Would Dicky Like The Call?

Getting to the punch line right away, Dicky would NOT like The Call with Halle Berry. This is not to suggest that Dicky is always a highly critical movie viewer. (Au contraire, she LOVES some movies that I consider deplorable.) The Call, whose first half is suspenseful and engaging, turns ridiculous when Jordan (Halle Berry), a 911 operator, takes it upon herself to go to a location connected to the kidnapper of a teenage girl (Abigail Breslin). She sifts through boxes of possessions that nary an FBI agent is sifting through, she finds a clue, and this leads her to the underground hideout where the psycho kidnapper has poor Casey strapped to a gurney and he's just about to scalp her. In fact, the movie goes south earlier when a suspicious onlooker gets beaten up by the killer and thrown in the trunk of his car where he lies next to Casey with what looks like a smile on his face. But this ridiculousness is not why Dicky would dislike this movie. Dicky would not like this movie because it disobeys one of the two inviolable criteria necessary for Dicky to like a movie:

THE DICKY RESTRICTIONS:

1) Will I like the ending (which means, is it a happy or redemptive one)?
2) Even if it is an ending I would like, is it painful getting to this ending?

Well, Dicky would not necessarily dislike the film’s highly improbable, 360 degree shift to a surprising payback ending; but she would certainly consider the film painful in getting to that ending because of its excessive acts of sadism perpetrated by the monstrously psycho kidnapper (Michael Eklund).

That said, who is Dicky?

Molly Dickson Allison, a former colleague at the school on Cape Cod where my wife and I teach, has been a very good friend of mine for twenty-seven years. At school, Dicky and I were drawn to each other from the start, and we soon learned that we had a lot in common. We had both grown up in the West, she in Boulder, Colorado, I in San Mateo, California. We both had a passion for movies, especially Westerns, particularly Westerns with John Wayne, a passion we had developed since childhood. We both also loved the American history behind these Westerns, and we learned that, serendipitously, I had been born on February 23, the day the Texians took refuge in the Alamo and the siege began, and she had been born twelve days later, the same year as me, on March 6, the day the Alamo fell to the Mexicans. This led, of course, to birthday greetings of “Happy Birthday, Dicky. Remember the Alamo!” This also led to the institution of the first Alamo Dinner Party when we watched John Wayne’s The Alamo and ate Tex-Mex food.

Of course, as I spent hours and hours talking to Dicky about movies, and watching Westerns together at my place, it goes without saying that I, someone who prefers very serious films that pack a visceral punch, found the Dicky Restrictions very frustrating, and I couldn’t believe it when I learned that she, a big John Wayne fan, had never seen The Shootist and she had only seen The Alamo once! “Why not?” I asked. In her inimitable, signature “golly-gee” Western/Eastern preppie voice, always intoned with passionate sincerity, she said, “Because it’s too painful, Richard. John Wayne dies!” (I forced her to watch The Shootist. She loved it, but she has never watched it again, and I’m not sure she forgives me!)

As a tribute to a most faithful blog follower (who never leaves a comment because somehow Google comments pose a problem even though, by profession, she’s practically a computer hacker!) I plan to critique some of the films I see according to whether or not Dicky would like them. These posts will carry a title like "Would Dick Like Title?" This is especially appropriate because Dicky tells me she reads EVERY one of my posts word for word, and she uses my reviews as a gauge, according to her restrictive criteria, as to whether or not she should see the movie. Consequently, she gets frustrated when I don't review a movie she's considering seeing; she feels lost! And spoilers don’t bother Dicky in the slightest. In fact, she’d love it if I described the ending in detail so as to save her from pain. In future posts, if I totally give away the ending and forget to write SPOILER ALERT, you can blame it on my efforts to save Dicky some pain.

