Review: COCO/OLAF'S FROZEN ADVENTURE

COCO 
(FANTASY/FAMILY-ANIMATION) 
★★★
Directed by Lee Unkrich
Co-directed by Adrian Molina
Screenplay by Adrian Molina & Matthew Aldrich
Story by Lee Unkrich & Jason Katz & Matthew Aldrich & Adrian Molina
Featuring the Voices of: Anthony Gonzalez, Gael Garcia Bernal, Benjamin Bratt, Alanna Ubach, Renee Victor, Jaime Camil, Alfonso Arau, Herbert Siguenza, Gabriel Iglesias, Lombardo Boyar, Ana Ofelia Murguia, Natalia Cordova-Buckley, Selene Luna, Edward James Olmos, Sofia Espinosa 
Rated PG for thematic elements.
109 minutes
Verdict: As visually lush and emotionally ambitious as can be expected from most of Pixar's better fare, COCO sometimes relies a little heavily on familiar Pixar mechanics but is nonetheless one of their stronger recent offerings. 
YOU MAY BE INTERESTED IN COCO IF YOU LIKED:
TOY STORY 3  (2010)
MONSTER'S INC.  (2001)
FINDING DORY  (2016)
THE BOOK OF LIFE  (2014)
UP  (2009)

Next to 2015's INSIDE OUT, COCO is Pixar Animation's best movie since TOY STORY 3, but still a bit less polished in its storytelling than the studio typically delivered in its prime.  It leans heavily into Pixar's bag of proven tricks, e.g. emotionally loaded storytelling, familiar antagonist types, exposition via old-timey TV and newsreels; and while it's somewhat predictable and well worn by now, the formula hasn't lost all its potency.

Directed and developed by Lee Unkrich, director of TOY STORY 3, COCO follows the adventures of Miguel Rivera (voiced by newcomer Anthony Gonzalez), a 12-year-old boy in Mexico who dreams of being a musician just like his late idol Ernesto de la Cruz (voiced by Benjamin Bratt).  Unfortunately, Miguel's great-great-grandfather was a musician who walked out on his family, leaving Miguel's great-great-grandmother to raise his great-grandmother as a single mother and shoemaker, and his family has stringently banned music ever since, Captain von Trapp-style.  In his quest to become a great musician, a mishap occurs on Dia de los Muertos which sends Miguel to the Land of the Dead prematurely, where Miguel encounters several of his ancestors, including his great-great-grandmother, who offers to send him back to the Land of the Living but on the condition that he never play music.  Naturally, Miguel can't live with that, so he decides to stay in the Land of the Living, at least until he can find someone who will send him back without no-music conditions, such as de la Cruz.  To find de la Cruz, Miguel enlists the help of Hector (voiced by Gael Garcia Bernal), a trickster who wants Miguel to put up his picture in the Land of the Living so he'll be remembered, and he's running out of time, since once no one left in the Land of the Living remembers a denizen of the Land of the Dead, they fade away into nothingness.

It's fairly heavy stuff, death and remembrance, but Pixar's approach is as lively and accessible as expected, with plenty of humor and somewhat clunky attempts to jerk tears.  The animation is gorgeous and richly detailed as ever, and the voice cast is all solid.  On its own, it's a pretty good movie, although within the Pixar canon, it's hard to miss the repetition of major elements for MONSTERS INC., UP and RATAOUILLE, among others.  In terms of animated movies centered around Dia de los Muertos though, it's an improvement on THE BOOK OF LIFE.

OLAF'S FROZEN ADVENTURE 
(ANIMATED-SHORT/MUSICAL) 
★1/2
Directed by Kevin Deters & Stevie Wermers
Screenplay by Jac Schaeffer
Based on characters created by Chris Buck & Jennifer Lee
Featuring the Voices of: Josh Gad, Kristen Bell, Idina Menzel, Jonathan Groff
Rated G
22 minutes
Originally planned as a Christmas TV special for ABC (with a few commercial breaks it would perfectly fit a half-hour block alongside something like A Charlie Brown Christmas), OLAF'S FROZEN ADVENTURE was lumped in with COCO and heavily advertised with its own trailer and posters, no doubt in hopes of better selling the original movie with the tremendous clout of the Frozen brand name.  Unfortunately, it sucks.  Following the original FROZEN's comic sidekick sentient snowman Olaf (voiced by Josh Gad) as he goes in search of holiday traditions for the princesses Anna (v. Kristen Bell) and Elsa (v. Idina Menzel) because traditions for traditions' sake is apparently the end all and be all of holiday happiness.  It feels like it was written by Disney's storybook department, the people who write those illustrated corporation brand approved stories featuring Disney characters which they sell at Wal-Mart.  There are four original songs, plus two reprises, crammed into 22 minutes by Elyssa Samsel and Kate Anderson (replacing Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez who wrote the original film's songs), all of which are basically serviceable but not particularly memorable.  The whole thing has an air of being strictly for FROZEN's youngest devotees and bears little of what made the original such a phenomenon in the first place.  OLAF'S FROZEN ADVENTURE is an ideal time for parents who were in a rush earlier to leave the kids in their seats go back to the concession stand for popcorn and drinks.

