Tag: clooney

Tomorrowland (2015)

Pretty scifi for kids, starring some kids, mostly human kids. Britt Robertson is Casey, 18 years old and a freedom fighter for science, though NASA would probably call her a terrorist, it’s always in the point of view concerning that duality. George Clooney was a kid, and he got his chain yanked by a darling robot played by freckly newcomer Raffey Cassidy. So Clooney is bitter and gloomy, and Britt is bubbly and optimistic, and that’s really our plot.

The plot is a bit thin and the devices are a bit preachy, and when this came out there was some grumbling that there are very few black people in the cast, but this week we see that the NAACP Image Award for Best Motion Picture of 2015 was “Straight Outta Compton” and it’s funny, isn’t it, that movies with white leads never win that award, right? So who’s being race-exclusive here? Disney made this movie as a positive voice for humanity’s future, and it didn’t seem like they were excluding black people on purpose, so all that griping falls on deaf ears until the day when the Image Awards are based on something other than just race.

This one is a more adultish Disney movie, like they tried with The Black Hole 35 years ago, thus people get killed and maimed, and a bunch of killer robots get offed. Mostly, instead of being a white-people movie, this is a girl-power movie. Britt Robertson has to save the world, and it’s Disney so we know she does, no spoiler there, but the best girlpower is from Athena (Raffey Cassidy), a ten-year-old dynamo of chopsocky asskicking, exterminating bad robots and, since this future has never heard of Asimov’s Laws, Robot Raffey also takes out some humans.

The scenes of the title place are stunning CGI, fully populated with realism and coherent artistic vision. Very pretty movie to watch, though there are some unexplained loose ends as though the script went through some changes after shooting began, or the editing process cut out some bits of continuity.

Since this is the 2010’s, there is no clear-cut bad guy, other than robots who can be blown up without offending anyone, but one of those missing bits in the plot is that a human controls all those killer robots. It’s namby-pamby stuff like that which is making Hollywood movies steadily lose cultural relevance, then they complain about falling box office without looking in the mirror. In this case, the bad guy turns out to be almost reasonable near the end of the movie, so maybe the real bad guy is humanity itself?

Blah, and that’s what i meant about the preachy stuff, though Disney does not mention oil companies specifically, because Disney is a global corporation too, and the upper floors know which side of the real world is buttered and which is plain. You simply can’t be preachy if you’ve got a tarry gnarled member lodged in your own throat.

So the message is a washed-out fail, but the movie is fun to watch and the characters are plucky and easy to root for. The scifi is good, effects are great, but a few things guarantee that there will be no sequel here.

Rating and more info…

The Monuments Men (2014)

Based on the book by Robert Edsel, about how the Nazis looted Europe of anything of value not bolted down, and many things which were. And about the group of artnerds who got a lot of the stuff back. When this came out the critics fawned over it. An all-star cast, a story about hi-falutin’ stuff, and for once, there was a war movie which no intelligensian can be too snobby to hate.

It’s a true story, or the book is anyway, and the cast really is outstanding. Bill Murray and Bob Balaban teasing each other is the running gag and it’s perfect. There’s even a parting shot of them ripped straight out of Casablanca, as in a beautiful friendship beginning. Star, narrator, producer, and director is Clooney, and he even worked on the script too. Matt Damon turns in another great role. John Goodman is a master at work. Cate Blanchett, nuffsaid?

So why does the movie fall so far short? Artsy critics were quick to praise this one, we already mentioned how it’s a war movie all their own, but it seems like no one got past that to evaluate the film on its own cinematic merits. Beautifully shot, Clooney is a fine director, there is nothing technically wrong with the movie. So why does it feel hollow?

Like a documentary but dramatized, and light on information because it’s a drama, not a documentary. The root trouble with this movie is covering too much story with too little information. A finer scalpel running over the book would have found the spine of a simpler plot, isolated it, and built a new creature around it. That’s what screenwriters do.

You can tell that someone attempted to do it with Edsel’s book. Focusing the plot on the Ghent Altarpiece and the Madonna of Bruges was a stab at boiling the plot down. Unfortunately, these two stories (where there should be one) happen in the beginning and in the last 15 minutes, and the intervening time is a series of anecdotes, disjointed vignettes of nostalgia.

Very entertaining anecdotes, to be sure. The Murray/Balaban feud is great and putting John Goodman into combat is bound to be hilarious. But then throw in an almost love story, and a dozen anecdotes about nothing more than how tough it was to invade Germany, and the whole middle hour of the movie turns to jelly. Bookending scenes with FDR and Truman are exemplars of how the movie skips around from thing to thing, jamming in as many odd loose bits of the book as it can.

It could have been a tight story about a few guys chasing Nazi plunder across Europe, with a quality side-story about unfulfilled desire in Paris in April. On one hand, the plethora of A-listers almost ensures that the plot will be diluted. At 1:51 the movie is plenty long, but there’s just too much starpower to contain. All the cast are brilliant, but none of them get to shine.

Would have made a great comedy, specially with this ensemble. A movie about the relationship between Damon and Blanchett would make a great movie. Or a movie about this group hunting down one specific trove of artworks, done as a combo of detective-movie and war-movie would be a fun ride. But this movie tries to be all those films at once. Predictable results.

In the end, it’s good entertainment with a tiny amount of culture sprinkled over it, but no meaty plot to bite into. Worth watching for the laughs, but like the ancient American proverb about Chinese food, you’ll be hungry again soon afterwards.

More info here…