Blu-ray Review: At Middleton (2013)

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Usually blonde-haired, twenty-something and played by Goldie Hawn or her daughter Kate Hudson, the free-spirited All-American waifs of romantic comedies past were famous for their ability to bewitch their straitlaced male counterparts into loosening up the grips on their lives as well as their neckties.

But if you’ve ever wondered what happens to these feisty females twenty-years after their happily-ever-after segues into marriage, middle-age and the prospect of facing empty-nest syndrome while taking their oldest child on a college tour, look no further than the aptly named midlife comedy At Middleton.

Launching headfirst into her against-type role as the aggressively eccentric Edith, actress Vera Farmiga is far more likable than the ticking time bomb she’s playing onscreen.

Seemingly eager to sabotage and steal focus from the lackluster tour of the picturesque tree-lined college that her over-achieving daughter Audrey (played by Vera’s sister Taissa Farmiga) is dying to attend, Edith goes for the jugular from the moment she first exits the car.

Whether she’s pretending to punch a woman in the back of the head or acting out in a variety of ways (from faux phone-throwing to temporary bike theft to lecture crashing), Edith decides to see just what exactly she will be getting for her forty-three grand per year investment in the span of one increasingly wild day.

"Advocating tour hooky" alongside her is the requisite bowtie wearing uptight potential extramarital love interest embodied by Andy Garcia’s cardiac surgeon George Hartman. And yes, a heart man named Hartman is just one in a series of cutesy contrivances and implausible shenanigans that span the film’s one hundred minute running time.

Needless to say, At Middleton requires a pretty large suspension of disbelief to buy into the premise that an uptight surgeon who showed no previous appreciation for humor, improvisation or impulsivity would suddenly embark on a hijinks filled afternoon of pot smoking and flirtation with the unstable Edith.

Exceedingly well-cast, ultimately it’s a credit to the actors that you’re willing to keep watching the tonally all-over-the-place film.

And this is especially true when Middleton meanders into disturbing territory that make you seriously question just how much screenwriters Adam Rodgers and Glenn German actually respect their female characters since both Farmiga sisters partake in some weirdly out-of-place emotional freak-outs as a like mother/like daughter pair of embarrassing basket cases that the males must placate.

Hoping for screwball but settling for an existential midlife crisis dramedy, all in all it’s a manic depressive mixture of pleasant highs and gloomy lows that makes you upset by how much potential the film wasted given not only the affable actors but its otherwise clever premise and setting.

While there are some truly beautiful moments including both clocktower scenes, a nice in-film tribute to Umbrellas of Cherbourg (which undoubtedly served as an influence) as well as an ironic twist for the prospective students in the otherwise fitting finale, ultimately it’s far too extreme in its unrealistic depiction of way too many characters on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Though it’s nice to see both its headliners embrace comedy, despite how much I really wanted to like the film, I’d still have to recommend Farmiga’s Oscar-nominated turn as a woman who finds herself at a crossroads in Jason Reitman’s much more realistic treatment of midlife coming-of-age Up in the Air before I'd suggest viewers take a tour of Middleton.

Text ©2014, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

DVD Review: Wings (2013)

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If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the movies it’s never to underestimate the impact that an underdog with a dream can have when they’ve been given the opportunity to make that lifelong dream come true.

And this often utilized cinematic adage is doubly familiar when it comes to animated tales of underdogs that undertake heroic quests over the course of a three act film. But as popular as these plotlines are in contemporary CG fare with so many studios copying the successful formulas employed by their rivals to serve up slight variations of the same bankable themes, they’ve also proven so profitable that some animators go back to the well of their own material, cranking out a new spin of a past production before other studios can do the same.

Whether it’s Disney’s Planes spin-off from Pixar’s World of Cars that was originally intended to go straight to DVD or Dreamworks’ Puss In Boots film line that spiraled off the monstrously successful Shrek series, ticket buyers and home video consumers have been treated to a lot of the same over the past decade in an increasingly crowded post-Pixar children’s entertainment market.

And eager to prove that Hollywood isn’t the only place to create vibrant animation, while Japan’s Studio Ghibli and England’s Aardman Animation have been influential for decades, other countries have begun to follow suit in a big way, releasing a wide variety of critical landmarks and contemporary favorites from France’s Persepolis to Israel’s Waltz With Bashir along with many other entertaining and enlightening offerings from around the globe.

