A sequel to the 2006 film based on a novel even further from a different era, with everybody involved 20 years older, seems kind of…made for streaming.
But when you’ve got Streep, Hathaway, Blunt and Tucci on board, there’s nothing for it but to zip up and doll-up and make your plans for May 1.
Fashion comes back into fashion?
A week doesn’t go by when I don’t dial hop past some “Pirates of the Caribbean” telecast and wonder “Whatever happened to Gore Verbinski?
The dude directed “Mouse Hunt,” “The Mexican,” “The Ring” and “The Weather Man” before selling his soul to Disney.
Well, here he is, behind the camera for an all-star action-farce about how a slob from the future starts the revolution today.
Zazie Beetz, Michael Pena, Juno Temple, Haley Lu Richardson and Asim Chandry are also in the cast.
Feb. 13, we see how it all goes down.
“The Silent Planet” is a sci-fi allegory that attempts to take the pulse of the human condition in our current, fear-immigrants moment and doesn’t quite come off.
One can appreciate the cleverness of seeing The Tablelands in Canada’s Gros Morne National Park as an alien world and some (but not all) of the sci-fi world-building-on-a-budget. But the script looks for universalities, loss, crimes and redemption or at least “tests” of humanity that it almost finds but never quite grasps.
Elias Koteas, a veteran of “The Last Days on Mars,” “The Baker” and “Chicago P.D.” is Theodore, an aged miner sentenced to this out-world where he digs up valuable ore which he’s able to electrically launch into a vehicle in low atmosphere orbit. He lives in the living-pod quarters stage of an atmospheric entry vehicle.
It’s implied that Theodore is the lone miner on this low-oxygen planet or planetoid (Europa?). For all the expense and tech it took to get him and those who proceded him –one at a time — there, his tools are a hammer, a chisel and a wheel barrow. The entry vehicle he plunged to the surface on had him strapped into a transparent bubble that forces him to face the searing flames and heat of hurtling downward. All part of his punishment?
Let’s take a moment to be thankful the writer-director didn’t call the mineral “unobtainium.”
Theodore mutters to himself through his days, writes and watches the sitcom “Roomies” at night during the 14 hour days. For some reason, he removes the life monitor planted in his chest. His overseers assume he’s dead. For some other reason, Theodore keeps mining and making his deposits into orbit.
Niyya (Briana Middleton of “Sharper” and “The Tender Bar”) is sent to replace him before anybody figures out the other guy is still there, just crazy.
Earth has been visited by aliens called the Oieans, designed and attired like creatures straight out of 1960s era “Doctor Who.” The planet has been less than welcoming of these interplanetary refugees. That’s how Niyya, raised by Oieans, got into trouble and was sentenced to work on thise mines.
“F— Humanity!” she’s scribbled in her journal, which Theodore promptly swipes rather than welcoming his new “company.” He’s paranoid, and he has his reasons. She’s paranoid and she has hers. At least she got Oiean advice as a child that might help her cope with her future.
“You can climb to the top of the world, but you can’t climb above yourself.”
Not sure if that’s as helpful as they make out. On a world with low oxygen, with a crazed fellow criminal your only company and rolling, sentient purple fog that reads your thoughts and turns them against you, “the silence will crush you.” Can these two just get along?
The clumsy arbitrariness of the plot, the “rules” of this world and the limits the story imposes which characters sometimes ignore undercut any “reality” we’re meant to buy into. Flashbacks, even those with nudity and murky evidence of past crimes, don’t illuminate much.
The actors are pretty much stranded in the The Tablelands with a static plot, spacesuit costumes, the flimsiest fake survival without O2 gear ever budgeted and most everything — wheel barrows included — sourced at nearby Deer Lake’s Home Hardware.
You don’t need a lot of Canadian money to pull off science fiction. But you do need to at least let us see what the actors must have seen in the script in the finished product.
Rating: TV-16+, violence, nudity, profanity
Cast: Elias Koteas, Briana Middleton and Courtney Lancaster.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Jeffrey St. Jules. A Quiver release on Amazon Prime.
Running time: 1:35
Zooey Deschanel and “Daredevil” Charlie Cox star in an old-fashioned/new fashioned romance of the sort that Deschanel used to excel in.
They play a couple splitting up, with a dog who isn’t taking it well. He needs a trip to “a dog beach in Florida.”
Kudos to the filmmakers for casting a real dog. That doesn’t look like any dog beach I visited during my years in Florida. But I’d totally go back and bring our pack if somebody threw together a beachside amusement park for puppies.
