Dave Made a Maze (opens August 18th at the Cedar Lee Theatre and the Nightlight Cinema]

[DAVE MADE A MAZE opens Friday August 18^th at the Cedar Lee Theatre in Cleveland, OH and The Nightlight Cinema in Akron, OH.]

Review by Bob Ignizio

It’s rare these days to find a movie as original and imaginative as DAVE MADE A MAZE. Writer/director Bill Watterson (not the Calvin and Hobbes guy, but rather an actor and voice actor originally from Cleveland, OH) has crafted a bizarre fantasy that feels like part BEING JOHN MALKOVICH and part low budget cult horror/sci-fi fave CUBE.

The premise is that Dave (Nick Thune), a thirty-something artist who seems incapable of finishing anything he starts, builds a massive box fort in the apartment he shares with his more responsible better half, Annie (Meera Rohit Kumbhani). Annie comes home from a weekend trip to discover this cardboard monstrosity, which Dave claims he has been trapped in for 3 days. He also claims he can’t find his way out.

Annie is, understandably, flummoxed by this. Why not just tear the fort apart? But Dave refuses to do so, and also warns Annie against coming in after him. The fort is bigger and more dangerous on the inside than it appears.

Once Upon a Time (opens August 11th at Cinemark at Valley View)

[ONCE UPON A TIME opens in Cleveland on Friday August 11^th at Cinemark at Valley View.]

Review by Bob Ignizio

There’s a whole lot of plot in the epic action/romance/fantasy film ONCE UPON A TIME. Like, literally three lifetimes worth of plot. And not just ordinary lifetimes, but the lifetimes of immortal Chinese gods who live for hundreds of years, then get reborn to live hundreds more.

As is often the case in movies about gods, whatever their nationality, there’s lots of scheming and plotting by one deity against another. In this case, Bai Qian (Liu Yifei) is the immortal being plotted against, although we don’t initially know the details of who is doing the plotting or why. All we know when we are first introduced to her is that she has fallen from the heavens, and upon landing on earth, has lost much of her memory.

The Dark Tower

Review by Bob Ignizio

Critics have for the most part been incredibly harsh in their reviews of THE DARK TOWER, the first attempt to adapt Stephen King’s epic fantasy/horror/sci-fi/western series for the big screen. To be sure, the end results are not best of the year list material. But neither are they all that bad. The problem, I imagine, is that with a cast of this caliber (Idris Elba and Mathew McConaughey representing the forces of good and evil, respectively) and the hype that comes with adapting (or, perhaps more accurately, continuing) such a beloved series, expectations were high. Too high.

The fact is, with a budget of 60 million, expectations for THE DARK TOWER should have been more in line with similarly budgeted genre fare like the MAZE RUNNER: THE SCORCH TRIALS or the RESIDENT EVIL films, not something with the scope and production values of HARRY POTTER or THE HUNGER GAMES. One can certainly make the argument that THE DARK TOWER needed a bigger budget to do the source material justice, but for better or worse that wasn’t the case. Given what director Nikolaj Arcel and his team had to work with, the end product really isn’t that bad.

Twilight Zone: The Movie (June 23 at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE screens Friday June 23rd at 7:30 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

Rod Serling’s revered TV half-hour anthology The Twilight Zone, aired originally from 1959 to 1965, told different sci-fi and fantasy-tinged morality plays each week. It’s long shadow inspired this Warner Brothers big-budget movie anthology that made its theatrical debut in 1983 – an era when the blockbuster box-office returns of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg fantasias led the entertainment rackets to lavishly remake, relaunch and reboot all the way-out properties they owned the rights to. Whether the studios “got it” or not.

Three parts of the four installments in TWILIGHT ZONE – THE MOVIE remake favorite TZ episodes, but the first, directed by John Landis (hot after AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON) is an original. It's about a bigoted businessman (Vic Morrow), ranting about losing a job promotion to a Jew, who instantly finds himself cruelly knocked about the whole 20th century, suffering the same persecutions as blacks in the Jim Crow South, Jews in the Holocaust, and Indochinese during the Vietnam War. This was the featurette in which actor Morrow (and two child actors) died in an on-camera accident, perishing beneath a crashing helicopter while filming the Vietnam section. The horrific waste made even more disappointing by the segment itself, a one-note bashing of a nasty guy that feels like something whipped up by slumming liberal Hollywood film-school students.

