SAN ANDREAS

Reviewed by Patrick Gibbs  

GRADE: C +

Dwayne Johnson, Paul Giamatti, Alexandra Daddario, Carla Gugino, Hugo Johnstone-Burt and Ioan Gruffud
Screenplay by Carlton Cuse
Directed by Brad Peyton
Rated PG-13 (a great deal of peril, some of it in the Monty Python sense of the word, and mild profanity)

The '90's and early 2000's saw something of resurgence of the '70's disaster movie formula, beginning with Twister, which put a fresh spin on it by combining it with the chase genre. This lead to a couple of bad volcano based flicks, and then between Armageddon and the various films of Roland Emmerich, suddenly, if the disaster wasn't on a global scale, it wasn't big enough to care about.  And nowadays, when the world, or at least a major city, is threatened, Marvel and DC are right there with a superhero to make sure that the maximum amount of damage is done but it can still somehow be labeled a victory.

But starting with Into the Storm, 2014's crowning achievement in crap, there seems to be a move toward bringing back the more traditional entries in the genre. The good news is that San Andreas is decidedly better than that debacle. The bad news is that honestly, that's a standard that can be achieved by any Pizza Hut commercial. However, with the addition of 3D and D-BOX to the presentation (a combination I have never seen before), San Andreas is quite literally set up to be a thrill ride, and it's hard to deny that it does deliver at times, often more so as a ride than as a movie.

Dwayne Johnson stars as Ray, a Los Angeles Fire Department search and rescue helicopter pilot/He-Man who can save anyone or anything, except his marriage. Ray's wife Emma (Carla Gugino) serves the lumbering oaf with divorce papers and tells him, on their daughter's birthday, that the two of them are loadin' up the truck to move to Beverly. Hills, that is. Swimming pools and floundering, didn't quite make it movie stars (Ioan Gruffudd, filling the legal requirement that all American disaster films must feature a U.K. actor awkwardly playing an American.). Emma has a new boyfriend, who's a multi-millionaire architect who lives in a posh mansion that is big enough for him, as well as Ray's wife and daughter, as well as their ample breasts, not that I noticed, or that it was hard not to do so constantly, or that in the presentation which I attended, the distinct movement of my chair during Daddario's gratuitous bikini scene may or may not have been an effect of D-BOX.

Cut to CalTech, where Dr. Lawrence Hayes (Paul Giamatti) is a seismologist on a mission to warn California that a major quake that just hit Nevada and killed his young partner (that Asian actor from the Fast and Furious movies whose name you would think I would know by now, or at least bother looking up), was only the opening act for a series of major quakes along the San Andreas fault line that are about to level California.
 

Meanwhile, back at The Rock, Ray’s plans for spending a final weekend with Blake before she starts college in San Francisco are screwed up by the Nevada quake, so Daniel offers to fly the girl and her magnificent breasts up north on his private jet, giving him a chance to try and bond with his new stepdaughter and, if all goes well, callously leave her to die when things go bad.

When the big one hits, Emma is lunching in a highrise restaurant as the building begins crumbling around her. Giving new meaning to the term "dumb luck," Ray is aleady airborne and flying solo and just happens by (seriously) in time to plucks his wife to safety. Together, they resolve that they spent too much money on their daughter's implants to let them get destroyed in the quake and vow to track them down and save them together.

Fortunately, Blake has made friends with a young Brit engineer named Ben (Hugo Johnstone-Burt) and his younger brother Ollie (Art Parkinson), who are there to save her when Daniel runs off to the bathroom when the T-Rex gets loose from it's paddock, leaving her alone in the car. Together, the brothers follow Blake's sizable bosom into the streets of San Francisco, where it is working on a plan to rendezvous with Ray and Emma.

The basic geological principals behind the plot are essentially loosely based in a form of reality, but in typical Hollywood fashion they are exaggerated to such extremes that it quickly loses any connection with reality, and at one point the entire state of California actually does "the wave" as if attending the football game to end all football games. The scenes become increasingly more ludicrous, but some are undeniably fun, including a sequence where Ray must race a speedboat over  the top of a tidal wave before it crests.

