispers in their ear before delivering a beating. His eyes even look odd, like he’s been made up with excessive mascara or something. The end result is the Bird feels like a cartoon, much like the Michael Fassbender character in “12 Years a Slave.”
It’s like they’re trying to cram all the evil of an era into a single figure, and it rings false.
Still, “Unbroken” was one of the most riveting cinematic experiences I had this year. The lesson of Louie Zamperini isn’t that he was tougher and braver than everyone else, but that this power to withstand desperate challenges resides in all of us if we can find it.
The biggest question I had about the Coen Brothers’ latest work was not “What?” but “Why?”
Why did they feel compelled to make this movie? Like another fairly recent film of theirs I was cool to, “A Serious Man,” “Inside Llewyn Davis” seems like a movie the co-writer/directors made for themselves rather than for any hypothetical audience. It’s all well and good for artists to primarily please themselves, but that doesn’t mean we need to see it.
Set in New York City in the early 1960s when the folk music scene that produced Bob Dylan was germinating, “Davis” is the story of somebody who never makes it. Llewyn (Oscar Isaac) is a sad sack and a lout who sponges off his friends for everything, even a place to sleep. But he’s a genuinely gifted singer – and so is Isaac, who skillfully and wistfully performs all his songs himself.
Llewyn stumbles from here to there, getting in and out of scrapes, including a perilous pregnancy that threatens the marriage of two fellow singers (Carey Mulligan and Justin Timberlake). Occasionally he lands a gig or an audition, but we sense – and so does he – that Llewyn just isn’t destined for the big time.
The story gets interrupted for a long, strange road trip across the country so Llewyn can play for a club manager who apparently doesn’t even know he’s coming. It’s filled with loopy Coen-esque characters, such as John Goodman as a whiny jazzman, but Llewyn doesn’t have much reason for being there.
You can say the same of the movie about him.
Extras are quite scant, and are the same for Blu-ray and DVD editions. You only get “Inside ‘Inside Llewyn Davis,’” a making-of documentary. It does feature the notoriously publicity-averse filmmakers plus all the major cast members. It just would’ve been nice to see some deleted scenes and perhaps a commentary track.
The Coen brothers are among my favorite filmmakers, but over the last decade or so they’ve run hot and cold … or I have.
“Inside Llewyn Davis” is their latest oh-so-sober effort, a dark and dreary portrait of a wayward folk singer trying to make it in the early 1960s. It’s shot in muted colors, contains little in the way of their trademark ironic humor, and doesn’t appear to be about anything than it superficially is.
It feels more like an exercise than a movie.
The film is wonderfully crafted, as is everything by Joel and Ethan Coen, and the music is often quite tremendous, especially Oscar Isaac in the title role. If you ask me if I wouldn’t mind owning the soundtrack, the answer would be yes.
But when I ask myself the question every filmmaker should before they start a new project -- “What is this movie really about, and why does it need to exist?” -- I’m afraid I come up empty.
The point, if there is one, is that serious artists who refuse to compromise their craft usually end up discarded and forgotten instead of celebrated. It’s only the lucky and the malleable who make it in the music biz. This comes as startling news, I’m sure, to exactly no one.
Llewyn is literally a man without a home, trundling his guitar case and duffle bag from apartment to apartment in New York City, where he crashes on the couches of his friends. The word “friend” is relative in Llewyn’s case, since a relationship with this man only flows in one direction. Food, accommodations, emotional support, invitations for gigs and a meager paycheck -- Llewyn only takes, not gives.
The one place where pours out his soul is behind a microphone. Isaac has a terrific voice and musicianship, and I loved the fact that the Coens actually let the actors perform the songs from start to finish, instead of that montage-and-segue thing you usually get.
He’s facing a new crisis when Jean (Carey Mulligan), a friend and one-half of the husband-and-wife singing team of Jean & Jim, announces that she’s pregnant, possibly with Llewyn’s baby. He has to come up with the money for the abortion, in addition to concealing this fact from Jim (Justin Timberlake).
The rest of the story wanders as Llewyn does. He ends up on other couches in other apartments, encountering other would-be folk singers and their enablers. Among those he meets is Troy Nelson (Stark Sands), an Army soldier who sings during his furloughs. Everyone adores him, and he certainly has talent, but Llewyn aptly wonders if Troy possesses higher brain function.
During one long, strange trek to Chicago to meet a producer, Llewyn finds himself ensconced inside a car sharing a ride with Roland Turner, a crippled jazzman played by John Goodman, who needles Llewyn that those in his profession “play all the notes” instead of just three or four chords. His largely mute driver, Johnny Five (Garrett Hedlund), seems like he wandered in from the “On the Road” film adaptation.
