Author Archives: Neil Pond

Dec 19 2015
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History, Movie Reviews, Movies, Pop Culture

Thar She Blows

‘In The Heart of the Sea’ is one whopper of a whale tale

HEART OF THE SEA

In the Heart of the Sea

Starring Chris Hemsworth, Brendan Gleeson & Tom Holland

Directed by Ron Howard

PG-13

No one who’s read Moby-Dick can forget when the stunned first mate, spying the great white whale for the first time, turns to captain Ahab, like he’s just seen a ghost. “You’re gonna need a bigger boat,” he informs him.

No, wait—I’m confusing my culture and my pop culture. It’s easy to do. Director Ron Howard kinda-sorta mixes it up a bit, too, in telling the story of the (true) story that inspired author Herman Melville to write the (fictional) story that became the (familiar) story we all know as the biggest, baddest whale tale of all time.

Ben Whishaw as budding novelist Herman Melville

In the Heart of the Sea begins with a young Melville (Ben Whishaw, who plays gadget-master Q in the new James Bond movies) coming to visit crusty Tom Nickerson (veteran Irish actor Brendan Gleeson). The fledgling writer wants to coax from the old salt the truth about a doomed whaling ship, the Essex, its encounter with a legendary monster from the deep—an alabaster-white demon of a whale—and the adrift-at-sea horrors endured by the surviving members of the crew before they were finally rescued.

Chris Hemsworth

Nickerson was an orphaned lad (played by Tom Holland) when he shipped out on the Essex, to which we’re introduced as the movie switches into flashback mode as it prepares set sail in 1820. The capable Owen Chase (Chris Hemsworth) was promised he’d be put in charge, but a squeeze on whale-oil supply-and-demand pressure Essex company men to appoint their benefactor’s under-qualified, over- gentrified son, George Pollard (Benjamin Walker), as captain. So Chase reluctantly signs on as first mate, promising his pregnant wife (Michelle Fairley) he’ll be home soon—maybe a year instead of two, in 19th century whaling terms.

Once the Essex hits the open water, the movie hits its stride—especially if you’re a fan of old-fashioned seafaring-adventure epics. The heavy canvas of the sails swells with the wind; ropes whip, whap and whoosh; metal clangs; swarthy men holler, hustle and clamber; and, of course, there’s water, water everywhere.

The whaling scenes are special-effect marvels. Howard melds the rush of adrenalized excitement, the ever-present, life-or-death danger, and the existential melancholy of slaying such magnificent creatures to provide oil to “fuel the machines of industry and move our great nation forward,” as a clergyman prays.

And heaven forbid you get stuck with blowhole-reaming detail.

When the gigantic white whale finally makes an appearance, well, it’s very bad news. And then things just keep going from bad to worse, to unspeakable.

It’s hard to look at Chris Hemsworth and not see Thor, the movie role with which he’s most associated, especially when the drama takes a deep, desperate dive into darker places. (Forget the harpoon—just break out your hammer, dude!) It’s hard not to sympathize with, or root for the whales, after seeing them impaled and bloodied with iron toggles, spikes and spires, and knowing that some of them have now been hunted now to near extinction.

And it’s impossible to miss the movie’s undertone, which eventually becomes its overtone: Yesterday’s whale oil is today’s petroleum, and humans are still driven to the ends of Earth to get it. Howard’s history-based high-seas yarn has a contemporary message about hubris, greed and resource exploitation that resonates today by land or by sea.

“We are kings, circumventing the globe,” boasts captain Pollard. “To bend nature is our right.” His first mate disagrees—we are but mere “specks,” Chase counters, compared to the vastness of the world, the unfathomable mysteries of the sea, and the monstrous majesty of a creature that can smash a ship into splinters.

They really do need a bigger boat—and sometimes, don’t we all?

—Neil Pond, Parade Magazine

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Dec 07 2015
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Gonna Fly Now

‘Creed’ soars as new Rocky saga

Creed

Starring Michael B. Jordan, Sylvester Stallone & Tessa Thompson

Directed by Ryan Coogler

PG-13

“No one cares about Balboa anymore,” sneers “Pretty” Ricky Conlon (Tony Bellew), the young British boxer itching for a fight in Creed.