As an actor, Johnson does just fine with the grim determination, macho man elements, but there is far too much human drama inherent to a such a harrowing disaster, even without soap opera subplots thrown in, and when it gets more and more personal and he's called upon to feel other, deeper emotions, he chickens out and doesn't even try, opting instead to go for a vague look of intestinal discomfort. He has gotten to the point of being tolerable as an actor, even working well in the right glorified prop role, but I kept feeling that with a younger Dennis Quaid or even Sylvestor Stallone, the movie could have had a lot more emotional heft to it. Giamatti is largely reduced to 1. taking off his glasses and rubbing his face to indicate stress 2. Pounding his fist on the table to indicate urgency and 3. Looking just barely not at the camera and mentioning God (a standing "My God" as the camera does a slow push in, "May God help us" when he is looking at his Earthquake predicting program, which registers the upcoming quakes as a "kiss your ass goodbye" magnitude event, and "God be with you" as he goes on television to implore the citizens of San Francisco to get out of the city and go someplace/explains that the quake is going to spread until nowhere is safe.). Daddario is there purely for sex appeal and to give Johnson a specific goal (and she undoubtedly will provide a driving force for more than one Johnson, let me tell you right now), with Gugino playing the love interest/sidekick and being there to cry in the emotional scenes so her co-star doesn't hurt himself trying to emote. The most misused presence by far is the talented Gruffud in a thankless role as the villain in a movie that didn't need one, and the most endearing performance comes from Art Parkinson as Ollie, the little brother of Blake's unconvincing love interest. Truth be told, the only thing coming close to an emotional investment in any of these character's survival came from his natural charisma and sincerity.

The effects are undeniably good, and there is some nicely done action staging that was greatly enhanced by the 3D and D-BOX. As a fun immersive experience, this movie genuinely does deliver. But I suspect that watched on DVD at home it will lose a great deal of it's excitement level.

Overall, I have to give the movie credit for succeeding at what it's trying to do in being a diverting entertainment experience, but at the same time, a lot of that is due to the frills, and it's hard to enthusiastically recommend spending the rather inflated ticket price that comes with 3D and D-BOX together on a movie that is so disposable.

ALOHA

Reviewed by Patrick Gibbs

GRADE: B -

Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone,  Rachel McAdams, John Krasinski, Danny McBride and Bill Murray

Written and Directed by Cameron Crowe
Rated PG-13 (Profanity, sex, vulgarity)

There are a lot of things you can say about Cameron Crowe as a writer and director. He writes wonderfully clever dialogue (and sometimes it's so clever that you don't believe it, especially when every single character talks that way.). His characters tend to contain an undeniable element of truth (yet are often so far removed from the relatable world of normal people that they might as well be robotic dinosaurs) and his stories shine in their day to day simplicity (and are often bogged down by their over reaching and convoluted settings.). What you cannot say is that he isn't ambitious or passionate, or that he ever gets less than 100 percent from his actors.

Aloha follows Brian Gilchrist (Bradley Cooper), a once great military pilot and aspiring astronaut who had some bad breaks, some of them caused by fate and others by his shallow, self destructive nature (see Jerry Maguire). He now works for a billionaire contractor named Carson Welch (Bill Murray), who wants to launch a satellite from Hawaii and must negotiate a deal. Despite prior screw ups, Gilchrist is given the job of brokering this deal because he knows the land and the people, and has a past friendship with Dennis "Bumpy" Kanahele (who plays himself), the leader of the Hawaiian Nation.

The upside of this assignment is the paycheck and the chance to get back in Carson's good graces. The bad side is having to face his former serious flame, Tracy (Rachel McAdams), whom he hasn't seen since she left him a little over 12 Years ago, along with her husband Woody (John Krasinski) and their two kids, including her suspiciously twelve-year-old daughter.

Matters are further complicated when Gilchrist meets his military liason/babysitter, a Captain Allison Ng (Emma Stone) an extremely bright and capable young woman with boundless energy and enthusiasm who seems to be thrilled to work with Gilchrist and fascinated by him as something of a legend (no, this never does play entirely as convincing as a complication, and certainly not as an annoyance. "Emma Stone at her absolute cutest but also intelligent, driven and capable wants to follow me everywhere I go!" I weep for you and your problems, pal.).

Of course, Gilchrist and Ng (her father was half Chinese-Half Hawaiian, which explains why her hair is half blond, half red) get on each others nerves (especially after he overhears her calling him a wreck of a man and comparing him to a sad coyote), but as they spend time together they begin to form a good working relationship, particularly when it is really the young Captain who makes the deal with the natives work out, not Gilchrist. The more time they spend together, the more she breaks down his barriers, and a mutual attraction starts to develop quickly.

