"Edge of Tomorrow"

 3.5 / 5 

If rampaging, villainous aliens ever do come to Earth to take over and rule the planet, we will know what to do: Look for the mother ship/queen alien/hive brain/controlling entity and attack it first.  It will be there.  I am sure of it.

I know this because Edge of Tomorrow, like countless films before it, promises that this is the way alien minds work.  Yes, they seem terrifying and insurmountable, but in fact they are easily and quickly destroyed with one or two grenades thrown into the mouth/lair/hive/control room of that single massive creature.

Hey, wait!  Isn't that a spoiler?  Only if you've never, ever seen a science-fiction film before.  Assuming you have, not to worry: The good news is that for the majority of its running time, Edge of Tomorrow is wonderfully fresh and intriguing, despite a "high concept" storyline that can best be described (in the way Hollywood prefers) with one line that recalls other successful movies:

Edge of Tomorrow is Saving Private Ryan meets Groundhog Day with some Starship Troopers and Alien thrown in for good measure.

There's a rather heavy sense of dèjá vu to the film that makes it all feel old yet remarkably new, like the biggest, best 1980s star-powered action movie that never got made.

It could be Arnold or Sly or Harrison Ford in the lead, but rather it's Tom Cruise, who would have been too young to play the role thirty years ago and now seems just ever so slightly too old.  The script dances around this nicely, because the story requires Cruise's character, William Cage, to be a private in the armed forces, and even if the military reinstated the draft there probably wouldn't be many 50-something privates.  So, the movie smartly imagines Cruise as a senior PR type who is camera ready but can't imagine the idea of combat.

Nonethless, he's thrust into the middle of a war between Earthlings and a vicious, nasty set of aliens called (for no apparent reason) Mimics.  Cowardly, panicky and utterly unprepared for war, Cruise finds himself on a sortie that will end in calamitous defeat.  It's the sci-fi version of Saving Private Ryan's beach battle, a futuristic D-Day in which Cruise is killed almost immediately.

Except that something happens -- something that will, rest assured, be explained, and that sets Cruise's character on a path that's not at all dissimilar to Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, but with many more explosions and a substantially increased body count.  As he relives the day over and over and over, Cruise gains expertise; the way he racks up experience points makes Edge of Tomorrow feel much like a big-screen, non-interactive video game in which the hero can't be killed, he can only pick up right where he started and move on, putting to use everything he has learned.

Along the way, he meets a female soldier (Emily Blunt) who is best known as "The Angel of Verdun" -- she's the reason humans were able to score a rare victory against the Mimics in the French town.  She also holds a secret, a surprising one, and one it would be entirely unfair to reveal; her revelation, and Blunt's no-nonsense performance, lift the Edge of Tomorrow even higher above expectations.

Then, just as the film really gets cranking, everything leads up to a dark, confusing, muddled mess of a final battle that brings it all crashing down.  The final third of Edge of Tomorrow is exactly the movie that the first two-thirds tried so hard not to be.  It's particularly disappointing, and amusing, to find out where the aliens hide their big, giant group brain -- it's a location that's been used before in a story that also traded originality and intelligence for a big, bombastic, utterly pedestrian ending.

Still, there is a lot worth admiring here, especially the two central performances by Cruise and Blunt (who, of course, manage to find time for an eye-rolling kiss).  Cruise has always been an intelligent, interesting actor, and even though the movie shies away from some of the more intriguing complexities of his character's inner path toward heroism, it's a brave choice to begin the film with Cruise as a sniveling, spineless coward.

Blunt, too, is a surprise.  She's an actress best known for supporting character roles, and she finds an interesting, slightly off-balance character here.

The breakneck editing and whiplash camera moves likely will be more confusing and distracting than immersive in IMAX and 3-D -- Edge of Tomorrow is a movie best viewed in traditional ways, and even in good old 2-D I found myself squinting and rubbing my eyes in the last murky 20 minutes.