It’s been nearly 40 years since the first Rocky movie introduced the plucky palooka, which Sylvester Stallone continued to play in five sequels. Rocky Balboa became a boxing icon, a rock-’em, sock-’em legend and a rags-to-riches tale for the ages.

But, does anyone care anymore?

In Creed, the first Rocky movie in which Stallone doesn’t put on the gloves, Rocky is coaxed out of retirement to train the son of his late friend and former rival Apollo Creed.

Creed05720.dngThe son, Adonis “Donny” Johnson (Michael B. Jordan), comes from L.A. to seek Rocky out at Adrian’s, the Italian restaurant named after his late wife that he now runs in his Philadelphia hometown. A born scrapper who grew up in a juvenile facility before finally being adopted by Apollo’s former wife (Phylicia Rashad), Donny appeals to Rocky’s own hardscrabble instincts—and their shared legacy, which Donny says makes them “like family.”

Can the grizzled former superstar help the feisty greenhorn learn the ropes, come to grips with his own legacy and face the cockney challenger from across the ocean, who’d love nothing more than to draw blood from a Creed—and the protégé of a Balboa?

Michael B. Jordan & Tessa Thompson

Writer-director Ryan Coogler, who worked previously with Jordan as the star of the powerful true-story drama Fruitvale Station (2013), draws deep on Rocky legacy while masterfully building a compelling, contemporary story that stands strong on its own, focusing on just a few central characters. Tessa Thompson brings sweetness and spunk as Bianca, an aspiring singer who lives in the apartment beneath Donny, whose music at first keeps him from sleeping—then later soothes his fighter’s soul.

Tony Bellew has a real swagger as the undefeated British heavyweight champ—because he really is one. As Apollo Creed’s widow, Phylicia Rashad (who played Bill Cosby’s TV wife, Clair) frets that boxing will wreck Donny the way it did her husband. “Your daddy died in the ring,” she tells him. “You’re better than that.”

Phylicia Rashad

Coogler’s technique is almost a character in itself, placing the camera inside the ring, between, behind and in front of the fighters, darting, shifting, bobbing and weaving along with them. One entire match is filmed as one breathlessly long, unbroken take, from the dressing room into the ring, through the final bell.

The blows land hard, and so does the sentiment—especially when the story shifts in the second act to another kind of “fight” that turns the tables on Rocky and Donny’s relationship. Creed packs a punch, in more ways than one.

There’s a lot to like and more to love about this movie, but most of it comes down to Jordan, whose performance as Adonis is raw, rousing and moving, and to Stallone, who at 69 does some of his best acting in years.

In one impactful scene, Adonis and Rocky ascend the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, immortalized in the original movie. “When you get to the top, you think you can fly,” says Rocky, this time a bit out of breath.

In making us care about Rocky Balboa again, in a big, big way, Creed indeed soars.

—Neil Pond, Parade Magazine

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Nov 30 2015
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The Future is Finished

‘Hunger Games’ finally runs out of gas in ‘Mockingjay 2’

Final Poster crop

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2

Starring Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutherson, Donald Sutherland and Liam Hemsworth

Directed by Francis Lawrence

PG-13

Opens Nov. 20, 2015

“Mandatory Viewing” is the directive that pops up on holographic screens across all of post-apocalyptic Panem when dictator Coriolanus Snow (Donald Sutherland) beams a transmission to the masses.

That message couldn’t be truer for Hunger Games fans, especially as it pertains to this movie, the final film of the four made from author Suzanne Collins’ trilogy of best-selling dystopian young-adult novels. This is the end, the big finish. The Games have come to a close—mandatory viewing for the masses, if ever there was.

The first Hunger Games, in 2012, made Jennifer Lawrence a household name as Katniss Everdeen, the galloping, galvanizing firebrand who became the leader of a revolution and an icon of female empowerment. As Katniss fought and forged her way to freedom in brutal, futuristic “games,” fans faithfully came back, movie after movie, to follow her—and to see just how faithfully Hollywood kept to the details of Collins’ books, which melded a young-love triangle with wicked satire on reality TV, media propaganda, social stratification and war.