The Great Wall

Review by Bob Ignizio

Critically acclaimed Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou delivers a fantasy epic in which color-coded warriors and a grungy looking Matt Damon do battle with hordes of CGI monsters in the most expensive film ever shot entirely in China, THE GREAT WALL.

Mercenary William Garin (Damon) and his Spanish friend Pero (Perdo Pascal) are all that's left of a band of warriors hoping to get their hands on some of China's rumored super weapon, a mysterious black powder (gun powder, natch). Instead they stumble into a centuries-old battle between Chinese soldiers manning the Great Wall of China and some vaguely defined space monster dragon things that can only be killed by shooting them in the eye. And for some reason magnets make them zonk out. How does that work? I don't know, ask Insane Clown Posse.

Evolution (January 28th and 29th at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[EVOLUTION screens Saturday January 28th at 9:00 pm and Sunday January 29th at 6:30 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Bob Ignizio

The French have a term: fantastique. It refers to a genre where horror, science fiction, and fantasy intersect. A genre in which the outré intrudes into an otherwise grounded, realistic narrative, generally without explanation. That quite nicely describes the general tenor and tone of Lucile Hadžihalilović's film EVOLUTION.

From the start, the viewer is simply dropped into the film's bizarre world and asked to accept what they see at face value, just as the characters do. What that entails is a small seaside village where a young boy, Nicolas (Max Brebant), is shocked to discover the body of a boy with a red starfish on his stomach while swimming in the ocean. His mother (Julie-Marie Parmentier) tries to reassure Nicolas that there was no body, only the starfish. But later, we see her bring the corpse to a mysterious cabal of women at night.

Monster Trucks

Review by Bob Ignizio

When a movie's title doubles as its plot synopsis, you know you're not dealing with Oscar caliber material. And so it is with MONSTER TRUCKS, from director Chris Wedge (ICE AGE, EPIC) and screenwriter Derek Connolly (JURASSIC WORLD, SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED). 

It's a movie about subterranean creatures who get pulled to the surface by a dastardly, greedy oil company. 2 of the creatures are captured, but a third gets away and, before long, has taken up residence in the old pick-up truck belonging to bad boy high school student Tripp Cooley (Lucas Till), who looks like the love child of Patrick Swayze and Kurt Russell.

After some initial freaking out about, you know, a giant monster living in his truck, Tripp befriends the beast and, along with his cute but uptight tutor Meredith (Jane Levy).

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.

Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children

Review by Bob Ignizio

I don't much care for director Tim Burton beyond a handful of films (PEE WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE and BEETLEJUICE are undeniable classics, and the guy has maybe one or two others that are passable but by no means favorites), so perhaps I'm not the right person to be reviewing the auteur's latest, MISS PEREGRINE'S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN. But nobody else at the Movie Blog wanted the gig, and I took my five-year-old to see it, so I guess it falls on me.

The plot is set in motion when teenage Jake (Asa Butterfield) is traumatized by the mysterious death of his grandfather Abe (Terrence Stamp), whose eyes were plucked from his head. Jake, who discovered Abe's body, is certain there was some kind of monster around, but his parent's assume that's just his way of coping with the tragedy.

The 9th Life of Louis Drax

Review by Pamela Zoslov

Louis, the nine-year-old protagonist of THE 9th LIFE OF LOUIS DRAX, introduces himself as “the amazing accident-prone boy.” In his short life, he's been bitten by spiders, hit in his crib by a falling chandelier, electrocuted by a wall outlet, suffered food poisoning and meningitis.

Even his birth was violent, claims Louis, who describes a brutal Caesarean section that nearly killed him and his mother. His pretty, doting mom, Natalie (Sarah Gadon) tells Louis he's “an angel,” and he believes himself to be her protector. On his ninth birthday, Louis “dies” again, falling backwards off a cliff and into frigid water while on a picnic with his estranged parents.

Pete's Dragon

Review by Bob Ignizio

The original 1977 PETE'S DRAGON was a musical about an orphan boy with a magical dragon for a friend who runs away from his abusive foster parents, only to find himself in a town of superstitious folk who don't treat him much better. Now Disney and director/co-writer David Lowery have remade the tale as a softer, environmentally conscious film minus the production numbers and abuse subtext. The main human character, Pete (Oakes Fegley), has also been reimagined as something of a wild boy ala Tarzan or Mowgli, raised not by foster parents, but by his dragon friend Elliot, since his real parents died on a camping trip when he was 5 years old. Hey, it may be toned down a bit, but you still can't have a Disney film without the lead kid's parents getting offed.

