Movie Review: "Steve Jobs" (Danny Boyle, 2015)

“STEVE JOBS”: ***½ (three and a half stars) by Patrick Belin

Above: Michael Fassbender is Steve Jobs.  Photo ©Universal Pictures

“Steve Jobs” is the story of a flawed man, not a mythical figure.  Not a man who changed the world (I believe it was destined to change anyway), but a man who did believe in himself and his ability to single-handedly do the changing.  Truly, there’s no doubt that Steve Jobs worked tirelessly at what he believed would work.  And considering what his company has achieved over the years, it paid off.  The feat of disrupting industries and bringing not one, but two corporate giants (IBM & Microsoft) to their knees is simply amazing.

“Steve Jobs” is not Steve Jobs.  It is a biographical film adaptation (starring Michael Fassbender) and originally told by Walter Isaacson, as dictated by Jobs himself.  The movie does justice to the fact that one person cannot single-handedly distort entire industries all by themselves, and I appreciated the film’s effort in bringing some of the myths surrounding Jobs back down to earth.  This is perhaps the movie’s greatest achievement to anyone interested in this man’s life (not to mention its excellently depicted relationship between Jobs and Apple CEO John Scully).

On film, the story of Jobs’ life works well; under writer Aaron Sorkin (“The Social Network”) and director Danny Boyle (“Trainspotting”), it is spread across three distinct movements, or acts—three product launches, each of which crystallizes some element of Jobs’ life.  These episodes aren’t difficult to follow; considering its two hour running time, the film moves at a very swift pace, its timing distorted by Mr. Boyle to manufacture a sense of unfinished business (which Jobs, who died in 2011, may have felt himself). 

This effect is enhanced by Mr. Sorkin’s infamous machine-gun dialogic delivery style, which I usually enjoy.  But in this film, it felt a bit much at times.  I walked away feeling as though more scenes of quiet contemplation would have allowed Mr. Fassbender to explore the complex character he portrays with greater subtlety.  Speaking of which, the fact that Mr. Fassbender doesn’t look much like the real Jobs was not an issue for me, either going into the film or while watching it.  That’s because the acting (which, to be honest, exceeded my expectations) all around in the movie is executed convincingly, as is the chemistry between all of the main characters.  

Overall, just like its protagonist (a figure who seems almost Shakespearean, if I dare say so), “Steve Jobs” isn’t perfect.  In film geek-speak, I just felt that the movie’s segues between its three acts could have been edited and directed with better finesse.  And as hinted at above, I would have enjoyed seeing a bit more of Steve Jobs outside of the agonistic circumstances that this film chose to focus on.

PS, this was written on my MacBook Pro.

Seen at Fox Tower, 21 October, 4.30pm showtime.

Movie Review: "Goosebumps" (Rob Letterman, 2015)

IT CAME FROM BETWEEN THE PAGES! by Mo Shaunette

Above: Odeya Rush and Jack Black star in “Goosebumps.”  Photo ©Sony Pictures Entertainment and Village Roadshow Pictures

During a lecture on the basics of writing in the new “Goosebumps” movie, author R.L. Stine (Jack Black) explains that all stories are made up of three parts: “The beginning, the middle…and the twist!”  Unfortunately, while “Goosebumps” features all of those, that’s not enough to make it a great film, or even really a good one.  The movie does its best to live up to the pedigree of the horror novellas it's based off of, but is so mired in cliché and mediocrity that it ends up being a well-intentioned but rather dull affair.

“Goosebumps” begins, as many of the books that inspired it do, with a move to an unfamiliar location.  Teenager Zach Cooper (Dylan Minnette) and his mother Gale (Amy Ryan) go from bustling New York to the quiet suburbs of Madison, DE, where Zach unexpectedly befriends dorky classmate Champ (Ryan Lee) and neighbor Hannah (Odeya Rush).

Hannah is the heir to a notorious legacy—her shut-in father is Robert Lawrence Stine, author of the long-running “Goosebumps” series.  We learn that the monsters from Stine’s books actually exist in the pages of his manuscripts, and can be released into the real world once they're opened.  Not surprisingly, a misunderstanding leads to the opening of the books, the unleashing of Stine’s monsters, and a rampage across Madison that forces the unlikely quartet of Zach, Hannah, Champ, and Stine to try and trap the beasts back in their paper-and-ink prison.