"I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore." Oz the Great and Powerful

By employing a 4:3 aspect ratio, softly rendered black-and-white, and gray mattes depicting a drab Kansas farmland, Sam Raimi’s Oz the Great and Powerful immediately alludes to The Wizard of Oz and taps into all our nostalgic associations with that 1939 classic. In fact, the opening vignette, in which James Franco plays a carnival charlatan called Oz the Great and Powerful, is the best part of the film. The carnival setting, the pathos generated by a crippled girl who begs the Great and Powerful to make her walk, and Michelle Williams as Oz’s sweetheart who sees no future staying with the rootless showman, all these elements make us feel like we’re watching a 1930s film. Indeed, full close-ups of Williams’s face and her poignant delivery suggest that she would have been a screen star in the golden era of film. You find yourself wishing the film would continue to emulate the look and tenor of that decade in film, but then the tornado whisks us into a 2.40:1 CGI 3D fantasyland that is not as dazzling.

Sam Raimi’s Oz is an odd Oz. The CGI landscapes are flat and too colorful, so much so that you imagine the green screen set up behind the performers. There are funny characters that are not so funny, and wicked witches that are not so scary. In this origin story for Evanora/the Wicked Witch of the East (Rachel Weisz)and Theodora/the Wicked Witch of the West (Mila Kunis), the film strikes a couple of spooky chords with the silhouette of Theodora transforming into the sharp-featured West Witch. This is the film’s most chilling moment, much scarier than full-on close-ups of Kunis’s puffy pea-green face.

For the most part, this is slow-paced children’s fare that tries too hard to be endearing. Although Michelle Williams’s overly sweet act as Glinda begins to grow on you, Franco’s overacting wears thin. The best visual is an amazingly lifelike but oddly creepy china doll saved from a massacre at China Town perpetrated by the not-so-fearsome flying baboons, not monkeys. (Guess they evolve into monkeys later on.) The scene in which Oz fixes the little doll’s broken legs with glue is quite touching, but the scene in which she asks Oz to tuck her into bed at night is rather uncomfortable. Overall, the film features some engaging moments, but there is not enough in its over-long length to call it much of a success.

Fee-fi-fo-fum, Jack the Giant Slayer Is Full of Fun

In 1962, when I saw Jack the Giant Killer with Kerwin Matthews, I was ten years old, and I enthusiastically embraced this film’s low-quality stop-motion animation of giants and beasts, and all its elements of high adventure. For a while after seeing it, everything I set up at home with my box of plastic figures was Jack the Giant Killer. So, tell me how I could stay away from this year’s Jack the Giant Slayer?

I have to admit, as a preview, Jack the Giant Slayer looked like the worst of overblown CGI silliness, but it’s not! Jack the Giant Slayer is an imaginative, thoroughly delightful fantasy-adventure with the accent on adventure. The film starts out with a poor farmer reading a bedtime story to his son, and a king reading a bedtime story to his daughter, and here animated sequenes provide the backstory on how a magic crown controls the giants and banished them to the land “where the thunder comes.”

The action gets started without any nonsense, or lengthy scenes involving dwarves endlessly stuffing their faces. Jack (Nicholas Hoult) trades his horse for the magic beans, the bean stalk grows, Jack climbs the bean stalk to rescue the princess (Eleanor Tomlinson), and the film proceeds expeditiously from thrill to thrill: the bean stalk growing, later falling; the arrival in the land of the giants; a humorous scene in which Jack saves Lord Elmont (Ewan McGregor) from getting turned into a baked pig in a blanket; and the culminating battle in which the giants assault the castle of the King (Ian McShane). When the CGI ultimately gets going, there’s nothing dizzying or hard to follow, like hobbits tumbling from mountainsides or jumping through the treetop to treetop. In addition, the art direction provides a lot to look at. Blending in picturesque location shots with the CGI, the look of the film establishes substantial, memorable atmosphere.

The acting is more than serviceable. Nicholas Hoult is the perfect Jack, the poor farmer’s son who falls in love with Isabelle, the fair princess, played well by Tomlinson. And any film is made delightful by the presence of Ewan McGregor, who gets to intone, “I have a bad feeling about this.”