The BFG

Review by Bob Ignizio

There's an old saying – can't see the forest for the trees. When a critic is in critic mode, there's always the risk of that happening. Of course it's our job to focus on the details, but sometimes in doing so we lose sight of the bigger picture.  

Take THE BFG. It tells the story of Sophie (Ruby Barnhill), an orphan girl who gets swept off into a world of adventure when a giant happens to notice her noticing him as he makes his late night rounds. I found it to be an okay kid's fantasy film, but a bit padded and, while not derivative, it still felt more than a bit familiar.

My five-year-old son, on the other hand, asked if there were some way he could go into the movie. Clearly there was some kind of movie magic at work here. It may not have affected me, but I can't deny the power it had on its target audience.

Tale of Tales (opens May 6th at the Capitol Theatre)

[TALE OF TALES opens in Cleveland on Friday May 6th exclusively at the Capitol Theatre.]

Review by Bob Ignizio

Even in their watered down, Disney-fied versions, fairy tales can get pretty dark. In fact, Disney’s SNOW WHITE has been credited with influencing that country’s take on the horror film, in particular Dario Argento’s SUSPIRIA. Go back to early written collections of fairly tales by the Brother’s Grimm and Charles Perrault, and the tales get even darker.

Go further back yet and we find ourselves in Italy once again. That’s where Italian poet and courtier Giambattista Basile collected some truly horrific versions of fairy tales both familiar and not in what he called "The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones".  The new anthology film adapted from Basile’s book, TALE OF TALES by Italian director Matteo Garrone, is most definitely not “Entertainment for Little Ones”.

Wolf Children (screening at Zipcon in Akron, February 20)

 

Hailing from the legendary Japanese distributor Toho, WOLF CHILDREN was a hit theatrical release in Nippon in 2012 and, and no wonder (well, aside from riding the lupine coattails of TWILIGHT movies, of course). Visually stirring and hitting a lot of buttons for longtime Japanimation connoisseurs, animator Mamoru Hosoda's tender fantasy does not hail from Hayao Miyazaki's renown Studio Ghibli - but there is a strong affinity, particularly in its reverence for the natural world.  

Heroine Hana is an orphaned, big-city Japanese college student with a keep-smiling attitude to life (pretty girl, big-city college student, keep-smiling attitude to life? Like I said, it's a fantasy). She falls in love with a handsome loner on the fringes of the campus. The nameless man reveals his astounding secret, that he is actually a Japanese wolf, the last of his kind, hiding in human form. Werewolf movies have it all wrong, he affirms.  

Labyrinth (January 24 at 8:30 p.m. and January 25 at 7 p.m. at the Nightlight, Akron)

For a film that received wildly uneven critical reactions in its time - some critics were crazy about it, some thought it was an embarrassingly pretentious piece of pop-music/fairytale - the Muppet epic LABYRINTH ...probably still would receive wildly uneven critical reactions in this time. Probably for the same reasons (plus, not enough swag, bribes, prostitutes and drugs given by studio PR to the bought-off internet critics during the all-expenses-paid press junket).

For what it's worth, I am one of this film's admirers, and I've always wanted to write about it. Now it's in revival thanks to VIP cast member David Bowie tragically dying. I am sure his fans will blame me.

Before you gender-confused glam-rock types on heroin and/or nostalgic baby boomer yuppies come after me with your sharpened artificial fingernails and gold-plated pitchforks, listen to me: Bowie was not right-off-the-bat cast as Jareth the Goblin King in the fantasy. I have it on good authority a number of musical icons were under consideration for the role back in 1986, including Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson. I guess if you want to lynch anyone, it's director Jim Henson; HE'S the one you want! If it weren't for him, Bowie might still be alive today! Death to Jim Henson! Death to Jim Henson...oh, right, I forgot. (sigh)

Jurassic World

Review by Matt Finley

The first time we see Jurassic World - an upscale corporate hellscape complete with chain restaurants and tacky bars (Clevelanders, imagine Crocker Park with the odd Stegosaur lumbering past Abercrombie) - is in a soaring pan over with John Williams' iconic clarion score blaring. Is this trenchant irony or is everyone involved in JURASSIC WORLD (the fourth film in the Jurassic Park series) just that oblivious to what made its precursor trumpet-worthy?  

