Double Feature: 'The Butler' and 'Insidious: Chapter 2'

Yeah, yeah, it's two consecutive reviews. Getting back on schedule has been more difficult than I had anticipated, and I'm still catching up. It doesn't help that Hollywood is releasing more wide-released titles per week than I'm currently able to keep up with, And so I'm finally getting around to two older, important films this week in Lee Daniels' The Butler and James Wan's Insidious: Chapter 2.

"You hear nothing. You see nothing. You only serve." If Cecil Gaines (loosely based on real-life Eugene Allen) had heeded that statement, we likely would never have gotten The Butler, which tracks the rise of Civil Rights from the antebellum south until the modern day, from the point of view of a longtime White House server. Featuring an ensemble cast and a story (and director) tailor-made for African-American audiences, it's obvious that this film is expressly geared towards the moviegoers that made The Help such a hit just two years ago.

Bowties are cool, now.

The Butler might not possess The Help's overall sense of charm, but it does have quite a bit going for it. The cast is largely excellent, headlined by the "Forrest Gump meets Bubba Blue" lead performance of Forest Whitaker (that comparison might normally be a complaint but it works here), but also by the bevy of talents -including James Marsden, John Cusack and Alan Rickman - as various US Presidents. The Butler presents a very unique perspective of the inner machinations in the White House, and some of the highlights involve Cecil being present (and in true fashion, completely ignored) as decisions are being made that affect worldwide events. The story, though long and at times overly familiar, does pull itself together in the final act, justifying every scene that one might originally have thought to cut.

Yes, that's Oprah. No, she doesn't deserve an award.

It's just a shame that not everything works. The Gaines family becomes representative of the Black American family, from losing a child to Vietnam to being the victims of looting and violence, but the fact of the matter is that Cecil Gaines is the least-interesting character in this tale. That's not a knock against Whitaker's performance, which does its absolute best to save the character from cliche hell, but with the screenplay, penned by a perhaps overly-reverent Danny Strong. Too much narration and too little to do means that we're far more interested in anything else happening. My favorite scene did not involve Cecil at all - it was a conversation between his sons - played by David Oyelowo (an amazing actor no matter his limited screentime) and Elijah Kelley - that I thought stole the entire movie. There aren't enough quiet scenes like this, with the scene so focused on the talents of the actors and nothing else. Speaking of which, Oprah Winfrey - in her highly-touted return to the big screen - is also not given nearly enough to do. Despite being a central character, and despite being involved in several sub-plots, Winfrey is often just shown as a typical dissatisfied housewife, complete with all the usual tropes, a big name wasted in a do-nothing role.

In Django: Unleashed they would now fight to the death.

The Butler's biggest problem is an unexpected one; at just over two hours, it's actually too SHORT for the tale it tries to impart, or at least for Daniels (an overrated filmmaker at present) to capitalize on fully. A miniseries on the same topic would have been a better fit (say, an hour dedicated to working for each President between Eisenhower and Reagan?), and allowed the amazing cast and the worthy story the time it needed to grow. Many people are talking about The Butler being up for awards this winter. I don't know about all that (MAYBE nominations for Whitaker and Oyelowo), but I do recognize some of the merits of their argument. Flawed as it is, there's a lot to like in this ensemble piece. I just don't think it's good enough to not wait for the DVD.

Insidious: Chapter 2 is also trying to reap the benefits of a predecessor from 2011, in this case the excellent supernatural horror film Insidious. Taking place immediately after that modern classic ended, Chapter 2 picks up with the newly-reunited Lambert family trying to recover from the events that had almost stolen their eldest son Dalton's (Iron Man 3's Ty Simpkins) soul from his body. Despite thinking they are safe from the malevolent spirits that had haunted them, the family begins to experience even more unexplainable occurrences, as a new threat begins to emerge. Soon, Renai (Rose Byrne) begins to suspect that the ghosts have a new plan for capturing her son's soul... and that her husband Josh (Patrick Wilson) did not come back from his trip to the spirit world without a malevolent monkey on his shoulder.

Maybe I'm just comparing Insidious: Chapter 2 to its progenitor, but I can't help but be a little disappointed in this sequel. The acting certainly is not the problem, as Wilson and Byrne are the same talented, under-appreciated actors who broke out back in 2011. And Simpkins, given a little more to do, was solid enough. Returning actors Barbara Hershey and Lin Shaye, as well as newcomer Steve Coulter, are wonderful performers, though they're given a bit too much to do, relatively speaking. (side note: one character runs off to spend a day and a half on an investigation... LEAVING HER FAMILY TO DIE) The film successfully manages to copy the tension and scare tactics of the original, thanks to James Wan's direction and horror experience, as he's already proven in this year's The Conjuring.

