Review: Rango

Grade: A

Upsides: Original, clever and visually dazzling with a shockingly deep plot that tips its hat to revisionist Westerns and Gonzo Journalism

Downsides: Realistically detailed creatures, some rough language and a heavy plot might scare, confuse and bore the youngest viewers

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Why did the chameleon cross the road?

No ideas?

How about to find himself?

Gore Verbinski’s Rango offers one of the deepest punch lines to a chicken-cross-the-road joke all wrapped in the most original and subversive animated feature to emerge from a studio not named Pixar. Raoul Duke would be proud. Coincidentally, Hunter S. Thompson’s alter ego and his compadre, Dr. Gonzo, make a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo in early goings, a clear tip of the hat to star Johnny Depp’s legendary turn as Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. In many ways, Rango is a spiritual and visual cousin to the Fear and Loathing, right down to spastic chameleon Rango’s red Hawaiian print shirt.

Rango is a fever dream twist on classic westerns, spiked with existential dilemmas and the orneriest collection of humanized critters this side of a Disney flick. The animated epic follows the titular chameleon as he is thrown from his life as a caged pet with dreams of starring in his own story and is forced to live the role he was born to play. That role just happens to be sheriff of the dying western hamlet of Dirt, where the denizens---including all manner of lizard, rodent, feline and rabbit—are struggling to survive amidst a mysterious drought, outlaws, cannibals and the shrinking border of the ‘west’. Despite some mildly predictable plot elements, Rango tackles everything from the death of the old west to the actor’s search for identity and the importance of the audience to the storyteller—including a Greek chorus of Mariachi Owls—with cleverness and personality, proving itself so much more than a fish out of water story with talking animals it seems to be.

Star Johnny Depp knocks it out the park, as usual, voicing the conflicted Rango with his trademark buzzed mania, self-awareness and pitch perfect comic timing. He hits many of the same beats from Fear and Loathing, but his voice work succeeds largely due to the fresh context. The rest of the cast is no slouch either. Isla Fisher voices Annie Oakley-ish lizard Beans with pure spunk, while Abigail Breslin turns in a creepy, smart-alecky turn as field mouse Priscilla. Ned Beatty lends a gruff world-weariness to the treacherous Mayor, and Johnny Depp encounters Davy Jones again as Bill Nighy voices the machine-gun-tailed rattler from hell, Rattlesnake Jake. There’s even another surprise character cameo that’s sure to please Spaghetti Western fans.

Visually, Rango is amazing. The creatures of Dirt are not only painstakingly and realistically detailed, each has a unique physical deformity or signature that shows how much living these characters have done. The shots of the desert and Rango’s hallucinations are an awesome balance of majesty and mystery. Verbinski and the animators at Industrial Light & Magic proceed to outdo their work on the characters and scenery by staging some ridiculously elaborate action sequences—complete with dive bombing bats and machine-gunning rabbit cannibals—that exceed the limits of spectacle and imagination in most computer animated features.

Despite all of its distilled greatness, Rango may not play well to kids under ten, as many of creatures are appropriately frightening and the language can be coarse (hey, it’s a western. Tough talk is unavoidable). Not to mention, most of the existentialist and post-modern western themes are bound to fly right over their heads. While the kids may not get everything that’s going on, they’ll still be mesmerized by the dazzling visuals and slapstick shenanigans that punctuate the deeper storyline. Even if the kids don’t have fun with this trippy revisionist Western, fans of post-modern Westerns and complex, humorous epics in the vein of Verbinski’s and Depp’s last collaboration—something about pirates—are sure to have one heck of a good time.

Review: Drive Angry 3D

Grade: C

Upside: Visceral gory action and gratuitous nudity, with sly self-awareness, that's sure to please fans of 21st century grindhouse flicks like Machete.

Downside: Generally unoriginal with archetypal characters and falls flat when trying to add any depth.

I can imagine the pitch for Summit Entertainment's new Nicolas Cage vehicle, Drive Angry (Shot in 3D!): 21st Century Grindhouse! It’s The Crow meets Death Proof!

Tarantino would’ve killed to direct this in his heyday.