Fans will be satisfied with Mockingjay—Part 2. It covers all the bases and ties up the loose ends, and everybody’s back on board: Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), Gale (Liam Hemsworth), Haymitch (Woody Harrelson), President Coin (Julianne Moore), Primrose (Willow Shields), Finnick (Sam Claflin), Cressida (Natalie Dormer), Johanna (Jena Malone). Even Phillip Seymour Hoffman returns, and he died in early 2014. It could have used a bit more of the colorful Games escort Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks) and wackadoo master of ceremonies Caesar Flickerman (Stanley Tucci), but hey, you can’t cram everyone front and center, even in a movie that runs two hours and nearly 20 minutes.

And about that: Most of those minutes are filled with chatter. Characters talk a lot—about what they’ve done, they’re doing and going to do. Occasionally they get up and actually do something—like Katniss throwing a cup at a cat, or heading out on a covert, high-stakes mission, which sets up the two big action scenes. One (a subterranean attack by a horde of hissing, spastic lizard-people) looks like something out of a horror flick, with a nod to Alien; the other involves a massive, surging wave of sludge and oil, which everyone outruns like it’s only slightly more terrifying than an overflowing toilet—or the not-even-there computer effect that it really is.

Donald Sutherland

And it’s dark. Yes, people die. But it also looks dark, dim and dull—greys, browns, blanched-out, bleach-y, blahhhh tones that seem to blot out the sun. Sure, it’s a grim, wintry, wartime world. But why did director Francis Lawrence (who’s helmed every Games movie, except the first) make every scene look like it was lit with a 40-watt bulb? Did he blow his lighting budget on CGI sludge and lizard people?

And does everyone in the movie have that “over it” look because they’re tired of all that fighting for the revolution—or because they really are? As Mockingjay flutters and flaps to a close, this victory lap looks and feels like a slog.

The Hunger Games franchise made billions of box-office bucks and became a pop-cultural phenomenon. But finally the Games have run out of gas. Jennifer Lawrence, now 25, has become a global, Oscar-winning superstar, above and beyond the YA bow-and-arrow heroine, the “girl on fire” she started out playing four years ago.

“I am done,” Katniss says in one scene. Yes she is. Congratulations and good job, everyone. Now proceed toward the exits, and let’s all just keep moving.

—Neil Pond, Parade Magazine

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Nov 22 2015
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Ho-Ho-Hokum

‘Love the Coopers’ is snow-covered Christmas gloop

(Left to right) Diane Keaton and John Goodman in LOVE THE COOPERS to be released by CBS Films and Lionsgate.

Love the Coopers

Starring John Goodman, Diane Keaton, Alan Arkin, Ed Helms & Olivia Wilde

Directed by Jessie Nelson

PG-13

In the early moments of this sprawling Christmas comedy, characters somehow appear to end up “inside” a snow globe, frolicking in the crystalline white flakes.

There’s a lot of snow in Love the Coopers; the stuff never stops falling. I was surprised by the end of the movie that it hadn’t shut down every road in Coopersville, or Cooperstown, or Coopers Knob, or wherever it is the story takes place. Instead, like a gigantic snow globe, the movie just seems to regenerate the same precipitate, shaking it up over and over again—so it doesn’t pile up, it just flies around and re-lands, making everything look like a big, fluffy white winter wonderland, snow on snow.

Love the Coopers indeed looks like a picture-perfect Christmas: sumptuous cookies and cupcakes, colorfully coordinated sweaters, coats and scarves, holiday carolers, red poinsettias, green mistletoe, twinkling lights on impeccably trimmed trees. Even the dogs are decorated.

LOVE THE COOPERS

Marissa Tomei

But all the cheery Christmas decorations cover up a big, dysfunctional mess: The Coopers are falling apart, in just about every way. Mom Charlotte (Diane Keaton) and dad Sam (John Goodman) are planning to split after 40 years of marriage. Their grown kids (Ed Helms and Olivia Wilde), Charlotte’s younger sister (Marissa Tomei) and her dad (Alan Arkin) all have issues of their own.

There’s also a jaded waitress (Amanda Seyfried), a foul-mouthed urchin granddaughter (Blake Baumgartner), a cop with an identity crisis (Anthony Mackie), a couple of teens working out the sloppy, tongue-twisting kinks of French kissing, a say-anything septuagenarian aunt (June Squibb), and a strapping young soldier (Jake Lacy) who gets roped into the Christmas Eve family reunion as a pretend boyfriend.

