Arrival - Movie Review

Starring Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker and Michael Stuhlbarg.
Written by Eric Heisserer.
Directed by Denis Villenueve.

★★★★

Denis Villenueve (Incendies, Prisoners, Enemy, Sicario) is quickly becoming one of my must-see directors. Actually, he's already there. I'm excited for where he could go.

This film is about an alien invasion of Earth, but it's really about Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams). In the beginning we watch her with her daughter. We watch her daughter grow to be a teenager and then die from disease. The next time we see Louise, we see the sadness in her eyes, and we see the semi-lonely existence she's carved out for herself as a college linguistics professor. But as she goes to teach, most of her class is gone. Why? There's been an invasion.

Due to previous work she'd done for the government, Louise is at the top of the list for the military to seek as a linguistic expert. The aliens are making sounds, and they want her to determine if Earthlings can somehow communicate with them.

The movie takes a slow, reverant approach to the reveal of the aliens. (I'm really glad the previews never spoiled what they fully look like.) Once she sees them, she goes through the process of trying to figure out how they communicate.

The movie is about the process, about finding common trends or signals in order to establish communication. There are 12 alien ships hovering over different parts of the globe. Each country that has one is trying to determine the best course of action. Should we preemptively strike in case their intentions are malevolent?

This movie is the antidote to Independence Day: Resurgence's summer stupidity. It's smart sci-fi that you hear about from time to time.

American Hustle - Movie Review

Starring Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, Amy Adams, Jennifer Lawrence, Jeremy Renner, Louis C.K., Jack Huston, Shea Whigham, Alessandro Nivola and Elisabeth Rohm.
Directed by David O. Russell.

★★★★

The true story would have been meaner and more black and white. I like that Russell took the basic elements and made it a lot more ambiguous and gray.

Russell's now directing three great films in a row - The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook, and now this. This might be his best yet.

It comes down to the actors, and under a director who clearly gives them a lot of freedom, they all step up. Bruce Wayne and Lois Lane make a great team. If Christian Bale didn't already have an Oscar, he might be getting front-runner chatter for his work here. And Amy Adams hasn't won one yet but I'll be rooting for her.

Bale plays Irving, a con man caught by the FBI, who then work a deal with him to use his con skills to help him catch some bigger frauds. It eventually leads to a web of corruption that may land some US congressmen.

The movie has those gloriously scuzzy details of the 1970's, and Bale's belly and combover are characters in themselves. Every scene crackles. It's lively and vibrant and a lot of fun.

Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters - Movie Review

Starring Jeremy Renner, Gemma Arterton, Famke Janssen, Peter Stormare and Thomas Mann.
Directed by Thomas Wirkola.

★★

Not sure what the thought process was behind this hybrid action-adventure-comedy-splatterfest.  Were they aiming for Van Helsing?  Was that the high-end bar they set for themselves?  Because it throws in elements of Your Highness, Red Riding Hood and Season of the Witch as well.  Yeah, all high-quality products, them.

Jeremy Renner, not a natural comedian, plays Hansel, and Gemma Arterton (Clash of the Titans) plays Gretel.  The two kids are grown up and thirst for hunting witches ever since one tried to eat them as children.  The witches, aside from the main villain Famke Janssen, might as well be orcs.  They are CG-creatures waiting to be mowed down.

If it had gone for more comedy, then maybe it could have worked.  Or if it had committed more to the period in its aim for action, maybe that would have worked. The Arnold-esque one-liners thrown in aren't funny, the action is indistinguishable from any other video-game-style movie, but at least I can say I wasn't bored.  It's fast-paced, mercifully short (88 minutes) and frank about its stupidity.

The Bourne Legacy - Movie Review

Starring Jeremy Renner, Rachel Weisz, Edward Norton, Stacy Keach, Dennis Boutsikaris, Oscar Isaac, Donna Murphy, Zjelko Ivanek, David Strathairn, Scott Glenn, Joan Allen and Albert Finney.  Directed by Tony Gilroy.

★★★

At its worst, it comes off as fan fiction of the Bourne universe, with side characters and a side project that is linked but in a way that we don't need to actually see Jason Bourne.  Picture a Star Wars movie that takes place between Empire and Jedi with just the bounty hunters and maybe a Darth Vader cameo.

But if you ignore all the explanations and rehashes and spelling-out the villains do about Bourne and Treadstone and so forth, you have a good chase thriller with Renner as Aaron Cross, a guy in the program who has his memory and has a bit of a sense of humor about himself.  But when his handlers try to kill him, well, this will not do.

I enjoyed it, and yet, it did feel like a hammock movie.  Norton and Keach and Murphy and Boutsakiris are the technocrats who spend the second half of the movie looking at monitors and reminding us of the stakes, the plot points, what this means, Bourne, Treadstone, motivations, implications... Hey, he's on the move!