But I also found myself, up to that point, unexpectedly entertained.  Everything about Edge of Tomorrow feels pleasingly familiar and also surprisingly new.  Halfway through, I wasn't sure where it was all headed, though I was confident its filmmakers did.  I gave my trust to them and enjoyed ride, even if the destination was exactly where I expected it to be.

Viewed June 8, 2014 -- ArcLight Cinerama Dome

1445

"The Fault in Our Stars"

 4 / 5 

The Fault in Our Stars is the kind of movie John Hughes might have made if he had been put in charge of Terms of Endearment or Love Story, a movie about beautiful people dying beautifully with a healthy chunk of teen-aged angst thrown in for good measure.

It opens with a line of narration not found in the best-selling novel, as 16-year-old Hazel Grace Lancaster (Shailene Woodley) explains that life isn't like the movies, where nothing is ever so bad that apology and a Peter Gabriel song won't fix it.  Then, for the next two hours, the movie is filled with apologies and songs that aren't by Peter Gabriel but could very well be.

If the movie is aware of this enormous irony, it makes no acknowledgment of that, and this must be said: Movies that lead to tearful apologies backed by Peter Gabriel songs are actually pretty effective.  The Fault in Our Stars is no exception.

Apart from that line, this is less an adaptation of John Green's phenomenally successful novel than it is a filmization of that book, and although I came through the novel with dry eyes, I admit the same can't be said for the movie, and it's either a credit to the author or the filmmakers, or both, that the movie mostly reflected exactly what I envisioned in my head while reading the source material.

Somehow, though, the movie rises above the novel, which seemed to me to be trying too hard to wring tears out of the reader.  The movie is more effortless, thanks primarily to the terrific central performances by Woodley and by Ansel Elgort as Augustus Waters.  If you don't know Augustus's fate, I won't reveal it here, but let's just say one of these two kids isn't going to make it to the final reel.

Both of them are dying of cancer, though the movie's version of cancer is a sweet and lovely one, in which the primary side effects are having to wear a sleek prosthetic device or a discreet cannula hooked to a wonderfully portable oxygen tank.  Neither Hazel Grace nor Augustus looks at all sick, and I suppose that if either one of them had, the movie would have lost more in physical appeal than it gained in realism.

Augustus is the impossibly beautiful boy who falls in love with a relatively plain-looking girl after they meet during a support group for teen-aged cancer patients.  When I say he is impossibly beautiful, I mean it: At a Saturday matinee screening, the audience comprised almost exclusively of teenaged girls swooned and screamed when he appeared on screen, and much later collectively hyperventilated during a scene in which he removes his shirt.  It makes sense that Woodley, though a capable actress and ostensibly the main character, is comparatively plain because she is the kind of girl the primary audience for The Fault in Our Stars can imagine being.

The movie makes being terminally ill look attractive, no doubt, and if it seems like I'm opposed to the way The Fault in Our Stars tells its story, I'm actually not.  The movie is made first and foremost for people who have never once seen Love Story or Terms of Endearment or Beaches or Brian's Song, to whom real death is something they are not accustomed to seeing on screen.

Given that, The Fault in Our Stars tells its story with admirable straightforwardness and restraint.  The plot leads Augustus and Hazel Grace to Amsterdam, and there's a scene in a restaurant that's more romantic and filled with more dignity and respect for its two main characters than anything else I've seen on screen this year.  The Fault in Our Stars might not be the most original movie ever made, but it is certainly one of the most sincere.  Later, Augustus and Hazel Grace visit the Anne Frank House, and the effective use of the famous diarist's own words draws tears honestly and appropriately.

As it was in the book, a long digression into a subplot involving Hazel Grace and Augustus meeting their favorite author and discovering that he is an embittered old sham (in other words, a grown-up) is less effective and doesn't seem completely thought through.  It connects to the plot, but only in a circuitous way that probably could have been handled differently.  But as with most filmizations of best-sellers these days, the filmmakers weren't about to make a substantial change, and it does allow the movie the luxury of some beautiful moments in a beautiful European city with beautiful doomed lovers.

