Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (3/5 Stars)

 

When I penned a review of the “The Guardians of the Galaxy” in 2014, I wrote that within the first scene, I knew I was watching something new, something interesting, and something fun. The Marvel Universe had before that time stumbled into a run of too-serious melodramatic CGI slug-fests (the nadir being Thor: the Dark World), but here came Director James Gunn to liven things up a bit. It would lead to a string of great Marvel movies between 2014-2018. But greatness cannot last, and lately we have seen Marvel hit run of melodramatic CGI slugfests. The problems are not the same. In the first nadir, Marvel was having trouble making some of its very old characters like Thor, Hulk, and Captain America new and fresh. But they got around this by turning Hulk and Thor into comedians and introducing more facets to the personality of Captain America that weren’t so conformist (I’m still Team Iron Man by the way).

This second nadir involves Marvel’s attempt to branch out past the core fans of comic books by introducing more diverse and gendered super heroes. The problem is not that Marvel has superheroes with these types of identities, the problem is that these superheroes are not interesting. Captain Marvel, Black Panther, and now Shang-Chi all have a “Thor” problem. Polka-Dot Man from “The Suicide Squad” is a more interesting character than these three.

Shang-Chi in particular is just too safe of a character. He is a played by Simu Liu who would otherwise be a perfect casting choice for a mannequin. He is tall, broad-shouldered, and devoid of personality. Imagine instead that Marvel had cast Randall Park. Yes, I know that Randall Park is already a recurring character in Marvel’s Ant-Man and is Korean, not Chinese. I’m just saying imagine this character as someone interesting. Shang-Chi emigrated to San Francisco with his motion has a child and now goes by the name Shawn. Shawn lives alone in an apartment that is not really expensive, but still pretty good digs for a single guy in San Francisco. He works as a chauffeur with his best friend Katy (played by Awkwafina). So you know that he’s not privileged, but then Awkwafina quips that she graduated with honors at Berkeley and Shang-Chi knows four languages, so they clearly aren’t disadvantaged either. He’s just right there in the middle, not offending anybody.

One day while riding the bus, Shawn is attacked by a bunch of goons sent by his still-alive and very powerful gangster of a father Xu Wenwu (played by Tony Leung). A martial arts fight ensues and it turns out that Shawn knows Kung Fu (and that Katy can drive a bus under pressure). The action in this movie makes one nostalgia for prime Jackie Chan movies. They take place in impractical locales that Jackie would have used like on a bus, or in the bamboo scaffolding of a building, but the action in Shang Chi is just so computerized. It lacks the visceral qualities of a Jackie Chan film. So by directing the cinephiles attention to these past great action movies, one is rewarded by nostalgia, but also the distinct impression that they are watching something inferior. I wonder if it is even possible to make a Jackie Chan film like the ones he made in the 1980-90s. Perhaps it is just too dangerous. In any event, the computer scientists have yet to be able to perfect an equal alternative in quality.

Shawn and Katy discover that the father thought dead by Shawn is hatching an evil conspiracy and travel to Hong Kong to find Shawn’s sister and warn her. Instead, Shawn’s sister Xia Ling (played by Meng’er Zhang) finds him and reveals herself to be the head of a brutal gambling syndicate that hosts deadly fights in a Shanghai skyscraper. When asked how she came to be so powerful and influential she replies that her father would not allow her to be a part of his club, so when she decided at 16 years of age to run away and make her own. Fast forward ten years and here she is. There are no follow up questions. It is the sort of backstory only Ayn Rand would find believable.

It is further revealed that Shawn’s father is searching for an extradimensional village called Lu’an, which guards the prison of an ancient and evil dragon that would Consume The World if released. We see this village, it is hidden in a bamboo forest and contains large Chinese dream beasts and a water dragon. It reminds one of Wakanda but does not measure up to the experience. For one thing, Black Panther was the first time any corporation spent hundreds of millions of dollars making an African Xanadu. In China, a movie that with the budget and scope of Shang-Chi comes out every month. In 2004, I saw Jet Li’s “Hero” in an American movie theater. That’s a bigger and better movie than Shang-Chi so don’t give me the marketing pitch that Shang-Chi represents the coming out of Asian cinema. It’s only the first Marvel movie with an Asian main character. That distinction is not an important one. Asians have been producing great and influential movies since Japanese cinema came into its own in the 1950s. I have plenty of recommendations if you want them.

