Pan: Soaring adventure

Pan (2015) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG, for fantasy action violence
By Derrick Bang

Old-style, kid-centric adventure films — those akin to Disney’s In Search of the Castaways or Richard Donner’s The Goonies — have become rare.

Today’s studio heads too frequently taint the formula with coarse humor and/or needlessly unpleasant violence, either (giving them the benefit of the doubt) in a misguided effort to court parents, or (more cynical, but more likely) to obtain the “tougher” PG-13 rating that generally does better business than a family-friendly PG.

Peter (Levi Miller, right) anticipates certain doom once he's forced off the ship's plank by
the dread Blackbeard (Hugh Jackman, in black). But although the boy doesn't yet know
it, he possesses a magic talent that will surprise everybody...

Which makes director Joe Wright’s Pan something of a minor miracle. It’s a throwback to kinder, gentler times, when young champions relied on pluck and resourcefulness, rather than sarcasm and potty humor. Scripter Jason Fuchs’ imaginative fantasy is a thrilling ride from start to finish: laden with stalwart heroes and opulently dastardly villains, wildly imaginative locales and a high-spirited adolescent hero who could have stepped from the pages of a Charles Dickens novel (with a detour that L. Frank Baum would have appreciated).

Fuchs’ story speculates on a question that might have occurred to young fans of Scottish novelist/playwright J.M. Barrie’s celebrated “boy who wouldn’t grow up.” It’s a tantalizing query: How did Peter Pan become himself?

Fuchs, making a respectable big-screen solo scripting debut, plays with elements of Barrie’s original mythos, while borrowing scenarios and character archetypes from other fantasy sources. The crazy-quilt result is a bit uneven at times, but Wright and editors William Hoy and Paul Tothill keep things moving so rapidly, that you’re not likely to mind.

The action begins at London’s bleak Lambeth Home for Boys, during the height of the WWII blitz, where 12-year-old Peter (Levi Miller, doing an excellent job in his feature debut) and his fellow youngsters are routinely terrorized by Mother Barnabas (Kathy Burke), the imperious and just-plain-mean nun who runs the place. Peter has long suspected that Mother Barnabas has been hoarding all the tasty food rations while forcing the children to subsist on gruel, but in truth her perfidy is much, much worse.

Aside from these suspicions regarding the orphanage provisions, the bigger issue concerns the ongoing — and unexplained — disappearances of a few boys each night. The answer to that question proves calamitous, when Peter is among those snatched the next time around. He finds himself on (of all things) a pirate ship floating high above, which “sails” air currents the way an ordinary vessel would navigate the seven seas.

Anna Karenina: A tale oddly told

Anna Karenina (2012) • View trailer
Three stars. Rating: R, and rather harshly, for mild sexuality and dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.30.12

Artistic vision is captivating — or clever — to the point at which it calls too much attention to itself, and interferes with the story.

Try as she might, Anna (Keira Knightley) cannot shake her growing infatuation with the
dashing Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). The resulting affair will prove scandalous in
every respect ... not that this heavily stylized film makes us care a whit.

In effect, the tail then wags the dog; we’re too frequently aware of the artifice, at the expense of plot and character development. Empathy and identification become difficult, if not impossible.

Director Joe Wright’s handling of Leo Tolstoy’s venerable Anna Karenina is radiant and ferociously inventive, thanks to Seamus McGarvey’s luminescent cinematography and, most notably, Sarah Greenwood’s brilliant production design. The film is a thing of great artistic beauty, and we cannot help being enchanted — initially — by its sheer, magnificent theatricality.

But the artifice soon becomes tiresome, which exposes the oddly flat and vexingly mannered performances. Celebrated playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard undoubtedly deserves equal credit (or blame) for this vision; I’m disappointed, however, that this abbreviated, heavily stylized handling of Tolstoy lacks the narrative snap and sparkling dialogue that brought Stoppard a well-deserved Academy Award for Shakespeare in Love. (He also was nominated, along with Terry Gilliam and Charles McKeown, for writing 1985’s Brazil.)