And a partridge in a pear tree—no, not really. But it does get very, very crowded, and that’s not even counting the narrator, who turns out to be…well, someone whose name you’ll certainly recognize, in a form you’ll in no way be expecting, in a manner that makes absolutely no sense at all.

LOVE THE COOPERS

Producer-director Jessie Nelson, whose previous projects include the heart-tugging, high-pedigree gloop of I Am Sam, Stepmom and Corrina, Corrina, remains true to form here, with an all-star cast fumbling around in a deep-dish holiday goo of dumb dialogue, silly shtick and artificial sweetness that feels like a concoction created with ingredients ladled from other, far better cinematic Christmas crock pots—a dollop of It’s a Wonderful Life, splashes of Love, Actually, sprinkles of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.

Snow on snow on snow.

Ed Helms and Alan Arkin sing, a dog gets blamed for a fart he didn’t make and Marissa Tomei hides a brooch in her mouth. There’s mashed potato slinging, Christmas carol mangling, streets full of Santas, gingerbread men in G-string frosting, and a joyous, swirling dance to a Bob Dylan song.

And so much snow. But it never piles up—and like the movie, it never adds up, either, to anything more than a slushy, mushy holiday heap of ho-ho-hokum.

—Neil Pond, Parade Magazine

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Nov 15 2015
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Bond is Back!

‘Spectre’ double-O dazzles with derring-do, action & emotional depth  

Spectre

Spectre

Starring Daniel Craig, Christoph Waltz and Lèa Seydoux

Directed by Sam Mendes

PG-13

 

James Bond, with his iconic “license to kill,” has never been a stranger to death. And in Spectre, the latest adventure of the world’s most famous secret agent, the prospect of mortality looms especially large. “The dead are alive,” a cryptic sentence, is the very first thing you see on the screen, just before the face of a gigantic skeleton in a Day of the Dead parade.

But as Bond (Daniel Craig) notes at one point, “Death and dying—it’s all a matter of perspective.” Spectre, the 24th movie since Dr. No began the Bond franchise in 1962, may reflect on the past and even gaze into the grave, but it’s vibrantly, expressively, emotionally alive and very much in step with today. Reuniting Craig with director Sam Mendes—his partner in the snap, crackle and pop of Skyfall in 2012—it begins with Bond going off the grid to wrap up some unfinished business just as the “double-O” espionage program headed by his boss, M (Ralph Fiennes), is in danger of being scrapped back in London.

Daniel CraigA crusading young British intelligence officer, C (Andrew Scott, Moriarty on TV’s Sherlock), wants to replace Bond and his “prehistoric” stalk-and-shoot derring-do with a new multi-national initiative, using global surveillance and drones to keep track of criminals—as well as everyone else.

“It’s the future,” C tells M. “And you’re not.”

M smells a big, worldwide rat, and so does Bond—and off he goes to track it down, to Mexico, Rome, Austria and the desert of North Africa, setting up some thrilling set pieces that up the ante on cinematic Bond moments. A dazzling 15-minute beaut of an opener begins as one ludicrously long, unbroken tracking shot (filmed by a drone!) down a street and into an alley, up and out of an elevator, into a hotel room, through a window and onto a rooftop—before climaxing in a building-toppling explosion, a frantic foot chase and a brutal hand-to-hand fight in an out-of-control helicopter dipping and diving over a crowded plaza filled with thousands of people.

Wow!

There’s a sleek nighttime car chase, an alpine pursuit with an airplane that becomes both a bobsled and a battering ram, and a brawl in a train so slam-bang intense you expect it to cause a derailment.

Christoph Waltz (left) and Leå Seydoux in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures/Columbia Pictures/EON Productions’ action adventure SPECTRE.

Christoph Waltz

Christoph Waltz plays a nefarious über-villain with a deep-rooted evil secret that haunts—and hurts—Bond in more ways that one. Former pro wrestler Dave Bautista (so memorable as the red-tattooed Drax in Guardians of the Galaxy) is a hulking wall of sneering, leering bad news—and only one teeny, tiny two-word line of dialogue.