Russia has joined in over the last few years, increasing their budgets to create some vastly detailed animated fare including some features that play off of the same plotlines and franchises made popular by Disney.

Their outstanding attention to detail was most notably on display in the country’s recent gorgeous adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale The Snow Queen which was dubbed in English and released on DVD at the same time that Disney’s Frozen took the box office by storm in late November of 2013.

Although it has none of the pomp and circumstance nor the classical style of the Andersen fairytale, the country’s latest venture to release in the states also ties into Walt Disney with the release of the new Lionsgate DVD send-up of Planes with the aptly titled Wings.

Using the same basic Cars-like plot that Disney also utilized for their recent aviation based animation, Wings milks the underdog formula for all its worth as we meet our aspiring world class flyer and small-town plane Ace (voiced by Josh Duhamel) who, through a one in a million opportunity, winds up accidentally being offered the fifth spot on a championship team just one month before the Super Wings Trophy Competition.

Taking all the help he can get from the film’s requisite wacky sidekicks, Ace befriends Rob Schneider’s wisecracking wingman and unsolicited advice giving bird Dodo, who becomes the surprise scene-stealer of the film as Schneider dives into voice work with the same energy we used to witness from him on Saturday Night Live.

While predictably, Ace also encounters a new love interest voiced by Hilary Duff as Windy, when Ace’s determination and passion inspires Top Gun alumni Tom Skerritt’s veteran coach to come out of hiding following a tragic accident, Ace incurs the wrath of a bullying competitor who tries to manipulate Windy and Ace into losing his place in the race.

Of course, it’s nothing we haven’t seen before and Disney’s far more sophisticated individualized animation made the aircraft characters come much more vibrantly to life in Planes. Nonetheless, I must say that much to my pleasant surprise and largely thanks to Schneider’s sterling voicework and the witty English language adaptation from scripter Mychal Simka, filmmaker Olga Lopato’s energetic, brightly colored children’s film is far more entertaining than I thought it would be.

As such, it ultimately reminds viewers that we never can underestimate an animated underdog as Wings takes flight – captivating the imagination of young viewers for the fun-filled ride along the way.

Text ©2014, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

Movie Review: Whiteout (2009)

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Citing everything from a shower scene as the sole high point by the overwhelming boys club of critics to an overly computer generated opening plane crash-- recently horrific reviews have likened Dominic Sena's latest film as being ideally suited for the common usage of the product that shares its title or have toyed with the movie's setting of Antarctica to describe it in terms of an avalanche of awfulness.

However, if you shovel beyond the surface level ice and strip down the layers of some plot contrivances and structural missteps that were piled on like the fifteen layers of clothing you would need to survive in that environment, you may be surprised to discover that Whiteout actually contains some pretty solid elements for what could've been a mighty little sleeper of a thriller.

Working from Jon and Erich Hoeber's screenplay adaptation of the 1998 Eisner nominated graphic novel which was released in four installments by Oni Press from creators Greg Rucka and Steve Lieber, the movie bounces back from an admittedly video game like and possibly plot spoiling prologue of sorts after gunfire erupts on a Russian plane and they crash to the ground with the introduction of our strong, conflicted heroine.

Played by Kate Beckinsale, we follow U.S. Marshal Carrie Stetko as she returns to the South Pole based American research station Amundsen-Scott and steps into that much discussed shower. While my heterosexual male colleagues checked out of critic mode temporarily, honestly Beckinsale's shower scene reveals about as much skin as an evening television program and is roughly on par with a shampoo or shower gel commercial.

And as we later discover, getting acquainted with Carrie and another colleague in and around her bathroom does have a purpose. Instead of just passing it off as gratuitous, it does pay off later metaphorically as we're hit with brutal Memento influenced bathroom-set violent flashbacks of Carrie before she traded the continental U.S. for the solitary surrounding of miles of snow.

Like an old cop movie cliche, she's just about to resign and return home when she and her closest ally Doc (Tom Skerritt) along with a refreshingly well-adjusted war veteran pilot Delfy (Columbus Short) discover an especially gruesome crime scene in the middle of the unforgiving landscape. With no tracks, climbing gear, or trace of the weapon, the Marshal who is used to dealing with misdemeanors becomes embroiled in Antarctica's first homicide. And while she and Doc briefly discuss just sending the body off to the next stop to analyze, Carrie realizes she can't abandon the reason she became an officer.