There are bright parts to this movie. For one thing, everything Awkwafina does is funny. At another point, Ben Kingsley reprises his actor character from “Iron Man 3” and he too is consistently funny. Here’s a novel idea. How about making the Shang-Chi sequel about Awkwafina and calling it “Katy with the No Powers”. It could be about her and Ben Kingsley’s efforts to sell a screenplay based on their adventures in this movie and then attempting to remake this movie with no budget. (I bet the no-budget car chases would be better than the ones in this movie). That fake movie could also have a great subplot about Katy’s efforts to kow-tow to the strictrues of the Communist Party of China in order to get the movie a release inside the country. Katy could be like “this is funny,” and CCP would be like “too funny,” and “this is interesting,” and CCP like “too interesting,” and then this is something, and then CCP like “make it nothing”. At the end Katy could come to the realization that communists won’t be okay with anything because they would rather people not say or think anything other than what they tell them to.

I’m throwing shade. It is Marvel that should come to this realization. This year they might. They have gone to great lengths to present China and the Chinese in the least controversial most boring light possible. For all their efforts, CCP still won’t allow “Shang-Chi” to be released in the country. CCP has also made it clear that the next Marvel movie “The Eternals” will not be released because it is helmed by Oscar Winning Director Chloe Zhang. Marvel must have thought it would have been a plus with CCP to hire a Chinese-American Director like Ms. Zhang for one of their movies. But no, Ms. Zhang once had an opinion about China, calling it a “place of lies” and CCP decided that it was insulting to China and the Chinese for anyone, and perhaps especially a Chinese person, to point out all of CCP’s lies. This may be a good thing. Perhaps Marvel with stop positioning for the approval of a totalitarian government and, as a result, make better movies.

Hugo 3D (3/5 Stars)

I love movies that much is for sure. But my love is a love with certain limits. A good movie may change a man, it may mold the way he empathizes, teach him something new, or inspire him to his own adventures, but there is no truly special quality within a man that gives him the ability to make movies. In other words, the Academy Awards are nice to have because movies are culturally important, but the nominees and even winners do not deserve the heaps and heaps and heaps of idolatry and praise that they receive. The difference in importance between a world famous great actor and an obscure great accountant is negligible. They both require natural talent and learned skill. The difference is that one is on a big screen that lots and lots of people will see see while the other sits in an office and has but a few clients. Thus the actor’s importance is distorted to an obscene degree while the accountant goes shamelessly unnoticed. Actually, I take that back. It probably takes far more to be a great accountant. (I would also argue that people recognize the greatness of actors and athletes far more readily than scientists and doctors because the greatest of an actor or athlete is very easy to understand. You may need a PHD before you understand just why a particular doctor is great.) That’s why I am sad to say, I was not overwhelmed and enraptured as Martin Scorsese probably felt I should be by the presence of Director Georges Meliere on the screen of this movie, even though he did make some of the best movies at the dawn of cinema. There should be a rule that stops directors of movies from making movies about movie directors. (The same goes for writers that write books and screenplays about writers.) I say you are sipping the poison fame cocktail that distorts your importance and inflames your ego to an insufferably pretentious degree.

Not that this movie is too insufferably pretentious. It is directed by Martin Scorsese with that subversively excessive amount of brilliant flair. It stars Asa Butterfield as a young boy named Hugo Cabret. Hugo’s father (Jude Law) dies in a fire one day and his uncle claude (Ray Winstone) adopts him into his work apartment at the Paris Grand Central Station and teaches him his job of winding all the clocks in the station. Then Uncle Claude goes AWOL on a drunken bender, leaving Hugo in the station alone. As long as he keeps the clocks in order though, nobody will check to see who is occupying his uncle’s apartment amongst the machines. When he needs food, he steals it. When he needs mechanical parts for the secret ??? he is building in his apartment, he steals it from the toy store run by a crusty old man (Ben Kingsley) who may just be the forgotten father of cinema Georges Meliere. Chasing the young thief in hope to catch him and send him to an orphanage is the imposing station inspector played wonderfully by Sacha Baron Cohen. Playing Meliere’s granddaughter is none other than Chole Grace Moretz, that girl of fourteen with such maturity her face could pass for twenty-five.  

