FANTASTIC BEASTS AND WHERE TO FIND THEM: 4 STARS
Five years after Harry Potter last displayed his wizarding ways on the big screen, J.K. Rowling is back with another adventure. The new film is a Potter prequel following the adventures of Newt Scamander, author of the textbook “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” (which also happens to be the name of this movie).
Taking place seventy years before Harry studied the text at Hogwarts, the film hits on many of the themes that made the Potter movies special -- loyalty, courage and the battle of good versus evil. Of course, there are wands aplenty, and yet it feels new and fresh.
Rowling fans will recognize the name Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne). An employee at the British Ministry of Magic, at the start of the film he’s just arrived in New York City with a briefcase full of wild, wonderful and fantastic beasts. The year is 1926, and NYC is under attack by a mysterious, destructive paranormal force. Dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald has gone missing and the zealous New Salem Philanthropic Society run by anti-magic fanatic Mary Lou Barebone (Samantha Morton) is threatening to expose the seedy underbelly of wizardry in the city.
Not exactly the best time for a wizard to land in America with a case of magic beasts.
A simple mix-up with Newt’s suitcase -- he inadvertently switches his with non-magical (or No-Maj) factory worker Jacob Kowalski’s (Dan Fogler) case -- unleashes the beasts, sees Newt “arrested” by Magical Congress of the United States of America worker Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston), and uncovers a far-reaching conspiracy that endangers wizards and No-Majs alike.
“Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” feels like a Harry Potter film in spirit, but looks nothing like the movies that came before it. Director David Yates, working from a script by Rowling, has reimagined the familiar wizarding world, adding period details ripe with richness. Rowling’s eye for story, quirky minutiae and veiled social comment --“I understand you have rather backward views about relations with non-magic people,” says Newt -- are all on display and should please her fanbase.
Also pleasing are the performances. Redmayne and company, and this is very much an ensemble piece, find the humanity in the characters, even if they aren’t completely human. The performances feel somehow old fashioned, as if the actors stripped away any sense of method acting or other tricks, instead embracing the theatrical nature of the material. The actors occasionally get lost in the film’s reliance on CGI spectacle, but always re-emerge to bring the story’s basic themes of loyalty, courage and Good v. Evil back to the fore.
When Newt says, “I was hoping to wait until we got to Arizona…” during one climatic moment, he hints at adventures yet to come which feels like a set-up to a sequel. Those are the kind of words that usually fill me with dread -- Just what we need, another franchise! -- but “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,” with its message that magic is all around us if we know where to look, is a handsome, entertaining and ultimately sequel-worthy piece of work.
BLEED FOR THIS: 2 STARS
The Miles Teller boxing film “Bleed for This,” like most sports movies, isn’t really about the sport. Sure there are TKOs and the smack of glove against skin, but really it’s about the indomitable human spirit with one of the greatest real-life comebacks in sports history as a backdrop.
Teller plays Vincenzo Pazienza, a.k.a. Vinny Paz a.k.a. the Pazmanian Devil, a championship boxer in lightweight, light middleweight and super middleweight categories. At the beginning of the film he is a wild card, a talented pugilist, but an undisciplined one. The night before a big fight he hits the town, gambling. The next day Roger Mayweather (Peter ‘Kid Chocolate’ Quillin) pummels him in the ring, soundly thrashing the former champ.
Despite his manager’s insistence that he retire, Vinny lumbers on, working out with Kevin Rooney (Aaron Eckhart), Mike Tyson’s former trainer. Pumped up, he jumps two weight classes and becomes a champion in the light middleweight category before tragedy strikes.
Flush with cash after his win, he buys a sports car. Within hours of owning it he’s involved in an accident that leaves him with a broken neck. “How much time till I can fight again?” he asks his doctor. “I can't say with certainty you'll ever walk again,” comes the grim response. His doctor wants to fuse the bone, Vinny instead opts for a halo procedure that involves screwing a circular metal brace into his head for six months to stabilize the injury. During his recuperation Vin secretly works out, preparing himself for a return to the ring. Within thirteen months the halo is gone, and he’s on the comeback trail.
