Jack the Giant Slayer

ACTION/ADVENTURE, SCI-FI/FANTASY, 3D

Fee, Fye, Foe, Fumm

7.0 out of 10 | DVD or Rental

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Rated: PG-13 Intense scenes of fantasy action violence, some frightening images and brief language.
Release Date: March 1, 2013
Runtime: 1 hour 55 minutes

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Director: Bryan Singer
Writers: Darren Lemke, Christopher McQuarrie, Dan Studney, David Dobkin
Cast: Nicholas Hoult, Eleanor Tomlinson, Ewan McGregor, Stanley Tucci, Eddie Marsan, Ewen Bremner, Ian McShane, Bill Nighy, Cornell John, Andrew Brooke, Angus Barnett, Ben Daniels

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SYNOPSIS: The ancient war between humans and a race of giants is reignited when Jack, a young farmhand fighting for a kingdom and the love of a princess, opens a gateway between the two worlds.

REVIEW: Valkyrie and X-Men director Bryan Singer returns to the big screen with a fantasy adventure based on the classic tale of Jack and the Beanstalk. A cadre of writers flesh out the original tale, including Shrek Forever After scribe Darren Lemke, Jack Reacher screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie, plus David Dobkin and Dan Studney. Can Singer succeed with a farm boy named Jack where he failed with a farm boy named Clark.

Jack (Nicolas Hoult, Warm Bodies) loves to hear about the legends of King Eric, magic beans created by monks trying to commune with their god, a massive bean stalk that led them to a realm between heaven and earth - a realm ruled by Giants with the thirst to acquire material objects and acquire the taste for human meat. Only the creation of a crown created from the hard heart of a Giant and worn by King Eric was able to stem the tide of the pillaging giants ravaging the earth and return the leviathans back to their realm. Fact became fiction. Fiction became legend. Legend became myth and stories to be told to children from fairy tale books. Young Jack revels in the stories his father tells of the legendary giants. Ten years later a more grown up Jack works on his uncle's farm, sent to the kingdom's castle to sell a horse and cart. While there, Jack intercedes when a young woman Isabelle (Eleanor Tomlinson, Alice in Wonderland) who is being accosted by village drunks. When Isabelle is sought out and rescued by the guardians of King Brahmwell (Ian McShane, Snow White and the Huntsman). As Princess Isabelle flees from the castle in search of adventure, she stumbles upon Jack's farm where an errant magical bean creates a beanstalk that transport Isabelle up to the mythical  floating lands of the Giants. The King summons his most trusted guardian Elmont (Ewan McGregor, The Impossible) to take a team up the stalk to rescue his daughter. Roderick (Stanley Tucci, The Hunger Games), Isabelle's arranged husband-to-be volunteers to go with the retrieval team, as does his assistant Wicke (Ewen Bremner, Great Expectations) and Jack himself. When they get to the top, they come face to face with a throng of Giants led by General Fallon (voiced by Bill Nighy, Total Recall), including Fee (voiced by Cornell John, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian), Fye (voiced by Andrew Brooke, Nice Guy), Foe (voiced by Angus Barnett, Hugo), and Fumm (voiced by Ben Daniels, Luna).

Based on the classic Jack and the Beanstalk tale, Bryan Singer and his stable of writers take the story and create a different spin on the tale of a farm boy taking on a land full of Giants bent on the pilfering and destruction of the human race. Can one forgettable boy birth succeed where royals and the noble ranks cannot? The tale is one of perseverance of a wayward dreamer pushing on in the name of romance and love. Add in the threat of mankind-hating Giants and you have a fantasy tale that a pre-adolescent audience will enjoy.

The Jack the Giant Slayer cast fit very well this fantasy adventure. Nicholas Hoult plays both the dreamy eyed farmboy and soon to be heroic conqueror of giants in equal measure. Ian McShane brings back a character similar to that he played in The Seeker: The Dark is Rising, always moving and speaking in even stoic tones. Tomlinson's Princess and future Queen Isabelle takes after her mother with a rebellious nature and adventurous spirit. She is beautiful enough to catch a man's eyes and tough enough to stand up for herself in the wild. Ewan McGregor, playing the King's General of the Guardians Elmont, takes a chapter from his later Ben Kenobi role to lead his men with grace, preparedness, and nobility. Stanley Tucci's Roderick and Ewen Bremner's Wicke represents the worst of humanity as he and his assistant only looks to take over the kingdom for his own power and gain, willing to use the Giants in the kingdom in the clouds to decimate the peoples in the lands Roderick wishes to rule. Bill Nighy leads the voice actors as the Giants' General Fallon.

