[Solid Rock Fist Up]

If you don’t know them already, you should really spend some time looking through the Vimeo page of DANIELS, the directing team of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. They’ve been making all of your favorite music videos and commercials for years and you didn’t even know.

Now their first feature, Swiss Army Man, is in theaters, and it is the same mix of silly, wildly imaginative and emotionally moving as their earlier work. It’s not a perfect film, but it’s a solid first feature from a directing duo with enormous potential.

Go see Swiss Army Man so you can say you knew DANIELS when. Watch my review for KCTV5 below.

The Coens’Hail, Caesar! disappoints us, Deadpool is a pleasant HARD R surprise, and Zoolander 2 is a deuce. Check out Trevan’s and Trey’s full review below.

This movie review of The Expendables 3 appears on Lawrence.com. Video review from KCTV5 This Morning.

[Minor Rock Fist Down]

Every single moment of The Expendables 3 is entirely familiar.

Its about as middling an action movie you can get, despite the fact that it stars Harrison Ford, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Mel Gibson—three former A–listers of the genre.

Of course, these former heavyweights are all brought together for approximately 15 minutes of screen time each by Sylvester Stallone; he of the frozen, expressionless face. It’s the third movie in the all-star “old dogs” action series, one that has already included actors like Bruce Willis, Chuck Norris, and Jean-Claude Van Damme.

The lazy screenplay, co-written by Stallone, has the ex-elite military team-turned mercenaries tracking down one of their own, and it runs through just about every action cliché in the book.

It opens with the obligatory rescue scene, where the Expendables break out knife-wielding badass Wesley Snipes from a moving train as he’s being transferred to another high-security prison. It features the standard montage where Stallone gathers new recruits in exotic locales as Kelsey Grammer narrates their skills—and the pair comes upon each recruit just as they’re about to illustrate said skills. And it has scene after scene of the Expendables walking away from huge explosions (or just escaping them) without looking back.

The action sequences are mostly uninspired messes with a lot of random shooting and bad guys biting the dust left and right. Since this is the first PG-13 film in the series, there’s no blood of course. But not all the tenets of Stallone’s heyday are respected. Perhaps to keep the budget below $100 million, there’s also an over-reliance on CGI. Can’t we just blow up a helicopter like the old days anymore? Do we have to replace it with half-rendered computer effects? Rambo would not be proud.

The dialogue fits into one of three categories: It’s either jokes about being old, simplified exposition, or unearned moments where characters talk wistfully of fallen comrades and brotherhood. If there’s one saving grace of The Expendables 3, it’s that some of the jokes, delivered by these very familiar faces, are mostly good-natured and less often, funny.

Arnie and Snipes get self-referential lines, Mel Gibson is hammy as hell, and Antonio Banderas occasionally livens things up—even if he is basically doing a low-rent, live-action version of Puss in Boots.

There are no surprises to be found here. The Expendables 3 is exactly what you’d think it is—a disappointing mish-mash of a throwback, trading in on its star power, with its eye safely fixed on producing more sequels.

A slightly shorter version of this movie review appears at Lawrence.com. TV review coming from KCTV5 This Morning.

[Solid Rock Fist Up]

Marvel’s new film Guardians of the Galaxy may have its connections—however slight—to the cinematic superhero universe it has been building for years, but it’s not a superhero movie at all. It has way more in common with George Lucas’ original 1977 space opera Star Wars. It isn’t quite ridiculous enough to be a straight-up parody of Lucas’ film, but it’s so cheeky and self-aware that you’d be forgiven for thinking that.

Chris Pratt (from TV’s Parks and Recreation) plays Peter Quill, an everykid who is unexpectedly whisked away from his home planet of Earth to find himself cruising in a spaceship to faraway lands, in search of meaning and the truth about his father’s identity. But Quill (who calls himself Star Lord) is not just some ordinary Luke Skywalker clone. He’s also equal parts Han Solo—a cocksure intergalactic scavenger who squeaks out a living stealing valuable objects and selling them to the highest bidder to pay for his beloved spacecraft.

One such object he gets his hands on is an all-powerful orb that everyone else in the galaxy is apparently searching for too. The movie, co-written and directed by Troma graduate James Gunn, is so self-conscious of its familiar plot machinations that it calls out this MacGuffin with a jab from Quill, who says the orb gives off a “shiny suitcase, Ark of the Covenant, Maltese Falcon kind of vibe.”

But Guardians of the Galaxy isn’t just about one guy’s struggle to find his way in an uncaring universe. Along the way, he meets four other outcasts—a green-skinned orphan-turned-assassin named Gamora (Zoe Saldana), a tattooed musclehead who doesn’t understand metaphors named Drax the Destoyer (Dave Bautista), a kindhearted tree-person with a limited vocabulary named Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), and Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper), the genetically-altered talking raccoon with a chip on his shoulder the size of Centauri IV.

