Ghost in the Shell

First Hit:  Interesting to watch but not very engaging. This is one of those films that with the right use of computer generated graphics and a great story we’d have a wonderful film. However, I think the script failed to create the sense of urgency this film can create.

A couple of the questions this film brings are: Will we all become a brain inside a hi-tech mechanical robotic body? Will the brain be able to embrace all our memories and our souls while operating without the rest of the body and all the other cells that hold memories of their own?

Here we have Major Mira Killian (Scarlett Johansson) waking up from a procedure that implanted her brain into a cyborg body. She struggles with memories because the lines between humans and robot are becoming blurred and therefore, she is as well. She was built to be a weapon.

She’s not the first and one of her predecessors Hideo Kuze (Michael Pitt), has become an enemy of the company manufacturing both him, Major, and other robotic cyborgs. He foils many of the company’s plans and when Major does a “deep dive” into a robotic that had been compromised by Kuze, she learns something about Kuze and has a stronger desire to find him.

Major’s support comes from District 9 Chief Daisuke Aramaki (Takeshi Kitano), friend and solider Batou (Pilou Asbaek), and her direct creator Dr. Ouelet (Juliette Binoche). Additionally, she learns of her real history when she meets Motoko’s (Kaori Yamamoto) mother. She learns and figures out that she is Motoko.

Most of the film is shot at night or in very dark scenes which made this film more difficult to watch in that there was little in the way demonstrating light and hope. However, from a filmmakers point of view, they couldn’t create the interesting CG figures that are as tall as buildings that grace the skyline if it wasn't dark.

In general, there wasn’t enough digging into the issue that's behind the story, the issue of combining mankind and machines into one unit. The film just danced around the subject.

Johansson was good but she lacked a great story, poor direction or, more than likely, both. Knowing her capabilities in roles like this (think “Lucy”), in this film she felt lifelessness. Pitt’s role was supposed to be intelligent and dark. It was dark but didn’t really work in the intelligence arena as the script was limited. Kitano was one of the best pieces of this film. He was clear in his role and delivered aspects of what this film could have been. Binoche was almost out of place. She's fresh and alive, and although I bought her role, I’m not sure she couldn’t have known more about her boss’s intention. She doesn't do naive well. Yamamoto was exquisite. I loved how she related the story of losing her son and daughter. Asbaek was great as Major’s friend and fellow soldier. Jamie Moss, William Wheeler, and Ehren Kruger wrote a mediocre screenplay as the dialogue did not create much interest. However, the direction by Rupert Sanders was as much to blame for the failure of this film as well.

Overall:  This film comes from great stock, but fails to really engage the story and therefore the audience.

Life

First Hit:  This film tried to be a horror thriller in the science fiction genre, but ended up being lifeless.

The film starts a little confusingly but with some interest. For some reason there wasn’t enough clear back fill as to how a space probe left Mars, heading for Earth and a space station had to catch it or…. Once I got past this unsolved puzzle, watching the team’s pilot Rory Adams (Ryan Reynolds) move a space arm to catch this thing in space was cool. However, any probe coming from Mars would be traveling much faster than it shows here, another puzzle to solve.

After bringing the soil samples into a sealed (not really because there were vents) bio-testing chamber, British biologist Hugh Derry (Arilyon Bakare) starts fiddling with the samples and finds a living one cell protoplasmic entity. Adjusting the mixture of oxygen and stuff, it grows. As Dr. Miranda North (Rebecca Ferguson), Quarantine Officer states; “…all muscle, all brain, and all eye.” It is named “Calvin” by some school children. I liked the reference in some ways because “Calvin and Hobbs” was one of my favorite comic strips and the character Calvin was a handful.

Hugh is like a child with this discovery and Rory states “there’s going to be a huge custody battle over this”, mostly because the space station has multi-national people working on board and it is the “International Space Station” (ISS).

To give some character to the team, Sho’s (Hiroyuki Sanada) wife gives birth while he watches it on a personal video device. Commander Katerina Golovkina (Olga Dihovichnaya) is Russian and is ultimately responsible for the safety of the crew. Dr. David Jordan (Jake Gyllenhaal) is the medical officer and has been in space longer than anyone 400+ days. He likes it there because being on the ISS it is a controllable environment for him.

