Movie Review Haunted Mansion

Haunted Mansion (2023) 

Directed by Justin Simien 

Written by Katie Dippold 

Starring LaKeith Stanfield, Rosario Dawson, Tiffany Haddish, Owen Wilson, Danny Devito, Chase W. Dillon, Jared Leto, Jamie Lee Curtis 

Release Date July 28th, 2023 

Published July 31st, 2023 

There is a lovely idea at the heart of Haunted Mansion that gets lost among the muck of trying to make a wide appeal blockbuster family movie. At the core of Haunted Mansion, director Justin Simien, creator of the ingenious, Dear White People, appears fascinated by the concept of grief and the ways it manifests in negative ways for many people. Losing someone you love is a life altering event, it can lead to any number of negative manifestations if it is not dealt with and processed in a healthy fashion. It manifests in Haunted Mansion via LaLeith Stanfield's Ben, an astrophysicist who gave up everything after his young wife died. 

Stanfield is unquestionably an actor who can handle this kind of heavy material but the heavy nature of Haunted Mansion unfortunately drags on what is otherwise intended to be a summer blockbuster version of a Disney theme park ride. While Simien is working in the emotional space of Stanfield's grieving widower, the rest of the movie appears to be going for something broad, campy, scary and yet family friendly and the tonal dissonance is a big part of the overall failure of Haunted Mansion. By attempting to serve a number of ideas, the film ends up serving none of those ideas particularly well. 

Ben (Stanfield) was once a very successful and happy Astrophysicist shyly using his unique profession to hit on women. One of those women is Alyssa (Charity Jordan), a tour guide who leads haunted tours through New Orleans. Ben, being a man of science, doesn't believe in ghosts but he still falls hard for Alyssa and the two end up getting married at some point, we don't see that part. What we do see is that Alyssa is no longer with us, a mystery that will be unsatisfyingly resolved later in the film, and Ben is floundering. Having given up all aspects of his previous life, Ben now leads Alyssa's tours while drunk and being entirely uninterested in indulging and any notions of ghosts being real. 

Ben's trajectory is altered forever by the arrival of Father Kent (Owen Wilson). Kent knows Ben by reputation. He knows that Ben had, years earlier, invented a camera that could theoretically, take pictures of the dead. He has a job for Ben. A single mother, Gabbie (Rosario Dawson), has moved into a decrepit mansion on the outskirts of New Orleans. Gabbie, and her son, Travis (Chase W. Dillon), are also dealing with the fairly recent loss of Travis' father, a loss that neither mother or son has fully processed. The parallel of both Ben and Gabbie having lost someone is used as something of a shorthand to bring them together as love interests but the love story feels rushed and forced. 

That's the thing about Haunted Mansion, I am this far into this review and I haven't mentioned any ghosts. That's because none of the ghosts or scares in Haunted Mansion are very memorable. Jamie Lee Curtis is perhaps the most interesting of the spooks. She plays a dead psychic who was killed and her spirit was trapped inside of a crystal ball. The visual of Curtis's head in the crystal ball isn't bad but its not very elaborate. It's fine, like far too much of Haunted Mansion is fine, it's there, it exists, but it doesn't have much of anything interesting about it. 

The big bad of Haunted Mansion is the Hat Box ghost, played by Jared Leto. The Hat Box Ghost is a remarkably weak villain. The ghost's real name is Crump and the lame comparisons between Crump and Donald Trump are not stated out loud but are very clear. It's a lame non-joke, clearly intended but not well executed at all. It stands out as a bad idea because Leto's performance as Hatbox Ghost is half-hearted at best. The same can be said of the weak CGI look of the character which is scarier in a single drawing by a sketch artist in the movie than it ever is alive and moving around in Haunted Mansion. 