The soundtrack to the film is as quirky as it’s post-modern take on the genre. 70s pop hits dot the film, introduced by Quill’s Walkman cassette player. Besides being an emotional connection to his past life on Earth, these cheery tunes provide an ironic juxtaposition to the seriousness of the typical life-and-death situations he and his compatriots often find themselves in, and frankly, are a welcome lighthearted change from the dismal action fare of late.

Sure, there’s a ton of expositional blather involving planets and interstellar races you’ve never heard of, and goofy quasi-generic sci-fi names like Yondu, Nebula, and Ronan. But there’s also a surprising undercurrent of investment in the characters, especially considering the insane amount of creatively designed CGI alien landscapes and sets that whizz by.

Quill’s outward bravado masks an inner sensitivity and insecurity that is shared by all of the misfits. Pratt plays it perfectly, and the script gives us just enough of his backstory to keep us grounded, while dropping clues to the others’ tough lives and their shared need for redemption.

Cooper and the digital artists that created Rocket also deserve huge props for filling their CGI raccoon with such verve and capacity for generating sympathy. The movie is too on-the-nose about it, but it is as much an ode to friendship as it is a rollicking action-adventure in space.

There’s plenty of action, of course, but it’s the heart and humor, delivered consistently throughout Guardians of the Galaxy, that make this tongue-in-cheek space opera the perfect fit for the 21st Century. Adults can get a kick out of how the movie tweaks the ever-so-familiar formula, while kids can marvel at the thrilling heroes’ journey and feel a little less alone in the world.

This movie review of Life Itself appears at Lawrence.com, video review from KCTV This Morning.

[Solid Rock Fist Up]

The new documentary Life Itself opens with a quote from its subject, beloved late film critic Roger Ebert:

“The movies are like a machine that generates empathy. It lets you understand a little bit more about different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us.”

For the following two hours, Life Itself (opening at Tivoli Cinemas in Kansas City and now playing on iTunes and VOD) generates not only empathy, but admiration for the man who exposed so many unknown films and filmmakers to the world at large.

The movie was directed by one of those filmmakers — Steve James — whose remarkable 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams got distribution and became a hit almost solely on the recommendation of Ebert and his former onscreen reviewing partner, Gene Siskel.

Adapting Ebert’s 2011 memoir, James juggles multiple facets of Ebert’s life — his formative years as a journalist, his early alcoholism, his complicated relationship/rivalry with Siskel, the marriage that changed his life, and his effect on the movie industry in general. All of these stories are framed within the bigger story from which the film (and book) derives its title. Like the book, Life Itself achieves a quiet peace about the specter of death.

Interspersed with footage shot from Ebert’s hospital room, where he spent a lot of time fighting thyroid and salivary gland cancer — and multiple surgeries that left him without a lower jaw — the movie documents not only Ebert’s courage in his final years, but also his eventual acceptance that his life was winding down.

James narrates the film, and punctuates it with revealing email Q&As that slowly become more difficult for the normally enthusiastic writer to respond to. This framing device gives the entire movie a reflective tone and makes Ebert’s story even more poignant.

I think Ebert would be proud of the even-handed treatment he’s given as a movie character. While Life Itself makes clear the influence Ebert had on generations of filmgoers, writers, and thinkers (myself included), it also spotlights his irascible side.

His and Siskel’s passion for film and obsession with being “correct” led to petty arguments (many of them hilarious, caught in outtakes from their TV shows). And although Ebert says that his blog (which contained some of his most open-hearted writing) became his voice after losing the ability to speak, his frustration often swells at the state of his health, and James doesn’t shy away from tense moments.

Besides being an invaluable primer on the life of a man who was omnipresent in any discussion about movies for over 40 years, Life Itself has a surprising amount of raw emotion. There’s no doubt that to achieve that, James had to sacrifice more in-depth examination of Ebert’s most cherished written content (he was the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize), but the resulting film is more cinematic for it.

Plato says that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” and this touching documentary makes a powerful statement about a rich life lived at the movies, examining life.

This movie review of Transformers: Age of Extinction originally appeared on Lawrence.com. TV review from KCTV5 It’s Your Morning.

[Rock Fist Way Down]

Transformers: Age of Extinction isn’t so much a movie as it is a 165-minute propaganda film made to appeal to the widest demographic possible (it’s full of gorgeous people running from gorgeous explosions set to the new single by Imagine Dragons) — but mainly for China.

