Movie Reviews: The Legend of Tarzan (2016) and The BFG (2016)

by Tony Dayoub

Recent events in the (not so) United Kingdom have altered my perception of a couple of movies in which Britain serves as a faint backdrop. Each misses the mark in some surprising ways. Certainly, the American take on a fantasy England and its genial queen found in Steven Spielberg's The BFG makes the most obvious missteps. But The Legend of Tarzan, directed by the very British David Yates (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows) isn't too far behind despite, save for its start and conclusion, largely avoiding Great Britain.

Movie Review: Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

by Tony Dayoub

Deep into Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Steve Rogers, aka Cap (Chris Evans), and Natasha Romanoff, codename: Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), end up in Camp Lehigh, the now abandoned army base where Rogers completed basic training before the Super-Soldier serum transformed him into the Sentinel of Liberty. As they try to figure out why they've been lured there, Rogers has a vivid flashback where he sees himself as the 90-lb weakling he used to be. The two SHIELD agents then locate an underground bunker replete with clues as to why the intelligence organization they've served so honorably has now turned against them. The most shocking surprise isn't the fact that SHIELD has been infiltrated by an enemy long thought disbanded or, for all intents and purposes, dead. It's that the bunker's outdated computer has gained a kind of artificial intelligence allowing it to forecast the plans of billions of the world's inhabitants with stunning accuracy. And it's harnessing that kind of power to take over not just SHIELD but the world with total acquiescence from the general public.

The Shackling of Django Unchained (2012)

by Tony Dayoub

The last time I discussed Quentin Tarantino's films at length here was a little over 3 years ago when I got into it with critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, defending Inglourious Basterds (20009) as more than just a "film that seems morally akin to Holocaust denial." Frankly, I didn't find the revisionism in Basterds—particularly the blatant recasting of Hitler's death as part of a gory massacre in a locked theater auditorium—to be offensive or even problematic. Basterds' climax was characteristic of the propaganda-like take on the American war films of the 40s that Tarantino was riffing on, movies in which Americans were clearly the "white hats" and the Axis were not only their opposite number; they were racially stereotypical, incompetent goons. Besides which, the violent death of Hitler, and not by his own hand, seemed like the kind of wish-fulfillment narrative few would admit finding unsatisfying on at least a primal level. Django Unchained is more of a mixed bag, another revisionist take on history by Tarantino, one that finds the director losing the thread of the conversation he himself instigates. And in this case, it's difficult to ignore his inclination to overindulge.

Movie Review: The Avengers (2012)

by Tony Dayoub

Captain America. The Incredible Hulk. The Invincible Iron Man. The Mighty Thor. As a kid, I remember watching Jack Kirby and Stan Lee's angst-ridden superheroes, then not much more than a dozen years old, on an umbrella cartoon (because of its limited motion, you couldn't really call it animated) series called The Marvel Super Heroes. Though it was rewarding enough to watch these heroes' early stories play out onscreen, for most viewers, one of the coolest parts of the show was when some other super character would pop in to the storyline unexpectedly, a crossover. Hawkeye, Black Widow, Quicksilver, the Scarlet Witch and many others would rear their head, and one imagined that the Marvel Universe was an expansive setting in which anyone could be the recipient of a metahuman power infusion.

What works on the comic page, or on children's cartoons, doesn't always work on the big screen, however. Marvel has spent a lot of creative and monetary capital on establishing their individual superhero stars as the most special and most powerful characters in their respective franchises. Iron Man 2, the weakest link of the interlocking series of films that preceded Marvel's newest release, fails mostly because its star is eclipsed by what feels like an interminable succession of characters with powers as unique as his (or in the case of War Machine, nearly exactly the same as his). In a world with gadget-laden assassin Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), the electric-tentacled Whiplash or even the crafty superspy Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), what makes Tony Stark's Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.) so special? As anticipation built for The Avengers, a culmination of Marvel's dream to unite its most recent moneymaking franchises, the film critic in me was going in with a skeptical eye.

