San Andreas toppled by wobbly foundation

Posted on June 2, 2015 by reelentropy

If nothing else good can be said about the movie, it was at least a huge victory for Dwayne Johnson, who has finally proved indisputably that he can bring in upward of $50 million basically by himself. Photos courtesy Warner Brothers Pictures.

San Andreas gets immediate points off for opening with the Warner Bros. logo transitioning into the New Line Cinema logo, triggering traumatic Hobbit flashbacks.

It follows this up at once by making viewers listen to most of Taylor Swift’s “Style.” This movie has, dare I say it, a very shaky start.

San Andreas mostly follows Ray Gaines (Dwayne Johnson) through an agonizing 45-minute act one, then through multiple earthquakes stemming from California’s San Andreas Fault. Gaines’ wife, Emma (Carla Gugino), has left him for real estate mogul Daniel Riddick (Ioan Gruffuld) and has already moved into his castle-like mansion with their daughter, Blake (Alexandra Daddario), though she waited until early in the movie to serve him divorce papers for the audience’s convenience. A rescue worker with more than 600 confirmed rescues, Ray Gaines is on his way to help relieve a smaller, related earthquake in Nevada, inexplicably unaccompanied in the world’s worst helicopter, when The Big One hits Los Angeles. Gaines gets a call from his wife, gives her terrible earthquake safety advice, then completely abandons his duty to rescue her. From there, they head to San Francisco to rescue their daughter, who was laying over in the city with Riddick on her way to college.

Meanwhile, California Institute of Technology seismologist Lawrence Hayes (Paul Giamatti) develops and proves a reliable method of predicting earthquakes a full half a minute in advance, which is actually a cool and interesting accomplishment, but doesn’t have anything whatsoever to do with the rest of the movie.

First thing’s first — let’s go through all the terrible, stupid things characters do in this movie. These actions and statements make these characters unsympathetic, and can make viewers not care what happens to them.

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There are reasons to remake Poltergeist, but this remake doesn’t use them

Posted on May 27, 2015 by reelentropy

With modern, high-resolution TVs, your little girl can interact with even more creepy ghost hands! Photos courtesy 20th Century Fox.

Poltergeist is a successful update that incorporates modern technology, background and tropes into an old movie, but you still have to wonder, “why?”

The remake follows the Bowens, who move into a new house that’s a step down for them due to father Eric (Sam Rockwell) being out of work. However, they got a great deal on it, as the neighborhood was mostly forclosed on in the housing crisis. Unfortunately, Indian burial ground shenanigans that mysteriously don’t affect the rest of the neighborhood kick in immediately, climaxing in young daughter Madison’s (Kennedi Clements) abduction into her closet. The signature tree and clown scares move to the opening haunting sequence and there are some adjustments to make the fracturing family subtext more obvious, but it mostly goes through the motions of the 1982 original.

It’s by no means a shot-for-shot remake. Modern effects are used to explore the netherworld in depth, where it was all offscreen in the original. Benevolent old psychic lady Tangia Barrons becomes Carrigan Burke (Jared Harris), an Irish ghost hunting TV star with black battle scars and grizzly, smoldering sex appeal. The daughter who spends all her time on the phone, Kendra (Saxon Sharbino), now spends all her time on her smartphone. It’s clever. It really brings the story into a 2015 setting.

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Tomorrowland gets A for ambition, C- for execution

Posted on May 27, 2015 by reelentropy

While many trailers have focused on George Clooney, even at the expense of co-star Britt Robertson, almost none tease Hugh Laurie. He’s a bit more popular than that, I think. Photos courtesy Walt Disney Motion Picture Studios.

Tomorrowland is a movie you want to like because it tries new things, an all-too-rare venture in Hollywood, but it doesn’t quite put them all together.

After a much too long layover in 1964, the plot starts with genius miscreant Casey Newton (Britt Robertson) finding a mysterious pin that transports her to a pocket dimension called Tomorrowland. After discovering a world still excited for new technology, Newton is desperate to return, and starts on a journey to do so with the help of Tomorrowland’s android recruiter, Athena (Raffey Cassidy), and now exiled golden son Frank Walker (George Clooney, Thomas Robinson in the 1964 scenes).

The movie’s got some pretty interesting storytelling concepts going on. It starts with a double narration — first from Walker talking about an apocalyptic future decided by greed, politics and willful ignorance, despite being raised in the ’60s when “The Future” was something out of The Jetsons. He’s interrupted by Newton, arguing for that limitless future, despite being raised in modern times when “The Future” always has something wrong with it. It’s an interesting dynamic that’s sadly dropped as Athena takes a more prominent role.

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A less chaotic state: 1982’s Poltergeist

Posted on May 21, 2015 by reelentropy

Photo courtesy Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

The original Poltergeist is kind of dull. It’s not overtly scary by today’s standards, until the end at least. However, the Steven Spielberg written, produced and possibly directed film has a strong family focus. Where a lot of recent horror movies had been about a group of shitty teenagers in an obviously haunted house, Poltergeist moved to an average suburban home and plagued a splintering but otherwise normal family.

The Freelings, father Steven (Craig T. Nelson), mother Diane (JoBeth Williams), teenage daughter Dana (Dominique Dunne) and elementary-aged son Robbie (Oliver Robins) and daughter Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke) live quietly in the first homes in the suburb Steven helped build. They don’t talk or listen to each other, and the early scenes go out of their way to show the family’s disconnect and general careless attitude toward each other. All that changes when Carol Anne literally vanishes into the TV. The Freelings begin to live in fear as they must share their home with an infestation of paranormal beings, and call in all manner of investigators to cleanse the house and return their daughter to the plane of the living.

It was scary because it attacked viewers at home, where they hadn’t been before, raising questions about who your children are really listening to on TV and whether or not you’re really safe in your own home and legitimizing the idea that there really is a monster in your closet and/or under the bed.  It became one of the most widely recognized scary movies of all time, even though it’s not that scary.

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Maggie unique, too slow

Posted on May 20, 2015 by reelentropy

One thing the film does do well is it lays the body horror on thick. In one scene, Maggie must dig giant maggots out of her bite wound. Photo courtesy Roadside Attractions.

Maggie has a refreshing enough premise to carry the movie regardless, but it is a slow and disappointing movie.

In a world recovering from a zombie apocalypse, Maggie Vogel (Abigail Breslin) has been bitten and goes to the city to die alone. Her father, Wade (Arnold Schwarzenegger), retrieves her from the hospital in order to spend as much remaining time with her as possible — the virus has a six-to-eight week incubation period in this film. But this is a wold riddled with zombies kept by their families too long as much as it is by the initial apocalypse, and Wade Vogel faces a choice he is never prepared to make — throw his daughter into a reportedly barbarous quarantine or kill her before she turns, an event he can’t precisely track.

Maggie’s strength is its deconstructive premise. There are plenty of zombie movies in which the enemy is a seething mass of comfortably irredeemable corpses, but in this one, they’re Wade Vogel’s next door neighbors. They’re his daughter, on an infection timeline such that he can’t be sure whether she’s more person or more ghoul at any given point.

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