But let us not forget Tracy, the women who slipped through his fingers, nor her increasingly distant relationship with her current husband, her precocious son who loves Gilchrist and needs attention from someone, or her suspiciously 12- year-old daughter. Or the extremely narcissistic Carson Welch, who may have a hidden agenda/be a Lex Luthor style super-villain secretly planning something involving putting weapons into space above Hawaii even though Emma Stone at her cutest but also intelligent, driven and capable promised Bumpy Kanahele that this would never, ever happen. Or the General (Alec Baldwin), who distrusts Gilchrist and is comically angry all the time because he he has to have a reason for being played by Alec Baldwin, or Danny McBride as Gilchrist's old friend and Ng's superior officer, caught between the two but not wanting to deal with anything at all if he can help it. Or Gilchrist's pet robosaurus, who seems to be achieving self awareness and does not wish to be deactivated (I may have made up one of those.).

If you are getting the sense that Aloha bites off a bit more than it can chew, you are not alone. Crowe
seems to be intent on adding as many story elements as he can to what, at its best, is an intimate character piece and romantic dramedy, and it makes for an uneasy mix. This is not a new problem for Crowe, though this film may represent the problem at its most extreme. His basic determination to never portray life as simple and easily focused is something I really like about his work, but the fact that this movie literally includes a super-villain played by Bill Murray is definitely a problem in terms of the whole "slice of life" factor, and it is unfortunate that the compelling human elements are framed by silly contrivances that have to resolved when you'd much rather just be watching Cooper and especially Stone do what they do best, namely, create real people we can get invested in and care about. In addition, the controversy that is starting to erupt that the movie is a little thin on it's ethnic diversity is not unfounded. The white people and the native Hawaiians are almost completely segregated throughout, and quite honestly, while it is nice that we don't see painful clichés like Don Ho singing "Tiny Bubbles," more time could have been spent on showing off the beauty of the island scenery and exploring cultural divides and similarities and less time on spy games and a rather ridiculous resolution to the "Garfield's private nuclear arsenal in space" plotline.

Still, I have to admit that despite its many flaws, I liked this movie better than most critics. The performances of the leads are divine, and however in love Crowe may often get with his own dialogue throughout his career (and the attraction is frankly quite understandable, if annoying at times), what resonates most with me about his work is the commitment both he and his actors have to what is expressed through silence, facial expressions and body language. This is taken to extremes here, blatantly parodied in a memorable moment between Cooper and Krasinski, who plays wonderfully against type, to a beautiful, heartfelt sequence between Cooper and young Danielle Rose Russell as Grace, Tracy's suspiciously 12-year-old daughter, that regardless of what any critic says about this film is, I predict, destined to be a scene pointed to by acting teachers, coaches and casting directors for years to come as the standard for connecting emotionally with your fellow actor, being in the moment and letting the emotion just come out naturally and honestly. The scene is a triumph for the two actors and the director both, and resonated far more with me than anything Cooper did in American Sniper.

Aloha is far from great, and while Cooper and Stone are the best thing about it, they also work against it, in that the moment you start thinking about Silver Linings Playbook or Birdman, the brief illusion that this is a genuine gem of a movie is destroyed. That being said, they are still a joy to watch, and for me this was enough of a welcome antidote to awful films such as Poltergeist or merely the intense loudness of the big blockbusters that I can't go to hard on it. You have to be pretty forgiving to really enjoy it, and a bit of a sentimental fool, but in the end I suppose I was feeling very forgiving when I saw it, and I have never claimed that I am not a fool.

TOMORROWLAND

Reviewed by Patrick Gibbs and Paul Gibbs

GRADE: B+
George Clooney, Britt Robertson, Raffey Cassidy, Tim McGraw and Hugh Laurie
Screenplay by Damon Lindelof and Brad Bird
Directed by Brad Bird
Rated PG for sequences of sci-fi action violence and peril, thematic elements and language

"You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope some day you'll join us
And the world will be as one."

- John Lennon, Imagine

John Lennon and Walt Disney were two very different people in many ways, and this philosophy epitomizes the creator of Mickey Mouse. Ever the innovator, inventor and optimist, Walt certainly had his flaws as a person, like most of the greats, but he was a visionary that never stopped dreaming up new things and hoping for a brighter tomorrow.

