Video review: "Aquaman"

There are trashy movies and there are garbage movies. The former are decent flicks that engage in various tawdry indulgences and lowered ambitions; the latter have surrendered to them completely.

As the late, great Pauline Kael said, there is trash and then there is glorious trash. And while “Aquaman” may not exactly be glorious, it is an entertaining film that revels in its own trashiness.

Yes, Jason Momoa still can’t act his way out of a bag. But if any actor today deserves to have the “Seinfeld” term of “mimbo” bestowed upon him, it’s Momoa. He’s easy on the eyes, if your thing is beefy-but-not-overly-‘roided Polynesian dudes with long dark ringlets.

He doesn’t exactly look like the sort of guy who swims with the fishes and talks to them too, but he’s a charismatic, swarthy presence.

I’ll pause here to note that once again Hollywood has managed to take a blond superhero and turn him brunette. Captain America, the Human Torch, the Flash -- it’s practically an entire super-team’s worth of color changers. Even Thor was revealed to have brown roots when his ‘do got buzzed in his last solo flick. Aquaman at least has a little sun-dappling around the edges.

Anyway, the premise is that Arthur is the long-lost son of the queen of Atlantis (Nicole Kidman), who fell in love with a land dweller (Temuera Morrison) and grew up estranged from his people. He still has the powers of a high-born Atlantean, including super-strength, durability and swimming crazy fast, plus the additional trick of communicating with sea life.

Worlds collide when his brother, King Orm (Patrick Wilson), declares war on the surface world -- mostly as an excuse to unite the tribes of Atlantis and have himself declared the supreme Ocean Master.

(Sounds like a fad diet.)

Aided by wise sage Vulko (Willem Dafoe) and plucky princess Mera (Amber Heard), Arthur goes on a quest to recover the lost trident of his forbears, depose his wayward sibling and bring about peace. Besides Orm the heavy duties are shared by Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a modern-day pirate who bears a special grudge against Aquaman.

The realm of Atlantis is represented in Day-Glo colors and trippy mood music, as director James Wan and script men Will Beall and David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick (got enough names, dude?) milk the comedy and science fiction angles.

It’s like “Flash Gordon” meets the briny deep. You may find yourself sniggering at this trashy gen, but doubtless having a good time while doing it.

Bonus features are pretty nice. They include breakdowns of key scenes and the following featurettes: “Going Deep Into the World of Aquaman,” Becoming Aquaman,” “James Wan: World Builder,” “Aqua Tech,” “Atlantis Warfare,” “The Dark Depths of Black Manta,” “Heroines of Atlantis,” “Villainous Training,” “Kingdoms of the Seven Seas,” “Creating Undersea Creatures” and “A Match Made in Atlantis.”

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Review: "The Conjuring 2"

In the real life 1970s, Lorraine and Ed Warren were a dowdy, middle-aged couple with double chins and dreams of being immortalized on film for their paranormal investigations, which they claim ran over 10,000 cases. They finally got their wish in 2013 with “The Conjuring,” a huge horror hit … which could mean there are at least 9,999 sequels to come.

Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson return as the Warrens, and they’re a nice break from the kooky sorts who usually inhabit possession movies. They’re pretty normal people of Christian faith who happen to work – often on behalf of the Catholic Church – to sniff out if reports of unusual activities are hoaxes or not.

Wilson plays Ed as a pure-hearted square, the sort of guy who fixes faucets at the houses he’s exorcising and imitates Elvis on the guitar just to calm some very scared kids. He’s kind of stiff and diffident, but there’s no mistaking his good intentions.

Lorraine is the talent, having the power to sense evil forces and communicate with wayward spirits. Despite her supernatural abilities, she’s the more grounded of the two.

After having a particularly rough outing in the 1976 Amityville case, the Warrens are taking a break from active investigations. It seems the spook followed them home, taking the form of Marilyn Manson in a nun’s habit. Well, not actually Manson, but a dead ringer. Then the Enfield case breaks near London, and they’re back on the hunt.

It seems the spirit of a nasty old man named Bill Wilkins (Bob Adrian) is reluctant to leave the shabby row house he once occupied. Peggy Hodgson (Frances O’Connor) and her four kids live there now, and soon start hearing the old thump-thump in the night – which soon turns into more terrifying incidents.

