"La La" recalls Golden Age of Hollywood Musical

The opening musical number in La La Land, set over four lanes on an elevated highway lanes in Los Angeles, is not quite the magical intro I had expected (maybe it's just me, but there's nothing graceful or cool about a bicycle riding over a car).  The movie's two leads, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, are as attractive and talented as anyone in Hollywood, their eyes sparkling with hope and wonder that their voices, as good as they are, simply can't replicate.  Song and dance numbers here take place early in the story, and then, after the first act, there's hardly any singing and dancing at all (watching the movie's trailer, one would thing that the party in La La never stops).  Director Damien Chazelle has made a very good movie (albeit not a great one) that recalls the Golden Age musicals of old, and Gosling and Stone's on screen dancing and chemistry really is mesmerizing.  This is a love story more so than a flick where symphony and melody take center stage, and the romance benefits greatly from its cinematography and the unquestionable charisma of its actors.  The final scene, set in a jazz bar, will make you wonder about all previous romantic "ones who got away", and it'll likely melt your heart.  

B+

Creepy "Jane Doe" is the spookiest/most provocative corpse ever

With her haunting gray eyes and her pale white skin, Jane Doe's corpse is creepy as much as it is sexy - in some weird, post mortem kind of way.  As the two morticians who are assigned with inspecting her corpse and discovering the cause of death, father-son duo of Austin and Tommy Tilden (Emile Hirsch and Brian Cox) soon find out that Jane's is no ordinary corpse, and that her death is another mystery of altogether different circumstances that science alone can not explain.  Cutting into her body, the two morticians soon hear strange footsteps in the hallway, hear curious songs and sounds coming from their radio, and even start seeing glimpses of strange silhouettes where there shouldn't be any.  Director Andre Øvredal does a good job of keeping the scares and ghouls off screen, and the suspense at maximum level.  The screenplay, by Ian B. Goldberg and Richard Naing, manages to keep our interest high for the entire ninety or so minutes, without ever dropping a beat.  The Autopsy of Jane Doe is a product of a rather simple production design (the film, for the most part, has only one location/setting) and a wild, vivid imagination.  However, it's the latter that it owes much of its scary success to.
B+

"Les Saisons" explores European wildlife's seasons through many millennia

The recently released French documentary, Les Saisons, by co-directors Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud, comes across like a cinematic version of BBC's Planet Earth, confined strictly to Europe.  As we watch various - you guessed it - seasons change in the wilderness, we witness a birth of a baby deer, wild stallions courting one another, wolves hunting then devouring a wild boar, two beetle bugs battling each other over territoriality, and even mountain goats banging horns in a testosterone heavy duel atop of misty, cloudy alps.  Unlike the world famous, afore mentioned BBC miniseries about the planet's animals, Les Saisons' French speaking voice-over narration is present early on and towards the end, but is mostly absent during a large chunk of the running time in the midsection, and the effect of watching wildlife behavior without additional expert insights feels a bit... incomplete. Perrin and Cluzaud have made a great looking film where animals roam freely and act in an uninhibited manner; its only flaw is that it has to be measured against the much superior Planet Earth series.  Such is life, and the seasons that accompany it.
B

Sleek production design highlights underplotted "Passengers"

The spaceship Avalon in Passengers look pretty fucking cool.  Like the slickest, upgraded version of a spacecraft in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Avalon zooms through the unending vastness of space like a spiraling drill gone haywire.  Its mission: to transport 5000 passengers and 258 crew members from Earth to a very distant planet where they are to colonize and begin anew.  When a male passenger, a mechanic by trade, wakes up 90 years too early due to a glitch in the hibernation chamber, we are privy to watching a man entertain himself on a gigantic spaceship all alone for eternity, until he decides he'd like some female company, and thus creates a moral dilemma.  Passengers presents us with a story similar with the Biblical fable of Adam & Eve, and it rides that formula as far as it can go mostly on the charm of Jennifer Lawrence's Aurora and Chris Pratt's Jim Pearson, two Hollywood superstars of the present - and hopefully the future.  The movie is never boring, I must say, and its production design and visuals are impressive and exhilarating, but its narrative, as well as a central conflict, is mostly lacking.  The final act, when the characters have to make some "life or death" choices, plays out its conclusion much too safely and conservatively.  It's unfortunate that the movie's screenplay didn't have the imagination of its art director.
B