I think the point was to show an agent who wanted to do the program, who liked it, who didn't have a memory lapse, but who was going to go Flowers for Algernon unless he flew to the Philippines and got the virus.

I liked the Alaska stuff, I liked the lab shoot-out, I liked the showdown in the house that eventually burned down.  The Philippines stuff got long, and the ending was a fizzle, but it seemed it was really just setting up Cross and Bourne to team up for Part 5.

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol - Movie Review

★★★½

Starring Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Paula Patton, Michael Nyqvist, Vladimir Mashkov, Josh Holloway, Tom Wilkinson, Anil Kapoor, Samuli Edelmann and Lea Seydoux.
Directed by Brad Bird.

Tom Cruise has turned the Mission Impossible movies into his own James Bond franchise, and while I've enjoyed all of them, I can't say I've loved any of them. The first one was a fun mystery, the second one was John Woo's parody of himself, and the third one was fast and fun, but all three were pretty disposable. This one's easily the best in the series.

Cruise, for the couch-jumping hullabaloo and the Stepfording-of-Katie-Holmes kerfuffle and the Scientology bruhaha, is still one of the coolest movie stars working today. He's back as superhuman spy Ethan Hunt, a Jason Bourne with a perfect memory. This time around he has to stop a nuclear activist trying to start World War III so Earth can be rebuilt from the ashes.

Movies on one level are supposed to transport the viewer, and here we go from the Kremlin to Dubai to India. Director Brad Bird brings a lot of sensibilities he displayed in The Incredibles, and that's a good thing. We get sweeping shots of the cities, we get heroes barely avoiding sudden death. I saw it in IMAX, and when Cruise has to step out of the world's tallest building in Dubai, it feels like we've gone out on the ledge with him. That's exactly what I would want.

And it's funny. The makers have Cruise, they have co-action-star Jeremy Renner, they have the sexy Paula Patton, and they make full use of the comic potential of Simon Pegg's chatty Benji. One thing Iv'e appreciated about the MI franchise is while Cruise is the star, Ethan can never accomplish his missions without a team.

This was Bird's first live-action directorial effort (he also did Iron Giant and Ratatouille), and the transition is seamless. I look forward to whatever he does next (which happens to be about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.) ((Wow, he's younger than me. Man, I've made some wrong choices in life.))

The Town - Movie Review

***1/2

Starring Ben Affleck, Jon Hamm, Jeremy Renner, Rebecca Hall, Blake Lively, Pete Postlethwaite, Chris Cooper and Titus Welliver.
Directed by Ben Affleck.

Is it perfect? No. But it's the best bank-robbing procedural of the year. It pays homage to Heat without ripping it off, and Affleck's quickly establishing himself as one of the most interesting directors in Hollywood. He's doing for Massachusetts what Martin Scorsese did for New York. At least he's on his way.

Affleck plays Doug MacRay, a guy born and raised in Charlestown, a one-mile area in Boston that we're told has produced the highest per-capita amount of bank robbers in the Northeast. His mom disappeared when he was six, and his dad's doing a life sentence. So he was raised with the Coughlins, where we still see his best-friend brother figure Jem (The Hurt Locker's Jeremy Renner) and the sister Krista (Gossip Girl's Blake Lively), whose baby may or may not be Doug's.

The movie starts out with a bank heist, an intense well-choreographed kick-off, with Doug and his crew wearing skull masks. Jem decides to kidnap the assistant bank manager Claire (Vicky Cristina Barcelona's Rebecca Hall) just in case, and they leave her by the river. Turns out Claire just lives a few blocks from them, so Doug sets out to make sure she won't be able to recongize any of them, but especially so Jem won't decide to just "take care of her."

They bump into each other at a laundromat, and Doug takes a liking to Claire. He sees her regularly. This bank robber begins to wonder if he can finally get out of Charlestown and have a real crime-free life somewhere else.

Always circling though is FBI agent Adam Frawley (Mad Men's Jon Hamm). He didn't make me forget Tommy Lee Jones's Marshal Gerard, but he has two good scenes, one where he lets Doug know just how much he's going to enjoy taking him down, and another monologue where he surgically removes Krista's options until the last one is betrayal.

Affleck's a good actor, not great, and this is one of his best performances. (My fave of his is still Changing Lanes.) It's his directing, though, where he shines. I love the overhead shots of Boston, the authenticity of the atmosphere, the scenes where actors can breathe, especially each one Renner is in. He always has that hairtrigger edge to him, like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas. The bank robbery, the second act armored-truck job, and the final heist are all well-done, in staging and suspense. The action here was more satisfying than anything in, say, Iron Man 2.

With ten movies as possibilities, I could see this sneaking in for a Best Picture nod.

P.S. To the guy who kept texting in front of me, you were rude, but thanks for at least finally getting up and leaving to finish the conversation after your third message.