Movie Review: Coda (2019)

Genre: Drama, Romance

Director: Claude Lalonde

Starring: Patrick Stewart, Katie Holmes

Running Time: 96 minutes

Synopsis: Celebrated concert pianist Sir Henry Cole (Patrick Stewart) makes a triumphant return to performances after a break of several years due to his wife's death. But Henry's anxieties are eroding his confidence, despite pep talks from his agent Paul (Giancarlo Esposito). New Yorker writer Helen (Katie Holmes) wants to interview Henry for a piece she is preparing, and eventually he agrees. A deep friendship develops between them before everything changes again.

What Works Well: The topics of anxiety, mourning, and aging are handled with understated elegance, underlining the fragile humanity at the heart of perceived stardom. Patrick Stewart slips gracefully into a role etched with more questions than answers, and the bond between concert pianist and respectful writer evolves in measured steps. The soundtrack of classical piano music adds melancholic lyricism.

What Doesn't Work As Well: The pacing is ponderous, and the running time is padded with passing scenery interludes. Many scenes suffer from lack of clarity in terms of timeline and setting - is this Europe, the US, or the UK? The 38 year age difference between Stewart and Holmes - he could be her grandfather - introduces itchiness around suggestions of a burgeoning romance. Some of the dialogue aims for profound but only achieves superficiality.

Conclusion: A relaxed twilight-of-life character portrait celebrating music's healing qualities.



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Movie Review: Conspiracy Theory (1997)

An semi-serious action thriller, Conspiracy Theory piles on the escapades but skimps on the the foundations.

In New York City, taxi driver Jerry Fletcher (Mel Gibson) is a paranoid conspiracy theorist. He also has a crush on Justice Department lawyer Alice Sutton (Julia Roberts), who is still grieving the murder of her father, a judge. After Jerry publishes his latest conspiracy theory newsletter and mails it to a subscription list of five people, he is suddenly apprehended and tortured by government-type goons led by the mysterious Dr. Jonas (Patrick Stewart). Jerry escapes and connects with Alice for help. She gets caught up in his crazy world and tries to decipher what is going on in his frazzled brain, as multiple assassination attempts are made on his life.

Conspiracy Theory provides jaunty, non-stop entertainment with a glib attitude. It is also frustratingly shallow. Despite a running length of 135 minutes, writer Brian Helgeland take an awful long time to reveal a coherent plot line, and then proceed to bungle it. The main conspiracy apparently swirls around a never-seen dead person, a never-seen defendant, and a never-seen assassin, all linked to a secret defunct government program. Director Richard Donner omits actually showing any of the events that define the plot, and instead Mel Gibson's Jerry blurts out the jumbled details a few minutes before the closing credits.

Otherwise, the movie is a long series of chases and escapes interspersed with Jerry's conspiratorial ramblings. Donner assembles the action scenes with welcome coherence, and injects the right doses of madcap humour to relieve the intensity. The presence of Gibson and Julia Roberts injects star power, but cannot help the lack of narrative discipline. Gibson brings a shifty manic energy to the role, and Roberts does enough to avoid decorative status. Patrick Stewart delivers a prototypical villain with some inspiration from Laurence Olivier. 

Jerry's trundled flight from a torture chamber while strapped to a wheelchair is a highlight, and other good moments are found in his cramped apartment, a showcase for a runaway mind demanding locks on coffee cans inside a locked refrigerator. It's no surprise but still delightful that Jerry anticipates an intrusion and plans a comprehensive self-destruct procedure. Conspiracy Theory does not dwell on logical impetus, but does enjoy the resultant rational madness. 



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Movie Review: Green Room (2015)

A horror siege thriller, Green Room recycles familiar elements into a blotchy package.

The underground punk band Ain't Rights, including bassist Pat (Anton Yelchin) and guitarist Sam (Alia Shawkat), is touring the Pacific Northwest in a beat-up van, not even making enough money for gas. Their fortunes look even dimmer when their latest gig is cancelled and replaced by a performance at a diner in front of totally disinterested patrons. In desperation they accept a show at a remote clubhouse frequented by neo-Nazi skinheads.

