San Diego Reader January 7, 2016 69


moments stand out in this battle between alpha male and alpha dope over who makes the best father figure for Wahlberg’s children: an expertly executed avalanche gag involving a motorcycle let loose on a house, followed by a particularly nasty throwaway laugh involving a drunken Fer- rell and a kid in a wheelchair. Add to this a marked anti-violence message and you’re automatically miles ahead of your average Ferrell vehicle. That’s not to say it’s good, just that it’s tolerable. Linda Cardellini plays a wife who doesn’t do much to come to her present husband’s defense, while Thomas Haden Church garners most of the laughs as Ferrell’s raunchy boss. 2015. — S.M. ★ (IN WIDE RELEASE)


The Forest — Natalie Dormer journeys to Japan in search of her sister, eventually following her into a forest where a lot of folks have gone to kill themselves. Review forthcoming at sandiegoreader.com. 2015 (IN WIDE RELEASE)


The Good Dinosaur — Three years after Brave, Pixar gets around to making a film that’s actually about bravery, aka the right response to fear. The setup: dino- saurs never went extinct; instead, they turned into people. That is, they became farmers who keep chickens and store up crops, and also cowboys who guard their herds from rustlers. Into this world comes knobby-kneed runt Arlo, a scrawny soul who spooks easy. Dad’s well-meaning attempt to get him past his pusillanimity goes disastrously awry, and Arlo ends up far from home with winter coming on and only a feral, largely canine boy for com- pany. As he makes his way back toward his family, Arlo bonds with his human pet, and meets various dinos with various responses to the terrors of the world. Wisdom comes, naturally, from sonorous Sam Elliott (as a battle-scarred T-Rex), and Arlo learns what really conquers cowardice. If the story sounds simple, that’s because it is. The complexity here is tonal — zig-zagging from silly to scary — and visual: a super-realistic depiction of nature red in tooth and claw contrasted with the foam-rubber, glass-eyed vulner- ability of our hero. 2015. — M.L. ★★ (IN WIDE RELEASE)


The Hateful Eight — Quentin Tar- antino’s restaging of the Civil War in a Wyoming bar owes more to Agatha Christie than it does John Ford’s Stage- coach. What was it about this cramped, underdeveloped parlor drama – the majority of which takes place on one set – that caused Tarantino to think 70mm? The frigid snowscapes that open the film put the lens to the test, but the moment the action shifts from stagecoach to soundstage, all of the verbal anachro- nisms in Tarantino’s loopy lexicography can’t buoy it. At a whopping 168 minutes (plus a 12 minute pee-break) the directors 70mm pipe dream could easily have lost an hour and no one would have been any the wiser. The third-act flashback reversal that served him well in Pulp Fiction, forcing even the most casual filmgoer to ponder narrative structure, reads like feeble inner-dialogue in these parts. See it in 70mm or not all, the second option being your best bet 2015. — S.M. ★ (IN WIDE RELEASE)


Hector and the Search for Hap- piness — Oh, dear. Hector (Simon Pegg in deadly earnest) is an English psychiatrist, an affluent, middle-aged white guy afflicted with the dreaded “tidy, uncomplicated, satisfactory life,” a man who, terrifyingly, “takes comfort in his predictable patterns.” No wonder he can’t help his patients. Happily, one of them is a psychic who tells him he’ll be going on a long journey. (Yes, really.) For Hector, that means a journey of self-discovery as well


MOVIES@HOME Whale Rider JAMES WICKS


Film professor, Point Loma Nazarene University


A Matter of Life and Death SCOTT DUNBIER


Director, special projects, IDW Publishing


A Matter of Life and Death is a beautiful fairy tale starring David Niven and the drop- dead gorgeous (pre–Planet of the Apes) Kim Hunter. Niven, a doomed RAF pilot, falls in love with a Yank girl as he makes his final radio transmission…but the angel of death somehow misses him, causing all hell to break loose upstairs. Great romance and drama (includ- ing a trial in Heaven!). And amazing photography — Heaven is sepia while Earth is in glorious Technicolor. Stephen Chow co-wrote, directed, and starred in what is quite possibly the greatest non-comic-book comic-book movie ever made. Kung Fu Hustle starts out as some- thing akin to a hyper-kinetic Road Runner cartoon (with ridiculously cool wire-fu effects) and slowly builds into something deeper. By the last act it’s become a story of redemption, one with intense heart and emo- tion, but without losing any of its crazed energy.


A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (England) 1946, Universal Available on YouTube and Amazon


KUNG FU HUSTLE (Hong Kong) 2004, Sony Pictures Available on iTunes and Amazon


as a literal journey to China, Africa, and — shudder — Los Angeles. The ostensible purpose is to ask various people about happiness in the hopes of maybe finding some for himself. Despite the slapstick humor and wobbly premise, there is promise at the outset: Stellan Skarsgard underplays beautifully as a wealthy worka-


Princess Mononoke appeals to audiences of all ages and expectations — even skeptics of anime are won over by its breathtaking artwork, depic- tion of the heroic journey, and strong female protago- nists. In fact, this film con- vinced me to study film in graduate school — and I’m far from being the only one inspired by filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki to write about the ways this epic film breaks a typical Disney narrative model in order to explore human nature.


