Quick takes on 5 films

Lion is a gut-wrenching movie, and doubly so for being based on a true story. Saroo is a young boy in India when he accidentally falls asleep on a train, which takes him over 1000 kilometers away from his village. He’s at that age where he knows his home’s name, but doesn’t know his own last name, and offers little help to those who (mostly half-assedly) try to help him. He is one of the lucky ones though, and is quickly adopted by an Australian couple. He flies there and grows up in a solid and secure middle class family. 20 years later and now an adult, Saroo wants to find his birth mother, to tell her he survived and that a loving family found him and raised him. The two leads of Dev Patel as Saroo and Nicole Kidman as adopting mother Sue are equally captivating, and the film does a spendid job of walking the line of tugging at your emotions without clobbering you with dramatic cliches.

Let’s face it, you don’t generally see a Keanu Reeves movie for the acting. John Wick 2 is a typical Reeves film. He shows us about 2 different dramatic faces (admistering and receiving pain), and all the other characters are as one dimensional as he is. But damn if it isn’t an entertaining romp. As most action movie sequels go, the body count goes up, the ridiculous factor goes up, and it sets itself up for yet another sequel. At this point, sign me up, I’m in.

Okja is (I think?) the second English language film from Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho, following Snowpiercer from a couple years ago. I thoroughly enjoyed Snowpiercer, and this film is a lot like that one in feel and direction. Okja is a giant “super pig”, bred to help feed the overpopulating earth. The pig is raised on a remote farm in Korea by Mija and her grandfather. After 10 years on the farm, the time has come for the pig to head back to its owners for butchering, and Mija cannot let Okja go. With insanely over-the-top characters (Paul Dano as an extremely non-violent extremist, Jake Gyllenhaal as a wacky tv star, Tilda Swinton as the emotionally unstable head of the company), like Snowpiercer this film has the feel of an Asian anime brought to live film. Under all the layers, there is a gripping story, and young Mija and the computer-generated Okja are the stars of the screen.

I really wanted to like Life, as sci-fi space adventure is right up this geek’s alley. The trailer seemed great. Unfortunately the film was a let-down for me. The backdrop is a team on the International Space Station grabs a probe returning from Mars to look for past life in the soil samples. They find not only past life, but a microorganism that has been in hibernation and is brought back to life again. This discovery is celebrated at first, but of course things go wrong when the tiny Martian lashes out at the humans. If it had stayed a tiny bug or parasite, I’d be down, but instead it grew to this flying super-strength Alien-esque monstrosity, that seemed damn near indestructible and more intelligent than our greatest minds. At the same time, these well trained astronauts made some pretty poor, rash decisions in the heat of the moment, that put their whole mission and lives at risk. Far fetched even by sci-fi standards, which ruined what could have been a great film.

Let’s end on a great one though. Logan is the (supposedly final) Wolverine film starring Hugh Jackman. Long the centerpiece of the X-Men movie franchise (17 years strong, for the most part), Jackman’s Wolverine has been through a lot. I don’t think I’m giving anything away when I say this film is the end of it all (it has been billed as such). Set in 2029, Wolverine and Professor Charles Xavier are pretty much all that is left of the mutants on Earth, and we don’t find out why until later in the film. Not sure which timeline this falls in, hard to keep that up unless you are a super fan, but you can set that aside and just enjoy this film. Logan is old and all of his life-long battles are finally catching up with him. He doesn’t heal as fast as he used to, he feels a lot more pain that he used to, and he seems to know he isn’t going to get to ride off into the sunset peacefully. A new government team has been breeding new mutants as weapons, and Logan reluctantly becomes involved to stop them. This is a violent film, rated R and rightfully so. It has gory, glorious action sequences, but it also has something that not every super-hero film does, and that is heart. This is a great one, and a fitting end to Wolverine’s run.