American Idol-esque "Sing" is all pleasantness and charm

Imagine, if you will, the world of Disney's Zootopia merging with FOX's singing competition, American Idol. That's ultimately what we get in Sing, a new charming animated tale about several different animals - an elephant, a mouse, a pig, a gorilla, and a porcupine - who enter a singing contest that's been falsely advertised by its struggling promoter, a Koala bear named Buster Moon (Matthew McConaughey).  Naturally, each character has its own personal dilemma and daily struggles to deal with, but missing is a central plot that otherwise drives such high quality animated fare to much higher emotional heights.  As constructed, the movie feels more like a stretched-out sitcom where everyone eventually gets their shot at fame, without any grand life lessons being learned.  It's not a bad movie, necessarily, but in a year rich with animated films that won the hearts of adults as well as their children, Sing never tries to be anything more than just charming and ordinary.
C+

Enigmatic "Nocturnal Animals" explores a woman's regrets

As a wealthy Hollywood art gallery owner plagued by questionable choices of men in her life, Susan Morrow (Amy Adams) floats through Nocturnal Animals like a woman full of doubts and uncertainty.  When her ex husband, Edward Sheffield (Jake Gyllenhaal) sends her a manuscript of a novel he's recently completed, Susan is instantly moved by the gripping story of a man whose wife and daughter are terrorized by a group of villainous punks, who come across as homicidal maniac rejects from movies such as Funny Games and Deliverance (eventually the movie turns into a poor man's Death Wish).  Part fiction, part literary fiction-within-fiction, director Tom Ford's second feature (after 2009's A Single Man) is an abstract thriller where the true protagonist remains vague, and where losing a wife to a divorce and an unborn baby due to her abortion is equated to them being raped and murdered.  The turmoil and pain that Gyllenhaal's Sheffield goes through are, sadly, never truly externalized the way I had expected them to be (and just how he meets his final demise is, at best, laughable). Ultimately, the movie is a darker version of Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation, infused with plenty of film noir elements, and possessing an atmosphere and tone worthy of David Lynch's most head-scratching work. The enigmatic and open ended final shot will make the audiences wonder whether the 115 minutes that preceded it were just a figment of Susan's imagination.  Or their own, for that matter.
B-

"American Honey" is long on running time but short on convincing drama

Newcomer Sasha Lane is Star, an eighteen-year old wide-eyed girl looking for adventure, so she joins a group of teenagers - all whom feel like the cast of a long-lost sequel to Larry Clarke's Kids (1995) - in order to sell door-to-door magazine subscriptions in Kansas.  She soon forms a relationship with Jake (Shia LaBeouf), the group's shady, conniving salesman who teaches her the ropes of their trade.  The movie's free flowing narrative and hand-held camera work reminded me of Terrence Malick and Jean Luc-Godard's films, but alas, American Honey, at two hours and forty-three minutes, is at least an hour too long.  There are way too many shots from inside the back of the van, the characters dance and jumps aimlessly a few too many times, and do we really need to see the main two protagonists have long, passionate sex not once, but twice??  (We kind of got the idea the first time)  Director Andrea Arnold has now made one too many movies about female teenage angst (2009's Fish Tank is a much more compact and superior film), and if I was her, I'd quit while I was ahead.  American Honey is what one gets when a filmmaker falls in love with her footage to such an extent that she's not willing to sacrifice a single shot for the sake of cohesion. It's unfortunate that it's the audience who gets the short stick in such a scenario.
C