Even in those Amsterdam scenes, The Fault in Our Stars is a movie with little visual flair, that takes no chances by diverging from its source material. In ways similar to the teen movies of the 1980s, it also doesn't quite know what to do with its adult characters -- though there is a fine, emotionally raw scene between Woodley and Laura Dern, who plays her mother and finally, for those few important moments, drops the faux happiness that worked so well in the TV series Enlightened but otherwise feels forced and uncomfortable here.

The movie isn't about the adults -- it's about the kids, who are learning some lessons that are all too rarely seen on film these days, lessons about integrity, dedication, relationships and the harsh realities of life.  In that regard, it's an almost shockingly old-fashioned view of the world by today's standards, but one whose very squareness makes it feel new and fresh.

The movie ends exactly the way its opening scene implies it won't: With a smile and a swelling pop song on the soundtrack.  But you know what?  Who cares?  There's a promise implicit in that movie convention -- life will get messy and unhappy and difficult, but ultimately there will always be something to smile about.  The Fault in Our Stars is sometimes messy, unhappy and difficult, but in the end, it is a movie very much worth smiling about.

Viewed June 7, 2014 -- Pacific Theaters Glendale 18

1605

"Maleficent"

 2.5 / 5 

Like the house built on sand, Maleficent can't stand up to its haphazard construction.  It's always reflecting, but never quite meshing, the random shards of Disney, cinematic and fairy-tale references from which it's made.

There are moments, long moments, when it comes agonizingly close, and every single one of those moments is anchored by the fully committed and sometimes stunning performance of Angelina Jolie as the title character.  This is one of the rare times when the "is" between the star's name and the title is justified: she becomes Maleficent.

Alas, the film itself can't live up to her centerpiece performance.  Jolie's towering efforts deserved a better, more thoughtful, more cohesive movie.

Throughout its relatively brief 97-minute running time, Maleficent is saddled by incessant, plodding narration.  The movie literally tells its story -- for the first 40 minutes or so, there is no character development, just one brief shot after another stitched together with the bland narration that propels the movie forward through sheer force of will.  The first half of the movie feels like a very long prologue.

Even Walt Disney was challenged to create an engrossing momentum for his 1959 animated version of Sleeping Beauty, which for all its exquisite, undeniable splendor lacked a beating heart at its center.  That movie is a visual feast whose 75-minute length feels padded.  And that's telling the story the "proper" way.

Maleficent wants to approach things differently, in a tone that feels more politically correct than revisionist.  It's a movie entirely fitting with the societal concept that bullying is an awful thing, that everyone deserves respect.  That's not a sentiment I necessarily disagree with -- unless the person being bullied is a mean, terrible, evil person, and let's face it, Maleficent is no sweetheart.  She places a curse on a little baby because she's vain, jealous and bitter.  Why?  I dunno.  She just is.

At least, that's the way I've always heard it.  Maleficent is the bad guy.  Simple as that.  Except nothing is so simple anymore, and screenwriter Linda Woolverton, who created two terrific villains herself (Gaston from Beauty and the Beast and Scar from The Lion King) wants to explain it all away, to show that Maleficent really is just misunderstood.  This is supposed to result in some type of empowerment, though I'm not sure how.

Take this kind of thinking to its logical end and some pretty awful revisionist history is justified; think of some of the most hateful, evil people who really existed, aren't just fairy-tale villains, and consider that if Maleficent can be seen as having good intentions, they should be due the same courtesy.  That doesn't lead to a pretty place.

So, Maleficent shows us that, despite her dark name (Magnificent + Malevolent = guess what?), Maleficent was just a good little girl living in a wondrous land made up of ideas thrown away during development of Avatar.  There she was, living her life, when she met a human boy, who grew up to be arrogant and greedy and wounded her both in body and soul.

Despite the enormous effort Maleficent makes to explain that wicked thoughts simply don't exist in her benign, fairy-encrusted world, Maleficent moves from being fair of heart to foul in the blink of an eye.