Watching Jack the Giant Slayer is like watching The 7th Voyage of Sindbad or Jason and the Argonauts on Saturday morning television. While the story is fun and entertaining, the effects don't live up to expectations. The Giants in their own land in the clouds are stylized and well-defined but they don't really hold when on screen against the human actors. Maybe meant to be fanciful and stylized, the scenes with human actors against a green screen on a soundstage with additionally shots exterior horses and actors and CGI work behind doesn't mesh well together at all. In this world of The Lord of the Rings franchise or any of a number of superhero action adventures one would think that Brian Singer could have put together a tighter CGI fantasy effort.

Brian Singer is known for exemplary work with films like X-Men United, Apt Pupil and The Usual Suspects. He is no stranger to fine storytelling or good work with special effects. Somehow in this effort Singer missed the mark with FX that detracts from the story.

Jack the Giant Slayer will be a good flick for older kids and young teenagers. Parents or adults may like some of what they see but will realize they have seen better. So, when dealing with farm boys, Singer still struggles.

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Warm Bodies

Doesn't Skip A Beat

★ ★ ★ 1/2 out of 5 buckets | Matinee or DVD

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Rated: PG-13 - Zombie violence and some language.

Release Date: February 1, 2012

Runtime: 1 hour 37 minutes

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Director: Jonathan Levine
Writers: Jonathan Levine, based on the novel 'Warm Bodies' by Isaac Marion
Cast:  Nicholas Hoult, Teresa Palmer, John Malkovich, Dave Franco, Rob Corddry, Analeigh Tipton

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SYNOPSIS: When a zombie named R starts to have feelings for a human named Julie, he finds himself in the strange position of finding love after death.

REVIEW: Jonathan Levine, noted director of The Wackness and 50/50, changes direction with a move into a popular but fickle subgenre known as the ZomRomCom - a zombie romantic comedy. Based on a novel written by Isaac Marion, Jonathan Levine adapts to the screen a new dead twist on a classic love story concept.

Being a zombie is a drag, literally! As your rotting corpse fails you and you can't feed you will eventually become a Boney - a skeletal shriveled walker with only the taste of human flesh ad blood. Corpses eats brains, too! But when the twenty-something dead corpse, with only the memory of the first initial of his first name R (Nicholas Hoult, X-Men: First Class), eats brains he feels conflicted about it. When young human survivor soldiers, led by Perry (Dave Franco, 21 Jump Street), venture out from behind the high walls of their safe urban city for a pharma-salvage run, they encounter a pack of corpses with a hungry R in tow. While feasting, R notices Julie (Teresa Palmer, I Am Number Four) and starts to feel something different than just hunger. He protects her from the other corpses in the pack and takes her back to his airfield home. Julie soon realizes that R is different from the other corpses. He escorts Julie back to her city, Julie trying to come up with a way to persuade her general father (John Malkovich, Transformers: Dark of the Moon) to look at R with more than just the urge to put a built in his skull.

Warm Bodies is one of those film that could have premiere CW or SyFy Channel film. But this film goes above and beyond to put together a good cast, clever story, and decent FX in order to give the zombie loving audience a cool big screen experience. There have been other well done zombie genre films that never made the big time, including cult films like 'Fido'. Warm Bodies takes advantage of the recent trend of monster romances like in The Twilight Saga to fit nicely into what is popular theater past time these days. Lucky for us, the filmgoers, Warm Bodies doesn't change the formula of what makes a zombie a zombie, never compromising the essence of the undead craving human flesh and soft brains.

Writer/director Levine adapts some interesting new walking dead ideas from Marion's book, like the deteriorated Boneys and the idea that a corpse can remember and even fall in love. The corpse R shuffles around with the other walkers at the local airport, bumping off his fellow undead with stiffening limbs. But unlike most other zombie flicks where the undead are simply backdrop pieces to a human tale of survival, this film's main corpse R provides a more human internal narrative to give us insight to their inhuman condition and set the stage for sympathetic and sometimes hilarious monologues.

Part comedy, part brain-eating undead survival tale, part classic Shakepearean love story - Warm Bodies is the perfect blended ZomRomCom film for both rabid genre fans and newbies who do not want to have to hide their eyes behind their split fingers. Sure, there are a couple moments that could be frightening to some, the majority of the story is more about the relationship between a corpse who has enough of a memory to collect random knick-knacks and to play found vinyl records on a turn table in his hoarder's airplane fuselage and a human girl who has lost her boyfriend and who does not share the survivalist attitude of her military leader father.

