TV Review: Loki (2021)

Episode 1:  Glorious Purpose: 

Loki (Tom Hiddleston) disappears from New York in 2012 and ends up being a prisoner of the TVA. (Time Variance Authority) The TVA accuses Loki of breaking his timeline, and she is about to be sentenced by Judge Ravona Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha Raw) when Mobius (Owen Wilson) intervenes. He wants to study Loki, see what makes him tick, and hunt down another variant while studying Loki, will Loki agree to help Mobius?  Or will he just continue to have delusions of grandeur? 

The concept of analyzing Loki is an interesting one, although they seem to be doing the same with the Winter Soldier in the other series.  The problem is Loki always worked better as comedy relief, working off of Thor’s hyper serious character, can the character handle a storyline all by himself, or will the show become too Loki-centric.  In this episode Loki seems to take a little too much pleasure in torturing his antagonists.  The other issue is the cast, Hiddleston is a fine actor, but Owen Wilson and his Ambien inflected beach bum voice is hard to take seriously, Mbatha Raw is a pretty face who hasn’t had many complex characters to play.  This series could be great, it could be lousy. 

Episode 2  The Variant: 

There’s a variant on the loose, and this variant is hurting TVA employees and hiding in certain events in time.  Mobius uses Loki to try to find the variant, and stop its plan. But does Loki really want to find the variant or is he just playing with Mobius’ mind? 

The two central questions in this show are, who is the variant, which the writers answer quite quickly and what are Loki’s motives, which will probably take all six episodes to answer.  The more important questions are, is this plot sustainable and can it hold the audience’s interest for a season or longer?  To be determined, but judging from the first two episodes, this show shouldn’t last more than 6 episodes.  Besides Tom Hiddleson, the acting is poor, and where can they go with this except Loki chasing the variant through different times and places and how long before that gets redundant? 

Episode 3  Lamentis: 

Loki finds the variant named Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) and they disappear to the planet Lamentis, just before the planet is about to be crushed by its own moon.  Loki and Sylvie board a train, to go to a rocket that will take them off the planet before it dies.  But they get kicked off the train, and it’s a race against time to get to the ship.  Do they make it in time? 

This episode, in fact the show so far, is the epitome of bad writing.  The writers boxed themselves in from the start of the show with the variant character, so they made the variant a woman.  So now, the exposition plays out like a bad rom-com, Sylvie and Loki are on a train, they don’t like each other at first.  Not only is this a rom-com, it’s a bad rom com.  Disney surely paid Tom Hiddleston a king’s ransom to be in a series, but didn’t come up with an imaginative enough plotline to make this show worth watching. 

Episode 4:  Nexus Event: 

Loki and Sylvie are still stuck on Lemantis, with no way to leave, are they doomed to certain death?  While on Lamentis Sylvie shares her insights on the TVA and the Time Keepers.  Loki is not sure what to think but he knows he wants to help Sylvie. 

This episode is another example of bad writing.  Sylvie and Loki are facing an existential threat in episode 4.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what happens next.  And no one should care what happens to the time Variance Authority for many reasons, which will be elaborated on in the Season One summary of Loki. 

Episode 5: Journey Into Mystery 

Loki is sent into an undisclosed location by Judge Renslayer, Sylvie soon follows.  They meet other variants, who are resigned to the fate of staying where they are. But can Loki and Sylvie survive Alloth?  What is Alloth? 

This episode has a very medieval feel too it, complete with a quest, a creature, and even a castle.  Unfortunately, it’s not as entertaining as Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  It tries to be funny in an off-handed Python way, with the variants, but it doesn’t work. 

Episode 6:  For All Times.  Always. 

Loki and Sylvie finally meet He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors) is he the being they’re after, or just another false face to battle through? 

There’s a Wizzard of Oz, man behind the curtain vibe going on here, it’s lazy writing and bad writing, because even if Loki and Sylvie achieve their goal what next? 

My Impressions of Season One. 

There was an interesting premise here somewhere, about Loki hunting a deadly variant, but the premise got plowed over by a lot of bad writing and yes even dangerous writing.   

