Burnt

Released:  October 30^th, 2015

Rated:  R

Distributor:  The Weinstein Company

Starring:  Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller, Omar Sy, Daniel Brühl, Matthew Rhys, Alicia Vikander, Emma Thompson

Directed by:  John Wells

Written by:  Steven Knight

Personal Bias Alert:  likes Bradley Cooper, not a foodie

4.2 of 10

            Oh crap, a pun-ready title.  That encourages a hard stance, a snappy line that sums up the film in forty characters or less.  Too bad Burnt is messier than that, getting a bushel of things right and a peck of things wrong.  I’d be so easy to tell you all a funny yea or nay, but you’ll be better served by the honest breakdown that follows.  Still, the puns must go on, so here’s my effort:  The end result of Burnt is really more of a singe, luring you in with a solid couple only to give you a painful nip from the half-baked story.

            Still here?  Excellent, because it’s time to get to the good stuff:  Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller, and all of the cast, really.  This is a film filled with people you’ll recognize but may not be able to place, and you’ll know them because they’re as solid a group of actors as you can get.  Obviously, everyone will know Cooper and Emma Thompson, and many will have gotten familiar with Alicia Vikander, but the rest are a hodgepodge of people who’ve been kicking around the international market for a decade plus.  They aren’t ones to phone in a performance, so even when this material falters, they’re able to pick it up and carry it to the finish line.

            And the material falters quite often, taking an overdone premise (asshole genius fighting his way back to the top) and adding an equally overdone twist by placing it in a small subset of society (high-end cooking).  If you dress up this outline correctly, people think it’s a modern masterpiece, but if you get it wrong, it becomes a groan-inducing bore.  Unfortunately, Burnt falls into the latter category, failing to make the world of chefs engaging or to make its antihero remotely likable.

            The film starts out on the wrong foot in the second category, showing Cooper’s Adam Jones shucking oysters until he hits the magical number of one million.  The instant he’s hit this, he takes a satisfied breath and walks out of the hole-in-the-wall restaurant he’s in, much to the consternation of his employers.  This is meant to play as a moment of redemption, a completion of penance for the wrongs he has done, but by walking away mid-shift, he proves that his time away hasn’t really changed him at all.  If this was simply a jumping-off point it would be a forgivable opening, but the character remains this way throughout most of the film, much to the annoyance of everyone around him, including the audience.  Cooper tries to play up his charm, but the character simply isn’t given any redeeming qualities except that he can allegedly cook well.  This, however, doesn’t engender any sympathy for the character because an understanding and love of cooking is never conveyed to the audience.  Director John Wells and cinematographer Adriano Goldman try to sell the cooking with some energetic montages of Cooper and company experimenting and working the service line, and while these scenes are visually stimulating, it doesn’t actually explain what the hell they’re doing.  The script tries to have the characters wax poetic about it with some clunker lines that are far too overwritten to be powerful, and in the end the cooking comes off as nothing more than a generic thing that all of the characters happen to be doing.  Given that this is a film about an obsessed antihero, the inability to empathize with his obsession is a massive hindrance.

            It’s actually the B-plot, a cliché-ridden romance between Cooper’s Adam and Miller’s Helene that works the best.  She’s a recruit to his new restaurant, and they allegedly bond over they’re passion and skill for cooking.  Again, the failure to explain the cooking hinders this romance on the page, but Cooper and Miller have enough chemistry to make it work on the screen.  Their scenes have an easiness to them that the rest of the film lacks, and for brief moments, you’re actually able to like both of them.  Unfortunately, this is the B-plot, and after a brief moment in the sun during the middle portion of the film, it fades behind the doldrums of kitchen life.

            You’re enjoyment of this movie will really come down to how much mileage you get out of a charming romance and how many clichés you can stomach.  If you’re driven insane by seeing the same movie plots over and over again, then Burnt will be rather unpalatable.  But if you go into it looking for an innocuous romance, then Cooper and Miller will take you on a satisfying little trip.

Other Notes:

Ø  If you want to feel something when you watch people eat, go watch I Am Love.

