Tag: Hugh Jackman

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Missing Link

Lost Horizon was Frank Capra’s dream project. After the runaway success of It Happened One Night, he got Columbia Studios to bankroll the literary adaptation for $1.25 million — the largest film budget to date in 1936. It took Capra about three months to blow through that budget shooting the story of an English diplomat who crashes in the Himalayas and accidentally finds Shangri-La. When he and his crew manage to leave the sheltered valley’s utopia, ruled by a benevolent High Lama philosopher-king, and return to civilization, he finds the “real world” is not all its cracked up to be.

Missing Link, the latest film from the animation studio Laika, takes a lot of inspiration from Lost Horizon. Sir Lionel Frost (voiced by Hugh Jackman) bears a physical and attitudinal similarity to Ronald Colman, embodying all of the stuffy hubris of the late-stage British Empire. But even though he has a peerage title, Sir Frost still feels like an outsider. He wants desperately to be a member of the Explorer’s Club, one of those oak-walled institutions where great men, surrounded by taxidermied animal heads, drink brandy from snifters and brag about their deeds amid clouds of cigar smoke. Derided as a “monster hunter,” Sir Frost enters into a bet with the Explorer’s Club leader, the unsubtly named Lord Piggot Dunceby (Matt Lucas); if he can return from a trip to America with proof of the existence of the Sasquatch, he will be admitted to the fold. But when he finds the Bigfoot (Zach Galifianakis), it’s a little anti-climactic. There’s no epic battle in the wilderness, but instead a conversation with a shy, self-depreciating, and unexpectedly articulate beast. Sasquatch, who takes on the name Mister Link, is lonely, and wants Sir Frost’s help to travel to Shangri-La, where he can live among the Yeti.

There’s plenty of heart to be found in Chris Butler’s new stop-motion film, Missing Link.

Laika is an animation studio, but it doesn’t create with 3D computer animation like Pixar or Dreamworks. Created by Nike founder Phil Knight and his son Travis, and based in Oregon, Laika is hands down the best stop motion animation operation on the planet. The opening sequence of Missing Link, where Sir Lionel and his ill-tempered assistant pipe bagpipe music into the depths of Loch Ness to flush out its monstrous inhabitant, is an absolute tour de force of the painstaking, time consuming technique. We’re so inured to weightless CGI wonders that when the camera rushes in from far away and wheels around the tiny boat bobbing in the dark Scottish loch, it’s hard to believe that this is a real camera, really moving across an actual tiny landscape, built on a soundstage. Ray Harryhausen, the stop motion super genius who created the iconic alien spaceships in Earth vs. The Flying Saucers, married stop motion and live action with the skeleton battle in Jason and the Argonauts, and brought the Medusa to life in Clash of the Titans, never worked out how to move his camera like this.

Using computer-controlled rigs for complex stop motion was pioneered in the 1970s by John Dykstra in Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Laika’s productions use it as one tool in an extensive kit. The highest profile stop motion on TV is on Adult Swim’s Robot Chicken, which mostly uses it to put G.I. Joe action figures in compromising situations. The credits to Missing Link include an entire rapid prototyping and 3D printing department, used to create the character puppets. One of the highlights of a Laika production are behind-the-scenes shots in the credits where they let you in on just a little bit of their magic. In this case, it is the creation of a ride through the Indian rainforest on elephant-back by Mister Link, Sir Frost, and his ex-girlfriend Adelina Fortnight (Zoe Saldana). It’s as mind-blowing to watch the craftsmen work as it is to watch the results.

If only the other elements of Missing Link were as strong as the visuals, we’d have a masterpiece on our hands. The images are the equal of Pixar, but the scripting of Missing Link is no Toy Story. The character arcs — Sir Frost moving from self-involved colonial adventurer to empathetic explorer, Mister Link carving out a place in the world and accepting his own strangeness — are admirable in concept but dry in execution. Chris Butler’s globetrotting screenplay lacks the mythic weight of his last script for Laika, Kubo and the Two Strings. Galifianakis is a comedy heavyweight, but even he can’t salvage dad-joke exchanges like “I’m very literal. / You don’t say? / I do say!”

But for the younger members of the audience, at whom Missing Link is aimed, this is a far, far better story than say, The Angry Birds Movie, which will be getting a sequel this year. If you’re an animation fan, Missing Link‘s visual wonders deserve a viewing on the big screen.

Missing Link

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Logan

When Hugh Jackman first “snikt’ed” his Wolverine claws in 2000, his biggest accolade was an Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Musical for playing the lead role in Oklahoma! in London’s West End. Director Bryan Singer took the unknown song-and-dance man and cast him as the most popular character in Marvel Comics’ most popular comic series. Twentieth Century Fox was taking a big chance with X-Men: Three years before, the failure of Batman and Robin had brought the superhero genre to the verge of extinction. But the studio’s bet paid off, and Singer’s slick, new vision for comic-book films kicked off a boom that shows no signs of stopping any time soon.

