Official Trailer for ZACK SNYDER'S JUSTICE LEAGUE

I've had little stake in the "Release the Snyder Cut" movement, but as someone who has always appreciated Zack Snyder's dark, almost sinister take on how super heroes might be received and/or implement themselves into modern society his films have always proved daring if not necessarily successful each time out. Man of Steel was one of my favorite films of 2013 and I absolutely adored the myth-building, Ben Affleck's approach to Bruce Wayne, and the sheer scope of Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice three years later which was only made better by the ultimate edition released later that year. Of course, all of this momentum - despite being stifled by a fair majority of critics - came to a screeching halt in late 2017 when Joss Whedon's re-configured Justice League hit theaters on November 17th. Snyder was already shooting his planned two-part Justice League when Batman V. Superman was released in March of 2016 and I can recall reading about set visits that June, many of which were attempting to course correct the BvS narrative and assure those that weren't fans of Snyder's vision for the DC Universe thus far that Snyder was listening and taking note. Of course, by May of 2017 Snyder - dealing with a family tragedy - decided to take a break from the project despite having completed principal photography and already screened a cut of the film for friends and fellow filmmakers. The story was Whedon was only being brought in to assist in some additional photography and to assist the remainder of the post-production process. A story in The Hollywood Reporter published in May of 2017 even stated, “The directing is minimal and it has to adhere to the style and tone and the template that Zack set,” said Warner Bros. Pictures president Toby Emmerich. “We’re not introducing any new characters. It’s the same characters in some new scenes. He’s handing the baton to Joss, but the course has really been set by Zack. I still believe that despite this tragedy, we’ll still end up with a great movie.” Needless to say, by the time Whedon's version of the film was released in November it was clear this wasn't the film Snyder intended it to be and large portions of the film had been re-shot and re-configured in order for Warner Bros. to get out from under the weight of Snyder's ambitious vision allowing them to move forward with more single-shot, director-driven films that Wonder Woman had proved could be just as successful earlier that summer. Five years later though, we're finally (somehow) getting a proper Justice League film and sequel to Batman v. Superman that Snyder always intended. As someone who was completely on board for Snyder's vision from the get-go I can't wait to see what this film holds and if/how it will change the course of DC films moving forward. In addition, this official trailer for the project does not disappoint and seems to hint that Snyder has delivered everything he promised his epic to be. Zack Snyder's Justice League premieres on HBO Max March 18th.       

JUSTICE LEAGUE Review

I guess I should start out by saying that I am and always have been a fan of Zack Snyder. Without much effort I can recall sitting in the theater and experiencing Dawn of the Dead along with that moment when it clicked that this wasn't just a fun horror flick, but it was a good movie. I can remember seeing 300 several times if not for the admittedly thin story, but for the ways in which the director was pushing the boundaries of the visual medium. My heart almost dropped out of my chest upon first glimpsing that opening credits sequence to Watchmen in glorious IMAX and with Man of Steel it felt as if Superman had never been so epic; that the whole scope of his being had been presented, warts and all, even if most didn't agree that Superman should have warts. I loved Man of Steel and to a certain degree, I loved Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice as well. I'm not one to say that film is without its flaws, there is a convoluted nature to the proceedings that are unnecessary and it devolves into a CGI crapfest for the last forty minutes, but for me BvS was very much a personal film and one that was as grand in scale as it was deep with heart and rich with themes. Though the marks against it have their validity it is a film that arguably has more to say and more at stake than any other superhero film produced in the last seventeen years and certainly in the last nine or so since Marvel has streamlined the process. This brings us to Justice League, a movie that is hard for me to even call a Snyder film for, despite having the trademark look of the director during certain sequences, is undoubtedly the least Zack Snyder film to have ever been produced. It's sad and disheartening in the way that Justice League, or what Snyder began in 2013 and has been building through to up until recently has culminated with this, a vanilla action film with people dressed like characters we know and love, but to the benefit of a story that is paint by numbers if not the simplest example of such, a barrage of unfinished CGI and shortcuts, with no real stakes to be felt. Say what you will about those civilian casualties or the lack of awareness for them in previous films, but they added a weight to these proceedings that reinforced that in order for evil to be avenged evil first has to occur. Warner Bros. and Geoff Johns have gone out of their way to ensure Justice League took into consideration the complaints from previous endeavors and it does, resolving it to be the broadest and most generic theater-going experience one might have this year. The masses will no doubt love it.