And when Michael Bay is the man in charge of the message, you know exactly what you’re going to get.

Because this fourth Transformers film is the longest of the ever-declining series, that means more low-angle, swirling camera, Bay-style U.S.A. propaganda than ever.

Dividing this typically bombastic outpouring of Bay’s over-testosteroned male psyche into two halves, let’s tackle the introduction of new characters in the first. There’s no mention of nerd-turned-stud Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) from the first three films, but there’s an equally clichéd iconic American type in his place. Mark Wahlberg plays Cade Yeager (yes, you read that name right), a muscle-bound everyman who has more American flags in his barnyard shop than all of Arlington National Cemetery.

Cade embodies the true American spirit, in that he’s an inventor who wants to make a difference. No really, the buff dude with the handsome rugged looks who could bench-press a couple hundred easy is an inventor. Because he wears glasses — glasses that he doesn’t need later when he’s shooting giant alien-made laser guns at Decepticons.

He’s also an over-protective widowed dad who doesn’t want anyone ogling his beautiful teenage daughter with the short shorts (Nicola Peltz), as Bay’s camera ogles said short shorts over and over again.

The sun-drenched Texas plains where fields of corn grow high is a great place for a modern country music video, which also makes it perfect for some traditional American mythmaking. When Cade stumbles upon an old, beat-up truck and it turns out to be the missing and wanted Autobot leader Optimus Prime (voiced again by Peter Cullen), he does the honorable thing and sticks up for him while evil government agents try to destroy the misunderstood Transformer.

Optimus Prime, as we all know by now, is a freedom-loving protector of humans. And as a poster on the wall in the CIA reads, “Freedom isn’t free,” which means that shadowy U.S. intelligence power player Kelsey Grammer wants to kill the freedom-loving Transformers and make his own — to keep America free and make himself rich.

There’s plenty of product placement (“I drive for Red Bull!” says another impossibly good-looking character) and the expected one-upping of Transformer-on-Transformer violence, but it’s the second half of the movie that really drives home the point.

Corn-fed Americana is Bay’s chief export, but our country’s market is minuscule compared with the money that will be made by this film in China. So when Transformers: Age of Extinction literally moves to China (to qualify as a co-production and give it more play there), it’s not that unexpected. It’s just really tasteless. A factory for mass-producing human-made Transformers is discovered — and guess where its located?

The rest of the film is a tired, humorless (although weak attempts at humor are made) slog of actors debasing themselves (poor Stanley Tucci) and at least four different clans of Transformers and “Creators” (huh?) destroying tenements and skyscrapers in Beijing and Hong Kong.

Amidst a plot that spirals completely into incoherence, Cade Yeager does the honorable thing again and again, proving to Optimus Prime that these puny humans are worth saving — especially the ones from Texas.

This review of The Rover appears originally at Lawrence.com. TV review from KCTV5’s It’s Your Morning.

[Solid Rock Fist Up]

It may be set in some kind of vague dystopian near-future, but The Rover isn’t a sci-fi story at all.

The dusty Australian backdrop, the heightened mood of constant danger, and Guy Pearce’s mysterious loner character give the deceptively simple film away as a spaghetti western.

The opening title states that this film, which is nothing if not tense, is set “10 years after the collapse.” There’s no outwardly futuristic giveaway to further clue us in on this fact, however. It’s relevant mainly because it amplifies the characters’ naked desperation and complete lack of honor — even among thieves.

The Rover follows the stop-at-nothing quest of one man to get his car back. Pearce’s Eric is a sullen bastard who speaks as little as possible, as if he’s reserving all his energy to squash the bugs that get in his way. One such bug is Rey (Robert Pattinson), the simple-minded young man at the receiving end of that lack of honor.

Injured in a shootout as part of a gang, he was left behind to die in the sun by his own brother. When Eric meets him by chance, he realizes Rey’s connection to the men who took his car and takes him hostage, setting course for their hideout.

On the way out of the theater, I overheard someone saying that The Rover reminded them of Mad Max. I’m not sure whether they meant the low-budget 1979 original or its 1981 sequel The Road Warrior, but I think The Rover has more in common with Of Mice and Men. Certainly the setting, the violence and the revenge-style plot bring to mind Mel Gibson roaming the Australian Outback, but John Steinbeck’s novella has some serious thematic ties that are worth considering. At the end of the day, The Rover is all about companionship.

When things turn violent, they do so with shocking suddenness. This isn’t the kind of movie where anonymous “bad guys” are dispatched quickly in thrillingly choreographed, high-stakes shootouts. Death is a one-on-one affair, and it usually happens at close range, even as it comes almost casually to at least one character.

