Captain Phillips

Yes, officer, I swear we have the

correct number of life preservers

Grade: A–

Director: Paul Greengrass

Starring: Tom Hanks, Barkhad Abdi, Barkhad Abdirahman, Faysal Ahmed, Mahat M. Ali and Michael Chernus

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 14 min.

While driving to his local Vermont airport early in Captain Phillips, the titular merchant mariner (Tom Hanks), bound for Oman and a freighter voyage around the treacherous Horn of Africa, chats with his wife Andrea (Catherine Keener) about how the world is changing and “different” from the one they’re used to.

On its face, this observation is an obvious—ham-handed, even—effort to evoke the post-9/11 anxiety that has fueled not just U.S. foreign policy in the past decade but also the terrorism-themed films of director Paul Greengrass (United 93, Bloody Sunday, and The Bourne Supremacy/Ultimatum). Yet, piracy is as ancient as seafaring itself. The Vikings were pirates, after all, and in Africa, piracy dates to at least the 16th century, when Barbary corsairs plundered European ships and enslaved prisoners.

And when four Somali pirates hijack Phillips' boat, the Maersk Alabama, the interlopers deny political motives. "We not al-Qaida," declares Muse (newcomer Barkhad Abdi), the rail-thin leader of the Somali band, on two separate occasions. "This just business," he continues with a tone meant to convey only qualified reassurance. The pirates cheer when they discover the hijacked vessel is U.S.-flagged, but for financial rather than political reasons.

Beyond being a story about Phillips' personal courage, Captain Phillips is Greengrass' rejection of the myopic, one-size-fits-all depiction of contemporary terrorism. At the same time, Greengrass deconstructs Hollywood's romanticized treatment of piracy that dates back to the silent film era. There's no Douglas Fairbanks, Errol Flynn or Burt Lancaster to swing in and dazzle audiences. Even the film's title is a riff on cinematic swashbucklers from Captain Blood to Captain Jack Sparrow. That changing world Phillips references turns out to be an artistic one.

In its place is a standoff between an average American with his frightened, unarmed crew and the desperate Somalis who must capture a lucrative ransom or face brutal consequences from their warlord minders back home.

Greengrass largely stills his trademark camera-in-a-blender, which allows his visual acuity to take center stage. He effectively conveys a detailed sense of space, from the claustrophobia of a tiny lifeboat to the labyrinth of the Alabama's engine room to the mammoth undertaking of four raiders in a skiff seizing a 500-foot container ship.

There are two captains at the center of Captain Phillips. Phillips is a fastidious micromanager slighted by his unionized crew until danger comes calling. Few actors can play resolute and vulnerable as well as Tom Hanks, and the movie universe is better with him in roles and performances like this, his best in at least a decade. And, among the outstanding quartet of first-time Somali actors, Abdi steals more than one scene as Muse, a dead-eyed mercenary who is both savvy yet in over his head.

Even as Captain Phillips' final act devolves into a coldly efficient procedural, Greengrass finds a way to puncture the air of inevitability. A closing cathartic, guttural moment from Hanks leaves you wondering whether Phillips’ emotional scars will ever fully heal. You also wonder whether Muse’s fate was just plan B. At one point, Phillips asks Muse whether there's more to life than being a fisherman who kidnaps people. Muse responds: "Maybe in America."

Cloud Atlas

Life is like a box of celestial confluences

Grade: B

Directors: Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski

Starring: Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, Doona Bae, Ben Whishaw, Keith David, James D’Arcy, Susan Sarandon and Hugh Grant

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hr. 52 min.

The overarching irony to D.W. Griffith’s 1916 masterpiece Intolerance, a colossus comprising four stories spanning 2,500 years meant to illuminate mankind’s unceasing penchant for injustice, is that was made partly as a response to groups who (rightly) attacked Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation as bigoted and extolling the Ku Klux Klan. While the motives behind Intolerance’s creation are dubious, there’s no debating its scope and influence.