Unfortunately, the duty of directing one of the purest examples of 70’s era B-movie schlock in years falls to Direct-to-DVD vet Patrick Lussier. In Drive Angry, Lussier directs Nicolas Cage through ridiculously violent and brazen revenge fantasy. Cage plays the cleverly—to some—named John Milton, an escapee from Hell dead set on saving his granddaughter from slimy six-gun slinging Satanist Jonah King (Twilight’s Billy Burke). Milton is accompanied on his roaring rampage of vengeance by Amber Heard’s Piper, a Southern-fried pistol and dead ringer for Friday Night Lights’ Tyra Collette. Tailing Milton and Piper is a snarky soul collector known only as the Accountant, played by perennial ‘That Guy’ William Fichtner with his usual ticks turned up to 100.

Fichtner is not the only one who has turned the intensity up for this flick. Everything about Drive Angry is beyond over-the-top. From the cartoonish violence to the abundant nudity, this flick operates almost exclusively on Badass Logic and slavishly follows the Rule of Cool. Whether this works largely depends on your taste and tolerance for the hallowed conventions of grindhouse cinema. Taken at face value, Drive Angry’s hard ‘R’ qualities—including gunshots to the eye, a shootout during sex (ripped straight from another 21st century big budget B-movie, 2007’s Shoot’em Up) and a plethora of limbs destroyed by buck shots—could be appalling. Thankfully, the makers of Drive Angry don’t take the material seriously and the sly awareness of the flick’s B-movie roots makes it more digestible than it has any right to be.

The performances, on the other hand, are much harder to swallow. Cage hams it up, as usual, with his trademark stilted delivery that ranges from quirky cool to laughably explosive. Heard fares a little better, playing Piper with just the right amount of spunk of vulnerability to avoid be grating. Burke and Fichtner do serviceable jobs as antagonists, but neither brings anything original to characters that most audiences have seen before, which is the main problem with Drive Angry.

There’s nothing new here. Lussier does competent work that is at times thrilling, but is mostly a series of shots, characters and plot points that even the most casual moviegoers would recognize. One would think that with carte blanche to go balls-to-the-wall Lussier and his team would be a bit more creative. If Lussier couldn’t give the flick a bit more originality, at least he could’ve given it some depth. Sadly, anytime Drive Angry tries to switch gears and show some character growth or even something resembling real emotion, it falls flat. Trust me, it’s never a good sign when the audience laughs at the most dramatic scenes. Despite these failings, Drive Angry succeeds in being exactly what it seems to be on the tin: a total turn-off-your-brain experience in 3D(which is noticeably clearer and more effective than recent 3D releases, thanks to some cool effects with objects shooting towards the audience). If you can manage to ignore the B-movie styling, unoriginal characters and rehashed plot, or you just love movies like Machete or Death Proof then Drive Angry is right up your alley. If not, it’d be your best interest to drive away from this undercooked revenge flick.

Better Than it Should Be? That’s The Dilemma

Vaughn and James Wring Some Depth Out of Their Latest Comedy

Vince Vaughn and Kevin James latest, The Dilemma, will leave with your own quandary: Is this movie really that good or am I just lying to myself? Truthfully, that’s not a terrible dilemma, and neither is this unexpectedly deep comedy about one man’s tortured attempt to keep a secret that could ruin much more than a friendship.

Vaughn and James play longtime friends and business partners, Ronny and Nick, on the verge of their big breaks, romantically and professionally. As the two work on an electric engine with bite for Chrysler that could change their business fortunes, Ronny, inspired by Nick’s wedded bliss with wife Geneva (Winona Ryder), is gearing up to propose to girlfriend Beth (Jennifer Connelly). Complications arise when Ronny catches Geneva playing cougar to Channing Tatum’s tattooed bad boy, Zip. Hi-jinks and heartbreak ensue as Ronny struggles with telling Nick the devastating truth and risking the Chrysler deal.

Director Ron Howard—or at least Universal’s marketing department—pulled a nifty bait and switch with The Dilemma. What was clearly marketed as another Vaughn frat buddy vehicle, with James stepping in for Owen Wilson, is actually a mildly heart-wrenching, and occasionally riotous, study of the psychological, and physical, stress associated with keeping secrets that threaten the delicate nature of relationships, platonic and romantic.

