A Monster Calls

Review by Bob Ignizio

If you've seen the trailer for A MONSTER CALLS, it looks like your typical awe and wonder magical realism dreck about a boy and his giant tree creature friend. Don't get me wrong. The film, directed by J.A. Bayona from a script by Patrick Ness (adapted from his award winning book), does center on a young English boy, Conor (Lewis MacDougall). And Conor does in fact associate with a giant tree monster (the voice of Liam Neeson). But there are no humorous capers or uplifting lessons about being true to oneself or whatever harmless pablum that passes for a message in most modern kid's films.

Instead, the tree monster shows up to share 3 stories with Conor, in return for which Conor must share a 4th story, that of his recurring nightmare. The stories the tree monster tells are complex and morally ambiguous, seeking to teach the young boy how to understand the often contradictory aspects of the human condition. These stories, depicted in an animation style that resembles watercolors come to life, all have some connection to Conor's current situation in the real world.

Repost: Kahlil Gilbran's The Prophet (opens in Akron September 4th)

[KAHLIL GILBRAN'S THE PROPHET opens in Akron on Friday September 4th exclusively at the Cedar Lee Theatre.]

Review by Bob Ignizio

Bringing to animated life several of its author’s metaphysical parables, KAHLIL GILBRAN’S THE PROPHET reminds me of the time-worn aphorism, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” There’s no doubt that producer Salma Hayek, who also provides the voice for one of the film’s main characters, wanted this to be an uplifting and inspiring experience for those who watch it. But in trying to shoehorn Gilbran’s much loved prose poetry into something with enough action and conflict to hold a modern audience’s attention, THE PROPHET follows the ‘Save the Cat’ beat sheet to a depressing tee. The result is a film that, when it isn't cheapening the source material with a cheesy and predictable plot, is boring the target audience of kids to tears with long stretches of metaphysical philosophizing

Kahlil Gilbran's The Prophet (opens in Cleveland August 21st at the Cedar Lee Theatre)

[KAHLIL GILBRAN'S THE PROPHET opens in Cleveland on Friday August 21st exclusively at the Cedar Lee Theatre.]

Review by Bob Ignizio

Bringing to animated life several of its author’s metaphysical parables, KAHLIL GILBRAN’S THE PROPHET reminds me of the time-worn aphorism, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” There’s no doubt that producer Salma Hayek, who also provides the voice for one of the film’s main characters, wanted this to be an uplifting and inspiring experience for those who watch it. But in trying to shoehorn Gilbran’s much loved prose poetry into something with enough action and conflict to hold a modern audience’s attention, THE PROPHET follows the ‘Save the Cat’ beat sheet to a depressing tee. The result is a film that, when it isn't cheapening the source material with a cheesy and predictable plot, is boring the target audience of kids to tears with long stretches of metaphysical philosophizing

A Walk Among the Tombstones

Review by Joseph Anthony

Liam Neeson must be the busiest man in Hollywood. It seems like every time you’re sitting in the theater waiting for his newest film to start, you’re watching Liam Neeson trailers. He’s doing a bit of everything: A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST, ANCHORMAN 2, THE DARK KNIGHT TRIOLOGY and tons of voice over work (the latest being the great LEGO MOVIE). Lately Neeson seems to have cornered a very important character market: the tough guy. The hugely successful TAKEN films have cemented Neeson as the go-to guy for intimidating bad guys on the phone. If you’re into that, A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES won’t disappoint.

Non-Stop

Review by Pete Roche

Airplane heist movies aren’t exactly in short supply, so we know going in that director Jaume Collet-Serra’s got lots of hurdles to jump with NON-STOP.

So many aircraft capers and crises have already been turned into blockbusters—redone, recycled, spat out and spoofed in flicks like AIRPORT (and its sequels), AIRPLANE!, DIE HARDER, FLIGHT 93, EXECUTIVE DECISION, and FLIGHT PLAN.  We’ve already witnessed so many hijackings, bombings, poisonings, and crash-landings at the cinema that Hollywood’s got us half-convinced that we too could survive these scenarios if they befell us.     

Heck, even NON-STOP star Liam Neeson already braved one of the most horrific plane crashes in modern film in his recent survival epic THE GREY. 

How do you top all that?

The Lego Movie

Review by Pete Roche

Everything is awesome in the LEGO universe—especially when you’re part of a team.

But evil Lord Business (Will Ferrell) isn’t a fan of teams, fun, or randomness.  Masquerading as the CEO of a mega-corporation by day, Business overlooks the mini-figure denizens of Bricksberg from atop his dizzily tall skyscraper and sets about imposing rigid order across the fictitious LEGO land.