Lea Seydoux

Lèa Seydoux

As the latest “Bond girl,” French actress Lèa Seydoux gives Bond pause for something “more important” than the sometime-vicious necessities of his job. Ben Whitslaw returns as nerdy gadget master Q, and Naomie Harris is back as Moneypenny, the office assistant who’s now become an invaluable assignment aide.

Will this, Craig’s fourth outing as James Bond, be his last, as rumored? Time will tell. Other spies come and go, but Bond—whoever portrays him—has been the standard for more than 50 years, and Spectre finds him in fine, full, clever, super-stylish, ultra-cool, death-dodging form, very much alive and well.

“It’s good to have you back, 007,” M tells him at one point, welcoming him home. Yes, it bloody well double-O is!

—Neil Pond, Parade Magazine

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Nov 13 2015
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Down & Dirty

Sandra Bullock, Billy Bob Thornton make politics personal in ‘Crisis’

OUR BRAND IS CRISIS

Our Brand is Crisis

Starring Sandra Bullock & Billy Bob Thornton

Directed by David Gordon Green

R

“I can convince myself of many things, if the price is right,” says Sandra Bullock’s character, “Calamity Jane” Bodine, in Our Brand is Crisis.

Jane is pretty good at convincing other people, too. That’s why the formerly formidable campaign strategist is lured out of early retirement to help an unpopular Bolivian president in an upcoming election—by convincing the reluctant public, through whatever means necessary, that they should vote for him.

But this battle’s not just political, it’s also personal: Bodine has to match wits with an old nemesis, Pat Candy (Billy Bob Thornton), who’s been hired to strategize for the other side.

It’s based on things that went down at a real 2002 Bolivian election, which was chronicled in an award-winning 2005 documentary of the same name. Thornton’s character is a movie remold of former hardball strategist James Carville, who appeared as himself in the original film. Bullock’s character—a part originally written for a male—is an amalgam of several other actual people.

OUR BRAND IS CRISISBullock and Thornton provide the movie’s real spark; it’s too bad there’s not more of it, and more of them, to help the whole thing catch fire. There’s a murky, turbulent history between Bodine and Candy that we never fully understand, just one of several things the movie doesn’t make clear. But the deft, unfussy way the two characters spar and parry, in guarded conversations and piercing silences, are artful reminders of just how these two pros can make the most of their screen time.

Scoot McNairy, Ann Dowd and Anthony Mackie are also aboard as Calamity Jane’s team members. Zoe Kazan plays a young dirty-tricks research wonk brought in to turn up the heat when things shift into true “crisis” overdrive.

OUR BRAND IS CRISIS

Zoe Kazan

George Clooney is one of the producers. The director, David Gordon Green, has a wide-ranging resume that includes the stoner comedies Pineapple Express and Your Highness. Peter Straughan, who provided the screenplay, is also the writer of the espionage thriller Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The movie has some solid DNA, but it never seems to know whether it wants to make us think, make us chuckle or make us sad. Is it political parody with heart, a satire that jabs with its funny bone, or a south-of-the-border rom-com based on real headlines? (The biggest  audience response, for what it’s worth, comes from Bullock’s bare buttocks hanging out an open bus window.)

If you’re a political junkie, this is your time of year. The presidential candidate debates make for riveting, sometimes-outrageous TV, and shows like The Good Wife, Scandal, Veep and the new Agent X take viewers inside the heated (fictionalized) heavings of Washington, D.C. Our Brand is Crisis brings up some timely points about what it takes to mount—and win—a campaign.

But is anyone surprised that politics plays dirty? That strategists can be snake-oil salesmen who convince people to buy things they don’t need, to elect leaders who may not have their best interests in mind? That America exports its will and influence to other parts of the world?

After her first meeting with the Bolivian president, Bodine realizes what a daunting job she signed on for, and she wearily notes that he “doesn’t smell like a winner.” Unfortunately, despite Sandra and Billy Bob, neither does this.

—Neil Pond, Parade Magazine

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Nov 13 2015
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‘Room’ Mates

Dazzling dual performances shatter gut-punch gloom

ROOM_hires_poster_crop2

Room

Starring Brie Larson and Jason Tremblay

Directed by Lenny Abrahamson

A woman and her young son laugh, play, tease each other, have breakfast and read books. She tells him when he’s watched too much TV, coaches him on brushing his teeth, bakes him a birthday cake and sings him a lullaby at bedtime.