It's one of the more problematic moments in a problematic film (along with a ludicrously conceived climax that has Maleficent quite literally tiptoeing right into a heavily fortified castle).  Although Maleficent claims it will show us what made this good creature turn evil, it never does.  She just goes bad in the blink of an eye.  Though she's never before heard of revenge, it suddenly consumes her life.

The rest of the movie reverse-engineers its way, pretty clumsily, through the Disney version of the Perrault fairy tale.  It sidesteps (just like Maleficent does in that finale) the difficult stuff, like this question: Without spinning wheels how did the kingdom's veritable army of seamstresses make its clothes for 16 years?  And why is a spinning wheel conveniently sitting in the throne room during a royal ceremony?  Worse, it treats the historical "good guys" (the king, his subjects) like true nasties for the sole reason that if Maleficent is actually the heroine, then they must be the villains.  The film foregoes any nuance in favor of trite simplicity.  That may be fine for a kids' film, but isn't this supposed to be an examination of the source of evil?

There at the heart of all of that messiness is Angelina Jolie.

For a solid 20 minutes, despite the inanity around her, she grabs the movie, turns it upside down and shakes it until some genuinely good moments fall out.  She wants us to feel the complexity of this woman, who develops unexpected feelings.  Though I was momentarily confused about her rather convoluted motivations, Jolie does with her face, voice and body what the script can't do with its words: She makes them clear -- and brings authentic, genuine emotion to the role.  She almost had me.

And then comes the thudding CG-infused climax.  In many ways, this isn't a live-action remake of an animated film, it's modern computer animation with a few live-action elements.  It has roaring CG waterfalls, wispy CG flying creatures, towering CG mountains, freakishly unnatural CG fairies, marauding CG armies, impossible CG camera moves, and its soul feels, in the end, equally computer-generated.

But there are those few splendid, quiet, non-CG-enhanced moments when Maleficent gets to know Princess Aurora (Elle Fanning), and everything quiets down and really, truly works.  For those moments, Maleficent is almost worth seeing.  Almost.

Viewed May 29, 2014 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks

1905

"Godzilla"

 2.5 / 5 

The poster for Godzilla features the namesake monster rising a thousand feet above the skyline of San Francisco, which for the umpteenth time in the movies is being destroyed, rather spectacularly.  The poster is missing something, though.  If it really wanted to accurately depict the movie, it would have featured those little boxes from disaster movie posters.

You know the boxes.  Roger Ebert described them perfectly in his famous glossary of movie terms. "Useful rule-of-thumb about movie advertisements that have a row of little boxes across the bottom … Automatically avoid such films."

I don't think you should automatically avoid Godzilla, though I'm not so sure the friends I went with would agree with me.  Godzilla stars Bryan Cranston as The Nuclear Scientist, Aaron Taylor-Johnson as The Soldier, Ken Watanabe as The Monster Scientist, Sally Hemmings as The Other Monster Scientist and so forth.  Now, as you can see, these character descriptions aren't nearly as compelling as, for instance, "Paul Newman as The Architect," "Stella Stevens as The Hooker," "Dean Martin as The Pilot" or "Ava Gardner as The Spurned Wife Who Is Only Seven Years Younger Than Her Father."  But I suppose they'll do.

Godzilla follows much the same pattern as the great guilty-pleasure disaster movies of the 1970s.  We're introduced to a number of characters, including the one who knows what all the warning signs mean.  Of course, no one listens to him, and (spoiler alert) he's going to die before the end of the third reel just before the real action gets going.

Those warning signs, in the case of Godzilla, are some weird seismic activity and odd electro-magnetic pulses that lead to the destruction of a nuclear-power plant in Japan.  Fifteen years later … it's all happening again.  The Scientist is the father of The Soldier, and together they meet The Monster Scientist and The Other Monster Scientist just before the big revelation, which I hope you'll realize is not a Spoiler Alert since you are, after all, interested in seeing a movie called Godzilla.  Guess what?  Godzilla is about to make an appearance.