Vaughn truly carries the film, portraying a man besieged by a secret he doesn’t want to keep. He still delivers his trademark snide insults—as well as a punishing amount of physical comedy when he tousles with Tatum in the film’s funniest, yet oddly violent scene—but the majority of his performance is balancing the jokes with a little more pathos than expected. While Vaughn hits most of the dramatic notes, particularly when showing exasperation over his duplicity, he doesn’t dig as deep as he could, often bailing for a joke instead of showing too much genuine agony.

With Vaughn carrying the comedic and dramatic load, James is left to play straight man and victim. Admittedly, it’s strange to see James in a role devoid of pratfalls, but he plays Nick with an equal measure of naivete and anxiousness, as a man beset by career anxiety while wholly unaware of his wife’s duplicity. James lets Nick’s good-natured gullibility sink in so deep that audiences will still feel a bit blindsided at the denouement, despite knowing exactly what’s coming. Winona Ryder takes another turn as a deplorable character playing Nick’s philandering wife without complexity until the final frames. Connelly plays a compassionate counterpoint to Ryder’s spiteful shrew with a low-key turn as Vaughn’s supportive girlfriend. Connelly may not have much to do, but at least she gives the role a dignity that eludes most contemporary female comedic leads.

Ron Howard does a fine job of pushing these actors just beyond their comfort zones—some much more than others—giving them characters with a little dirt on them who are constantly forced to suppress their personal and professional secrets. The understated confrontations, and subsequent confessions, between Vaughn and Connelly alone give the Dilemma more depth than it deserves.

Despite surprising depth and strong performances, there are notable missteps particularly with supporting actors who are grossly underused—Queen Latifah and Tatum in particular—the lack of comedic material for James, and the wall-banging reluctance of the characters to just fess up, already! Even worse is the amount of jokes that face plant from launch. The audience sat without so much as chuckling for most of the film’s two hours, largely due to a stream of tired Vince Vaughn jokes buried under the weight of the drama. Flat jokes and missed opportunities aside, the Dilemma is a real surprise, especially with its dreaded January release date, offering more emotion than laughs and showing viewers something they haven’t seen from Vaughn since his turn in The Break-Up: range.

The Dearth of Our Imagination

I returned from my first pilgrimage to Comic-Con inspired, but broken-hearted.

Comic-con was every inch the spectacle of legend. The central exhibition hall of the San Diego Convention Center, a two-block long cage of white-washed steel and glass, was crowded from wall to pillar to post to wall with an ocean of ‘geeks,’ children, tourists, stars, creators and drag-a-longs. The crowds clamored, pushed and tugged beneath towering displays of supersized mechas and movie posters, grabbing and snatching at every free trinket or toy tossed in their general direction. The hallways above the exhibition hall were congested with snaking lines that wrapped around, inside and outside the convention center. Hall H alone was a staggering, humbling sight. The cavernous hall, housing more seats than a small theater, barely contained crowds of thousands who waited hours with baited breath, and sharpened pencils, to squint at the movie stars of the month and gaze at sizzle reels. Among those crowds, the brown and, especially, the black faces were easily outnumbered by what seemed to be a 100 to 1 ratio.

For two days, my girlfriend and I squeezed through the stifling crowds, sliding between bodies to grab swag and wearing out the soles of our feet for a chance to see our favorite TV stars from 300 yards away. As we shimmied through the crowds and stood in ridiculously long lines, I noticed how rare a sight we were. In a moment like this, my girlfriend’s brother would pose the terribly clichéd inquiry, “How does it feel to be the pepper in the salt shaker?” My typical response would be to let the question hang until the silence becomes too awkward to continue any conversation. But this time, I would’ve answered, “lonely and discouraging.” Sure, attendees of myriad ethnicities attended Comic-Con. The diversity of California’s population practically demands it. But, among the rainbow of attendees, people of African descent were notoriously underrepresented. As bad as it seemed, the dearth of black creators and talent was even more distressing.

