The Morton Report - The Movie Spew Archives

This Week in Film: The Okay, the Bad, and the Worse

2012-08-04T02:15:00Z

Well, I hope you weren’t desperately hoping to see a movie this weekend. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you really don’t have much to look forward to this week at the movies.

The best movie is the tragic rom-com Celeste and Jesse Forever that’s filled with its own problems, while Hollywood is unloading a pretty dreadful Total Recall rehash, and we’re also getting “treated” to the rough (to say the least) tapestry movie 360.

You might want to dedicate the civic holiday to catching up with blockbusters you missed over the last couple of weeks or re-acquainting yourself with your DVD player. Sadly, the theater won’t be offering you much.

The Okay: Jesse and Celeste Forever

Jesse and Celeste Forever offers us one of those ho-hum "love stinks" experiences to make the summer that much less romantic. Parks and Recreation’s Rashida Jones (who also co-wrote) stars alongside Andy Samberg as the titular unhappy couple. They were together since high school before she became a career-driven success and he became a lazy artist. They broke up, but Jesse stayed in the guest house carrying a torch while Celeste encouraged the daily routine of a relationship without all the sex stuff. It’s weird, but they seem to like it. Then Jesse knocks up a girl, takes responsibility, and suddenly Celeste wants him back. Obviously, that ain’t going to happen. So Celeste spirals into a hilariously drunken tailspin.

As you may have gathered, this is a melancholic relationship comedy and unfortunately it’s neither as funny as it should be or as insightful as it thinks it is. To make matters worse, director Lee Toland Krieger lays on the indie shaky-cam cinematography, quickly creating an irritating aesthetic that seems to scream at the audience, “Look! This is realistic and serious! Appreciate, damn it! Appreciate!”

Thankfully it’s not all bad. While the visual style and “cold career woman discovers her heart through heartbreak” and “lazy artist makes good” plotlines are the stuff of indie comedy cliché, the central performances are strong enough to carry the material above the embarrassment. Samberg has only really done broad sketch comedy before, but shows surprising depth here, suggesting a leading man future that never seemed possible before now (and might not be if he keeps sticking with Sandler).

Jones has been wasted as the serious girlfriend in comedies for too long and clearly wrote the script as a means to show off her acting skillz (yes, with a “z” — that’s the only way they pay the billz). She’s able to mine her character’s sadness and regret for deadpan laughs and tear-tugging drama easily, often in the same scene.

Together Jones and Samberg have surprising chemistry and feel like a genuine couple. The pair is so good, they’ll often make you forget the creaky script because, let’s face it, character-driven comedy/dramas are acting showcases more than anything else. Viewed on that level, Celeste and Jesse Forever qualifies as a pleasant surprise. Let’s just hope Jones gets more work as an actress out of it and will get to leave the screenwriting behind.

The Bad: Total Recall

The world didn’t need a new Total Recall. We already have one with Arnold Schwarzenegger and it’s great. Sure, it may not have exactly been a brain-tingling masterpiece but at least it was clever, featured Arnie at the peak of his cheesy powers, boasted some stunning makeup effects work by Rob Bottin, and was enlivened by director Paul Verhoeven’s patented campy tone and love of over-the-top ultra violence.

The new version, on the other hand, has Colin Farrell at his most disinterested, standard issue CGI, and director Len Wiseman’s usual bland and overly frenetic PG-13 action. All of the rough edges and oddball ideas that made the last Total Recall such a beloved trash-classic have been smoothed over in favor of generic Hollywood sheen. There’s nothing special or unique about this movie. Even the opportunity to honor Dick’s original bizarre concept with more mind-trip sci-fi was set aside in favor of additional indistinguishable action scenes. Sigh…this is sadly where blockbuster filmmaking has gone in the 22 years since Arnold was first flashed by a three-boobed alien on Mars.

This new movie doesn’t even take place on Mars, but Earth, the first of many changes that add nothing to the material and only serve as a distraction. None of the actors add any personality to the roles and while Wiseman has the resources at hand to pull off some impressive set pieces, he has no sense of pacing whatsoever. Frenetic action scenes pile on top of each other without rhyme, reason, or humor. The final effect is exhausting rather than exhilarating and none of iconic sci-fi author Philip K Dick’s ideas get more than a fleeting flicker of screen time.

The lone moments of subversion and excitement are either references to the last Total Recall or other, better action movies. I’d call it a total disaster were it not for the fact that the movie does pretty well exactly what it’s expected to do. Let’s be honest, how high were the expectations for this Total Recall? It provides all the explosions and special effects promised in the trailer and has pretty people doing it. I suppose if all you’re looking for is mindless action, you could do worse. We just should be able to expect better. Especially since, you know, there’s already a pretty great action movie called Total Recall that does everything better with a few laughs and less brooding-as-importance indulgence.

The Worse: 360

Hey kids, did you know that even though it feels like we live in a bubble, all of humanity is actually interconnected? In fact, every little decision we make can actually have an impact across the globe. Mercifully, the deeply disappointing, multi-character mosaic movie 360 stops short of actually saying that regurgitated nonsense out loud, though sadly the well-worn theme is hammered home so hard that it might be a good idea for theater owners to hand out vomit bags and sleep masks with each purchased ticket.

