Bryan Cranston

Kung Fu Panda 3

Director: Jennifer Yuh Nelson & Alessandro Carloni (2016)

It’s re-enter the dragon warrior as martial arts most portly practitioner returns in his third animated action adventure.

Drawn on a spectacular epic canvas it combines a light hearted tone with a serious message about responsibility, family and achieving one’s potential.

There’s plenty of silly slapstick but no major laughs, relying heavily on the exuberance of Jack Black as Po, the reluctant hero panda of the title.

At home in the Valley of Peace, Po is reunited with Li Shan, his long lost biological dad, played by Bryan Cranston.

J.K. Simmons voices Kai, a giant ox like supreme warlord who’s returned from the spirit world and intent on stealing the everyone’s life force.

With his friends incapacitated, Po the former pupil must become a master and train up some wannabe karate kids to help defeat Kai.

If you enjoyed the first two then this will definitely err, panda to your taste.

 

 

 

Trumbo

Director: Jay Roach (2016)

Romping through the career of a Hollywood screenwriter, this entertaining biopic suffers from a self-gratifying script filled with too much lightweight sentiment.

Enjoying a privileged lifestyle as one of Hollywood’s elite in 1947, Dalton Trumbo was one of many writers and actors illegally blacklisted for refusing to testify against communists to the US government.

Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston stars as the irascible scribe who types in the bathtub with a cigarette holder and glass of whiskey in hand.

Trumbo’s a less than loveable eccentric who patronises the masses who watch his movies and fund his comfortable lifestyle.

A honey throated spinner of yarns who invokes the constitution to serve his own ends, Trumbo reminds us of another historic US public figure given a recent cinematic makeover.

There’s a clear parallel between Cranston’s performance and Daniel Day Lewis’ Oscar winning turn as the ill-fated US President in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2013).

The script even includes a similar moment wherein a colleague refuses to listen to any more of Trumbo’s stories, lest he be converted to his cause.

We fail to sympathise for the champagne communist when he suffers the indignity of downsizing from his country manor to a large house with a pool.

Being aggressively covered in fizzy pop isn’t nice and holidays are interrupted. But a brief and uneventful stint in prison aside, nothing too worrying happens to him.

As an illustration of the rarefied social circles Trumbo moves in, a friend can afford to sell the drawing room Van Gogh to pay for their lawyer’s fees.

Meanwhile Trumbo’s career goes from strength to Oscar-winning strength. Under various pseudonyms he works with Hollywood directors and stars of huge stature.

The timeline covers some forty years giving the handsome film a breathless feel despite it’s stately pace.

Part of the problem is a desire to cram in many era-famous faces. As the story lacks drama, this is possibly to compensate for a suspected deficiency of audience interest.

Michael Stuhlbarg as Edward G. Robinson is one of several examples of casting capable peformers as famous cinema actors. They’re not as charismatic or talented and physically aren’t great matches.

David James Elliot essays John Wayne as an unconvincingly magnanimous presence.

At least Dean O’Gorman as Kirk Douglas is given a gift of a line which is guaranteed to bring the house down with laughter.

Helen Mirren is terrific as the waspish society columnist Hedda Hopper. But by making her the villain of the piece, the male dominated hierarchies of cinema and politics are let off the hook for their behaviour.

Hopper suffers a poorly articulated rationale for for the intensity of her attacks on communism and there’s no hint her anti-union publisher is any way pulling her editorial strings for their own ends.

Diane Lane plays Trumbo’s wife Cleo with nothing to do except add glamorous scolding and sympathy.

Elle Fanning as their daughter Nikola fairs little better, being ushered down a civil rights movement cul-de-sac.

John Goodman plays to his strengths as a down market producer offering a broad comic performance which recalls his turn in ben Affleck’s Argo (2012).

Never convicted of any criminal charge, Trumbo presents himself as a fearless defender of the first amendment and the script bequeaths him a suspiciously retro-fitted sermon on the importance of the constitution.

There are great lines in the film but one suspects they’re lifted from the scripts or diaries belonging to one of the many scriptwriters portrayed on screen.

★★★☆☆

Godzilla

Director: Gareth Edwards (2013)

This handsome reboot of the Japanese sci-fi classic is monstrously poor, resurrecting the giant lizard with dazzling computer graphics but failing to create any excitement, tension or fun.

Characters are thin and lack humour, the dialogue is banal and the story needs focus. It lumbers from Japan to California creating plot-holes so deep they could hide a massive mutant reptile.

Nuclear physicist Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) loses his wife in a mysterious explosion at a Japanese power plant. Fourteen years later and he has become a conspiracy theorist trying to establish what really happened.

When his estranged son, naval Lieutenant Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), visits they are arrested investigating the quarantine zone where his wife died. Taylor-Johnson can be excellent but here he is a dead-eyed, muscle-bound charisma bypass.

They are taken to a secret base where scientists are keeping a huge radiation-eating insectoid called a Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism. It promptly buzzes off to the US to mate with another escaped Muto.

Scientist Dr Vivienne Graham (Sally Hawkins) has nothing to contribute except listen attentively to Dr Ichiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) bang on about the balance of nature. He displays a surprising amount of Godzilla background knowledge considering it’s the first time he or anyone else has ever encountered the beast.

Elizabeth Olsen plays Ford’s wife Elle who has very little to do. Director Edwards must shoulder the blame for his poorly written characters being absent-mindedly picked up, toyed with and forgotten about.

With no-one to empathise with we fail to care what’s happening on screen, regardless of the marvellous work of cinematographer Seamus McGarvey.

Meanwhile Godzilla appears and swims across the Pacific to fight the Mutos. The US navy manage to lose sight of him despite his size.

A dog is put in danger in a shameless attempt to generate tension. Then children are put in jeopardy in a school-bus on a bridge. I haven’t seen that happen since ooh, The Dark Knight Rises.

Military Intelligence decides to attack the radiation-eating monsters with a nuclear weapon. This is clearly stupid so Lieutenant Ford must parachute in to defuse the bomb, ending the film with a whimper not a bang.

The name Godzilla comes from the  Japanese word Gojira and is made of two words; Gorira, meaning gorilla and kujira meaning whale. So not so much a giant lizard. But it would probably have made for a more fun movie.

★☆☆☆☆