Ø  The costume design for this film was remarkably dull.  The guys rarely got out of their fitted leather jackets.

Ø  So are cooks really evaluated by a tire company?

Aloha

Released:  May 29^th, 2015

Rated:  PG-13

Distributor:  Sony Pictures

Starring:  Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, Rachel McAdams, Bill Murray, John Krasinski, Danny McBride, Alec Baldwin

Directed by:  Cameron Crowe

Written by:  Cameron Crowe

Personal Bias Alert:  huge Almost Famous fan, didn’t think Aloha could be as bad as people were saying

3 of 10

            There’s a certain fascination that overcomes you when watching this big of a train wreck.  It’s not so much a question of how it happened; movies are big, complicated beasts that can go wrong in more ways than you can count, but there is a sense of wonderment about how the film before you got released.  Someone, somewhere sat back after watching it, locked down the edit, and sent it out as a finished product to their bosses and to the world.  The shame and trepidation that must have enveloped them before hitting that send key had to be overwhelming, because no one can look at the final cut of Aloha and see a competent film.

            Competent, mind you, is a very low bar.  I’m talking about something that has a coherent plot and characters paired with an audio and visual presentation that isn’t off-putting.  That’s bare minimum of what a film should be, and Aloha manages to fail at three of these four things.  The first half is such chaos that it’s sort of stunning because you know the people in front of and behind the camera, can tell that they aren’t phoning it in, and it’s still a complete mess.  The film jumps around without any idea of where it’s going, the characters don’t have clear goals, the dialogue is, at times, nonsensical, the shot composition is occasionally ugly, and there’s jarring edits that interrupt any flow that the film manages to start.  The back half settles into something approaching coherence and gives you hints about what the film was supposed to be about, but irreparable damage has been done and you no longer care.

            What I think the film was supposed to be about is Brian Gilcrest’s (Bradley Cooper) struggle for morality.  As the opening narration explains, he once dreamed of going to space, but circumstances far from his control caused his aspirations to become mired in the dirty business of earning his spot.  After a failure and a long recovery, he returns to Hawaii for a chance to get his life back on some sort of track, and whether he chooses the right or wrong direction seems to be the film’s largest question.  Complicating matters is the love triangle between himself, a serious ex-girlfriend (Rachel McAdams), and his young, overly perky military liaison (Emma Stone).  Setting a story like this in Hawaii and steeping it in U.S. military and native Hawaiian culture is actually kind of genius as the relatively short battle between these two groups have gone down as one of the most corrupt and bullying engagements the U.S. has ever embarked upon (I recommend Sarah Vowell’s Unfamiliar Fishes for an entertaining history lesson).  If put together correctly, this could’ve been a rich film about a man and a country’s struggle to achieve noble aspirations in spite of their old, dishonorable habits.

            Unfortunately, Aloha doesn’t cobble this message together until late in the film, and even then it remains murky.  This is one of the films that got caught up in the Sony hacking incident late last year, with reports surfacing that the film was a mess and had to undergo extensive re-edits.  How bad it actually was to begin with isn’t currently known, but whatever edits they did make certainly didn’t improve it.  The final cut is so nonsensical that entire conversations have no meaning and have nothing to do with what happened in the scene before.  It’s as if they hired someone with brain damage, one of those unfortunate people who can’t remember things for more than 30 seconds, and paid them to edit the film.  Someone like that would probably like Aloha, because for all its shortcomings the cast is still likable and Hawaii is still beautiful.  On a moment to moment basis, the character’s arguments and motivations might make sense and the occasional horrendous shot could be quickly forgotten.  But most of us do have long-term memory, and Aloha is a film that will stay in there for all the wrong reasons.

Other Notes:

Ø  The opening credits roll over two entirely different setups.  One is a music montage over images of Hawaiian culture while the other is Bradley Cooper narrating his character’s background.  Neither go together and the transition between the two is abrupt.  It’s like they had two ideas for how to open the film and couldn’t decide which to go with, so they went halfsies in such a way that everyone lost instead of won.

