Category: Reviews

You have to begin by asking yourself, do we really want an origin story for Peter Pan? J.M. Barrie certainly didn’t seem to think we needed it when he first wrote the play Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up in December 1904. The book we’re more familiar with, Peter and Wendy, didn’t arrive until 1911.

However, we have been conditioned to expect to understand everything there is about a character and too often we’re given origin stories that dilute the action. So, one has to wonder why Warner Bros and director Joe Wright felt we needed Pan.

The overwrought, over-produced production got bumped from summer to fall only to flop big time and is out now on Combo Pack from Warner Home Entertainment.

The idea of the boy who never grew up, who had wild escapades in Neverland should be sufficient lure for audiences. It certainly worked for Disney and Mary Martin but today, that’s not good enough.  Rather than a story to enchant children, this is aimed squarely at those of us to achieve adulthood and long for simpler days of youth.

The action is, we’re told, tamped down for younger audiences but it’s still in your face with a riot of colors, sounds, and frenetic energy that diminishes a script by Jason Fuchs (Ice Age: Continental Drift) once considered so strong it made the infamous Black List of great, yet-unproduced screenplays.

Working from the familiar set pieces we’ve come to love, Fuchs takes the youngster Peter and sets him on the classic hero’s journey taking way too many liberties from the source material to satisfy.  Young Peter was abandoned by his mother, Mary (Amanda Seyfried), leaving him to be raised by the cruel Mother Barnabas (Kathy Burke).  Even though Barrie’s story was set at the turn of the century, we’re somehow told its World War II and the London Blitz is on. Peter (Levi Miller), now 12, and his friend Nibs (Lewis MacDougall) find out Barnabas has been hoarding food and there’s a letter from Mary foreshadowing how “special” Peter was meant to be.

Peter escapes the Nazis, snatched up Bishop (Nonso Anozie), aboard his flying pirate ship. The man is collecting orphans to work as slave labor. Upon arrival, Peter meets the infamous Blackbeard (Hugh Jackman), the mine’s overseer. Now Fuchs wrote the part for Jackman and used the pirate because Barrie established it was he who trained Hook – so what’s a sea-faring man doing in a mine? Jackman’s plays the part as if it were a Broadway production, chewing his beard or the scenery.

What are they mining? Pixum, or crystalized fairy dust. Uh huh.

We quickly meet the other denizens including Princess Tiger Lily (Mara) and her father (Jack Charles). Then there’s James Hook (Garrett Hedlund), cast in the swashbuckling role one expects from true pirates of yore. Hook is not Peter’s arch enemy yet but all the warnings are in place.

You get the idea. The movie is overstuffed with sets, characters, and anachronisms galore which spoils the sense of wonder the movie should have created. Wright’s a capable director but not here. Instead of something special, like Peter was meant to be, this movie can’t make up its mind what it really wants to be and who its audience should be. As a result, it leaves children overstimulated and parents shaking their heads in disappointment.

The Blu-ray transfer is just lovely, which is needs considering the visuals.  The 1080p, AVC-encoded result maintains the rich colors just fine. There’s a 3D version but this was not screened for review. The Dolby Atmos soundtrack is strong.

For a film boasting so much effort, the special features prove disappointing. You start with Wright’s commentary which shows his head and heart were in the right place, although his defense of using “Smells Like Teen Spirit” fails to convince. There’s also Never Grow Up: The Legend of Pan (10:50), which does a nice job showing us how Barrie’s story grew from stage to book; The Boy Who Would Be Pan (6:07) introduces us to Miller, who at least looked age appropriate for Pan; The Scoundrels of Neverland (5:49), explores the pirates and Blackbeard’s origins; and, Wondrous Realms (5:01), a promotional tour of Neverland.

There are times when I doubt that Feynman could possibly be real. A wild man physics savant who was also  a world-class womanizer, bongo player, and practical joker? No, no — that’s a fictional character, not a real man. But the world then gently points out that he was real.

Ottaviani has made a small career in comics out of telling stories about science and scientists, and this latest book-length graphic novel fits well into his oeuvre. Feynman is the most interesting scientist of the 20th century, beating out even Einstein and Hawking — quirky, fun, endlessly quotable, but still clearly brilliant at really esoteric theoretical physics and creator of a major explanatory theory that hardly anyone has ever understood.

