Jingle Jangle — A Christmas Journey: Sparkling all the way

Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey (2020) • View trailer

3.5 stars. Rated PG, for no particular reason

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.18.20

This is an impressive slice of holiday razzle-dazzle.

 

The tag line for writer/director David E. Talbert’s opulent fantasy promises that viewers will “discover a world of wishes and wonder,” and that’s an understatement. This often breathtaking blend of Alice in Wonderland, Babes in Toyland and Hugo also seems to be gunning for the seasonal crown long worn by The Wizard of Oz. 

 

Perky Journey (Madalen Mills), not one to be denied, insists that her grandfather
Jeronicus (Forest Whitaker) take another crack at perfecting his Buddy 3000 robot toy.

Because yes: Just as we’re getting accustomed to the production design and special-effects overload, John Debney’s orchestral underscore shifts into a Broadway-style prelude, and we realize, goodness, these folks are about to break into song.

 

Which they do. In addition to everything else, Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey — a Netflix original — is an old-school musical, complete with a few extravagant dance numbers.

 

Actually, Talbert might hit us with too much of a good thing: a notion emphasized midway through this saga, when we’re introduced to an oh-so-cute little robot dubbed Buddy 3000 (and looking like he wandered in from WALL-E’s universe).

 

Events are related in storybook fashion, much the way Peter Falk narrated the action in The Princess Bride to grandson Fred Savage. The raconteur here is Grandmother Journey (Phylicia Rashad), who shares her childhood adventure with a pair of rapt young listeners.

 

First, a prologue, set in 1860 in the quaint Dickensian town of Cobbleton. Jeronicus Jangle (Justin Cornwell) is proprietor and designer of the delights found within Jangles and Things, the town’s famed toy shop. It’s chockablock with colorful, steampunk-inspired gadgets, gizmos, whachamacallits, thingamabobs and doomaflatchies, including a huge pendulum clock and a contraption called the Jangulator.

 

Production designer Gavin Bocquet went absolutely nuts with this eye-popping set, with its checkerboard floors, damask wallpaper and stairwell filigree; it’s impossible to take it all in.

 

Anyway…

 

Jeronicus uses the Jangulator to grant life to a doll-size, Spanish matador puppet dubbed Don Juan Diego (and played, via deliberately jerky motion-control, by Ricky Martin). Ah, but Don Juan is an evil little creature, and he persuades Jeronicus’ assistant, Gustafson (Miles Barrow), to set up a separate shingle and claim this miracle as his own.

 

Rogue One: Plenty of thrills in this Star Wars entry

Rogue One (2016) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, for intense sci-fi action and violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.16.16

The Force is strong with this one.

Rogue One is a crackling entry in the Star Wars canon, perhaps most accurately subtitled Episode 3.95. It takes place immediately preceding 1977’s original Star Wars, and in fact can be viewed as the events abridged in that film’s opening text crawl.

Once Jyn (Felicity Jones) agrees to join Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) on a mission to find
and rescue her father from the evil Empire, she's startled to discover that her new
partner's companion droid, K-2SO, is a former Imperial Enforcer Droid ... with a
distinct inferiority complex.

The fast-paced script — credited to John Knoll, Gary Whitta, Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy — is equal parts heist thriller and down ’n’ dirty war film: a fairly grim escapade, by this series’ usual standards, taking place at a time that finds the severely overmatched rebel Alliance without much of the “new hope” promised by the eventual arrival of Luke, Han and the many others destined to enter the fray.

This film’s essential place in series continuity notwithstanding, director Gareth Edwards and his scripters manage the neat trick of making it a solid stand-alone adventure, for the benefit of any first-time Star Wars viewers (assuming such individuals still exist). This adventure builds to a terrific climax, while also delivering an unexpected degree of emotional gravitas.

The prologue and first act are a bit top-heavy with exposition and the need to introduce a lot of new characters, but — once beyond the information dump — it’s smooth sailing.

Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen), once a respected scientist with the evil Empire, became appalled by the weapons of mass destruction he’d been fabricating for his masters; he fled to an outworld planet with his wife Lyra (Valene Kane) and their young daughter Jyn, hoping to remain beneath the Imperial radar. As the film opens, they’ve just been found by Imperial Director Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn), a former colleague, and now an implacable enemy determined to put Galen back to work on a massive new project.

From the moment we meet him, Mendelsohn oozes the “foul stench” that has characterized the best of the Star Wars middle-management villains. His curled-lip sneer and quietly condescending tone make him the pluperfect martinet.