It seems so lovely, so happy, and so right. But in the opening moments of Room, we know that something is so awfully, terribly, very, very wrong.

Ma (Brie Larson) and her son Jack (Jason Tremblay), who’s just turned five, are prisoners in a soundproof, windowless outdoor shed measuring about 10 feet square. Jack was born there, the son of a man who still comes to “visit” Joy in the evenings and bring the things she and Jack need to survive. The room is not only Jack’s home, it’s the only world he knows, the only place he’s ever been, and the entirety of everything he’s ever seen, done and experienced.

That’s the setup for director Lenny Abrahamson’s knockout, gut-punch movie adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s award-winning 2010 novel.

Jack is a growing boy, and Ma—whose real name, which has lost much of its meaning for her, is Joy—remembers life outside “room.” She wants a better life for Jack, who’s getting old enough to understand more about their predicament. She hatches a wild, dangerous plan.

room-ROOM_DAY8-0044_rgbLarson, who’s already demonstrated her acting chops on TV (The United States of Tara, Community) and in films (21 Jump Street, The Spectacular Now, Don Jon, Trainwreck) turns in a performance that’s getting major—and deserved—Oscar buzz. She plays Joy as a wounded, fiercely protective, paternal marvel, a woman who’s held things together for herself and her son and made a hellhole a home for seven long, almost unfathomably dark years.

And young newcomer Tremblay makes you feel every soft, wide-eyed nuance of Jack’s innocence, curiosity and confusion, and the steep, overwhelming learning curve he faces in the dazzling, blinding hustle-bustle of the outside “world,” full of new things—other people, pets, traffic, ice cream, germs.

Jason Tremblay

William H. Macy plays Joy’s father, who can’t get his mind around the ordeal his daughter has endured. Veteran TV/film actress Joan Allen is her mother, who becomes the warm heart of the film’s second half.

The only natural light in Joy and Jack’s dismal room comes from a small, single skylight, high in the ceiling. The camera turns to that skylight often—just like the movie itself, despite its rather grim, gloomy premise, which also keeps turning to something higher, brighter and beautiful. It may begin in a claustrophobic box, but driven by the breakout performances of its two main stars, Room becomes a moving, lyrical meditation on love, imagination, bravery, strength, happiness, home, holding on and letting go, looking back and moving on, and the unbreakable, unshakeable bond between a mother and child.

—Neil Pond, Parade Magazine

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Nov 01 2015
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Tech Titan

Smart, savvy ‘Steve Jobs’ shows the man behind digital revolution

5_2462_TPT_00020R_CROP

Steve Jobs

Starring Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen & Jeff Daniels

Directed by Danny Boyle

R

Steve Jobs was a digital pioneer and technological entrepreneur whose ferocious drive and tenacious zeal for perfection lead to companies, products and services that today define much of the world’s lifestyle: Mac computers, iTunes, iPhones, iPads, iPods and Pixar movies.

But Jobs wasn’t successful right off the bat—and his life wasn’t nearly as sleek and smooth as the clean, uncluttered lines of a thin, new iPhone.

“I’m poorly made,” Jobs (Michael Fassbender) confesses to his head of marketing and longtime business associate Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet) in Steve Jobs, the sprawling new biopic directed by Danny Boyle based on former Time magazine editor Walter Issacson’s 2010 bestseller.

Michael Fassbender and Seth Rogen

Michael Fassbender and Seth Rogen

His former partner, Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen), comes to agree. “Your products are better than you are,” he tells him.

The movie begins in 1984 at an event heralding the launch of Jobs’ Macintosh computer, which turned out to be an overpriced, underpowered flop and ended his career at Apple, the California computer company he started in his garage in the 1970s with Wozniak. The film continues through two other “acts,” also around product launches: Jobs’ NeXT cube, in 1985 (another flop), and then the 1998 unveiling of the iMac, which marked his triumphant, full-circle return to Apple.

