Tag Archives: Dwayne Johnson

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May 20, 2017

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F8 of the Furious

OK, it’s time to fill your tank, strap yourself in and forget everything you learned in science class. We have another entry in “The Fast and the Furious” franchise to watch.This logic defying, cheesy dialogue spewing, CGI mismash, is what I like to refer to as “Craptacular”. It doesn’t need to make any sense, it just needs to entertain us for a couple hours on a sunny weekend afternoon after we’ve had a nice lunch and we are looking for some air conditioned silliness. “F8 of the Furious” as I insist it should be spelled, has a lot of things going for it despite the cockamamie story telling, paper thin characterization and 1000 yard stare machismo. I don’t anticipate these films like some people do, In fact I was not even sure I would see this one. But when the history of my life is written, I won’t hate myself for having enjoyed these movies a bit. They feel like summer.

From where I sit, the best things about this series are it’s most recent additions. I missed the film where Dwayne Johnson first showed up as a character in these, but he is a guy that oozes charisma. Jason Statham is in his third one of these movies, having a brief cameo in 6 and then being the main bad guy in 7. Whatever they are paying these guys it is worth it because they inject the most energy into the movies of any of the actors. Kurt Russell shows up in a suit and tie for a few scenes, and his swaggering smarminess as a spook with no name, brings a smile to my face. If only Scott Eastwood were as much fun as the intern version of Russell’s character.

Two new additions for this film are the ladies that figure heavily in the plot. Charlize Theron steps in as the villain for this edition of the story. She has tightly weaved hair extensions and a badass attitude. It looks like she was saving all her action chops for “Atomic Blonde” later this summer, because in her role as Cipher, she primarily barks orders and frantically types. In another of the mindless film sequences over the years, cyber hackers attack, block and outwit each other as we see who can really reach 70 words a minute on their laptop. Maybe if we edit it together tightly enough and inject some screen shots of computer graphics, it will feel like an action piece. [No it doesn’t]. After giving us a dozen reasons to hate her and be ready to cheer for the comeuppance that we have been waiting for, there is an unsatisfactory close to her story. In all probability, we will see the same plot twist that has happened in every one of these films happen in the next one. Also stepping in in a brief scene is Dame Helen Mirren. She doesn’t get to do much but she can act everyone else in the film right off the screen just by sitting there.

For thirteen years people have piled on Pierce Brosnon’s last outing as 007, for some of the same reasons that they have embraced this franchise. CGI cars that defy gravity, preposterous super villains with all powerful knowledge, stunts that induce as much laughter as excitement, and jokes that don’t produce either laughter or much character. With the exception of Statham’s sequence on a plane, the humor here largely falls flat. Since I am at heart a sentimentalist, I sometimes find myself being drawn into the “Family” motif that strings these films together. Who doesn’t like a hardy laugh as you celebrate your victory of a new bad guy by breaking bread and forming an alliance with the last bad guy. As I said earlier, it doesn’t make a lot of sense but cracking the whip on a movie like this is a little like kicking a puppy. It ties so hard to please you that it is just wrong to punish it when it drops a turd on your carpet. fate_of_the_furious_ver3

If you think you can take a giant grain of salt and choke it down, than you will almost certainly enjoy a car chase with a submarine, or a parachute jump that would make D.B. Cooper proud. You probably won’t care that a convoluted double cross is arranged without any explanation or that people leaping out of cars traveling well in excess of the speed limit results in no physical consequences. “The Rock” doesn’t need the force to levitate his opponents off the ground, Statham doesn’t need gravity to interfere with a good fight or foot chase, and Vin Diesel doesn’t need to act to star in a movie. All of these things are still more believable than finding enough clear road to chase on in New York City on a weekday afternoon.

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December 4, 2016

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Moana

 

Back in 1991, I took my two small children, 3 and 5 at the time, to see “Beauty and the Beast“. It was one of my favorite memories of their childhood and my fatherhood. They loved the movie and my oldest was so passionately involved that she cried out to warn Belle and the Beast when the villagers are led by Gaston in an attack on the castle. Three years ago, I saw “Frozen” and I imagined that little girls would love it much as my kids had responded to the ’91 film, and it seems they did. My youngest daughter, 26 at the time was unimpressed, and while I thought it was a fine film, it did not have the same impact on me as the early film did. Today I saw a movie that reminded me so much of that late November 1991 experience, I wished I had two small children to share it with. Nostalgia, not being what it once was, leaves me to respond to this movie mostly on my own. “Moana” is great.

Pins a got as a Premiere Stubbs Card Holder at The AMC Theater Today

I don’t think I even saw a teaser for the movie before we went today. I’d listened to a podcast or two where it had been discussed, and since I mostly avoid reading reviews until after I have seen a movie, this was really more surprise than I had anticipated. The look of the animation is marvelous. The characters are designed to accurately depict south sea island people and the characters of “Moana”, her father and grandmother but especially “Maui” are spectacularly authentic and beautiful. The opening sequence with Moana as a toddler, being called to the ocean is charming as all get out. Even the animated water tentacle that reminded me so much of the early CGI work in “The Abyss” had personality to it. The island home is lush and the people, songs and way of life are the sorts of things that drab landlubbers are going to dream of when they imagine escaping to a deserted island and retiring to the good life.