Worthy of praise, as well, are the giants. Substantially rendered by well-developed CGI, these oversized characters are suitably obtuse but scary and imposing in their size and hunger for human meat. The leader of the giants is accompanied by a second head, cackling like the imbecilic hyena in The Lion King; the grimy, nose-picking cook is the most sinister as he obliviously rolls McGregor in pie dough and starts to bake him; and the head of the soldier giants provides tension as he leads the thrilling assault on the castle.

Open Your Mouth and Close Your Eyes, and You Will Get Dark Skies

As you can see above, there’s a hell of a lot of jaw-dropping in Dark Skies. The human-abducting aliens, called “The Grays” in this film, just cause jaw-dropping terror, or they want the humans to open wide and say “Ah” so they can examine human teeth. Why the aliens require decades to “study” humans is beyond me. They can travel through space at light speed but I guess they’re kind of slow when it comes to research.

Yes, most of Dark Skies plays like its preview: a display of poor acting and cheesy suspense elements that rip off Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The Birds and bring the movie very very close to being one of those recent Paranormal Activity spoofs. (There's even the ubiquitous kitchen moment involving pots and pans!) Keri Russell as the Mom and Josh Hamilton as the Dad try hard to look concerned and fearful about the possibilities of aliens abducting their kids, but for the most part they look like that haven’t gotten enough sleep. Though his appearance in the preview elicits a laugh, J. K. Simmons as an alien-abduction theorist provides the first little spurts of a creepy tone, and when the final alien invasion of the Barrett residence comes, rather entertaining chills, suspense, and a nice plot twist are finally provided.

Nemo, Side Effects, A Good Day to Die Hard, and Safe Haven

I was on a roll there, posting weekly on each movie I saw this year, and then Nemo hit Cape Cod with high winds, lots of snow, and Capewide power outages. Nature rules. In anticipation of the impending storm, schools were closed on Friday, February 8th, so I was able to see an early showing of Side Effects before the travel ban at 4:00.



Steven Soderbergh’s Side Effects is a crafty, well-made mystery about depression, mood-altering drugs, and deception, featuring excellent performances by Jude Law and Rooney Mara, a very awkward performance by Catherine Zeta-Jones, and some artful cinematography and editing. Rooney Mara is especially good as the devious Emily. The story keeps you thinking, though the whys and wherefores get a little perplexing in the film’s final third. This is an enjoyable film to watch, and I love how Soderbergh makes distinctly different one-offs to refresh us in this day and age of sequels and remakes.

Back home, we lost power that night and wouldn’t get it back for 48 hours. We have the fireplace, and I have a camp stove and lantern for cooking and light. I had cooked a massive stew before we lost power, so we had a hot meal on Saturday night. I’m a survivalist. Nights were very cold, however. My wife, my daughter, and I spent Saturday night huddled near the fire, watching The Hunger Games on my iPad. All day Saturday had been spent shoveling to keep ahead of the snow that fell all that day. We would shovel, go in for tea and food, shovel, eat, shovel, eat, all day long. We have a long, sloping drive that I call Truckee Pass.



Nights were very cold, so after two nights like that, my wife and daughter went to my brother-in-law’s place in Westborough, where they had more snow but still had power. I stayed behind, shoveled, cut limbs off a fallen tree that smashed the backyard fence, and made my way to Panera in Hyannis for warmth and Internet. That night I got power.



Friday, I saw A Good Day to Die Hard. Very silly. John McClane (Willis) looks for his estranged son, Jack (Jai Courtney), in Russia, where the chip off the old block is a CIA operative. The franchise needs to end here, but I have to say I was fascinated by all the damage done to prop cars, and some of the flying car stunts are amazing. Many cars flip, many Russians die, many things explode. You get the point.

Sunday, the 18th, more snow! More shoveling. Bad roads! I’m not enjoying this winter. But today, a sunny one, my daughter and I saw Safe Haven.