Nicolas Hoult plays R with style and staggering grace, ever the handsome corpse. Teresa Palmer, as the lovely Julie, is not just the typical damsel in distress. She plays fear, sadness, and defiance with equal ease. Rob Corddry, as a fellow zombie and possible best friend zombie to R, trades in pink flesh for a gray pallor  - all the while not relinquishing any of his signature dry wit. And John Malkovich, as Julie's father and leader of the last bastion of humanity, brings all of his Malkovich-esque abilities to his role.

Warm Bodies entertains as a fine genre romantic comedy, offering quaint insights to the human and undead condition. This film will never be on par with Romeo's original Night of the Living Dead, but it does take zombies to the next step of acceptance by the rest of us.

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X-Men: First Class

Meets Xpectations

Director: Matthew Vaughn

Writers: Ashley Miller, Zack Stentz, Jane Goldman, Matthew Vaughn, Sheldon Turner Bryan Singer

Stars: James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Kevin Bacon, Rose Byrne, Jennifer Lawrence, January Jones, Nicholas Hoult

SYNOPSIS: Before they opposed what each stood for on mutant/human relations, Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr were friends and worked together to set up a school for those with mutant abilities.

Before Wolverine joined the team, an entire generation of comic readers remained riveted to the origins of Marvel Comics' X-Men. Set in the backdrop of a semi-historical look of 1963 and the Cuban Missile Crisis during President Kennedy's administration, director Matthew Vaughn and a series of writers (including Bryan Singer) put to film something that Marvel Comics does so well - namely, the ability to interlace the fiction of superheroes and mutants with the realities of ongoing real-life events. Where DC Comics has the fictional Gotham City and Metropolis, the Marvel "bullpen" churned out story after story using the skyscrapers of New York City and the sprawl of the surrounding boroughs to bring us Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, and a team of mutants living in a world that fears and hates them.

But avid comic reader and geek graphic novel historians beware! The 1963 team of X-Men in the film, although an origin story, has few parallels with the comic where a wheelchair-bound Professor X, Cyclops, Marvel Girl, Beast, Iceman and Angel battled against an already embittered Magneto. In X-Men: First Class, the only member of the original comic team is Beast (Nicholas Hoult), last seen in 2006's X-Men: The Last Stand, as an adviser scientist fur ball played by Kelsey Grammer. Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence from Winter's Bone) returns (can you return to an origin story?) as a younger self not yet completely loyal to the future Magneto bent on the domination over and the servitude of all homo sapiens. The rest of the team consists of Banshee (Caleb Landry Jones), an Irish lad Sean Cassidy with a sonic scream, Havoc (Lucas TIll), Cyclops' brother Alex Summers with his own barely-controlled concussive blasts, and Darwin (Edi Gathegi), a mutant with the ability to adapt for survival.

The relationship between Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender) is compelling throughout the film. Xavier's bright and sometimes naive expectation that mutants and mankind can coexist flying in the face of the beliefs held by Erik based on an upbringing of Nazi concentration camps, murder and experimentation. Lifting the Magneto origin straight from the original X-Men opener and expanding it is a reminder of how good Bryan Singer's contribution to the X-Men franchise is.

X-Men: First Class covers much ground trying to pack in lots of "Easter eggs" and faithful beginnings to the original set of films, some good, some okay and some that makes the audience giddy and hooting with excitement. The recruiting montage that Charles and Erik spearhead after the first use of a primitive Cerebro works perfectly, funny and captivating. The villain mutant Azazel (Jason Flemying) dispatches a building full of CIA operatives that would make Nightcrawler envious. Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) is a decent evil foil against the combined efforts of Xavier and Lehnsherr, but the references to Shaw's Hellfire Club are watered down to mere passing. And Emma Frost (January Jones) as Shaw's right hand telepath, although fashioned in plenty of White Queen attire for the comic geeks to drool over, is little more than diamond eye candy with plenty of screen time. The genetic scientist Moira MacTaggert (Rose Byrne) from the comics has been completely reworked to be a mid-level CIA spook, for better or worse.

X-Men: First Class has story, action, heart and levity, but ends up a little uneven. The original concept for a Magneto prequel by Singer evolved, like mutants, into a bigger story involving all sorts of furry and high-flying players. Although somewhat faithful to the X-films that come after it, the die-hard fans will certainly be offended by some of the liberties that the film takes over the comic source material, both in terms of chronological history and the spirit of the Marvel mythos that houses homo superior.

WORTH: Matinee or BluRay