Mary and the Witch’s Flower

When the celebrated Studio Ghibli (My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Porco Rosso, Spirited Away, among many others) halted production in 2014, Yoshiaki Nishimura founded Studio Ponoc along with several Studio Ghibli veterans. The name is said to derive from a word meaning “midnight,” signifying the end of one day and the beginning of another. Mary and the Witch’s Flower, directed and cowritten by Hiromasa Yonebayashi (When Marnie Was There) is Studio Ponoc’s first feature film.

It tells the story of Mary, a young girl sent to stay with her Great Aunt Charlotte in the country while her parents are away for some unspecified reason. Bored out of her mind, she follows Tib the cat into the woods and discovers a rare flower that temporarily gives her magical abilities. She activates a long-forgotten broomstick and finds herself transported to Endor College, a school of magic, where she is mistaken for a new pupil. She soon discovers some unsavory experiments going on behind the scenes. Continue reading →

The Room Far Exceeds its Reputation for Badness

Finding the theater packed with hipster millennials was my first hint that something was about to go terribly wrong. The fact that many of them seemed to know each other was an ominous sign. Then a clip of Tommy Wiseau doing a semi-coherent live question and answer session in front of a theater packed with adoring fans appeared on screen. Then a mashup video of what turned out to be some of the stupidest dialogue in the movie started playing, and the audience sang along. And then someone started passing out plastic spoons. I knew The Room had achieved something of a cult status, but nothing had prepared me for a theater full of millennials making a pathetically lame attempt to recreate The Rocky Horror Picture Show. More on that later.

The Room was released in 2003, and the numerous criticisms published since then vastly understate the magnitude of its awfulness. The basic idea is that Johnny (Tommy Wiseau) is a successful banker engaged to Lisa (Juliette Danielle). Depending on which section of dialogue you’re listening to, they’ve been together for 5 or 7 years. And no, 2 years do not pass over the course of the film. Lisa has inexplicably gotten bored with Johnny and decides to cheat on him with Mark (Greg Sestero). Mark is Johnny’s best friend. We know this because Johnny, Lisa, and Mark explicitly state this dozens of times. Johnny finds out multiple times and eventually decides to freak out about it.

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Gary Oldman Shines in Darkest Hour

The biopic, Darkest Hour (directed by Joe Wright), follows Winston Churchill (Gary Oldman) through his early days as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. As the film begins, “Peace for our time” Neville Chamberlain’s (Ronald Pickup) disastrous policies have come home to roost, Hitler is threatening all of Europe, and Chamberlain is forced to resign as Prime Minister. Unpopular among his own party but considered acceptable to the Opposition, Churchill is summoned by King George VI (Ben Mendelsohn) to become the new Prime Minister.

Darkest Hour is primarily a character study of Churchill, and Oldman clearly relishes the role and fully immerses himself in it. He gives the audience an admittedly flawed Churchill, hopelessly politically incorrect by current standards, who nevertheless possesses a passionate loyalty to the British Empire and an unbreakable determination to see the British people through what seemed an almost hopeless situation at that stage of the war.

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Star Wars: The Last Jedi – Suddenly Jar Jar Binks Doesn’t Seem So bad

Star Wars: The Last Jedi achieves the near impossible task of making the wretched prequels look like beautifully written masterpieces and George Lucas’ dialogue seem brilliant. It’s unmitigated crap from the very get-go.

After the obligatory text crawl, this 152-minute agony-fest leaps right into General Hux (Domhnall Gleeson) pacing his bridge as he closes in on the Resistance base. Apparently, Mr. Gleeson thought he was in a theater-in-the-park production of The Pirates of Penzance. I expected him to burst into a rendition of “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General” at any moment. And then things started to go downhill fast.

It would take a novel to detail all this movie’s sins, so, for the sake of readability, I will limit myself to the most egregious infractions.

Adam Driver, reprising his role as Kylo Ren, once again fails to be even slightly menacing. There’s just no way to take this guy seriously as a Big Bad, no matter how many force powers he throws around. Even so, he comes off better than most by simply managing to be an actual character. No one else in the film accomplishes this. Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), Leia (the late Carrie Fisher), Finn (John Boyega), Poe (Oscar Isaac), and vapid newcomer Rose (Kelly Marie Tran) are all soulless puppets, blandly performing their assigned tasks and reciting seemingly endless speeches. Rey (Daisy Ridley), supposedly the main protagonist, is little more than a piece of uninteresting scenery. The worst failing in this department is Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis). He has zero character development and zero backstory. Without so much as a hint about who he is or where he came from, he becomes nothing more than a stock bad guy figuratively twirling his mustache and cackling as he ties Rey to the railroad tracks.

Adam Driver in Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Adam Driver in Star Wars: The Last Jedi

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Even Ebenezer Scrooge Would Like The Man Who Invented Christmas

Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol has become a staple of western Christmas celebrations. It has been the subject of countless adaptations, and even Mr. Magoo took a crack at playing the lovable old miser, Ebenezer Scrooge. The Man Who Invented Christmas spares us yet another rehash of the story and, instead, gives us the epic journey of Charles Dickens conceiving it and bringing it to life.

The film opens with Charles Dickens (Dan Stevens) conducting a triumphant tour of America. A year later, he’s back home, has had 3 flops, and is in the middle of expensive renovations to his home. In dire financial straits, Dickens embarks on the ambitious task of writing and publishing a Christmas story in time for Christmas.

Time pressures are not his only problem, though. After an argument with his publisher, he dives further into debt to pay for the publication himself. His estranged father (Jonathan Pryce) escapes from the country house to which he had been banished and returns to London to cause all kinds of havoc. And his wife (Morfydd Clark) informs him she’s pregnant. Again. Continue reading →