(I know much less about Myrick — he’s got a lot of credits, but I haven’t seen much of his work. He has a slightly cartoonier style than I’d expect for a biography, which means his Feynman looks only slightly like the real man, but he has the skills to tell this story well, despite a lot of talking heads and big caption boxes.)

Ottaviani mostly tells Feynman’s story straight through, with a few digressions for style and framing. He uses unobtrusive captions to place each scene in a time and place, jumping forward occasionally to use a major lecture or discovery to frame earlier events. It makes what could have been a dull life — Feynman, for all of his energy and wit and wackiness, spent most of his time lecturing, writing, or sitting in a chair thinking about physics — into a thoughtful graphic novel that mediates on an interesting life lived well.

I expect this will mostly be read by physics nerds and young readers — it’s the kind of thing
that teachers and librarians hope will snare some resultant reader into a life-long passion — but that’s fine. Feynman was both of those things, in his time, and I think he’d be glad of the company.

Say what you will about Tom Cruise as a person but as an actor and producer, he is one of the strongest performers in Hollywood. For the last 19 years, he has been responsible for Paramount Pictures’ Mission: Impossible franchise and has turned it into a goldmine. The fifth installment, Rogue Nation, arrives tomorrow in a combo pack from Paramount Home Entertainment just as people worry about the granddaddy of espionage franchises, James Bond.

I was not alone in feeling disappointed by Spectre, a lax story, a waste of Monica Bellucci, and boring set pieces. In comparison, the three major action sequences in Rogue Nation are fresher, more exciting, and still works on repeated watching.

Cruise set out at the beginning to honor Bruce Gellar’s creation but also add new flavors by insisting someone different direct each movie.  Brian DePalma set the stage and satisfied fans while John Wu had a misfire but then they came back with J.J. Abrams, Brad Bird, and now Christopher McQuarrie. The latter, it seems, was an uncredited writer on the previous film, Ghost Protocol and has been a frequent collaborator with Cruise so seemed a natural to become the next director. It should be noted that the film was so successful McQuarrie will be the first repeat director.

Whereas M:I 4 isolated Ethan Hunt and the IMF team because of things going awry in Russia, the new film takes things a step further, echoing Spectre’s thread that such agencies have outlived their usefulness. Without government support, Hunt cannot hope to uncover their shadowy duplicate agency, Spectre, er, the Syndicate despite the global consequences for failure.

The team is fractured as Hunt recruits Benji (Simon Pegg) to leave his dead end desk job and join him in Europe. Meantime, when Hunt and Benji go silent, IMF Chief William Brandt (Jeremy Renner) seeks out Luther (Ving Rhames) to come to their aid. In the mix is Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), who may be working for the syndicate, some other agency, or out for herself. All Hunt knows is that she’s very good at what she does and comes to trust her when others remain suspicious.

The story, credited to Drew Pearce and McQuarrie, takes us around the world, uses inventive technology, and rarely lets up the pace while leavening the drama with some genuine humor and warmth between the characters. If there’s flaw, it is that Hunt remains a bit flat as a character, especially without any hint of his private life, which made Mission: Impossible III, a richer experience.

McQuarrie does a great job moving things along and the action sequences – Hunt on the airplane, the mandatory car/motorcycle chase, and the underwater computer bit – all work. While newcomer Ferguson has garnered the majority of the raves, a deadpan Alec Baldwin as CIA Director Alan Hunley should be credited with keeping things interesting. The final moments with the downfall of Solomon Lane (Sean Harris) is pitch perfect, replicating how many of the classic episodes ended.

The Blu-ray transfer is just swell, perfect for revisiting the film at home matched well with the Dolby Atmos soundtrack.

The film comes with several featurettes, all just long enough to give you the basics without getting boring. In some cases, I wish there was more, especially about the franchise as a whole but I suppose leaving them wanting more is better than boring us.

We open with Audio Commentary from Cruise and McQuarrie and you can sense how comfortable they are with one another, which transfers neatly into the film itself.

Lighting the Fuse (5:57) focuses mainly on McQuarrie’s involvement, as partner and director; Cruise Control (6:33) shines the same spotlight on Cruise’s role in the filmmaking process; Heroes… (8:06), profiles the recurring IMF agents plus Ilsa; Cruising Altitude (8:23), so how did they film that plane sequence; Mission: Immersible (6:45) is all about the underwater sequence with emphasis on the physical training required; Sand Theft Auto (5:35) explores the high speed vehicle chases; and, The Missions Continue (7:08) where cast and crew reflect on the franchise’s staying power.