So many great movies have been made about the beautiful and ugly ways that strangers' lives intertwine and bounce off of each other (mostly by Robert Altman) that you have to wonder why City of God director Fernando Meirelles would even bother to try and add his stamp to the almost-genre, especially when he’s stuck with such a nauseatingly melodramatic and clichéd script. Adding Russian prostitutes and possible sex offenders to this type of movie doesn’t make it original. It just mindlessly pushes buttons in a sad and failed attempt to create something verging on profundity.

The international all-star cast, including Anthony Hopkins, Jude Law, Rachel Weisz, and Ben Foster, ultimately add nothing other than famous window dressing. All that good will that Meirelles built up amongst film fans with the genuinely enthralling City of God and the under-appreciated thriller The Constant Gardner is going to disappear quickly following the wannabe art house swill of Blindness and 360. I’m still holding out hope that the terrible screenplays the director was saddled with on his last two movies are to blame, but I can’t imagine that anything better is going to fall into his lap after two consecutive failures. Maybe it’s time for the director to return to Brazil for his next feature in the hopes of recapturing the spirit that made his first movies so compelling. Meirelles definitely needs to try something different because whatever it is that he thinks he’s doing now sure as hell isn’t working.

This Week in Film: The Good, the Okay, and the Quirky

2012-07-27T20:50:00Z

By summer movie standards, this is a pretty slow week at the box office. The reason is obvious — The Dark Knight Rises just opened last week and is guaranteed to topple this weekend as well.

The only major studio release is The Watch and the fact it’s been issued the post-Batman death slot is a sure sign that the studio has a feeling it will be a bomb anyway and is shipping it off to certain doom. It’s actually not that bad and even better are the two wildly different American indie flicks coming out this week: William Friedkin’s dirty, deep-fried Southern thriller Killer Joe and the charming and magic quirky rom-com Ruby Sparks.

So, all things considered, it’s not a bad weekend at the movies after all. Chances are that you’ll still go see that Batman movie this weekend, but if not at least you’ve got three excellent substitutes without a single rubber costume in sight… okay, maybe there’s one in The Watch. I’m not revealing anything.

The Good: Killer Joe

Killer Joe is only the second movie that William Friedkin, the director behind The Exorcist and The French Connection, has made in the last five years since he’s essentially transitioned into being a full opera director (something that I doubt anyone saw coming, least of all Friedkin). However, those two movies have also been easily the best he’s made since the 1970s. His last movie was the 2006 insect infestation/paranoid delusion thriller Bug based on Tracy Letts’ play of the same name. Now Friedkin teams up with Letts again for an adaptation of Killer Joe, a darkly comic and deeply twisted “southern gothic” thriller.

The movie is about a none-too-bright father and son team (Thomas Haden Church and Emile Hirsch) who decide to have the mother of the house killed to collect the insurance money and pay off some debts. Aware that they are too incompetent to pull off the murder themselves, they hire the titular Killer Joe (Matthew McConaughey), a local law enforcement officer who moonlights as a contract killer. With no money to make a down payment, the deflowering of Hirsch’s virginal sister is offered to Joe as collateral and, as always tends to happen in these sorts of stories, nothing goes as planned. Cue bloody beatings, betrayal, and fried chicken fellatio (you’ll understand that last part once you see the movie).

Killer Joe starts as a fairly conventional, if well-executed, dark thriller before spinning off into some absolutely insane territory. For the sake of avoiding spoilers I won’t go into details, but rest assured that the film will divide audiences into the disgusted and the enthralled with little room for fence-sitters. It’s a dark, claustrophobic, paranoid thriller where every character comes off as at least somewhat reprehensible before the credits roll. In other words, it’s vintage Friedkin and one of the best films that he’s ever made.

With poetically filthy dialogue provided by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tracy Letts coming out of everyone’s mouth, the cast all create rich and compelling characters, but special notice must be given to McConaughey. Though primarily known for a decade of lazy, shirtless performances in crappy Kate Hudson rom-coms, it’s easy to forget that it was the guy’s acting chops that earned him fame for preying on high school girls who “stay the same age” in Dazed and Confused many moons ago.

He’s absolutely terrifying as the sociopath Joe and carries the film admirably (and along with Magic Mike and Eastbound and Down, he’s in the midst of a mini-comeback). I’d say he has a shot at some well-deserved acting awards were it not for the fact that this film is simply too fucked up for that kind of recognition. Killer Joe won’t be a big hit, but it’s a great 'n' greasy little thriller destined to have a strong cult appeal for all the sick puppy cinephiles out there. As a proud member of the community, I’m pleased to say that it won’t disappoint lovers of depraved entertainment.

The Okay: The Watch

Every few years, someone in Hollywood decides it’s time to recreate Ghostbusters. The formula seems simple enough: take a collection of popular comedians, put them up against a supernatural threat, and watch the magical mix of comedy and special effects-driven blockbuster entertainment unfold. The thing is that no one has ever quite managed to find that magical mixture again, not even the Ghostbusters crew. Men in Black came close, but even that franchise has been ruined by terrible sequels.