Few films since have sought to so directly duplicate Intolerance as Cloud Atlas. Simultaneously engrossing and infuriating, this spiraling adaption of David Mitchell’s 2004 novel spans six interwoven storylines, beginning with a Pacific Ocean voyage in 1849 and ending hundreds of years hence. In between, there tales about a young amanuenis and Cambridge outcast (Ben Whishaw) struggling to survive as a gay man in 1930s Europe, an investigative journalist (Halle Berry) fighting to uncover the dangerous ties between nuclear power and oil companies in the 1970s, and a mini-revolt led by a genetically-engineered clone named Somni-451 (Doona Bae) in totalitarian Neo Seoul, circa 2144, where fabricants are used as slave labor (and sometimes worse).

The puzzle-piece plots are both thematically and narratively connected. The main character in each timeline discovers the tale of the preceding one via evolving modes of storytelling, from diaries and letters to a book manuscript, a movie and a holographic recording device. The final plot thread, set in post-apocalyptic Hawaii, is shared a millennia away by an old man (Tom Hanks) to a group of children gathered around a simple campfire. The common refrain to each story is the corrupt, oppressive nature of mankind and its propensity to subjugate others for the sake of selfish gain.

In a film full of cannibals, slavery and futuristic floating cars, the most wacky story might be a modern-day parable labeled “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish.” There, the titular book publisher (Jim Broadbent) goes from being unexpectedly flush with cash to fleeing a group of gangsters to being involuntarily confined to an old folks home reminiscent of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, down to a Nurse Ratched variant played by Hugo Weaving.

If it sounds like Cloud Atlas is all over the place, well, it is. The initial flow of the film evokes the early establishing scenes in Magnolia—both movies also share an alternating blend of gonzo humor and deadly drama. Much of the cast—including all the leads—play multiples roles spanning each episode that sometimes cross gender and racial lines (the closing credits match actors with their parts, including several surprising reveals). While it’s uneasy to watch white actors in epicanthic yellowface (or Berry as a white trophy wife in one chapter), the device does further (and, indeed, often shoulders) the film’s notion of our collective continuity through time. I’m still waiting to hear exactly why that notion is important, though.

Any film conceived by Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run, and little since) and Andy and Lana (née Larry) Wachowski (The Matrix, and little since) is going to be spectacle first, not that there’s anything wrong with that in a movie lasting nearly three hours. But the film is also as bloated as the number of directors employed to make it, traversing not only time and space but also movie genres. Ironically, the filmmakers foist contrasting methods to force-feed a story about connectivity. Moreover, it is telling that only half of the six storylines would make compelling standalones.

As a fantasy hodgepodge, Cloud Atlas as a whole is far greater than the sum of its disparate parts. Still, breadth—no matter how impressive—does not necessarily equate depth.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

You can say that again, Max

Grade: C –

Director: Stephen Daldry

Starring: Thomas Horn, Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock, Max von Sydow, Viola Davis and Jeffrey Wright

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 9 min.

I am not one of those who believe that certain tragic events should be shielded from artistic examination. The acute emotions that emanate from publicly shared grief can be a catalyst for creative studies of the human ethos. But, while the line separating exploration from exploitation is one an artist should not shirk, it is also one that can be easily and perilously crossed.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close tackles 9/11, a cinematic third-rail used as the milieu for films both brilliant (United 93) and inept (World Trade Center; Remember Me). Its bare premise is apposite and affecting – a 10-year-old boy coping with the loss of his father, who perished on the 105^th floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center. However, the problems with this pious adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Oprah-approved 2005 novel are both extreme and incredible.

Before his untimely death, Thomas Schell (Tom Hanks, Joe Versus the Volcano) and his son Oskar (newcomer Thomas Horn, Jeopardy! Kids Week) are an inseparable duo, mixing trips to Thomas’ jewelry shop and Central Park with their ongoing game of “Reconnaissance Mission,” which would send Oskar out in search of clues to solve make-believe mysteries (such as the fate of a fabled “sixth borough”). Their inexhaustible quality time appears to have the more fundamental aim of coaxing the socially awkward Oskar out of his shell.

