The animation is quite good in “The Wild Life,” with exceptional use of space designed to make the best use of 3D and cleverly constructed mechanics. But the voice talent is poor, the characters are dull, and the story and script start out badly and go downhill from there.
It is inspired by but bears little relation to the classic shipwreck story Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe, memorably illustrated by the great N.C. Wyeth (father of Andrew). But in this version there is no Man Friday. Instead it is, for no particular reason, told as a flashback from the perspective of the animals on the island, including a pangolin, a hedgehog, a tapir, and a parrot named Mak, later dubbed “Tuesday” by Crusoe.
The movie begins with pirates seeing what they think is a signal flame on a remote island. The captain sends his men to check it out and bring back anything of value. They capture Crusoe, and Tuesday settles in with some friendly mice on the ship to tell them the story from the beginning.
We meet Crusoe and his dog Ainsley onboard La Luna. They are novices at sea travel and looked down upon by the seasoned sailors. Crusoe does a lot of looking down, too, at the ocean, as he barfs into it. Also on board are two scraggly cats with Cockney accents, the scheming May and henchman Mal (Debi Tinsley and Jeff Doucette). A storm destroys the ship and Crusoe and Ainsley are trapped when the sailors depart in the lifeboat. The ship crashes on the shore of a tiny uninhabited island. Well, uninhabited by humans. The animals live in a predator-free paradise, with daily luaus, and they are all very happy except for Mak the parrot, who dreams of finding something exciting and different.
Crusoe, Ainsley, and the splintered remains of the ship are thrilling for Mak but terrifying for the other animals. Eventually Crusoe gains Mak/Tuesday’s trust and the animals begin to make friends with him, helping him to build a treehouse complete with running freshwater. But May and Mal, briefly stuck on an adjacent rock and soon accompanied by a litter, are determined to return to the island and pretty much eat and/or destroy everything and everyone.
Illuminata had the same mix of exceptional animation technique and underwritten story in “Fly Me to the Moon.” I wrote in my review, “Unfortunately, the dull characters and weak story keep getting in the way of the gorgeously produced backgrounds.” My strong recommendation for their next film is that they try to find writers and performers as capable as their visual artists.
Parents should know that this film includes a scary shipwreck, mean cats, pirates, guns, and fire, characters drink alcohol and there is a sad offscreen death of a character.
Family discussion: Why is Mak the only one on the island who is curious about the rest of the world? Why did Mal do what May said? How can you tell the difference between a coincidence and a bad omen?
If you like this, try: “The Pirates! Band of Misfits” and “Shipwrecked”
Rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and disturbing images
Profanity:
None
Alcohol/ Drugs:
Some social drinking
Violence/ Scariness:
Intense and sometimes graphic peril and violence including battle scenes, crucifixions, abuse, and accidents, characters injured and killed
Diversity Issues:
A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:
August 19, 2016
Copyright 2016 Paramount Lew Wallace’s 1880 book, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, had a revolutionary idea in a spiritual setting. The story of a minor, fictional character at the time of the crucifixion was the first to try to illuminate epic themes through the depiction of a character who was not a participant. Indeed, the title character was hardly aware of the monumental events going on around him. He was too busy dealing with his own personal crises like being enslaved and having his mother and sister contract leprosy. Wallace’s book became the top seller of the century. And then it became a play, two silent films, a Best Picture Oscar winner tied for first place for the most Academy Awards, plus two animated versions and a television miniseries.
Now Roma Downey and Mark Burnett, following the enormous success of their “Bible,” “A.D” and “Son of God” know the genre well and have remade the grand but dated three hour and thirty-seven minute epic. Their version is brisker, not just in the overall running time of just over two hours but in the more contemporary quick cuts and trimmed storyline. It is also more explicitly religious. While earlier versions suggested the presence of Jesus but did not include his face or voice, he is more explicitly involved in the storyline here, portrayed by Brazilian actor Rodrigo Santoro.
As in all of the earlier versions, it is the story of Judah Ben-Hur (Jack Huston), a Jewish prince who is wrongly accused of a hostile act against the Roman invaders and sold into slavery. In this version the Roman Messala (Toby Kebbell) is more than a close friend; he is Judah’s adopted brother. They are devoted to one another but also deeply competitive.