SILENCE Review

Silence is director Martin Scorsese's twenty-fourth narrative feature and one the auteur has been longing to make for quite some time. With that, Silence is a nearly three-hour epic that feels as if it has so much on its mind while at the same time not exactly conjuring much thought about anything other than what is physically presented. This is somewhat troubling considering Silence is a movie wholly about spirituality and the fact it isn't so much the traditions and exteriors of a religion or set of beliefs that matter, but whether the individual practices what their faith teaches daily while realizing how best to do so when that faith is inevitably tested. There is clearly a lot going on in Silence and much Scorsese seems to want to discuss, but the final product we've been delivered is so subtle about its deeper meanings and feelings around the people and subjects it is taking on that the viewer really has to reach into the depths of their attention to pull something substantial from the experience. One can counterpoint with the fact that Scorsese simply isn't spoon feeding viewers what he wants them to think and how he hopes they perceive his ponderings, but rather that he gives the facts of these "based on true life" events with limited shades of interpretation to allow the audience to have their own. This is fair. We have so many churches and/or places of worship these days due to the fact so many couldn't let their interpretations settle into an already established denomination, but this isn't the same kinds of conflicts of faith our characters in Silence struggle to comprehend. More, this a film about the thought process, the heart of the teachings Christianity and other religions preach, and how these intangible things define who we are as individuals and the role they play in determining the tone of humanity. There are no concrete definitions, no absolutes, no black or white, but instead Scorsese and co-writer Jay Cocks (Gangs of New York) have adapted Shûsaku Endô's 1966 novel into a meditative film that has the odd distinction of both being completely about what lies beneath the surface yet often times feels only surface level as far as impact and effectiveness are concerned. There is no denying that the film has layers upon layers from which numerous conversations can be elicited while featuring gorgeous photography, a couple of committed and rather brilliant performances, as well as some genuinely heart-wrenching moments that, depending on beliefs prior to seeing the film, will either reaffirm your faith or cast greater doubt than even before. For such factors alone, Silence is a staggering piece of work that should be commended, but on a basic level of raw emotional response the film didn't leave the lasting impression or transcendent experience great sermons hope to accomplish.

First Trailer for Martin Scorsese's SILENCE

After it being initially announced that the first trailer for auteur Martin Scorsese's long-gestating film Silence would premiere before showings of Allied on Tuesday night and online this Saturday things quickly snowballed into the trailer not playing before my screening of Allied to walking out of Allied only to find out the trailer had already debuted online. All of that said, the first trailer for Scorsese's passion project has finally debuted and it certainly promises a tale of vast epicness and deep explorations in the biggest, most complex of territories: religion. Based on the 1966 novel by Shusaku Endo and adapted for the screen by Jay Cocks (Gangs of New York) Silence follows two Jesuit priests who go looking for their mentor in 17th Century Japan, a time when outsiders, and especially Christians, were treated with disdain and mistrust. Scorsese is said to have been working on trying to adapt Endo's novel for some twenty-five plus years, but finally was able to move forward with the project at the beginning of last year after Fábrica de Cine and SharpSword Films agreed to produce and provide the financing for the $50 million picture with Paramount distributing the film in the U.S. While anything Scorsese does is naturally going to be of great interest to cinephiles the dierector has proved fairly bankable in his last few endeavors with Paramount releasing Shutter Island, Hugo, and The Wolf of Wall Street each to solid financial success and/or great rewards reception. Not counting Shutter Island, Scorsese's last five films have also scored Best Picture nominations and so the precedent is rather high for his latest, but if this trailer truly is any indication of the three hour opus the filmmaker has constructed we seem to be in for something special if not hugely insightful and maybe even influential. Silence stars Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, Liam Neeson, Tadanobu Asano, Ciaran Hinds, Shin'ya Tsukamoto, and opens in limited release on December 23rd, 2016. 