Incidentally, the Police sketch artist in Haunted Mansion is played by Hasan Minaj, a very funny man who is wasted in a nothing performance. Minaj is there to skeptically poke fun at Stanfield and Devito's claims about a ghost and he's offscreen in less than 3 minutes. And, Minaj isn't the biggest waste of talent in Haunted Mansion. Dan Levy and Winona Ryder both make appearances in Haunted Mansion and you are left to wonder if they owed someone a favor and that favor was being in this movie. Levy, one of the most dynamic comic personalities working today gets less than 2 minutes of screentime and his outfit is funnier than anything his character does. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media

Movie Review Lord of War

Lord of War (2005) 

Directed by Andrew Niccol

Written by Andrew Niccol

Starring Nicolas Cage, Jared Leto, Ian Holm, Bridget Moynahan

Release Date September 16th, 2005

Published September 15th, 2005 

Writer-Director Andrew Niccol is a filmmaker of great ambition. His resume as a director is short but both Gattaca and Simone are projects of great imagination and aspiration. Gattaca succeeds far better in its story of genetic engineering than Simone did in its examination of fame and technology but both are films of big ideas and grand ambition.

For his latest effort, the dark gun running drama Lord Of War, Andrew Niccol may have his most ambitious subject yet. An in depth examination of the worldwide trade in weapons that takes a microscope to the life of real life gun runners while turning a large spotlight on an issue most Americans refuse to examine.

Nicolas Cage stars as Yuri Orlav, a Russian born immigrant living in the Little Odessa section of New York City. His life track looks laid out in advance: manage his father's restaurant 'til the old man passes then run it until he himself passes. That all changes when Yuri witnesses a mob hit in his neighborhood. The Russian made hardware used in the hit is inspiring and, using some of his father's connections through a Jewish synagogue, Yuri gets into the gun trade.

Soon he is the top distributor in his neighborhood and is ready to go global. With the help of his little brother, Vitaly (Jared Leto), Yuri attempts to break into the international gun trade. In one of the film's most memorable scenes Yuri and Vitali confront Simeon Wiese (Ian Holm), an old school distributor with ties to the CIA, at one of the strangest conventions you will ever see. Women in bikinis selling tanks and armored personnel carriers and worldwide enemies rubbing shoulders as they purchase the weapons they will soon use to kill each other.

Yuri and Vitaly fail to make it in with Wiese but world events soon occur to level the playing field. With the fall of communism in Russia and the end of the cold war, Wiese and his old guard, with their concern for geo-politics and scruples about only selling to countries with top secret ties to the US, are finished and apolitical types like Yuri, who has no qualms about selling to any and everyone regardless of doctrine, are in.

The rise of Yuri is transposed by the fall of Vitaly. Unable to cope with the violence that results from his brother's projects (he witnessed a teenager executed with one of Yuri's guns), Vitaly begins taking drugs and disappearing for long periods. The far more unscrupulous Yuri on the other hand is as casual about his own drug use as he is about his product and soon lands the life of his dreams with the girl of his dreams played by Bridget Moynahan.

In a story such as this, the audience is trained to wait for Yuri to get his comeuppance. Evil is almost always punished in movies and, while Yuri may be charming, he is clearly evil. Andrew Niccol however keeps you guessing all the way to the end as to whether Yuri will pay the price for his evil deeds. Niccol's scripting is as efficient and cold blooded as his lead character and his direction almost as cool.

Be sure to arrive on time so as not to miss the films opening credits which follow a bullet from production to distribution to execution, literally. It's an extraordinary sequence shot from the bullet's point of view and set appropriately to Buffalo Springfield's classic "For What It's Worth". The credits combined with Nick Cage's extra chilled voiceover narration perfectly set the tone for this brilliantly dark satire.

The odd thing about Lord of War is that while I recommend it as a movie people should definitely see, I don't find the film entertaining by typical Hollywood standards. The film is far more disturbing than entertaining and yet that worked for me. If you don't walk out of Lord of War with a lot of heavy issues on your mind then clearly you were not paying attention. This is one of the smartest  and disquieting political satires since 1999's Wag The Dog or 1962's original Manchurian Candidate.

I know sometimes people go to the movies just looking for simple or even mindless entertainment and if that is the case for you right now then Lord of War is not the movie for you today. If, however, you're out to enjoy a smart movie that deals in big issues and big ideas then Lord of War is a must see. In the intellectual sense Lord of War is highly entertaining.