So what happens? Calvin gets loose and attacks people because humans are filled with the type of liquid nutrients it needs to survive. As Hugh states at one point, it is just trying to survive. All havoc breaks loose, Earth loses communication contact with ISS and decides to send a Soyuz capsule up to push the ISS into deep space forever, killing everyone and everything on the ship. However, when this plan fails, the last two living humans make a decision to try to save Earth from Calvin.

Part of the problem, is that Calvin wasn’t interesting, I didn’t care about the characters, and it seemed like a fight in futility from the get go. Then there were the logistics issues that I pointed out above.

Reynolds had little screen time and maybe the film would have done better with his presence extended. Bakare was OK, but a bit too inquisitive in trying to make Calvin respond to stimuli, which wasn't scientifically stringent enough if this were real. Ferguson was bland and didn’t really add much to the film. Dihovichnaya was OK, but didn’t seem to be controlling her team much, which caused part of the problem. Gyllenhaal was good and one of the better parts of the film because you can tell he pours himself into each part. Sanada was OK and didn’t add much to the overall picture. Writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick were both probably aiming for an “Alien” type film but ended up alienating this audience – some actually walked out during my viewing. Daniel Espinosa had some great photography, and visual effects, but the weak script and story deflated the overall presentation.

Overall:  This film will not get reviewed well and just didn’t work

Wilson

First Hit:  At times out-loud funny but I wouldn’t have called it a comedy.

This film was a study of a man who was socially inept, neurotic, and brazenly honest with his comments to and about people. We find Wilson (Woody Harrelson) living in a messy apartment filled with paperback books. He’s got a sweet dog with whom he talks to and allows to run and act freely around the apartment. When he walks the dog, and people want to speak to the dog in a doggie voice, he insults them by mimicking the doggie voice the people use.

He despises technology and continually interrupts people who are wearing headphones. His only friend is moving away and Wilson blames his buddy's wife. Wilson gets a call from the hospital telling him his father’s heart is failing and dying. He visits the hospital and we see that Wilson didn’t get much acknowledgment or love growing up and although his father, lying there, was unconscious, the audience gets that Wilson’s statement was probably true. Then his dad dies.

Cloaked in confusion because he has no family his best friend is gone, although his dog sitter Shelly (Judy Greer) likes him well enough, he seeks to find his ex-wife Pippi (Laura Dern). There are some very out-loud funny scenes as he makes his way to find Pippi, including speaking with her co-worker. After a drink together, Pippi and Wilson start talking and as they talk, it becomes obvious why they were a couple and why they split up. When he asks her about the reasons for aborting their child, she tells him that she had the child and gave it up for adoption.

With a new mission to spend his energy on, he searches for and finds his now 17 year old daughter, Claire (Isabella Amara). Convincing Pippi to join him, they follow her to a mall where they introduce themselves.

His continued, no filter, behavior eventually gets him in trouble with the law when he takes Claire to meet Pippi’s sister Polly (Cheryl Hines). In this interaction we see part of the reason why Pippi struggles with her family as their judgmental ways are tough to be around.

Harrelson was good but I didn’t like the character much. I liked some of Wilson’s ideas and his directness, but cringed at the level by which his unfiltered communication with complete strangers (the bathroom urinal scene). Greer was wonderful and represented a calm place and person in Wilson's life. Dern was great. She embodied the frustration of not having the kind of life she wanted while acknowledging her own failures. Amara was wonderful as the confused daughter. Hines did a good job of being the perfect, antagonistic sister. Daniel Clowes wrote this screenplay from his own graphic novel and there is some speculation that Wilson’s behavior occasionally mirror’s his own. Craig Johnson’s direction was clear but the issue was it was neither funny enough to be a comedy nor was it dramatic enough to be just a drama.

Overall:  This film is entertaining enough, but it is mostly a study on how a maladjusted man finds he way through life.

T2 Trainspotting

First Hit:  A wonderful 20-year follow-up film to Trainspotting.

Director Danny Boyle did what many people don’t know how to do, and that is create a follow-up film that works on many levels.

The characters are back and still attempting to find their way through life. Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) is back in Scotland after being in Amsterdam. He’s coming on the pretense that he has a happy life in Amsterdam and he’s back to settle up with his buddies after making off with £20,000 that the crew had stolen at the end of the previous film.