Hi, you're home! How was your night out? I was just putting the kid down!

Unfortunately, that's about all that is good here. As I mentioned before, the side character are not just given more to do, but TOO MUCH. Part of the first movie's charm was its focus on the trials of beleaguered parents Renai and Josh, but here they are sidelined for most of the film while others go off on frightening scavenger hunts. Also, while the atmosphere is amazing, the specific scares feel recycled, and there's nothing that matches the turntable playing "Tiptoe Through the Tulips" from the first film. The opening twenty minutes, which serve as a minor prequel and setup to the current story, feels like an afterthought, so horrible are the dialogue and the acting. Some of the jump scares work, but it's all less subtle than I remember from the original, and reeks of rushed script-writing by co-star Leigh Whannell. It's obvious that they were trying to pump out a low-budget sequel to a bona fide hit, and the story suffered from the haste.

He just read the script.

In the end, Chapter 2 has its moments, but doesn't match the overall brilliance of its predecessor. While I enjoyed how Wan tied everything together between the two films and the seemingly disparate plot threads throughout, it's not enough for fans of old-fashioned horror. If you really want to see a creepy, dark and sometimes unintentionally funny, scary movie, then a rental of the first Insidious should be MORE than enough to whet your appetite. The sequel is unfortunately a cobbled-together rush job, unworthy of the name it inherited, and MAYBE you can go ahead and see it on DVD if you REALLY want.

Open Letters Monthly: Jack Reacher

Sometimes what you really need to get through the day is a mindless action flick that doesn't challenge you but still leaves you feeling fulfilled. Thankfully, Tom Cruise has been pumping these types of movies out regularly since his early acting days, and his latest, Jack Reacher, might be just the thing to see if you're not interested in uber-violent revenge tales or Parisian musicals.

When a former Army sniper is arrested and accused of murdering five innocent people in a public park, he is asked to confess. Instead, he insists that it was not him and tells them one thing: "Get Jack Reacher." Reacher is a former Military Policeman with a killer investigative mind. When he puts the pieces together, he realizes that the arrested man has been framed, and starts to ask question and break skulls until things start to make sense. But a shadow group doesn't want him finding the truth, and soon target the unstoppable Reacher with a vengeance.

Jack Reacher is directed by Christopher McQuarrie and stars Tom Cruise, Rosamund Pike, Richard Jenkins, Werner Herzog, David Oyelowo and Robert Duvall.

Click here for the full review at Open Letters Monthly.

War Games

Well, it’s finally here. After twenty-three years, George Lucas has at last released Red Tails, his film celebrating the Tuskegee Airmen, a squadron of all-black fighter pilots who flew over Europe in World War II and are relative unknown in this day and age. In a recent interview on John Stewart’s The Daily Show, Lucas (who is credited as the film’s executive producer) revealed that in fact the reason it took so long to make Red Tails was in fact due to the fact that major movie studios balked at financing it, not knowing how to promote the title to an overseas audience, from which a movie will make about sixty percent of its profit. After so long a time, it’s remarkable that it was finally made, but is it true? Is a film like Red Tails not as marketable when other war films can all but walk away with guaranteed grosses? It wasn’t all that long ago that Saving Private Ryan and Pearl Harbor came in and capitalized on major WWII pride to the tune of a combined $400 million. Saving Private Ryan especially has resonated, to the tune of eleven Academy Award nominations, including a Best Director award for Steven Spielberg. But did those films deserve that level of appreciation, and is there really that much difference between Red Tails and the enjoyable but far overrated Ryan?

Oh, yeah, he's a star

 

Well, one difference would be each film’s plots. While Saving Private Ryan focused on an obscure war rule to set up a tale of men versus long odds, Red Tails by comparison has a far more important tale, that of an all-black fighter squadron who undergo discrimination in the air and back home, where racism keeps the pilots far from the front lines. The best these beleaguered pilots can hope for is to mop up where white units have already stopped patrolling. Their commanding officer, Colonel Bullard (Terrence Howard), has been hard lobbying for the unit to have a more active role in the war in Europe, and that has finally paid off when bomber squadrons need escorts to protect them in delivering payloads deep into Nazi-occupied Germany. Fighting through a sky full of Luftwaffe and preconceptions about their abilities, the pilots manage to prove their ability to both themselves and the rest of two opposing armies certain they will fail.