As one body grows into multiple murders, an unidentifiable killer welding an ice axe chases Carrie Stetko as the movie morphs from "C.S.I.: Antarctica" to Dead Calm meets "Friday the 13th on Ice." And although I was able to guess the murderer among the tiny main ensemble cast of Beckinsale, Short, Skerritt, Gabriel Macht (as a UN sent investigator) and a few other inhabitants, the ultimate a-ha moment is rushed in the last twenty minutes in a ludicrous, dissatisfying finale with a run of the mill motive and weak showdown.

For instead of playing it as a straight mystery or a spooky thriller with another nail-biting chase pitting Carrie against the freezing temperatures and the murderer, Whiteout suffers unevenly with its cinematic hybrid and may also have been plagued with the daunting task of trying to cram four graphic novels into one roughly two hour movie.

As such, Beckinsale's Carrie is the only character remotely fleshed out via the gritty flashback sequences that reveal her past and also given the partial bathroom setting and what took place offers you an immediate sense of whom the culprit will turn out to be in case you hadn't guessed in the opening act. Yet unfortunately she's never given a true opportunity to right the wrong of her past or the way she's been senselessly punishing herself for it since the Whiteout finale goes for a cop-out instead of a cop-on-the-case resolution.

However, this being said, she fares much better than her male counterparts like Skerritt and Macht who are essentially playing "types" yet admirably Short's charm and humor give his character the most life and onscreen joy. While overall, producer Joel Silver's film is surprisingly better than most critics would have you believe and it's a damn sight more watchable than Smilla's Sense of Snow, I couldn't help wishing they would've taken Whiteout's strong building blocks and turned it into what for a moment seemed like a twenty-first century icy version of Dead Calm.

And as a a writer who can't simply trash a film without trying to figure out what went wrong and how to rectify it, my brain was put into overdrive especially since female heroes are few and far between in Hollywood and I desperately wanted Beckinsale's film to be the brainy woman's answer to the junk usually hurled our direction.

While I won't know precisely what the most crucial elements were without taking in the graphic novel, I felt that Whiteout could've been incredibly enhanced by possibly ditching the opening sequence to make the discovery of the plane far more surprising as well as giving our murderer a motive that's much more unique than a '60s style heist film from the plane's cold war era.

Likewise by inserting more characters and red herrings, the filmmakers could've cashed in on the ultimate atmosphere of claustrophobia when Carrie and a small handful of colleagues (one of whom is the villain) are stuck there for the winter. And again by encouraging the writers to view films of varying success levels like Blair Witch Project, Panic Room, P2, The Mist, and Dead Calm to see how to make the most of "group-think" and having characters confined as evidenced in producer Joel Silver's Die Hard series, I know it would've gone from a relative C+ to a much more frightening, realistic and psychologically engrossing work.

Although most reviewers have gone overboard in telling you to stay away as if the movie was on par with some of the true over-produced, silly with CGI works of the last year including Macht's beautiful bomb The Spirit, Watchmen, Quantum of Solace, and others, I'd still give it a cautious low recommendation. While it's definitely rental worthy for the gorgeous scenery also, it's also intriguing for writers to try and use the otherwise promise filled movie as a great creative exercise in analyzing just how it would've gone from an indecipherable blizzard to an intoxicating yet undeniably freaky frozen sensory feast.

Text ©2009, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com
Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited.

Bonneville

Director: Christopher N. Rowley

It’s become a near prerequisite for female bonding movies or, to use man’s favorite term that still makes me squeamish—chick flicks-- to include one or more of the following: a) the word sisterhood in the title; b) unlikely bonding between the obligatory straight-laced friend and the obligatory flirtatious or promiscuous rebel; c) flashbacks from childhood where the women pledged they would remain BFFs for all eternity; d) dysfunction reigns supreme either in the form of abuse, marital infidelity, medical drama, or parental issues; e) it’s unbearably depressing; f) utilizes a heavy “you go girl” styled soundtrack of 60’s and 70’s female empowerment hits that have now become the theme songs of drag queens; g) there’s an overly sensitive, sexless and nearly neutered Prince Charming who not only looks amazing shirtless but says all the right things at all the right times to compensate for the Neanderthals they’ve met in the past; and lastly h) it involves a journey of some kind-- usually in the form of a road trip-- which we all know is a motif for the women to “cut loose, kick off… [their] Sunday shoes,” and get Footloose while rediscovering their true selves.

