2016: A Year in Reviews

10 CLOVERFIELD LANE

★★★★

103 minutes

Starring: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, John Goodman, John Gallagher, Jr.

Director: Dan Trachtenberg

One of the most fascinating characters on the J.J. Abrams-produced series Lost was Desmond Hume, a man who had spent a 3-year portion of his life living underground in a bunker filled with ‘60s technology, hoodwinked by a man who convinced Desmond he’d saved him from a epidemic and that to leave would be to expose himself to a deadly plague. The two-hour episode that showed his whole ordeal in flashback is considered by many to be not just one of the best episodes of the show but of modern broadcast television.

The fact that J.J. Abrams wasn’t involved in the creation of 10 Cloverfield Lane (which was originally titled The Cellar, until Abrams changed the title to juxtapose it with his 2008 monster movie, Cloverfield) makes this a fascinating case of full-circle art, as the movie is, for the most part, that very same two-hour episode of Lost. But while Lost had to keep itself open to more seasons of possibilities, 10 Cloverfield Lane is free to aim for the sky and reach as high as they dare.

While the story may be familiar, the characters here change everything. As we meet Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), she’s fleeing her old life (and fiancé). The opening credits play over the startlingly sudden car accident she finds herself in. Five minutes into the movie, Michelle awakens in a concrete room, attached to an IV bag and the wall, seemingly the victim of a caregiver who watched Misery one too many times.

That caregiver is Howard (John Goodman). As the opening act unfolds, the quite-possibly-crazy, quite-definitely-unstable Howard explains to Michelle there has been a worldwide catastrophe that’s wiped out the rest of the population. The only survivors are Michelle, Howard — who built the bunker they’re in and rescued Michelle on his frantic drive home to get safely underground — and Emmett (John Gallagher, Jr.).

Emmett is a local contractor who helped Howard built the bunker back in the Y2K days and confides to Michelle that he witnessed the explosion that lit up the entire sky beyond the horizon, which made him race to Howard’s and fight his way inside just as Howard was arriving to do the same.

Michelle doesn’t believe a word of it. At first.

The setup is pretty flawless, but what keeps the thriller from becoming stale are the performances. As Michelle grapples with her situation and conceives of every possible future between escaping into a normal world and living out the half-life of a nuclear attack underground with two strangers, so much is expressed just through a movement of Winstead’s eyes. And Gallagher, Jr. makes Emmett a sympathetic, naïve fool, too quick to believe everything Howard says until Michelle begins asking him questions he never pondered.

Goodman’s acting is the one to come for, though. He gives a loudly powerful performance, commanding the screen with an authoritative anger he hasn’t tapped into since The Big Lebowski, but with none of Walter Sobchak’s dimwittedness. He makes Howard an incredibly formidable and inscrutable figure, always half a step ahead of or behind Michelle. The bulk of the movie is spent determining whether Howard is a malicious kidnapper, a conspiracy nut who’s snapped, a true saviour of Emmett and Michelle, or some combination thereof.

While the performances are wonderful, they disguise how disappointingly simple the characters are. Any characters’ backgrounds that are provided come about through delayed exposition — which, admittedly, is a staple of mysteries – but by asking audiences to accept and follow characters that are initially question marks, there’s a tacit understanding that a movie will eventually give you the information it’s withholding.

The large problem with 10 Cloverfield Lane is that it asks so many misdirecting questions and has so many red herrings, it can’t find enough narrative time to answer or explain them all. And in 10 Cloverfield Lane’s case, some of those red herrings — including an unseen character repeatedly talked about that is the indirect cause of numerous later turns of the plot — are so fascinating, it’s a real disappointment to not get any resolution to those parts of the story.

10 Cloverfield Lane, for the record, is not a direct sequel to Cloverfield. If you go in anticipating another kajiu movie, you’ll find yourself disappointed. It’s no more related to Cloverfield than Prometheus is to Alien or than Kevin Smith’s first five movies are to each other — which is to say, tangentially at best.

No, the movie it feels more like the true successor of a different movie from the ‘00s: M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs. Whatever your thoughts on the love-it-or-hate-it climax/ending, it’s hard to argue that the first two-thirds are a brilliantly ratcheted thriller. People’s issues with the Signs are generally dissatisfaction with where the story went once it finally took its biggest leap of faith and spilled its beans in the third act, which shouldn’t negate how good the rest was.