Thankfully, this week a dark horse blockbuster comedy has quietly slipped onto screens that managed to beat Men in Black 3 at its own game for what was clearly a fraction of the budget. That movie is The Watch and while I can’t pretend it’s as good as Ghostbusters (that’s just madness — few comedies in general are that good) the movie is definitely worth a look. Though undeniably flawed, this ramshackle flick does at least manage to mix laughs and SFX spectacle with a far higher success rate than should have been possible.

Ben Stiller stars as his usual uptight type-A personality working as the manager of a Costco. However, his true calling doesn’t officially arrive until the night watchman of his Costco is killed and skinned one night and the idiot local police (led by the always hysterical Will Forte) can’t seem to do anything about it. So Stiller decides to start up a neighborhood watch program and ends up finding three guys as lonely and desperate for excitement as he is. There’s Jonah Hill as a mama’s boy with a butterfly knife and obvious mental issues, Vince Vaughn at his most Vince Vaughniest, and little known British cult comedy icon Richard Ayoade as a straight-up weirdo.

Together they hold stakeouts, investigate clues, and of course get trashed and become buddies. One night they discover that the murderer is an alien and everyone in their town could potentially be one as well. (That’s why everyone who is murdered loses their skin. Disguises, people! Disguises!) At that point, there’s only one thing for the group to do — kick as much alien butt as possible and crack a few one-liners while doing it.

Stiller, Vaughn, and Hill all have very well established screen personas at this point and deliver exactly what you’d expect. Unfortunately the shtick that made all three of those gents famous is getting increasingly tired and the hit-to-miss ratio of their never-ending improv sessions can be a little rough. That said, they all reached their star status for a reason and deliver more than enough gut-punch funny scenes (like when they pose for photos with an alien corpse) to justify the misfires.

The real stand-out in the central cast is Richard Ayoade, who brings a unique sense of timing and characterization to the party that the stars just can’t offer anymore. Were it not for the fact that The Watch probably won’t be very successful (it is coming out right after Dark Knight Rises, after all, and nothing will beat that this weekend), it would be the kind of role that would kick off a Hollywood career. That ain’t going to happen, but hopefully he’ll get noticed and plopped into another movie where he can steal some scenes. The guy deserves it.

Manning the director’s chair is Akiva Schaffer of Lonely Island/SNL fame. He was a smart choice for the project since he’s one of those few comedy directors with a knack for visual storytelling. That’s key for a comedy genre mashup, as you have to be able to nail the laughs and generate at least a little atmosphere. Schaffer is predictably more comfortable with comedy than suspense/scares, but can execute those scenes well enough to be effective. “Effective” is probably the highest level of praise that’s appropriate to slather over The Watch.

This isn’t a brilliant comedy (the Seth Rogen/Evan Goldberg script has so many dick jokes it’s almost as if they had a contest to see how many could be shoved in) nor is it a revelatory work of genre filmmaking. But the talent behind the project manages to deliver competent levels of both, which collectively raises the movie just above average. The movie isn’t Ghostbusters; hell, it isn’t even Men in Black. However, considering how bad special effects comedy movies can be (have you seen Evolution?), this thing squeaks out just enough decent sequences to qualify as a success.

The Quirky: Ruby Sparks

Well, there hasn’t been a quirky faux-indie rom-com this summer yet, has there? Guess it’s time for that to happen in the form of Ruby Sparks. The movie is a fairly stale retread through indie clichés, given that it’s a rom-com with magical realist qualities starring two hip, up-and-coming actors (Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan, with Kazan earning bonus points for writing the script) and directed by the husband and wife team Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, who previously brought us the gratingly twee Little Miss Sunshine.

It should be a movie practically begging to be disliked for trying too hard to please the pseudo-intellectual hipster set. Here’s the pleasant surprise though — the movie is actually fairly interesting, heartfelt, and personal. There are still a few indie movie clichés in there to distract and a final scene rather blatantly knocked off of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but something about this fantasy examination of awkward romance rings so emotionally true that it overcomes all the flaws to charm and tickle in equal measure.

Paul Dano stars as the typical lead for any such Sundance-ready melancholic comedy: a depressed and lonely young man in search of love. He’s also somewhat of a literary prodigy who wrote a massively successful novel at 18 and has done nothing but produce minor short stories ever since. Dano’s character is in a desperate search for companionship, but has an inability to connect with people, so as a writing exercise for his therapist (Elliot Gould) he writes a little story about meeting his dream girl. This girl literally comes to him in his dream and he’s so enamored by the fantasy that he starts writing a back story for the girl as well as the start of their relationship.

It turns into the start of his long delayed second novel and he gets excited. Then, somehow, one morning his fictional Ruby Sparks (Zoe Kazan) appears in his room as a real flesh and blood person. He’s frightened at first, but is so enamored by the fantasy that he goes with it and continues the relationship. Unfortunately, like all relationships, the early dreamy days pass, Ruby starts acting like an actual person with needs, and Dano panics. He tries to rewrite her to suit his needs and it works, but it just never feels right.

