Nothing in Common (1986)

IMDb plot summary: A successful ad man (Hanks) must juggle his ever-demanding career while his parents' marriage breaks up.
Directed by Garry Marshall. Starring Tom Hanks, Jackie Gleason, Eva Marie Saint, and Sela Ward.

(Mild spoilers about the ending.)

This movie is absolutely mislabeled. Everything I found about it as I was pulling stuff together for this review treated it as a comedy, when it's clearly a thoughtful family drama more than anything else. I wasn't entirely sold on this movie while I actually watched it, and perhaps it would be more accurate to say I admired it than that I liked it. The final scenes in particular are worthy of mention -- when the story takes a turn for the darker toward the end, each scene is really beautifully done, and each seems poignant and moving. I also appreciate that the narrative structure is different than a lazier version of this same story. The story, in fact, seems to end where others would begin, leaving just a sense of hope that this will be a good thing, no matter how difficult the relationship has been thus far.

My main concert was that since I couldn't get a sense at the beginning of the movie of where this was ultimately heading, it felt... somewhat scattered as I watched it. However, in hindsight, it was clearly leading to where it did, but I got a little antsy on the journey. This is one that feels almost unfair to write a review of after a first viewing, though, as I feel a rewatch would feel very different. So the ultimate ranking and star rating should be taken with a grain of salt.

3.5 stars.

Flickchart: #835 out of 2288, below The Absent-Minded Professor and above Hugo.

Into the Woods (2014)

IMDb plot summary: A witch tasks a childless baker and his wife with procuring magical items from classic fairy tales to reverse the curse put on their family tree.
Directed by Rob Marshall. Starring Meryl Streep, James Corden, Emily Blunt, and Anna Kendrick.

(Some spoilers ahead, though I try to keep a lot of it vague.)

I've been both extremely excited and extremely nervous for this movie. Excited because it's a show I love a lot. Nervous because I wasn't convinced of some of the casting and I had heard rumors of a lot of... Disneyfication, making the story less dark and creepy, which is kind of the point of the entire second act.

Fortunately, I had very little to worry about. While it's not perfect, it's a very good adaptation, and when it differs from the show it nearly always makes sense. I only have a few nitpicks, and they're relatively minor, so let's start with those. Let me just tell you right now, this may be the longest review in the world.

Typically in the show, Little Red and Jack are played by adult actors, though they still play children. I'm still not convinced that they made it work casting an actual child as Little Red. Jack's story worked all right, and I found that I really liked having children in the story at the end, where vulnerability, growing up, and loss of innocence are all huge themes. These themes worked much better when I didn't have to suspend disbelief further to imagine that this mid-20s actor was a 12-year-old. However, Little Red's early story is extremely disturbing. "Hello Little Girl," the song where the wolf distracts her in the woods, has always had sexual predator undertones, and Little Red's later song "I Know Things Now" doubles as a coming-of-age song about sexual discovery. With a 22-year-old woman is singing these songs, even dressed as a child, they're thought-provoking and interesting. When a child who looks about 13 is singing them, it gets very icky very fast. They tried to give "Hello Little Girl" a lighter tone and use visual clues to make "I Know Things Now" as literal as possible, but it just isn't enough. Fans of the original show no doubt are yelling, "Then just cast an adult!" and I would have said that as well before seeing this, but I'm not sure you could find anyone who looks old enough that this wouldn't be disconcerting *and* young enough that it could still be at least mildly convincing as a child. The theater makes it easier to do that -- you're not sitting mere inches from the actors' faces as you are with a movie. I feel this was probably a necessary change, but it carried unpleasant consequences, and as much as I love "Hello Little Girl," I would have been much more comfortable if that song had been cut altogether.

Secondly, there's an important theme that gets lost here because of crushing time plots together. Cinderella's Prince reiterates it in the movie: "I thought if I had you, I would never wish for anything more." In the show, there's several months, perhaps even a year, between the happy ending finale and the appearance of the Giantess. In the movie, everything starts going wrong perhaps even at the Princes' weddings (it doesn't really look like a wedding, but everyone in the kingdom seems to be gathered at the castle and cheering for the Princes). This makes it seem almost like "happily ever after" didn't work not because it's a fundamentally flawed idea, but because *it got interrupted*. At the beginning of act 2 in the show, you see the characters have all gotten their wishes, and they still have things to complain about. It's a vital theme that happily ever after will eventually fade and change to something different, and that's not quite as strong a theme in the movie. Dividing the two halves for me *is* important, because it shows you what, well, what Disney thinks of as a happy ending and how it goes when that happiness doesn't last eternally.

Those were my main two nitpicks, and while they didn't ruin the movie, they were changes I didn't think worked. But let's talk about the good things, and there are many.

One of my favorite things about theater is that every production you see can shine a light onto a different character and a different theme. This is especially true with musicals like Into the Woods which have OH MY GOSH SO MANY LAYERS. This time around, the shining star is James Corden as the Baker. Bringing to life a character I never liked much, Corden is perhaps the heart of this entire production, a regular guy who loves his wife but worries that he's just not good enough.