Those familiar with high-functioning autism and other behavioral disorders will recognize some telltale signs of Oskar’s affect – of course, some might also object to Oskar’s more caricatural tics, such as the tambourine he constantly carries around and rattles to calm himself. For some reason, however, director Stephen Daldry (The Hours, The Reader) remains vague about Oskar’s condition – all we get, in one of the boy’s typically precocious moments, is an offhand remark that he was once tested for Asperger’s, but “the results were inconclusive.” In so doing, Daldry squanders the opportunity for an informed, respectful look at families coping with this issue.

The rest of the audience is placed in the innocent position of recoiling, if not outright disliking the garrulous, hyper-emotional preteen. When not self-inflicting bruises on himself or repeatedly listening to the voice messages Thomas left once his death seemed imminent, Oskar screams at all the adults in his life and tells his mother (Sandra Bullock) that she’s “an absentee parent” (no proof provided) and should have been the one who died in the Twin Towers instead of dad.

A year after 9/11, Oskar breaks a vase while rummaging through his father’s closet and discovers a key inside a small packet with the word “Black” written on it. Believing this to be one final quest, he canvas the phone book to categorize, map and then visit all 472 people with the surname Black in hopes of matching the key with its corresponding lock. This fairy tale of an unsupervised 10-year-old child roaming the streets of New York City conveniently allows Daldry to foist a greeting card cross-section of the five boroughs under the guise of communal uplift.

In a panoply of cloying cardboard cutouts, the lone, all-too-brief standout is Max van Sydow as an elderly, mysteriously mute neighbor who communicates using a notepad and, as Oskar somehow knows and relays via incessant voiceovers, hails from Dresden and lived through "some really bad stuff." That description, in essence, sums up the function of 9/11 in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close – a stage prop of sorrow unbothered by context or consequences, present only to help personal anguish masquerade as something profound, little different than the love triangle in Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor. As the plot threads coagulate, one of the Blacks (Jeffrey Wright) solemnly and with a straight face laments the fact that the post-9/11 proliferation of missing-persons flyers hampered his search for a family heirloom. Some really bad stuff, indeed.

Neil Morris

Larry Crowne

The Mild Bunch

Grade: C

Director: Tom Hanks

Starring: Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Cedric the Entertainer, Taraji P. Henson, Bryan Cranston, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 38 min.

Ten years ago, a motion picture starring Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts would have been blockbuster material. Today, Larry Crowne plays weekend second-fiddle to a mindless movie about shape-shifting robots.

The irony of the film’s title is that by the end of this sanitized rom-com, we actual know surprisingly little about Larry (Hanks), an average, suddenly jobless Joe who enrolls at the local community college to rebuild his resume for the 21^st century. We learn that Larry is divorced and buried under a mountain of alimony and mortgage debt, but we’re left clueless as to how or why this milquetoast got to this point.

Instead, we watch as Larry’s free-spirited classmate Talia (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) invites him to join her scooter gang, updates his wardrobe and goes feng shui on his living room. And, Larry gets sweet on Mrs. Mercedes Tainot (Roberts), his speech teacher caught in her own unhappy marriage.

Individually, Hanks and Roberts are as charming and reliable as ever, our post-modern editions of Hollywood icons. In particular, Hanks wrings quiet, heart-breaking emotion out of the scene in which Larry gets canned from his lowly but loved job with a big box store named U-Mart. Together, they lack credible romantic chemistry. As the storyline starts to inevitably peter out, it leans almost exclusively on Hanks’ aw-shucks routine and Roberts’ trademark toothy grin.

Hanks directs his first feature since 1996’s That Thing You Do! and tries to shoehorn in contemporary phenomena like corporate downsizing, higher gas prices and “strategic mortgage defaults.” However, this is also a script by Nia Vardalos of My Big Fat Greek Wedding fame, meaning it’s as sappy as a tapped Vermont maple.