Daniel “Spud” Murphy (Ewen Bremner) is still struggling with heroin, is now divorced and loses connection with his son Fergus. Simon “Sick Boy” Williamson (Johnny Lee Miller) is now regularly doing cocaine and supports himself by having his girlfriend Veronika (Anjela Nedyalkova) sexually pose with rich people so that he can compromise them and blackmails them. He also runs a rundown bar that he inherited.

Lastly there is Francis “Franco” Begbie (Robert Carlyle) who has been in prison nearly the whole time. I loved that his accent was so strong that Boyle used captions allowing the audience to understand his rants. Near the beginning of the film, he breaks out of prison, returns home to find his son is in school for “Hotel Management”. Franco is an angry mean sort of man who wants to fight everyone and he especially wants revenge on Renton for stealing the money.

The film dives back to when they were kids together along with when they were all doing heroin together. The film uses these flashbacks along with very interesting imagery to tell the story. The one scene with Mark and Simon doing heroin in Daniel’s living room was surrealistically realistic. The friendship between the men, except Franco’s anger towards Mark, was touching.

McGregor was wonderful in his reprised role, thoughtful enough for the audience to like, and twisted enough to keep audiences interested and engaged as to what might happen next. Miller was appropriately intense, violent, and high strung. Each time he was one the screen, one wondered if he would blow-up and explode. Bremner was amazing as a very lost man but slowing finding his voice by writing stories. Carlyle was amazingly intense. He was like a firecracker each time he was on the screen and I kept wondering how long he could live his life like this. Nedyalkova was really wonderful by balancing her need to make enough money to go back home to take care of her child with how to get the most from both Williamson and Renton. John Hodge wrote and excellent screenplay filled with turns and truths about the characters. Boyle is on the top of his game with this film.

Overall:  This film is not everyone’s cup of tea but it is an excellent second film about these characters and very well done.

The Sense of an Ending

First Hit:  Somewhat slow, subtle, and insightful film about someone coming to grips with things as they are and not what he thought they were.

I didn’t mind that this British film plodded along because its plodding was even and unfolded the character and the past of Tony Webster (Jim Broadbent) in a thoughtful and realistic way.

Tony is a quiet grumpy (“curmudgeon” according to his daughter) retired old man. His best friend is his divorced wife Margaret (Harriet Walter). He’s a retired professor, but owns and works at a very small antique camera business. He receives a registered letter one day that tells him that his first college girlfriend Veronica’s (Freya Mavor as young Veronica and Charlotte Rampling as the older Veronica) mother, Sarah (Emily Mortimer), left him a diary by his old college friend Adrian Finn (Joe Alwyn).

Curious, he goes to the solicitor’s (lawyer) office to collect the diary, however he’s told that Veronica still has it and isn’t giving it up to Tony. This prompts him to discuss his university story to his former wife, who sees through the surface representation and tells him, come back and tell me the real and in-depth story.

The film is about this slow unfolding of his reconciliation of his actions as a student. To assist the story, his daughter Susie (Michelle Dockery) is pregnant and having a baby, which is used to enhance Tony’s inability to connect at an emotional empathetic level to the possibilities of what happened a long time ago.

To tell the story the film goes back and forth in time often to explore his relationship with Veronica, her mom, Adrian, and his other close friends. It takes a bit of getting use to because the segues between the two time periods are not always matched.

Broadbent was perfect for this role. He’s got the look and the acting ability to make me believe he was learning about his whole life through the story of the film. Being an occasional curmudgeon myself, I got why he asked the questions he did and the way he isolated himself. Walter was wonderful as his understanding and caring ex-wife. Mavor was interesting as young Veronica but it was Rampling as the older Veronica who really put the right flavor on his growing up, so-of-speak. Mortimer was really strong in her brief but impactful role. Alwyn was OK as Tony’s friend. Dockery was wonderful as Tony’s daughter. I liked their interaction and was touched by his being with her during the birth of her baby. Nick Payne did a wonderful job of creating a script that unfolded slowly. Ritesh Batra did a good job of letting the dialog unfold the scenes.

Overall:  This was enjoyable to me, but I can see why it may not be enjoyable to others.