The one thing you can take away from Lord of War that you could call entertaining by any standard is the performance of Nicolas Cage whose strange career track takes yet another fascinating turn. His last film, the brainless PG adventure National Treasure, showed Cage at his laziest and least thought provoking. In Lord of War it's back to that weird kind of charisma that brought him to fame in his Oscar winning performance in Leaving Las Vegas.

Andrew Niccol has directed sparingly in his career in Hollywood, preferring to write for others. His exceptional script for The Truman Show was everything his own directing effort in Simone wasn't in terms of its satire of celebrity. But one thing that all of Niccol's writing and directing work shows is an aim toward grandiose ideas, incomparable ambition, and a social conscience. Niccol is the rare director in the era of the blockbuster who is interested in telling large, involved stories about American culture, politics and even science.

This consciousness separates him from most other Hollywood directors who seem to prefer telling small stories with smaller characters with nowhere near the ambition of Niccol. It is this quality that will lead Andrew Niccol to create a true masterpiece someday. Lord of War is not that masterpiece but it shows he is on the right track.

Movie Review: Alexander

Alexander (2004) 

Directed by Oliver Stone 

Written by Oliver Stone, Laeta Kalogridis 

Starring Colin Farrell, Angelina Jolie, Val Kilmer, Jared Leto, Rosario Dawson, Anthony Hopkins

Release Date November 24th, 2004

Published November 23rd, 2004 

If Aaron Spelling had made a movie about Alexander The Great, it might sound a lot like the one Oliver Stone has just pushed into theaters: A breathy, overcooked melodrama of hot-blooded hardbodies falling in and out of bed in between fighting wars. Oliver Stone's Alexander is a big budget bio-pic that would feel more at home as a trashy TV movie than as a potential Oscar nominee.

Some 300 years before the birth of Christ, one man ruled most of planet Earth before his 32nd birthday. Alexander the Great, the son of King Phillip of Macedonia (Val Kilmer) and Queen Olympias (Angelina Jolie), was never supposed to be king. Because of a feud between his mother and father, Alexander was caught in the midst of a power struggle that leads to his father's murder and suspicion that his mother may have arranged the killing. 

Regardless of how he rose to power, once Alexander took power, he lead his charges to the ends of the world conquering and civilizing all barbarian tribes along the way. His story is marked with the deaths of thousands, but history is written by the victors which may be why Alexander is remembered as a benevolent conqueror who maintained palaces and people in power even after defeating their military forces on the battlefield.

Watching Stone's take on the life of Alexander would leave you to believe that Alexander's bloodiest battles were with his own top advisors, none of whom shared his vision of Asia as part of the Macedonian empire. Alexander's men simply wanted the riches of Asia to take back to Greece or the kingdom of Babylon, but Alexander -- a regular 4th century Jesse Jackson -- wanted a rainbow coalition of subjects who would help him rule the world and mix all the races of man; a regular united colors of Benetton style conqueror. 

Yes, according to Stone, Alexander was a champion of civil rights who even took a Persian wife, Roxana (Rosario Dawson), to placate his new Persian subjects. Alexander was also a champion of gay rights as well often sharing a same-sex canoodle with slaves of various ethnicities and sharing an especially close relationship with one of his top generals, Hephaistos (Jared Leto). The two soldiers never consummate the relationship on screen but it's clear from the dewy-eyed gazes and quivery-voiced declarations that if it wouldn't hurt the box office they might have hopped into bed.

Colin Farrell has played sexually confused man-child before, in the indie A Home At The End Of The World. However, there is a big difference between a broken home teenager searching for a family and an identity and the man who united the kingdoms of man before his 32nd birthday. If you want to play the character gay, that's fine, but do it with more depth than whiny schoolgirl stares and grandiloquent speeches whose only weight comes from the fact that they are delivered with an accent.