In other words, “Goosebumps” is “The Monster Squad” meets “Wes Craven’s New Nightmare”—not a bad starting point for a child-friendly horror romp.  Sadly, the child-friendly part of the equation necessitates child characters, something that gives “Goosebumps” a major stumble.  While Zach and Hannah are serviceable enough as leads and the actors have decent chemistry with each other, the characters are written so blandly that they make the whole film seem sluggish.  Their pretty faces and quirky banter are never enough to really engage, the twist with Hannah's backstory ends up meaning nothing, and Zach’s character arc (he learns to “let people in again” after the passing of his father) feels so half-hearted that it makes me wonder if the only reason the filmmakers included it is because main characters, y’know, need an arc.

Attempting to compensate, the script (by Darren Lemke of “Jack the Giant Slayer”) fills in the edges of the story with quirkier characters in the hopes of bringing the laughs—most of which fall short.  Champ is the sort of comic relief sidekick who’s only funny when he’s being berated by someone else, but at the very least, Ryan Lee has been playing parts like these for years and has the act down pat.  Other supporting players like Jillian Bell, Ken Marino, and that guy who plays Jonah on “Veep” all do fine work and elevate some of the film's attempts at humor, but then again, not much is asked of them.

The real star of the show is, unsurprisingly, Jack Black.  His version of Stine acts as a parallel to Zach, but to the extreme: Stine is a recluse who never made real friends, but created his own in the pages of his stories.  His character arc is sold more potently than Zach’s, and Mr. Black clearly has fun playing Stine, painting him as a sometimes-manic paranoid who sometimes can’t help but brag about his success (especially when he’s compared to that hack “Steve King”).

The effects of Stine’s creatures aren’t exactly game-breaking, but in a story like this where humor and horror are meant to mix, that can be forgiven.  The ringleader of the monsters, the recurring “Goosebumps” baddie Slappy the Dummy (voiced by Mr. Black), is rendered as an actual puppet and is effectively spooky.  Really, more than anything, “Goosebumps” is a greatest hits parade of Stine’s creations (including a giant praying mantis, an overgrown Venus fly trap, and an army of zombies and ghouls), one that shows off the wide variety of horrors the author committed to the page, but doesn't really linger on them long enough to make them more than a quick scare to run away from.

Even still, I’m inclined to forgive a lot of the shortcomings of “Goosebumps.”  This movie wasn’t made for me.  It was made for people who read and loved the books; the kinds of fans who would delight in trying to name every monster onscreen the same way I would delight in naming every mutant in an “X-Men” flick.  Yes, “Goosebumps” is awkwardly paced and hangs its story on uninteresting leads, but it’s harmless and features enough humor and monster action to keep the little ones entertained.  If you loved the books or just like this brand of spook house fun, check it out.

Movie Review: "Sicario" (Denis Villeneuve, 2015)

HARD (MOVIE) DRUGS by Bennett Campbell Ferguson

Above: Emily Blunt stars in the latest movie from Denis Villeneuve.  Photo ©Lionsgate, Black Label Media, and Thunder Road Pictures

At the suburban mall theater where I saw “Sicario,” a joyless new thriller directed by Denis Villeneuve, I spotted a sign: a notice that bags would be checked.  It was a reminder of the mass murders in Aurora and, most recently, Lafayette.  For most of us, that violence is wish-you-could-forget-it horror.  But for Mr. Villeneuve, killing is a phenomenon to be dissected, probed, and scrutinized—via the lens of tastefully bleak cinematography.

            I’m not going to shout out a lecture on cinematic ethics (not in this review, at least).  But I do think that Mr. Villeneuve should loosen his macabre shroud.  Two years ago, he directed the kidnapping mystery “Prisoners,” in which Hugh Jackman flayed a teenage boy’s skin until it gleamed like a maraschino cherry.  Now, in “Sicario,” Mr. Villeneuve has outdone himself by multiplying that boy into a house full of dead and brutalized bodies, sandwiched into the walls of an Arizona townhouse invaded by FBI agents.

            Leading the charge is Kate Macer (Emily Blunt).  At first sight, she looks combat ready, an action figure sealed in a black helmet and bodysuit.  Yet the moment that Kate sees those sadly grotesque bodies, she is reduced to a fountain of vomit with only one thought—to find the cartel-running criminals responsible for the savagery she’s uncovered.  A shady FBI “advisor” named Matt Garvan (Josh Brolin) offers her a chance, though Kate isn’t sure if she should trust him.