It’s an MGM release Dec. 10 on Amazon Prime.
This fall’s North American box office success of such anime franchises as “Chainsaw Man” and “Demon Slayer” and the vast collection of such titles on offer from Netflix underscore the soaring popularity and international appeal of the Japanese animated art form.
But when it comes to anime, there is but one godfather and undisputed master of that world. The Oscar-winning writer and director Hayao Miyazaki, now 84 years old, is the artist who still towers over any serious discussion of anime. And his films, from “My Neighbor Totoro” and “Ponyo” to “Spirited Away” and “The Wind Rises” are still the exemplars of the best anime, a corner of film dominated by artistically inferior and far less demanding franchises with mass production TV production values.
“The Worlds of Hayao Miyazki” is a lovely new appreciation of Miyazaki’s art and touchstone films in book form, a breakdown of the myriad influences that this artist absorbed before making “Kiki’s Delivery Service,” “Howl’s Moving Castle” and “The Boy and the Heron.”
Nicolas Rapold, a former editor in chief of “Film Comment” magazine, has written an “unofficial” and “unauthorized” biography that isn’t a conventional “biography” at all. “Worlds” touches on some of Miyazaki’s life story and folds bits of biography in with the scores of literary and animation origins and origin stories he tapped into to create his work. The new book is an illustrated biographical monograph compiled without much in the way of fresh access to Miyazaki or his animation house, Studio Ghibli.
We learn of the filmmaker’s youthful love of early sci-fi writer Jules Verne and how that helped shape the “steampunk” settings and production design of works like “Future Boy Conan,” Castle in the Sky” and “Howl’s Moving Castle.” Rapold may try to correct that “steampunk” label, but Miyazaki was most fans’ introduction to that world.
Miyazaki’s World War II childhhood and his father’s work for a fighter plane parts manufacturer informed the aviation-centric “Porco Rosso” and his fanciful “Jiro dreams of Zeroes” biography of a Japanese fighter plane designer — “The Wind Rises.” There are academic theses and New York Times “think pieces” on Miyazki’s obsession with flight, some of which Rapold traces back to an oft-mentioned favorite book from his youth, “The Little Prince.”
Miyazaki wasn’t just reading, digesting and adaptation variations of characters, fantasy themes and settings from “The Little Prince,” “Alice in Wonderland,” “Pippi Longstocking” or “The Secret Garden.” Like Disney corporate practice to this day, he’d take colleagues on scouting trips to quaint, historical European cities and towns to inform the backgrounds of his often Euro-centric stories.
Rapold labels Miyazaki’s ability to absorb and re-think themes, ideas and characters into new stories “magpie tendencies,” and these manifest themselves in forms that render seemingly “foreign” fantasies like “Ponyo” somehow familiar.
That’s just a Japanese “The Little Mermaid” with younger characters and more modern and more Japanese concerns and considerations.
I’m not much of a fan of fantasy fiction or films. And using Miyazaki as your benchmark is a great way to dismiss the vast majority of anime as boilerplate mass production piffle, from under-developed derivative stories to under-animated execution.
But if you’re going to have standards, “The Japanese Walt Disney” is a great place to set the bar. His creative process, style, influences and the ongoing impact he has have been covered elsewhere, in a very fine TV documentary “10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki,” for instance.
“The Worlds of Hayao Miyazaki” adds to that appreciation. It’s a beautiful book, filled with images from those inspirations and how Miyazaki re-imagined them, and a grand overview of the touchstone TV and film works of Miyazaki’s career. Even a casual Miyazki fan will be transported back to those films, gain insight into their themes and the creative process. That makes this new publication a great gift idea for the anime or animation fan on your holiday shopping list.
“The Worlds of Hayao Miyazaki: The Influences and Inspiration Behind the Iconic Films.” By Nicolas Rapold. Frances Lincoln Publishers. 224 pages. $35.
This festival darling, the latest from Park Chan Wook (“Old Boy”) has echoes of the Michael Caine dark comedy about (literal) cutthroat corporate life, “A Shock to the System.”
Long term unemployment means you’ve got to do something to better your odds of landing that next job. “Anything.”
Christmas Day in select cities, everywhere when the Oscar nominations honor it in January.
“Terrible twos” and teens have nothing on Tweens when it comes to imagininative cruelty, shunning and making you question what you know and who you think you are.
This Dec. 24 release wears lots of newfound labels — “body horror” among them. But the story and stories like it were ancient when “Lord of the Flies” was published.