There are some of the same patterns of defiance, growth and independence by a young girl that I saw in the story of Belle 25 years ago. There is also a character song like in so many of these films, where the heroine sings of her dreams and obligations and the burden that she feels. So it might seem that the story is conventional Disney Princess territory. I think that’s going to be a cliche that gets used anytime a young girl is the featured character in a Disney story and I think it’s a little unfair. “Moana” is very different, especially in one of the most important ways. Unlike Ariel, Belle, Mulan, Rapunzel and the rest, there is no love story here. Romance is not part of this equation, unless you count the love that Moana has for her island home and people. This is a very straightforward quest film with high adventure and a lot of humor built in, but there is no subplot about marriage or choosing the one you feel the most for. The writers of the story seem to have drawn heavily from Polynesian mythology, but almost certainly there are the usual Disney variations to keep the story on track and simplify the points being made. I thought it was a unique perspective and made the peoples of the area so interesting to me. There were some similar themes in “Whale Rider” from 2002.

Auli’i Cravalho is a nice discovery as the voice of “Moana”. I loved the line readings she gives as she practices the speech she plans on giving to Maui when she tracks him down. The greatest treasure in the film however is the presence of a man who might have at one time been a punchline in the film business, but today stands astride the movie world as a major star and an ambassador of goodwill from film makers everywhere. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has charisma oozing out of his whole body, and it fills the screen here, even though he does not appear on the screen and only his voice is used to act his character. The animators do their job to make Maui fun and interesting. He is a bit of a goat to begin with, but a very confident demi-god and able to ignore his own transgression, up to a point. His performance of the Lin-Manuel Miranda song, “You’re Welcome”, is right up there with “Gaston” and “Prince Ali” as odes to characters that are self inflated and hysterical at the same time. The use of tribal tattoos on his body to tell his backstory and his faults is a brilliant story telling trick that works very well for an animated feature. It’s one of the many things that reminded me of that soon to be live action film, just as the film makers in Beauty and the Beast found a way to make the story sing with the anthropomorphic furniture, the drawing on Maui’s body let us know more about the character without having to leave the main plot.

There are at least two very entertaining sequences where Maui and Moana have to work together to overcome adversaries. The Kakamora warrior attack will remind you of every Mad Max film. The chase across the ocean looks like something right out of “Fury Road”. While I was less impressed with the fight against Tamatoa, the jewel encrusted crab monster, it still had a number of clever bits to it and again, it shows the creativity of the film from a number of different points. There were times in which I felt I was watching something a little more strange than is expected from a Disney film. The Ocean voyage was sometimes reminiscent of a Japanese Anime film. There were some meta jokes about the whole “Princess” concept, and the focus on the two main characters was much more involved than the usual pack of side kicks and comic relief.

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This has been a particularly good year for animated features.

For once , Pixar is unlikely to be the favorite at Oscar Time. I might still give the edge to “Kubo and the Two Strings”, but “Moana” is a worthy entry and I thought it was very much more fulfilling than even some of the most financially successful animated films this year. If you have kids, take them and make it a special holiday excursion. Get them some popcorn, go Christmas shopping afterwards, and laugh with them over the jokes in this movie. I think you will be making a memory for them which will be something they can treasure decades from now. I wish I had grand kids that I could have taken to see this movie, but if you go because of anything I wrote here, it will be a little bit like I was there, taking you to see it. Merry Christmas memories to you.

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June 18, 2016

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Central Intelligence

 

Let’s start with a little critical thinking lesson. Sign reasoning is the basic concept that is easily explained by the old phrase, “If it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, and it walks like a duck… than it’s probably a duck.”  Now here is where the critical thinking comes in, how certain is the relationship between the signs and the conclusion?  Today’s movie offers us several signs that it is a problem, before a single moment of the film runs. First, it’s a mismatched buddy film featuring a C.I.A. plot. Second, the trailer features a cheap CGI joke about a fat kid singing in the shower getting bullied. Third, it stars Kevin Hart, a comedian and actor that I have rarely found to be funny. You put those things together and the conclusion is that this film is a piece of crap. To test the validity of the conclusion we might look for other signs that would reinforce the original point. For a guy like me, who grew up in the golden ages of poster art, the visual image on the poster, with the bright yellow background screams “Turd”.