The writers boxed themselves in by making the variant a variant of one character, with nowhere ese to go, the writers the writers made the variant a woman.  That led to the oldest and most tired cliché, sexual tension.  Yes, every television comedy and drama from Friends to Moonlighting to The Wonder Years used this overused plot device, and suddenly with Loki, sexual tension is supposed to be fresh and new, well it isn’t.  Sylvie and Loki hate each other at first, then they open up to each other, then they fall for each other, it’s all been done before, many times. 

This leads to other cliches later on in the plot, the medieval themed “Journey Into Mystery” is filled with characters and images viewers have all seen before, the writers try to change the circumstances of the setting shift, but the change in setting wasn’t as imaginative as the original setting, so it fails.  Then as a finale, at the end of the rainbow, as it were, viewers are treated to an Oz themed finish, again It’s been done before and done better. 

Now, here’s what’s dangerous about the writing, Loki is sent to the TVA, Time Variance Authority, not the Tennessee Valley Authority, Loki has nothing to do with rural electrification, although maybe Loki would have been more interesting discussing rural electrification.  Loki is left in the Time Variance Authority a big, bumbling bureaucracy that somehow manages the timelines of every humanoid in this reality, in a world that believes that their world is held aloft by the Timekeepers, three lizard-llke creatures, who control the timelines for everyone.   

Questioning authority and even divinity is fine in make-believe worlds, what’s the worst that can happen in a make-believe world, fake chaos?  But we humans are facing a very real and existential threat from a very real variant called Delta, and now is not the time to create a storyline that questions authority, when belief in any sort of authority is at an all-time low.  And when some need faith to soothe their grief when their loved ones are dying is this a time to satirize people’s beliefs in a higher power?  Hindus believe the world was created by three gods?  Is Disney satirizing polytheism?  Or animals as gods?  Hanuman is the Hindu monkey God, Ganesh is the Hindu elephant God.  So, this storyline is either a very condescending take on religions that the American Disney writers do not understand, or a satire of a bumbling bureaucracy that doesn’t know what it’s doing or why.  Either one is a horrible take when the world is suffering through a global pandemic. 

For a show with a seemingly innovative premise, the characters are awfully conventional.  Loki is a mischief maker, he likes to cause chaos.  Sylvie is nothing more than a love interest, with a strange nod to narcissists.  Mobius is the epitome of an establishment character, a TVA functionary, a bureaucratic pencil pusher, his evolution through the episodes is unconvincing and uninteresting. Judge Renslayer is even more determined to preserve the status quo than Mobius, and therefore even less interesting. 

Loki is a showcase for Tom Hiddleston.  Hiddleston does not disappoint, he uses his wit and charm to turn Loki from an irritating pest to a likeable antihero.  But the writers made a mistake by pairing him up with Sylvie, that means Hiddleston has to share time with an actress, and generate genuine feelings for her.  That takes away from Loki’s Modus Operandi, which is tricking people to get his way.  Owen Wilson and his narcoleptic beach boy delivery is not a sharp enough retort to Hiddleston’s quick witted verbal bobbing and weaving.  Sophia D’Martino doesn’t really have any chemistry with Hiddleston, so the romance seems forced, the writers also try to give her an action hero aspect to her role, but that doesn’t work well either, so the writers are stuck with a romance.  Gugu Mbatha Raw brings nothing to her performance as Ravona Renslayer, no dramatic ability, no comedic ability, it’s a flat uninspired performance.  Wunmi Mosaku is good as a variant hunter, named B-15 (really creative name there) but not as good as her performance as Ruby in Lovecraft Country, where she got to show off her singing talents.  Here, her character was more one-dimensional. 

The direction is not that great, the pacing lags somewhat.  There’s a cliffhanger in episode 3, that the audience knows is not a real cliffhanger, and the final set piece, or climax is really anti-climactic.  There are different locales, some meant to be exciting, but the dying planet of Lamentis looked like set decoration from a Star Trek episode from the 60’s, surely Disney can afford better set design. When Loki is banished, the scenes look like something out of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  Except Monty Python’s version looks more authentic. 

Loki:  Hiddleston’s non-low-key performance can’t save this predictable sci-fi series. 