But it turns out that Godzilla is only one of three monsters in Godzilla, and before he shows up there are a couple of other creepy dragon-like creatures that start wreaking havoc across the globe.  Well, at least the United States.  Godzilla is really focused on the United States, even though there are, numerically speaking, more opportunities for these radiation-munching beasties to get their nuclear fixes in Japan, South Korea, China and Russia.  Aw, who cares about such things?  Those countries don't have San Francisco and Las Vegas to tear apart.

For about an hour, or half of its running time, Godzilla explains how and why these monsters came to be, even providing a questionable backstory that gives an alternate version of why so many nuclear "tests" were conducted in the South Pacific.

There are lots of scenes of male characters doing macho things and female characters looking alarmed.  The dialogue tends to lean toward lines like, "Current projections indicate they're heading toward the West Coast of the United States," while helpful on-screen graphics show the West Coast of the United States.

For reasons that are rather too complex to explain, one monster gets to tear the Vegas Strip to shreds, while the three of them converge on San Francisco.  I'd like to go on record here and now as asking filmmakers to stop destroying the Golden Gate Bridge.  It's not interesting anymore.

The visual effects in Godzilla are pretty good, especially when the monsters start stomping all over the place.  Sometimes, they seem intentionally cheesy, like they're recalling hand-drawn matte paintings and are daring us to think they look a little silly.  That's OK.

What's less OK is how many shots of the wreckage and destruction are deeply, directly informed by footage of the Sept. 11 attacks.  Prior to Sept. 11, 2001, when cities got destroyed on screen, we saw lots of buildings fall over or crumble, and they all seemed a little fake, which was good.  Since then, visual-effects artists show billowing plumes of cement dust heading straight for the crowds who are running toward the camera.  The effect, to me at least, is a constant reminder of the very real pain and terror we experienced on that day.

I think the way Godzilla levels San Francisco bothered me a little less than, say, Star Trek plowing enormous spaceships into the City By the Bay, or The Avengers bringing down skyscrapers in Manhattan primarily because Godzilla is recalling the movies that inspired it.  Back then, of course, a man in a monster suit stepped on balsa-wood buildings and held toy trains in his hand, and nothing about it seemed real, though it was spectacular in its way.

Godzilla, for all of its verisimilitude, is not quite as spectacular.  It's so over-the-top and relentless in a three-way monster battle that seems to take forever that it becomes a little boring after a while.

Back in the 1950s, the first Godzilla movies were showing audiences things they had never seen.  It was the same with the capsizing boat, the bombed airliner, the massive earthquake and the burning building in the 1970s.  The makers of those films seemed like giddy kids experimenting with things no one had ever done.

Godzilla is showing us more of the same.  If it feels like we've seen this a hundred times before, it's because we have.  The CGI becomes a little ho-hum, despite its massive scale, especially since the human characters (such as they are) become relegated quite literally to the background.  In its final 30 minutes, Godzilla barely remembers to show us the wide-mouthed reactions on their faces.  It's all about monster-versus-monster.

All in all, Godzilla delivers exactly what it promises, no more and no less. Despite the ultra-serious, reverential tone it takes to its source material, Godzilla is mostly enjoyable as trashy camp.  It's an entirely stupid movie, rendered with great love and care.  That old master of disaster himself, Irwin Allen, would probably have been proud.  And he would have found a way to slip in a side story about a hooker, a crooked cop and a guy who just lost his job.  Something like that could, I think, have made Godzilla even better.  I would have had someone to root for other than the big monster, who (Not Actually a Spoiler Alert) wins in the end.  He had to.  There's got to be a sequel.

I can see the poster now: God2illa.  I hope they remember to include the little boxes.

Viewed May 18, 2014 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks

1715

"Neighbors"

 2 / 5 

It's entirely appropriate that so much of Neighbors involves marijuana. Most of the movie feels like hanging out with a friend who's high. It's not nearly as funny as it thinks it is, it's way too loud, but it's harmless and occasionally makes you laugh along.

