Mary Shelley: Life before Frankenstein

Elle Fanning does credible work as Mary Shelley, the 19th-century author of Frankenstein. But Saudi Arabian director Haifaa Al-Mansour (Wadjda) loses out by attempting to walk a fine line between a well-adorned period piece and an emotionally turbulent tale populated by Mary Shelley and two poetic geniuses. Shelley's life changed when she met Percy Bysshe Shelley (Douglas Booth). Still a teenager, Mary defied her father (Stephen Dillane) to begin a relationship with Shelley, who already had a wife and daughter. Predictably, Mary's views about fidelity came into conflict with the Romantic poet's open attitudes toward sex and free-style living. Shelley's advocacy of counter-cultural values can seem a bit forced, although a rumpled Booth does his best to convey the poet's live-for-the-moment enthusiasms. The movie moves toward a gathering at the home of Lord Byron (Tom Sturridge), another Romantic poet, as well as an insufferable cad who comes across as someone who'd get himself into deep trouble in the age of #MeToo. Aside from being insensitive to anyone else's feelings, Byron exploits Mary's gullible half-sister Claire (a spirited Bell Powley). Mary Shelley clearly delineates the prejudices faced by 19th-century women with aspirations beyond landing a husband. Al-Mansour's movie also serves to introduce Shelley to those who only know her work, many through big-screen adaptations. But Al-Monsour doesn't solve the major problem faced by those who make movies about writers: their work -- Frankenstein doesn't emerge until the movie's almost over -- usually surpasses their lives, even when lived with the kind of stress, tumult, and suffering that supposedly helped Shelley create her masterpiece.

Living inside van Gogh's paintings

Loving Vincent can't find a story equal to the artist who inspired the movie.

It's easy to see why festivals gobbled up Loving Vincent, an animated work that tells the story of artist Vincent van Gogh in the style of the master's paintings. Tactile and throbbing with energy, the movie's images seem intended to allow viewers to take a vicarious journey inside van Gogh's world.

The story of how the movie was made is impressive. Directors Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman hired 125 painters to take us into the surroundings of van Gogh's later years, if someone who died at the age of 37 can be said to have had later years. To obtain the motion that animates the story, some 64,450 oil paintings were created.

The directors first filmed live actors, using that footage as source material for the movie's many painters. I've read that every second of film required 12 hand-painted frames to bring us into the cafes and rooms van Gogh made famous.

Nothing if not ambitious, Loving Vincent uses actors to give voice to characters familiar to those who've seen van Gogh's work -- and who hasn't? Among the van Gogh subjects who have made it into the movie: postman Joseph Roulin (Chris O'Dowd), Doctor Gachet and his daughter Marguerite (Jerome Flynn and Saorise Ronan). Van Gogh, who appears sporadically, is voiced by Robert Gulaczyk.

Clearly a labor-intensive affair, making Loving Vincent required big-time dedication and the movie easily could have resulted in folly. Loving Vincent is no disaster, but it's not quite the triumph that its subject deserves.

Many reasons: To begin with, the movie's painting proves inconsistent, perhaps an inevitable result of using hundreds of artists.

That, however, wouldn't have mattered had the story lived up to the stature of the artist. Kobiela and Welchman try to wrap the story in mystery. After van Gogh's death, Armand Roulin (Douglas Booth) is dispatched from Arles by his postman father to deliver a letter Vincent wrote to his brother Theo in Paris, but never mailed.

As the story unfolds, the initially skeptical Armand becomes increasingly sympathetic to van Gogh; in particular, he wants to know more about van Gogh's death.

Questions about whether van Gogh killed himself or was murdered don't do enough to add intrigue to a movie that covers mostly familiar ground about one of the world's most recognizable artists.

As various characters recall their dealings with the artist, the movie switches to black-and-white renderings of episodes from the painter's life, some of which look more photographic than painted.

In sum, Loving Vincent might be deemed a noble failure that some will wish to see me merely because of love for van Gogh or because the endeavor certainly qualifies as daring. But it's equally true that little in Loving Vincent proves as illuminating as van Gogh's work itself.

Besides, isn't adding motion to van Gogh's painting a prime example of gilding the lily. Van Gogh's work already reflects a reeling, explosive sense of energy that hardly needed a booster shot from the movies.