Krennic succeeds in his task, but little Jyn manages to escape and hide in a bolt-hole, where she’s eventually rescued by Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker), a rebel guerrilla fighter given considerable exposure in TV’s animated Clone Wars series. (It’s nice to put a live-action face to this character.)

Arrival: They're here!

Arrival (2016) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.11.16

Michael Crichton’a The Andromeda Strain pretty much invented the modern sci-fi techno thriller, and it was made into a crackling 1971 thriller by director Robert Wise.

After confronting the alien spacecraft that has terrified the entire United States, linguist
Louise Banks (Amy Adams) and physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) are garbed in
protective haz-mat suits, prior to their first meeting with the ship's inhabitants.

The tone was pure procedural, with a gaggle of scientists researching and conferencing in labs, to determine why a highly lethal microorganism killed everybody in a small Arizona town, except for a geriatric Sterno addict and a relentlessly cranky baby.

Few films since then have successfully duplicated that formula, because it’s a difficult tightrope walk: too many talking heads, and the result is boring; too much contrivance and coincidence, and audiences roll their eyes in contemptuous disbelief.

Director Denis Villeneuve gets the balance just right with Arrival, easily one of the most intelligent “first contact” movies Hollywood ever has delivered. Scripter Eric Heisserer embraced the challenging assignment of adapting sci-fi author Ted Chiang’s  2000 Nebula Award-winning novella, and the result is impressively faithful: fascinating, clever and suspenseful, with an out-there finale certain to fuel debates as impassioned as those that greeted the conclusion of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The story also boasts one of the most truly unusual alien cultures ever conceived, the depiction of which is likely to forever change most viewers’ perception and understanding of language.

Finally, the film is an uncomfortably timely reminder of the dangerous levels of nationalism and xenophobia currently running amok throughout this country and the globe, and the consequences of failing to recognize that — at the end of the day — we’re a single species sharing this planet, and that it behooves us to behave accordingly.

To cases, then:

Northeastern university professor Louise Banks (Amy Adams), an internationally respected linguist, is surprised one day to discover that her huge, entry-level language class is almost empty. The reason becomes clear as breaking news reports interrupt all radio and television broadcasts: A disturbingly large something has landed in a deserted Montana meadow.

Actually, “landed” is the wrong word; the semi-cylindrical object hovers about 20 feet off the ground.

Out of the Furnace: Not much warmth

Out of the Furnace (2013) • View trailer 
Three stars. Rating: R, for strong violence, profanity and drug content
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.6.13

I’ll be happy when Hollywood gets over its current fixation on dull, dour and dreary protagonists.

The first encounter between Russell (Christian Bale, right) and the malevolent DeGroat
(Woody Harrelson) is accidental, and the latter suggests that it would be unwise to
invite a second meeting. But this is the sort of grim drama that demands precisely that
subsequent clash, under far more lethal circumstances.

Director/co-scripter Scott Cooper apparently intends his new film to occupy the urban noir territory inhabited by Dennis Lehane or Elmore Leonard, where the mean streets are inhabited by working stiffs just trying to get along, until they lock horns with giggling psychopaths. But Cooper and co-writer Brad Ingelsby haven’t anywhere near the narrative chops of their aforementioned betters, and this new drama plays out like an average episode of TV’s Justified ... minus the gallows humor, and characters about whom we give a damn.

Any kind of humor, for that matter. I won’t accuse Cooper of attempting to out-bleak Cormac McCarthy, but he gets close at times.

The cast can’t be faulted; the actors do everything required of this grim narrative. Indeed, at first blush we can’t help being impressed by a cast that includes Christian Bale, Woody Harrelson, Sam Shepard, Casey Affleck, Forest Whitaker, Willem Dafoe and Zoe Saldana. That’s a strong ensemble, and everybody imbues their respective roles with emotional depth and a persuasive sense of presence.

But as the screenplay drones on, our expectations waver. This two-hour flick is v-e-r-y slow, and it becomes apparent that all these people are doomed, in one way or another. The best possible outcome is surviving to be stuck in the dying Rust Belt hamlet of Braddock, Pa., where the local steel mill — which has given honest work to generations of blue-collar workers — is about to shut down.

And the worst? A bullet in the brain. After a tediously contemplative speech.

The absence of hope hangs over this storyline like a shroud; it’s accompanied by a similar absence of any spiritual values. Braddock’s men folk work hard, drink harder, sleep like the dead and then rise to repeat the ritual, day after grinding day. I’d love to acknowledge Cooper and Ingelsby for insightful commentary on the fading American dream, but that would be giving them far too much credit. This saga is simply depressing.