Safe Haven is a perfect little world of wish fulfillment and second chances. Typical of films based on novels by Nicholas Sparks, a beautiful woman and a handsome man both enjoy second chances in love in a quaint and beautiful rural town in the South. In this case, Katie (Julianne Hough) is fleeing an abusive husband, a policeman who uses his power to track her down. Alex (Josh Duhamel) is a widower with two cute kids who runs a quaint general store in an idyllic North Carolina coastal one-store town. As in all Sparks stories, the two fall in love, the kids love the newcomer too, there’s a scene in the rain when the lovers get all wet and start kissing, there’s the ubiquitous misunderstanding (Alex thinks Katie is accused of murder), there’s the scene where they run back into each other’s arms, and there’s always a flood or fire and a rescue. Neither Hough nor Duhamel is a great actor, but the locations shots are gorgeous, Hough is not hard to look at, and after a week of snow and shoveling and hazardous driving and cars sliding down Truckee Pass and cancelled Drama Club shows, I have to say I enjoyed this perfect little world. Once in a while, it’s nice to watch everything come out all right.

21st Century Survival: Warm Bodies

In Warm Bodies, directed by Jonathan Levine, Romeo and Juliet gets the zombie movie treatment in a gray and desolate, highly detailed post-plague setting. R (for Romeo), played by Nicholas Hoult, is a zombie who feels that he’s changing, getting better (an impossibility in zombie lore) after he falls in love with Julie (Teresa Palmer), an angsty, Kristen Stewart-style love interest whose face has launched R’s metamorphosis. Meanwhile, Julie’s Daddy (John Malkovich), the zombie-hating commander of a survivors’ colony, will never go for this relationship!

Brilliantly, the film plays on its central twist by beginning with a shot following R shuffling through a dilapidated airport amidst the other undead. Immediately, with R’s introspective voiceover, the story is told from the zombie’s point of view, and lots of laughs arise in the deconstruction of standard zombie movie tropes.

But Warm Bodies is not a zombie movie; it’s not even a zombie comedy like Zombieland, and viewers expecting graphic head-shooting violence will be disappointed. First and foremost, this is a love story about the difficulties of human interactions. On another level, we are all zombies wandering dazedly through our daily routine. From the beginning, Warm Bodies adopts the tone of a quirky arthouse indie, with a moody musical score, and becomes a quiet, touching love story about a reclusive outsider learning to communicate his feelings for a beautiful young woman. R’s voiceover refers sardonically to the pre-plague days when people were always so closely connected – and we see a flashback to a crowd of people glued to their cell phones. In those not-so-golden pre-plagues days, R might have been one of those inward, inarticulate tech nerds more comfortable in front of a computer screen than in front of a warm human being. The massive wall that surrounds the survival colony comes to symbolize the barriers barring human interaction, barriers that seem pointedly ironic in this age of connectivity.

Hoult as R does a fine job of showing his gradual emergence from zombiehood to warm, feeling human being. He initially communicates with very expressive grunts, growls, and wide-eyed blank stares. In a touching scene clearly echoing WALL-E, R takes Julie to his solitary quarters inside an abandoned airliner where he shows off all the cherished things he has collected, including pre-digital LP records. R has learned from WALL-E how to show a woman you have heart, and vinyl records are cool. Meanwhile, Palmer fits her character right into all the standard scenarios of the angsty and spoiled but desirable young 21st century female responding to the weird outsider. “Wuzzup?” Palmer imitates Kristen Stewart’s forehead-down scowl to a T.

In a post-apocalyptic setting, there are always opportunities to reference all that is lost – all that we had that may not have been all that great. Julie’s friend Nora (Analeigh Tipton) wishes she could access the Internet in order to figure out what ails her friend. Warm Bodies uses this setting to point out that amidst all the material possessions and the technology, we are not necessarily better off. In the 21st century world – or in the grim wasteland of a zombie plague – the most important thing in life is human warmth.