Writer/director David Michôd’s previous film Animal Kingdom profiled desperate people as well, exploring the twisted underbelly of a modern-day crime family. Both films are set among the fringes of society and feature young men who challenge the prevailing bleakness of their situation by trying to make real connections with people.

Animal Kingdom earned Jacki Weaver a surprise Oscar nomination as the conniving matriarch, and The Rover features equally strong performances from both Pearce and Pattinson. Pattinson is virtually unrecognizable, while Pearce anchors the film and gives it the hefty emotional weight a story like this needs.

It’s not a pleasant movie, but The Rover twists genre tenets to expose the need for connective tissue that lies somewhere beneath the dark depths of men’s souls.

This review of Maleficent appears originally at Lawrence.com. TV review from KCTV5’s It’s Your Morning.

There’s a telling scene toward the beginning of Maleficent, a revisionist retelling of Sleeping Beauty from Disney, the same studio that made the classic fairy tale famous again with its animated version in 1959.

For a brief moment, outside the contrived conflict that surrounds this revenge-turned-sweet story, the young faery Maleficent (played as an adult by Angelina Jolie) doesn’t really have anything to do.

She’s already met the man of her dreams — a young boy whom she grew close with and has since disappeared into the world of humans — so all she does is fly around Faeryland saying “hi” to everyone while she pines for her lost love.

The next time he sees her, he performs an act of extreme cruelty that alters her life forever.

Huh?

There’s several moments in the PG-rated, live-action but heavily CGI Maleficent where the titular character sits around watching other people and waiting for things to happen. That could be because in order to re-invent the Brothers Grimm fairy tale (and original Disney version) from the villainess’s point of view, there were bound to be a lot of things that don’t make sense, such as believable motivations.

Although it may sound like I’m getting too “deep” for a kid’s movie, some kind of internal life for the main character would have been nice. You can’t cheat, even when you’re aiming for a younger audience. Children can tell when something’s amiss in the storytelling department.

The heavy lifting in the character department, then, is all done by Jolie because Maleficent has little more than a couple of thinly developed and somewhat jarring plot points to turn her from innocent faery to malevolent witch.

On the positive side, all is not completely lost. Maleficent has its charms, however shallow they may be. Jolie’s already angular features are emphasized by Rick Baker’s makeup effects and caricatured even further by impressive digital sculpting to recall the classic animated look of the 1959 movie. As Princess Aurora, Elle Fanning is her usual ebullient self, and Sam Riley is credible and surprisingly warm for the barely-there role of Diaval, Maleficent’s asexual raven-turned-human companion.

But the script, at least partially written (and endlessly revised, according to reports) by Linda Woolverton (who wrote The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast) leaves the actors and digital artists to try to make movie magic out of nothing.

This review of X-Men: Days of Future Past  originally appeared on Lawrence.com. TV review from KCTV5 It’s Your Morning.

Since Bryan Singer‘s X-Men debuted in 2000, Hollywood has given us three different Incredible Hulks, two Spider-Men, two more Supermen, and has abandoned and already started rebooting the Fantastic Four and Daredevil. The filmic legacy of the X-Men before now spanned six uneven movies and covers confusing timelines that date back to the 1800s.

With the release of the new X-Men: Days of Future Past, that timeline now extends into the dark future of 2023, where giant robots called Sentinels oppress humankind and mutants alike. At times, Singer’s new film — and his first return to the X-Men since the series-high X2: X-Men United in 2003 — feels like an alternate history lesson. He and screenwriter Simon Kinberg have the formidable task of bringing together plot threads and character motivations from films with differing tones.

I’m not going to lie. It is challenging to digest all the details of a time-travel story that flashes back and forth between alternate realities in 1973 and 50 years from then, but X-Men: Days of Future Past works mainly because it keeps its emotional reality rooted in the familiar struggles of its characters.

Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan are back as frenemies Professor X and Magneto, played in 1973 (like they were in 2011’s X-Men: First Class) by James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender respectively. It’s not clear, and certainly not advisable, from a plot standpoint exactly why Wolverine (series mainstay Hugh Jackman) must break Magneto out of prison in 1973, but certain lapses in logic must be accepted to buy into the general premise, which is essentially “getting the band back together” in a past that never was — to change the future.

As always, the threat of mutants to the human population is at the core of the conflict, with the Professor and Magneto on opposite sides (in the past at least) and Wolverine struggling with his immortality. But Jennifer Lawrence‘s tormented Mystique is the surprising center of the movie, since a crucial decision that she makes in 1973 sets the Sentinels on the path toward enslaving the planet.