The same goes for 10 Cloverfield Lane. One way or another, it’s hard to not adore the skill and talent on display in front of and behind the camera in the first two acts. Once the final act arrives and you get answers to (some of) the questions that have been plaguing you all movie, your enjoyment will be dictated entirely by whether you appreciate the gutsiness of the filmmakers to see their story through to an ending that’s as daringly unexpected as what came before. Of course, if you’re already a fan of J.J. Abrams or Cloverfield, appreciation of the daringly unexpected is really an assumed pre-requisite.

(March 12, 2016)

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ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

★★

112 minutes

Starring: Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Sasha Baron Cohen, Anne Hathaway

Director: James Bobin

It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. –William Shakespeare

When the Bard wrote those words in the last act of Macbeth, he was describing life itself, but it tends to be quite apt when it comes to movies that put all their attention on technical details and dazzling effects at the expense of story and characters.

2010’s Alice in Wonderland, directed by Tim Burton, was already very guilty of that descriptor, but its sequel, Alice Through the Looking Glass, is even more visually spectacular and even more devoid of any substance.

Since Alice’s (Mia Wasikowska) return from Underland in the first movie (which was, despite its misleading title, not a literal adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland but rather a sequel to an adaptation that never existed, similarly to Hook), she has become a ship captain. In the immediately gripping opening sequence, her ingenuity and refusal to accept the impossible saves her ship from destruction.

Once in port, however, she discovers her jilted ex-fiancé, Hamish (Leo Bill), has childishly taken control of her mother’s house and will only sell it back in exchange for Alice giving up her ship and coming to work for him as a secretary.

As Alice storms off to fume about the situation and decide what to do, she discovers a mirror that takes her back to Underland, where she finds all the surviving minor characters of the first movie conveniently waiting. They need her help to save the Mad Hatter (Depp), who’s dying from an unintelligible impossibility of sorts involving his dead family.

Because Alice’s journey requires her travelling to the past, she finds herself negotiating with Time (Sacha Baron Cohen), a mechanical man conveniently in love with the macrocephalic Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter).

Once Alice absconds with the narrative device that allows her to fly through time, Alice Through the Looking Glass just bounces from random (visually stunning) scene to another, killing time — no pun intended — with mind-numbingly beautiful CGI until, after an aimless 45 minutes or so, it stumbles into a final act almost in spite of itself. The climax works, but solely because it’s the only scene that has anything to do with the bare essence of a story the film established at the start.

With Burton exiting after the first movie, director James Bobin (The Muppets, Muppets Most Wanted) steps in, but is unsuited for the task. Bobin’s sensibilities are too PG; as faulty as 2010’s Alice in Wonderland was, at least Burton brought some semblance of an edge to the proceedings.

Trying his best to imitate Burton, Bobin succeeds in creating a feast for the eyes, but he also takes the wrong lessons from original’s weak script. There’s no coherence to the meandering picture, with many scenes being interchangeable at no cost to the final picture. If there’s a positive to the story this time, it’s that despite the fact the Mad Hatter is treated as disproportionately important again, he’s at least not shoehorned into every scene this time.

Alice Through the Looking Glass is toothless, a sequel that makes the PG-rated original looking downright threatening. For all its dialogue about being unafraid to stand out, the movie insists on smoothing every rough edge of its universe, going so far as to include several flashback to the Red Queen’s youth, just so you can understand why she became so heartless (because that worked so well in 2000’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas).

This is also the final movie Alan Rickman participated in before passing away earlier this year, providing the voice for Amsalem the butterfly. For an acting titan who appeared in so many cinematic greats (even before he joined the biggest series of the last quarter-century), it’s disappointing this is the movie that will forever be his last. Thankfully, his character has the good sense to flutter away shortly after Alice Through the Looking Glass begins, leaving your memory free to mostly forget he even took part. Call it his final Memory Charm.

(May 27, 2016)

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ARRIVAL

★★★★★

116 minutes

Starring: Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whittaker

Director: Denis Villeneuve

The last three autumns gave us the sci-fi masterpieces Gravity, Interstellar, and The Martian. While December’s Jennifer Lawrence/Chris Pratt-starring Passengers has gotten more buzz online, the heir apparent in tone has seemed like it would be Arrival.

On the surface, Arrival tells the tale of what it might be like if we make first contact with an alien species. Below that exterior of entertainment, though, the latest piece of cinematic wonder from director Denis Villeneuve also examines what it means to be a self-conscious being, while still finding time for visuals that will linger in your memory.

Linguistics professor Louise (Amy Adams) leads an isolated life, teaching students who don’t really care. When a dozen almond-shaped spacecraft appear at seemingly random spots on the globe, Louise is approached by a US Army colonel (Forest Whittaker)