The main charac- ter of Niki Caro’s Whale Rider, portrayed by Keisha Castle-Hughes, is an ener- getic, determined young person who is driven to become the next leader of her Maori tribe in New Zealand. Somehow, she manages to both pursue her goals and maintain a deep love and respect for those who attempt to stand in her way — a bal- ance almost impossible to achieve.


PRINCESS MONONOKE (Japan) 1997, Studio Ghibli Available on


WatchAnimeMovie.com and Putlocker


WHALE RIDER (New Zealand) 2002, New Market Films Available on special edi- tion DVD


AMI IPAPO-GLASS Choreographer and movement filmmaker, wedaretomove.com


As a dance choreographer I aim to create work with a keen attention to detail that evokes some sort of human emotion or connection. And I find myself seeking these same qualities when watching movies. One of my favorite films is Amélie. It stars Audrey Tautou as a shy waitress who devotes her life to helping others, yet struggles with her own lone- liness. Viewers get to experi- ence Parisian life through the lens of Amélie’s bright imagination and the quirky cinematography of Bruno Delbonnel.


Director Wes Anderson creates wonderful, whimsi- cal fantasy worlds in all of his films, but one that particularly stands out for me is Moonrise Kingdom. This eccentric, humorous story of adolescent love has an all-star cast, a fantastic soundtrack, and effectively captures the oddities, adven- tures, and innocence of youth.


AMÉLIE (France) 2001, Miramax


Available on Amazon


MOONRISE KINGDOM (USA) 2012, Focus Features Available on Vudu and Google Play


Amélie


without undue exaggeration. He is a bull protecting his herd, albeit to a degree as yet unheard of among those who harvest the sea’s bounty. Unfortunately, the film is largely composed of that other stuff: unnecessary exposition and narration, painfully on-point dialogue, jumbled activity on board the whaling ship Essex, overwrought considerations of morality, etc. Mind you, it gets better as it goes: the talk between haunted survivor Brendan Gleeson and curious author Ben Whishaw becomes genuine and intimate, and the conflict between the American dreamer first mate (Chris Hemsworth) and the bumbling aristocrat captain (Benjamin Walker) is overshadowed by their com- mon enemy out there in the deep. But there’s a hollow at the heart of things, a strange decency and politeness for a film that strives to depict, in epic form, man’s dark and visceral struggle with the world and himself. 2015. — M.L. ★ (AMC MISSION VALLEY; KRIKORIAN VISTA VILLAGE; REGAL RANCHO SAN DIEGO)


Joy — Writer-director David O. Russell serves notice that there have always been multi-generational stories of strong women who figure out how to make their way in a so-called man’s world — on television soap operas. He even helpfully opens this (based-on-a-true) story of one woman’s (Jennifer Lawrence) struggle to become the inventor/CEO of her child- hood dreams on the set of the soap that Mama watches instead of, you know, living a life. Perhaps less helpfully, he soaps up the movie itself something fierce, with weird results. The battle against a naysaying world is far-fetched, overblown, and melodramatic, but still okay, because it’s basically fun. (Schematics in crayon? A secret passage onto the factory floor? Sure, why not?) The intrafamilial stuff, however, feels like a fever-dream of impersonal intimacies. (Hey, let’s talk business grave- side!) By the time Dad (Robert De Niro) starts apologizing for ever helping Joy to believe in herself, it’s clear that the point here isn’t people, it’s payoff, emotional and otherwise. 2015. — M.L. ★ (IN WIDE RELEASE)


The Look of Silence — An optometrist offering free eye-exams slowly infiltrates the mob chain of command to confront and hold accountable the men responsible for the brutal murder of his brother. What sounds like a pitch for a second-rate HBO series is in reality the first of two intended companion pieces to Joshua Oppen- heimer’s unprecedented documentary, The Act of Killing. Where Killing focused on the surreal reenactment of mass genocide by its perpetrators. Silence makes it personal, ripping into the past of a family whose youngest son, Adi, places his life on the line by facing down his brother’s assassins, many of whom still hold politi- cal office. He simply refuses to take “The past is past” for an answer, to the point where his fearful mother stops just short of insisting that her son hire a food-taster. Every tale of brutality is punctuated by what should be described as uncomfort- able laughter, yet a pride in craftsmanship resonated throughout each giggle. I’m almost afraid to see what Part 3 holds in store. 2015. — S.M. ★★★★ (DIGITAL GYM CINEMA)


Find more Seen on DVD re v i ews at SDReader.com/dvd


holic who shows Hector a good time. But the promise is buried under cutesy touches, bland platitudes, wildly veering tone, and a rushed bid for profundity at the end. With Rosamund Pike, Toni Collette. 2014. — M.L. ● (DIGIPLEX MISSION MARKETPLACE)


In the Heart of the Sea — First, the good news: director Ron Howard does right by the whale in this story of the true story behind the greatest fish story of them all, Moby Dick. In contrast to nearly everything else — characters, action, themes — the massive marine mammal is presented clearly, potently, and


The Martian — Kids: stay in school, especially if you plan on becoming an astronaut. When a freak accident (wind- loosed antenna piercing bio-monitor) leads to his being stranded on the red planet, astro-botanist Matt Damon decides he ain’t got time to muse on fate, the fragility of existence, or man’s place in the universe. Not when there’s rations to number, schedules to draw up, and basic questions of survival to be answered (in


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