                                                                                                                                                                          Images via Disney

Review: JUSTICE LEAGUE

JUSTICE LEAGUE 
★★
(ACTION/FANTASY) 
Directed by Zack Znyder
Screenplay by Chris Terrio and Joss Whedon
Story by Zack Snyder and Chris Terrio
Starring: Ben Affleck, Gal Gadot, Ezra Miller, Jason Momoa, Ray Fisher, Henry Cavill, Ciaran Hinds, Jeremy Irons, Diane Lane, Amy Adams, Connie Nielsen, J.K. Simmons, Robin Wright, Joe Morton, Amber Heard, Billy Crudup
Rated PG-13 for sequences of sci-fi violence and action.
121 minutes
Verdict: Whelp, it's not as bad as it probably would have been, but the first live-action theatrical appearance of DC's Justice League will likely go down in movie history as a weird accident occurring in slow motion.
YOU MAY BE INTERESTED IN JUSTICE LEAGUE IF YOU LIKED:
BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE  (2016)
MAN OF STEEL  (2013)
WONDER WOMAN  (2017)
MARVEL'S THE AVENGERS  (2012)

JUSTICE LEAGUE is significantly better than BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE, but it's still not particularly good, and what's more, the people who did like BVS: DOJ probably appreciated it for reasons that JUSTICE LEAGUE has now eschewed.  It's a rushed course-correction, something that seems a bit closer to what a DC cinematic universe could have more successfully attempted from the beginning, but at this point feels unearned and shoddy.  It's more an obligation than anything else.  It's a $300 million wet fart.  BVS was lambasted by critics, and while it certainly had its defenders, and it did technically make money at the box office, it performed well beneath what it should have brought in as the teaming up of a trio of our culture's most iconic and popular superheroes onscreen together for the first time.  The wheels were already in motion though, with filming beginning for JUSTICE LEAGUE only a couple of weeks after the release of BVS, with Warner Brothers scrambling to re-position the series on the fly.  Zack Snyder, who directed the not-great MAN OF STEEL and the horrid BVS, was directing JUSTICE LEAGUE for over a year before leaving to deal to a personal family tragedy, leaving Joss Whedon, the man who united Marvel's all-stars behind the camera in MARVEL'S THE AVENGERS and AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON, to step up and direct JUSTICE LEAGUE through to completion, which included reportedly extensive re-writes and re-shoots.  In the end, Whedon is given a screenwriting credit, while Snyder maintains sole directorial credit, and the movie is just all kinds of weird.  Individual directors have made odd, uneven misfires before, but the behind-the-scenes drama does lend some explanation.  It was also mandated by the studio to have a two-hour run time, which I realize is probably to the chagrin of fanboys who want as much movie as possible for their dollars, but I've made no secret that I'm in favor of shorter movies.  Ideally, a two-hour run time would be the decision of the filmmaker, but really, most of these bloated two-hour-plus blockbuster run times come down to excessive exposition, overly convoluted plots and overextended action sequences, and the constraint of a limited run time I think genuinely helps most movies, including this one.  BVS was pretty bad all over, but enduring bad for two hours is easily preferable to enduring bad for two and a half, so while I acknowledge the artistic infringement of a run time mandate of two hours coming from Warner Brothers executives, I'm not complaining.