Discussing any further would be unfair, but it’s in the second half that Ruby Sparks becomes more than the indie comedy of the week. The love affair with an impossibly perfect magical dream girl makes for an amusing first half with Dano at his awkward best. Then when things get real, the movie matures beyond being a quirky love story and the fantasy girl becomes a metaphor for all relationships that eventually hit a point where the dreams and fantasies of love must die so that two humans can find the compromises and compassion necessary to have a mature relationship. There’s also a loose element of meta-commentary in the movie of the absurd fantasy of such dream girls in most movies as well as the way an artist’s creation can so quickly spiral out of his or her control. That may sound a bit pretentious, yet Ruby Sparks never feels pretentious for second.

Kazan’s script is goofy, smart, and deeply heartfelt, thankfully feeling more like personal expression than an attempt to show off how clever she is as a writer. The central performances by her and especially Dano are honest and grounded, regardless of how fantastic the situation can be, while Dayton and Faris shoot things simply and focus on the performances rather than over-stylizing the characters and worlds in a way that would have been all two easy (well, except for a brief episode at Dano’s parents' home with Annette Bening and Antonio Banderas playing goofball hippie caricatures for easy laughs).

In many ways, it’s a movie you’ve seen before, just one clever enough to recognize the clichés and limitations of the genre to allow real emotion and characterization to sneak in. That’s a hard balance to strike and one that Ruby Sparks accomplishes so effortlessly that most viewers might not realize just how complex the movie was until it’s all over and they find themselves walking home suddenly overwhelmed with unexpected emotion.

This Week in Film: The Batman, The Bad, and The Woody

2012-07-20T01:10:00Z

This week in film is predictably and understandably defined by one guy in a rubber suit. Yep, I’m talkin' 'bout Batman. After weeks of feverish anticipation, the epic conclusion to Christopher Nolan’s dark and brooding superhero trilogy is finally here. It’s a movie set to break records and even though The Avengers had the 3D ticket-hike boost on its side, there’s a damn good chance that it could end up playing second fiddle to Bats at the box office this year.

This is a film everyone can and should see this weekend. However, if you’re not too keen on costumed crime-fighting shenanigans, don’t worry; there is another option. New York’s favorite neurotic Woody Allen also has a new movie that we missed last week. So you can watch Batman beat up bad guys or Woody explore award love in Italy. If neither option appeals to you, there’s always Ice Age 4 as well as the possibility that you don’t enjoy movies and as a result, I probably don’t like you. Sorry, I’m a bit of a dink like that.

The Batman: The Dark Knight Rises

Arriving on screens to more anticipation than the goddamn Olympics, The Dark Knight Rises was always destined to be the big movie of the 2012 summer and thankfully it delivers on that promise (sorry Avengers, you may make more money, but you just got topped as a movie). After borrowing from famous Batman comics like Year One, The Killing Joke, and The Long Halloween in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, for the third chapter Nolan made the universe entirely his own.

While still rooted in famous characters, The Dark Knight Rises feels like the Batman story only Christopher Nolan could tell. That’s both a good and a bad thing. This film takes all of the brooding performances, physical action, nihilism, grand speeches, and at times misplaced social commentary that defined Nolan’s take on the Batman and dials them all up to 11. The result is a genuine blockbuster epic and a fitting capper to the series that also stays true to the flaws that dogged his movies from the beginning.

The film opens eight years after the events The Dark Knight, with Batman considered a villain by the public and Bruce Wayne retired from crime fighting and left hobbled with a cane. He’s soon roused out of his slumber when a sexy young cat burglar (Anne Hathaway, never named Catwoman onscreen) steals his mother’s jewels and warns of a storm coming to Gotham City that will punish the city’s wealthiest citizens for leeching off of the poor. That storm is embodied by Tom Hardy’s Bane, a physical force who builds a literal underground army in the sewers to rise up and take the city under siege in an act of class warfare.

Batman must return along with the help of his three father figures (Michael Caine’s Alfred, Morgan Freeman’s Lucius Fox, and Gary Oldman’s Commissioner Gordon) and a new young honest cop played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt who figures out the Dark Knight’s secret identity. Batman’s first fight with Bane doesn’t go well and the battles just get bigger from there.

Nolan is in command of the project from the first frame. Shooting over half of the film in IMAX, the action scenes are both viscerally realistic by comic book movie standards and larger than life in a way the series hasn’t felt before. Backed by a relentless bass-heavy sound design and one of Hans Zimmer's typically overwhelming scores, the film is a masterful technical accomplishment that delivers the finest spectacle of the summer. As a screenwriter Nolan is just as ambitious, but a little less sure-footed.

With so many characters in his ensemble and so many threads in his narrative tapestry, the movie drags a little bit in the first act as the pieces fall into place. Thankfully, once things get going, the film takes off. Some editorial nips and tucks in the first act could have smoothed things over and kept the running time mercifully under two and a half hours, but the amount of freedom offered to Nolan on this project guarantees excess and you’ve just got to go with it.

Thematically, Nolan wraps up the series in a satisfying way, fulfilling the themes of “Batman as symbol” and “Batman as Bruce Wayne’s actual personality” established in the first film as well as adding Batman into the images of contemporary social strife like Nolan did in the sequel. Sometimes the characters express themes through droning speeches better explored in images elsewhere, but that’s par for the course with this director.