Chris Pine is a surprise delight, especially in "Agony," where and Billy Magnussen try to constantly one-up each other over who has the more tragic love life. He's also excellent in his smaller scenes with the Baker's Wife and Cinderella, but "Agony" is a highlight for him and for the entire show.

Meryl Streep, who was The Worst in Mamma Mia! (along with the rest of the cast), is really great here. The Witch's plotline was altered a little bit, and while it could have potentially dulled her motivation, Streep acts the heck out of it anyway and manages to deliver where a lesser actress would be lost. "Last Midnight" is a much *bigger* production than in the stage show, and it works, building to a huge climactic storm of sound and a literal whirlwind. I really wanted to applaud after that song.

Anna Kendrick and Emily Blunt are both quite good in their roles, though they don't steal the show as much as the three previously mentioned. "On the Steps of the Palace" is a beautifully done number, and Kendrick's version is the only one I've heard that I've liked. Kudos to her there.

Overall, it's a really beautiful movie. A couple of missteps, yes, but it's hardly the poorly-cast mess that was Les Miserables. I hope this continues to do well in theaters and pave the way for further musical adaptations.

4 stars.

Flickchart: #288 out of 2287, below Jean de Florette and above Another Woman. That is a little high, but I'm sure it'll adjust itself eventually.

Splash (1984)

IMDb plot summary: A man is reunited with a mermaid who saves him from drowning as a boy and falls in love not knowing who/what she is.
Directed by Ron Howard. Starring Tom Hanks, Daryl Hannah, Eugene Levy, and John Candy.

(Vague spoilers about the ending.)

I really do like Tom Hanks in drier comedic roles like this one. He has mastered the art of delivering sarcastic lines in a genuinely funny way. In fact, pretty much everyone who's required to be funny in this movie pulls it off. Where the movie doesn't work is in its ending, where the comedy gets pushed aside to make way for a romance-centric ending. While the romance was obviously a large part of the story, it was rooted in comedy, with Madison not knowing how to behave in the human world and Allen not quite knowing how to behave with her, and when the movie takes a turn for the dramatic, it loses its charm and seems just kind of dumb. Fortunately, that's only in the last 15 minutes, and the rest of this is pretty solid. I was surprised by how much I liked most of it and disappointed by the bland (and nonsensical) ending.

3 stars.

Flickchart: #901 out of 2286, below Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Peter Pan (1960).

The Polar Express (2004)

IMDb plot summary: On Christmas Eve, a doubting boy boards a magical train that's headed to the North Pole and Santa Claus' home.
Directed by Robert Zemeckis. Starring Tom Hanks, Eddie Deezen, Nona Gaye, and Peter Scolari.

(Some mild spoilers about characters.)

This movie is very in-the-middle for me, so let's start with the good things. The animation is gorgeous. Yes, the people get a little uncanny-valley-esque, but as the story goes on I stopped noticing it quite so much, and the animation of the train and the snow is so, so lovely. As a result, this movie does best in highly visual moments: the skiing scene on the roof of the train, the ticket's wordless journey across the snowy landscape, and the train plunging down an incredibly steep track and across a frozen lake with no tracks. These are some really great moments.

Where the film fails is in its story. Turning a short book into a 90-minute movie understandably requires some padding, and I don't know what was taken directly from the book and what was created for the movie, but a lot of scenes feel meandering and aimless, especially once the children reach the North Pole.

The main child (credited on IMDb as Hero Boy) is also far from interesting as a lead. His doubting of Santa is a story that's been told many, many times, and nothing is added to his character to make him stand out among those many other stories. All three other children whose personalities are seen were more interesting, but the one *I* wanted to be following was Billy, the withdrawn, melancholy child who sadly tells his fellow train riders at the beginning that "Christmas just doesn't work out for me." The story is deliberately vague about the cause of his unhappiness, and perhaps that was for the best -- this kind of movie shouldn't be weighed down with depressing details of an unhappy home life or celebrating the holidays in poverty or whatever else might have been the burden on Billy's shoulders. However, he was the one I rooted for. He was the one I hoped would be Santa's pick for "first gift of Christmas." He was the one I wanted to see a full movie about.

The movie really is beautiful, and as an atmospheric fantasy, it does its job. But an aimless, unoriginal story and a bland main character keep it from being the magical tale it could have been.

2.5 stars.

Flickchart: #1147 out of 2285, below The Day After Tomorrow and above Bobby.

Inland Empire (2006)

IMDb plot summary: As an actress starts to adopt the persona of her character in a film, her world starts to become nightmarish and surreal.
Directed by David Lynch. Starring Laura Dern, Justin Theroux, Jeremy Irons, and Karolina Gruska.

I actually watched this movie a couple days ago, but it took me until now to write the review not so much because I'm lazy but because I really needed time to process it.

So this was the third Lynch I've watched this year, and the progression definitely went from more linear and comprehensible to much, much less (Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire). And yet I feel like this was the first one where I actually latched onto the emotional tone of the movie. People praised Mulholland Drive for its atmosphere, but for the most part I felt nothing but coldness and distance, certainly not the creepiness and eeriness others were praising.

