Wild: An incredible journey

Wild (2014) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated R, for nudity, sexual content, profanity and drug use
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.2.15

In June 1995, at the age of 26 and with her life in what could have been an inescapable downward spiral, Cheryl Strayed impulsively — foolishly, naïvely, absurdly — embarked on a solo hike along the Pacific Crest Trail.

A glimpse backward, at a happier time: Cheryl (Reese Witherspoon, right) watches as her
mother, Bobbi (Laura Dern) enjoys a daily ride on the beloved horse that is one of the
few precious things in her life.

The Minneapolis-based liberal arts scholar — magna cum laude, with a double major in English and women’s studies — had zero experience with such activities, but she knew one thing: Her life was in crisis, and she had to do something.

Attempting to regain her soul while trekking through Nature’s wonderland likely seemed a reasonable plan.

The resulting memoir — Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail — was published in the spring of 2012, reaching No. 1 on The New York Times Best Seller list that July. The book was selected for Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club, and in fact had been optioned by Reese Witherspoon’s production company before copies even hit bookstores.

And so here we are, two years and change later, with director Jean-Marc Vallée’s big-screen adaptation bringing Witherspoon the best reviews of her career: accolades that are heartily deserved.

Vallée will be remembered as the director/editor who just last year guided Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto to Academy Awards in Dallas Buyers Club. Clearly, Vallée has a gift for extracting the best from his actors, and he has worked the same magic here: not merely with Witherspoon, but also — and equally notably — with Laura Dern, utterly luminescent as Cheryl’s wise and loving mother, Bobbi.

And it wouldn’t surprise me if both Witherspoon and Dern galloped home with the same two Oscars.

Vallée also is drawn to fact-based stories involving people in deep spiritual crisis: self-destructive individuals who — whether through anger, anguish or an epiphany — abruptly resolve to turn things around, to make a difference. Two decades passed before scrappy AIDS angel Ron Woodroof’s saga became a film, in Dallas Buyers Club; I’m intrigued by the similar length of time that passed before Strayed felt comfortable turning her chronicle into a book (after which, the film couldn’t have been made faster).

One suspects she needed time to process everything.

Obvious Child: Needs to grow a bit

Obvious Child (2014) • View trailer 
Three stars. Rated R, for profanity and sexual candor
By Derrick Bang

John Carpenter and Dan O’Bannon collaborated on a 16mm short film initially called Planetfall while students at USC’s film school in the early 1970s; it was expanded for theatrical release in 1974, now titled Dark Star, and quickly became a cult classic. Carpenter went on to a lucrative career highlighted by Halloween and Escape from New York; O’Bannon made his bones as a screenwriter, notably with Alien and many other horror and sci-fi projects.

On the sad day that Donna (Jenny Slate) packs up books — her final act as clerk of a
bookstore forced to close — she gets a surprise visit from Max (Jake Lacy), who
manages to bring a smile to her face. Whether she'll agree to his gentle push for an
actual date, however, is another matter.

A few years earlier, in 1967, George Lucas made a 15-minute short titled THX 1138 4EB, also while a student at USC’s film school. It, too, was expanded to feature length with a slightly shorter title — THX 1138 — and was released commercially in 1971, now starring Robert Duvall and Donald Pleasence, and became both a cult classic and Lucas’ first directorial credit. He went on to make American Graffiti and, well, a certain sci-fi epic that took place in a galaxy far, far away.

Obvious Child began life in 2009, as a 23-minute short film written by Anna Bean, Karen Maine and Gillian Robespierre, and directed by Robespierre. Encouraging reviews at various film festivals encouraged Robespierre and star Jenny Slate to re-make the film for feature release, with an expanded cast and running time. A Kickstarter campaign raised the funds to get it placed at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, where indie distributor A24 picked it up and now has brought it to a theater near you.

Its occasional merits aside, however, I rather doubt Robespierre will go on to the sort of career enjoyed by Carpenter, O’Bannon and Lucas.

Slate, however, should get a pretty good bump. She’s been all over TV for the past five years, from Saturday Night Live and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, to House of Lies and Parks and Recreation. She capably handles a big-screen starring role here, establishing a warm and delectably snarky persona.

Moving forward, though, she needs better material.

The major problem is that Obvious Child still feels like a 23-minute film, albeit one that has been padded with a lot of extraneous “stuff” in order to beef it up into an 84-minute feature. Several sequences do little but fill time, to the detriment of the story being told, and at least one sidebar is completely pointless.

And since Robespierre now has taken the primary scripting credit for this longer version, she’s clearly the one to blame. Perhaps she shouldn’t have been so quick to dismiss Maine and Bean (although Maine and newcomer Elisabeth Holm do share a “story by” credit here).

Veronica Mars: Back on the case

Veronica Mars (2014) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rating: Rated PG-13, for profanity, sexual content, drug content and violence
By Derrick Bang

Rob Thomas obviously is an honorable fellow, and he deserves considerable credit.

Veronica (Kristen Bell) is surprised to discover that yet another intimate video of Logan
(Jason Dohring) and his recently murdered girlfriend has been posted to the Internet,
further swaying public opinion into believing that he's guilty of the crime. But this begs
the more pressing question: Who shot this footage, and how?

Mindful that his big-screen Veronica Mars project owes its very existence to the crowd-funded Kickstarter campaign that raised $5.7 million, Thomas — as director and co-scripter, sharing the latter credit with Diane Ruggiero — did his very best to deliver a film that meets fan expectation and smoothly updates events from the cherished 2004-07 TV series ... while also functioning as a self-contained adventure that (hopefully) is approachable to first-time viewers with no reference to the original show.

A tall order, and one that Thomas mostly pulls off.

Full disclosure demands that I acknowledge being one of the 91,585 Kickstarter backers, from 3,655 different cities in 88 countries, who pledged some $$$ to help create this film. It made perfect sense to me, since I’ve also (for example) supported PBS programming with pledges since being old enough to write checks.

As one of the show’s longtime fans — star Kristen Bell refers to us as “marshmallows” — I’m quite pleased by the results. That said, this big-screen Veronica Mars looks and feels less like a full-blown movie, and more like a two-part television episode granted a bit more budgeting juice. I recall, back in the day, that several of the 1960s Man from UNCLE two-parters were re-cut and released theatrically, particularly in foreign countries; this Veronica Mars update shares that pedigree.

Back during Hollywood’s golden age, this would have been a respectable B-feature. Nothing wrong with that; indeed, many so-called B films are remembered far more fondly today, than the higher-prestige A pictures with which they shared billing.

By way of contrast, the many Star Trek films that followed the original show’s three 1960s seasons definitely look like big-screen spectaculars quite far removed from their humbler TV origins. Joss Whedon’s Serenity, as well, granted impressively opulent closure to the short-lived Firefly, which had gone off the air several years earlier.

It’s an intriguing distinction, perhaps having something to do with the modest, easily relatable sensibilities that made Veronica’s television adventures so approachable in the first place. Veronica also owed her quick popularity, in part, to good timing: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (also from Whedon) had just gone off the air, and Thomas’ plucky high school heroine — and the coterie of friends, frenemies and enemies she gradually accumulated — admirably filled the niche left empty after Buffy had staked her last blood-sucker.