BLEED FOR THIS Review

Though the national stage for boxing has only seemed to grow smaller and smaller over the years Hollywood's infatuation with the sport has only grown stronger. Between Southpaw and the generally terrific Creed last year to Hands of Stone and now Bleed for This the question around the story of Vinny Pazienza was always going to be not what made it worth telling-we know what the hook is-but more what makes this film in particular worth watching as the options for such sports dramas are continually growing. One could go on to discuss the committed and rather spectacular performance that Miles Teller gives in the role Pazienza, or the cool aesthetic that matches the time period in small, effective ways, but despite the casts best efforts and writer/director Ben Younger's endeavor to paint more a portrait of a man determined to overcome the odds rather than going through the motions of another redemptive sports tale, Bleed for This unfortunately ends up reducing itself to just that. It's a difficult place to be in as the genre trappings of such a film are so familiar and so easily relied on at this point that it is difficult to conjure up any such alternate as to how to go about telling such a story. Younger clearly has a knack for visual storytelling and each of the performances on display here, with the supporting turns from Aaron Eckhart, Ciarán Hinds, and Katey Sagal standing strongly next to Teller's lead performance, are far more than competent and in fact add heavily to the overall arc these characters experience allowing them to not just remain stock characters. This is key as it's always the characters who are going to allow pieces like this to stand out. Younger and his cast are able to create fully realized human beings who come across not as functions for the purpose of this movie or who are only present to further certain plot strands, but instead as individuals who have found themselves in the circumstances of this dour situation who are each trying to figure out how best to deal with it. Sounds rousing, right? Maybe even inspiring? It certainly could be as Bleed for This has all the right moves to make it a cornerstone boxing movie, but pacing issues and a lack of any heavy emotional impact leave this one stranded in the middle of the ring.   

FROZEN Review

Frozen is all about defying expectation and convention. Looking at the marketing campaign for the film you really don't get much of a sense of what the story is (very similar to Pixar's usual tactics in fact) and what we do gather from the commercials we've seen and the pictures plastered all over Wal*Mart and Target is that this is more than likely a new Princess tale from Disney looking to capitalize on the good will of both Tangled and Wreck-It Ralph as those two films have come to be revered with much more excitement than anything Pixar has produced in the past few years. Going into the film, I wasn't overly sure of what I was getting myself into, but the early word of mouth that praised it as being the best Disney animated film since Beauty & the Beast or the The Lion King was certainly something that caught my attention. If nothing else, I was now curious to see how the film would measure up against these other films that shaped my childhood and are nothing short of classics in my mind. Frozen does indeed fit nicely into the library of what Disney has brought us before in terms of beautifully realized castles and princesses with funny supporting characters to lean on and charming princes or underdogs that rise to the occasion, but as I said earlier it is also all about defying those expectations and it is those variations on the structure, those added moments where the characters within the film look at each other as if to say what every grown-up in the audience is thinking, that make this all the more delightful and all the more fulfilling than simply being another knock-off of the early princess stories that made Disney the brand that it is.  Disney animated films have always been able to transcend age groups and trends, but what makes this film work along with its past couple of efforts that differentiate it from something like Treasure Planet is that it is no longer trying to be cool or stay with the times, but is instead playing by its own rules and letting the magic flow without any caution as to what might be widely accepted and in return is being rewarded handsomely.

THE WOMAN IN BLACK Review

Patience. Patience is a virtue and we must not only possess this characteristic to watch Danny Radcliffe's new ghost story "The Woman in Black" but we must have it in order to relate to his character Arthur Kipps. There is a point in a ghost story where you just get the hell out of there and never look back. No doubt this doesn't usually bode well for characters in a movie but at least we can respect them enough because they have the sense to flee when they have the chance. Mr. Kipps is not looking for a way out. He embraces his involvement with the supernatural and to a point we can understand why, but in the end things are just a little too grim, a little too bleak that he could actually conceive to find any real hope in his situation. This train of thought doesn't exactly go along with the conclusion of the film which was actually a nice break from modern horror flicks, but as depressingly sad as it was there was a hint of peace in it. That it is actually what our protagonist wanted, and if that is the perspective you take on it (I surely did) it will feel all the more haunting to you. That is the accomplishment of "The Woman In Black"; it is not a gory all out screamfest. In fact, dialogue is few and far between. The movie is all about tone and telling a good ole fashioned ghost story in the most effective of ways. It may not break any new ground or offer as many scares as I originally hoped for, but it succeeds in becoming a haunting tale I wouldn't mind hearing around a campfire.

Mr. Daily (Ciaran Hinds) helps our protagonist go about
his business when visiting his small town.

The tale of the woman in black is one that has its origins in the early eighties. A novel is the source material for the menacing spectre that was later adapted into a stage play that still runs in London's West End and is the second-longest running play in the history of the West End. It was also adapted into a television film in 1989 but I had neither seen any of these previous incarnations nor had I read the novel. I went into the movie knowing little about the story other than what the trailer indicated and I love experiencing a scary movie that way. "The Woman In Black" begins as dark as one might expect. A chilling sequence in which the stage is set for our title villain. We meet the young lawyer Kipps as he is getting ready to travel to a remote village for work on sorting out the estate of a deceased couple. It is clear upon arriving that the locals intend to get him out of town as quick as possible, but Arthur is hard pressed to prove his worth at his job. You see, he recently lost his wife during the birth of his child and has been in a state of grieving ever since. The film shows us this without over explaining. It gives us small clues and indicators as to who these characters are by their decisions and not by having the script's dialogue tell us. Slowly the clues become more evident as to what the ghost of a woman does to the local villagers and why they fear her. Why they all believe in her. It is taken with an ease of acceptable truth. Only the town's wealthy Mr. Daily (Ciaran Hinds) tries to ignore the rumors of the haunting. Mr. Daily becomes a sort of companion in Arthur's struggles to get past a personal complication with the local town and just to do his job and bid him goodbye. If those that came in contact with the woman in black could escape her there would be no story though and so we know Arthur will do his best to put the towns and his own sorrows to rest.