And yet, if you look at Disney's slate of live action films for the next few years, Tomorrowland looks like it may be the last thing they put out that isn't a remake of an animated classic, a Marvel movie, a new Star Wars episode or anthology, or the latest chance for Johnny Depp to prance about and pretend anyone besides him still gives a doubloon about Captain Jack Sparrow. 

What makes this all the more ironic is that Brad Bird's enjoyable adventure may be the ultimate personification of the old man's idealistic and innovative vision of the future, creativity and the wonders that humankind is capable of when imagination is their only boundary. Walt may have been as commercially motivated as anyone, but he also believe in taking people places they've never been before, creating new experiences, and in dreaming. Note to current Disney CEO Bob Iger: stop buying and start dreaming.

In 1964, Frank Walker (Thomas Robinson) is a young inventor who has created a jetpack and attending the World's Fair with the intention of winning a $5 prize. His entry i rejected by one of the judges, but Frank soon forgets this when he meets when an enchanting little girl called Athena (Raffey Cassidy). The girl gives him a mysterious pin and he suddenly finds himself transported off to the world of Tomorrowland, a futurstic utopia filled with skyscrapers, flying cars and other wonders.

Flash forward to present day, and we meet young Casey Newton (Britt Robertson), a plucky teenaged girl who is intent on sabotaging an attempt to disassemble NASA"s launch pad at Cape Canveral, which would put her engineer father (played for some reason by Tim McGraw) out of a job.

Casey is arrested, and upon her release she notices a strange pin among her belongings that she hadn't seen before. She reaches for it and once she touches it the world around her changes to a massive field of wheat. Off in the distance, a shining city beckons. But this vision only appears to Casey, and only when she touches the pin.

Her search for answers leads her to a bitter, middle aged hermit named Frank Walker (George Clooney), who initially wants nothing to do with her, but when they are attacked by robots that play like "what if Disneyland was staffed entirely by T-1000's?" Frank and Casey become a team, and they are joined by Frank's old friend Athena, who (surprise) hasn't aged a day.

Tomorrowland does face some serious problems  by biting off more than in can chew, leading to a sometimes very convoluted story where you are never completely sure that all of the pieces fit, which is par for the course for writer Damon Lindelof (Lost, Prometheus and the two Star Trek reboot films.). Fortunately, the other thing we can always expect from him is mind blowing fun that may not answer all of the questions it asks, but at least it dares to ask questions and present ideas.  This movie is a wild ride of twists and turns that mixes childlike wonder with a cautionary tale about complacency, following the crowd and excepting the inevitable without even trying to fight it. to evoke Terminator 2 once again, the message is "no fate but what we make."

Robertson makes for a great young heroine, and while you are no doubt tired of every film being saddled with a feminist spin, to paraphrase A.A. Milne, "tough shit." What is most wonderful about Casey is that the filmmakers treat treat her like any reluctant hero thrown into an impossible adventure, from Marty McFly to Harry Potter, except that she just happens to be a girl. No special attention is brought tho this, there are not two boys she has to choose between (there isn't even one.). She's not a remarkable young girl, she's just a remarkable young person.

Perhaps the trickiest element of all of this is the relationship between Frank and Amelia. The aging, bitter old man who was spurned by is first love at the age of ten, only to meet her again and have her still, for all intents and purposes, be a ten year old girl, creates a tension that could and probably should have been creepy, but Clooney's mature and nuanced performance, young Raffey Cassidy's luminous and ageless sense of wisdom and director Brad Bird's sensitive approach makes this easily the most complex and interesting character relationship in any movie this summer. For all of the movie star hype and glamor, Clooney reminds us that he is a first-rate actor who can portray sincere, powerful and understated emotion with the very best.

Tomorrowland may be a bit loud and confusing at times, and it gets a little too shameless about advertising for Disney properties (especially Star Wars), but it all comes together well enough in the end to be well worth the price of admission.

POLTERGEIST

Reviewed by Patrick Gibbs

GRADE: D
Sam Rockwell, Rosemarie DeWitt, Kenedi Clements, Kyle Catlettt, Jane Adams and Jared Harris
Screenplay by David Lindsay-Abaire
Directed Gil Kenan
Rated PG-13 (supposedly intense frightening images, suggestive material and a giggly little girl saying the word shit)

The 1982 classic Poltergeist is really the only horror film that I saw when I was a kid, and it's still not only my favorite, it's the only one that still scares me a bit. I am not a believer in ghosts and the supernatural at all in real life, but every time I hear Zelda Rubinstein utter the words "to her, he is just another child. To us, he is the beast" a cold chill goes through me.