Emmett (Chris Pratt) is an irritatingly cheerful, rule-abiding LEGO citizen / consumer who buys the right things (overpriced coffee), watches inane TV shows (like “Where’s My Pants”) and listens to pedestrian music in a pitiful, aw shucks effort to conform.  He’d love to actually belong to something—to be part of one of these teams everyone keeps singing about—but he’s so downright ordinary and average that not even his construction site coworkers remember who he is from day to day.  Emmett’s too invisible even to tease, and too dim to fathom that soon his desperation to fit in will set him free.  His awareness of being ostracized becomes the key that will unlock strange, wonderful doors and transform him from a blithering nobody caught in an Orwellian nightmare into the “most interesting and extraordinary” person ever, alive for the first time in a waking dream of endless possibilities.

The Nut Job

Review by Pete Roche

I’m one of those people who always hated working in groups in classrooms and at the office.  Even in grad school I found myself surrounded by lazy ne’er-do-wells who wouldn’t carry their weight, but would happily take co-credit for my labor.  I still prefer autonomy.  But even mavericks and lone wolves need a helping hand (or paw) every once in a while.  Sometimes we might have to spread the wealth or forgo credit entirely in order to benefit greater numbers or even just to keep our own moral compasses aligned.

A disenfranchised squirrel learns this hard the hard way in Toonbox Entertainment’s THE NUT JOB, whose title alludes to the rogue protagonist’s mental state as well as the similarly complicated heists perpetrated in crime movies THE ITALIAN JOB and THE BANK JOB.

Taken 2

Review by Matt Finley

TAKEN the first was a passably enjoyable action flick because it trafficked in a sort of skull-crunching fat-free momentum, wearing all of its sentimentally out on its sleeve and never getting bogged down with things like complex characterization or marginal believability. We connect to Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) simply because his teenaged daughter, Kim (Maggie Grace), has been kidnapped by sex traffickers. And, as the movie unspools, we watch him posed as a DEATH WISHian Bronsonesque hero with Jack Bauer spy skillz, consumed with vigilante tunnel vision.

It’s fun, in an appropriately American (read: jaded and self-obsessed) kinda way – he couldn’t be bothered to bring down the trafficking ring, cut all the girls loose, blow-up the base and jetpack into the sunset… instead, he shoulder-checks his way through brothel-loads of k-holed innocents without a second thought until he reaches his own progeny and strolls whistling home, leaving the rest of the suffering to languish ‘til such a time as their own fathers deigned to heave themselves off the couch and muster their own berserker rampages.

Wrath of the Titans

Review by Pete Roche

A decade has passed since Perseus (Sam Worthington) rescued Princess Andromeda from the clutches of the dreaded Kraken and saved Argos from an incipient CLASH OF THE TITANS.  Now he’s got longer hair, a son, and a modest fishing business along the coast.  He’s not interested in doing the Hercules thing anymore and would rather be the Dad than pummel pillars in more petty squabbles with steroid-steeled scorpions and hormonal gorgons. 

Ah, but this demigod (like most, one supposes) hails from a broken home.  Perseus' Father Zeus (Liam Neeson) and Uncle Poseidon (Danny Huston) are losing power because humans—emboldened by Perseus’ heroic deeds—won’t worship them anymore.  A third Olympian uncle, the banished Hades (Ralph Fiennes), summons Zeus’ other son, vengeful Ares (Edgar Ramirez) to Tartarus to help awaken their lumbering, lava-based patriarch the titan Kronos, imprisoned in the underworld by Zeus eons ago.  Seems the young war god also has a bone to pick with stepbrother Perseus, who after the events of the first film only solidified his status as Zeus’ favorite. 

So yeah, it's the most dysfunctional film family since the Skywalkers.  And that’s just the boys.

The Grey

Review by Pete Roche

Director Joe Carnahan (THE A-TEAM) again summons the Olympian screen presence of Liam Neeson for epic (but existential) THE GREY, a masterful Man vs. Nature thriller that’d make tough guy authors like Ernest Hemmingway (The Old Man and the Sea) and Jack London (White Fang, Call of the Wild) proud as peacocks. 

Neeson is Ottway, a sharpshooter employed by an oil company to keep lions, tigers, and bears from turning its Alaskan riggers into Lunchables.  His assignment is done, so he’s headed home (wherever that is) in bad weather on a plane filled with other societal outcasts like himself: hardworking but profane drifters, felons, and loners.  The movie trailer reveals that their rickety craft is swatted from the sky into some cold corner of the Pacific Northwest that time forgot.  What it doesn’t fully reveal—but suggests—is Carnahan’s skill at wringing the pathos out of the survivors as they brave the challenges of the snowy wilderness.