A brief prologue introduces us to Harrelson’s Harlan DeGroat, a crafty, ferociously brutal monster with a hair-trigger temper, who clearly is Nobody To Be Messed With. (So, naturally, we can expect our other players to do precisely that.) As has been the case numerous times before, Harrelson is completely believable in such a role; he’s the stuff of ghastly nightmares, his devious grin far scarier than his hardened scowl.

The Last Stand: Solid comeback vehicle for Schwarzenegger

The Last Stand (2013) • View trailer
3.5 stars. Rating: R, for considerable violence, gore and profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.18.13

The New Year seems to have brought a run of transplanted Westerns.

Last week, the Magnificent Seven template wound up in 1950s Los Angeles, as Gangster Squad. This week, Howard Hawks’ iconic 1959 John Wayne oater, Rio Lobo — which John Carpenter riffed, just as suspensefully, as 1976’s Assault on Precinct 13 — has been transformed into a modern-day mission to stop a notorious Mexican drug kingpin from making it back to the safety of his native country.

When screwball Lewis Dinkum (Johnny Knoxville, being carried) gets pinned down by
gunfire, Frank (Rodrigo Santoro) charges into the thick of battle in a rescue attempt.
Things have gotten out of hand in the sleepy little town of Sommerton Junction, and
they're about to get even worse...

The only thing in his way: the helplessly outnumbered and outgunned citizens in the pokey little border town of Sommerton Junction.

The Last Stand marks the American directorial debut of South Korean director Kim Jee-woon, perhaps known on these shores for A Tale of Two Sisters and his genre-bending Oriental Western, The Good, the Bad, the Weird, which was Korea’s top box-office hit in 2008.

No surprise, then, that Kim would favor us with a variation on a classic American Western known for its blend of suspense, deftly sketched characters and snarky humor (in this case, quite dark at times).

Frankly, Arnold Schwarzenegger couldn’t have selected a better comeback vehicle, at this point in his career. Andrew Knauer’s story — clearly shaped by the earlier Hawks and Carpenter films, with scripting assists from Jeffrey Nachmanoff and George Nolfi — plays to Arnie’s advancing age, while amply demonstrating that movie action heroes never die, they just find more inventive ways to get the job done.

Mind you, this scenario is wholly outlandish and ludicrous, and no laws are broken more than the basic laws of physics. But it’s all in good fun — if unexpectedly gory at times — and you’ll have no trouble embracing Kim’s all-stops-out rhythm.

Events kick off late one evening in Las Vegas, as grim-faced FBI Agent John Bannister (Forest Whitaker) oversees the transfer of drug lord Gabriel Cortez (Eduardo Noriega) via a special prisoner convoy. Borrowing a gag from James Bond’s You Only Live Twice, Cortez makes an impressive escape; within minutes, he’s speeding from the scene at 250 miles per hour (!) in a tricked-up Corvette ZR1.

Worse yet, Cortez has a hostage handcuffed in the passenger seat: FBI Agent Ellen Richards (Genesis Rodriguez).

Repo Men: Take it back

Repo Men (2010) • View trailer for Repo Men
Three stars (out of five). Rating: R, for profanity, nudity, plenty of violence and gobs o' gore
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.19.10
Buy DVD: Repo Men • Buy Blu-Ray: Repo Men (Unrated) [Blu-ray]


Buried somewhere beneath a wealth of directorial flourishes — and too many efforts to appease arrested-adolescent gorehounds — lies the faintly beating heart of a reasonably imaginative cautionary tale.

Too bad we have to wade through so much distasteful swill, to reach it.

Remy (Jude Law, left) and Jake (Forest Whitaker) truly enjoy their work, the
"wetter" the better. After all, what's not to like about shooting folks and
blowing stuff up ... and then, as an added bonus, harvesting "rented" organs
from deadbeat clients?

At its core, Repo Men is a disturbing what-if scenario that belongs in the good company of Fahrenheit 451, Blade Runner and Brazil: all stories that extrapolated current events to pose a series of extremely unsettling questions. The central premise in each of those films has yet to come true, I'm relieved to report ... although Fahrenheit 451 is inching ever closer, thanks to the decreased value of the intelligently printed word, in this 21st century age.

The irony: Books won't be destroyed by fire, but by collective disinterest.

And while the horrific events suggested by Repo Men probably won't become standard operating procedure any time soon, one cannot help chuckling over the timing of this film's release, as it hits theaters amid renewed debates about the desperate need to re-boot this country's health care system.