This new version is arguably the first remake of a Steven Spielberg film (arguably because we will never really know who truly directed the original, the credited director, Tobe Hooper, or Spielberg himself, as some cast members have insisted.). That's a precedent that doesn't set well with me, but I nevertheless tried to enter the film with an open mind. Not very hard, mind you, but I did try.

Eric and Amy Bowen (Rockwell and DeWitt) are a young, stupid and self absorbed couple who are in a bit of a rut, between Eric getting laid off and Amy being awkwardly unattractive, especially when she is trying to be sexy in the obligatory underwear scene.  The couple decides to move their three children into a house in the suburbs that none of them seem to like, agreeing that at least it's something else they can be angsty and bitch about and, whenever possible, take it out on the kids. ("We have too many children," says Eric, complaining about his troubled son as he pours himself a drink. "Here's to little jerks.")

The three junior Bowens, who were purchased directly from a stock Hollywood kid catalogue, are Kendra, a teenaged girl who (this is creative) really likes malls and phones; Griffin, an awkward, troubled 10 year old boy who might be suffering from agoraphobia and possibly even autism, or maybe just the fact that his parents are total asses to him all the time; and Maddie, a little girl who was scarred for life by being born two decades too late to star in the remake of Miracle on 34th Street, which has lead to her frequently talking to imaginary friends in an ever so cute and precocious kind of way that in no way forshadows anything.

Almost immediately, things start going wrong, starting with the box of creepy clown dolls that falls out of the attic, which the family wisely decides to keep in the bedroom of the little boy with an intense, crippling fear of everything, to Maddie making contact with with a presence inside the TV, which causes her to blow her big scene by saying "they're here" in a lifeless monotone. But when Eric and Amy go out to a dinner party and leave  the oldest in charge, surprise surprise, that's when the Poltergeists come to terrorize the kids, reference iconic moments from the original and pull little Maddie into their realm inside the closet.

Eric is worried that if they go to the police about their daughter's dissappearance, they might get blamed. So they shrewdly determine that nothing can possibly go wrong with hiding the fact of their missing child from the authorites, and go to the paranormal science department of the local college, where they enlist the aid of Dr. Brooke Powell (played by Jane Adams, whom you may recognize as having played Alex Keaton's brief love interest Marti on the last season of Family Ties, especially if you are bored as I was at this point in the movie.). Dr. Powell comes to their aid with her tallest white student and her blackest female student in tow just to cover all of her bases.

But when even these three plucky and intrepid ghost hunters can't do anything to bring Maddie back, it's time to bring in the big guns, and Powell enlists the aid of Carrigan Burke (Jared Harris) a television celebrity from a show called "Haunted House Cleaners" (his catch phrase, "This house is clean" is yet another smirking wink at the original, referencing one of Rubinstein's iconic lines.). Kendra is of course totally thrilled at this, being a big fan of the show, and seems to completely forget that her baby sister is literally trapped in hell, because there's a minor celebrity in her house. How awesome is that!

On the whole, this is a very uneasy mix of hitting everything on the checklist that you absolutely have to have in order to convince fans that the filmmakers have at least seen the original, and being so painfully resigned to the fact that they can't illicit scares using the same techniques that we saw before, and that was a surprise over 30 years ago may be more than a little bit expected now, that there is no slow build whatsoever, and the creepy music starts long before anything remotely abnormal happens and never lets up. What's more, the original approach of getting the biggest scares out of what they don't show you is totally abandoned in favor of showing everything, even going so far as to have the team send a drone camera into the closet abyss, turning one of the most frightening locations ever left to your imagination into a weak replica of a Halloween spook alley (at any moment I expected to see a High School dropout with a dull chainsaw jump out.).

The movie has a few moments here and there that actually work, like a memorable sequence involving a powerdrill, but overall it's only real strength is the likability of young actor Kyle Catlett as Griffin, and the camp factor of Harris channeling his father at his absolute drunken, hammy best. This movie doesn't just pale by comparison to the real, classic Poltergeist, but to countless inferior ripoffs we've been subjected to over the past few decades.

If you want to be frightened, check out Reese Witherspoon's performance in Hot Pursuit. If you want to actually enjoy yourself at the movies, there are much better options out there than this tepid mess.