The story is simple like all children’s stories and basically consists of Hugo's quest of fixing the secret ???? and getting old cranky Meliere to appreciate his past greatness all while outrunning the station inspector. The movie looks great, but don’t all movies nowadays. The camera moves deftly and in great long shots like other Scorsese movies, but these ones are obviously helped with special effects and other types of cheating so they do not have the same type of impact. The kids when going off on an adventures find themselves in libraries reading books or in movie theaters watching new movies (by that I mean very old movies. This is the twenties.)  Is that exciting? Uh, well, let’s get back to that a little bit later.

There needs first to be said something about the acting chops of children. I find that children act much better in movies opposite adults in scenes. Think of such great child acting movies like “The Road,” “Little Miss Sunshine,” “The Sixth Sense.” They all have kids interacting with adults.  When children act with each other it yields less fruitful results (because let’s face it, acting is reacting and children do not know what they are doing (perhaps we can make an exception of Jodie Foster and Dakota Fanning)). Chloe Grace Moretz in particular is not a very good actor. I can picture somebody on YouTube doing something rather funny with her line, “Don’t you just Love Books?!?” Asa Butterfield is forgettable. I wonder if Kodi Smit-McPhee was busy or something. I feel he could have done much better. Not to mention Kodi and Chole had already successfully worked together in “Let Me In.” Perhaps that might have helped.

The one that steals the show quite consistently is Sacha Baron Cohen. He has the vast majority of the movies laughs and delivers his scenes with that peculiar quality only a comically tall man can apply. Ben Kingsley as George Meliere for his part spends far too much time crying. He may have good reasons for it or not. All of this, and whether libraries and movie theaters are adventurous, hinges on whether one would think that Melieres is just the greatest thing since sliced bread. I would think only a couple of people in the audience (and most likely none) would have even heard of the guy. Well, I have heard of him. And I have seen his masterpiece: A Trip to the Moon. In fact, I have seen almost all of the old movies that are sampled in this movie from Harold Lloyd’s "Safety Last," to Buster Keaton’s “The General” to Louie Brooks in “Pandora’s Box,” to Charlie Chaplin. It is so common for critics to fawn all over these movies and say they are the best ever and that movies were never so good since. My opinion: These movies are generally okay but not great movies. The exception would be the average Buster Keaton movie, which I find works astonishingly well in the 21^st century. But overall, we make better movies today. We have a better idea of what we are doing, we have a century worth of trial and error knowledge, and we are armed with technology that makes what we want to create much more easier to accomplish with tightened budgets. George Meliere’s was a pioneer no doubt, but his sci-fi epics come off rather amateurish by today's standards. "A Trip to the Moon" had only one long distance camera shot. There was no acting or dialogue to speak of and absolutely no character development. The totally super famous shot in “A Trip to the Moon,” where the rocket lands into the moon’s face is well, iconic to say the very very most. It is worth seeing this movie like it is worth knowing who won WWI, but it does not a great movie make. And if like me, you think it isn’t all that worth hooting about, you will feel rather detached during “Hugo,” which treats that movie like it is so totally all that. It isn’t. Take my word for it. You wouldn’t want it too last much more than its running time of ten minutes.

By the way, this will be the last 3D movie I ever see. Not once did I feel I would be missing something if I paid five dollars less and saw the movie in 2D. If Scorsese can’t pull this technology off than nobody can. It doesn’t deserve to exist. Too dim, too distracting, too disturbing. Please stop.

Shutter Island (4/5 Stars) February 24, 2010

A heartbreaking study of staggering sadness.