            Who would trust him?  Mr. Brolin, easing into a sleazily contented smile, is seamlessly cast as a man who greets human depravity with nasty amusement.  Yet “Sicario” doesn’t toss him any munch-worthy dramatic meat, and Ms. Blunt fares no better.  Kate may be the focal point of “Sicario,” but she is often relegated to the crosshairs rather than the frontlines.  At one point, a man tells her, “You look like a little girl when you’re scared”—a line that creepily hints at Mr. Villeneuve’s lack of interest in dreaming up a fearsome heroine and his passionate interest in projecting some sickeningly masochistic imaginings onto Ms. Blunt’s body (as a matter of course, the film includes an attempted rape).

            Fantasy is central to Mr. Villeneuve’s work, especially his Jake Gyllenhaal döppelganger freak-out movie “Enemy,” which trafficked in distorted dreams and tricked-out sexual fantasies (the most unsettling of which starred an overlarge, very fuzzy spider).  Ostensibly, “Prisoners” and “Sicario” are more realistic, but there’s a superfluous nature to Mr. Villeneuve’s visions of crime.  Lest you forget, one scene in “Prisoners” commenced with a door-breaking arrest and climaxed with an image both ludicrous and terrifying—the unlocking of a plastic case filled with snakes.

            Mr. Villeneuve’s knack for unfurling such horrors makes his movies scarily entrancing (if the film career doesn’t pan out, you can expect Denis Villeneuve’s House of Creepy Crawlies to open at a park near you).  Yet his lust for horror and gore drowns any hope of his movies flourishing with genuine meaning or emotion.  I’ll admit that in “Sicario,” he does turn his gaze toward the human toll of the drug war, most poignantly during a vignette about the mother and the son of a corrupt, hapless cop named Silvio (Maximiliano Hernández).  But the hard truth is that Mr. Villeneuve doesn’t care about Silvio or his family. 

If they didn’t suffer, he’d be out of a job.

Movie Review: "The Martian" (Ridley Scott, 2015)

SURVING (AND CLOWNING) ON THE RED PLANET
by Bennett Campbell Ferguson 

The first scene of Ridley Scott’s new film “The Martian” is a haunting one.  With steely control, the camera stares down at Mars, then fixes its gaze on a cadre of astronauts spearheaded by Melissa Lewis (Jessica Chastain).  They’re collecting data, joshing, showing off their shiny orange spacesuits…until a buffeting dust storm forces them to rocket back into space and abandon their presumed-dead comrade Mark Watney (Matt Damon), who is buried in martian sand and very much alive.

            Save for a sappy shot of Mark’s vacant chair, these early moments of the movie coalesce into a delicious inferno of jovial teamwork, otherworldly vistas, and stinging loss.  Yet once Mark is left in solitude, “The Martian” surrenders its emotional vigor.  Mr. Scott may tell the tale with the brisk bravado of a veteran assembler of Hollywood entertainments, but his film is frustratingly hollow and even boring—much less exciting, in fact, than the recent proclamation that the real NASA has discovered water on the real Mars.

            Mr. Scott, of course, didn’t learn that in time to change “The Martian,” so Mark has to make do with a towering, metallic water-manufacturing contraption to stay the affects of dehydration.  He keeps the device inside a crinkly white shelter where he harvests potatoes, while waiting over a year to hear the trumpets of a rescue party that may never touch down.  “I’m going to have to science the shit out of this,” Watney wryly declares, proving that in times of duress, a spacefarer’s most potent gadget is their sense of humor.

            Or is it?  As the days pass and Mark ventures further across the Red Planet’s dusty plains, he appears strangely immune to despair.  Or any emotion, for that matter.  “The Martian” is based on a novel by Andy Weir, who explained in a recent New York Times interview that he bristled against the possibility of plunging into the gloom of exploratory loneliness, choosing instead to zero in on Mark’s adventurous bravado and scientific know-how.  The film follows his lead, to its detriment.  

In fact, “The Martian” commits itself not to dramatic storytelling, but to rattling off a string of painfully unfunny quips.  At least three times, Mark mocks the disco music Melissa left in his martian hut, as if hoping that repetition will improve the joke (it doesn’t).  What’s more, Mark’s oppressive jocularity even infects the film’s capsule-spinning climax, in the midst of which he cheekily says that if he punches a hole in his spacesuit, he’ll “fly around like Iron Man” (which is the sort of grating pop culture reference that might show up in, well, “Iron Man”).