Here they are; recognize any of them?

 

There’s not a whole lot of difference outside the general story however.  As a director, Anthony Hemingway has nothing akin to the experience that Spielberg had before Ryan was released in 1998. Hemingway, who has directed episodes of cable shows Battlestar Galactica, The Wire and Treme, has never before directed a major motion picture, and that is readily apparent when you stand back and watch him in action. While competently done, the story gets bogged down by cliches that are as natural to a war film as guns, bullets and death. Nobody likes to mention how many of those cliches made their way into Spielberg’s release however, and for a war film the stock characters, obvious plot lines, predictable outcomes and nick-of-time rescues are no more prevalent in Red Tails than any major WWII title of the past two decades. Hemingway’s work on The Wire and Treme also means he’s used to working with a black cast, several of whom he worked with on those two shows. Say what you want about George Lucas, but he knew enough that he couldn’t get the job done in the director's chair in the same way that Hemingway would.

The best pilots you've never heard of

What the characters may lack in depth, they make up for in exuberance from the film’s acting corps. Terrence Howard is the unrivaled star of the film, despite the fact that he doesn’t once enter the cockpit of a P-51 fighter. When Howard enters the room, he demands attention, and when Colonel Bullard tells a racist superior officer that he and his men don’t care what he thinks, the entire audience rallies behind him. Despite his singular acting strengths, it’s the pilots who are the focus of the story, and fortunately most of them are very good actors deserving of their shot at prime time here. David Oyelowo had a good 2011 with American audiences, with supporting roles in The Help and Rise of the Planet of the Apes, two very good films that showed his flexibility as a performer. Here he’s a cocky fighter jockey who look for trouble and love in equal doses. Other standouts include Nate Parker as an alcoholic flight leader with daddy issues, The Wire and 90210’s Tristan Wilds as a young pilot desperate to prove himself, and Andre Royo as a cantankerous mechanic. Even while most of the others are not especially detailed characters, the sheer joy the actors take with them on the set is infectious and translates to a strong communal personality that overrides the inability to sometimes tell the secondary pilots apart. Not that there aren’t disappointments, especially Cuba Gooding Jr. as Bullard’s second in command, who has a few too many scenes and gets overshadowed by the talent of just about everyone else.

Ooh, that's going to hurt

 

An unfortunate side effect to making a movie about WWII in this day and age is that it’s usually cheaper to create all the action in CGI than the old methods, which usually involved building replica machines of what was actually used at the time. So instead of rebuilding a squadron of P-51 fighters and dozens of B-19 bombers to shoot aerial dogfights, not to mention dozens of German fighter planes, the entirety of sky battles are fought in a computer program. While the visuals themselves are beautiful and chaotic in their execution, they do sometimes feel a little off, especially when a plane is shot down. It’s a little disappointing when you look at some of the best special effects of the past few years, but considering that Red Tails has a much lower budget than most of those special effects juggernauts, what they do show is really not all that bad.

I may not know how to pronounce his name, but Oyelowo deserves to be a star

 

So what is the real difference between Red Tails and other war movies? On the surface, the all-black cast is definitely unique for a major motion picture. If it does well that would certainly separate it from Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna, another movie about a segregated WWII unit that was a box office bomb and a main argument against these variety of films. Other than the color of the actors’ skins, however, there is absolutely no reason to go to any other WWII film over Red Tails. While this is by no means a GREAT film, it is an enjoyable one, and doubtlessly an IMPORTANT one to see on the big screen. There’s no reason Saving Private Ryan can make over $200 million all by itself and be so lauded, just for similar movies like Red Tails to be so ignored by audiences. There are few enough minority stars in this business that when such a concentrated effort is made to put them forward, especially in such a strong manner, it says a lot about us when we don’t bother to support it. Don’t make that mistake now. See Red Tails when you can. Even if it’s no more than an enjoyable action movie, that should be reason enough to want to see it.

For now at least, it's the #1 film of 2012.

Rising Tides

There is a moment at about the three-quarters mark of Rise of the Planet of the Apes in which you will be so shocked and moved that you might think you're witnessing one of 2011's best cinema creations, if not Hollywood history's. This is a fleeting moment at best, and while most of this title is indeed an impressive production (and definitely much better than one would expect) this is one of a very few aspects of the film that match that feeling of wonder. As you can imagine, I was among those unimpressed by the idea of yet another Apes film, with the franchise seemingly gone completely overboard with Tim Burton's critically panned remake of the iconic original just ten years ago. A prequel that takes place during the modern day, everything was in place for me to hate this latest entry to the franchise: obvious computer digital effects, a cliched "good science gone bad" plot, and starring roles held by mediocre performers. These things usually add up to mediocre summer fare, but one thing I hadn't counted on was the talent of greenhorn director Rupert Wyatt. The English native made his directorial debut in the 2008 Sundance entry The Escapist, and while not many people actually saw that film (its box office gross tallies around $13,000) it was enough to catch the eyes of producers, who put him in charge of what can only be described as a major opportunity for one so inexperienced.