Adolescent flashback time?
Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein” is Gothic horror rendered in the grandest strokes.
The expansive, baroque settings are grandeur incarnate, with grandiose performances pitched to fill every pixel of the Grand Guignol frame that the scarlet, grey and gloomy green backdrops do not.
Where Robert Eggers’ “Nosferatu” was a younger filmmaker’s homage to one of the cornerstones of horror, del Toro’s take on Mary Shelley’s horror epic is a mature master’s contemplative, considered appreciation of a work that still has something to say to humanity two hundred years after it was published.
“Only Monsters Play God” is added to his film’s full title. That hints at the opera without song he’s made out of it, profound and sentimental and smart enough to recognize no modern interpretation of a scientist absorbed with humanity’s obsession with longer and longer life would be satisfying without a Byronic fatalism the Oscar winning director is old enough to understand.
Eternal life denies “death, the one remedy to all pain.”
Oscar Isaac is our wild-haired genius, raised to pursue science and be heedless of most anything else by his commanding, demanding and unsentimental Swiss man-of-science father, Baron Frankenstein (Charles Dance).
But young Victor’s motivation crossed into mania the night he say his mother bleed out in childbirth. His obsession with ending death has him experimenting and shocking the Edinburgh university where he teaches, and his ranting, theatrical defense of his “I would have command over the forces of life and DEATH” Jeremiad gets him fired.
But an onlooker at his faculty inquisition is his salvation. Harlander (Christoph Waltz) is there to bring him news of his brother, William (Felix Kammerer). He’s engaged to marry Harlander’s niece Elizabeth (Mia Goth). And he’s heard of Victor Frankenstein’s “mad” experiments and wants to underwrite them.
As the story is framed within a Danish polar expedition’s encounter with a towering, cowled “monster” whom they cannot kill, with battered and bloodied Victor there to confess when the captain (Lars Mikkelsen) asks “What manner of devil made him?” we know how this turned out.
That’s the beauty of this retelling of a timeworn tale. We know the plot, the characters, the themes and the subtexts. Writer-director del Toro introduces just enough novelty and an unexpected turn or two — one must leave narrative breathing room for Maggie Gyllenhaal’s just-as-anticipated “The Bride” of Frankenstein film next spring — to make the story “new.”
Our monster (Jacob Elordi, who first gained fame in “The Kissing Booth” and broke out in “Euphoria”) isn’t mute. He talks. “VICTOR” he shouts, before finding a shortcut to learning a philosopher’s vocabulary and mindset.
There are no villagers with pitchforks. Danish sailors will have to do. Victor’s great love here is (somewhat) unrequited, his passion for his brother’s intended. But in the best Mel Brooks tradition, we see the la-BOR-a-tory designed and installed in an abandoned “public works” (water pumping) tower left unfinished by the many wars of 19th century Europe.
And what do wars provide in plentitude? Fresh corpses to dissect, dismember and piece together for “galvanic” (electrical) reanimation, the doctor is told by his arms-dealing sponsor Harlander.
The casting could not be better. Isaac devours the screen with his rages and touches with his late-act epiphanies. Elordi, hired to give Alexander Skarsgaard a break from famous horror roles, brings a soulful turn to our cursed “monster.” Goth’s Euro-accent is never unsteady enough to deny the fact that as a horror icon (“Pearl,””X,” “Suspiria”) she belongs here more than most anybody else.
Waltz’s casting pretty much guarantees that Harlander has an “angle” he’s playing.
Mikkelsen, brother of Mads, brings gravitas and a hint of megalomania to the captain who hears both sides of this tale while trapped in a sailing ship in the polar ice.
And Dance, draped in a cape big enough to hold every actor who ever played “The Phantom of the Opera” all at once, is simply magnificent — vulpine malevolence incarnate and a mean man with a mission, to see that his science is served and continued by his oldest son.
I wasn’t crazy about the hoary “Let me tell you my story” framing device. Having two characters launch the flashbacks is just cumbersome. The turns towards sentiment are undermotivated, and even at two and a half hours in running time, the shifts in tone and point of view play as abrupt.
And any thriller that leans on CGI elk and wolves has cut corners in ways that can take you straight out of the movie, if only for a scene or three.
But “Frankenstein” is beautiful to look at and thoughtful enough to make one ponder its two hundred year old themes and warnings anew.
And if young Mr. Eggers and Ari Aster (“Hereditary”) figure the world of smart horror is their oyster, the Mexican master del Toro reminds us that the smart money — even a Netflix blank check — is always bet on him.