After initially going after young Billy (Benjamin Haigh), a shy lad with a stutter, the spirit focuses its intentions on Janet (Madison Wolfe), age 11. Even though we’ve seen it a hundred times, it’s still creepy as all get out when a little girl speaks with a ghost’s croaking moan. Then comes flying furniture, apparitions, possessed toys, etc.

Some local experts – Franka Potente plays Anita Gregory – have already dismissed the case as ventriloquism and clever tricks, though Maurice Grosse (Simon McBurney) is a kindly scientist with a receptive ear. The Warrens come in late in the game, just as the Wilkins spirit kicks things into high gear.

The movie takes a while to get going – it could easily stand to be 20 minutes shorter – but director James Wan, who co-wrote the script with four others, is adept at stirring the pot of anxiety. He’ll build the tension for a long moment, then have something jump out at the audience from somewhere we didn’t expect.

As horror sequels go, “The Conjuring” scares up enough to entertain us.

Review: "Furious 7"

"Furious 7" features a lot of great stunts and a great deal of silliness. This franchise started out 14 years ago about a bunch of punk twentysomething street racers, and by now it's morphed into a James Bond clan in which everybody does martial arts, spy infiltrations and super stunts in addition to being expert wheel men (and women).

You pretty much know what you're getting with any of the "Furious" flicks: aerobatic car stunts, smashmouth fights, explosions galore, booties shaken, muscles engorged, exotic locales and lots of quips. The first 20 minutes or so features very little action, with main star Vin Diesel repeatedly threatening the camera, vaguely: "They're gonna pay for their mistakes... big time."

That's not actually what he says, but it could be. One of the main failings of these movies is that the dialogue often sounds like it was written by a pair of 15-year-olds who were locked in a vault with a bunch of video games and no contact with other humans.

(Chris Morgan, who penned the first, fifth and sixth movies, is officially given credit.)

Justin Lin, who directed the last four films in the series, is replaced by horror filmmaker James Wan. He adds a few new flourishes of his own, such as rotating the camera to follow the trajectory of an actor spinning through the air during a fight or crash, and then flogs them like a deceased equine.

Still, it's hard to deny that many of the chase scenes in the latter half are truly thrilling. The best are a multi-car road duel on a twisty mountain road, and a super-valuable sports car being jumped from one high-rise skyscraper to another... and another.

Dwayne Johnson, as supercop Hobbs, is actually sidelined for most of the movie after sustaining serious injuries during an early tussle, which is notable for a couple of reasons. First, we don't get to enjoy Johnson and Diesel engaging in another pointless battle of behemoths. Second, this is virtually the only time a character gets more than a scratch during the entire flick, despite an unrelenting barrage of bullets, shrapnel, kicks, punches and sudden g-force trauma.

The plot is an incomprehensible muddle of MacGuffins, red herrings, come-and-go villains and set pieces. Our travels take us from Los Angeles to London, Abu Dhabi, the Caucuses, the Dominican Republic and more.

Ostensibly it's about catching Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham), the brother of the bad guy from the last movie. He's a British black ops chap who wants revenge, so he starts tracking down the "family" members of Dom Toretto (Diesel), leader of the crew. Dom doesn't believe in playing defense, so soon they're chasing the guy chasing them.

Somehow this morphs into the search for an international hacker named Ramsey, who has created a program called the God's Eye, which uses cell phones, security cameras and virtually every electronic device to track anyone, anywhere.

(You may recall this is the same thing Batman used during the finale of "The Dark Knight"; it was goofy then, and it's still goofy now.)

Other familiar characters include Paul Walker as cop-turned-wingman Brian; Michelle Rodriguez as Dom's squeeze Letty, still struggling with amnesia after returning from the dead; Roman (Tyrese Gibson), ladies' man and comic relief; and Tej (Ludacris), computer expert and Roman tamer.

(Walker's death mid-production is handled by using CGI to paste his face on other actors' bodies; if you're not looking for it, you probably won't even notice. He also receives a send-off at the end that's genuinely touching.)

Joining the fray are Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell), head of a vague American government arm that wants God's Eye, and Mose Jakande (Djimon Hounsou), an African crime lord who desires it, too. Things build up to a spectacular showdown in L.A. with all parties taking part in a very destructive fracas.

"Furious 7" is not the sort of movie you're supposed to spend more than a few seconds thinking about, because if you do it all falls apart like sand. (For instance, how does the God's Eye track Shaw when he drives through a barren desert? Are the geckos rocking Samsungs?)