Likewise, while Bane’s attack on Gotham conjures images of urban terrorism and the Occupy movement, don’t expect the film to offer any commentary or insight on those genuine issues. This is a superhero movie after all, not a place for social commentary. Nolan just borrows those images as part of his desire to ground Batman into contemporary reality and that trick works well again here. It may be a bit rough around the edges, but The Dark Knight Rises confirms Nolan as a master of his craft and one of the few filmmakers around who can filter blockbusters through his distinct sensibility.

He’s also pretty damn good at casting and that’s true this time as well. After taking a back seat to The Joker and Two-Face in The Dark Knight, Christian Bale once again becomes the focus of the movie. His growl can be distracting as Batman, but it’s kept more in check this time and he gets far more screen time to play the damaged soul of Bruce Wayne, which was always his strength. Anne Hathaway brings levity to this relentlessly dark cinematic endeavor as Catwoman, playing a con artist who beats her foes with words as much as her spiked-heeled toes and is caught in an internal battle over her own morality. She clearly has fun making the role her own, although this more subdued take never tops Michelle Pfeiffer’s scene stealing in Batman Returns even if it’s more appropriate to the Nolan-verse.

Tom Hardy has the unenviable task of replacing Heath Ledger’s Joker as the main villain, yet the brilliant actor is up to the task, creating a vicious physical force and twisted evil mind capable of destroying Batman and doing it with his face covered in a mask. He’s not as compelling or interesting a villain as The Joker, but then few big screen baddies are. Franchise vets Oldman, Freeman, and Caine provide their usual good work, with Caine stepping up to become the emotional core of the movie. Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Marion Cottilard are also strong additions to the cast, though explaining why would require spoilers, so I’ll just leave it at that.

Most movie trilogies choke on their final chapter (The Godfather Part III, anyone?), but Nolan has pulled off a satisfying ending to his series. The film doesn’t come close to topping The Dark Knight and that would have been an impossible task without Heath Ledger/The Joker (the character isn’t even mentioned in the film, which is odd and distracting). However, it is better than the somewhat muddled Batman Begins and concludes the series in such a satisfying way that it will probably be considered a single, satisfying, three-part story in a few years. It’s not a perfect movie, but that can’t be said about The Dark Knight either.

The film does at least confirm that Nolan had a distinct vision for the caped crusader that he was able to follow through to completion. In theory the series could maybe continue, but it absolutely shouldn’t. This is the end and thankfully there’s no need for tears, Bat-fans. The franchise is way too lucrative for Warner Brothers to abandon it. There will be a Batman reboot in a few short years to look forward to, even if the filmmaker put in charge is going to have one hell of a difficult time topping or matching what Chris Nolan and company seemed to pull off so effortlessly in three satisfying Bat-films. Good luck, future Batman director, whoever you are.

The Bad: Ice Age: Continental Drift

I’ll keep it brief. The Ice Age movies are the absolute worst example of kiddie CGI flicks with celebrity voices. Now entering its fourth chapter, the limited franchise has absolutely nowhere left to go. You get to hear the same famous voices again and look at the same cute characters, but any sense of fun or novelty has long since disappeared. On DVD it might be a decent babysitter for children too young to be able to determine which Ice Age movie they are watching.

For everyone else, this thing is just one giant waste of time not even worthy of discussion. There is a nice little 3D Simpsons short before the feature though. Too bad they didn’t turn that into a movie instead. Let’s just hope this franchise doesn’t come back again for round five. At this point, it’s time for the series to move into direct-to-DVD releases. The writing quality is already at that level, so the studio may as well make that true of the production values as well.

The Woody: To Rome with Love

Hey everybody, Woody Allen is back! Okay, I guess that isn’t much of a surprise. The Woodster has made at least one movie per year since the '70s and that ain’t going to change any time soon. However, thanks to Midnight in Paris providing viewers with the finest Woody Allen adventure in years, his new flick faces lofty expectations for the first time in quite a while. Unfortunately new Woody fans are about to feel the sense of mild disappointment that anyone who has followed the director for years knows all too well.

When you make one movie a year, they won’t all be classics and a great deal of what this filmmaker puts out are merely mediocre larks. To Rome with Love is clearly a collection of half-finished ideas Allen has been sitting on for a while, strung together in an Italian setting simply because he had an opportunity to shoot a movie there last summer. Some laughs and nice performances emerge, but ultimately this is one of those Woody Allen movies that will disappear into obscurity almost instantly.

This is an ensemble Woody Allen picture that intertwines a variety of plots, so let's take a second to acknowledge them all, shall we? The best one stars Roberto Benigni as an average Italian man who suddenly becomes a celebrity for no reason and has to deal with being hounded by paparazzi and pursued by beautiful women. Woody Allen stars in the next plot as a failed opera director who flies to Rome with his wife (the long-missed Judy Davis) to meet their daughter’s (Alison Pill) new fiancé (Flavio Parenti). Woody quickly discovers his son-in-law’s father (Fabio Armiliato) is a talented singer, but only in the shower, requiring some creative staging to show off his talents.