Director Boyle, an Oscar winner whose previous work includes Slumdog Millionaire and 127 Hours, keeps things moving at an almost breathless pace and uses three different types of film (grainy 16mm, standard 35mm and crisp, high-def digital) to define each of the movie’s trio of distinctive segments. The screenplay by Oscar-winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin is full of the smart, savvy, rat-a-tat-tat dialog that made The Social Network, Moneyball and the TV shows The Newsroom and The West Wing zip and zing.

Steve Jobs

Jobs introduces his daughter (Makenzie Moss) to his latest invention, the Macintosh computer.

As the man at the center of it all, Fassbender portrays Jobs across a span of three decades and masterfully summons the powerful gravity that pulled other objects into his orbit—as well as the icy, distant chill that pushed most people away, including his daughter, Lisa (played at three different ages and stages by Makenzie Moss, Ripley Sobo and Perla Haney-Jardine), by former girlfriend Chrisann Brennan (Katherine Waterson).

Jeff Daniels, a Sorkin mainstay, plays Apple CEO John Sculley, and Rogen steps outside his usual stoner-comedy roles as Wozniak, who comes to resent his former partner’s arrogance and hubris, his dismissive treatment of everyone who was ever close to him, and his rise to rock-god-like stardom.

Jobs—who died in 2011 from complications of a pancreatic tumor—may have been a tech and marketing genius, but Steve Jobs makes it clear he could also be a colossal jerk. To gazillions of Apple product uses, however, he became a guru, if not a messiah. Maybe that’s why Doyle’s closing shot—with Jobs bathed in blinding light, beaming, walking slowly into the camera before disappearing into a wash of white—looks so much like a resurrection.

—Neil Pond, Parade Magazine

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Oct 24 2015
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Gollywhopper of a Ghost Story

Sumptuous ‘Crimson Peak’ is full of deliciously dark surprises

 

Crimson Peak

Starring Mia Wasikowska, Tom Hiddleston & Jessica Chastain

Directed by Guillermo del Toro

Rated R

Released Oct. 16, 2015

Crimson Peak is a ghost story with a capital G—a couple of them.

The first is for writer-director Guillermo del Toro, the acclaimed Mexican filmmaker renowned for the dark-fantasy, supernatural-horror and sci-fi blowout movies Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy and Pacific Rim. Just having his name attached has kept fans and industry insiders buzzing for months.

The other big G: This ghost story is a real gollywhopper, a voluptuous, sumptuously festooned saga of love, lust, jealousy, money, madness, secrets, ambition and spirits that refuse to let go, all set in a gigantic Gothic manor on a barren hillside in early 19th century England.

Tom Hiddleston and Mia Wasikowska

Mia Wasikowska plays Edith, a young New York heiress who falls in love with a visiting British baronet, Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston). An aspiring writer, Edith believes in ghosts, ever since she was visited as a child by the wraith of her departed mother, who ominously warned her to “Beware Crimson Peak.”

“Where I come from, ghosts are not to be taken lightly,” the baronet tells Edith, which is one reason she falls for him over the objections of her father (Jim Beaver from TV’s Supernatural), who tries to send Sharpe and his coldly aloof sister, Lucille (Jessica Chastain), packing. But a gruesome incident—that wasn’t the “accident” everyone seems to think—leaves Edith to make her own decisions. She decides to follow her heart and marry the handsome Brit.

When she arrives in England with her new hubs, Edith finds his big, creaking, groaning house, Allerdale Hall, with a hole in the ceiling, leaves in the foyer, and gloopy blood-red clay oozing through the wooden slats of the floor. She also finds things that howl, scream, creep, crawl and go bump in the night.

Crimson Peak

And she learns that estate is nicknamed Crimson Peak—and that ghosts aren’t the scariest things inside the house.

Audiences accustomed to the cheap thrills and gutbucket carnage of many contemporary horror flicks might be a tad disappointed that del Toro is much more interested in meticulous, old-school storytelling and creating a spectacular world for his characters to inhabit. Blood does flow and there are moments that will make you gasp, but they jarring red punctuation marks on a much bigger tale, one with horrors on an even grander, more operatic scale.

