Chronicle (2012)

 

Chronicle (2012) Movie Review

Chronicle is a 2012 science fiction thriller film directed by Josh Trank and written by Max Landis based on a story by both Trank and Landis. The film stars Dane DeHaan, Michael B. Jordan, and Alex Russell. The plot follows Andrew (DeHaan), his cousin Matt (Russell) and their fellow high school student Steve (Jordan), as they form a close bond after receiving telekinetic abilities from an unknown object. The group use their abilities for mischief and personal gain until Andrew begins to use them for darker purposes. The film is visually presented from the perspective of various video recording devices, primarily from a hand-held camcorder used by Andrew to document the events in his life. The film was released on February 1, 2012 in the United Kingdom and Ireland and was released in the United States on February 3, 2012. It received positive reviews from critics.

 

Directed by Josh Trank, the 20th Century Fox feature is a clever twist on superpowers and hand-held filmmaking that stumbles before the ending.

Although it dog-legs into silly mayhem in the homestretch, for a good portion of its quick 83-minute running time Chronicle is a quite clever boys-gone-wild-on-telekinetic-powers fantasy. Unquestionably endowed with the best special effects ever in a low-budget shaky-cam movie, this better-than-average teen item will hit high school guys right in the sweet spot, to ample commercial returns for Fox in all markets.
More or less employing the boilerplate Marvel premise — that of a young man suddenly possessed of superpowers — but walking the other way with it, director Josh Trank and writer Max Landis fancifully imagine what ordinary kids might do if they found they could levitate stuff, crush heavy objects, do insane magic tricks and fly. At the very least, such talents always provide an advantage over other guys when it comes to impressing girls and putting bullies in their place.
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The fellows in question are handsome loner Andrew (Dane Dehaan), his better-adjusted cousin Matt Garetty (Alex Russell) and Steve Montgomery (Michael B. Jordan), jock, aspiring class president and all-around cool black guy the two white dudes look up to. With his fancy new video camera, Andrew intends “to film everything from now on” and, while director Trank takes liberties from time to time, a great deal of the action is seen from the p.o.v. of Andrew's toy.
The trio's lives are changed when they climb down a mysterious hole in the ground, behold a large glowing crystal and emerge with — powers! Their first trick is throwing a baseball with unerring accuracy and making it stop in mid-air but they shortly move on to pranks; with the wave of a hand, they can move a woman's grocery cart around, push a car off the road and levitate. The only downside is a bloody nose, which is sometimes inconvenient but a small price to pay.
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Early on, the responsibly minded Matt suggests some rules: They shouldn't use their powers on living things, in public or when they're angry. Andrew quickly transgresses on all counts, breaking apart a spider into its many body parts (a sly illusion, no doubt, to Marvel's franchise), putting on an acrobatic display at the school talent show and delivering payback to an a-hole who's been tormenting him for years. As for anger, Andrew can't abide by that rule because he's angry all the time; for starters, his mother, permanently attached to an oxygen tube, is dying, while dear old dad yells at him and beats him practically every time he walks into the room.
Chronicle's high point arrives when the three anointed ones take to the sky, zoom through clouds, tumble around and generally behave the way frisky dolphins do in the water. The effects here, as elsewhere, are seamless, as realistic as any sky diving footage and better than typical superhero flying scenes because they're not rocketing from place to place but exuberantly goofing around. Handling the visual effects was Simon Hansen, second unit director on District 9, and he and his team have done a terrific job.
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Unfortunately, the script doesn't take advantage of the ideal opportunity it sets up to explore the multiple possibilities superpowers hold for both good and evil. That the project entertains certain philosophical aspirations is suggested by an early exchange about Schopenhauer, and the three-character focus is perfectly designed to illustrate the positive and negative uses of exceptional powers, with the third character available as a mediator.
Instead, the film nosedives into destructive nonsense in its final stretch, with Andrew behaving in all the worst possible ways despite attempts at friendly intervention. The effects keep things interesting, notably in a vertiginous scene around Seattle's Space Needle, but the late innings intelligence leak is crippling in terms of the story's ultimate impact.
DeHaan, known from television's In Treatment, has an arresting look that falls between handsome and dweeby; he convinces as an outsider. Aussie Russell and Jordan of TV's Friday Night Lights are both perfectly good. Ashley Hinshaw, as another student with a video camera, could easily play Reese Witherspoon's younger sister if such an occasion were to arise.