Movie Review: Motherless Brooklyn (2019)

In the 1950’s, Lionel Essrog (Edward Norton) is a detective investigating the murder of his mentor Frank Minna. (Bruce Willis) Minna was undertaking a secretive corruption investigation involving some of New York City’s most powerful politicians, but he was shot before could finish it. So now, it’s up to Lionel to pick up Minna’s investigation, and try to find out who killed his boss. Using Minna’s notes, Lionel tracks down Laura Rose, (Gugu Mbatha Raw) a crusading lawyer fighting urban renewal. Posing as a reporter, Lionel talks to an idealist named Paul (Willem Dafoe) who says the real power in the city is Parks Commissioner, Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin) a developer, who doesn’t mind displacing a few minorities to see his vision realized. Moses has more than a few secrets as does Paul, but where does Laura fit in, and can Lionel find all the answers, and solve the murder of Frank Minna?

First, and foremost Motherless Brooklyn is a period piece. that makes the storytelling difficult as it is, but the story is a long, meandering story that tries to reinvigorate the noir genre of filmmaking. It tries to combine the film Cotton Club with a Bogart type detective, except that Lionel is not a tough guy, he’s a sensitive guy with Tourette’s Syndrome, unfortunately Lionel is not given many character traits, besides Tourette’s and an eidetic memory, so there’s not much to make the character memorable. The other characters are similarly one dimensional. Motherless Brooklyn could actually be a conscious or unconscious biography of Robert Moses, the master builder of modern New York city. One of the main characters is named Moses Randolph, he is Parks Commissioner, and he’s bullying the mayor for more power. Even if Motherless Brooklyn was a story about Robert Moses it was sloppily told, with a half-hearted romance, and it limps to an anticlimactic finish.

The acting is sub-par. Edward Norton is a good actor, who hit his peak in Fight Club and American History X, but with Lionel, he goes to the well too often with the Tourette’s Syndrome. If he was trying to engender some kind of sympathy for Lionel, it doesn’t work. The Tourette’s utterances after almost every sentence becomes grating, and actually works against him and makes him less likeable. Gugu Mbatha Raw’s character Laura is central to the plot, but her character has very little to say or do, besides be a lukewarm love interest, and that’s not much. Bruce Willis is in this film for a thankfully short time, his whatever charm he had seems to have faded with his looks and he’s not a good enough actor to play character roles. Willem Dafoe can’t help but play a bad guy even when he tries to play an idealist, and that’s what happens here. Alec Baldwin does a passible job as a power-hungry parks commissioner, who wants to be a prime mover in modernizing the city. Baldwin’s voice starts as a guttural groan, and then returns to his normal speaking voice. There are more than a few similarities to another power-hungry New York developer, but he’s done such good comedy work on 30 Rock and Saturday Night Live, that it’s difficult to take him seriously, even when he’s playing a serious role.

Second-time director Norton makes the mistake many actor/directors make. He thinks that none of the screenplay that he wrote should be edited, so what the viewer ends up watching is a slowly paced, labored piece of filmmaking, that takes forever to come together, and once all the plot points come together, the ending is hardly worth the wait. He doesn’t get inspired performances from his fellow actors, and so the project Norton worked so hard to bring to the screen ultimately falls flat.

Motherless Brooklyn: Not the rebirth of noir that was hoped for.

Movie Review: The Cloverfield Paradox (2018)

In the near future, earth is running out of fuel, nations are on the brink of war.  The multination crew of the Cloverfield space station is tasked to test the Sheppard Particle Accelerator, and if see if it’s operational.  If it is, Earth will have a renewable source of energy, and the specter of world war will diminish.  Crew member Hamilton (Gugu Mbatha Raw) is debating whether to join the team or not, she talks it over with her husband, Michael (Roger Davies) and decides to go.

Three years later, the crew is still on the space station and they are nowhere closer to firing up the particle accelerator, but then they have a breakthrough, and they get the particle accelerator to work briefly, and provide energy to the earth.  In doing so, the crew blows the space station wildly off course and off the Earth’s radar. When the station is blown off course, strange things are happening on the ship.  Volkov, (Aksel Hennie) thinks something is wrong with his eye.  The other crew members find a crew member named Jensen (Elizabeth Debicki) enmeshed in the wiring of the space station, except no one seems to know her. While sealing the ship’s interior panels, the panels amputate Mundy’s (Chris O’Donnell) arm.  While all this is happening, Tam (Zhang Ziyi) and Schmidt (Daniel Bruhl) are planning something without the knowledge of the commander of the Space Station, Kiel. (David Oyelowo) Did the particle accelerator that threw them into the vast reaches of space, cause these weird occurrences to happen?  Can the crew do anything to repair the accelerator and save themselves and the Earth?