Cap and his Howling Commandos

Ensemble support in Captain America: The First Avenger

by Tony Dayoub

One of the most unexpected pleasures of some of the recent crop of superhero blockbusters is how adjustments to period and setting have freshened up what was fast becoming a moribund subgenre. Nearly half of Thor takes place in the mythological Norse realm of Asgard. X-Men: First Class isn’t just set in the 1960s; it takes place in a jet-set imaginary ’60s right out of the 007 films. The backdrop for Joe Johnston’s Captain America: The First Avenger, the most recent of these films to come out on Blu-ray and DVD, is an art-deco-by-way-of-steampunk version of the ’40s not seen onscreen since Johnston’s last superhero film, The Rocketeer (1991). Such application of period and locale legitimizes what for many is an inherently childish class of film. (Personally, I prefer to think of superhero films as escapist but, nonetheless, my kneejerk stance when discussing one is to come out of the gate defending it.) This affords the filmmakers the ability to attract a higher caliber of actors or technicians while generally making it a tougher sell to general audiences. (2005’s noir-ish Sin City, based on a graphic novel series, comes to mind.) What it also does, though, is allow the knowledgeable helmer (such as journeyman Johnston) to have some fun with cinematic conventions, and not just the comic book in-jokes that have become de rigueur in these films.

Movie Review: Mother and Child

by Tony Dayoub

In contemporary cinema, Alejandro González Iñárritu (Babel) has created a whole cottage industry around melodramas starring ensemble casts in which seemingly disconnected plotlines ultimately converge to impart some moral lesson. So it is no surprise to see his name attached (as executive producer) to Mother and Child, a drama about motherhood, child abandonment, and adoption written and directed by Rodrigo García. While I'm no fan of Iñárritu's heavyhanded approach to what is already supposed to be a rather high-strung genre, what attracted me to see this film is director García, who I discovered for his sensitive attention to actors when he was writing, directing, and showrunning HBO's wonderful psychodrama In Treatment, a show so unlike any other, I once listed its serialized first season as one of the best films of 2008. Just as in that series, Mother and Child's strongest component is the acting by its uniformly spectacular cast.

Movie Review: Iron Man 2

by Tony Dayoub

Fulfilling the commercial objectives set by its preceding film, Iron Man 2 makes good on its aim to spearhead an entire Marvel Universe of film franchises. But at what cost? All of the goodwill engendered by its endearingly brash predecessor completely evaporates before this film reaches its denouement. Iron Man 2 doesn't play within any established dramatic constructs in existence. And it betrays the fine character work of its cast by limiting their appearances in order to tease fanboys with the promise of future entries in the tapestry it is intent on weaving.

The Year 2000: Counting Down The Zeroes - Unbreakable (M. Night Shyamalan)