The crowd is rough but the performance is ok and the band is about to depart with a decent payout when they stumble onto a violent crime scene in the ramshackle green room. Ain't Rights along with the victim's friend Amber (Imogen Poots) now know too much and find themselves in hostile surroundings, locked up in the waiting room as the skinheads' leader Darcy (Patrick Stewart) plots a cover-up.

A low-budget independent production, Green Room provides a skinhead spin to the well-worn horror cliches of bumpkin dangers lurking in the woods and a small group beleaguered in a compound with help out of reach.

The premise of punk rock as an aspirational occupation for the scrappy protagonists introduces a whiff of originality to the first third of the film, but then fades away as a narrative thread. Director and writer Jeremy Saulnier struggles to concoct enough incidents to stretch the running time to 95 minutes, and Green Room suffers from the familiar ailment of utter incompetence by the bloodthirsty attackers at every crucial juncture. Darcy's troops appear to have the numbers, weapons, savagery and terrain familiarity to end the siege within a few minutes, but always find lame excuses not to do so.

Some character depth would have helped, but Green Room almost goes out of its way to keep all the key people on both sides of the siege as flat as possible. Despite bassist Pat and skinhead leader Darcy emerging as the leaders on both sides of the divide, the film ends with precious little revealed about either of them, the talents of Anton Yelchin and Patrick Stewart quite wasted. The rest of the cast members, particularly the interchangeable attackers, suffer even worse non-definition.

The few positives include some dry humour, limited but effective gore, and fun with microphone feedback and attack dogs. Stylistically the film is frequently dark and muddy, the dialogue often mumbled or obscured by loud music. The Green Room is caught in the land of grunge, after the music stopped.

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Movie Review: Logan (2017)

An X-Men superhero adventure, Logan follows Wolverine and Professor X in the waning days of the mutants, as they embark on an unlikely rescue of a young girl.

It's 2029, and Logan (Hugh Jackman), also known as Wolverine of the X-Men, is one of the few surviving mutants. Aging, losing his self-healing powers and drinking heavily, he works as an El Paso limousine driver and crosses into Mexico to care for the ailing Charles "Professor X" Xavier (Patrick Stewart), now close to dementia and in need of medication to control his telepathic powers. The albino Caliban (Stephen Merchant) is the other mutant survivor and Xavier's primary caregiver.

Mexican nurse Gabriela (Elizabeth Rodriguez) insists that Logan take care of eleven year old Laura (Dafne Keen), a girl with Wolverine-like powers. Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook), head of security for the evil Transigen corporation, is also pursuing Laura, who was among a group of children developed by Transigen as the next mutant generation. Logan reluctantly helps drive Laura towards the mythical safe haven of Eden in Canada, with Transigen's Dr. Zander Rice (Richard E. Grant) and X-24 (also Jackman), a younger stronger and soulless version of Wolverine, joining the pursuit.

A superhero movie with more depth and character drama than usual, Logan aims for a more grounded vibe and generally achieves it. Directed and co-written by James Mangold, the film takes the X-Men story towards a downbeat ending, powers eroding, numbers degraded, and emotions in tatters. For Wolverine one more saviour mission is one more mission too many, and although Xavier is willing and understands the implications of saving Laura, he is too feeble to do anything other than prod Logan into taking action.

But for all the downbeat soul searching and tentative father-daughter sub-theme, this is still a superhero movie, which means the villains are ridiculous all-evil caricatures, and the action scenes are over-the-top, frantic, and always knocking on the ridiculous door. At least Logan genuinely embraces the ethos of violent entertainment for adults, and features no shortage of profanity, plus generous doses blood and gore courtesy of the retractable claws deployed by Logan, Laura and X-24.

Mangold directs with a disciplined visual style and does not chase comic book cliches. But the editing and pacing are lazy, the film dragging out to 137 minutes, the road trip chase seemingly endless and the climax disintegrating into a messy lots-of-kids versus lots-of-bad-guys uneven showdown. Other than Laura the kids are not characters anyone cares about, but they parachute unannounced and quite late into the middle of the action. And it's an extraordinarily unfortunate sign of creative bankruptcy when the entirety of the climactic dialogue is swiped from a whole other movie.

Logan is less vacuous and more mature than most superhero movies, but it's an easy bar to step over.

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