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Showing posts with label Mila Kunis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mila Kunis. Show all posts
Sunday, February 8, 2015
Sunday, February 8, 2015
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Jupiter Ascending is about a Russian-American toilet cleaner called Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) who's rescued from murderous aliens by half-dog spaceman Caine Wise (Channing Tatum) and subsequently discovers she's the genetic reincarnation of a murdered space-vampire Queen. Also thrown into the mix are royalty detecting bees, an army of flying dinosaur-men, a crapload of gigantic explosions, some killer frocks and some outrageously hammy performances that leave no scenery unchewed.
God only knows who gave the Wachowskis the £175m budget, but they deserve kudos for funding one of the barmiest mainstream science fiction experiences in years. This is the kind of film that casually cuts from kitchen-sink comedy/drama to a destroyed alien world where three weirdoes chat gobbledegook about the end of the world, then cuts back to the real world without so much as blinking. This is the kind of film that you just have to 'go with', trusting that the ludicrous dialogue and nonsensical plot developments are building up to something.
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| Also you get to see Tuppence Middleton's butt. |
Well, not to spoil the film, but everything pretty much comes together in the final act. Though the Wachowski's revel in chucking bonkers new ideas onto the screen every five minutes or so, the actual plot isn't so dissimilar from The Matrix. Both here, as there, the accepted layers of reality are peeled away to reveal a horrible truth; that humanity is being exploited for our raw materials.
On its narrative merits, Jupiter Ascending often comes up short. Perhaps a victim of an overzealous studio mandated edit, the plot jumps forward in fits and starts. Characters are introduced with great fanfare then disappear from the plot, the heroine suddenly knows things she shouldn't and the film has at least two unrelated climaxes one after the other. Similarly, Mila Kunis' Jupiter is mostly a bit of a limp rag, forever falling off things and being caught in midair by Channing's hunky dogman, not to mention that she gets riches and fame purely by dint of who she is rather than actually doing anything to earn them.
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| Aw yeah. |
This adds up to a undeniably flawed movie, but also a deeply enjoyable, super fun one. By way of an example; there's a scene relatively early in the movie where Jupiter and Caine have temporarily escaped the clutches of the villains and headed to the countryside to seek help from grizzled space veteran Stinger Apini (Sean Bean). For some reason Stinger has filled his house with bees, hives growing from every wall and honey trickling down over the wallpaper. Jupiter reacts to this with understandable fear, brushing them away from her before they sting. But they don't sting.
It's then explained that she's not being stung because bees can instinctively detect royalty and as bees are incapable of lying (news to me!), this means Jupiter must be space royalty. The characters instantly kneel before her, referring to her as "Your Majesty" for the rest of the movie. There's two reasonable audience reactions to a scene like this. The first is "What the fuck is going on? This doesn't make any sense. I don't like it." The second (correct) reaction is "This doesn't make any sense! What the fuck is going on? This is amazing!".
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| These bees know the score. |
This freaky dream-logic bubbles under for most of the film, enjoyment largely predicated on audiences just accepting that right now Channing Tatum is breakdance fighting an angry winged Tyrannosaurus man on an exploding refinery in the middle of the planet Jupiter's eye and there's not a damn thing anyone can do about it.
This rebellious, headstrong quality to the script that perfectly tickles away at my sensibilities. So when in the middle of the film, Jupiter Ascending decides it's going to be Terry Gilliam's Brazil for about 10 minutes you just roll with it, giggling along with it as it then produces Terry Gilliam himself to play an sinisterly eccentric intergalactic bureaucrat who proceeds to tattoo the heroine with a cool glowy symbol.
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| yes yes yes |
This stuffed-to-the-brim sci-fi maximilism is also realised in the baroque visuals. The spaceships in the film are ornate, gilded and elegant, decorated with gigantic golden statues and glass atriums. Parts of the ships shift and move around the core, the outlines never quite coalescing into something concrete and recognisable. A similar trick is played with the costumes, the most elaborate looking like the kind of thing Lady Gaga would turn down as too impractical. The best way I can summarise this aesthetic is if The Fifth Element and David Lynch's Dune had a lovechild, and that lovechild grew up to become seriously weird teenager.
All of this is extremely my shit, but I've as yet only alluded to the cherry on top of this teetering, sugary, whipped cream bedecked ice cream sundae of a film. This is Eddie Redmayne's Balem Abrasax, main baddie and the silliest thing for lightyears around. Redmayne appears to be channelling David Bowie's evil twin - all pouty lips, high collars and bizarre pronouncements. He does all this in a strangled theatrical mumble, punctuated by angry yelps of passion. He's perfectly attuned to the material, his every appearance sending the audience into giggling fits.
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| I love this guy! |
Cards on the table - whatever the Wachowski's are serving up I'll gobble up. Speed Racer, generally regarded as an embarrassing megaflop, is in my book a secret psychedelic masterpiece. Cloud Atlas, a film that confused and alienated it's meagre audience, was for me an imaginatively sincere spiritual quest. And so it is with Jupiter Ascending, a deeply creative, ultra-imaginative and playfully original sci-fi treasure that, let's face it, is probably destined to vanish into ill-regarded obscurity. Ask yourself: do you want cookie-cutter, grey-ass predictable bullshit? No? Then go and see this already!
OOH! OOH! I forgot to mention that when Channing Tatum's dogman fires his space gun it barks at the baddies! :D
★★★★
Jupiter Ascending is out now.