And frankly, it’s a tragedy in not only unleashing horrifically bad films on the public but even more so in perpetuating sexist stereotypes on the teenage boys who purchase tickets to the latest video game turned into a movie as well as a predominantly male profession of journalists whose scathing reviews will no doubt-- even if they’re completely justified-- not only keep people away but prevent Hollywood from trying to create more films for the demographic… and dare I say help shape future media coverage about us when we do something out of the “norm” like perhaps run for presidential office. Oh, but we won't go there!

Yet, even as a woman who—more than anything—wants to encourage more films made for our gender, it’s an appalling fact that the ones we’re peddled usually condescend with several of the aforementioned criteria and so the vicious cycle continues and instead of a modern day equivalent of All About Eve or Gone With the Wind, we get Paris Hilton in The Hottie or the Nottie and Mandy Moore in Because I Said So.

With this in mind, after I saw the previews for the latest female bonding picture, Bonneville, starring Academy Award winners and nominees Jessica Lange, Kathy Bates, and Joan Allen, I began bracing myself for the worst. First a confession-- I’m a great fan of all three actresses, (especially the underrated Joan Allen whose chameleon like ability never ceases to amaze), and I applauded the moxie to produce a film starring a trio of women over the age of fifty. However, the fact that the trailer featured: the three jumping on a bed like giggling schoolgirls, one remaining like a prim schoolmarm while the other acts flirtatious in trying to meet cute with a Prince Charming, and taking a lengthy road trip to face a dysfunctional relative after a depressing event seemed to solidify every cliché in the genre book... yet I found myself pleasantly surprised by this predictable but innocuous and heartwarming little sleeper just released on DVD.

The film, which begins in Pocatello, Idaho, opens as the beautiful, recently widowed Arvilla (Jessica Lange) tries to come to grips with the death of her much older, adventuring, best-selling author husband. Although she’d been his wife for twenty years, her goodhearted yet absentminded husband Joe was so consumed with living life to the fullest that he neglected to create a new will explaining not only his wish to be cremated and have his ashes scattered but also to leave the house to his beloved wife. When Joe’s bitter, defensive daughter Francine (a wicked Christine Baranski) arrives to contest her father’s undocumented wishes, she blackmails her stepmother by giving her a week to deliver Joe’s ashes to her in Montecito, California where she intends to bury him next to his first wife or else she will kick Arvilla out of the home Francine has now inherited.

Still reeling from the untimely death of her mate, not to mention the threat of homelessness lingering in her mind, Arvilla decides she will hand-deliver Joe to Francine herself and her two best friends--the strict but kind, perpetual reader of The Book of Mormon, Carol (Joan Allen) and the rebellious Margene who breaks Mormon rule and indulges in coffee, decide they will go along with their friend, feeling that there’s no time like the present to have a girl’s vacation.

Deciding to take Joe’s gorgeous blue, vintage Bonneville out for a spin for the first time in her life, Arvilla picks up her friends and after a few mishaps including a flat tire and several detours, makes the impulsive decision to skip the flight and make it up to Montecito by car, with her loyal friends by her side. Predictably, they encounter memorable eccentrics along the way such as a young, beautiful hippie born decades too late played by Victor Rasuk (Adrift in Manhattan) who rescues them in the Salt Flats and then gives them his MP3 player in exchange for a ride, along with big-rig driving Tom Skerritt who catches Margene’s eye and interest, yet when the time comes wherein he actually ask the ladies to dinner, she’s the most hesitant one—revealing the truism for not only Margene but most women that it’s far easier to fantasize than actualize-- until with a little prompting she opens herself up to the possibility of love.

Filled with sumptuous cinematography of the majestic American southwest that’s worth the price of the DVD rental alone, although the film hits one contrived plot-point after another and anyone who has seen even a few female bonding classics know precisely what will happen next, the actresses seem to genuinely engage one another in ways that make what may have been one-dimensional roles seem far more real than the less than inspired writing.

In fact, it’s on their capable shoulders that Bonneville rests and I’m sure I don’t have to assure you that when you have Bates and Allen navigating with Lange in the driver’s seat, even if you hit some potentially rough traffic and annoying road construction along the way, you’re guaranteed a mostly smooth and entertaining trip, if you can face your fear from enough bad female journey pictures of the past to give the likable, mild Bonneville a spin.