2016 - The Highlights (lionsroar)

Films watched for the first time and reviewed in 2016

Note: Since Trophy Unlocked has to pay for most of the movies we see in the theaters and for most of the films we watch at home, we don’t have the scope of a newspaper reviewer. We don’t see everything that’s out, so our ratings of films are based on what we decide to spend our money on.

Best Films of the year:

In no particular order:

The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years

Okay, so any Beatles film released this year would probably make my list, let's just get that out of the way. There was certainly a lot of hype surrounding the film and the involvement of Ron Howard as the director when it received its brief theatrical release. Not sure what, if anything, Howard really added to the project besides his name appeal. The film concentrates on the U.S. tours, which is somewhat well-trodden ground. A lot of the footage has been seen before, but hell, it’s The Beatles, what more do you need?

Zootopia

In a year with a lot of great animated films, Zootopia is one of the best. Not a sequel, which sets it apart from Finding Dory, the film doesn’t talk down to kids, its intended audience, which allows adults to enjoy it as well. I could have done without the Shakira-based character, which seems a little tacked on. Good, but I’m not sure if it has the timeless quality of the best Disney classics.

10 Cloverfield Lane

It’s not often that the sequel is so much better that the original, but then again, 10 Cloverfield Lane isn’t really a sequel in the strictest definition, to Cloverfield (2008). While that film is so poorly acted, 10 Cloverfield Lane is more of an acting tour de force, featuring a cast with John Goodman and Mary Elizabeth Winstead, the former who seems to be in every movie and the latter who doesn’t make enough movies for my money. While I have no desire to follow the surviving protagonists from Cloverfield, I really want to see what happens to Michelle.

Deadpool

It seems like every year for the past five or six, there are more and more comic book-based Superhero films. The Marvel ones especially seem to be somewhat cookie-cutter and the DC ones seem to fall flat. That’s one of the appeals of Deadpool, it seems to break the mold and present its hero in a different way. A sarcastic smart-ass, Ryan Reynold’s Deadpool is one of the most fun and certainly the most adult, super-hero film to hit the silver screen.

Kubo and the Two Strings

Laika has been an amazing animations studio with each film getting better than the one before it, culminating in Kubo and the Two Strings, which, along with Zootopia, ranks as one of the better-animated films of 2016. This may be the most accessible Laika film to date. It contains all the elements that make Laika films unique to come down the pike in a number of years.

Disappointments of the Year:

In no particular order:

Hail, Caesar!

You expect better from the Coen Brothers. This film tries, but sadly fails to capture Hollywood in the 1950s. While there is a breakthrough performance by Aiden Ehrenreich, it is not enough to save the film. The most disappointing of all the missteps is a musical number featuring Channing Tatum that would never have even seen the light of day during the Production Code era. Call it comedy or parody, the filmmakers had to know there are other ways to make fun of musicals other than stooping to a sophomoric homoerotic dance number. A lot of context, but little text to Hail, Caesar!

Warcraft (2016)

Having never played a second of the video game, I can honestly say this movie did nothing for me. Fans of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) may love it, but it does not have much appeal to a wider audience. A gamer film strictly for gamers.

Suicide Squad

I could have chosen this or Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice for this post, as both are disappointments from Warner Bros. and DC comics. While making money is the goal for any film studio and both of the DC films have made money, making good films puts them back in the seats the next time. Look at Paramount’s disappointing returns from their TMNT film Out of the Shadows. While this may have been a better film than its prequel, audiences stayed away mostly because the first one wasn’t that good. This is a painful lesson that Warner Bros. needs to learn as well. Audiences won’t keep coming back if the product doesn’t get better.

Anomalisa

Sometimes being different is good, sometimes it is just different. While obviously, a lot of work went into this film, it tried a little too hard to be different rather than great. You can applaud the idea behind it, but the film never quite gets you there. Stop action is one of the hardest genres to work in, but this film never lets you forget that it is stop action. A late entry for 2015, Anomalisa tackles adult situations using a type of animation normally reserved for children’s fare. But while the best Laika films get you past the media, Anomalisa never lets you forget you’re watching stop action to its own detriment.

The Secret Life of Pets

Another example of where the film is not as good as its box office would suggest. This is basically Toy Story with pets, but it goes dark, much darker than the trailers would have led audiences to believe. The film lacks Toy Story's magic and while visually it looks good, looks aren't everything. Pet owners as slave owners and murder as an initiation are not really good story elements for what was billed as family fare.

Hail, Caesar! - Lots of Context, But Little Text

Hail, Caesar! (2016) Starring: Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Aiden Ehrenreich, Ralph Fiennes, Jonah Hill, Scarlett Johansson, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, Channing Tatum. Directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen. Written by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen. Produced by Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner. Color. U.S.A. 106 minutes. Comedy

The 1950s saw Hollywood in turmoil. The arrival of television had forced it to make fare that audiences couldn’t find on the box in their living room. As a result, we see a rise in flashy Technicolor musicals and epic wide-screen biblical epics. At the same time, there was a rise in the industry of communism, as writers, like Dalton Trumbo, were attracted by its promise of a piece of the pie that studio executives, read moguls, were unwilling to share. And about this time, those moguls were starting to fall to a new breed of filmmaker, as the studio system was being replaced.