Strong Super Bowl Box Office Weekend! 

 Fox’s action horror drama “Chronicle” opened much better-than-expected and drew young moviegoers (61% under 25 - 55% of the audience was male, 45% female) to this story of a group of high school friends who after a strange discovery realize that they suddenly have gained superpowers. The PG-13 film had a solid Super Bowl weekend debut of $22 million with $8.625M on Friday, $10.2M on Saturday and an estimated $3.175M on Sunday. A $12 million budget makes this a real Super Bowl winner.

CBS Films opened their super creepy haunted house tale “The Woman in Black” starring Harry Potter’s Daniel Radcliffe in his first movie since the final installment of that massive franchise. The PG-13 film boasts enough jump-out-of-your-seat moments to satisfy even the most hard core horror movie fan and debuted with a much stronger-than-expected $21 million. Female fans in particular were drawn to the film and its gothic setting and of course to the very popular Radcliffe in the lead role. The PG-13 film had a strong Super Bowl weekend with $8.3M on Friday, $9.545M on Saturday and an estimated $3.155M on Sunday. This is the best opening weekend for CBS Films(previously The Back-up Plan, $12.2M)and with a pick up cost of only $3 million, this is a great result for the film.
Open Road’s “The Grey” enters its second weekend with strong mid-week numbers under its belt and earned a solid $9.5 million for the weekend. Debuting with a better-than-expected $19.7 million last week, fans of star Liam Neeson keep coming out in big numbers to see the 59 year-old actor doing what he does best in this R-rated action adventure which has earned $34.75 million to date.
Universal will made a splash this weekend with their PG-rated family film “Big Miracle” starring Drew Barrymore and John Krasinski. Set in small town Alaska the film follows the story of a news reporter and his former girlfriend who is a Greenpeace volunteer on a mission to save a family of gray whales trapped by ice in the Arctic Circle. A nice option for non-sports minded members of the family this Super Bowl weekend, the film performed as expected with an $8.5 million debut.
Sony’s Screen Gems “Underworld: Awakening” in 3-D took fifth place with $5.6 million in its third weekend of release and a total of $54.3 million in the North American blood bank.
An incredibly strong weekend at the box office continuing the string of “up” weekends in 2012 propelling revenues up nearly 14% over last year at this time. This was also one of the stronger Super Bowl weekends at the box office bringing in an estimated $119 million (up a whopping 36% over Super Bowl 2011) for the overall period and impressively the top 2 films rank now among the top 6 Super Bowl opening weekends of all-time.

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Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011)

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011) Review

Falling Off Skyscrapers Sometimes Hurts a Bit

Run harder and run faster, leaping from one building and dangling off another, the world’s tallest — as he does to exhausting, unnerving effect in “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol,” his latest exercise in extreme performance? The fourth in the franchise, this “Mission” has a solid cast, including a notable new co-star in Jeremy Renner; a new director, Brad Bird; and a story that’s as nonsensical as any in the series. Mostly, though, it has Mr. Cruise hurtling through the movie as if his life depended on it, which, to judge by the hard line of his jaw, his punishingly fit body and the will etched into his every movement, may be what’s at stake.

Tom Cruise in "Mission Impossible — Ghost Protocol."

It’s fitting that Mr. Bird, the director of the Pixar movies “The Incredibles” and “Ratatouille,” has taken over the reins of the franchise for his live-action directing debut. The “Mission: Impossible” movies belong to that outlandish, sometimes cartoonish class of action adventures in which lesser, Bond-like heroes walk or race from fiery explosions in between locking and loading, kissing and killing, and killing some more. The films, spun off the 1960s television show, fondly remembered for its rubber masks and Lalo Schifrin’s brilliant, pulsating theme music, added Mr. Cruise, who in the 15 years since the first installment has tumbled from his top spot as the world’s biggest movie star to lag behind neo-action figures like Leonardo DiCaprio and Johnny Depp.

Mr. Cruise may be somewhat down (certainly his smile has dimmed), yet he’s scarcely out. That’s partly because of Mr. Bird, who has given this movie a self-aware levity that’s intended to clear away the bummer blues of the last “Mission,” five years ago. Directed by J. J. Abrams, who is also a producer of this movie, the third film skewed the series too dark with a nihilistic baddie (chilled to shivering by Philip Seymour Hoffman) and a nightmarish torture scene. It also burdened Mr. Cruise’s character, Ethan Hunt, with a wife (Michelle Monaghan), an unwise move — American action heroes, latter-day fantasies of our native rugged individualism, walk alone, not down the aisle — which suggested that the soon-to-be-remarried Mr. Cruise was borrowing a chapter from his own life.