The combo pack comes with a DVD and Digital HD code.

Marvel’s Ant-Man, which was an international box office smash this summer, is also a schizophrenic movie demonstrating the strengths and weaknesses of working within a shared universe. Where James Gunn was given a corner of the universe to play with the Guardians of the Galaxy allowing him to be cheeky and amusing while introducing cosmic threats that will dovetail in future films, Edgar Wright’s original ideas were too comedic and “out there” to fit in the terrestrial threads already in place.

Despite Wright working on this for years and coming close to bringing his vision to the Avengers’ world, it ultimately fell apart when too many compromises were demanded in order to fit in more closely with the tone and feel of those films. Wright walked and was replaced by director Peyton Reed, best known for the fresh-feeling Bring it On.

Reed did a more than serviceable job in bridging that gap, delivering an entertaining, at time thrilling, feature film that fits nicely within the evolving Marvel Cinematic Universe.  The film is now available for live-streaming via Disney Movies Anywhere and related services with the Blu-ray combo pack coming out December 8.

Paul Rudd is well cast as Scott Lang, a convicted criminal who is having difficulties reintegrating into society since most companies won’t give ex-cons a chance. He’s in a strained relationship with his wife Maggie (Judy Greer) and her new husband, a cop Paxton (Bobby Cannavale). Of course his young daughter Cassie (Abby Ryder Fortson) is the only one to see him as the hero he is.

Lang’s family issues and struggle for a fresh start lead us to his being lured into the home of Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), where we learn Pym has been keeping an eye on Lang, hoping to recruit him as an agent of change, helping him prevent his protégé, Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) from making some very bad choices. Of course there is the grief felt for the missing Janet Van Dyne, the Wasp, and the strain between father and daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly) that is predictable but well-delivered. This thread is engaging, emotionally-packed, and very much the origin story of a hero.

Wright’s influence remains in the other half of the film, led by former cell mate Luis (Michael Peña) and assorted misfits. They provide a lot of the comic relief in the film but every time they are on screen, it feels like an entirely different film and this half does not satisfactorily mesh with the other half as we build to the climax.

The “Marvelization” of Ant-Man is also evident in how many of the story beats between Pym and Cross are replicated from the Tony Stark and Obadiah Stane beats seen in the first Iron Man, right down to the Ant-Man versus Yellowjacket battle. What saves it, though, is the visual verve brought to the battle in Cassie’s room as we go from terrifying objects being hurled to a real scale vision of a toy train harmlessly smacking against a wall. Overall, it needed to be fresher.

Where the creative committee’s contributions are welcome is found in the opening scene showing a younger Hank Pym quitting his Ant-Man work for S.H.I.E.L.D. with Howard Stark (John Slattery) in place, fitting this in with the overall timeline. Also, Anthony Mackie’s lighthearted turn as the Falcon also established this as being a piece in the Avenger’s overall arc.

The visual effects are top-notch, giving the world of the Ant-Man and the microscopic world he finds himself trapped in are simply wonderful. So the various parts are largely fine, but taken together, creates an unevenness that ultimately disappoints. With luck, the recently announced Ant-Man and the Wasp sequel can find fresh ground to tread.

The Digital HD version reviewed looks great and sounds equally fine. Obviously, this deserves to be enjoyed on a big screen with a good sound system.

There are an assortment of special features that are interesting but not compelling. We start with Making of an Ant-Sized Heist: A How-To Guide (14:34), which is a too-brief look at the film’s background; Let’s Go to the Macroverse (8:06), exploring the technology behind the effects; four WHIH NewsFront — Promo (1:21), Vista Corp Heist (1:49), Darren Cross Interview (2:36), and Scott Lang Live (3:25) – all with reporter/anchor Christine Everhart (Leslie Bibb, last seen in Iron Man 2); pay attention to the ticker at the bottom; Deleted & Extended Scenes —  Fixing the Cable (3:11), Hank Vaults the Suit (0:31), Paxton and Gale (0:22), Qubit Defense Matrix (0:31), Scott and Cassie (0:40), Wish Fulfillment (0:24), The Future of Pym Particles (1:38), and The History of Ant-Man (1:19), all with optional commentary by Reed and Rudd; and of course the Gag Reel (3:25).

Not part of the digital streaming is Reed and Rudd’s audio commentary, which can be heard on disc.