Oz the Great and Powerful

For all the debt modern filmmaking owes Sam Raimi, and for all that his work has been aped and bastardized by corporate ventures hoping to guise their sickly, leaden core with equally leaden “quirk” and superficial “wit”, it’s perhaps fitting that Raimi finally shills out for his own big-budget corporate tent-pole (yes, yes, the Spider-Man movies, but the first two were mostly before Raimi was cool again and the third one wasn’t particularly Raimi-like anyway). Of all things then, it’s quite a surprise that this is the most un-Raimi like of all his films, and it’s not “un-Raimi like” in the way one might imagine a big, heaving corporate tent-pole might be unlike a grubby, devilish, grotesque horror comedy either.
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The Wolverine

Just look at that poster, the best teaser to a blockbuster in many a year, its charcoal impression of an animalistic figure capturing his soul-sucked blackness, his barely-there inhumanity, and his ragged, bestial fury all in one. It is at once a fascinatingly direct impression of a figure more than human and an ambiguous ode to Japanese watercolor lightness keeled-over into dreary depression. It is ominous yet melancholy, boxed-off and contained to display its central figure torn between life crushing him down and his claws almost bursting off the edge, ready to tear that life a new one even as it comes down harder on him. And best of all, the poster lives, like the figure it depicts, to showcase its own grit and grain at the expense of clean clinicality.
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Robocop

As expected, the 2014 model is a much more dour and serious-minded Robocop than its snarky, lurid predecessor. That would be its most notable feature, and a breath of fresh air, except that every other genre film of the past ten years or so has taken this once pristine “serious” path and rendered it a well-worn tourist trap. This film is likely hoping to be bequeathed with the label “thinking man’s Robocop”, and it succeeds at this, to be honest. However, the effect bears mixed results, keeping the film at once too mired in glum moroseness to work as a giddy delight and too thoughtful to ever really be notably bad. The thematic core of the film, wholly invested in that pesky age old “what makes humanity” issue along with something more politically modern in the form of drones, is sufficiently developed if primarily functional and never insightful. But it’s there, and it almost gives the film a certain measure of respect and thoughtfulness. Robocop almost manages to avoid the tension of having its blood-and-guts violence and chastising others for the same (certainly a worthwhile note in relation to director Jose Padilha’s two previous Elite Squad films all torn between neo-fascist rage  and neo-liberal excusatory middlebrow-ness). Almost, and in today’s age almost is almost enough.
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Paranorman

The big thing about Paranorman is that it is not anywhere nearly as interested and indebted to childhood nightmares as Coraline, nor is it as interested in being formally revolutionary. Laika’s second film is more a childhood tall tale, a campfire story for lost souls. It’s easy then to argue that the film is less radical than the company’s first film, and in fact, it is less radical. But if it doesn’t delight in demolishing our senses with demonic energy quite like its predecessor, it’s as committed to exploring our souls. For Paranorman is ultimately a work about childhood trauma, a substantive and serious-minded reflection of how Halloween glee serves as an outlet for social outcasts lost amidst the doldrums of everyday existence. And if the film isn’t as aesthetically wondrous as Coraline, it sees Laika expand their technical chops and nuance the sheer expressive motion and feeling of their motion capture for more subtle means. The end result is a film that feels very deeply, and haunts us as it does so.
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