How many times have I told you NOT to leave the biological hazards within reach of the chimpanzees!?

Will Rodman (James Franco) is a dedicated man, scientist and son. With the intent of curing his father's Alzheimer's and restoring him to his former brilliance, Will has been working for years on a cure to this most confounding disease, only to endure a recent crop of animal testing that carries particularly tragic results. Long story short, Will's reputation is ruined, and he finds himself in possession of a baby chimpanzee whom he calls Caesar. Caesar was the son of one of Will's lab apes, and surprisingly takes on the characteristics of Will's experimental cure, beginning to display signs of increased intelligence, beginning with advanced puzzle-solving and sign language. Any fan of science fiction can tell you exactly where this is going, but the fun part is seeing how Caesar goes from domesticated chimp to battling ape leader.

He's wishing he hadn't waited the extra day to call the exterminator

While the human side of the story is rather lackluster and without an original thought, where the film really stands out is when the story is told from Caesar's point of view. While of course most of the main ape characters are computer generated, this does not turn out to be the problem it had seemed to be in previews. For one, the computer generated models actually allow you to easily identify a major character from the bulk of the ape horde. While these images look less than stellar on paper or still photos, the realistic movement makes more than enough amends for that slight flaw. The motion-capture work done to render the chimps is also amazing, thanks especially to Andy Serkis. Serkis' great work on films like King Kong and the Lord of the Rings trilogy will likely become the definition of his career, and his motion-capture work here is amongst the best I've seen since his rendition of Gollum. It's thanks to him that the ape storyline does so exceptionally well, and that's a good thing because without it, Rise wouldn't be much of the experience it turns out to be.

I seem to remember having more hair in my baby pictures...

If only that pesky human element didn't get in the way so much. James Franco is among my least favorite actors, having shown no inclination to live up those early James Dean comparisons. Here he once again squanders opportunity, with his rat-like appearance leading far too much of the film with his shoddy performance and complete lack of character. He's just the everyman who you're supposed to root for because he's familiar, rather than actually doing anything worth cheering. Slightly better is Freida Pinto as Will's beautiful and brilliant girlfriend who also happens to be a veterinarian. Essentially, her character has no depth beyond being the film's conscience, and she doesn't even do that particularly well. Better are some of the supporting characters played by David Oyelowo, Brian Cox and John Lithgow, but none of them are really used to their full potential. Perhaps it was meant that the animals are the heroes of this film, but those pesky humans couldn't have been worse off than the way this story left them.

I think we all know what comes next...

Most remarkable is the film's ability to feel like an allegory to human slavery, with chimpanzees kidnapped from their native jungles via violent means, transported across oceans for the whims of the white man, oppressed and caged against their will and disposed of when they prove troublesome. Caesar undergoes another familiar theme as he is at one point transferred from the "kind" solitude of living with Will and his father to the more ruthless animal sanctuary where he is abused by his gaolers and fellow apes. As I watch this, I'm reminded of Alex Haley's Roots and that book's remarkable story of slaves in the American South. It would be easy to compare the stories in Roots to what is presented here, and the fact that I can do so comprehensively is difficult to fathom when you consider how the work presented is from such a young director. I'm not certain where Wyatt got his inspiration, but he manages to let us perfectly follow entire scenes and sections of film where no dialogue is included and not be remotely confused by what we witness.

James... he's already a bigger star than you'll ever be

That directorial talent is what lands Rise of the Planet of the Apes at #9 for 2011. While the human characters could have been all but ignored without detriment to the plot, it is the story involving Caesar and his apes that makes this title the near-masterpiece it is. It's far better than you could have ever expected, and may qualify as 2011's biggest surprise. No, it's not perfect and will likely finish up the year outside the Top 10, yet this is probably the best Apes film since the 1968 original, and possibly even better than that Charleton Heston classic. No, I can't believe I'm recommending this title to you either, but the fact that I am means hat any inclination you might have had to see this in the theater must be followed. You'll never really appreciate what comes around three-fourths of the way in otherwise.