There’s one terrific, heartbreaking scene where Llewyn finally gets to audition for that producer (F. Murray Abraham). The man clearly recognizes there’s a bonafide artiste sitting in front of him, but crass concerns prevail: “I don’t hear any money there,” he says, less a judgment than an apology.
Here’s a good Rorschach test to see if you’ll be drawn to “Inside Llewyn Davis”: What did you think of the Coens’ “A Serious Man”? If you were put off by that impenetrable rumination, which to me played like an inner dialogue inside the directors’ heads, then this new film will feel like more of the same. If you loved “A Serious Man,” you’ll probably enjoy this one, and we can find something else to talk about.
I'm not quite sure how to judge "On the Road." If it existed on its own as a film, separated from any notion of the seminal Jack Kerouac book, I'd probably dismiss it as rambling and unfocused. But since the Bible of the Beats is defined by its poetic embrace of chaos -- both in life and literary endeavors -- to knock it for its quivery plot would be like criticizing a flamingo for being too pink.
Brazilian director Walter Salles and Puerto Rican screenwriter Jose Rivera previously teamed up for "The Motorcycle Diaries," a similar project about young men rambling about the countryside looking for themselves, also based on a book by a person of note (in that case, revolutionary Che Guevara). Since "On the Road" has generally been regarded as unfilmable, perhaps it required a foreign perspective to adequately capture the peculiar rhythms of this quintessential, quirky American tale.
Certainly "On the Road" has verve and gutso. In chronicling the on-again, off-again travels of Kerouac stand-in Sal Paradise (Sam Riley) and his best friend/muse Dean Moriarty (Garrett Hedlund) during the late 1940s, the actors and filmmakers have probably made as good a translation of the book as possible.
It's a booze-soaked, drug-riddled, sex-filled escapade with no real point other than casting off whatever yokes chain them and seeing what's out there. It captures the pure exhilaration of freedom for its own sake.
Some portions of Kerouac's narrative are skimmed over or eliminated, while others are pumped up -- particularly those involving Dean's teenage wife (soon to be ex-wife) Marylou, played by "Twilight" star Kristen Stewart. Stewart has a vibrant, erotic presence as a wanton girl who enjoys her escapades with Dean -- including three-ways in bed with some of his friends -- even as she knows it must all come to a crashing end, with her grasping the stick's short end.
One scene, where Marylou and Dean are shaking it to a raucous jazz song as others look on, is scorching hot. Stewart's small but steamy role should do much to banish her adolescent image.
Much of the heart of the book dealt with Sal idolizing Dean as a sort of vagabond holy man, a con artist and liar who nonetheless embraced the concept of living in the moment, and inspired others to do the same. Dean is a car thief, treats women as disposable objects and leeches off his friends, but others are drawn to his audacious individuality.
Hedlund is terrific as Dean, the distilled essence of American manhood, especially his use of his voice to command and compel those around him. Riley is also good in the less showy role of the introspective writer and chronicler of the group. Tom Sturridge has an abbreviated but effective turn as Carlo Marx, a self-destructive poet who struggles with his homoerotic fixation toward Dean, which Dean uses to tease and taunt.
Viggo Mortensen turns up as Old Bull Lee, an older writer and heroin addict who acts as a mentor and father figure to Sal. It's notable that he is the one person who is instinctively disdainful of Dean's flights of fancy, recognizing them as more narcissism than revelation.
Kirsten Dunst plays Camille, Dean's much put-upon second wife; Amy Adams is Lee's mentally fractured wife; Alice Braga is an itinerant love of Sal's; and Elisabeth Moss and Danny Morgan play a recently married couple sundered by Dean's need to always be on the move.
Kerouac lovers probably know that the book "On the Road" was written in long, frenetic sessions using rolls of paper so he wouldn't have to stop typing. The movie erratically but vividly captures that freewheeling sense of losing oneself -- in the act of creation, or consumption, and even self-destruction.
Like its predecessor nearly three decades back, "TRON: Legacy" is a silly movie wrapped in a bubble-gum package of dazzling computer-generated imagery.
But unlike 1982's "TRON," this new Disney movie takes itself a little too seriously at times, going all apocalyptic and Deep Thoughts on us when what the audience really craves is light-bike races and discus fights between warriors limned in neon.
Fortunately, there's enough of the latter in "TRON: Legacy" to make the former bearable.
Twenty years after the disappearance of rogue video game designer-turned CEO Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), his son Sam (Garrett Hedlund) gets zapped into the same world of computer programs, where everything looks sleek and shiny.