Singer has a way of juggling an ensemble cast that includes almost 20 mutants that keeps X-Men: Days of Future Past on solid enough footing even when its multiple reality timeline bends and almost breaks. He narrows his focus on each character to a couple of defining traits and then illustrates those traits through action. One shining example of this is newcomer Evan Peters, who plays the lightning-fast and carefree Quicksilver. He steals the movie with one inventively funny slo-mo scene that’s shot from his perspective and tells you everything you need to know about him.

X-Men: Days of Future Past shows Singer exercising some much-needed control over the franchise he built 14 years ago and wrangling a lot of loose ends. It’s a welcome return, and although the material itself is a little unwieldy, it successfully brings together characterizations from the ’60s-set X-Men: First Class with the modern era ones.

There’s a certain amount of satisfaction just to be had in the fact that the new film isn’t a re-imagining — or a reboot with another origin story — even if Singer and Kinberg do pull a J.J. Abrams Star Trek-style move and sidestep consistency problems by using an “alternate reality.”

KCTV5

This Godzilla movie review originally appears at Lawrence.com. TV review from KCTV5’s It’s Your Morning.

What kind of a movie would waste the talents of Oscar nominees Sally Hawkins, David Strathairn, Ken Watanabe and Juliette Binoche?

A Godzilla movie, that’s what kind.

Another way to look at it is that Godzilla, the newest reboot of a franchise that started in Japan in 1954, didn’t waste these fine actors’ talents at all, but rather used their formidable reputations and screen presence to “class up” a genre that’s become synonymous with kitsch. Sure, most of them aren’t doing much more than delivering a bunch of junk-science exposition, but they deliver it convincingly and without a hint of irony.

The challenge for Godzilla director Gareth Edwards — the man who made the indie monster movie Monsters for $500,000 and did all the CGI effects himself on a laptop to save money — was to utilize the big studio budget to respect the tenets of the kaiju film, take the premise dead seriously, and create some actual awe-inspiring cinematic moments.

Considering the limitations of the genre, I’d say he more than succeeded.

Bryan Cranston sinks his teeth into what I’m calling the Richard Dreyfuss Close Encounters of the Third Kind role — the guy who knows something big and ominous is coming to the planet, and yet no one will listen to him. His name is Joe Brody (a nod to Chief Brody from Jaws?), and the first half of Godzilla is a series of glimpses that allude to a mythical backstory and build anticipation.

Some clever misdirection from screenwriters Max Borenstein and David Callaham toys with an audience that’s waiting with baited breath for the Godzilla reveal. But Edwards is in full Spielberg mode, alternating between monster teases and a straightforward story about a military lieutenant (a bland Aaron Taylor-Johnson) returning home to his family.

This foreboding aura finally manifests itself, and what Edwards and cinematographer Seamus McGarvey are so good at doing throughout all of the giant monster scenes is keeping them in perspective. For the CGI Godzilla to be truly jaw-dropping, a sense of scale has to be present at all times. To us, this towering dinosaur-like beast is unfathomably huge — and unstoppable. To Godzilla, we are insignificant, like insects. We’re just tiny creatures inhabiting the Earth at this point in time. He’s been here much, much longer and sees a bigger picture — literally.

This concept comes across naturally from the plot mechanics, but Edwards strengthens it visually as well, framing every shot of the monster with scale in mind. We see Godzilla through a car or bus window, over the shoulder of a human, from a bridge, and every other perspective you can think of.

In Pacific Rim, when a giant machine fights a giant monster in the middle of the ocean, there’s no reference point to reinforce the hugeness of the objects. But when Godzilla emerges from the ocean and there are people in the foreground on a bridge watching his giant iconic fins go by right in front of their eyes, you feel the creature’s size.

There are even a couple of bravura cinematic set pieces, like a thrilling skydiving sequence, shot with the smoking ruins of a city below. Alexandre Desplat’s score is also a standout, creating dread and menace with unsettling string arrangements, and punctuating the shocking moments with big bursts of brass and taiko drums that play like a darker take on classic ’50s sci-fi/horror.

Edwards’ movie also contains shades of the 1954 Godzilla, which was haunted by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, along with subtext about the dangers of nuclear power and man’s hubris that are especially relevant in the shadow of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster of 2011. Without revealing too much of the plot, let’s just say that the nuclear option is not a viable one, and man’s greatest threat turns out to be himself.

To pay tribute to the legacy of Godzilla without completely re-inventing it, one must have a certain amount of humans frantically scrambling to wrap their heads around the giant monster phenomenon and shouting clunky dialogue. But Edwards has cast his reboot well, and does a fantastic job of building suspense and preying on the audience’s apprehension.

Once the monster appears, it delivers on virtually every level. Driving around after the screening, it was impossible not to visualize a giant monster towering above and tearing through the Kansas City skyline as if it were so much trash strewn about the floor. Mission accomplished.

