The Age of Adaline

I'm not sure where to start with this movie, or how exactly I feel about it. Throughout the film I kept trying to look for a deeper meaning or message the film was trying to push, but it just ends up being a very average love story where the supporting cast is much better than the star.

Adaline Bowman (Blake Lively) was born in 1908, but due to a freak accident involving snow, freezing water and lightning, she somehow loses the ability to age, not just superficially, but all her organs remain intact as well. On New Years Eve 2014, she meets a handsome man by the name of Ellis (Michiel Huisman) who falls for her. Adaline is torn between her attraction to Ellis and the fact that she knows she will never age as long as they are together.

It takes quite a while for this film's plot to get moving into territory where actual events take place. The majority of the first act is made up of conveniently placed flashbacks describing how Adaline got her bizarro powers, all triggered by a newsreel she watches at the San Francisco Public Library where she works. I feel as though these flashbacks were used up all too quickly at the beginning and instead of using them as reveals throughout the film, we are shown others that seem like they were hastily put together and shoehorned in. These are narrated by Hugh Ross, who also narrated The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford, and his inclusion to me seems like director Lee Toland Krieger was somehow trying to elevate this film to something it isn't.

The film also suffers from some perspective issues, as it jumps around a bit and makes the film seem a bit disjointed. The first act focuses on Adaline's past and the second on the present, but the third act shifts to the perspective of a whole different character entirely, Ellis' father William (played surprisingly by Harrison Ford), who had a close relationship with Adaline in the 60s. While this is only a minor problem, it does mess with the structure a bit.

It may come as a shock to some (especially those Gossip Girl fans out there), but Blake Lively can't particularly act. She just kind of chews the scenery and stares blankly at whoever she is sharing the screen with. Luckily the supporting cast does its job. Michiel Huisman is a likeable and charismatic love interest and does well being goofy when he needs to. Ellen Bustyn plays Adaline's daughter and is much more energetic than Lively ever is. Harrison Ford's reveal in the film is almost as shocking as his fake goatee.

The Age of Adaline has many flaws surrounding its shoddy love story, unexplored sci-fi tangents and missed opportunity as an episode of The X-Files set in the 50s. Lively proves that her acting ability is only skin deep and doesn't branch out more than a few sighs and a thousand yard stare.

Wild

Last year I reviewed the Aussie film Tracks, a film about a girl with a rough background walking across the desert. This week I watched Wild, a film about a girl with a rough background walking the Pacific Crest Trail, a hike that goes from Mexico to Canada. Like with Tracks, Jean-Marc Vallée's latest film didn't really inspire me the way these films are supposed to.

Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) is a wreck after the death of her mother Bobbi (Laura Dern) and divorces her husband Paul (Thomas Sadoski) after he finds that she's cheated on him. To get her life back on track, Cheryl decides to walk the Pacific Crest Trail. Along the way she meets a fair few people who she relates to, as well as some unsavoury characters who just want to use her.

While I appreciate the film's overall message (despite it not doing anything to me), I feel like Vallée's filmmaking is all over the place here. The structure and editing don't do much help make sense of the story. Non-linear films can be fun to watch and sometimes they can give backstory to characters, as is the intention with this film. However, the flashbacks that we do see are very fragmented and brief, giving only a cursory insight to Cheryl's motivations and thus not making her a very endearing character.

The film suffers from an overabundance of narration. Scenes where we should read into Witherspoon's performance are interrupted by obvious narration of what's going on in her mind. The film's epilogue is also rushed along with a solid minute monologue at the end of the film, felt like something a teenager would write at the end of a story to let the reader know that everything would be okay. This could have been cut out entirely and given time for the audience to breathe and come to their own conclusions on whether Cheryl achieved her redemption.

Thematically the film is very much on the nose, holding hands with the audience the entire time. Such is the nature of a poorly done CGI fox who represents the soul of her mother and you know this from the moment you see it. Also, whilst I am not one of those hideous men's rights people and I fully support feminist films (and this is a great example of one, up there perhaps with Jackie Brown), every man, bar her brother and ex-husband, comes across like they wish to take advantage of Cheryl and I truly was scared for her at times. I don't feel like this needed to happen every time to remind the audience that there is that fear that Cheryl carries with her.

With this being a film with a lone main character, I had expected to see Witherspoon for the entire film. She gives a superb performance, something I haven't seen her do since Pleasantville. The fact that there are too little supporting roles, or if there are, they aren't in it for long, that irked me a little. Laura Dern comes back time and time again in the flashbacks, but I didn't feel a strong connection to her. Thomas Sadoski and Gaby Hoffman, who plays Cheryl's friend, both get a pitiful amount of screen time and I would have loved to see a lot more of W. Earl Brown.

Jean-Marc Vallée is capable of making better movies as we saw with Dallas Buyers Club and I know that all the actors can do better than this and despite this movie having some Oscar nominations based on it's strong female characters, it isn't a too exciting movie.

World War Z

This movie is not for the hardcore fanatic of zombie pop culture. It was made for a mainstream audience who might be interested in seeing what this whole zombie thing is about. It's probably best to stick with The Walking Dead if you are a fan.

The plot revolves around Gerry (Brad Pitt), a former United Nations investigator, who, at the behest of his former colleagues, is sent around the world in search of something that will stop the zombies (not necessarily a cure). He leaves his family on an aircraft carrier and flies off around the world, encountering many people along the way. Gerry goes to South Korea, Israel and Wales in search of something to help.

This movie was very intense and chaotic and the setting was unsettling. This came from the fact that normally zombie films and TV take place in a contained environment, such as a shopping centre or prison, but here it was global. The scenes where hordes of the undead are swarming were intense and at times I didn't quite know what was going on.

The fact that the majority of the movie is chaotic makes the ending all the harder to watch. The final 40 minutes returns to a climax that would fit well in any other zombie film. It is the classic stalking of the hallways trying to reach the ultimate goal, but due to the intensity of the first part of the film, it just seems distracting. Maybe this is due to another writer coming in and rewriting the entire ending of the film. Apparently, it was supposed to end with another climactic battle, which would have kept up with the pacing of the entire film.

The cast of this movie is very chaotic as well. Brad Pitt and his family are the only constant. Except we don't see his family all too often, which is good because is wife Karin (Mireille Enos) is one of the most annoying movie characters ever. Matthew Fox (Lost) is supposedly in this film, and quite prominently billed, but I did not see him once, so that's a waste of some cash.

Verdict: Max Brooks' novel did have potential, but it was poorly executed and even though it takes place on a global scale, the world feels kind of empty but not in a I Am Legend way.