“Bleed For This” aims to be a bigger-than-life tale of resilience and perseverance over adversity, but plays like a gritty television movie. Pazienza overcame great odds and proved a lot of people wrong, including his doctors and trainers. But he’s not a particularly likeable champ. Teller emphasizes the character’s never-say-die spirit, but instead of wining us over, his cockiness comes off as a caricature of chutzpah. Ditto the portrait of Pazienza’s hard-scrabble family. They fight, they argue and worship at a home altar so loaded with Catholic iconography it looks like a page out of the Italian Stereotypes 101 textbook. If the Order Sons of Italy in America were outraged by “The Sopranos,” wait till they get a load of this bunch.
Writer-director Ben Younger is a muscular filmmaker, all macho posturing and turbo-charged momentum. It may not do his characters any favours, but works well when the movie is in the boxing ring.
The final fight scene hits hard with stylish flourishes, like dropping out all the sound save for the smack of clubs against skin and a pep speech with flashbacks, but it is more compelling than anything that came before it.
As a retelling of one of the most unlikely comebacks in sports history “Bleed for This” succeeds in getting across its predictable ‘never-say-die’ lesson. It’s a shame Younger settle for a made-for-TV-movie sentiment instead of digging deeper to explore a subtext that would really knock the audience out.
THE EDGE OF SEVENTEEN: 4 STARS
“The Edge of Seventeen” is a contemporary coming of age story that feels like a throw-back to the John Hughes films of the 1980s. Think “Sixteen Candles” and “Pretty in Pink,” with an updated soundtrack, and you get the idea.
Hailee Steinfeld is Nadine, a dramatic seventeen-year-old who thinks the world is divided into two camps, those who are winners and exude confidence, and those who want to blow those people up. Her handsome brother Darian (Blake Jenner) falls into the former camp, she into the latter. Krista (Haley Lu Richardson), Nadine’s oldest (and only) friend is her emotional support and sounding board until one drunken night when something unspeakable happens -- Krista and Darian hook up. The relationship drives a wedge between the two BFFs --“You can't have both. It’s me or him. Pick,” Nadine demands -- and Nadine finds herself on the outside at school and at home. With more time on her hands the teenager finds new ways to vex her self-absorbed mother (Kyra Sedgwick), pine over her Facebook crush (Alexander Calvert) and bond with her sardonic teacher (Woody Harrelson). In the background, trying to be seen and heard, is Erwin (Hayden Szeto), an awkward and sweet classmate with eyes for Nadine.
The story sounds like something we’ve seen before, but Steinfeld’s performance makes it seem fresh and new. In Nadine we have a composite of what it is to be a teenager, all the confusion, the fun, the rage, the melancholy, everything. It’s tremendous work that grounds the movie and gives equal weight to the comedy and the drama of her teenage life. The look on her face as the realization sinks in that her former best friend has left her behind for a boy and a game of beer pong is almost Shakespearean in its portrayal of teen angst.
Surrounding Steinfeld are Harrelson, whose laid-back performance is a delicate mix of sarcasm and compassion, Szeto, who oozes awkward charm, and Sedgwick, who brings new meaning to the word frazzled. Strong work from all, but all orbit in Steinfeld’s universe.
Thanks to a great central performance “The Edge of Seventeen” is funny, heartbreaking and melancholy, sometimes all at once.
NOCTURNAL ANIMALS: 2 STARS
“Nocturnal Animals” is a story about terror, infidelity, alienation, revenge and heartbreak all filtered through an almost Seinfeldian lack of meaning. Beautiful images fill the screen to engage your eye, but that’s as far as it gets. Nothing here pierces the heart or the mind.
Amy Adams leaves her smile at home to play Susan Morrow, Los Angeles art dealer and wife of Hutton (Armie Hammer) a handsome, but morally flawed man. “Do you ever find your life has turned into something you never intended?” she asks. As she tries to repair their broken relationship a manuscript written by her ex-husband Edward Sheffield (Jake Gyllenhaal) arrives. Titled “Nocturnal Animals” and dedicated to Susan, it is the violent story of teacher Tony Hastings (also played by Gyllenhaal) and the abduction of his family, daughter (Ellie Bamber) and wife (Isla Fisher, who bears a striking resemblance to Susan). As metaphors pile one on top of the other, striking resemblances between fiction and life begin to make themselves clear.
