MALEFICENT

Reviewed by Patrick Gibbs

GRADE: C

Angelina Jolie, Elle Fanning, Sharlto Copley, Sam Riley, Imelda Staunton, Leslie Manville, Juno Temple
Screenplay by Linda Woolverton
Directed by Robert Stromberg

Nobody can create magic like Disney. And nobody can detract from that magic like they can, either.

The '90's barrage of dreadful straight to video sequels that continued into the early 2000's was suuposed to be killed when John Lassiter took over as head of animation: in fact, he specifically stated that one of the major reasons he took the job was to protect PIXAR classics from such a fate. Unfortunately, Lassiter has become a full blown Disney exec and embraced the "don't let other people ruin our stuff when we can do it ourselves" mentality. Cars 2 was PIXAR's first film to genuinely receive bad reviews, and PIXAR has shifted over to sequelizing most of its movies. Yes, Cars 2 and Monsters University were better than Aladdin: The Return of Jafar. But they weren't up to standard of the originals.  And while Disney still puts out some classics  (Frozen ranks among their best features), it's hard to shake the feeling that they will beat it into the ground someday.

The latest half-hearted "money before art" piece the studio has given us is Maleficent.  According to press releases, Maleficent "explores the untold story of Disney's most iconic villain from the 1959 classic Sleeping Beauty, and the elements of her betrayal that ultimately turned her pure heart to stone."  That's a nice way of saying it throws out the original story in favoring of a cheesy and very clunky glorified TV special that clearly has no real idea behind it beyond the casting of its lead.

The young Maleficent is a preteen fairy that lives in "the moors" (even though the card says "the moops"), a magical fairyland that is basically a hybrid of Disney's straight to video Tinker Bell series and Avatar. One day Maleficent meets a young boy named Stephan and falls deeply in love. Their romance blossoms until they get older, at which point Stephan becomes a Republican and moves away to seek public office. Maleficient grows older and skinnier until she finds herself played by Angelina Jolie, and gets into a skirmish with the local king, who is trying to take over the moors (not the moops.).

Meanwhile, the ever ambitions Stephan (now played by Sharlto Copely of (The A-Team and District 9) hears the king say that, having no heir to the throne he will make whoever kills Maleficent the next king. Stephan goes back out to the moops (the moors) to see Maleficent, who is delighted to rekindle their romance. Unfortunately, Stephan has other plans, and as she sleeps, he tries to stab her in the heart, but can not go through with it. Instead, he cuts off her wings using a chain of steel (steel is apparently fairy kryptonite.). Maleficent awakens to find both Stephan and her wings gone. Yes, that's right, SHE SLEEPS THROUGH GETTING HER WINGS CUT OFF.

Driven by revenge, places an irrevocable curse upon the human king's newborn infant Aurora. As the child grows, Aurora (Elle Fanning) is doomed to walk through a boring movie until she turns 16 yadda yadda death yadda yadda spinning wheel.

This is about as lazy an idea for a movie as I have seen in quite some time, and honestly the most intriguing aspect of it is the uncomfortable feeling that between the cutting off the wings off and and the whole idea of kissing girls while they are asleep that this movies sees the story of Sleeping Beauty as a metaphor for date rape.  Stephan is turned into a pretty despicable character, and while I'm all for making royalty look bad, he's simply not iteresting, and neither is Maleficent. Jolie gives an entertaining performance, but the character's rather meager motivation simply doesn't play. In general, the characters are dull and the script never delves beneath the surface, and the sense of pacing is downright awful: far too much time is spent on setting up the shallow, uninteresting "woman scorned" story between Stephan and Maleficent, while the relationship between Maleficent and Aurora, which is supposed to be what the movie is about, feels extremely rushed. The three fairies who raise Aurora are played as dimwitted and ineffectual, and for some reason their names have been changed (perhaps Disney is so famously letigious that they were afraid they might sue themselves, and honestly, they should have.).

First time director Stromberg (who until know has worked as a visual effects artist) is right at home with pretty visuals but hasn't the foggiest idea what to do with actors, even good ones, and it seems pretty clear by this point that writer Linda Woolverton (Beauty and the Beast) is a one hit wonder and we should stop acting like her presence is anything special. Maleficent seems want to pass itself off as a feminist fairy tale, but in the end we have a lead character her turns evil when she is rejected by the cute boy and turns good again when her maternal instincts kick in.

A great deal of effort has been put into visually mimicking the original classic. It's a shame that same sense of detail was not put into telling a good story.

Maleficent is Rated PG for violence and peril.