It is against this backdrop that the Coen brothers have set their new film Hail, Caesar! I felt a tenuous connection to the film, as we were both on the Warner Bros. lot in December 2014. I even took some photos showing the presence of the production, not knowing what it was all about. Add to that, my love for old Hollywood film and I was a ready-built audience.

Warner Bros. turned into Capitol Pictures.

The Coen brothers have previously used Hollywood as a backdrop, Barton Fink (1991). In that film, the studio system was in full bloom and a young New York playwright, the titular character played by John Turturro, gets caught up in it, when he is hired by Capitol Pictures to write scripts. While the film received a lot of critical attention, winning the prestigious Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival, it failed to recoup its production costs when it hit theaters.

Josh Brolin's Eddie Mannix is more than a "fixer".

For Hail, Caesar! Capitol Pictures is once again the backdrop. Now it is run by Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), who has to spend most of his time keeping track of all the studio’s productions and the actors under his charge. But the Mannix character is an example of what is not quite right about Hail, Caesar! While Brolin does a fine acting job, his position in the film is systematic of what is wrong with it. We’re told, he’s a “fixer,” a nebulous position, but at the same time his responsibilities seem to be much more far reaching, including making casting choices, counseling with religious leaders on the studio’s bible epic already in production, making a daily call to the head office in New York, and other items that would fall into the inbox of the head of production. While I doubt Louis B. Mayer was as personally involved as Mannix is, he certainly would care about the same things Mannix does, down to the arranged dates of his actors for premieres.

Hail, Caesar! just doesn’t quite gel as well as it should. The production does a fine job of making a believable seeming studio, culled from location and stage shooting at Warner Bros., Sony and Universal, as well as Union Station and other locales. But like a studio set, there is nothing much more behind the façade. There is no big story here, just a lot of little ones that don’t come together to make a better whole.

Capitol Pictures is part Warner Bros.lot (above) and part other studios as well.

The acting, for the most part, is pretty good, but quite frankly none of the other characters seem to run true. Oh, you can see the types they’re playing, George Clooney’s Baird Whitlock is clearing a Kirk Douglas type; Scarlett Johansson is an Esther Williams type star, DeeAnna Moran; Channing Tatum is a Gene Kelly type as Burt Gurney; Tilda Swinton is both Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, but the twist is that she’s twin sisters ala Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren (Dear Abby): Thora and Thessaly Thacker. Jonah Hill really has very little to do besides sit behind a desk; you almost see as much of him in the trailers as you do on the screen.

The stand out for me was Alden Ehrenreich, who plays Hobie Doyle, a singing cowboy, ala Gene Autry, whom Mannix tries to turn into a serious leading man. He’s been around Hollywood for a few years with roles in Beautiful Creatures (2013) and Blue Jasmine (2013), to name a few. Having seen the latter, I have to admit I don’t remember him at all being in it. But unlike that film, he stands out here. He has perhaps the best scene in the film, in which he and film director Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes) discuss his delivery of dialogue in his first serious role.

Stand out performance from Alden Ehrenreich as Hobie Doyle. Here in one of the
 film's best scenes, he takes help from director Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes).

Another stand out is Frances McDormand. She may be in only one scene in the film, in the small role of the cigarette chain-smoking film editor C.C. Calhoun, but McDormand (the wife of Joel Coen) certainly makes the most of her screen time.

Along the way, the film tramples on some reputations, either directly or through association. While I can’t go into details without giving too much away, safe to say Esther Williams and Danny Kaye get the worst of the innuendos tossed around about their reputations.

Also, some of the productions depicted in the film wouldn’t have made it through the production code, which was still very much in effect at the time. I’m thinking mostly of the homo-erotically charged dance number we see Burt Gurney (Tatum) participating in. While it might be played for laughs now, it doesn’t ring true as something a studio would have done at the time. Just another example of Hail, Caesar! missing the mark.

Dance routine wouldn't have passed the Production Code.

Historically, Hollywood is very much hit and miss when it turns the camera on itself; films like: Show People (1928), Stand In (1937), and Boy Meets Girl (1938) don’t quite succeed.  There are exceptions when they do work like: Sunset Blvd (1950), Singin’ In the Rain (1952), and The Artist (2011), the latter really being a French production shot here. Hail, Caesar!, I'm afraid, is in the miss category.

While I really wanted to see Hail, Caesar! I really can’t recommend it. Set in a troubled time in the history of Hollywood, there is a lot of context, but not enough text for me to recommend.