That thud Netflix subscribers heard was this bomb landing in their streaming queue. This is an earth-shatteringly bad film, shockingly produced by JJ Abrams.  Why he would lend his name to this floating piece of excrement is beyond me.  It takes an interesting premise and ruins it.  It starts out as a pretty good mystery, trying to generate the atmospherics of vastly better movies like 2001 or Moon.  The reveal is disappointing, and the ending is a bad joke.  This movie was made to try to explain the original Cloverfield film, which was an awful Godzilla ripoff.  Abrams should have left the Cloverfield movies alone after 10 Cloverfield Lane, which was a decent suspense movie.

Equally shocking is why good actors like David Oyelowo, Daniel Bruhl and Gugu Mbatha Raw would be in a film like this.  Oyelowo was great in Selma, as Martin Luther King Junior, but he’s given very little to do here.  Daniel Bruhl was very good, as Nicki Lauda in Rush, he was also very good as Lutz Heck in The Zookeeper’s Wife, and again, he’s got a small role.  Mbatha Raw is given the biggest role, and try as she might, she can’t avoid the terrible writing.  Zhang Ziyi, who was great in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, and 2046, speaks Mandarin throughout, and that got tiresome.

The direction is quite mundane,and the film feels longer than its 1 hour and 40 minute runtime, Abrams is not the director, and it shows the pacing is sloppy, the performances are lackluster, and the ending is ludicrous.

The Cloverfield Paradox A bad luck Cloverfield for anyone who watches.

Movie Review: Miss Sloane (2016)

Elizabeth Sloane (Jessica Chastain) is a lobbyist.  She has engaged in some pretty morally reprehensible things, but she supports her causes unquestioningly. But when her boss, George Dupont, (Sam Waterston) asks her to support a campaign to make women more ardent gun rights supporters, she refuses to work on the campaign and moreover quits the lobbying firm and joins the Brady Campaign, a  gun control organization.  Elizabeth takes along five co-workers, she wants to take a sixth co-worker, but her protégé, Jane Malloy (Allison Pill) stays behind.

Undaunted, Elizabeth joins the Brady campaign, and befriends Esme Manucharian (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) a fervent believer in gun control who confides her reasons to Elizabeth, but wants to keep her reasons private.  Elizabeth wastes no time in raising money for her new found cause, from wealthy donors like Evelyn Sumner (Christine Baranski) and she gets to work flipping Senators’ votes, 60 is the magic number to withstand a filibuster.  But her slash and burn tactics, and her reckless proclivities anger her political enemies and endanger her friends.  Finally, in a desperate attempt to stop her momentum she is called in front of the Senate Ethics Committee to testify by Senator Ronald Sperling. (John Lithgow)  What comes out at the hearing? Does the bill Elizabeth is championing pass the Senate?

Miss Sloane tries very hard to be a sophisticated version of Mr. Smith Goes To Washington.  But it really is a sad day in America when a lobbyist is a protagonist in a political drama.  Mr. Smith was a political neophyte and a complete innocent, and that was part of the charm of that movie.  This movie has no charm, it portrays cynical move after another.  And it’s not very realistic, either. If flipping votes in the Senate was as simple as pulling a few political stunts, than fighting the NRA would be easy.  It is not, If Newtown Connecticut can happen and the Congress can’t pass background checks, then nothing will ever defeat the NRA.  So this is just Hollywood wish fulfillment, if Congress can’t pass the real thing, Hollywood can make it up.  And it doesn’t even work as wish fulfillment, because it’s so overtly political, and people, all people, go to movies to escape politics, not to revel in it.

I really love Jessica Chastain, because she enjoys playing a wide variety of roles, and she plays them all pretty well.  She really ties hard to play a tough woman and yet make her likeable, it’s a tough job.  I only wish the script was better and not so contrived, I still like Chastain, but I doubt that anyone could have pulled this role off.  I like Gugu Mbatha Raw too, but the writers make her a victim throughout the film, and she is never allowed to break out of victim mode.  And she disappears almost completely near the end of the film. John Lithgow seems to enjoy playing a puppet politician, but again his role is too predictable.

The direction is nothing special, the pacing is slow at times the movie is very long, and takes a long time to get to its ending.  The director doesn’t get great performances from anyone in particular, and the ending is predictable.