With Inland Empire, the two emotions that came through loud and clear for me were guilt and terror. Guilt over things done, possibly done, and not done yet. Terror from something watching or chasing you, something being there, not knowing what time or day it is or perhaps even who you really are. This alone made it more interesting than either of Lynch's previous films.

This, however, is also the only one for which I found a theory/explanation that was satisfying to me. Since Lynch clearly does not like pigeonholing people into one correct answer, I feel it's perfectly valid for me to simply pick the theory I liked best, the one that conveyed the story I thought I was watching, rather than perhaps the one that fits all the answers perfectly. (I'm still not convinced the latter exists for Lynch.)

I talked this one over with my dad, who recommended this to me and is a huge fan of Lynch's work in general. (A transcript of that conversation can be found here, including a spoiler-filled discussion of the IE theory I like best and why. Spoilers for Mulholland Drive and maybe Lost Highway are in there as well.)

When I shared that I didn't like Mulholland and then that I was going to watch Inland Empire, a lot of people mentioned that I'd find Inland Empire harder. And in one sense I did, but in another, the somewhat coherent plot in Mulholland worked against it for me. It masked the symbolic and subconscious aspects of the storytelling. With Inland Empire, it's just... alllllll out there. I feel like it actually may be clearer in its intentions than Mulholland, which tricks you into thinking it's one kind of movie and then saying, "Kidding, you should have been watching it like this all along!" That can work sometimes and maybe even be what people liked about it, but I wasn't amazed enough by the twist to care enough to rewatch it.

Anyway, Inland Empire may have finally given me a bit of insight into Lynch, because here he's not trying to work his surreal symbolism subtly into a plot. Without feigned coherent stories to block my view, I felt like I finally heard what he was trying to say, and the theory I found gave me a new appreciation for even some of his older ones I haven't cared for. I don't know that I can exactly say I *liked* it, but I feel like I *got* it. And that's better than I've done with Lynch thus far.

3.5 stars.

Flickchart: #1018 out of 2284, below A Snoodle's Tale and above Fantasia 2000. This is a very weird one to rank, so that may be completely inaccurate.

Hannah Arendt (2012)

IMDb plot summary: A look at the life of philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt, who reported for The New Yorker on the war crimes trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann.
Directed by Margarethe von Trotta. Starring Barbara Sukowa, Axel Milberg, Janet McTeer, and Julia Jentsch.

The top review for this movie on IMDb said "This is a philosopher's movie, not a film buff's movie," and in a way I agree. It's very slow and while there is a story, it doesn't really bother with typical narrative build and resolution. But that doesn't necessarily work against it. My dad is a philosophy teacher and recommended it to me as a movie that deals with philosophy well, and that seems right. It's slow, quiet, and thoughtful, with more attention paid to the philosophical ideas than to an exciting story arc. It's definitely not going to be everyone's cup of tea, but I liked it.

I'm definitely going to seek out some other movies by this director. She's apparently done a couple other movies about historically important women, including Hildegard von Bingen, who I wrote a paper about once and found her fascinating. This movie wasn't a sensationalized version of Arendt's life, so I'd definitely be interested in watching the same director tackle other biographical stories.

4 stars.

Flickchart: #542 out of 2283, below Panic Room and above All's Faire in Love.

Koyaanisqatsi (1982)

IMDb plot summary: A movie with no conventional plot: merely a collection of expertly photographed scenes. Subject matter has a highly environmental theme.
Directed by Godfrey Reggio.

It's... hard to know how to review this exactly. There are a lot of people I know who LOVE this, and although I see where they're coming from, it didn't have nearly that effect on me. Maybe my attention span is too short or too narrative-focused, but I found myself zoning out a lot. It would definitely be interesting to see this in a more immersive format, in a theater or with a really good sound system with nothing else trying to grab my focus. As it was, it was too easy for my brain to convert this into background noise.

That's not to say there weren't moments that really stood out. I for some reason really got into the segment showing big city traffic faster than real life. That was almost hypnotic to watch, as drivers zoomed in and out of lanes and pedestrians appeared to almost jump out in front of them. I also really enjoyed the score, particular the one with the men chanting "Koyaanisqatsi" -- there was a deep, profound sadness in just that one word. I couldn't remember what "koyaanisqatsi" meant, though I know I had someone tell me once, so when the word and the definition appeared on the screen at the end, I had another moment of really connecting to the material. Somehow, after that hour and a half of images, seeing the words "a life out of balance" on the screen made me very sad and melancholy. So, interestingly, the strongest response I had to this movie involved actual words, either sung or written. It's quite likely that the scarcity of language made the few occurrences of it much more powerful to me.

That being said, I don't know that I'd watch it again -- certainly not in the same video/audio setup. There are some very compelling moments, but there are a lot that just... aren't, and I'm not sure they make up for the few that work.

3 stars.

Flickchart: #1035 out of 2282, below Cypher and above Monster.