Messala, in love with Judah’s sister, joins the Roman army in hopes of achieving enough wealth and status to be considered worthy of her. When he returns to Jerusalem, Judah is married to Esther (Nazanin Boniadi). Messala and Judah agree to find a way for the local population to live peacefully under Roman occupation. But a rebel hiding in Judah’s house kills one of the Roman officers and Judah is blamed. Messala refuses to protect him or his family. Judah becomes a galley slave, spending five years chained to an oar on a Roman naval ship.
When the ship is sunk, he escapes. An African named Ilderim (Morgan Freeman) gives him a chance to win back his freedom by competing in a chariot race. And that, after all, is what everyone remembers about “Ben-Hur.” Director Timur Bekmambetov is known for action scenes with tremendous vitality and he more than delivers with the chariot race, which is thrillingly dynamic. The naval battle scenes are also exciting. The screenplay has some clunky dialog and awkward transitions, but Huston is always engaged and engaging and balances the intensity of the action scenes with an inspiring message of forgiveness. The movie is true to the story that has endured in its various versions for more than a century.
Parents should know that this film includes intense and sometimes graphic peril and violence with many characters injured and killed, battle scenes, whipping, abuse, crucifixions, some disturbing images, brief non-explicit sexual situation and mild sexual references.
Family discussion: What changed Ben-Hur’s mind about Messala? Was Ben-Hur right to try to make peace with the Romans? What did Pilate mean when he said, “They’re Romans now?”
If you like this, try; “Risen” and the 1959 version of “Ben-Hur”
Rated PG for thematic elements, scary images, action and peril
Profanity:
None
Alcohol/ Drugs:
None
Violence/ Scariness:
Monsters, peril, sad offscreen deaths
Diversity Issues:
None
Date Released to Theaters:
August 19, 2016
Date Released to DVD:
November 20, 2016
Amazon.com ASIN:
B01KMKM4TW
Copyright 2016 Focus
LAIKA Studios’ fourth film, “Kubo and the Two Strings,” is a fable of exquisite beauty and meaning, gorgeously produced in the most painstaking of all forms of filmmaking, stop-motion animation. They are the modern-day equivalent of the monks who labored for years on each page of illuminated manuscripts.
Every detail in every frame and every element of the story, set in a magical version of ancient Japan, reflects the simple profundity of the ancient and contemporary Japanese art that inspired it. LAIKA’s last film, “The Boxtrolls,” was set in a cluttered, sooty, steampunkish imaginary Victorian London, and the studio’s motto was “no square corners, no straight lines.” This time it went in the opposite direction, with the muted palette and spare, carefully balanced settings of Japanese woodblock prints and the sharp lines and perfect corners of origami.
One of the hardest elements to get right in stop-motion is water, because it is impossible to control it frame to frame. In “Boxtrolls,” the studio’s greatest technical triumph was an elaborate set-up for a brief scene in which a character touched standing water and created some ripples. LAIKA loves to challenge itself, and so this film starts with a storm at sea. A woman we will learn is Kubo’s mother is desperately trying to stay upright on a tiny boat. We know she is escaping someone or something, but we are not sure yet what or who it is. And we do not learn until she is washed up on the shore, exhausted and hurt, that she is not alone. In her backpack, there is a baby. It is Kubo.
Like Harry Potter, Kubo had a father who died trying to protect him from a danger so great that Kubo bears a wound. One of his eyes is gone. Kubo’s mother survived, but she used all of her magic to save him and now she is frail, forgetful, and inconsolable.
When we next see them, he is about 11, and has been caring for her all his life. Each day, he makes her food and feeds her. And then he walks from their home in a cave on top of a cliff into the nearest town, where he tells stories in the market. He has the power to bring origami characters to life to act out thrilling tales of the great samurai warrior Hanzo. The townspeople love his stories, which always end with a cliffhanger, and they toss him coins.
The community has an annual Obon festival, where they light lanterns and remember the dead. Kubo wants to go, so he violates his mother’s rule about never being out after dark. And the danger she protected him from years ago comes after him in the form of his mother’s two spooky sisters, both voiced by Rooney Mara and both wearing implacable-expression white masks and terrifying swoopy capes made of black feathers.
Kubo’s mother has just enough magic left to save him one more time. And then she is gone, and Kubo finds himself on a journey, accompanied by the live version of the small monkey charm he always carried in his pocket. He and Monkey (Charlize Theron) set off to find the three pieces of Hanzo’s armor that he will need to fight the sisters and their father, who wants Kubo’s other eye. Along the way they meet a samurai who has been cursed and turned into a giant beetle (Matthew McConaughey). And they meet and fight three different monsters, a giant skeleton, an underwater garden of eyes, and an enormous, floating, reticulated moon serpent, each giving Kubo a chance to discover his courage and power.