“Nocturnal Animals” is several plot threads and beautiful pictures -- every shot looks ripped from the pages of “Vanity Fair” -- in search of a meaning. Director (and fashion icon) Tom Ford has made the feel-bad movie of the month; a film so beautiful yet deeply unpleasant. It is a litany of misery -- from Susan’s failed marriage and general ennui to the senseless abduction to a sloppy act of revenge -- that seems to only suggest that wealth and beauty don't insulate a person from tragedy and sorrow. It exists in a place where beautiful people have psycho pharmacologists on speed dial and world weary men in tight suits sigh, “Believe me, our world is much less perfect than the real world.” If the film wasn’t so pretty to look at it would be difficult to sit through the vapid observations on display. It occasionally plays like a parody of social registry types, but is Ford poking fun or sympathising with them? It’s impossible to know.
Ford makes good use of Adams’ and Gyllenhaal’s expressive faces, and, as usual Michael Shannon brings the awesome, this time as a blunt Texas detective. “Why no fingerprints?” asks Tony of the crime scene. “Because his hands were probably busy on your wife,” comes the terse reply.
“Nocturnal Animals” won the Grand Jury Prize winner at the Venice Film Festival and some have been comparing it to the Holy Trinity of surreal noir, Hitchcock, Lynch and Kubrick, but for me it is more like a bloodspattered glossy magazine come to life.
ELLE: 3 STARS
To call director Paul Verhoeven provocative is like suggesting that the Atlantic Ocean merely contains some water. He’s the man who gave us “Saved by the Bell” sweetheart Elizabeth Berkley licking a stripper’s pole in “Showgirls” and the splatterfest of “Starship Troopers.” A cursory glance at any of his films suggests his Taste-O-Meter is permanently set at garish, but his movies beg -- actually they sit up and demand -- more than a cursory look.
His new movie, “Elle,” based on French-Armenian writer Philippe Djian’s award-winning 2012 novel “Oh…,” is a complex and corrosive psychological thriller about a woman seeking revenge on the man who raped her.
In Verhoeven’s French-language debut, Isabelle Huppert is Michèle, daughter of a serial killer and CEO of a video game company that specializes in erotic, violent games. As the film opens she is raped by a masked man. Instead of calling the police, however, she cleans up, sweeping up some broken glass before taking a bath and continuing her day. “I was assaulted at home,” she tells friends over dinner. “I guess I was raped.”
She is a complicated character. As the daughter of a notorious serial killer she has developed a hard shell. She’s blunt to the point of being rude with everyone from her future daughter-in-law and ex-husband (Charles Berling) to her mother and son, who she refers to as "a big lout with nothing special about him." She’s having an affair with her best friend’s husband and even deliberately runs into her ex’s car then blames the damage on someone else.
Initially challenged by flashbacks of the assault, her steadfastness kicks in as she refuses to allow fear to rule her life. Shortly after the rape she is back at work, scolding one of her programmers, suggesting “the orgasmic convulsions" of one of her game’s ogre characters are "way too timid."
To give away any more would do a disservice to the film as Verhoeven relies on surprise to unfurl the rest of the occasionally darkly funny story.
“Elle” is a deeply polarizing movie -- in Cannes it was equally lauded and condemned -- that treads some very delicate territory. Not that this is a delicate film. The assault is first heard, then seen in increasingly graphic detail as the running time climbs to the closing credits. It’s unpleasant, but that is the point. But as jarring as it may be, it is only the beginning of the plot machinations of this dark and dirty suspense.
There will be no spoilers here. For one thing it’s rude to give too much away, and for another, it would take more space than I have here to describe the deep psychological depths Verhoeven and Huppert plumb in this story. It’s fearless stuff, a character study of a captivating anti-heroine who demands your attention while simultaneously pushing you away in scene after scene as she refuses to allow fear to dominate her life.
It’s easy to use words like grotesque, grim and provocative to describe “Elle,” and they would be appropriate, but underneath its lurid skin is a Hitchcock movie minus the sexual repression. It’s up to you to decide if that’s a good thing for your sensibilities or not.