To be sure, our lives are unlikely to be snuffed by a nameless thug who arrives in the dark of night, with a legally defensible claim to "retrieve" the artificial livers, lungs and hearts that have kept us alive ... but is that really so different from being denied similar conventional medical care via a phone conversation with some bureaucratic drone who wouldn't know a forceps from a fork, who has all the bedside manner of a fence post, and who reads from a script prepared by bean-counters beholden to nobody except their shareholders?

I dunno. As a package, Repo Men may be bombastic, ghastly and reprehensible more often than not, but the core message still gets delivered. The points raised by the novel on which this film is based — The Repossession Mambo, by Eric Garcia, the idiosyncratic writer who also brought us the similarly mordant Matchstick Men — can't help raising the little hairs on the back of our necks.

The time is some unspecified point in the future, when a single corporate behemoth dubbed The Union has secured control of all medical technology relating to artificial limbs and organs. For the equivalent of a mortgage, you, too, can shed your failing heart for a bio-mechanical construct that'll keep you alive (until something else threatens to fail).

Street Kings: Dethroned

Street Kings (2008) • View trailer for Street Kings
Two stars (out of five). Rating: R, for pervasive violence and profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 4.11.08
Buy DVD: Street Kings • Buy Blu-Ray: Street Kings (+ Digital Copy) [Blu-ray]


Street Kings is a movie for folks who thought the characters in 2001's Training Day were too genteel.

Santos (Amaury Nolasco, left) and Demille (John Corbett, right) are visibly
disappointed that their partner, Ludlow (Keanu Reeves), has left them nobody
to kill, in a typical scene from this tawdry cop flick. And let us remember:
These are the good guys. Don't you feel safer?

If Joseph Wambaugh has devoted his career to exploring the psyches of flawed but noble police officers, James Ellroy has been much more intrigued by the unredeemable corruption of those granted the privileges that come with a badge. Both novelists wonder whether inherently decent men can survive a polluted system with their integrity intact: Wambaugh generally holds out hope, whereas Ellroy obviously has none whatsoever.

Factor in a director — David Ayer — who views South Central Los Angeles as a war zone, and the result is quite bleak and distasteful.

But even that would be tolerable, if Ayer were willing to explore the topic with any degree of credibility. Alas, Street Kings isn't drama; it's overwrought burlesque, littered with giggling psychopaths on both sides of the equation. These characters shoot first and don't bother with the questions.

We got a taste of the Ayer/ Ellroy mentality with 2002's Dark Blue, an equally ludicrous tale of bent cops gone from bad to worse. Apparently determined to sully the LAPD badge even further, we're once again thrown onto these mean streets, expected (as viewers) to buy into macho nonsense where vile cops are so far gone that they don't even watch out for each other.

On top of which, Ayer is a lousy director. His film has no sense of time and place; the action within this story might be unfolding within hours, days or even weeks. He extracts truly dreadful and overwrought performances from just about everybody in the cast; every line of hard-bitten dialogue emerges from teeth so firmly clenched that the actors must worry about long-term lockjaw.

Indeed, Ayer manages the impossible: He makes Forest Whitaker look and sound like a bad actor.

Goodness, Whitaker even managed to escape from Vantage Point with his integrity intact, and that film's also a mess. Here, though, his line readings are shrill and hysterical, his eyes literally popping out of his skull; he looks for all the world like a junkie in desperate need of his next fix.

And we're supposed to accept Whitaker as a police captain on the rise, with visions of being anointed LAPD's master chief?

Puh-leaze.

Vantage Point: Point of far too many returns

Vantage Point (2008) • View trailer
1.5 stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for profanity, action violence and relentless gunplay
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 2.28.08

Barry L. Levy's screenplay for Vantage Point may have seemed like a clever, can't-miss concept on paper, but it's paralyzingly inept on the big screen.

To explain:

In the aftermath of an assassination attempt on the U.S. president, Secret Service
agents Thomas Barnes (Dennis Quaid, center) and Kent Taylor (Matthew Fox,
right) examine the footage obtained by American tourist Howard Lewis (Forest
Whitaker), in an effort to see where the shooter was concealed.

Way back in the mists of time, the superlative 1960s horror/sci-fi TV series The Outer Limits aired an episode titled Controlled Experiment, which concerned a pair of Martian researchers who, intrigued by our quaint custom of murder ("which only happens here," one of them notes, "on this weird little planet"), scrutinize an incident involving a jilted floozy who blows away her unfaithful lover after he steps out of the elevator leading to the lobby of a low-rent hotel.

