Chad Liffmann – Page 28 – Spinning Platters

Film Review: Pacific Rim

Finally, the summer blockbuster we’ve been waiting for! Pacific Rim is smart, compelling, and unleashes an exhilarating fury of battling giants.

A jaeger strolls through Hong Kong streets in Pacific Rim — A Jaeger strolls through the neon lit streets of Hong Kong in Pacific Rim

From here on out, every time I gaze up into the fog-filled night sky that enshrouds the top portions of downtown San Francisco’s office buildings, I’ll imagine a colossal Kaiju smashing through the buildings like tissue paper, the debris raining down upon the dimly lit streets…and a Jaeger behemoth emerging through the haze, crushing the Kaiju’s skull in with a downward punch and throwing the giant beast’s body down the length of Market street. This is the lasting effect of Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim. The film makes a solid effort to tell an emotional human tale in the midst of a near-future world at war with giant alien creatures. The effort is not lost, but takes a backseat behind the extraordinarily impressive battle sequences. As a science-fiction action movie, Pacific Rim delivers and then some.

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Film Review: The Lone Ranger

Johnny Depp and Armie Hammer strut their hero stuff in The Lone Ranger

“Hi-Ho, Silver! Away!”…meh. When Hans Zimmer’s rehashed Sherlock Holmes score kicks into “William Tell Overture” mode, Disney’s new re-imagining of The Lone Ranger is at its best. Unfortunately, this only happens twice. What could have been (and should have been) a fun adventure ends up being an odd concoction of conflicting tones and a bloated story. This “messiness” worked well in director Gore Verbinski’s last effort, Rango, but that film was about an eccentric chameleon in the midst of an identity crisis who ends up tangled in a Chinatown-esque conflict in a wild west animal town. So, it was obviously poised to extend the limits of the bizarre. The Lone Ranger, on the other hand, is about fun adventures. Bad guys vs. good guys. The film is 150 minutes long and easily could’ve been 90 minutes. The few action set pieces are fun and well choreographed, but they lose their effect when they are bookended by a plodding story involving genocide, power struggles, and weird spiritual visions.

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Film Review: Despicable Me 2

Steve Carell as Gru, standing with two adorable minions, in Despicable Me 2

Gru’s minions are so gosh darn adorable and hilarious! The production team behind Despicable Me 2 knows this, hence the endless amounts of advertising for the film featuring the little yellow round bundles of gibberish-speaking joy. Despicable Me 2 lacks the overall charm of the original, choosing instead to focus on minion mayhem, a tireless string of jokes, and adorable slapstick humor. This isn’t to say the film lacks a clever story. In fact, Despicable Me 2 impressively avoids trudging down expected paths. However, the story doesn’t feature the same emotional core as the original, nor does it stay as focused. Despicable Me 2 meanders a bit, but never loses sight of the task at hand — to entertain and have a really good time doing so. Plus…those minions!

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Film Review: White House Down

Jamie Foxx is Mr. President and Channing Tatum is Mr. Hero in White House Down

We say a picture is worth a thousand words. If my math is correct, a two hour and seventeen minute movie, therefore, should be worth 197,280 words (at 24 frames per second). Why, then, when White House Down ended, did my friend turn to me and say, “There are no words…”, and begin conjuring up fantasies of what he could have been doing for the previous 2+ hours instead? The answer is that White House Down is a terrible movie that misses all of its marks. It is not the fun explosion-filled action spectacle we used to expect from director Roland Emmerich in the mid-late 90’s and early 00’s. It’s better than 2012 and worse than Anonymous, although comparing WHD to 2012 is like comparing dirt to mud. It’s a shame this movie falls so far short because it had all the right ingredients in place for it to be a loud summer escapist romp. Instead, White House Down belittles its own silly story by trading in ‘silliness’ for ‘stupidity’. It is chalk full of stale acting and uninspired thrills, complete with a genuinely shocking amount of unrealistic moments (yes, even for a film about the White House being hijacked).

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Frameline Spotlights: C.O.G. / In the Name Of

From June 20-30, Frameline: The San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival is showing an eclectic lineup of films steeped in social, political, and sexual themes, pushing the boundaries and bringing audiences closer to the incredible stories of numerous individuals and communities, both fictional and real. Tickets for screenings are available at http://ticketing.frameline.org/festival/. Here is a glance at two of this year’s festival entries:

C.O.G. (USA, 2013)

Jonathan Groff is a sour apple in C.O.G.

Based on the unassuming essay by David Sedaris and under the steady direction of Kyle Patrick Alvarez, C.O.G. is the piercingly honest tale of a young man’s escape from his privileged Ivy-league world into the apple orchards and Christian community of a small town outside Portland, OR. The sold out audience at the Castro Theatre laughed, cheered, sat silent, and gasped, and left with a welcome sense of renewal, as if the film’s flawed characters had challenged each of us to examine ourselves in a way we hadn’t considered for some time.