This is a gorgeous, epic adventure with grandeur, scope, and spectacular settings, every bit of it wonderfully imaginative. It reflects LAIKA’s own adventurous spirit in taking on narrative and technical challenges as daunting as that faced by any hero. Who else would try to create a stop-motion battle under water? Or take on, in a family movie, a quest that encompasses themes of family, story, courage, loss, destiny, and meaning? LAIKA understands that the most enduring fairy tales are not afraid to deal with darkness because that is the only way to understand its true message, here delivered in a breathtaking conclusion, of tenderness and forgiveness.
Parents should know that this film includes fantasy-style peril and violence with monsters and magic, and sad deaths of parents.
Family discussion: Why did Kubo answer his grandfather’s questions the way he did? Why didn’t Monkey tell Kubo where she came from? Why did the two strings make a difference?
If you like this, try: “Coraline,” “Paranorman,” and “The Boxtrolls”
Disney has wisely jettisoned the songs, the plot and the cartoon for the remake of the Helen Reddy musical with live-action boy befriended by a cartoon dragon. It’s still about Pete and his dragon friend Elliott, and the entirely new story that is genuinely enchanting.
This seems to be a year for stories about children who make friends with giant, magical creatures. We’ve already had “The BFG” and have “A Monster Calls” coming up. And this reworking also owes quite a debt to another live-action 3D Disney remake of just a few months ago, “The Jungle Book.” But hey, it is a lovely fantasy — a child left alone finds a devoted protector. Pete (Levi Alexander), age 5, is reading a book called Elliott Gets Lost in the back seat of the car with the encouragement of his parents when there is an accident. The parents are killed (very discreetly handled off-screen), and Pete is left alone, like Mowgli and Tarzan, but instead of being raised by wolves or apes, he is taken in by a furry green dragon he dubs Elliot.
Six years later, Pete (now played Oakes Fegley) is living a life of Rousseauian paradise in the woods. We don’t waste time on how or what they eat or why his teeth are so white and even. It’s just racing through the Edenic forest and, in the film’s most exhilarating scene, leaping off a cliff in the sure knowledge that Elliott will be there to catch him and take him soaring through the sky in gorgeous 3D. They are very happy together.
But a logging operation is moving very close to the cozy cave where Elliot and Pete live. Two brothers, Gavin (“Star Trek’s” Karl Urban) and Jack (Wes Bentley) are cutting trees in the forest under the watchful eye of Jack’s girlfriend, Grace (Bryce Dallas Howard), a forest ranger who considers the woods her home. Her father Meacham (Robert Redford) likes to tell local children the legend of the dragon in the woods and boasts that he once fought the dragon with a knife. But Grace insists that she knows every inch of the forest and does not believe his story.
Gavin is reckless and greedy. When Gavin’s crew goes beyond Grace’s limits, Jack’s daughter Natalie (“Southpaw’s” Oona Laurence) discovers Pete, who has not seen another person in six years. He goes home with Jack and Grace and begins to learn about the human world. But he misses Elliot terribly. Gavin discovers Elliot and thinks he can make a fortune by capturing him.
The movie is disjointed at times, likely due to recutting, leaving unanswered questions about Grace’s relationship to Jack and Natalie and oddly having three main characters motherless. I never quite got used to the idea of a dragon with fur instead of scales. But it is thrilling to see Pete and Elliot soar together and the love between them is genuine and heartwarming enough to make this one of the year’s best family films.
Parents should know that this film includes fantasy/action-style peril and violence, sad death of parents (discreetly shown) and references to other absent parents, and brief mild language.
Family discussion: Why did Gavin and Jack have different ideas about their business? If you had a dragon friend, what name would you pick?
If you like this, try: “The Jungle Book” and “Free Willy”
I always say that the success of a superhero movies depends on the bad guy. So, shouldn’t a movie that is all bad guys be really great? That’s the idea behind “Suicide Squad,” a sort of “Avengers” (all-star hotshots who don’t play well with others have to work together as a team to save the world) crossed with “The Dirty Dozen.” And it kind of works. On the one hand, it is an August movie, the cinematic equivalent of the shelf in the back of the grocery story with the dented cans, irregulars, and day-old bread. On the other hand, it approaches a nicely messy, authentically amateurish, form equals content vibe that suits the subject matter. If these guys made their own movie, they might overlook some of the fine points, too.