Ø  The romance doesn’t work.  I have no clue if that’s due to the awful edit or a lack of chemistry.  Your guess is as good as mine.

Ø  I don’t think this film is guilty of whitewashing Hawaiian culture, but Emma Stone’s character is certainly whitewashed.  I still love Emma Stone, though.

American Sniper

Released:  December 25^th, 2014

Rated:  R

Distributor:  Warner Bros.

Starring:  Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller

Directed by:  Clint Eastwood

Written by:  Jason Hall

Personal Bias Alert:  likes war movies, wary of jingoism

7.2 of 10

            After playing in New York City, Los Angeles, and Dallas for three weeks, American Sniper has finally hit theaters nationwide.  I assume this stall was to avoid competing with Unbroken, whose success seems only to have revved up anticipation for Sniper.  It’s expected to do boffo business in its opening weekend, breaking the box office record for January and giving quality-starved movie fans a bit of relief.

            Following the military career of the most lethal sniper in American history, Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper), the film could have gone a few different ways.  It could’ve been a gritty, realistic portrayal of modern warfare, a jingoist celebration of a dedicated SEAL, or a character study of an inevitably haunted man.  Director Clint Eastwood went with a mixture of the former and the latter, delivering a solid, albeit simple story of a uniquely horrific war and the toll it took on one of its most successful combatants.

            The movie thrives in the battlefields of Iraq, where Kyle seems the most sure of himself and, oddly, the most comfortable.  Little time is spent outside of the missions, giving viewers a taste of how all-encompassing the job must’ve seemed.  The actual war sequences, which range from stationary sniper missions, home infiltrations, and street-careening Humvee deployments, are well-executed, ratcheting up the intensity in deceptively different ways without devolving into character-less set pieces.  If Kyle truly was as obsessed with his duties as this movie portrays, then American Sniper does an excellent job of establishing why he might’ve felt that way.

            Cooper, who’s been with the project since its inception, is the other big plus here.  He’s clearly very comfortable with the material and delivers the emotions in a tamped-down way that rings true for a Navy SEAL.  Really, his eyes are the most striking thing about his performance.  They fade as the movie wears on, losing the twinkle we’ve come to expect from the lively star.  By the end, he’s a weighed-down man, one who perhaps better understands the impact of his decisions and makes them more cautiously.  Kyle never was and never becomes a complicated man (he loves his wife, his country, and Texas), but that doesn’t mean he was lacking in regrets.

            Giving viewers this focused portrait of Kyle was surely difficult, but it doesn’t excuse the lack of attention given to the rest of the story.  Nearly everyone else who appears is a stock character, with his wife played by Sienna Miller being the only one to get any extra treatment.  Still, she’s nothing more than Kyle’s wife and mother of his children, and she gets stuck in many of the clunky PTSD scenes that could’ve been ripped from a TV movie.  That’s disappointing, especially after their meet-cute at a bar was handled so well by both Miller and Cooper.

            Really, everything that takes place outside of Iraq is lazily handled.  Plotlines are dropped and never heard from again, points are made through obvious exposition, and the ending happens far too fast.  This is a film that takes its time depicting war but rushes everything else.  Yes, there’s time constraints to take into consideration, but there are a few useless threads (like a bland rival sniper) that could’ve been cut to make room. 

None of these drawbacks take away from Cooper and Eastwood’s portrait of Kyle, but it certainly holds the film back from being anything more.  No larger statements on the War on Terror or war in general is made, nor do I think they were trying to.  More alarmingly, it doesn’t comment much on Kyle himself.  The insights that are made are fairly straightforward, feeling like the kind of mid-level observations you can throw out about yourself, which in this case almost certainly came from Kyle’s book, instead of the more honest and sometimes painful connections that only an outsider can make.  There’s many high-quality elements in American Sniper, but this lack of depth keeps it from being truly great.

            Other Notes:

Ø  Several pieces have been written calling into question the accuracy of this film.  This is a rubbish argument, because the film’s a fictionalized version of events, not a documentary.