Rating: R, graphic bloody violence, nudity
Cast:: Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, Christoph Waltz, Felix Kammerer, Lars Mikkelsen and Charles Dance
Credits: Scripted and directed by Guillermo del Toro, based on the novel by Mary Shelley. A Netflix release.
Running time: 2:32
Seems like this would be the most challenging music biopic of them all to keep honest for a deep dive.
An NPR program a few years back tackled the subject of Michael Jackson and why Black people have been disinclined to turn away from his, pedophilia, publicity stunts, sham marriages, skin lightening and the whole freak show be damned.
But if you don’t deal with those dark corners of his personality and psychology, you’re “whitewashing” him in the worst way.
This looks triumphalist, a fantasia sanitizing the image, like Baz L’s “Elvis.”
Would that play? Because swinging and missing at an honest take on MJ would be cringe beyond belief
You’d think these sorts of things would be figured out at a table read, if not in the audition.
Give your leading man his pages, make him read some of the fifth rate Raymond Chandler “tough guy” voice-over narration you have in mind.
“I only kill wolves to protect the sheep…I’m the BEST…I AM the ‘Exit Protocol.'”
Do you believe it? Do you believe him? Does he have the presence to pull off being “the best” hit man out there? An assassin’s assassin?
Scott Martin wrote, directed and acted in a Lou Diamond Phillips, Patric, Danny Trejo and Michael Paré B-movie Western titled “Big Kill” a few years back. Perhaps that’s where the delusion that he could carry a thriller was born.
But even a B/C movie like “Exit Protocol” demands a lead who won’t make the viewer feel embarrassed for veteran character actors Dolph Lundgren and Michael Jai White.
“Protocol” is a terrible script terribly conceived, directed and acted. Every time the phrase “the best” turns up we grimace in recognition that nothing here merits that phrase.
Hit man movies and those pretentious enough to label their killer an “assassin” because there’s no union rules that say they can’t are, to a one, “researched” by watching other hit man movies. Such figures are rarer than cultured, educated and erudite serial killers who love chianti and fava beans. Outside of the movies, they don’t exist.
And this nonsense of the “hitman who hunts hitmen” is totally a fictional and filmic invention.
So by design, these movies, from “Hitman” on down the line, grow dumber with every iteration. And if you don’t have an aged Pierce Brosnan or Liam Neeson or Wesley Snipes or whoever in the lead, you’re lost before you start, condemned to waste the viewer’s time.
Our contract killer Sam Hayden (Martin) narrates and narrates about being “the best” “assassin of assasins,” and how killing this or that “mark” is him doing “the world a favor.”
But “Section 8” screenwriter Chad Law and Martin do everything in their power to show us “the best” is just in his head. We meet Hayden during a botched “contract” in a church, where he’s given away the element of surprise to lecture his quarry. He shoots a lot and misses a lot.
This is repeated every time he has a hit his mob intermediary (J.B. Yowell, better suited to selling used cars, but only in a dealership his daddy owns) assigns him.
Screw that silencer on, pull the trigger and miss and miss.
Until, of course, you inexplicably befriend a grizzled killer (Lundgren, lumbering like Frankenstein’s butler Lurch these day) and have to shoot your way past legions of masked, tac-geared-up murderers. Those guys they never miss.
“Black Dynamite” White is brought in to assassinate the assassin, and the assassin assigned to kill the assassin. White tries to keep things professional, but the disappointment shows. Martin’s wife Stephanie Beran plays Wicked, another killer, because of course she does.
Listening to this dialogue and mulling over this half-assed plotting you don’t have to go to the screenwriter’s IMDb page to know how much he likes chewing gum. You can just picture it.
And director Shane Dax Taylor isn’t up to improving anything that was written or any of the acting or the drab uncinematic New Mexico locations.
Much of this crew has worked together before on similar fare (“The Best Man” is also a hitman movie), so it’s not like they didn’t know their leading man was no leading man. They’re just churning this junk out on a budget that guarantees it’ll sell, quality be damned.
So no, that’s nothing that could be discovered or corrected at a table read.
Rating: R, violence, profanity
Cast: Scott Martin, Dolph Lundgren, Charlotte Kirk, Lina Maya, J.B. Yowell, Stephanie Beran and Michael Jai White.
Credits: Directed by Shane Dax Taylor, scripted by Chad Law. A Saban release.
Running time: 1:24
Movie Nation 