The passage of time can destroy or crystallize your opinion of just about anything. In the world of cinema, films can become dated or with hindsight, look quite prescient. M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable falls into the category of the latter. The visually arresting movie is the earliest example of American cinema examining the mythos of comic book superheroes with reverence. Misunderstood at the time of its release because of an ill-conceived marketing campaign designed to sell it as another Sixth Sense, it calls for a reexamination in light of last year's release of The Dark Knight. Like that film, this one takes the mythology of superhero graphic novels quite seriously, grounding the players in a real world, and burdening them with the same kinds of problems people deal with on a daily basis. Unbreakable is about two men who seem to be mirror images of each other-reflections and refractions will be a running motif. David Dunn (Bruce Willis) is a melancholy security guard who is in the early stages of separating from his wife, Audrey (Robin Wright Penn), and keeps his son, Joseph (Spencer Treat Clark), at a distance. Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson) is a wealthy dealer in comic book art who has insulated himself from the rest of the world because of a condition that causes his bones to break at the slightest impact. David is the sole survivor of a train wreck which brings him to the attention of Elijah. Elijah believes that if he is a man on one side of the spectrum of fragility, his opposite number, a man of superhuman strength, must reside at the other side of the spectrum. It all makes sense to David's son Joseph, a comic book fan who is looking for anything special to elevate his rather ordinary, estranged father. Elijah's relentless harassment of David and his family concerns him. David only sees an overgrown, bitter, isolated individual who has started believing in the comforting graphic novels he grew up with while real relationships eluded him. But Elijah is correct in asking David if he's ever been sick. He hasn't. And Elijah astutely suggests that the car accident that once sidelined David's promising football career may have simply been an opportunity for him to leave a sport which his then-girlfriend Audrey found repulsively violent. Shyamalan takes some of the conventions of superhero mythology and builds his own iconography around it. David's alliterative first and last name, for example, is common to superhero's secret identities, i.e. Peter Parker/Spider-Man or Bruce Banner/Hulk. Yet his depiction of David's environment in drab and industrial green tones is a cinematic expression. In the picture above, one can see how Shyamalan subtly frames the film's subjects frequently using columns, windows and the like as a subconscious reminder of the comic book panel, as first discussed by Jim Emerson at his movie blog, Scanners. That screen capture also implies the reflection motif discussed earlier with its inclusion of the chandelier in the frame. One man, unbreakable in body; the other, unbreakable in spirit, doggedly hoping to measure his own importance by confronting his opposite doppelganger; both are framed in the scene above. Here is an explicit framing of the two diametrically opposed men by the stadium bleachers, with David's past playing out behind them in the form of a football game at the stadium he guards. Once an active participant in the game, he is now an outsider relegated to overseeing its fans on the fringes. More of Shyamalan's use of color coding can be found in the cool blues and purples that dominate the screen whenever the crippled Elijah is onscreen. And his name is an evocation of prophecy, destiny, indiscriminate fate. Here, David is framed in the candy-colored hues of Joseph's world, a world of unfulfilled dreams and limitless potential sprung to life from Joseph's comic book sensibilities. Audrey and David on a first date since becoming estranged. With each experiencing a new lease on life since David's miraculous survival, their dreams become a possibility once more. The interior of the bar is lit like an exterior - lush, green, and with a hint of sunlight lining each silhouette. They are still in shadow, still haven't let go of the resentments; his over sacrificing his destiny for her, and hers over the wall he's built around himself. Here David is framed by the doorway in the dark, the long night of his rite of passage beginning with Elijah's message on the answering machine in the foreground. Framed again, this time by the train wreckage he survived, David wears his security uniform rain poncho as he remembers another wreck he lived through. The poncho evokes the capes so often found in superhero mythology. The weight of the past on his ultimate destiny, the superhero origin told in flashback is a comic book convention. In my mind (and perhaps only in my mind), this one recalls the staging of the origin on TV's Incredible Hulk (Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno), a TV show that was the first to show the same level of reverence towards a comic-book superhero. The train station sequence fuses all of the errant elements together, as David's destiny becomes clear to him. He has returned full circle to a train station, home to the same mode of transport that forced him to reexamine his life. James Newton Howard's score reaches an ominous crescendo during his sequence. Eduardo Serra's cinematography highlights evildoers - like the woman in the red jacket - with splashes of color whenever they brush up against David, as he instinctively reads their particular crimes committed. David, seen from behind with his palms pointing out, recalling similarly staged depictions of Jesus in biblical epics of the fifties like Quo Vadis (1951) and Ben-Hur (1959), where Jesus' face is given power by its absence from the frame. The crane shot depicts the emergence of the Messianically-lit David from the crowd of travellers, an abrupt shift in point-of-view reserved throughout the film for moments in which David's destiny comes to the fore. From the depths of hell - or at least the street below - a harbinger of evil rises toward the light: the evildoer that will prove to be David's first challenge. Out of the darkness and rain emerges the hero. The God's-eye point-of-view again, as the camera surveys the completion of David's journey - and its casualties - from above. Now a little more brightly lit, as David achieved a form of self-actualization last night. The dawn is taking hold for David and Audrey as their resentments recede with the shadows. David's gift to his son, a newspaper drawing of himself as a superhero. The family unit in the heart of the home - the kitchen - together at last. The once gloomy household now lit like an exterior also. The brightness of a new day for Audrey and David, and Joseph - now closer to his dad than ever - sharing his secret identity. The revelation that Elijah caused the train accident that set David on his path comes to him when he shakes Elijah's hand. A gloved hand, from the bitter man incapable of joining society, meets an outstretched hand, from a man who now knows who he is. David and Elijah are surrounded by the comic books that have, in their own unique way, defined who each is. David's joy is drained by Elijah's reveal, and the frame is overwhelmed by Elijah's cool-colored blues and purples. Elijah, eccentrically dressed as a criminal mastermind, realizes his own destiny as the villainous "Mr. Glass," or so he thinks. A virtual cipher all of his life, he still can't define himself without doing it through others: the teasing kids who invented the nickname, and David his superheroic opposite. This post was first published at Film for the Soul for its continuing series on the best movies of the 2000s, Counting Down the Zeroes, on 4/20/09.