Indeed, despite all the bosom-heaving melodrama present in Tolstoy’s novel, this newest adaptation of Anna Karenina is a curiously bloodless affair.

Wright’s approach best can be described as a stylized blend of Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge (absent the music), Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover and the popular stage farce Noises Off. Luhrmann’s flamboyant musical told its story as the characters improbably broke into song; Greenaway’s saga unfolded as the camera tracked horizontally, apparently seamlessly, between events taking place in various settings ... as if characters wandered into and out of fully dressed stages in half a dozen impossibly connected theaters.

Toss in Noises Off, for its behind-the-scenes antics — the stuff we’re never supposed to see — and the result is, well, fascinating. For a time.

The primary set piece, then, is a once-beautiful but now decaying theater, intended to represent the aristocratic rot of 1870s Russian high society; this building’s various sections, dressed appropriately, serve as the story’s many locales. We find Anna (Keira Knightley) and her husband, Karenin (Jude Law), at home in one corner of the massive stage; as Anna — for example — exits the room, she wanders “backstage” between curtains, scrim and backdrops, perhaps changing her wardrobe in order to be properly garbed as she enters the setting for the next scene.

Hanna: Revenge served hot

Hanna (2011) • View trailer for Hanna
2.5 stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, and much too generously, for profanity, sensuality and relentless (often grim) violence
By Derrick Bang


Goodness, what a bizarre, unpalatable and clumsy mess.

I cannot imagine what drew director Joe Wright to this project.

On the run from yet another collection of vicious thugs, Hanna (Saoirse Ronan)
leads them on a merry chase through a dock yard filled with stacked containers.
It's a well-executed sequence, delivered with slick cinematography and clever
editing, but the flash merely serves to conceal this film's bankrupt script.

Wright is the talented filmmaker who delivered such sumptuous, intelligent and inventively photographed adaptations of the books Pride and Prejudice, Atonement and The Soloist. All three are engaging dramas, impeccably acted by superb ensemble casts; all three stir our emotions and showcase a craftsman who understands how best to use every nuanced element of the collaborative motion picture art form.

Hanna, in great, staggering contrast, is a nasty, lumbering oaf of a project: a misbegotten collection of scattered, individual scenes that barely count as a “plot” at all. Seth Lochhead’s story — given additional espionage-style juice by David Farr, a veteran of the British TV series MI5 — couldn’t ever have looked good: not on paper, and certainly not once the damage was up on the screen. It’s as if Wright suddenly forgot everything he ever knew about constructing a coherent film.

Bad scripts can be awful for all sorts of reasons, but one of the greatest sins is a failure to remain true to the rules established from the beginning. If we’re to be a real-world thriller, that demands certain levels of consistency; we don’t suddenly detour into sequences that would have felt more at home in Tim Burton’s handling of Alice in Wonderland.

I’m not certain it’s possible to describe enough of this chaotic, scattershot story in order to properly illustrate its many flaws, but here goes:

We open in a barren, snowbound forest, where Erik Heller (Eric Bana) apparently has been teaching survival skills to his teenage daughter, Hanna (Saoirse Ronan, who earned a well-deserved Oscar nomination for Atonement), ever since she was a little girl. As a result, Hanna has become a lean, mean fighting machine: an ambulatory weapon trained for some dire mission.

These early sequences, and the mysterious build-up behind them, feel like a real-world spin on the character of Hit-Girl in Kick Ass, who similarly was transformed into a slicing, dicing assassin by her father. Fair enough; it’s an intriguing concept.

Believing herself ready, Hanna insists that it’s time she return to civilization, in order to fulfill her mission. Thanks to a homing beacon that Erik allows the girl to trigger, they don’t need to wait long; their isolated cabin soon is surrounded by gun-toting paramilitary types. Erik already has vanished, promising to re-unite with the girl in Berlin; Hanna, meanwhile, demonstrates her skills by taking out a few soldiers before quietly allowing the rest to bring her ... elsewhere.