Neil Morris

Toy Story 3

They want a 4th film now? Get my agent on the phone!

Grade: A –

Director: Lee Unkrich

Starring the voices of: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Ned Beatty, Don Rickles, Michael Keaton, John Ratzenberger, Estelle Harris, and Timothy Dalton

MPAA Rating: G

Running Time: 1 hour, 43 minutes

After years of producing films of evolving maturity and sophistication, it is legitimate to consider whether Pixar and its parent Disney– not immune to the sagging economy – are milking its first and most lucrative cash cow for an easy money grab by unveiling Toy Story 3 15 years after the original entry and 11 years after its sequel.

Notwithstanding the studios’ motives, this tertiary return of Pixar’s beloved playthings fits firmly into the studio’s blueprint of growing with its original core audience. Andy (voiced by John Morris in all three films, to my point) is now 17-years-old and leaving for college, and Woody (Tom Hanks), Buzz (Tim Allen), and the rest of the playroom worry they’ll be consigned to the attic or, worse still, the trash heap – the soldiers are the first to parachute away: “When the trash bags come out, we army guys are the first to go.”

Fearing the unknown but still yearning relevance, the gang escapes to an alluring daycare with a sinister underbelly. They are greeted by a virtual island of misfit toys, run by Lots-o’-Huggin’ (Ned Beatty), a huggable pink bear with a genteel Southern façade that masks a despotic plantation owner’s cruelty. Backed by Lotso’s hench-dolls – the spookiest baby this side of Chucky and a metrosexual Ken (Michael Keaton, having a blast) – our newcomers are banished to the Caterpillar Room, a hellhole director Lee Unkrich depicts with the frenzied madness of an early Sam Raimi horror flick or the riot scene in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

From there, Toy Story 3 becomes, of all things, a taut prison-break flick, with Lotso playing the part of the warden from Cool Hand Luke. He brainwashes Buzz by flipping the Demo switch beneath his battery cover, which leaves it to Woody to help his mates escape using some Mission: Impossible style strategizing.

The visuals (3-D version not necessary) are still gorgeous but now hued with a comforting retro quality. And, the series’ trademark humor is as snappy as ever, although the obvious, uneasy chuckles at the expense of Ken’s foppishness and Buzz’s amorous Spanish language mode are the sort of things Shrek sequels do – “Like your as-cot,” Barbie coos to Ken.

But, only Pixar could craft a charming fable about facing one’s mortality, including a relatively macabre turn that sees our plastic protagonists linking hands in quiet acceptance of a seemingly inevitable fiery demise. While trying to find his way back to Andy, Woody is innocently nabbed by a toddler named Bonnie, whose bedroom is filled with a troupe of stuffed animals led by a British hedgehog named Mr. Pricklepants (Timothy Dalton), who treats every imaginary tea party or outer space adventure like a West End production. As Woody joins in their playtime, a look of sheer, long-lost ecstasy creeps across his face, overjoyed to be working again…needed again…wanted again. The scene speaks to the plight of the jobless in our current economic climate. More broadly, however, it illustrates the universal urge to find happiness and meaning in our existence.

The script by Little Miss Sunshine scribe Michael Arndt always couches these thematic complexities in terms of workmanlike fun until the poignant final five minutes, which packs an emotional punch rivaled only by Up’s opening act montage. Oozing with bittersweetness, the denouement’s lesson about both treasuring and letting go of the past elegantly concludes this seminal trilogy. Behind your smile will be a lump in your throat, as Toy Story 3 just might send you rummaging through the bygone boxes in your attic.

Neil Morris

Angels and Demons

Please, Mr. Hanks, we'll tell you everthing you want to know.

Just don't make us watch "Turner & Hooch" again.