Depending on your point of view, the poster either promises or threatens that Neighbors is "from the guys who brought you This Is the End," which was a movie that mostly befuddled me.  These people obviously have a great time making their movies, and they've become a stoner version of Orson Welles' Mercury Theater, pulling together roughly the same group of friends for a cinematic venture, though in this case "cinematic" might be stretching it a bit.

But Neighbors mostly made me wonder what it could have been if the creators had laid off the bud and spent their time studying a few classic comedies instead.  They've got the ideas, they've got the ability to write good jokes, but their timing is all off and the movie moves in fits and starts, sometimes genuinely funny, other times moderately amusing, but a lot of the time completely confused by its own characters and situations.

There really aren't any characters here, just some basic outlines -- Mac and his wife (Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne) live on a quiet street lined with houses decorated by Pottery Barn, and when a moving van shows up next door the occupants aren't the gay couple they hoped but a raucous, noisy fraternity.  The fraternity has loud, pot-filled parties, and for a while it seems they all might find a way to get along, since Mac and his wife are sort of stunted adolescents, anyway, despite having just had a baby.  They smoke pot, too, and they can party right along with the frat boys.

But when Mac calls the police, frat president Teddy (Zac Efron) decides to seek revenge.  Some of the things he and his frat brothers do is funny, but mostly it's scattershot -- and not in the manner of, say, Mel Brooks or the ZAZ brothers and theis exquisitely timed, gag-filled frolics, but in the way of a stoned college kid who hasn't really thought things out.

A lot of Neighbors seems like it might have been improvised, like the script was really more of an outline than a tightly constructed bit of comedy.

Making people laugh isn't easy.  It requires more than sitting around and talking about penises, booze, vomiting and pot.  Talk about those things enough and you're going to elicit a giggle, it's inevitable.  It's also the lazy way out, and Neighbors is mostly lazy.  This is a "culture war" movie, in which the two sides shouldn't understand anything about each other, but Mac and his wife aren't strait-laced enough to sell that concept, and frat president Teddy's need for revenge doesn't feel grounded.  To be really great, comedy requires that kind of rooting in reality, and Neighbors just doesn't have it.  (An example: One whole scene is devoted to the couple learning they could never sell the house, and the screenwriters have thought through the dilemma enough to bring the real-estate agent into the picture -- but they never address the point of how a frat house could have been been sprung on residents in the first place.)

Neighbors is friendly and good-natured, offering more than few chuckles.  It's what passes for comedy to most of today's audiences, and delivers most of what it promises; it's just too bad its comedic aspirations weren't, ahem, higher.

Viewed May 10, 2014 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks

1730

"Locke"

 4 / 5 

Solo performances are nothing new on stage, but when movies try them they often seem like gimmicks.  

Steven Knight's Locke isn't a gimmick, and it never feels contrived, thanks to a remarkably calm and captivating performance by Tom Hardy, along with impeccable help from a handful of actors whose faces are never seen but who nonetheless manage to create sharply defined characters.

Hardy plays Ivan Locke, a construction supervisor who is getting ready for an enormous -- and enormously important -- project.  But as Locke begins, he leaves the construction site in Birmingham, England, and gets in his car with a lot on his mind.  Where he's going and why become clear quickly, along with the implications: By doing what he's doing, Ivan Locke is changing his life.

It wouldn't be fair to reveal the circumstances, but Locke is trying to rectify what he believes is a mistake.  For 90 minutes, he drives the M6 highway, juggling phone calls and working out his problem, both on the phone and in his own head.

Hardy is the only on-screen actor in Locke, and the only set is the inside of his BMW.  The car's high-tech dashboard helps tell the story, as the name of the caller appears on screen, though the script is so sharply drawn that after a while that assistance isn't needed.  There's his wife, Katrina, and his sons Sean and Eddie; there's his boss, Gareth, who is nicknamed "Bastard" in Locke's contact list; there's Locke's colleague Donal; and there's Bethan, a woman in London who Locke is driving to see.  Locke's father is along for the drive, too, though he is long-dead and exists only in Locke's mind, but they have a score to settle -- which is just one of many issues Locke has to resolve as he heads down the dark and lonely road.