The new movie, written by Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec, both alumni of Mr. Abrams’s television show “Alias” (mostly), ditches the wife and gets back to action basics with globe-trotting, nifty gadgets, high-flying stunts and less loquacious villainy (Michael Nyqvist). (It was also partly shot in Imax, which doesn’t really enhance anything.)

Ethan, after being broken out of a Moscow prison, where he had been idling among hordes of bull-necked Ivans and Igors, sets off on another mission with an old teammate, the tech whiz Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), and the obligatory pretty lady, Agent Jane Carter (Paula Patton). The mission goes bust and boom, as does a debriefing with Ethan’s boss (Tom Wilkinson, uncredited), whose murder finds Ethan and his team blackballed (if still sleuthing) and keeping company with an intelligence analyst, William Brandt (Mr. Renner).

Mr. Renner, who played the main bomb specialist in “The Hurt Locker,” eases effortlessly into the blockbuster register, where star charisma and presence like Mr. Cruise’s matter more than emotionally selling a scene. Mr. Renner has to do some actual acting because of the role (surprise: there’s more to Brandt than a suit), and his low-key performance is a dividend in a movie in which almost all human interactions take exaggerated form, with more throttling than talking, or so it seems. Mr. Renner isn’t an obvious action type — he’s good-looking rather than roguish or boyishly pretty — but as soon as he rolls up his sleeves and picks up a gun, it’s obvious that he’s qualified for the job.

For his part, Mr. Cruise seems comfortable resuming his franchise duties, though there’s a palpable difference in his affect, even from the last movie. He still radiates intensity bordering on mania, but without the familiar “what, me worry?” air of invincibility. Maybe it’s age: he turns 50 next year, or perhaps Mr. Bird’s approach doesn’t sit well with him, even if it also fits. The wolfish Cruise smile seems tighter, at times reluctant, despite Mr. Bird’s efforts to lighten the mood with banter (much of it supplied by a chattering Mr. Pegg). Over the years Mr. Cruise, a divinely superficial presence in pop fodder like “Top Gun,” has grown progressively heavier, weighted down by stardom, ambition and the misstep of turning his personal life into a public drama. At times he can feel leaden.

Unexpectedly, though, his age and inescapable gravitas work for “Ghost Protocol,” partly because they invest the outrageous stunts with a real sense of risk. Mr. Cruise’s primary job in the “Mission” series is to embody a not-quite-ordinary man whose powers are at once extraordinary and completely believable, a no-sweat feat in the first few films.

Here, however, when Ethan zip lines off a building onto a truck and then rolls hard onto the street, Mr. Bird — while borrowing more than a little from the “Roadrunner” cartoons — also makes you aware of the fragility of the body ricocheting on screen, absorbing every blow for your entertainment. And when Mr. Cruise hangs off the even taller building, what you see isn’t just a man doing a crazy stunt but also one poignantly denying his own mortality.

“Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Largely bloodless, if at times extreme, violence, including gun play and a fatal push from a skyscraper. Those with acrophobia beware.

This Content derived From http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/movies/mission-impossible-ghost-protocol-review.html

Director: Brad Bird

Writers: Josh Appelbaum, Andre Namec, Bruce Geller

Stars: Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner and Simon Pegg
Storyline:
In the 4th installment of the Mission Impossible series, Ethan Hunt and his team are racing against time to track down a dangerous terrorist named Hendricks, who has gained access to Russian nuclear launch codes and is planning a strike on the United States. An attempt by the team to stop him at the Kremlin ends in a disaster, with an explosion causing severe destruction to the Kremlin and the IMF being implicated in the bombing, forcing the President to invoke Ghost Protocol, under which the IMF is disavowed, and will be offered no help or backup in any form. Undaunted, Ethan and his team chase Hendricks to Dubai, and from there to Mumbai, but several spectacular action sequences later, they might still be too late to stop a disaster. Written By Shreesha Bhat.

Taglines: No Plan, No Back up, No Choice
Genres: Action, Thriller, Adventure
Tags: Kremlin, Explosion, Mumbai India, Machine Gun, Shot to Death, Sub marine, Pistol, Knocked Out, Murder, Kicks, Fighting, Big Mission, Watch, Online,

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