Ø  As a warning, this does get rather violent.

Ø  It was kind of distracting that I recognized Jonathan Groff in his scene, but he did nail it.

Ø  Kyle’s book:  American Sniper:  The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History

Guardians of the Galaxy

Released:  August 1^st, 2014

Rated:  PG-13

Studio:  Marvel Studios

Starring:  Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Vin Diesel, Bradley Cooper, Lee Pace, Michael Rooker, Karen Gillan, Djimon Hounsou, John C. Reilly, Glenn Close, Benicio del Toro

Directed by:  James Gunn 

Written by:  James Gunn, Nicole Perlman

Personal Bias Alert:  not a Marvel Universe fan, likes all the actors

7.7 of 10

            On its face, Guardians of the Galaxy seems remarkably different than the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  It’s the first release not associated with The Avengers, and it seemingly exists in its own world, populated with aliens, gods, and high-powered weaponry.  I was hoping this would mean a stray from the safe, middle-of-the-road formula the rest of these movies employed, but alas, its breezy humor isn’t enough to cover its conventional plot.

            To say that Guardians is simply a space western would be overlooking a large part of its appeal.   It’s an homage to the genre, a loving reminder of how much fun a shoot ‘em up in space can be.  Think back to 2011’s Super 8.  That film worked not because it was an immaculate rip-off of 1980’s Spielberg, but because it captured a nostalgia for how movies like E.T. made you feel when you watched them.  Guardians captures a similar feeling, even if it does lack the sappiness of my example.  It serves as a reminder of pleasurable romps gone by, and fans of Firefly and Star Wars will find themselves transported back to their first encounters with the genre.

            Nostalgia comes with a fair amount of good-naturedness, and there’s hardly a more fitting lead for that tone than Chris Pratt.  As Andy on NBC’s Parks and Recreation and the voice of Emmet in The Lego Movie, he’s honed an eager, affable personality that goes a long way to making his Peter Quill/Starlord a viable leader for the group of undesirables that become the Guardians of the Galaxy.  He’s not the brightest nor the strongest, but he’s capable and charming.  Plus, he owns his own ship.  Backing him up is a redemption-seeking assassin (Zoe Saldana), a very literal tough guy (Dave Bautista), and a bounty hunting duo consisting of a genetically modified raccoon and a walking tree voiced by Bradley Cooper and Vin Diesel, respectively.

            Pratt’s comedy background comes in handy, as much of the film’s charm is wrapped up in its flippant humor.  Quill’s got a cocky streak, and his unsuccessful attempts at Saldana’s Gamora is mined for some early laughs.  Character flaws, ridiculous situations, and plot expectations are all used for comedy gold, and the silly laughs keep coming throughout the film.  Cooper’s Rocket (the talking raccoon, mind you) is often the smartest creature in the room, and if that doesn’t give you an idea of this film’s comedic style, then I don’t know what will.

            The plot of Guardians can essentially be summed up in one sentence:  There’s an orb, and everyone wants it.  I would love to say that there’s actually more to it, because the fixings that go with it are so delightful, but that would be a bold-faced lie.  To cover this inadequacy, Guardians fills its runtime with a series of roadblocks that the group must overcome, which never feels like it’s building to an actual resolution.  Instead of working towards a clear goal, it’s more like the group stumbles through the situations they find themselves in, making the whole thing feel almost episodic.  The plot machinations are basic, which they poke fun at, but that doesn’t stop me from knowing exactly how each situation will work out and feeling a little bored by it.

            I wish Guardians of the Galaxy backed up its flair with a bit more substance, but in the end it relies too heavily on familiar conventions to pack a real punch.  I chuckled my way through the film, but I could feel it sliding out of my brain as I walked out of the theater.

            Other Notes:

Ø  This is my favorite Marvel Cinematic Universe film.

Ø  I totally called the mom’s gift.

Ø  Why was Drax worthless?

Ø  Why were the Novas trustworthy enough to get the stone?

Ø  Why did we have to be explicitly told that Quill isn’t entirely human?  It was pretty clear in the very first scene.