Movie Review: The Spirit - Campy Comic Book Film a Misfire Post-Dark Knight

I was kind of tickled by Frank Miller's The Spirit. Not the instant classic that I've deemed the 2-dimensional Sin City (2005) to be, what could have been a fun campy tribute to the pulpy comics of yore ala Beatty's Dick Tracy (1990), Losey's Modesty Blaise (1966), or Vadim's Barbarella (1968), turns out to be a colossal misfire of the first order in late 2008, post-Dark Knight. How dare this movie be produced after the comic book hero genre got serious? Of course, if you can manage to not be so fanboy about it, it's really a magnificent piece of eye candy. And Miller has fun expanding on the traditional comic book tropes of duality between hero and villain, identity, etc. The Spirit (Gabriel Macht) and the Octopus (Samuel Jackson) are both ciphers on the page, infused only by whatever personality the actors, their costumes and their surroundings bring to them. The Spirit is the remnant of deceased officer Denny Colt. His various girlfriends are all facets of an idealized woman, and depending on which one he's with, one wonders if Colt has allowed his heroic identity to take over to release him from any ties he once might have had to a fiance played by Sarah Paulson. In the original comic book, the Octopus was never seen outside of a gloved hand at the corner of a page frame. So imagine the fun for Jackson and Miller to craft the character by allowing him to dress in every outfit from Samurai to Nazi officer. But I can't help feeling uncomfortable at the Aryan-ness of the whole enterprise. In addition to the Octopus, every person of color is on the wrong side of the law, including Italian Louis Lombardi as the clones, Spanish Paz Vega as Plaster of Paris, and the Cuban-American Eva Mendes as Sand Saref. And the rest of the denizens of Central City are all lily-white. Even more discomfort do I later feel in light of this little tidbit I discovered.

DVD Review: Diva and The Red Violin - A Classic and a Cult Favorite are Rereleased for a New Audience

by Tony Dayoub



Lionsgate Films' new Meridian Collection debuted in May. It is intended to showcase foreign films in newly remastered editions with more extras than previously available on DVD. The first two films to launch the collection are the classic Diva (1981) and a cult favorite, The Red Violin (1998).


In Diva, Jules (Frédéric Andréi), a postal worker, secretly records a famous opera singer's performance. The tape is in high demand since the performer, Cynthia Hawkins (Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez) has stated she would never allow any recordings to be made of her voice. When the recording is switched with a tape exposing the leader of a prostitution ring, a chase involving the police and the underworld ensues, with the postal worker caught in the middle.

Directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix, this classic film was at the forefront of a movement of filmmakers, like Luc Besson (Nikita), and Leos Carax (Les Amants du Pont-Neuf), collectively known as the "Cinema du Look". Panned by critics upon release, the film was accused of being pleasing to the eye, but ultimately shallow. Americans were having similar reactions to Paul Schrader's American Gigolo (1980), and Michael Mann's Thief (1981). Taken all together, it may be true that these films would ultimately inspire the Michael Bays of the world to stimulate moviegoers visually with no regard for complexity in story. But Beineix, cinematographer Philippe Rousselot (who would go on to greater acclaim with some well-known films like Dangerous Liaisons), and production designer Hilton McConnico were essentially pioneering the a neo-noir. Visually expressionistic like its antecedents, the film now had the luxury of introducing color into film noir's palette. It still, however, limited the hues, focusing on the high contrast as the earlier noir films did, but in monochromatic blues and yellows instead of black and white. The neon sheen of this film and its American counterparts predates, and no doubt influenced, later fare such as Scarface (1983) and Miami Vice (1984).

The Red Violin is a triptych revolving around a violin that is being auctioned to high demand. After a prologue depicting the violin's "birth", a framing story follows an appraiser (Samuel L. Jackson), through the auction house's authentication process. The viewer is then treated to a "biography" of the musical instrument. Three stories, set in different countries and periods, give us a glimpse into the violin's "life", and its mystical ability to curse all who own it. The complex structure of the story centers around the dual mystery of whether this is the actual Red Violin everyone in the film has been pursuing, and why the legendary instrument is red.

This cult favorite has a wonderful Oscar-winning score by John Corigliano, and features passionate performances by Jason Flemyng, Don McKellar (who also cowrote the screenplay), and Greta Scacchi. While not a true classic on the level of Diva, The Red Violin has an aura of beauty and mystery that rewards both the new and repeat viewer.

These two films are definitely worth adding to your collection, and a step in the right direction for Lionsgate. I can't wait to see what the next films in their Meridian line will be.

Stills provided courtesy of Lionsgate Home Entertainment.

Movie Trailer: The Spirit

by Tony Dayoub


Click on the picture above for the trailer to the latest comics-to-film adaptation, this one based on Will Eisner's classic landmark hero, and directed by comics great Frank Miller (Sin City, 300).

It's so hot right now, the best I could do was link to this YouTube capture, but I'll update it when I can get a direct link to the official one.

Let me know what you think in the comments section.

UPDATED: The picture now links directly to the trailer on the official website. Enjoy.