Grade: C +

Director: Ron Howard

Starring: Tom Hanks, Ewan McGregor, Ayelet Zurer, Stellan Skarsgård, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, and Armin Mueller-Stahl

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hours, 18 minutes

I am of two minds about using the Catholic Church and its austere, shadowy tenets as both literary and cinematic punching bags, first in the film adaptation of Dan Brown’s runaway bestseller The Da Vinci Code, and now in its follow-up, Angels and Demons. On the one hand, there is something discomforting about appropriating the religious beliefs held by billions around the globe as a bogeyman for mere pop entertainment.

However, the declaration “Hey, it’s only a movie!” has been rightly used to excuse a plethora of provocative films throughout cinema’s history. And, as long as the Catholic Church remains a powerful world influence adhering to clandestine, medieval traditions and doctrinaire, reactionary teachings, it must expect to be fodder for political activists, conspiratorial muckrakers, and sensationalistic fiction writers.

Angels and Demons is the latest such byproduct, in which Brown parlays the longstanding feud between religion and science as the basis for a pedantic, winding murder mystery. Although Brown’s book is actually a prequel to Da Vinci Code, director Ron Howard wisely postdates the narrative into a sequel. Tom Hanks returns as symbologist Robert Langdon, again called upon to uncover the dastardly plans of another occult society. This time, it is the ambigramatic Illuminati, an Enlightenment-era association purportedly looking to punish the Church for its past denunciation of science by destroying Vatican City and the College of Cardinals using a canister of stolen antimatter.

The bulk of the film, however, finds Langdon spouting one dollop of theological mumbo jumbo after another, each prompting another leg in what becomes an extended travelogue through the streets of Rome and the Universal Studios back lot. No staircase, corridor, or secret passageway goes unexplored as Langdon also tries to stop a series of related, Se7en-esque theme slayings against kidnapped cardinals belonging to the, er, Preferiti, after the Pope’s death and on the eve of the ensuing papal conclave. Going along for the ride is a comely Italian scientist (Ayelet Zurer), an irascible Vatican police commander (Skellan Skarsgård), and Patrick McKnee, the Holy See Camerlengo (Ewan McGregor, now permanently derailed off the track that once led toward headlining these sorts of blockbusters).

The existence of this sequel comes in the face of a first installment that made money despite underperforming at every critical level. Fans and critics complained and Howard listened, righting many of the wrongs that plagued his languid 2006 effort. Angels and Demons moves at a brisker pace, even at nearly 140 minutes, and is not as slavishly shackled to its literary source. And, thankfully, Hanks’ bouffant hairstyle has been tamped down. But, there is little difference between this and the claptrap of National Treasure aside from Hanks’ cachet and better set design.

Howard is a capable director, but he anchors himself in too safe a harbor with a prosaic script co-written by usual suspects Akiva Goldsmith and David Koepp (only the absence of David Benioff prevents the formation of an unholy scriptwriting trinity). Just how lazy is it? Well, the film’s centerpiece suspense scene features Langdon escaping a locked, oxygen-deprived chamber in the Vatican archives by tipping a bookshelf through a Plexiglas wall, and the denouement hinges on the discovery of a secret video recording in which true villain unwittingly confesses his crimes (so, apparently, you don’t need to recount the Seven Catholic Sacraments to solve this whodunit).

When McKenna barges into the conclave and pleas for a religion-science détente, it sounds like a speech lifted from the end of Rocky IV. And, between belated, belabored goose chases, the depth of the screenplay’s “intrigue” extends only to guessing which characters will turn out to be good and evil. Not-so-much spoiler as simple-minded plot-device alert: They will be exactly the opposite of how they initially seem.

If Hanks’ career seems to emulate Jimmy Stewart’s, then this is another furrowed-brow chapter in the transition from his Frank Capra and screwball comedy beginnings into the more stolid but no less productive Alfred Hitchcock-Anthony Mann phase. Let’s hope for more films like Vertigo and The Naked Spur (or Saving Private Ryan and Apollo 13) in Hanks’ future. Otherwise, we might have to settle for walk-on poetry readings on late-night TV talk shows sooner than we thought.

Neil Morris