For a movie that devotes so much of its early runtime to (overly) pointed conversations about the increasing public demand for sensational spectacle and ante-upping (ahem) sequels to familiar animals, it's more than a little disappointing how quickly director Colin Trevorrow's (SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED) film divests itself of satirical potential in exchange for an extended, lukewarm nostalgia bath. But at least there are plenty of mindlessly engaging bath toys

When Marnie Was There (opens in Cleveland June 5th at the Cedar Lee Theatre)

[WHEN MARNIE WAS THERE opens in Cleveland on Friday June 5th exclusively at the Cedar Lee Theatre.]

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

Sorry, a rush job on this review of a Japanese animated feature. Bob Ignizio, white foreign barbarian devil round-eye giant pale ghost (those are all bona fide racist slurs Japanese use against anglos, unless I'm much misinformed) dropped this one right on top of me, a review assignment of the latest release from legendary Nippon animation factory Studio Ghibli - right in between my binge-watch assignments to go through two other, more "conventional" anime shows.

So you can identify with my befuddled state, these were the bookends: Noir, a famous 2001 action serial (and, to my eyes, Sergio Leono tribute) about two winsome young girls working as a lethal international assassins-for-hire team, who are also puppets in the hands of a 1,000-year-old secret society. The other is Unlimited Psychic Squad, one of those sci-fi deals in which telepaths with incredible mind-superpowers duel like gods in a sort of alternate-history version of Japan.

Repost: The Strange Case of Angelica (May 14th at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[THE STRANGE CASE OF ANGELICA screens Thursday May 14th at 8:15pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Bob Ignizio

Isaac (Ricardo Trêpa ), the photographer we meet in THE STRANGE CASE OF ANGELICA (O Estranho Caso de Angélica), is a young man but an old soul. He spends his days photographing the vineyard workers across the street from his boarding house, much to the chagrin of his landlady Justina (Adelaide Teixeira ). She can't understand why anyone would take pictures of the men since, as she mentions several times, no one does the job that way anymore. She seems almost embarrassed by these living relics of another time, but Isaac sees nobility in the way they hold on to their old ways.

Welcome to the Space Show (now on video)

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

I don't know about you, but when a separate Oscar category for Best Animated Feature was inaugurated, I welcomed it as a chance to open audiences up to the rich world of cartoons, CGI and stop-motion that exists outside of the usual Disney/DreamWorks axis of evil. (Plus, I like to think that advancements in animation will mean fewer live-action cinema - meaning fewer borderline-psycho actors would be employed in our midst - and that can't be a bad thing). So, perhaps thanks to the Academy, more viewers are turned on to stuff like SONG OF THE SEA and the output of Studio Ghibli than would have been otherwise.

Still, there are still some major animated features that take some time to get here. I'm still curious about FELIDAE, the German cartoon based on a best-selling thriller novel (that never broke big with American readers) about a cat version of Sherlock Holmes...

Wait a minute! Didn't I just write this same exact lead for a previous review? Well, yes. I've got two movies in a row in which it's applicable. Plus this is a bad economy, it's cold and dark, it's dispiriting in Cleveland, and I just couldn't up with anything more original. What are you going to do, garnish my Cleveland Movie Blog wages? Good luck.

Nocturna (now on video)

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

I don't know about you, but when a separate Oscar category for Best Animated Feature was inaugurated, I welcomed it as a chance to open audiences up to the rich world of cartoons, CGI and stop-motion that exists outside of the usual Disney/DreamWorks axis of evil. (Plus, I like to think that advancements in animation will mean fewer live-action cinema - meaning fewer borderline-psycho actors employed in our midst - and that can't be a bad thing). So, perhaps thanks to the Academy, more viewers are turned on to stuff like SONG OF THE SEA and the output of Studio Ghibli than would have been otherwise.

Still, there are some major animated features that take some time to get here. I'm still curious about FELIDAE, the German cartoon based on a best-selling thriller novel (that never broke big with American readers) about a cat version of Sherlock Holmes. Then there's NOCTURNA, a Franco-Spanish epic that was completed all of eight years ago. Now it's finally shown up here on disc.