Locke is a meticulous man, but his carefully, calmly managed life is coming undone.  He believes he can control the outcome, but the variables don't want to cooperate.  Locke cannot convince everyone else to see the situations as rationally, as thoughtfully as he does.

In his cool, controlled cadence (Hardy has a remarkable voice, and he uses it to full effect in Locke), he tries to explain to one of the callers that the mistake he made only happened once, and that its consequences can therefore be managed. Not so, comes the response. "The difference between never and once is the difference between good and bad."

Over and over, Locke insists that what he's doing -- abandoning the project, driving away from his family -- is not at all like him.  He becomes so vocal about this that even he has to start to wonder if the Ivan Locke he thought he was is not actually who he really is.

Locke is a small, tight movie that never feels cramped or confined.  Hardy's fixed, cold gaze keeps us riveted for the film's brief 90-minute running time, and his predicaments -- which pile up and up and up -- become fascinating.  As the film starts, it's hard to know exactly what Locke does for a living; by the time it ends, viewers have become marginal experts on C6 concrete and the way 216 trucks have to line up to pour it just right.  Hardy's description of what would happen if one minor element went wrong, the way the concrete would crack and the building would begin to buckle and eventually come crashing down, not only lets us know what's at stake -- but gets us into his world in ways most movies struggle to do.

Locke begins the film with a job, an important project, a wife, a family, and ends the film, just 90 minutes later, with every one of those in doubt.  Driven by Hardy's mesmerizing performance, haunting cinematography, and sharp editing (along with the supporting voice cast, as well as a fine score by Dickon Hinchliffe), Locke is the kind of cinematic ride that comes along only rarely.  We've certainly been taken on wild rides by movies, and we've been inside cars of every shape and size -- but they've never been combined like this.

Locke isn't melodrama -- never once does a gunshot go off on the other line, for instance -- but it is wholly engrossing nevertheless.  Hardy takes us as deep into the mind of his character as is likely to be possible in a film, and even though he reveals some pretty unpleasant things, Locke the character is always as fully in control as Hardy the actor.

Locke is a gripping, captivating movie, and to its enormous credit never feels like a simple visual experiment.  Though it ends a bit abruptly (I could have spent another solid 15 or 20 minutes hearing things pan out fully), Locke manages the exceedingly rare feat of taking us on a complete emotional journey even while the character never leaves our view.  Locke is top-notch filmmaking and allows Tom Hardy to prove that he's one of the most formidable, and compelling, screen actors working today.

Viewed May 3, 2014 -- Arclight Hollywood

1930

Catching Up: "How I Live Now"

 3 / 5 

Growing up in the 1980s, certain disaster seemed to loom.  We were taught how to duck under our school desks and brace our heads, were warned not to look at the light, and taught about the world-changing perils of nuclear fallout, which would lead to a "nuclear winter" that would render most of the earth uninhabitable for decades.  Grim movies like the disaster-movie-style The Day After and the melancholy, difficult Testament reminded us that the future was hardly guaranteed.

Today's young people have it so much easier.  They listen to their iPods, they fret about not having video games to play, and they have a future that is much more certain.  But that's not the way How I Live Now sees it.

It's a movie that uneasily grafts young-adult-novel angst and first-love jitters onto a story about a sudden nuclear attack, but in this movie the nuclear winter lasts as long as an afternoon, and there's only occasional mention of radioactive fallout.  More important to the film is whether an American girl named Daisy (Saorise Roanan) will be able to reunite with her dreamboat cousin Edmond (George MacKay), with whom she has found first love.  (The film doesn't go in much for the "Eww, they're cousins" bit.)

How I Live Now deposits us right into Daisy's world as she lands at Heathrow airport in some not-too-distant future where short-term parking costs £15.  (It's about £10 now, you do the calculations.)  But this isn't a normal day at London's busiest airport: the arrivals terminal is overrun by armed guards, and the drive to the British countryside is peppered with ominous signs of military helicopters and troop movements.  Something's going on.