And in this big, big-looking, super-stuffed spook-fest, the attention to detail is astounding, from rooms, costumes, furniture, jewelry, kitchenware and candelabras, down to the tiniest of trinkets. The haunted house of Allerdale is a thing of wonder in itself, a real-life, three-story-tall cathedral of gloom (constructed especially for the movie) with a rasping, decrepit elevator, a sweeping grand staircase, murky hallways, hundreds of moths on the walls, locked vats of goo in the basement, and some deliciously dark, twisted surprises.

Sometimes everything feels like a phantasmagoric Downton Abbey nightmare knocking around a forbidden section of Disney’s Haunted Mansion.

“Ghosts are real,” a battered-looking Edith tells us twice, bookending the movie at its opening scene as well as its violent, sprawling finale—during which she discovers not only the power of her pen, but also the brutal effectiveness of a coal shovel. If you ever get put through the wringer like she does in Crimson Peak, you’ll believe they’re real, too.

—Neil Pond, Parade Magazine

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Oct 17 2015
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Movie Reviews, Movies

Pan’s Prequel

Peter Pan backstory is heavy on effects but light on magic

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Pan

Starring Hugh Jackman, Levi Miller, Garrett Hedlund and Rooney Mara

Directed by Joe Wright

PG

“This isn’t the story you’ve heard before,” begins the voiceover narration to this prequel to the tale of Peter Pan, the mischievous lad who never grows up and learns how to fly.

Created by Scotch novelist and playwright J.M. Barrie in the early 20th century, Peter Pan became a hit on the London stage before spreading into even wider fame via a 1953 animated Walt Disney movie, other film adaptations and live TV musical presentations—including one as recently as last year.

But this movie isn’t that story, as it wants you to know right off the bat. Pan is the story behind that story, about how an orphan boy (Levi Miller) came to be the eternally youthful Peter Pan, the scourge of the pirate captain Hook, the champion of the Lost Boys and the airborne companion of the flittering, phosphorescent fairy Tinkerbell, all in a faraway place called Neverland.

Pan is big, loud and full of razzle-dazzle. British director Joe Wright—Pride and Prejudice (2005), The Atonement (2007), Hanna (2011)—obviously set out to make a spectacle. But his extensive, exhaustive, CGI-heavy production and the movie’s darker themes often crowd out the exuberant escapist magic that audiences have come to expect from a familiar tale and its familiar characters.

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Hugh Jackman as Blackbeard

The movie’s most notable new addition to Peter Pan lore is the pirate Blackbeard, played to the malevolent hilt by Hugh Jackman. It’s Blackbeard, we learn, who’s been spiriting World War II-era London orphans away to Neverland to work as his “lost boy” slaves, mining glowing little globs of fairy dust he calls pixem. A source of rejuvenation that offers him the tantalizing hope of eternal youth, pixem is Blackbeard’s obsession, and he’ll stop at nothing to get it—even killing children who slack off in their search for it.

We also meet James Hook (Garrett Hedlund), a lost boy who’s grown to lost young-adulthood in the mines—and who’ll grow up even more later, in dots easily connected, to become Peter’s nemesis, Capt. Hook. We meet the princess Tiger Lily (Rooney Mara), a leader of Neverland’s indigenous people, who have a history of tangling with Blackbeard. There’s a trio of luminous mermaids (all played by British fashion model Cara Delevingne), a gaggle of gigantic screeching birds that look like rejected Jim Henson prototypes, and an enormous crocodile that will—presumably—one day chomp off one of Hook’s hands.

IMG_9946.DNGPirates, outfitted as if they’ve raided Broadway prop rooms as well as Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey clown closets, zip up and down from flying galleons like Cirque du Soleil acrobats on bungee cords. There’s a legend that comes to life in a tree stump, memories at the bottom of a dark lagoon, a chorus of raggedy boys singing Nirvana and Ramones songs (yes, you read that correctly), and Peter’s undying quest for his mom (Amanda Seyfried), who gave him a pin in the shape of a pan flute before abandoning him as an infant. The sign of the pan, as it turns out, is a big deal in this realm of fairy dust and flying pirate ships.

It’s all a lot, and really it’s just too much. For this noisy, busy trip to Neverland, Pan relentlessly packs, whacks and attacks the screen. The “boy who could fly” still takes to the air, but this cumbersome, weighty, bombastic bit of backstory feels like an over-crammed, tossed-around piece of movie baggage.

—Neil Pond, Parade Magazine

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