Miss Sloane:  Misses the mark.

 

 

 

 

Movie Review: The Free State of Jones (2016)

In 1862, farmer and Confederate medic Newton Jones (Matthew McConoughey ) becomes disillusioned with the Civil War after his nephew, Daniel, (Jacob Lofland) is killed in battle.  He becomes further disillusioned when a Confederate soldier Lieutenant Barbour (Bill Tangradi) steals corn from the farms in the area including his own.  In October 1862, after the Battle of Corinth, Newt desserts the Confederate army and meets a slave woman named Rachel (Gugu Mbatha Raw) who helps nurse his son back to health.  Later while escaping Confederate troops, Rachel helps Newt into a nearby swamp, where Newt has his hurt leg repaired by another slave named Moses. (Mahershala Ali) From the swamps of Mississippi, Newt and his band of Confederate Army deserters and slaves continue to battle the Confederate army.  But some of the Confederate soldiers resent fighting alongside slaves, can Newt Jones hold his rebellion together?  Can the Confederate army smash the rebellion within their ranks?

The Free State of Jones should have been an interesting movie, but instead, it’s a long, boring tedious movie.  It tries to be a sprawling, sweeping historical epic.  The epic sweep of this film makes the viewer lose focus, because the events span years.  It also splits its time between Newt’s soldiering, and his personal life, which is messy, to say the least.  Finally, it intersperses the story of Newt’s great-great-grandson, and that throws a further monkeywrench in the linear storytelling.

The acting is just ok.  Mathew McConoughey is a great actor, but he’s given very little to do, for the first hour, he literally does nothing.  There are a few compelling scenes for him in this film, and the viewer sees spark of the great skill he possesses, but those scenes are few and far between,  Gugu Mbatha Raw is not given much to do except gaze longingly at McConaughey which she does dutifully, but all romance is inferred, there is not even a kiss between them, and so there is hardly any chemistry to speak of.  Kerri Russell is wasted, she appears in early scenes, disappears and reappears later in the film.

The director also wrote the film, and its length 2 hours and 15 minutes seems much longer as the viewer is dragged along for every inch of Newt Jones journey. The performances aren’t great, and the film is not well lit, the nighttime scenes seem too dark.

The Free State of Jones:  Not Jonesing for this film.

Movie Review: Belle (2013)

In 1769, Captain Sir John Lindsey  (Matthew Goode) claims her mixed race daughter, Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsey (Lauren Julien-Box, Gugu  Mbatha Raw) and brings her back to the family estate to live with her great uncle, Lord Mansfield, (Tom Wilkinson) Chief Justice of the British Supreme Court.  Belle’s father dies and leaves her a sizable fortune, but she still cannot eat dinner with guests. A young man, John Davinier,(Sam Reid) wants to study the law under the tutelage of Lord Mansfield.  Belle and John quarrel at first, but they seem to be attracted to each other.  John is doing research on the Zong case, a fraudulent insurance case involving a slave ship, which could deal a crippling blow to slavery in England.  Belle helps John find some key papers in the case, but how does Lord Mansfield rule in the case?  Do Belle and John act on their feelings for each other?

Belle is based on a true story, but a true story doesn’t mean it’s a compelling story.  This movie tries to be part Jane Austen type movie about cotillions, and debutantes, and the social niceties of that period, and part Amistad, a movie about a slave ship case.  Add to that the story of a mixed race girl growing up in a mostly white environment.  The trouble is, it’s not enough of Jane Austen, or enough of Amistad.  There are no sparks in the romance, and the slave case seems like an afterthought.  The ending is predictable and didn’t help my opinion of the film.

The acting is not bad.  Gugu Mbatha Raw, tries hard to portray the conflicted nature of being a mixed race woman in the late 1700’s, but the romance which should be a key part of the story falls flat.  There is no chemistry with Sam Reid, no sparks, nothing.  They hug at the end of the movie.  Hug?  Come on.  They are supposed to be in love with each other. Tom Wilkinson tries to class up the picture, but he plays Lord Mansfield as a cantankerous old cuss, who never really warms up to Belle or anyone else.

The pacing is slow and ponderous the movie is long, there are no breathtaking visuals, no great direction.

Belle:  Doesn’t ring true.