Kubo and the Two Strings

Posted on August 18, 2016 at 8:00 am

A-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Kindergarten - 3rd Grade
MPAA Rating:	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

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”

Pete’s Dragon

Posted on August 11, 2016 at 5:24 pm

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”

Suicide Squad

Posted on August 3, 2016 at 12:00 pm

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”

Jason Bourne

Posted on July 28, 2016 at 5:29 pm

Whoever thought that the “Fast and Furious” series would keep getting better while the once-smart “Bourne” series is the one that drives off a cliff?

During the boring parts of this movie, I played a game I made up that I called “Same or Different.” For example, in one of the earlier Bourne movies, our hero, the once-amnesiac CIA assassin Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) grabbed a limited-use anonymous cell phone for a particularly clever maneuver. In this one, he grabs a small tracking device handily left out in a bowl like peanuts at a bar for happy hour. Same or different? Different because the first one was plausible and this one was ridiculous.

The earlier films had exceptionally well-staged fight scenes that felt like real people who get out of breath and hurt each other and jockey for advantage. In the first moments of this film, in addition to completely unnecessary jumps between five different locations around the world for no purpose, he knocks out an enormous professional fighter with one punch. Same or different? Same answer as above. And if we distinguish between the good guys and the bad guys by how much collateral damage they inflict on the world — how many innocent bystanders get killed, the answer here is more same than different.

There are franchise films made for fan service and then there are those that do not even service the fans, are merely a cash grab, and retroactively devalue the franchise.

This is a movie that asks us to believe that the head of the CIA and a Mark Zuckerberg-young titan of the world’s coolest social media company, a sort of cross between Google and Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat, decide to have a conversation of the utmost secrecy in a posh Washington DC restaurant, the kind where everyone eavesdrops on the big shots at the next table, especially reporters, politicians, and Hill staffers.

The first three Bourne films transcended the action/spy genre with a gritty, almost intimate feel far from the glossiness of James Bond, and with an expanding, deepening storyline that, as the then-LA Times critic Manohla Dargis said, began with the existential in “Identity” (Who am I?), extended to the moral in “Supremacy” (What did I do?). With the third film, the question of culpability extended to the larger “I” of the government: Who are we and what have we done? We will put aside for the moment the non-Bourne “Bourne,” which mistakenly went in the direction of a secret government program that was more “Captain America” than Bourne, with a mysterious ability-enhancing drug that removed the somber reality that resonated with the era of waterboarding and Abu Ghraib. There is plenty to explore and attempt to expiate now, and the movie tries to touch on contemporary issues explored in far more compelling — and terrifying — terms in documentaries like Alex Gibney’s “We Steal Secrets” and “Zero Days.” It just doesn’t do anything interesting with them while it is piling improbable motivations and preposterous situations almost as high as the carnage and wrecked cars.

Parents should know that this film has constant spy-related action-style peril and violence, many characters injured and killed including many innocent bystanders, themes of government corruption, and some strong language.

Family discussion: Who should decide the balance between privacy and security and how much information about those decisions should be public? What real-life events inspired this story?

If you like this, try: the other “Bourne” films and “Zero Days”

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Action/Adventure Series/Sequel Spies

Ghostbusters

Posted on July 14, 2016 at 5:20 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
Profanity:	Mild language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Extended fantasy/paranormal violence with some disturbing images
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	July 15, 2016
Date Released to DVD:	October 10, 2016
Amazon.com ASIN:	B01I2FFGW6

I’m willing to believe them. I mean, sure, the original is a classic, mostly thanks to Bill Murray, Sigourney Weaver, and a new approach to action/paranormal comedy. But the reboot has the Mount Rushmore of movie comedy with SNL writer/cast members Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones, and Kristen Wiig, plus America’s sweetheart Melissa McCarthy. That’s some serious comedy power there, and some serious dimples, too. It pays tribute to the original, opening with the Ray Parker, Jr. song and featuring cameos from original cast members Murray, Aykroyd, Hudson, Potts, and Weaver, and a couple of the original ghosts, too.

But it is very much its own take on the story, with a fresh script from director Paul Feig and Katie Dippold (“Parks and Recreation,” “The Heat”). There are tweaks on the original’s headquarters and car. And it has updated references — you know that if a New Yorker saw a ghost today, she’d whip out a selfie stick and Instagram it, and they pause for a burn on Reddit haters).

Like the original, it begins with scientists losing their jobs in academia because of their insistence on exploring the paranormal. Wiig plays Erin, a physicist who misses her chance at tenure when it is revealed that she once co-authored a book called Ghosts from Our Past — Both Literally and Figuratively. It was out of print, but the other author, her estranged friend Abby (McCarthy), has made it available on Amazon. Erin visits Abby’s lab and meets Jillian Holtzmann (McKinnon), a mad scientist type who literally plays with fire. When they are all fired, they start a company to investigate the paranormal and are soon joined by Patty (Jones), a subway worker who does not know much about science but has an extensive knowledge of New York city history. And they hire a receptionist named Kevin (“Thor’s” Chris Hemsworth) and get to work trying to capture a ghost so they can prove they are right.

Meanwhile, a nerdy guy is building a machine to unleash and intensify all of the spirits in the city, and so the women go from studying the ghosts to, yes, busting them, with a major confrontation in the midst of a metal concert with a group called “The Slimers” onstage and Ozzy Osbourne watching in the wings. The mayor (Andy Garcia) and his aide (Cecily Strong) thank the team privately but denounce them as frauds publicly to keep the city from panicking.

The final confrontation goes on a bit too long, which is probably why there is an obvious cut of what would have been a dance number (glimpsed in the credits and I hope added in full to the DVD extras). But the action scenes are strong and the comedy is first-rate, at its best achieving a deliriously loopy silliness that is refreshing in an era where gross-out, oh-no-they-didn’t jokes are considered wit.

Each of the four main characters is clearly having a blast showing what she does best, creating distinctive characters with very different styles but always working the chemistry between them with dialog that often feels improvised by actors trying to make each other laugh. It is refreshing to see a movie with four female leads who are professional, super-smart, and totally badass, kicking the butts of all the ghosts and demons and the Bechdel test as well. Their happily ever after is saving Manhattan not getting some guy to put a ring on it.

Newcomer-to the big screen McKinnon tears it up as a Doc Brown type with a wicked smile, a steampunk vibe, and a Faraday cage, swinging into a Glinda the Good Witch song and handing out weapons from a motion-activated proton glove to a Swiss army knife. “She’s doing a marvelous impression of a deflating balloon,” she says as one of her colleagues is being shot through the air. Jones, also in her first feature film lead role, is outstanding as Patty, who knows who she is and what she wants. McCarthy is adorable as always and has a lot of fun with a particular demon. And Hemsworth is flat-out hilarious as the incompetent Kevin. It’s funny, smart, and sweet and in every way as good or better than the original. Fanboys, have at it.

NOTE: Stay through the credits for glimpses of the excised dance scene and some other treats, and following the credits, a brief extra scene with some important information.

Parents should know that this film includes extended fantasy/horror peril and violence. Characters are killed (one off-screen, one suicide by electrocution), and there are some gruesome images and mild crude humor.

Family discussion: What’s your favorite ghost story? Which was the scariest ghost in the movie?

If you like this, try: the original “Ghostbusters,” “Monster House,” and “ParaNorman”