C.O.G. screened on Saturday, June 22nd. For more info on the film, visit the film’s festival page or C.O.G.’s official website at http://www.cog-movie.com/

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Film Review: Monsters University

Monsters in Monsters University — Scary monsters are scared in Monsters University

It has been nearly twelve years since Monsters Inc. made its theatrical debut, introducing audiences to one of film history’s most imaginative storylines and a memorable duo of lovable Monster protagonists, Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal) and James P. “Sulley” Sullivan (John Goodman). It was Pixar’s fourth feature film and became an instant classic, one that still ranks high up on most people’s “what’s your favorite Pixar film?” list. Because of the place Monsters, Inc. held in our hearts, we all became cautiously optimistic yet filled with trepidation with the announcement of the prequel, Monsters University. We wondered why Pixar would even bother returning to a world that was so perfectly captured in a tightly bound film that had no cause for story extensions. The answer may be shrouded in dollar signs, or, perhaps like Toy Story 2 & 3, the Pixar team just could not abandon these lovable monsters forever. When all was said and done, Monsters University was greenlit and it has now finally arrived. The finished product is a playful “origin” story, filled with substantially more satirical humor rather than original humor, but also showcases a larger cast of lovable characters and genuinely touching moments.

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Film Review: World War Z

Brad Pitt (and his fictional family) in World War Z — Brad Pitt keeps his cool (with his fictional family) in World War Z

Fans of the book World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks can either rejoice or fume at the fact that the new film adaptation is almost entirely its own unique entity. An opening credit claims it is “based” on the book. Sure, it does share the same title, and I can confirm that there are some borrowed story elements. However, the action-packed narrative of the World War Z movie is extremely different from the book, in which a collection of post-pandemic interviews conducted by an agent of the U.N. Postwar Commission (Max Brooks, as a fictionalized version of himself) reads like a non-fiction history book. In my opinion, a faithful adaptation of the book would work best in the form of a ten part HBO mini-series. But, since the Brad Pitt action spectacle is what we must see to satisfy our WWZ cravings, then we will just have to make do. Luckily, it really is not that bad. In fact, it is quite entertaining. WWZ lacks the heart and layered character portrayals we hoped for due to its connection to the phenomenal source material, but it remains a worthwhile blockbuster that contains a lot of thrills, impressive visuals, and a fun frenetic pace courtesy of numerous rewrites, reshoots, and a healthy dose of unpredictable plot turns.

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Album Review: Coma Cinema – Posthumous Release

“Closer than before / on the edge of being / the same fuck up as before / dying in a secret”, Mat Cothran (aka Coma Cinema) mumbles out on the opening track of his fourth full-length album, Posthumous Release. The South Carolina native spills out seemingly half-conscious lyrics throughout the twelve short tracks, as if he is reading scribbled notes directly out of a diary. The music does not stray far from Cothran’s melancholic roots, though this time recorded with a higher production value. The question is — how does the higher quality change the feel of Coma Cinema’s output, formerly lo-fi, that fans are accustomed to?

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Film Review: The Internship

Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn in The Internship

(NOTE: I worked at Google for a number of years. Let us just say that I may be slightly biased…but I can also shed some light on accuracies and inaccuracies depicted in The Internship about life at Google.)

In a performance review, The Internship would meet expectations. It is a silly film with a few laugh-out-loud moments and many more moments that miss the mark. We have seen this story before — a group of underdogs learn to work together and discover real value in themselves that helps them fight against the odds. It crosses every stereotype and dots every cliché. The Internship borrows elements from fish out of water stories, bromance plots, and sappy inspirational tales. Such a concoction of non-surprises fit into a one-note joke of a movie would be forgivable if it were actually hilarious. Unfortunately, it is not. However, if you are a fan of Vince Vaughn’s motor mouth, you will have a good time. If you work in the tech industry, you will find the film highly amusing. But most importantly, if you don’t expect much, you will be decently rewarded.

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Film Review: The Kings of Summer

Nick Robinson, Gabriel Basso, and Moises Arias in The Kings of Summer — Gabriel Basso, Moises Arias and Nick Robinson in The Kings of Summer

Two teens bang sticks against a giant rusted steel pipe running through the forest; atop the pipe, a third teen dances spastically to the rhythm. The three kids continue like this for a while, devoid of distractions or concerns. They’re completely carefree, and we immediately yearn to free ourselves with them. So begins The Kings of Summer, a film about three teenagers who run away from their frustrating domestic lives to build a house in the woods and fend for themselves in the wilderness for a summer. The story is a familiar type of coming-of-age tale in which each character discovers something about his or herself — not just the teens, but the adults, as well (or at least a few of them). The film features beautiful cinematography and a lively soundtrack. It is wistful and sincere, yet partial and contrived. There is something inherently attractive about this film genre — the independent coming-of-age film — in which not that much really happens.

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