This movie review originally appears at Lawrence.com. Video review with clips coming soon from KCTV5 It’s Your Morning.

At its best, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is a deeply felt story of two young people who realize they are in a doomed relationship, but are too madly in love to stay apart.

As Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy, Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone (who became a real-life couple during the filming of 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man) radiate onscreen chemistry. And although they are both too old to play just-graduating high school students, it doesn’t really matter because of the obvious electricity being generated.

At its worst, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 — the second in a series that was rebooted just five years after the Tobey Maguire-led one died — is the ultimate litmus test for audiences who may be experiencing superhero fatigue.

It took new franchise director Marc Webb only two movies to essentially reach the point where old franchise leader Sam Raimi was on Spider-Man 3 — that is, a breaking point where there are too many supervillains and interweaving storylines for anything too truly take root.

With a total of four screenwriters (including the prolific and recently broken-up fantasy-franchise team of Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman) credited on the movie, I expected a frazzled kind of screenplay-by-committee approach. Knowing that Paul Giamatti, Jamie Foxx and Dane DeHaan were cast as comic-book mainstays Rhino, Electro, and the Green Goblin, respectively, I also expected lots of action and underdeveloped backstories.

Yet, like the first of Webb’s series in 2012, I was eventually won over by the film’s strict adherence to comic-book conventions and the keenly understood duality that is Spider-Man, a teenaged pop-culture icon that has endured since 1962 when he was created by Stan Lee.

Sometimes, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 feels like a movie from 1962. Foxx plays engineer Max Dillon the way Jerry Lewis might have played him, complete with greasy hair, pens in his shirt-pocket, and his pants pulled up too high. He’s an over-awkward and nerdy cliché in an age when being a nerd means something quite different than it did in the ’60s. (The nerds 50 years ago didn’t get $200 million movies created just for them.)

Foxx’s broad portrayal matches that of Giamatti, who hams it up to the nth degree, has zero backstory, and whose scenes exist essentially as a framing device. DeHaan fares better as a believable character, despite having to play catch up. Garfield and DeHaan make up for lost time quickly as orphaned Peter and his old pal Harry Osborn, having just lost his absent father, define their relationship as one based on shared loss.

Eventually, it’s this simple and smart adherence to what makes Spider-Man a great character that drives the film and keeps it resonant: It is easier now for people to relate to strained or missing paternal ties, both emotionally and physically.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t monstrous displays of the latest in 3-D computer-generated special effects and plot holes big enough to drive a hijacked truck full of plutonium through.

I will admit that seeing Spider-Man glide effortlessly through skyscrapers and traffic using his web shooters while cracking wise is still one of modern cinema’s greatest nostalgic pleasures, and Webb’s addition of the POV shot (also used in The Amazing Spider-Man) has added even more thrill-ride excitement to it. Some of the action scenes hearken back to the bullet-time stylings of The Matrix and prove an effective illustration of Spider-Man’s ability to make multiple split-second decisions while flying through the air, while others, for all their amazing detail and actualization, still feel like watching a video game.

As cutting-edge as its technology is, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 stubbornly adheres to old-school comic conventions. When it’s not tending directly to the emotional core of Peter Parker, it can sometimes feel like an episode of the cheesy ’60s Batman TV series. This may drive some audiences batty, but after I chose to accept it as a kind of classical tribute, I found the throwback strategy quite charming.

So it was even more of a surprise, then, to be so entirely moved by the film’s climax, followed by a creeping sense of disappointment as the movie tacks on an obligatory epilogue that sets up the next film.

In an age when a new superhero movie opens every couple weeks — over a summer that starts earlier every year — it doesn’t really stand out as anything groundbreaking. But it knows exactly what it is, and playing with classic themes that haven’t changed over 50 years means it will probably have a shelf-life of at least another 50.

This review appears originally on Lawrence.com. TV review from KCTV5 It’s Your Morning.

Filled with all kinds of opposing tendencies, Under the Skin is a movie that is by turns grimy and beautiful, confusing and enlightening, and vague yet specific. It’s been weeks since I’ve seen the film and I haven’t shaken it yet.

Under the Skin revels in the limited amount of information it gives you. Director Jonathan Glazer co-wrote the screenplay with Walter Campbell and the prevailing strategy is alienation. Despite the fact that it’s based on a book by Michel Faber, all the details seem to be left out, or at least open for interpretation.

Scarlett Johansson plays Laura, a being that comes to life following the death of a young Scottish woman. Glazer opens the film with a “birth” sequence that could have been ported straight in from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Punctuated with the harsh, squeaky tones of Mica Levi’s sometimes painful score and dialogue snippets of Laura testing out her voice, it’s completely disorienting and serves to put the audience in the same position as Johansson’s character, viewing this new world for the first time.