The franchise has had its ups and downs over the years, but the best X-Men movie in a decade, 2014’s Days of Future Past, came after Jackman had left for a Wolverine solo trilogy. Today’s X-Men lack a Wolverine, and all of the original actors — Famke Janssen’s Jean Grey, Halle Berry’s Storm, James Marsden’s Cyclops, Rebecca Romijn’s Mystique, Ian McKellen’s Magneto, and Patrick Stewart’s Professor X — have been replaced. Jackman, however, has been the only onscreen Wolverine. His announcement that Logan represents his retirement from the role has been the big driving force behind the film’s $244 million opening weekend — but the fantastic word-of-mouth advertising it’s been getting obviously helped. I’m here to add to that word of mouth.

Dafne Keen and Jackman

Jackman’s got the brooding, the barely concealed inner pain, and the howls of berserker rage down to a science at this point. The safe move for Logan would have been to just pick a couple of exotic locations and another set of bad guys. Evil mutants? Did that. The military industrial complex? Done. Robots? Did that, too. Yakuza? Yep.

Instead, director James Mangold and Jackman, who is the executive producer, found a way to let Logan go out in style. Superheroes usually work with unlimited resources. Batman and Tony Stark are billionaires, Superman has a Fortress of Solitude packed with what’s left of Krypton’s technology, and Professor Xavier’s sitting on a fortune he used to build his School for Gifted Youngsters, the only prep school with an X-Jet. When Logan opens, our hero, Wolverine, is hustling for bucks as a limo driver in El Paso. It’s 2029, and it looks like Trump’s presidency has gone as badly as we fear. Among Logan’s fares are groups of drunken frat boy types who hang out of the sunroof and chant “USA” at Mexicans detained by the border wall. His first dust up is with a bunch of gangbangers trying to steal his hubcaps. When he’s forced to let the air out of a few of them, he reveals his existence to Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook), a cyborg working as head of corporate security for TransGen, a pharmaceutical company that is actually a front for Zander Rice (Richard E. Grant) to carry on the work of the Weapon X project that created Wolverine in the first place, back several movies ago. Pierce warns Logan to be on the lookout for a woman and a young girl who will ask him for help. In fact, they already have asked him for help, and he refused, because he’s trying to protect a bigger secret: He’s hiding Professor X down in Mexico. Charles Xavier is dying from a degenerative brain disease, but since his psychic brain is a weapon of mass destruction, his seizures pose a real public danger.

Logan and Professor X help the child, a refugee from the revived Weapon X program called X-23. Laura, as the nurses named her, is played by 12-year-old newcomer Dafne Keen, who looks something like a 2/3 scale model of Natalie Portman. The three mutants embark on a desperate road trip to North Dakota, where Laura can find sanctuary at a secret base called Eden.

Stripping Wolverine of his superhero trappings and putting him in charge of the dying Professor X and the volatile, mute Laura was a brilliant move. Logan has more in common with Sicario or No Country for Old Men than it does with Doctor Strange or Batman v Superman. Stewart and Jackman give a pair of brilliant performances, and Keen shows dazzling range for a girl younger than the franchise itself. The X-Men subtext has always been about the treatment of outsiders by the larger culture, and unfortunately, that maps perfectly with the story of a young Mexican girl struggling to find safety in a post-Trump America, imbuing Jackman and Stewart’s superhero swan song with an urgent relevance.

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Chappie

Like his feature debut District 9, South African director Neill Blomkamp set his new science-fiction film Chappie in his hometown of Johannesburg. To American audiences, that lends the films an air of unfamiliarity. Some characters, such as the muscle-bound gangster Hippo (Brandon Auret), speak with such thick Afrikaans accents that they require subtitling. There are plenty of familiar aspects on the screen, such as brand names and Washington’s portrait on the American dollar bill, which shows up on a memorable pair of shorts, but they are reshuffled and reused in unfamiliar ways. This is useful to Blomkamp’s world-building, as he uses his documentary-style camera work to make the South African capital look like a Mad Max post-apocalyptic dystopia without much trouble. But it can also be problematic. Watching a Blomkamp film like Chappie must be what it’s like to watch American movies translated into other languages, and one wonders what has been lost in translation.

In the film’s not-so-far-off world of 2016, the Tetravaal Corporation, led by CEO Michelle Bradley (Sigourney Weaver), has created a line of virtually indestructible humanoid robot policemen to help maintain order in lawless Johannesburg. The robots, known as scouts, have enough artificial intelligence to perform basic functions, but that’s not enough for their lead designer Deon (Dev Patel), who spends his off hours trying to develop a truly sentient A.I. that can allow his creations to make real moral choices. Meanwhile, rival designer Vincent (Hugh Jackman) is pushing his project, the MOOSE, a walking tank remotely controlled by a human operator. When Deon has a breakthrough, he asks his boss for permission to test out his new A.I. on one of the scout robots. But when she says no, he steals the broken chassis of an unlucky robot that has taken an RPG to the chest, intending to use it as a testbed.