The minimal presence of black artists at Comic-Con was enough to make one ask, “Do we have any imagination?” Personally, I wondered: Where were the representatives of Aaron McGruder’s Boondocks—a series steeped in as equal doses of pop culture lexicon to rival Scott Pilgrim—? Who was present to discuss DC Comics Milestone Line—one of the most influential collection of African-American superhero creations—? I know we are capable of contemplating and conjuring the same feats imagination as creators of any other culture—despite having less money in many cases—but looking across the exhibit hall would prove that assertion wrong. I passed maybe four or five booths, out of hundreds, with black artists and, even more depressing, maybe one or two booths with black-owned properties. Of the two booths displaying black-owned properties I saw, one was a cheaply-made comic with poorly rendered superhero archetypes and the other was a clear Boondocks knock off, complete with brown-skinned anime characters. Generally, this type of creativity is inoffensive and tolerable, but, in a room where creativity is bursting at the seems, a couple of derivative projects with brown and black characters weren’t going to draw much attention. Perhaps the best example of dismal black attendance on either side of the Comic-Con fence came in the last minutes of our last day at the convention. My girlfriend and I were making our final rounds on the exhibit floor, minutes before the doors were to close, when a stocky black man with a immaculate ‘fro and a wide collared shirt over a canary yellow suit caught sight of us. I saw him approaching out the corner of my eye, hoping he wasn’t some suit trying to drag us to a preview of some hackneyed project like No Ordinary Family or The Cape. Instead, he politely blocked our path and asked “Do you guys know Jim Kelly?” Of course, I knew the legendary Jim Kelly from Enter the Dragon and Three the Hard Way. Since the question was obviously directed at me more than my girlfriend, I replied with a guarded enthusiasm, “Yeah.” He responded, “He’ll be here tomorrow…Come and check him out.” We nodded, feigning enthusiasm and knowing that, even if we were coming the next day, we probably wouldn’t stop to see Mr. Kelly because we’d rather catch the Marvel movie preview in Hall H.

Our apathy for black projects or seeing an aging black actor was likely informed, in some part, to the apathy our people show towards aspects of pop culture that don’t include music or sports. Despite the fact that the world is falling at the feet of the comic and video game gods, we don’t seem to care to contribute. However, we’ll gladly consume. We’ll buy movie tickets, video games, toys and a select few will purchase comics, but we rarely have a presence at the creator’s table and, at times, it seems that we don’t care to. Now, I won’t decry the hard work of the black creators who are stretching their imagination and creating uniquely creative work that demonstrates we are on par with the best creators of any color. Unfortunately, these creators are buried beneath the rappers, athletes, actors and quasi-celebrities who most of America associates with black “creativity.” Making matters worse is the reluctance of some creators, even the best, to avoid creating material so ingrained in “our” struggle that it turns off the mainstream consumer. I believe everyone should tell their story their way, but if we persist in telling stories with decaying neighborhoods, discordant romances and preachy drag queens, and we only stretch our imagination to evaluate the same issues of racism, poverty, and urban despair that have been repeated ad-hoc for decades then we risk alienating mainstream audiences who are far more engaged in the fantastic than the tragicomic. We don’t have to sacrifice the spirit of our stories and the integrity of our voices, but a little variety wouldn’t hurt. There are infinite ways to address these issues with imagination and ingenuity, from metaphor to allusion. If we, as creators, don’t embrace creative approaches to our material and start dreaming a little bigger then we’ll be stuck selling the same stories to the same people. With African-Americans making up a small percentage of the country, how far will that strategy take us?

To be fair, I’m sure a number of black creators and talent would have willingly attended Comic-Con to sell their stories and promote their projects. I’m also sure that there’s a sizable community of African-Americans and individuals of African ancestry from other countries who would love to have attended the convention as witnesses to the glut of creativity, but couldn’t for a myriad of circumstances. The truth is not everyone’s going to make the pilgrimage every year, but that shouldn’t stop those of us who love this stuff—the comics, the movies, the video games, the genre shows, the anime, etc.—from trying, at least once. And, for those of us who dare to create pop culture art or tell a wildly inventive story—myself included—it is imperative that we make the pilgrimage at some point, so that we can share our creations with an audience that will devour them without hesitation. Let’s just be sure to bring something fresh and original that will blow the geeks out of the water and show them that creators of color can dream as big and as bright as the best in the business.