After beginning with a brief flashback scene introducing a more classically good-natured, decidedly revised Superman (Henry Cavill) from his super-douche portrayals in Snyder's MAN OF STEEL and BATMAN V SUPERMAN, the movie opens immediately following the events of BVS, with Superman dead and buried in a montage of society declining set to Sigrid's cover of "Everybody Knows", sort of bringing to mind a superior Snyder opening montage from WATCHMEN.  Then, the CGI aberration called Steppenwolf (Ciaran Hinds) arrives from outer space, or something like that, to collect the "Mother Boxes," vaguely defined ancient sources of raw power which, when combined, are even more powerful, so Bruce Wayne, aka Batman (Ben Affleck), and Diana Prince, aka Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), set to uniting a team of super friends to protect the planet.  In DC's rush to get to the team-up before the set-up, there are still a few characters that need introducing, having only previously appeared in weirdly lazy BVS cameos. There's Victor Stone, aka Cyborg (Ray Fisher, previously best known for stage work), a former college athlete whose father saved him from a nearly fatal car accident with the use of a Mother Box which regrettably also turned most of his body and part of his mind into advanced alien machinery.  There's Barry Allen, aka The Flash (Ezra Miller), a super-fast, socially awkward youth who's awestruck by the other heroes, and lastly, there's Arthur Curry, aka Aquaman (Jason Mamoa), the super strong, aquatically-powered prince of the undersea city of Atlantis.  They're still short one Superman, though.
The most obvious target of criticism, so obvious it really isn't fair, is Steppenwolf, a character that doesn't necessitate a CGI creation, but which has been rendered as such anyway and looks about 15 years late to the party.  His motivation is the cheapest stock motivation for any action movie villain; power, pure and simple; and there's really nothing else.  Hinds, a perfectly good character actor with the right material, gets one of the easiest paychecks outside of voicework doing a motion-capture performance with hardly any performance seeming to coming through the pixels.  Steppenwolf is an utterly lifeless creation.  He's not even accidentally interesting.

Within a perfectly ample two hours however, whether what the movie is doing tonally or thematically is particularly successful or not, it makes good use of its time with little waste.  While BVS took an extra half hour to do little worthwhile, JUSTICE LEAGUE sufficiently introduces three new heroes, a piece of crap villain, a lazy McGuffin, and while a lot of that is rote and could have been put to better use, it never feels rushed or languid.  As opposed to the oppressively moody, self-serious gloom and doom of BVS, the tone is a lot lighter and optimistic this time around, with a lot dull and desperate attempts at humor from The Flash, who's basically a less inspired version of Quicksilver from X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST, although there are a couple of decent laughs scattered elsewhere.  Honestly, the funniest thing about the movie by far is the behind-the-scenes story of how Paramount Pictures wouldn't allow Henry Cavill to shave his luxurious MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 6 mustache for reshoots as Superman, so thousands of additional dollars had to be spent by Warner Brothers digitally removing the mustache with visual effects.  They must have been so busy with Cavill's upper lip that they didn't have time to give Steppenwolf any expressions.
In the end, the movie feels sort of pointless, but also harmless.  It's trying to make up for the godawfulness of BATMAN V SUPERMAN and SUICIDE SQUAD, but in rushing into the franchise building so early, before they knew what they'd done, the DC Extended Universe crippled itself.  There's a potentially much worse movie in JUSTICE LEAGUE, which is a weird reverse of the more common kind of movie that has good ideas but bad execution.  It's not that JUSTICE LEAGUE has good execution, but the execution is a lot better than the ideas.  The result is a movie that feels neutered, maybe for the better, but neutered nonetheless  It's the kind of movie that I think I wouldn't mind seeing more of, except, you know, good.

                                                                                                                                                         Images via Warner Brothers

Review: THOR: RAGNAROK

THOR: RAGNAROK 
(ACTION-ADVENTURE/FANTASY) 
★★★
Directed by Taika Watiti
Screenplay by Eric Pearson and Craig Kyle & Christopher L. Yost
Based on characters created by Stan Lee & Larry Lieber, and Jack Kirby
Starring: Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Cate Blanchett, Idris Elba, Jeff Goldblum, Tessa Thompson, Karl Urban, Mark Ruffalo, Anthony Hopkins, Benedict Cumberbatch, Taikia Watiti, Rachel House, Clancy Brown, Tadanobu Asano
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and brief suggestive material.
130 minutes
Verdict: Without shaking up the Marvel Cinematic Universe in any particularly exciting way, RAGNAROK is the best of three Thor-led movies thanks in large part to its light, breezy tone and colorful personality.
YOU MAY BE INTERESTED IN THOR: RAGNAROK IF YOU LIKED: 
GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2  (2017)
THOR: THE DARK WORLD  (2013)
THOR  (2011)
TIME BANDITS  (1981)
TRON  (1982)