Our scrappy little band of anti-heroes live in one of those “lock them up, throw away the key, throw away the Constitution, and any record of their existence while you’re at it” sort of prisons. Will Smith plays Deadshot, an assassin with a young daughter he loves. Margot Robbie is Harley Quinn, a psychiatrist turned psychopath with the demeanor of a school girl, locked in a romantic tangle with the Joker (Jared Leto) so twisted it makes Sid and Nancy look like Dick and Jane. Somewhere behind full-face tattoos, Jay Hernandez is Diablo, a gang-banger with the power of fire. Somewhere inside a reptilian rubber suit (maybe it is CGI, but it looks like rubber) is Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje as Killer Croc, and I never quite figured out what he could do besides fight and swim. Jai Courtney plays the Aussie thief Boomerang. Neither one of them is intelligible.
They get a chance to escape the abuses and isolation of prison life when national security expert Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) says that their special skills make them the world’s only hope against the terrorism threat that entities with supernatural powers will pose. “The world changed when Superman flew across the sky. It changed again when he didn’t.” (Cut to super-coffin)
Waller is certain she can control them. Whether she can or not, there is no alternative. And so they are assigned to Colonel Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman), who informs the motley crew that each of them has an explosive injected into his/her neck, and that he will not hesitate to blow their heads off if they disobey or even if they vex him. “I’m known to be vexing,” Harley Quinn pipes up helpfully, well aware that saying so she proves her point. And then it’s off to the big confrontation with some moments for (1) some bad behavior, (2) some exchanges of confidence and bonding to let us see that these guys may be bad but they have their good points and while they may have made some poor choices, they have feelings, too, (3) a few reminders that these are the bad guys, (4) some setbacks and death of a tangential character to show us how serious this is, and (5) weaknesses becoming strengths, strengths becoming weaknesses, a chance to see that some of the good guys aren’t so good and some of the bad guys aren’t so bad (and deaths are not necessarily deaths).
Here is what the movie gets right: B**** please. Margot Robbie is a huge movie star who owns this film and every moment she is on screen in “Suicide Squad” you get your money’s worth and then some. Anything else that works in the film is an extra cherry on the sundae. #imwithharley so give HQ her own movie PDQ.
Smith and Kinnaman are also excellent. Most of the best of the rest was in the trailer including one exchange which inexplicably was cut from the film. In fact, given the many evident recuts and reshoots, Warner Brothers should just have turned the footage over to whoever made the trailer and let them control the final print. The soundtrack veers into Spotify playlist mode but there are some good choices.
Here is what it gets wrong: Writer/director David Ayer, whose speciality has been military and law enforcement stories, does not understand the right tone for a comic book movie. Compare Marvel/Disney, which managed to create distinctive and right-on-the-money tones for Thor, Captain America, Iron Man, Ant-Man, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Deadpool and yet make us believe they could exist in the same universe, and made that work in the “Avengers” movies without shortchanging anyone. Second, note the reference to the evidence of reworking above. Third, note the very first thing I said. Comic book movies are all about the villain. In this case, with villains as the the good guys, they really need someone specially evil for us to root against. The villains in this film are terrible in every category, starting with the special effects, which should be primo, right, Warner Brothers? But most importantly, a movie that spends too much time introducing us to the Z-team’s backstories never provides us with the basics about the powers and threat of the bad guys so we have no way of knowing what we are hoping for (other than obliteration) from the final battle. Wait, so this and that didn’t work but this and that do? Really? And what happened to those SEALS?
It is good to see more than one female character and this film has four strong and powerful women of different races. But the gender politics of the film are less than one might wish. Both female Suicide Squad members are there because of the men they love, and the female villain is alternately weak around the man she loves and strong but not as strong as her brother. Viola Davis, as always, is sublime as a woman who may be only human but is in every way a match for anyone, superpowered or politically powered.
It’s better than “Batman vs. Superman” and “The Fantastic Four,” but it falls frustratingly short of what it could have and should have been.
NOTE: Stay through the credits for an extra scene, but you don’t have to stay after that.
Parents should know that this film includes extended sci-fi/fantasy violence with some graphic and disturbing images, torture, abuse, many characters injured and killed, skimpy costumes, sexual references, some strong language
Family discussion: Who was the worst villain in the movie? Who caused the most harm? What could “bad guys” do that the “good guys” could not?
If you like this, try: “The Avengers” and “The Dirty Dozen”