Teddy Daniels fought in the Second World War. He was there when the Allies liberated Dachau, a Nazi concentration camp. He saw the emaciated shrunken faces of the prisoners. He walked past frozen piles of murdered corpses, too many to count. Him and some of the other American soldiers took the German soldiers stationed there, stood them up against a wire fence, and shot them execution style. It wasn’t warfare. It was murder and Teddy knew it. Teddy came home and married a woman he dearly loved. Their marriage was strained. One day she found a closet full of whiskey flasks. She asked him why he drank so much in a compassionate and worried voice. “I killed a lot of people in the war,” he replied throat full of guilt and sorrow. Teddy witnessed cruel random tragedy twice. His wife died from smoke inhalation when a pyromaniac set fire to their apartment building. He has dreams of her almost every night. They embrace in mercy and forgiveness and then she burns up from within and turns into ashes in his arms. He is left alone grasping the air around him.

Such is the background of the U.S. Marshall (played by Leonardo Dicaprio) who is investigating the disappearance of a patient at an insane asylum for the criminally insane in Martin Scorsese’s newest movie Shutter Island. The trailers suggest that this movie is from the horror genre but don’t be mistaken, this is out and out film noir and it fits in perfectly with its time period, the Golden Age of Film Noir, the early 1950s. 

The plot twists and turns so much that I feel compelled to leave most of it out of my review simply because I would probably need to see the movie again just to make sure I have it right. In the end though, the plot itself is just a red herring. The real story here is in the character development. When Martin Scorsese won his first Oscar for the The Departed he joked that it was the first movie he had made that had a plot. He’s back to his old ways in an ingeniously disguised way. 

But what do I mean that this isn't a horror film. Well, in your regular horror film the criminally insane (like say Hannibal Lector or Mike Myers) are explained just enough to completely freak you out. Here, the crazy people are explained to the point where you really really understand why they’ve gone crazy. Instead of being afraid of them, you empathize with them. And let me tell you, it takes some serious trauma to become criminally insane. Keep in mind that Teddy Daniels is the sane one in this story. Everyone other patient (including the 67th) has gone through worse. One place where this really shows is in the casting. The woman who went missing was guilty of drowning her three children. She isn’t played by a deformed hag of a woman. Scorsese instead chose to cast Emily Mortimer, an actress who can easily play the ‘sweetest woman in the world’ roles (Lars and the Real Girl.) Filling in other supporting roles are inherently compassionate actors like Ben Kingsley (Ghandi, Schindler’s List), Michelle Williams (Synecdoche New York), and Mark Ruffalo (Eternal Sunshine). Scorsese doesn’t want to just scare us. He wants to break our hearts. 

Scorsese is a master at empathy. Watching his movies makes one grow as a person. He chooses perhaps the hardest possible characters to relate with and provides the viewer with an opportunity to sympathize and understand them. (A violent loner like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. An inarticulate brute like Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull. Even someone as inhuman as Jesus Christ himself in The Last Temptation of Christ.) Here, he chooses the criminally insane as his muse. I can’t imagine any other filmmaker doing a better job. I heard that in the late 70s Scorsese was hospitalized with deep depression and apparently thought that Raging Bull would be the last movie he would make. I don’t know if that’s the cause, but it is certainly clear that this guy understands suffering inside and out. 

Film noir as a genre grew into popularity at a distinct time in American History. World War II had begun and ended. The Korean War, which is usually forgotten but killed thousands of Americans started just a few years later. The Soviet Union had just gotten the bomb and America was in full Red Scare mode. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder had yet to be identified but must have existed on a grand scale. Take a look at the classic film noir movies then: Hardboiled cynical men, untrustworthy women, nihilistic plots and gloomy photography. Everybody smoked and drank nonstop. This movie has the same dark feel to it. The mood is so encapsulating that at times I thought it would have worked better had it been shot in black and white. There’s an especially cool cinematic trick Scorsese used in the dream sequences to give it an eerier than usual feel. Pay special attention to the cigarette smoke. It seems to be going in reverse sucked back into the cigarette. I can’t wait for this guy’s next movie.