The strangest thing about Chappie is not the titular robot, which is a seamless collaboration between Blomkamp, who began his career as a 3D CGI animator, and District 9 star Sharlto Copley, who provides the voice and motion-capture performance. It’s the supporting players Ninja and Yolandi of the South African rave-rap band Die Antwoord. Using their own names, they are essentially playing themselves — or at least, they’re playing a version of their public image, which has made them international YouTube stars. Die Antwoord takes American hip-hop culture and reflects it back at us through a funhouse mirror. Their distinctive visual style is all over Chappie, from the neon-colored assault rifles to the strangely sinister beach wear Yolandi sports through most of the film. But here, like in their music videos, it’s difficult to know exactly how seriously they take themselves. And that problem translates to the film as a whole.

Ninja and Yolandi are in hock to Hippo for 10 million Rands, and they kidnap Deon and his creation, hoping to find a way to thwart the police robots and rake in enough dough in a big heist to pay off their debts. So when Deon activates his robot, which Yolandi christens “Happy Chappie,” the first people it meets are insane gangster rappers. Needless to say, Chappie gets some pretty weird ideas about life.

As in District 9 and Elysium, Blomkamp is playing with some heady concepts. When Robbie the Robot was introduced in 1956’s Forbidden Planet, the concept of a walking, talking, reasoning humanoid robot seemed like something from the distant future; in 2015, it seems like something we’ll be dealing with sooner rather than later. Like Spike Jones’ Her, Blomkamp wonders about the ethics of creating artificial intelligence. When Chappie discovers his battery is running out, he asks Deon, “Why did you just make me so I could die?” — a question philosophers have been asking the heavens since the Book of Job.

Despite flashes of brilliance, Chappie‘s script often resembles a list of stuff that would be cool to see in a movie rather than an actual story. The obvious nods to Paul Veerhooven’s Robocop, the go-to example of how to combine satire and action, only reinforce the sense that Chappie is an intriguing near miss.

Chappie
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X-Men: Days of Future Past: Mutatis mutan(t)dis

I forgot how thrilling the X-Men movies were until the moment in Days of Future Past when a Sentinel robot shattered Iceman’s head. So I wasn’t surprised to discover that the fifth (or seventh) installment in the franchise is as casually creative and proudly pseudo-profound as its predecessors. With the exception of a few moments of lachrymose speechifying, its unrelenting, almost sadistic intensity makes it the summer’s most ruthlessly efficient blockbuster. You will be entertained. Resistance is futile.

Although I confess an irrational fondness for Brett Ratner’s X-Men: The Last Stand, bringing back two-time X-Men director Bryan Singer for Days of Future Past was a wise choice. His third entry (after the original X-Men and its first sequel) in the series satisfies serious fan expectations and respects the cinematic universe built by the previous four films. And if you don’t look too closely or think too hard, he also straightens out the previous tetralogy’s knotty timelines, gaps, and inconsistencies.

A movie this size is a big undertaking, and at times it creaks like some superhero version of It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. The army of recognizable faces in Days of Future Past is formidable: we see old and young Magneto (Ian McKellan and Michael Fassbender), old and young Professor X (Patrick Stewart and James McAvoy), new Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), old Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page), old Storm (Halle Berry), and more fresh faces and peripheral favorites. At the center of this mutant whirlwind stands Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), an immortal tough guy for whom history is a nightmare from which he cannot awaken.

In Days of Future Past, Pryde sends Wolverine’s consciousness back to the 1970s in an effort to avoid the nightmarish future the surviving mutants now live in, where they are hunted down and obliterated by the sleek, chain-mailed Sentinels. But the fight scenes are only part of the show. Singer’s film is also a poppy, propellant gloss on Jean Renoir’s famous observation from The Rules of The Game: “The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons.”

Take Magneto, whose hostility is partially rooted in his belief that fearful humans will wipe out his mutant brothers. Or take scientist and industrialist Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage). Trask believes that mutants will do the same to humans because that’s the way evolution works. And don’t forget the eternal optimist Charles Xavier, who continues to believe in human decency and human hope even when he’s a drug-addled, powerless version of his former self. Each of them is, at some point in the film, doing the right thing.

Although its most fully realized set piece is a funny slow-motion musical interlude inspired by the 2006 animated film Over The Hedge, Days of Future Past is the most serious film in the X-Men cosmology. There’s not much time for verbal grace notes, but there are plenty of visual ones, from Wolverine’s gray-streaked temples to an army of Sentinels spreading out over a stormy sky like skydiver-shaped warheads. It traduces history because its whole premise is that history is changeable bunk, and for a global $300 million smash hit, it gets awfully dark before the dawn. Good stuff.