In Hollywood movies, space has long been a laughter-friendly zone (as the delectable wordplay of J.J. Abrams’ “Star Trek” movies has reaffirmed).  But making a space epic that isn’t attuned to the rush of wonder and loneliness that an outstretched starry canvas of can’t help but stir is like strapping on a spacesuit with no oxygen tank.  Lest we forget, it was the isolation of Sandra Bullock’s stranded Ryan Stone in “Gravity” that made her survival so exhilarating; her despair primed us perfectly for the joy of her triumph. 

            It’s a shame that “The Martian” couldn’t do the same, and that it offers a multitude of cinematic stumbles to nitpick (including Mr. Scott’s distracting and ludicrous choice to flash the names of every NASA character’s name and rank onscreen when they first appear).  Yet there are fleeting moments when the movie coheres into something wondrously diverse.  Not only are Mark’s would-be rescuers are of, respectively, American, Latino, and German descent, but the action on terra firma is spurred by the resourceful NASA techies played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, Donald Glover, and Benedict Wong.  Towards the end of the film, we even see people across globe gathering in public to pray for Mark’s return. 

            Somehow, the struggle of one inspires the transcendence of borders.

Movie Review: "Pawn Sacrifice" (Edward Zwick, 2015)

CHECKMATE by Bennett Campbell Ferguson

Above: Tobey Maguire as Bobby Fischer.  Photo ©Bleecker Street

How do you solve a problem like Tobey Maguire?  Somebody ought to figure it out.  The sincere, frog-eyed star of “Wonder Boys,” “The Great Gatsby,” “The Good German,” and the “Spider-Man” trilogy is one gloriously eccentric thespian—yet his cache of film roles remains sparse.  I suspect most filmmakers aren’t sure how to handle his unnerving ability to oscillate between the tender and the creepy, a problem that “Pawn Sacrifice,” a new biopic in which Mr. Maguire plays the much-vaunted chess champion Bobby Fischer, won’t help.

            “Pawn Sacrifice” begins, as so many post-“Citizen Kane” films do, at the end, with Fischer on the cusp of a potentially career-making match (note to filmmakers: just because Orson Welles savored scrambled chronologies doesn’t mean you have to).  It’s not going well: while his opponent waits for him to show up, Bobby throws a paranoid fit in his hotel room, tearing up his phone to search for surveillance bugs, just before the film abruptly cuts to a scene from his childhood in Brooklyn.

            Bobby, we learn, has been mentally ill since his youth.  When he’s a young boy, we watch him preen over his chess skills, rage against even the quietest noises, and even order his mother (Robin Weigert) from the house.  The fact that Bobby sounds less like a son and more like an abusive husband is the first clue that something is seriously wrong with this kid—a fact that his rapid ascent into fame (and Mr. Maguire’s slender shoes) doesn’t dispel.

            Ultimately, “Pawn Sacrifice” sheds its intellectual trappings and becomes a standard sports movie, albeit one where the players just sit, sweat, and glare at each other from across a table.  That’s one of the movie’s most visible failings—by declining to delve into the actual intricacies of chess playing, it unknowingly asserts that great chess requires nothing more than a well-pressed business suit and a travel case of dirty looks.

            The actors exchange those well enough, though “Pawn Sacrifice” often yearns for a string of authenticity.  I love Mr. Maguire; he’s been a hero to me ever since I saw him staring out over Manhattan wearing his spider-suit.  But he’s miscast here, a larger-than-life presence in a role that demands a more low-key brand of madness (on the other hand, Liev Schreiber delivers just the right dose of droll amusement as Bobby’s rival, Boris Spassky).

            There is a great movie to be made from Bobby Fischer’s life (especially since it was spun so thoroughly into the paranoid web of the Cold War).  Yet “Pawn Sacrifice” is too crass, sloppy, and boring to even be called good.  Even the film’s finest shot, an image of Bobby slumped on a Santa Monica beach after a draining loss, flat lines.  If the real Bobby Fischer sat on that beach on that day, he likely felt genuine pain.  But in the movie, he might as well be posing for a picture, waiting to be ushered on for the next scene.