What happened to the fire that Colin Farrell used to carry him through his best performance in Tigerland? The fire that made him a logical choice for mega-stardom? Somewhere in the making of Alexander, that fire was replaced by the petulant longings of a dewy-eyed manchild. With his childish mood swings, it's hard to believe that this guy could have conquered his mother’s bedroom let alone the known world. I don't need Alexander to be John Wayne but a little butching up couldn't hurt. 

As for his mother, Jolie's performance provides the film’s only entertaining moments; not for her eloquent line readings or smoldering presence but rather the campy Joan Collins-style overacting she employs. Her every scene reminded me of the behind the scenes scheming that Collins made so deliciously goofy on Dynasty. Kilmer is no John Forsythe but he can bite into the scenery with the best of them and here he's a regular Jeremy Irons, absolutely chewing the walls.

Oliver Stone has always been prone to excess, but even by his standards, Alexander is a little much. His ego is way out in front of his storytelling here and what should be an epic feels more like an exercise of Stone's ability to raise large amounts of studio capital to feed his massive ego. A true disaster, Alexander will be remembered on Oscar night only as the subject of one of Chris Rock's biting monologue punchlines. 

Movie Review Panic Room

Panic Room (2002) 

Directed by David Fincher

Written by David Koepp 

Starring Jodie Foster, Kristen Stewart, Forrest Whitaker, Jared Leto, Dwight Yoakam

Release Date March 29th, 2002 

Published March 28th, 2002 

David Fincher is my favorite director. For the uninitiated, Fincher is the brilliant eye behind the lens of Fight Club and Seven, two stylishly violent, high voltage thrillers that pair catchy visuals with blistering commentary on our consumer culture. Fincher's new film, Panic Room, doesn't aspire to social commentary, it's just a straight edge thriller easy to enjoy as long as you don't expect too much from it.

Panic Room stars Jodie Foster as Meg Altman, a divorcee raising a teen daughter (Kristen Stewart) and looking for a new home. A real estate agent shows Meg a gorgeous New York brownstone. 3-stories, multiple bedrooms, single bath, cable ready, and oh yeah there is this little room built by the ultra-paranoid former tenant. This room is essentially a safe built for a human being, with two feet of cement encasing two feet of steel on each side of the 6 by 10 foot area. 

The panic room is meant to keep the owner safe from a break in. Needless to say Meg and her daughter move in immediately and on their first night there is a break in, forcing Meg and her daughter to put the panic room to use. Unfortunately for Meg, the men behind the break in, Junior (Jared Leto), Burnham (Forest Whitaker) and Raoul (Dwight Yoakam, yes Dwight Yoakam playing a guy named Raoul), need to get into the panic room to get what they came for.

The first half of Panic Room encompasses the character introductions, and explores the space of the panic room and it's very good. Director David Fincher's camera helps build suspense through shadow and light. The props go to Oscar winner Conrad W. Hall's Cinematography as well for giving the apartment and the titular panic room dimension, we want a strong sense of the space and we get that while also ramping up tension between the thieves and our innocent mom and daughter duo. 

Once Meg and her daughter are inside the panic room, the film begins to lose steam. There are still a few good moments but the attempts by the gang to get inside the panic room are right out of MacGyver's playbook as are Meg's attempts to thwart them. It is those MacGyver-like logical leaps like Meg's figuring out how to hook up the panic room’s phone line and Burnham’s oh so lucky guess as to what she's doing that border on the ridiculous. That scene, amongst others, undermines the tension and kills some of the suspense.

Still, Panic Room is not a bad movie. Jodie Foster is good in a very difficult role that seems the least defined of all of the characters. Each of the bad guys is able to communicate their motives and personalities in their interaction with each other while Foster's only interaction for most of the film is her daughter, which is confined to being the protective mother. Forest Whitaker and Jared Leto have good chemistry as a team but Dwight Yoakam seems woefully miscast as Raoul, the supposed intimidator who is more laughable than imposing. 

Visually, Fincher is very much on his game, with unique camera work and one of the most visually interesting credit sequences I've ever seen. Be forewarned: if you have a problem with motion sickness you may want to bring some medicine because Fincher's camera rolling through walls and windows and flying through keyholes and air ducts can be somewhat jarring.