Hang on! We ain’t done with stories yet. Next, there’s the tale of two newlyweds (Alessandro Tiberi and Alessandra Mastronardi) who arrive in Rome for their honeymoon and end up comically separated, spending the vacation pursuing accidental new relationships with a prostitute (Penelope Cruz) and a movie star (Antonio Albanese). Finally, there’s a story starring Jesse Eisenberg as a “young Woody in love” who is forced to choose between a safe long term girlfriend (Greta Gerwig) and her fascinatingly flaky actress friend (Ellen Page). He gets advice on the matter from Alec Baldwin who plays either an older version of the character looking back or a once spurned aging lover offering advice (that’s never clear). Either way he walks in and out of Eisenberg’s story in an inexplicably magic manner for what is essentially a remake of Woody’s 2003 comedy Anything Else.

That’s a lot of stories for 112 minutes and it feels like it. None of the stories are interesting enough to play on their own and are essentially little larks for Woody. Combining them together is more confusing than anything else given that they all have different timelines, so that one story takes place over a couple of months and another intercut with it happens over a few days. That about sums up how lazy Woody’s approach was on this movie as a whole. He’s clearly just having fun shooting a movie in Italy, working with a fresh collection of actors who might become new collaborators, and hopefully spending time daydreaming about his next fully thought out project.

If you’ve followed much of Woody Allen’s career, you’ll know what to expect from his forgettable endeavors. Nothing really resonates in the movie, but there are at least a few genuine laughs (particularly out of the Roberto Benigni plot) and a handful of enjoyable performances (especially from Eisenberg, Pill, Baldwin, and Paige, who will undoubtedly be asked to come back and play with Woody again). Unlike Midnight in Paris, this one is for hardcore Woody Allen fans only and even they shouldn’t expect much. Ah well, at least it’ll only be a year before he redeems himself with the next movie. That’s Woody’s process, after all.

This Week in Film: The Early Reboot and the Drug War Movie on Drugs

2012-07-06T01:25:00Z

It’s a slow week at the movies, mainly because most studios are too frightened to put up any competition against the revival of a certain wall-crawling superhero who's already proved capable of pulling in one billion dollars at the box office. So this week is all about The Amazing Spider-Man.

Well, that’s not entirely true. Oliver Stone also gets another crack behind the camera with his drug war flick Savages. That thing is in no danger of beating old Spidey at the box office, but it’s at least an interesting alternative for anyone weary of big screen superheros.

The Early Reboot: The Amazing Spider-Man

The time has come for that dusty old Spider-Man movie to be gussied up for a new generation. After all, it was ten whole years ago when Sam Raimi’s long-awaited film adaptation broke box office records and ushered in the age of the superhero flick. Back in the ancient days of 2007 the series got a disappointing conclusion with Spider-Man 3 and kids can’t be expected to remember back that far to keep the franchise going, right? Well, that’s what Sony studio execs seem to think anyway. After Raimi bailed on Spider-Man 4 because he could tell he would have to endure as much tampering as he did on the loathed third chapter, Sony realized they’d have to get a new Spider-Man movie in the can quickly or the rights would revert to Marvel Studios.

So for the sake of keeping a cash cow alive, we all get this reheated Spider-Man reboot rather than Marvel getting a chance to reboot the character their way and bring him into the expanding cinematic universe that just exploded with The Avengers. It’s with these “noble” and “artistic” intentions that The Amazing Spider-Man arrives on screens this week and boy, does the movie feel like a corporate product.

This being a reboot rather than a sequel, we all have to sit through yet another rendition of Spidey’s origin story that has been told countless times in every possible form of media. The basic beats are the same. Outcast teen gets bit by radioactive spider and receives superpowers. After his uncle is killed, he decides to use the powers for good and becomes a superhero. It takes new director Marc Webb (most likely hired for the name over his only feature 500 Days Of Summer) almost two and a half hours to bring the story to its conclusion with teen romance interludes and a bubbled rendition of the mad-scientist-turned-monster villain, The Lizard.

Even though that much screen time is wasted on a simple story, the film is poorly edited and choppy, with huge gaps missing in a convoluted screenplay that was most likely written during production. The film keeps awkwardly shifting genres with the Twilight-inspired emo high school days of the first act quickly abandoned and some sort of conspiracy plot involving Peter’s dead parents, Doc Connors/The Lizard, and an unseen Norman Osborn (aka The Green Goblin) constantly alluded to without ever being explored (I guess we get to wait for sequels for that). As a piece of storytelling, this thing is a mess and clearly a result of too many chefs in the kitchen. Thankfully, it’s at least not as big of a mess as Spider-Man 3 which clearly suffered from the same issues on a larger scale.

The good news is that not all is wrong in Spider-Man country and it’s at least a decent version of the character, if not nearly as accomplished as Spider-Man 2 (which remains a highwater mark for superheo movies in general). Andrew Garfield is a fantastic choice for Spider-Man/Peter Parker, an actor equally comfortable playing a social outcast as an ass-kicking hero (a split that Tobey MaGuire never quite got right).

His love interest is Emma Stone’s Gwen Stacy, and while on the page she’s a somewhat boring generic character, Stone’s natural charm and undeniable chemistry with Garfield elevate the material whenever they share the screen. While Webb doesn’t have the same visual panache or experience with spectacle as Raimi, the director does well with the love story and stages a few fantastic physical Spider-Man set pieces using as many actual stuntmen as possible. Sure, Rhys Ifans is horribly miscast as The Lizard, that CGI monster is a technical disaster, and all of the side characters feel like little pawns in a leaky screenplay, but the most important elements are Garfield, Stone, and Spider-Man and Webb gets them all right.