Arthur Kipp (Daniel Radcliffe) starts to believe in what the
locals have been whispering about... 

The real point of interest in the film though is if Radcliffe is able to begin a post-Potter career that will set him apart from the character that has encompassed most of his life. Though it feels he is a little young to play the widowed father of a four year-old he takes on the responsibility of the role well and reacts to the scary moments with just the right expressions. It is hard to judge how his career will go from here not because the performance isn't any good or not convincing, no, he just isn't required to do much here. Much of the film he is lurking through the dark mansion holding a candle waiting to see what lies just around the corner. There is little action despite his characters one attempt at a rescue but even in this moment the best of the film shines through. It is a quietly creepy movie that offers plenty of chill-inducing moments. It is not the type of film we are used to seeing Radcliffe in which is to say he isn't playing a version of Harry Potter and though this may put off some of the audience who expects that, it is a good indicator that Radcliffe is trying to show range and if he continues to try he certainly will. Though Arthur Kipps is nothing if not a common man, for that reason alone he couldn't be any less similar to the boy wizard, and Radcliffe keeps in tune with the films tone and gives a quiet, haunting performance that creates a coherent film that is dressed in period costumes and sets to add prestige to its ghost story proceedings. It works. It lends to the atmosphere that is necessary for an audience to buy into the unreal things going on. Writer Jane Goldman (Kick Ass, X-Men: First Class, Stardust) understands her message and world enough to make everything she puts into the script compliment these two items; these two items that allow this to stand above the standard ghost story.

Arthur Kipps attempts to set right what has caused
much heartache for the woman in black.

Parts of the film certainly drag and there could no doubt have been a bit more exposition that delve deeper into the back story of our antagonist seeing as it is her movie, but again, this is all about mystery and in many ways feels like a more grown up horror story than those the cinema usually delivers. "The Woman in Black" may not even be that great of a film, but with literally the only good "scary movie" last year being "Insidious" movie-goers are desperate for decent films that deliver the scares and "The Woman in Black" certainly delivers more than a handful of genuine moments where you look around the dark theatre to make sure no one is standing over you, watching. It is good fun and a refreshing look back at horror movies of yesteryear. I can't say that it is something everyone will love, but it has a strong story behind all of its "gotcha" moments and in that story we receive a few genuinely touching moments that build together with the reasoning for our existing ghost to create a feeling of something more bittersweet than bloody. The resolution comes at the expected time, but it turns the entire film around in what direction you expected it to go that you are taken aback and begin to reevaluate the themes that are at work here. It seems odd to call a scary movie touching, but this film is an exception to the rule on almost every level as far as horror flicks go as of late. Good for you Danny boy, you may just have a little magic left in you yet.

THE WOMAN IN BLACK Review

Patience. Patience is a virtue and we must not only possess this characteristic to watch Danny Radcliffe's new ghost story "The Woman in Black" but we must have it in order to relate to his character Arthur Kipps. There is a point in a ghost story where you just get the hell out of there and never look back. No doubt this doesn't usually bode well for characters in a movie but at least we can respect them enough because they have the sense to flee when they have the chance. Mr. Kipps is not looking for a way out. He embraces his involvement with the supernatural and to a point we can understand why, but in the end things are just a little too grim, a little too bleak that he could actually conceive to find any real hope in his situation. This train of thought doesn't exactly go along with the conclusion of the film which was actually a nice break from modern horror flicks, but as depressingly sad as it was there was a hint of peace in it. That it is actually what our protagonist wanted, and if that is the perspective you take on it (I surely did) it will feel all the more haunting to you. That is the accomplishment of "The Woman In Black"; it is not a gory all out screamfest. In fact, dialogue is few and far between. The movie is all about tone and telling a good ole fashioned ghost story in the most effective of ways. It may not break any new ground or offer as many scares as I originally hoped for, but it succeeds in becoming a haunting tale I wouldn't mind hearing around a campfire.