X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST

X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST

GRADE A+ Starring Hugh Jackman, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult, Halle Berry, Peter Dinklage, Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan Directed by Bryan Singer Reviewed by Paul Gibbs Rarely has a major movie franchise varied as wildly in quality as the X-Men franchise. The first two films, directed by The Usual Suspects' Bryan Singer, are about as entertaining as the genre gets and go a little deeper than usual comic book fare by adding a soulful subtext about the oppression of society's misfits. But when Singer left the franchise, these were followed by a horribly disappointing sequel and spin-off. Since then the situation has improved, but in the latest installment Singer returns, superhero-like, to fix the mistakes of the past and restore the franchise to its former glory. X-Men: Days of Future Past begins in a slightly more distant version of the franchise's Not Too Distant Future, when mutant hunting robots called Sentinels are hunting down and kill the X-Men and their kind. The X-Men, lead by Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and his onetime nemesis Magneto (Ian McKellan), conceive a bold and dangerous plan to send Wolverine/Logan (Hugh Jackman) back to 1973 to stop Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) from setting in motion the future that brought about the Sentinels (If you don't know who these characters are, you may want to brush up on some of the previous installments before venturing forth). Arriving in the past, Logan hooks up with the younger Professor Xavier (James McAvoy) from the prequel First Class (the only really good film in the franchise not directed by Singer). But Xavier has changed, he's become a bitter, depressed shell of the man he used to be. His rundown school is now occupied only by Xavier and Beast (Nicholas Hoult). Soon our heroes decide they need the help of 1973 Magneto (played again by Michael Fassbender), who is now doing time in a maximum security prison. Singer has created a film every bit as good as his first two installments, one which balances spectacular action and effects with humor and heart. He shows again that he has a magic touch with this franchise and makes one of the very best films of his career, getting the most out of the massive budget without losing track of the humanity (mutantity?) of the story. One sequence feature the ultra-fast mutant Quicksilver would be worth the price of admission on its own. But there's much more to it than that, a well-rounded movie that's everything both an X-Men movie and a summer blockbuster should be. The principal cast members all deliver stellar performances, with Jackman returning to the lighter, funnier version of the character rather than the brooding one we saw in last summer's second spin-off The Wolverine. McAvoy and Fassbender (who is giving us something of a McKellan impersonation this time) are again excellent, with McAvoy's Xavier doing the majority of the dramatic heavy lifting along with Lawrence, whose Mystique is torn between her allegiance to Xavier and her desire to fight the humans who oppress her people. And of course it's a joy to see Stewart and McKellan in these roles again.

If you're a fan of any of the X-Men films, you're likely to love this one, easily up there with the best of them, and finally rids us of the bad aftertaste of Brett Ratner's X-Men: The Last Stand. This is the X3 we had hoped for. It's going to be next to impossible to beat as THE blockbuster entertainment of the summer, and it gives Joss Whedon reason for concern on whether his The Avengers: Age of Ultron can follow it next summer. I'll be going back to see it at least two or three more times, and thoroughly enjoying each viewing. I imagine a lot of other film goers will be able to say the same. X-Men: Days Of Future Past is rated PG-13 for violence (some of which is fairly graphic), profanity (including one use of that word which really freaks out some people and endlessly entertains others), brief nudity (Jackman from behind, and of course Lawrence in blue body paint and prosthetics) and some implied sexual content.

GODZILLA

GRADE: A
Starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, David Strathairn, Elizabeth Olsen. Ken Watanabe and Bryan Cranston
Directed by Gareth Edwards
Reviewed by Paul Gibbs


As much as a year before its release, people were trying to convince me that the 1998 Roland Emmerich version of Godzilla was going to be a classic that made everyone forget those puny little dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. I was quite skeptical about the movie, and it turns out I was right. It ended up being a lackluster dud chock full of spoofy jokes that weren't funny, and is now mostly forgotten. This was one of the biggest reasons I couldn't muster up any excitement for the 2014 version, even when people tried to convince me how good it was going to be. This time, I was happy not to be right.

Gareth Edward's Godzilla begins with Dr. Joe Brody ( Bryan Cranston, a nuclear physicist conducting radioactivity research at a power plant in Japan, along with his scientist wife (Juliette Binoche) when tragedy strikes his family. 15 years later, Brody is estranged from his son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a military man working in explosive ordinance disposal. Ford is summoned to to Japan, where his crackpot father is pursuing wild theories about what happened before. It's not long before the Brodys of course discover that the theory are not only not so crazy, but also involve three giant monsters, one of which is the legendary lizard of the title. From here the story shifts to a larger scale to include various Admirals,scientists, and people fleeing the wrath of the creatures.

The story gets off to a somewhat slow start, and it's very disappointing to see the immensely talented Cranston once more woefully underused (has any movie other than Argo really made a decent use of him?). Among the humans, only Ken Watanbe (playing Dr.Ishiro Serizawa, a Japanese scientist) makes much of an impression. But amazingly, it doesn't really matter. The stars are Godzilla himself and director Gareth Edwards, who looks to be a major presence in the future. The skill with which Edwards films and stages the action/suspense sequences recall much of the best genre work of Steven Spielberg, and yet at the same time demonstrates a creative vision of his own. This is a director who has studied and learned technique and knows how to use it in ways that put nearly all of his blockbuster contemporaries to shame. Edwards expertly blends teasing the monster (like Spielberg did in Jaws), with wowing us with the spectacle of the beast (like Spielberg did in Jurassic Park), and helps to give the big guy a presence which almost makes the blandness of some of the human characters an asset because they don't distract from the King of Monsters. The soul of the movie is the creature, and there's a lot more to him than smashing stuff. Edwards also wisely keeps the other two monster dark and lacking in facial detail to make them genuinely scary, and not all sympathetic (even to a guy like me who always wants to root for the creature). He also deftly utilizes point of view to make us feel inside the action without resorting to an excess of shakicam (yes, the 3D helps, and it's a no brainer that a giant monster is best in IMAX). The effects team of course deserves a lot of credit. They and Edwards use the effects in a way which reminded me how exciting and fun effects used to be. While the film may be lacking a bit in humor, that's understandable as they try to distance themselves from the campiness of Emmerich's version, and there is one moment that earns much more laughter than any of the groan inducing mugging of that film did.

It may be a bit thin on the side of story and character, but sheer technical skill of effects and direction, and sheer monster movie thrills, scares, cheers and fun, Godzilla is a blast. It's a movie that knows exactly what it wants to be and does it to near perfection.  It is rated PG-13 for violence.