One scene that takes place on a beach is viewed with an unthinkable amount of dispassion for the human condition.

At its core, Under the Skin is an exploration of how a complete stranger to humankind might view us. Laura drives through the Scottish countryside into the gritty environs of working-class neighborhoods, trolling for men to lure into her van. Glazer’s camera often takes on her perspective, and the use of so many non-actors gives the film an authentic, docudrama feel — which is completely at odds with what happens next.

Once “she” finds a willing victim, the film gets vague again. We see what happens, but where exactly do they go and what exactly is happening? Glazer has designed a nightmare sequence that only gets more haunting and mysterious with return visits. Seeing the fate of Laura’s victims works both as a terrifying mounting terror and an allegory for our own physical alienation from our own bodies.

It isn’t too often that I can say I’ve seen something in a movie that I’ve never seen before.

Under the Skin is aptly named. It feels otherworldly, as it burrows itself into your subconscious. The languid pace gives plenty of time to digest the images and their meaning. On one level, the film explores the banality of base human desires, and the difference between simply being sentient and actually becoming sympathetic. As a movie-going experience, it is thrillingly alive, hearkening back to the heyday of ’70s art cinema.

This review originally appeared on Lawrence.com. Video review from KCTV5.

The independently produced horror movie Oculus, which opens in wide release this weekend across the U.S., has all the markings of a Jason Blum-produced movie.

Filmed almost entirely in one house on a very low budget with two almost-name actors (Katee Sackhoff from TV’s Battlestar Galactica and Rory Cochrane from Dazed and Confused), it adheres to the high-concept micro-budget ethos that has built Blum’s reputation in Hollywood. He has turned an enormous profit on similar films in the Paranormal Activity series, Insidious: Chapter 2 and The Purge.

Mike Flanagan is the co-writer and director of Oculus, which was developed with co-screenwriter Jeff Howard from Flanagan’s own 2006 short film. By design, it’s a psychological thriller masquerading as a haunted house movie, and Flanagan wisely avoids cheap jump scares in favor of letting the dread develop naturally.

Karen Gillan, a Scottish actress mainly known for her role on Doctor Who, plays Kaylie, a twentysomething antiques dealer who has finally come into possession of a mirror with supposed supernatural powers. Her younger brother Tim (played by Brenton Thwaites) is recently released from a mental hospital, and she convinces him to spend the night with the cursed mirror in the house where their parents (Sackhoff and Cochrane) were murdered. Tim has finally come to grips that his own delusions were the real cause of their childhood tragedy, but his sister clearly hasn’t.

What’s brilliant about the screenplay is that Kaylie introduces the “rules” of the mirror’s power right away, as well as her own carefully constructed plan to thwart the mirror and exact revenge. The film then flashes back and forth to the present-day plot while strategically filling in the backstory of that awful night 11 years ago. It’s an effective technique not just because it draws numerous parallels between stories, but because it constantly calls into question the sanity of all four characters.

Flanagan gets great mileage out of the fallible perspectives of Tim and Kaylie, putting the audience in their shoes as much as possible. How much of the narrative can we trust if the person conveying it has a possible mental illness?

Remove the supernatural threat and you have a film that preys on the sometimes scary dynamic of any dysfunctional family. Leave it in and you have a genuinely creepy ghost story that spotlights some nightmarish scenarios without resorting to gore.

This article appeared originally at Lawrence.com. Video from KCTV5 It’s Your Morning.

There is a moment in David Ayers’ moving police drama End of Watch when the two affable and dedicated LAPD officers played by Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña discover a pile of dismembered bodies in a house. It is an uncharacteristically gruesome moment in a movie filled with rich characterization — and it was jarring to say the least.

I am particularly saddened to report then that with Ayers’ newest film Sabotage, it seems that the writer/director has given in completely to what can now only be described as a fetish for shocking gore. Let’s be clear: I’m all for a good amount of gore when it’s appropriate — last year’s Evil Dead remake for example was a joyfully gory thrill ride — but Sabotage is a repellent action movie with absolutely no point, and may be the most miserable time I’ve had in a movie theater in years.

The film opens with promise. Arnold Schwarzenegger leads a gung-ho team of DEA agents (including Sam Worthington, Terrance Howard and Mireille Enos) who infiltrate a drug cartel and raid a safe house. The shoot-out that ensues is violent for sure, but it’s shot and edited with energy, and ends with one agent dead and the rest of the team hiding $2 million of the drug money they discover for themselves. But when they go back for it, it’s gone.