Now, let’s point out the weakness of this conclusion using the other tests of sign reasoning, are there any contradictory signs?  Before seeing a frame of the movie, I can say there are two signs that might undermine the conclusion above. First, Kevin Hart is balanced out by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Maybe you haven’t noticed yet but “The Rock” has become a legitimate movie star and he exudes charisma in everything he’s been in.  [As a caveat to the argument, he has been in a lot of crappy pictures, but they were not bad because of him.] Second, the marketing team has had one great idea to sell this film with, a pun based on the names of the two stars. It’s not much but I’m a Dad and everyone knows that Dad’s like bad puns. In one of my classes this last quarter, I had a student take it upon himself to keep a tally of all the bad puns I made in class. He had me over 150, which for a class that meets twice a week averages almost 4 bad puns an hour, and by the way, more than 40% of class time is taken up by student performance, so if we calculate based on my speaking time the average is well over ten an hour. Which explains why I appreciated the “Little Hart/Big Johnson” tag line, despite it’s low brow approach.

Drawing inferences from the above issues, I think it is safe to say I probably would stay away from a film like this for the most part. So how, you might ask, did I end up seeing it?  Now it’s time for a little cause-effect reasoning. It’s hot here this weekend, and the theater is cold. Also, “Finding Dory” is off limits until my daughter can go with us. Finally, a little disjunctive deductive reasoning, my alternatives for the time we had were “Warcraft” “X-Men Apocalypse” “Now You See Me 2” and “Me Without You”. I barely escaped the wheelchair love story, and everything else looked worse.

Having rationalized my way into the film, “How was it?” The answer is, …not as bad as you might think. Although Kevin Hart did not do much for me, he did not undermine the film and there were a couple of places where he delivered a pretty fair line or two. I could have done without the string of dialogue he throws out when describing his character as being scarred “S***less”, but maybe his audience likes that kind of humor. Johnson on the other hand seems to be having a ball, and he actually conveys a series of convincing emotions, which are supposed to be contradictory because we are not really supposed to understand his real character. It’s all very convoluted and not important except to say that once again, the man once known as “The Rock” is worth every penny he was paid to be a part of this film.

The movie trades on cliches in some deliberate ways, but it also repeats some cliches without the irony that would make them less likely to choke us. There are two surprise cameo appearances and both actors add a little something to the film that it needed to avoid being dreck. I was pleasantly surprised by last year’s “Spy” which covers some of the same territory. This is not quite as satisfying and I can’t recommend it highly, but if you have no air conditioning, and you want a couple of laughs, this film will kill two hours and not too many brain cells.

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May 31, 2015

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San Andreas

I understand the commerce behind a film like this. Big action, a big star, and over the top visual sequences make money. Look, I put down my twelve bucks so I guess I should not complain too much, except what does it say about me and the rest of humanity when we watch disaster porn? Are we confronting our fears and our own mortality or are we revealing in the destruction and enjoying watching millions of people die? I just can’t answer. I feel a little dirty but it is also such a stupid movie that I feel silly for feeling guilty, talk about mixed emotions.

Southern California is the only home I have ever known, and I know that we are all going to be very unhappy when the “Big One” does show up. I rode out the 1971 quake in Sylmar, the 87 Whittier Narrows Quake that killed my hometown theater, and the 94 Northridge quake which made the area sit up and beg. Every once in a while we get a good sized movement of the earth that reminds us that stuff is happening below our feet. This movie wants to bitch slap you into alertness and then make you care about five people while the whole west coast is going to hell in a handbasket. If anyone is better prepared as a result of seeing this, that would be a good thing. The problem is that this movie suggests that we are all pretty much screwed unless we have a helicopter, a plane and a boat at our disposal. Also, pack Dwayne Johnson in your EQ kit because mere mortals are not going to survive without this kind of hero.

The former “Rock” has been a movie star for fifteen years now. He is in one of the biggest franchises in Hollywood, and he gets better as an actor each time out while keeping the charisma that made him a star wrestler before he moved over to the silver screen. He loads this unbelievably derivative story on his broad shoulders and powers though it as if it were Shakespeare. He does not play it camp and he does a credible job playing the hero that everyone will need in a disaster. If Liam Neeson and others are the Old Guy fantasy of competence, Johnson is right there with them, assuming the old guys look like Arnold Schwarzenegger reborn.

Take three parts “Earthquake”, one part “The Towering Inferno”, one part “The Poseidon Adventure”, throw in a dash of “2012” and “The Day After” and you have this movie. Match it with state of the art visual effects to depress the hell out of anyone who remembers 9/11 and you will see what I mean. This movie is cheesy as hell but also sadly familiar. I spent hours watching tsunami videos after the Japanese disaster a few years ago, and I felt like a gawker at the scene of a car accident, but still not able to look away. The dramatic action scenes in this movie still manage to involve you because the main characters are likable and we have followed them through the whole story, but look around and there are a hundred other stories that end in tragedy every time our leads make it thorough ( which they would never do it this was real.)

Paul Giamatti is credible as a Cal Tech scientist, and he adds a little gravitas to the proceedings but the whole scenario is so over the top that in the long run it does not matter. If you can swallow your self loathing and just load up on popcorn, you will be moderately entertained. If you are at all conflicted about the idea, then maybe you should wait for the next comic book movie, where it is easier to laugh off the ludicrous amount of destruction as just being a movie.