You're invited to just sit back, drink in the crazy action scenes and sneering attitude, and cheer. There are plenty of moments worth a huzzah, but many others that earn their derision.

Video review: "The Conjuring"

It’s been a down year for animation but a hot time for horror, with “The Conjuring” one of the latest movie to scare up a lot of cash at the box office.

This summer hit stars Vera Farmiga as a demonologist who’s a clairvoyant to boot. Lorraine Warren and her husband Ed (Patrick Wilson) were normal, everyday people who investigate hauntings and participate in exorcisms as a vocation. In 1971 they encountered one of their worst cases ever, which formed the basis for this rollicking “true life” tale.

A couple moves into a lonely farmhouse with their five daughters and things start going bump in the night. All the clocks stop at the same time in the middle of the night, and a secret lair in the basement produces strange sounds and drafts. Eventually evil forces start threatening the children, so the Warrens have to team up to cast them out.

(Strangely, the film received an “R” rating from the MPAA, despite having no cursing and little gore.)
The strong part of the film is its focus on the exorcism duo as protagonists equal to the haunted couple. By depicting the Warrens as grounded folks who just happen to have made their careers in the occult, it makes the proceedings feel more plausible.

Directed by James Wan (“Saw”), “The Conjuring” starts out rather slowly, but when things get into full brimstone-and-holy-water mode, it’s a heckuva thrill ride.

Extras are just so-so. The DVD comes with a single featurette, “Scaring the ‘@$*%’ Out of You.’ Upgrade to the Blu-ray combo, and you add two more features: “The Conjuring: Face-to Face with Terror,” a making-of documentary, and “A Life in Demonology,” a look at the real-life Warrens.

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Review: "The Conjuring"

"The Conjuring" dredges up nearly every trope of the exorcism subgenre of horror, and faithfully puts its characters and the audience through the paces. It doesn't do much of anything that we haven't seen before, but what it does it does mostly well.

Director James Wan gained notoriety with "Saw," kicking off the (thankfully) now-waning "torture porn" fad. Here he turns to more cerebral frights, based on building a sense of dread mixed with sudden scares. The first half really drags, but once they get to the hard stuff of demonic possessions and thrashing exorcisms, it's a genuine thrill.

(I should point out that the R rating from the MPAA seems hard to justify. There is no cursing, sex or drugs, and though there is a constant threat of violence, very little of it actually occurs. "Overly forbidding" wouldn't seem to be part of the association's charter, but there you have it.)

Usually with these sorts of movies, the focus is on the family plagued with an ominous spirit, and the paranormal experts show up about halfway through. Here, the demonologists are just as much a part of the story as the haunted.

Like many movies of this ilk, we're assured that the events we're seeing are based on a true story. Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) were real-life occult investigators, who tried for decades to get a movie made about themselves. The idea is that although they have a really strange job, the Warrens are perfectly normal folks with a strong marriage, Christian values and a loving daughter.

We get to see them presenting film and audiotapes of their disturbing cases on college campuses, and it's pretty eye-opening stuff. One possessed man has bloody tears and speaks Latin, despite having only a third-grade education. Of course, what they encounter in the movie is far worse than anything they've seen before.

Parallel to the Warrens' story is the Perrons, Carolyn and Roger (Lili Taylor and Ron Livingston). It's 1971 and they have just bought an old farmhouse cheap at auction to live with their five daughters, ranging in age from cute little pixie to surly teen. The house seems like a dream come true until, as they say, strange things star to happen.

Things go bump without explanation, clocks stop at precisely 3:07 a.m. every night, and the younger girls start to see things looming in dark spaces. They bust through a boarded-up stairwell and find a basement loaded with all sorts of cool stuff that just screams, "Evil spirits residing here!"

The strength of the film is depicting the Warrens as careful, rational people with lives outside their demon-hunting. For instance, Lorraine is a clairvoyant, meaning she can get a sense of the spiritual aura of things and people just by being near them. But their ghostly encounters each cost her a little piece of her own emotional stability.

Farmiga brings a matter-of-fact calm to her role, an unflashy sort of competence and groundedness that offsets nicely with her character's supernatural talents. The kid actors all acquit themselves nicely, particularly Joey King as the initial target of the spirit's ire.

I respected the craft with which "The Conjuring" was made, and its attempt to insert a little sober rationality into a familiar ghost story. It won't haunt your dreams, but this film will creep you out sufficiently for a couple of hours.