It seems Flynn's quest to achieve a utopian world with the help of a program he created called Clu -- also played by Bridges, aged backwards using CGI -- has backfired miserably. Sam's mission: Find his dad, defeat Clu and remake this universe in a kinder, gentler fashion.
The movie gets downright turgid when Flynn starts talking about "Isos," special computer programs that supposedly will even solve our healthcare woes. (Take that, individual mandate!)
Thankfully, there's always another blissfully fun scene around the corner, such as when the gang invades a nightclub run by a Ziggy Stardust clone (Michael Sheen).
"TRON: Legacy" is at its best when it thinks the least.
Extras are a little on the underwhelming side.
The DVD version has only two featurettes running just over 10 minutes each: One about casting the film, the other about the cutting-edge computerized visual effects.
When you move up to the Blu-ray/DVD combo pack, you add another 10-minute featurette on how the sequel came together. It's interesting mostly in the revelation that showing a few minutes of test footage at a Comic-Con convention helped secure backing to make the final film.
There's no commentary track or digital copy, which grates. There is a "Disney Second Screen" interactive feature that allows you to learn more about the film as you watch it -- but it's only available as an iPad app, or on a computer equipped with a Blu-ray player.
Cutting people out of the experience because they lack the favored technology just seems so ... un-Tron-like.
The thing everyone remembers about 1982's "TRON" are the light cycles and the discus fights. I watched it again recently (having barely any memory of it) and was surprised to find these action sequences -- which represented some of the first computer-generated imagery -- comprised barely five minutes of the film.
"TRON: Legacy," the much-delayed sequel to the original that flopped at the box office but became a cultural touchstone, is all about the toys. There are light cycle duels, discus fights, some aerial dogfights, and about a dozen other new kinds of CGI mayhem.
Of course, with the benefit of nearly 30 years of technology, everything looks waaaay cooler. The special effects of "TRON" are laughably crude now, while those of "TRON: Legacy" are cutting edge.
The movie aims for a little soul, too, and that's where it gets self-indulgent and silly. The first film seemed to poke fun at itself a little, or at least recognize its modest ambitions as lite sci-fi for kiddies. But the sequel has to go all save-the-world apocalyptic on us.
Still, it's an undeniably entertaining flick, a cornucopia of eye candy and family-friendly violence.
If you don't remember the plot of the original, Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) was a rebel video game designer who got zapped into the world created by computers. It's a place populated by Programs, who here are thinking, sentient beings trying to carry out their intended function. As a User, Flynn is essentially a god, and uses his powers to tumble the reigning tyrant.
No doubt you've heard about the new movie's big trick, which is that Jeff Bridges plays dual roles as Flynn and Clu, the program he created to run things in a more benevolent fashion. Clu took over and remade things in his vision, and Flynn's fate has remained a mystery for the past 21 years.
All things now rest in the hands of his son Sam (Garrett Hedlund), who is officially the inheritor of his corporate empire, but is more interested in pulling a little cyber-terrorism on the company. That, and leading the police on chases aboard his Ducati motorcycle -- boy, I wonder where that skill will come in handy!?!
Sam has serious abandonment issues, so when his dad's old partner Alan (Bruce Boxleitner, who also plays the briefly-seen title character, Tron) says he got a message from Flynn's old arcade headquarters, it piques Sam's interest. Needless to say, he soon finds himself transported into his dad's digital world and forced to fight in the gladiator-style games.
The look of everything in rookie director Joseph Kosinki's world, from the costumes to the vehicles to the buildings, is sleek and shiny. As before, everything is edged in colored lights to announce its allegiance -- white for Sam and other good guys, red for the baddies, and Clu gets his own special burnt orange to let you know he's in charge.
There's a lot of other gobbledygook cluttering things up. Something about "Isos" -- isomorphic algorithms, or special programs that weren't created but just spontaneously evolved. Flynn, eventually tracked down in a self-imposed exile that's part Zen warrior and part Jeff Lebowski, says these Isos are the panacea to all mankind's ills, and will solve healthcare, science and philosophy conundrums.
Old Jeff Bridges looks great, haunted and resigned to his fate, but the young version represented by Clu isn't so convincing. The eyes don't read quite right, maintaining a doll's placidity, and when Clu attempts a smile it looks like someone slipped a switchblade between his ribs.
There's been a lot of talk from technology-embracing directors about using CGI to allow older actors to play their younger selves, or vice-versa, or even digitizing John Wayne or Humphrey Bogart up from the grave. For a movie that makes pretensions at warning us about the limits of technology, "TRON: Legacy," while indisputably fun, still shows a few of its own.