'Jupiter' ascends, Wachowskis sink

A muddled fantasy that pours on the visual stimulation.

Get ready for a list of strange ingredients:

-- Inter-species gene-splicing.
-- Something called "recurrence," a mysterious process that resembles reincarnation.
-- Aliens who want to conquer Earth to boil down the human population in refineries designed to produce a life-extending substance for those greedy aliens.
-- A young woman who cleans toilets in Chicago, and doesn't know that she's actually a queen.

Ok, take a breath. The idea here is to let you know that these and many additional incongruities populate Jupiter Rising, the latest muddle of a movie from the Wachowski siblings (Andy and Lana).

As visually dense as it is dramatically unsophisticated, Jupiter Ascending doesn't so much flop as splatter, sending fragments of story flying toward incoherence.

Any initial excitement about the movie probably stems from the Wachowskis success with the Matrix trilogy, movies that created their fan base. It remains to be seen whether that fan base has sufficient strength to help Jupiter Ascending get off the ground.

A short summary of the plot probably is unavoidable. Mila Kunis plays Jupiter Jones, the daughter of a Russian immigrant family living in Chicago. Various aliens are tracking Jupiter, who happens to have been born with the exact DNA of the late queen of an alien civilization.

Jupiter's royal genetic heritage threatens the offspring of the late queen, a group of ambitious siblings want the Earth for themselves. If Jupiter's genetic heritage allows her to be recognized as a royal, she inherits the Earth.

Take another breath. There's more.

How about a dutiful alien protector? Channing Tatum portrays Caine Wise, a stoic alien warrior with a few wolf genes, a goatee and shoes that allow him to lift off the ground and fly. Think super Air Jordan's. Caine rushes to Jupiter's aid when villainous aliens try to kill her.

Once on the run, Caine introduces Jupiter to Stinger (Sean Bean), an alien with bee genes mixed into his make-up. I can't remember whether it matters, but bees never sting royals, the caste to which an unknowing Jupiter belongs.

Now, about the late queen's competitive offspring, foul creatures that they are:

Balem (Eddie Redmayne) wants the Earth badly. So good in The Theory of Everything, Redmayne here lends his talents to a movie so addled it might have been dubbed The Theory of Absolutely Nothing. Redmayne tries his best to be menacing, interrupting his barely audible whispering with occasional bursts of anger.

Then, there are Kalique (Tuppence Middleton), the sister in the group, and Titus (Douglas Booth), the obsequious brother who tries to advance his cause by staging a ceremonial marriage to Jupiter in some intergalactic cathedral.

Meanwhile -- and there are a lot of meanwhiles in Jupiter Ascending -- Jupiter falls for Caine. He resists her because he knows that no lowly gene-spliced guy can hope to aspire to romance with a royal.

Perhaps trying to emulate the episodic leaps of a Star Wars movie, the Wachowskis shift the action from Jupiter to other locations without establishing much sense of where the hell they're dragging us, and the action set pieces extend beyond any reasonably supportable length.

At one point, Jupiter must establish her legitimacy by obtaining some sort of official validation, a process that enables the Wachowskis to assemble a mini-satire on bureaucracy that boasts a cameo from Terry Gilliam. Gilliam's no stranger to visually bloated movies himself -- although, he's better at it than the Wachowskis. Remember Brazil?

As Jupiter, Kunis brings little to the role. Tatum, who knows how to give a real performance (see Foxcatcher), isn't asked to do much beyond striking a heroic pose. He battles strange looking creatures and pretends as if he's flying through he air in an ice-skater's crouch.

Now, if Jupiter Ascending were a flat-out comedy, its visuals might be more interesting. But as a bit of sic-fi that aspires to Dune-like complexity, it lacks enough consistency to be taken seriously.

Ornate spaceships, for example, pass in review like floating art objects. They seem unrelated to any plausible technology.

To be fair, I did spend some time wondering how the Wachowskis achieved some of the movie's more impressive effects, but I spent even more time wondering why they had bothered to create them in the first place.

It would be wrong to suggest that the Wachowskis suffer from some horrible talent deficit: It's more apt to say that as writer/directors, they make fabulous production designers.