The Thor installments of the Marvel Cinematic Universe so far have been particularly weak points in the franchise; the Kenneth Branagh-directed THOR (2011) was seen as a big leap in bringing a far more fantastical superhero into the MCU than had been featured before, and it got the job done in a mostly staid way, while the Alan Taylor-directed THOR: THE DARK WORLD (2013) remains one of the weakest installments in the MCU yet, with a stock villain, oversized destruction and structurally mangled.  Even Tom Hiddleston as Loki, a fan favorite in the MCU as a whole, I don't think got to a very strong point as a villain until MARVEL'S THE AVENGERS.  But introducing New Zealand-born filmmaker/comedian Taika Watiti as director of THOR: RAGNAROK was an interesting move, similar to Marvel picking James Gunn for GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY.  Best known for his work on the cult-comedy TV series Flight of the Conchords, and two independent comedies, the 2014 vampire mockumentary WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS (co-directed with Jemaine Clement) and the 2016 comedy-drama HUNT FOR THE WILDERPEOPLE, Watiti's work is energetic, with an often very weird but witty sense of humor and a fair bit of heart as well, and as the MCU struggles to keep from falling into bland formulas, it needs directors who bring a stronger flavor.  Watiti succeeds partially in that respect, making what's easily the best Thor-led Marvel movie yet, but while often feeling very much like other Marvel movies in a way that the exhilarating candy-colored trailer set to The Immigrant Song seemed to suggest.  At the same time, it also feels very, very much like a certain strain of 1980s sci-fi/fantasy movies, e.g. TRON, TIME BANDITS and THE BLACK CAULDRON.  Terry Gilliam could never make a Marvel movie, but it turns out that a Taika Watiti Marvel movie is a pretty good approximation of what that might be.

RAGNAROK places Thor (Chris Hemsworth), the Norse God of Thunder and member of the Avengers superhero team, in an unfortunate predicament when he learns that he is not in fact the first born of Odin (Anthony Hopkins); instead, that title belongs to Hela (Cate Blanchett), the warmongering Goddess of Death, who Odin has been able to keep at bay until now, and she's coming to claim the throne of Asgard.  She makes short work of Thor, destroying his hammer, and Thor and his trickster brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) only manage a narrow escape.  Crash-landing on Sakaar, a refuse planet, Thor is captured by the planet's eccentric ruler, the Grandmaster (Jeff Goldblum), and forced to fight in a gladiatorial arena, where he is reunited with a fellow Avenger, the Incredible Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), who went missing during the climactic action of AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON.  The burden falls on Thor to escape the Grandmaster's grip along with the Hulk and make it back to Asgard before Hela kills all who resist her rule.

Presumably, as the subject of the Avengers' villain Thanos's romantic intentions in the upcoming AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR, Hela will return in future installments of the MCU, although, in essence as a character, she doesn't bring all that much more to THOR: RAGNAROK than the typical MCU villain.  On the other hand, Blanchett brings a fair bit to the character herself; beautiful in her ethereal way with a Goth makeover and hamming it up as a distinctly comic book villain (on multiple occasions, she slicks her long black hair up into hard and shiny antlers) but with a reasonable amount of restraint that keeps things safely out of Rita Repulsa territory.  Goldblum is just doing his Goldblum thing like he hasn't done for years as the simultaneously zany and deadpan Grandmaster, and Watiti himself earns a few laughs as one of Thor's fellow gladiators, the rock-skinned Korg, whose CGI-rendered features are unfortunately poorly defined.  Among the new characters, however, I'm a particularly big fan of Tessa Thompson (star of DEAR WHITE PEOPLE and co-star of CREED) as the exceptionally hard-drinking Scrapper 142, a self-exiled Asgardian and bounty hunter with a Jack Sparrow-like drunken efficiency.

While the joke-laugh ratio isn't as successful as Watiti's WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS or HUNT FOR THE WILDERPEOPLE, RAGNAROK is often very funny, which, like GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2, is unexpected for a movie that seems to be emulating THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK in a lot of ways (ironically, Marvel's "Phase 2" of movies IRON MAN 3 through ANT-MAN specifically did reference THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK according to producer Kevin Feige, by way of each film, except for ANT-MAN (originally intended as part of Phase 3), depicting a scene in which a character loses a hand, but RAGNAROK and VOL. 2 are part of "Phase 3").  With a thoroughly breezy, fun tone, it's kind of too bad that the movie wound up half an hour longer than the run time had been reported as of this past summer, because it does start to feel a little long by that last half hour.  130 minutes isn't actually unreasonable for most tentpole studio movies, but I really think brevity is an increasingly underappreciated virtue of entertainment.
It's never as weird or avant-garde as it promises to be, but RAGNAROK is always entertaining and frequently amusing, making proper use of the appropriately-themed The Immigrant Song and never afraid to be a lot of silly.  Oh, and the Hulk fights a gigantic wolf, which is awesome.

                                                                                                                                                                        Images via Marvel