Thanks to a "temporal condenser," which can reverse, slow down and speed up time like some amped-up DVD player, the Martians study the incident from every possible angle, and even freeze the action to interfere with salient details.

On paper, a clever idea. Watching at home, however, viewers quickly grew tired of seeing the primary action — the descending elevator, the lobby confrontation, the bullet emerging from the gun — over and over and over again ... not to mention the golly-gee-whiz noise and light show that accompanied the use of the temporal condenser, also broadcast over and over and over again.

Vantage Point suffers from the same problem.

Familiarity really does breed contempt.

The setting is contemporary, the event a photo-op in a crowded Spanish city square, as U.S. President Ashton (William Hurt) steps to a podium and prepares to open a landmark summit on the global war on terror. Seconds later, he has been shot; Secret Service agents scramble to protect our chief of state, while the panicked crowd attempts to flee before anything else happens. Explosions follow; chaos erupts.

We witness this event on the monitors within a TV news truck parked on the outskirts of the plaza in question; producer Rex Brooks (Sigourney Weaver) cuts between on-site cameras. She's vexed because one remote operator doesn't follow instructions, and annoyed because the on-air talent is prone to injecting her political views into what should be unbiased reportage.

Then the unthinkable erupts; as Brooks and her control room crew stare, shattered, at the aftermath, the scene flares out like a candle.

And film director Pete Travis "rewinds" what we've just seen in fast reverse, re-setting the clock to a few seconds before noon, and unspools the events again ... but this time from the point of view of veteran Secret Service agent Thomas Barnes (Dennis Quaid).

Another 10 minutes or so of slightly altered exposition, and Travis does this again.

And again.

And again, and again, and again.

The Great Debaters: Words with power

The Great Debaters (2007) • View trailer
Four stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for violence, disturbing images, brief profanity and mild sensuality
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.4.08


On top of his impressive skills as an actor and director, Denzel Washington has an unerring gift for spotting young talent.

Having shephereded his team through several early victories, Professor Melvin
B. Tolson (Denzel Washington, left) prepares for the next challenge by giving
study pointers to, from lft, Samantha Booke (Jurnee Smollett), Henry Lowe
(Nate Parker) and James Farmer Jr. (Denzel Whitaker).

He coaxed a haunting, painfully nuanced performance out of Derek Luke in 2002's Antwone Fisher, and now has done the same with young Denzel Whitaker in The Great Debaters, a stirring, fact-based saga that stretches the truth a bit, but nonetheless conveys a strong sense of time, place and destiny.

Washington also gives himself a plum role, which he delivers with his usual steel-gazed intensity. From his first appearance — striding into a classroom, standing on a table and intoning "I am the darker brother," from Langston Hughes' I, Too, Sing America — we scarcely can take our eyes off him. That we do is testament to the similarly powerful performances elicited from Whitaker and co-stars Nate Parker, Jurnee Smollett and Forest Whitaker (no relation to this film's younger Whitaker).

The Great Debaters is an old-style Hollywood underdog saga, given additional juice both by its setting — small-town Texas in 1935, at the racially combustible midpoint of the Great Depression — and by the conviction Washington brings to the material. Watching a quartet of kids from Wiley College rise to become an undefeated debating squad in the Jim Crow South is stirring enough; understanding that they do so in an environment laced with lynchings and the undisguised hatred of sneering white crackers, makes this one powerfully nervous picture.

Indeed, an atmosphere of latent menace pervades every scene, settling on us like the stifling humidity that cinematographer Philippe Rousselot (A River Runs Through It) captures so well.

Washington plays college professor Melvin B. Tolson, one of this film's two authentic characters; the other is young Denzel Whitaker's James Farmer Jr. In real life, Tolson fought on campus and off for racial equality and social justice; he eventually became a poet very much in the mold of Langston Hughes. James Farmer Jr. grew up to found the Congress of Race Equality in 1942, after which he remained a highly visible player in the civil rights movement.

The other members of the debate squad, notably Henry Lowe (Parker) and Samantha Booke (Smollett), are composite characters created from many other individuals ... which makes the "Henry and Samantha went on to greater glory" text crawl at film's end an insufferable fabrication. How is the average viewer to separate the authentic later accomplishments of Tolson and Farmer from those of "Lowe" and "Booke," when the text statements are presented with identical candor?

Movies really must stop lying to patrons like this. I expected better of Washington and screenwriters Robert Eisele and Jeffrey Porro, particular since they dedicated this picture to the actual Tolson's passion, dedication and teachings.