Sabotage is all downhill from there. There’s a ton of forced macho camaraderie among the team and a series of grisly murders that even Hannibal Lecter would find classless. Had there been any real development in any of the characters, perhaps it would have softened the blow of one of the most idiotic scripts in recent memory. Rewritten by Ayers from a screenplay by Skip Woods (A Good Day to Die Hard), Sabotage is nothing more than a revenge movie, and it’s a poor one at that, with a complete lack of compelling motivation and a contrived, roundabout scheme that rings hollow.

It’s up to the actors to breathe lives into their “characters” because there’s virtually nothing to distinguish any of them on the page. Josh Holloway is one of at least three team members who seem identical and just fade into the background, and as the only female of the group, Enos tries to make an impression, but in this all-dude tough-guy-athon, it’s a tough sell. Even investigator Olivia Williams, struggling to push down her British accent with a vaguely Southern drawl, can’t just be a powerful woman — she has to break down and sleep with one of these super manly men.

My father once said to me that he couldn’t watch The Sopranos because he didn’t like any of the characters on the show. I told him that this was one of the things that made the show so fascinating. Besides getting a peek inside a world you’ll never see, The Sopranos goes deep into the hopes and fears of all its richly drawn characters. Who cares if they’re all a bunch of sexist murderers? Finding out what makes them tick and reveling in the absurdity of their lives was what made that show — with unlikable characters — so compelling.

This film has all of the sexist murderers and none of the compelling. The “mystery” at its core ends up being solved with a shrug, because the reveal is so unlikely and unsatisfying. Of course, there’s another gruesome death scene, and the film drags on for —wait for it — another gratuitous shootout where scores of Mexican drug dealers and hookers are killed with impunity.

Sabotage is a cynical piece of trash that thinks it’s smarter than it is. It’s what happens when filmmakers mistake “violent” and “unlikable” as keywords for gritty adult entertainment. None of those traits matter if your movie is just plain stupid.

A different version of this article appears at Lawrence.com. Video from KCTV5 It’s Your Morning.

Ever since the Harry Potter and Twilight film series’ have struck gold, the young-adult fantasy section of bookstores has become fertile raiding ground for the next mega-hit franchise. But for every record-breaking Hunger Games, there’s an underwhelming Eragon or an also-ran like Percy Jackson.

The latest fant-angst-ical cash cow hopeful from Hollywood is based on a trilogy by Veronica Roth and it’s called Divergent.

What I want to know is this: Do young adult authors these days write these books with the foresight to know that they may be picked up and turned into lucrative movie franchises? Also: I understand that this genre takes teenage issues of alienation and self-discovery that feel like life and death, and blows them up into literal life-and-death situations, but do they have to be so goddamned obvious about it?

In the workmanlike Divergent, adapted by Evan Daugherty and Vanessa Taylor and directed by Neil Burger, a post-apocalyptic society in Chicago has been divided up into five cliques—I mean “factions.” And everywhere you go, the teens somehow outnumber the adults about 1,000 to one. The know-it-alls, the geeks, the jocks, the smart-asses, and the Jesus freaks are clearly defined groups, and it can be tough if you don’t fit in anywhere.

These cliques—sorry, factions—all play their specific roles in the walled-in near-future city, but if you’re one of the mild-mannered Jesus freaks who has to wear frumpy gray frocks all the time, let’s face it: You’ve been itching to sport tight leather pants and jump off of moving trains with the jocks for what seems like eternity, right?

The very capable Shailene Woodley lends some authority to a silly, one-dimensional script as Tris, a member of the Abnegation (Jesus freaks) faction who makes the decision to be a Dauntless (jock). The catch is that she’s known the whole time that she’s Divergent (different). As she learns the value of asserting her independence, the fate of the entire city hangs in the balance, and she’s got some quick growing up to do.

Along the way there’s a chaste romance, an excruciatingly long military-training sequence that’s too dumb to be satiric, and Kate Winslet phoning it in as an evil former honor student with fascistic designs. Did I mention that her brilliant plan to take over rule of the city is basically just plain genocide?

Winslet excluded, most of the actors are up to the task of treating this material with the dead serious tone it requires. Ashley Judd is a welcome sight as Woodley’s heartbroken mother in a couple of scenes and Theo James is fine, I guess, as the romantic interest. At least they are working hard to sell it.

When the plot mechanics are moving forward and there’s no time to think, Divergent churns right along, high on it’s own dumb inevitability and good intentions. Yes, kids should embrace individuality, and yes, they should think for themselves. But at two hours and twenty minutes, this thinly veiled metaphor can be rough going sometimes, and the humorless, dumb script asks way too much of its cast.