The Amazing Spider-Man is plagued with problems, but it’s not like this is ever going to be seen as a standalone film beyond this summer. It’s ultimately a pilot for a new Spidey franchise and Webb gets enough of the core elements right that a more suitable filmmaker given the appropriate time to develop a functioning screenplay should be able to churn out an interesting sequel. This movie is more about setting up a world than a singular experience and despite the wealth of issues, it seems like a decent enough direction to go. Whether it will end up working better than Raimi’s Spider-Man series can’t really be judged until all the movies are in. Right now it looks like a poor relation, but we’ll see where they go from here.

If the rumors are true about Marvel Studios' creative team coming in to help out with plans of crossovers between Spidey and other Marvel properties, it could get quite exciting very quickly. If not, within a couple years the thing will inevitably be rebooted again. Spider-Man is big business at this point. The actual merits of the movies themselves are secondary to keeping that money machine chugging along.

The Drug War Movie on Drugs: Savages

Oliver Stone may not wield the power in Hollywood he once did in the '90s when he could get a blockbuster bankroll for a three-plus-hour collection of JFK assassination theories comprised almost entirely in dialogue, but he still keeps managing to make movies about socio-political issues as they are happening. He’s just not quite as good at it as he once was. Stone’s last two efforts were the George Bush bio W., made during the presidency, and Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps, made just as the reality of the recession kicked in. His latest film, Savages, is his drug war action flick focusing on beheading Mexican drug cartels and multimillion dollar legal Californian grow-ops that are both peaking in headline-grabbing notoriety right now.

He’s not really leaning too heavily on commentary this time though, perhaps irritated that no one “got” his muddled take on the current financial system in Wall Street 2. This flick is pretty much a straight-up action/thriller and also one of his most purely enjoyable efforts since the '90s. It still suffers from Stone’s inability to play any scene at a volume below 11 (when he’s violent, he’s vicious; when he’s corny, he’d make Spielberg gag), but for all its flaws Savages is still a damn fun movie to watch, made by a filmmaker with ideas even if those ideas can seem pretty confused at times.

The film’s biggest weakness is that it’s told from the perspective of its weakest character. Blake Lively stars as O (short for Ophelia, and don’t worry—the Shakespearean references are laid on thick), a blonde beauty who lives in a three-way hedonistic relationship with two weed farmers/semi-legal drug dealers. One is botany/business major Ben (Aaron Johnson), a hippie type who believes in loving the planet and giving away profits to charity. The other is Chon (Taylor Kitsch), a war veteran who handles the muscle and business side of things when necessary. Together they are O’s perfect man. “Ben is the earth,” she says while also claiming that Chon has “wargasms” while she has orgasms during one of her typically irritating and faux-profound voiceovers that Stone must have written while indulging in the trio’s drug of choice himself. The O/Ben/Chon trio are a pretty drab and boring lot, but thankfully they get tossed into the middle of a whole lotta action.

One morning they get a video emailed to them from a cartel showing a collection of severed heads; the cartel insists they make a deal together. The potheads aren’t comfortable and try to sell the business, but the cartel isn’t having it. Led by Salma Hayek's Elena, the cartel wants to study the stoners’ working methods for three years to copy them and when they try to skip town to avoid that fate, Elena strikes back.

She has her US-based strong arm, Benicio Del Toro (who amusingly conceals hits by driving around with Mexican sidekicks dressed as a landscaping company and has them use loud gardening equipment to conceal his gun shots), strike back by kidnapping O and forcing the deal. Since wargasm specialist Chon doesn’t take too kindly to that and has some old army buddies willing to help cause a ruckus, the stoners strike back. They bribe their FBI contact John Travolta for just enough info to hit Elena where it hurts and things get a bit nutty from there.

Stone seems infinitely more interested in his bad guys this time out so as dead-eyed boring as the Lively/Kitsch/Johnson combo can be, the Travola/Hayek/Del Toro team more than make up for it. The veteran actors have more of a sense of humor about the style of ludicrous pulp that lends the movie the playful tone it needs. In particular, whenever Del Toro is on screen in his ludicrous mullet wig, you’ll wish Stone had gotten a chance to make an entire movie following him working his way through the cartel.

Hayek and Travolta can go a little too far over the top at times, but this is an Oliver Stone movie, so no one goes father over the top than the filmmaker himself. Though not as nauseatingly stylized as Natural Born Killers, Stone trots out plenty of tricks for a glossy visual presentation filled with fancy pants editing, bleached out cinematography, and not one, but two endings with the film rewinding to change the capper from a romantic shoot out to an ironic drug bust.

It makes sense that Savages is being released in the summer given that it’s the most streamlined piece of action/entertainment Stone has attempted in years (although the studio probably pushed it to the summer assuming that Kitsch would be a star right now after John Carter and Battleship…whoops!). The twin settings have some current political and cultural resonance, but once they are established Stone essentially pushes those issues to the side in favor of a twisty-turny thriller that works quite well despite the drab heroes and occasionally irritating directorial flourishes. It’s not a film destined to win awards or be remembered amongst Stone’s finest outings, but it is a rip-roaring piece of entertainment for viewers too old to get wrapped up in the adventures of a teen in tights.