The Idea of Control (INCEPTION SPOILERS AHEAD)

Regardless of one’s interpretation of Inception’s conclusion, the final minutes of the film exemplify the film’s overarching theme of control. Christopher Nolan’s dream-twisting heist flick may have audiences battling over the “truth” of the final frame, but the undeniable thematic truth is that Inception affirms the individual, conscious desire to control the uncontrollable, be it dreams, emotions or a life spiraling into the hands of fate. Inception, for all its sleek tidiness and meticulous narrative design, is essentially about taking control of the uncontrollable by letting go. Whether Leonardo DiCaprio’s Dom is in the real world or limbo by that closing shot, he decides to abandon the dreams and emotions that ruled his life and rushes to embrace his children, effectively reclaiming control of his life. Dom’s decision punctuates the theme of taking control that reverberates through every facet of Inception, from the setup to each “stage” of its climax to the dénouement.

Long before Inception’s multi-layered climax and perplexing conclusion, Nolan examines the concept of controlling the uncontrollable through co-mingling A-stories: Dom’s struggle to control “Mal” and his team’s quest to control the dreams of Fischer. Both plotlines deftly illustrate how the characters struggle and conspire to control unbound elements of the human psyche, specifically emotions and dreams. From the opening “extraction,” Dom struggles to avoid, ignore and altogether obfuscate “Mal,” the embodiment of his guilt over the death of his wife. Dom cripples his ability to perform dream-share extractions because he cannot control the grief that disturbs his subconscious. So disturbing is this grief that it emanates in the visage of his deceased wife and constantly threatens his team’s missions. Dom’s journey in Inception is as much about returning to his family as it is gaining control over a debilitating emotional handicap, in his case a devastating amount of grief. He fights with “Mal” through the duration of the film—physically, verbally and emotionally—and it is only when he faces her and embraces the irony of control—letting go in order to gain control—does he begin to conquer his emotions and escape his own personal “limbo.” By facing his emotions as an addict does an addiction that has overrun their life—by confronting and releasing the source of the pain—Dom achieves a semblance of control over a seemingly uncontrollable adversary.

Accordingly, Dom’s team plots a meticulous strategy—one that makes use of a wealth of talents to control the heretofore uncontrollable realm of dreams—to manipulate the dreams of global energy conglomerate heir, Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), and plant an idea that will prevent him from monopolizing the energy industry. Each member of Dom’s team represents an attempt to control some aspect of the dream process, from Yusuf (Dileep Rao) the Chemist, whose sedatives initiate near-endless sleep, to Ariadne (Ellen Page) the Architect, who constructs the dream world, to the Eames (Tom Hardy) the Forger, who creates weapons and identities out of thin air. The specialists all prepare clever plans to control their respective aspects during the multi-stage inception, the act of planting an idea in the mind by delving into deeper dream levels, yet they face seemingly preternatural resistance the longer they spend in Fischer’s dreamscape. In response, the dreamer, or controller, of each level must wrest control of their dream level from forces beyond their control, be they physiological or emotional. Inception’s climax bounces between dreamers on each level as they battle subconscious soldiers, anti-gravity, and errant emotional manifestations to regain control of their dream worlds. At crucial points during the climax, each dreamer regains control of their level moments before they are “kicked,” or awakened, into relinquishing control.

The concept of control also surfaces in certain concepts, characterizations and arcs. The very concept of dream-sharing, including the acts of extraction and inception, is built on the foundation of attempting to control a realm of uncontrolled thought. A victim of a dream-share extraction, Saito hires Dom to perform an inception on Fischer in an effort to both prevent Fischer from controlling an industrial monopoly and likely establish his own conglomerate. Even the target of the inception, Fischer, is seeking his deceased father’s approval to control his own life. To varying degrees, each character and concept in Inception is dedicated to echoing the theme of gaining or losing control.

By the conclusion of Inception, the idea of control is prevalent in every aspect of the story from the characterizations to concepts to the props (i.e. totems like Dom’s spinning top, which act as barometers of differences between controlled dreams and reality). When Dom abandons the top in favor of his children at the end, he becomes the embodiment of the idea of control and its inherent irony. He has become a man who has regained control, but only after struggling against, and frequently losing to, forces beyond his control, both internal and external. However, even in this moment of triumph, the irony of control—that delicate balance between losing and gaining control—lords over the scene. As Dom makes his way to his children and exits the frame, the top, which affirms Dom’s presence in reality by falling, he spun seconds earlier continues to spin until it wobbles, seemingly losing control.