Her absent father has sent her here, ostensibly to keep her safe while something even worse happens in New York City, and Daisy's not happy about it.  She keeps hearing voices in her head -- voices, we'll come to learn, that connote no mysticism or deeper story about mind control; she's just got the normal problems of a 15-year-old girl locked behind her glum face.  She acts out.  She tells the family they live like slobs -- which they do, since Mum is nowhere to be seen.  She is involved in some kind of governmental work.

That leaves the four kids (including Tom Holland from The Impossibles and Hayley Bird, who looks like she's come out of the tomboy role in a 1970s Disney movie.  On one beautiful summer day, they manage to persuade Daisy to join them for a swim in the local river.  It's a heavenly day, marred only by a distant detonation of a nuclear bomb.

The kids don't know what to do, and how could they?  Nothing has prepared them for this.  They make plans, they worry about the missing grown-up, and just as things look potentially dire, Daisy and Edmond have sex again -- How I Live Now uses sex much in the same way as teen slasher films did in the 1980s; as soon as the two lovebirds boff, something really bad is going to happen.

Military troops descend on the bucolic farmhouse and split up the children, separating the two young lovers from their destiny.  Daisy develops a plan to escape.  They have all promised to reunite at the farmhouse, and Daisy isn't going to let World War III get in the way of love.

The rest of the movie is an odd road-trip-by-foot as Daisy and Piper try to find the boys.  There are hints of the conflict at large, tantalizing glimpses of what might actually be happening.  But politics and war are not the subjects of How I Live Now, not when there's teen love to tackle.

How I Live Now suffers for its insistence on making these two kids into doomed lovers.  Daisy is a petulant, irritating brat, and Edmond takes his shirt off and speaks with a British accent, so of course he's spoonable.  Whether the kids actually learn about the greater conflict is never made clear, but it's obvious they have no interest in it.  Nor, apparently, does nuclear warfare result in much collateral damage in the movie.  The bombs that go off in London and Paris are just plot points.

One of the great attributes of the previously mentioned 1983 film Testament was the way it incorporated a teenage girl into its story.  In the days and weeks after the bomb, nothing much seemed different about life -- until people started dying, hair started falling out, food ran short, and life got remarkably tough.

There's little such difficulty on view in How I Live Now.  Flowers bloom, rivers flow, birds swoop and sing, and life is pretty easy -- except for the ways (never described) that Edmond has suffered through his own search.  Badly battered, unusually submissive, wounded in body and spirit by what he has done, he has a story to tell.  But How I Live Now doesn't have much interest in it.

It's more eager to find out how a spoiled, rich American brat could become a war-orphan, poor British brat still obsessed with finding someone to call a boyfriend.  That's the character arc for Daisy, and as such, her story isn't without interest.  I never once felt How I Live Now was boring or contrived.

But I did wonder about what was happening in the larger world, and how much that conflict would take its toll on the kids.  Watching kids try to cope with the horrifying aftermath of the equally petulant behavior of world governments could have been interesting.  But today's teens, not realizing or caring that the world is still quite often on the brink, want to know what it all means to them.  They may be a little relieved, then, that How I Live Now basically says, "Don't worry, you'll still get to be self-obsessed in a post-nuclear world."  But the opportunity here to remind young audiences that their world is not one they get to shape -- it is being shaped for them, by people they don't know -- was huge, and it's mostly missed.

The movie has a haunting, genuinely captivating first half, then becomes the kind of movie the Brat Packers might have made if World War III had started during a Saturday-morning detention in a Chicago high school.  How I Live Now could have been more daring, a teen version of Children of Men, perhaps.  But for those moments of genuine surprise and fear, and the way it makes kids grow up fast, it's worth seeing.  How I Live Now is entertaining, for sure; it's just not very enlightening.

Viewed April 27, 2014

VOD