Sunday, March 3, 2013
Sunday, March 3, 2013
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Oz the Great and Powerful is a prequel to the 1939 classic, a prospect that didn't exactly fill me with confidence. There have been an awful lot of CG heavy reinterpretations of fairytales lately, and frankly, fatigue is setting in. Also, the world of Oz just doesn't seem like a place that'll benefit from having its back story fleshed out. My initial thoughts were that the film reeked of an attempt to repeat the enormous gross of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland 3D. So, as the opening credits rolled expectations were not particularly high, but I was surprised to find the film quickly carving out a pleasantly light-hearted and not entirely serious niche for itself.
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| James Franco as Oz |
We open with Oz as a stage magician in a fairly grim dustbowl circus. Audiences are abusive, his fellow performers generally despise him and he lives in tatty poverty. Importantly we quickly establish that he's actually is an outstanding magician and showman, letting us sympathise with him when he bemoans his circumstances. The pressure in the circus comes to a head, with Oz running away in terror from an angry strongman and taking refuge in a hot air balloon. He cuts loose and flies away, waving his top hat and whooping "so long, suckers!" (I love a good "so long, suckers!"). But his celebration is cut short, behind him is a huge tornado. Before he knows what's going on he's been transported to Oz, where a prophecy talks of a powerful wizard who falls from the sky, saves the kingdom and becomes King. Oz quickly begins exploiting the situation, his head filled with starry-eyed dreams of gold, power and naive and sexy witches.
Your enjoyment of Oz the Great and Powerful will largely depend on your opinion of James Franco. This is very much the James Franco show from start to finish, the film taking great pleasure in bouncing him off a series of weird characters. Fortunately, the self-appointed mayor of Gay Town is perfect as a pleasantly egotistical would-be renaissance man. Franco plays a great confidence trickster; a huckster thrown into a fantasy world, not taking it seriously. This light cynicism works well in making the bizarre world of Oz believable to us, allowing us to laugh with the film at how weird things are rather than at it.
As a casual student of Franco-ology, I love the idea of James Franco as a man wandering into situations he doesn't know much about and smirkily bluffing his way through events. Additionally, he cements his reputation as the go-to man for films involving CG apes and monkeys. After this and the better-than-it-has-any-right-to-be Rise of the Planet of the Apes it's clear that no-one in the business can talk to an invisible monkey quite like Franco can. I realised partway through that Sam Raimi has essentially made this film already; the basic plot is very, very similar to Army of Darkness and the way Franco bluffs his way through danger has certain shades of Bruce Campbell's Ash.
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| Rachel Weisz as Evanora and Mila Kunis as Theodora |
The rest of the cast generally take the outlandish premise as an excuse to ham it up to various degrees. But then, if there's any time to ham it up a bit, it's when you're playing a cackling, green skinned witch in medieval fetishwear, commanding armies of winged baboons. The three witches, Theodora, Evanora and Glinda, are respectively played by Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz and Michelle Williams. Kunis is pretty damn brilliant as Theodora, injecting what is essentially a pantomime character with some genuine pathos and a sprinkling of masochistic body horror. Weisz and Williams are slightly less complex, although as almost literal embodiments of good and evil they have much less wiggle room.
Similarly impressive are the voice-acting of the CG characters, particularly Zach Braff as the flying monkey servant, Finley and Joey King as the 'China Girl'. Zach Braff sounds an awful lot like Danny DeVito as Finley, and makes what would be an exceptionally annoying character surprisingly enjoyable. But it's the China Girl that makes the biggest impact; everything about her screams fragility and King's voice work goes a very, very long way towards pulling the character from the uncanny valley and giving her genuine pathos.
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| Zach Braff as Finley the Monkey |
There's an awful lot of CG in this film, a huge amount of the production must have been James Franco wandering around a big green green room talking to no-one. There's so much that it becomes self-indulgent, and you sigh inwardly when for the fourth or fifth time the film finds an excuse to show off some fancy 3D trickery or yet another artfully composed fantasy landscape. It all looks great, but this film is probably a little too long, and by the end you find yourself fatigued by endless scenes of the camera swooping around the landscape and just wishing they'd get on with the plot.
Sadly, the most disappointing aspect of the film is the workmanlike direction. I am a huge fan of Sam Raimi's earlier work: Evil Dead II is absolutely fantastic, and there's much to admire in Spider-Man 2 and Drag Me to Hell. But, even though there's a Bruce Campbell cameo and Raimi's yellow Delta 88 Oldsmobile apparently makes an appearance (although I couldn't spot it) Oz could be directed by any jobbing big budget director. You get a tiny taste of Raimi's trademark kinetic style in the tornado sequence and there's a few Dutch angles that I doubt another director would have put in, but that a once exciting director like Raimi could put out something as blandly shot as this is quite depressing. Perhaps the ever-present corporate hand of Disney on his shoulders stifled some of his natural creativity.
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| Very pretty. Back to the plot please. |
This aside, I had a surprisingly enjoyable time watching Oz the Great and Powerful. I'm generally wary of prequels, finding them largely devoid of dramatic tension and filled with annoying winks to the films that come after it chronologically. Aside from a few jokes and references, Oz this, being both a self-contained narrative and a clever way to set up the events at the beginning of the 1939 classic. Thematically it's tightly constructed, with over-arching themes of the skill of showmanship, the relation between performer and audience and appropriately, given that it associates itself with one of the most iconic films of all time, the immense power of cinema. I'm lukewarm on the recent trend for CG drenched interpretations of classic fairytales; but this the best so far.
***/*****
Oz the Great and Powerful is on general release from the 8th of March
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