There are definitely deeper and more interesting stories to be told about the California weed trade and Mexico’s vicious drug cartels that Stone could make quite well. However, we didn’t get that. We got a star-packed machine gun thriller instead and on that level Stone did a pretty good job. Here’s hoping it’s successful enough to keep him working in Hollywood.

This Week in Film: The Good, The Bad, and The Stripper

2012-06-29T17:10:00Z

This week we get a little break from spectacle-driven blockbusters (don’t worry, kids, Spider-man is less than a week away!) in favor of a collection of character-driven movies. Granted, it’s the summer so one of those character tales involves a pot-smoking teddy bear, one involves male stripping, and the other is a piece of crap. Still, it’s a change of pace in the summer months and at least only one of the new releases is a turd. That’s sadly all too rare.

The Good: Ted

So the time has finally come. Family Guy’s Seth MacFarlane takes a crack at that whole “movie” thing with Ted. The movie starts out like an '80s schmaltz fest about a young boy named John who wishes that his little teddy bear would come to life and be his best friend. This being a movie, that happens and the cutesy walking Disney character becomes not only a family fixture, but a TV celebrity.

Fast-forward a few decades and now John (Mark Wahlberg) and Ted (the voice and motion capture work of Seth MacFarlane) are a pair of stoners who spend all of their time watching bad movies, eating snacks, and generally getting fucked up. John has a girlfriend Lori (Mila Kunis) now, though, and she gets tired of the slacker bear, eventually saying he has to move out after an incident involving three hookers and a giant poop (yeah, this ain’t highbrow stuff). So the little bear does and Ted/John have to deal with the pain of being separated for the first time.

Essentially, the setup for Ted is a stoner-makes-good comedy that could have easily been designed for Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill. The difference is that the Rogen role is played by Wahlberg as a man far too old to be playing with toys and Hill’s role is a CGI teddy bear. That’s just enough to make the premise feel fresh, particularly when run through the MacFarlane comedy spin cycle that includes an endless array of vulgarity and non sequitur gags hitting on everything from Flash Gordon to 9/11 (at one point there’s even a joke that references the Saturday Night Fever parody in Airplane!, which is about three or four more meta layers deeper than should be expected from this type of studio comedy). There’s a reason why MacFarlane has three animated series running on television right now — the man knows funny and Ted is filled with it. When his Masshole-accented Ted and the gooey, childlike, innocent version of Mark Wahlberg are lazing around and cracking wise, the joke count is as high as an episode of Family Guy, which is no easy task to do consistently over 90 minutes.

Unfortunately, while Ted shows off MacFarlane’s considerable comedy chops as writer, director, and voice actor, it also puts his weaknesses on display. The guy is great at coming up with masturbation jokes for a children’s toy, but when it comes time to tell a story he’s never been that interested. Ted is dripping with misplaced sentimentality between the boy, his toy, and his girlfriend that never meshes with the anarchistic laughs, while also featuring an awkward and forced thriller subplot with Giovanni Ribisi there purely to facilitate a climactic chase scene. The story is essentially meaningless and the stabs at emotion completely trite (MacFarlane is no Judd Apatow). However, that’s been true of Family Guy for years; the only difference here is that a cheesy emotional episode wrap-up takes only 30 seconds away from a 22-minute cartoon, while in a movie that material goes on much longer and is all the more irritating for it.

So Seth MacFarlane isn’t much of a storyteller. The good news is that he’s still fucking hilarious and since Ted is an inconsequential comedy, the fact that those laughs hit as consistently and hard is really all that matters. Ted is not destined to become a new comedy classic, but it will make high college kids happy for many years to come. If MacFarlane can stumble into a movie concept like Airplane!, Dumb & Dumber, or Anchorman where the idiotic plot is mocked along with everything else, he could make one hell of a big screen comedy. Until then, Ted will fill the void for audiences missing their 90 minutes of weekly MacFarlane FOX cartoons this summer.

The Bad: People Like Us

Few movies have a more inappropriate title than People Like Us. Let me assure you that none of he soap opera clichés who walk across the screen in this film are even remotely like you, or anyone in the real world for that matter. Chris Pine stars as a fast-talking business type who is required to come home for his father’s funeral. Turns out he didn’t get along with Pops and is dismayed to learn that his inheritance is a vinyl collection rather than the cash he needs to pay off his debts.

Well, he does get a secret bag of $150K, but is instructed to give it to a woman named Frankie (Elizabeth Banks) who turns out to be a half-sister Pine never knew he had. Bit of a weird one and instead of Pine telling her who he is, he starts up a strange relationship with Frankie and her inevitably precocious son. They almost become a twisted family unit before reality finally hits and Pine’s mother (Michelle Pfeiffer, whose performance is the best part of the movie) has to tearfully explain why she split up the half-siblings.

Eeek! How this movie ever got financed by a studio instead of falling into TV movie land is a mystery. There’s not a shred of relatable human emotion here, nor are the characters exaggerated enough to work as comedy either. Instead it’s just dull melodrama played out by actors who are better than the material. Even the few fleeting elements that seem like they could be interesting (like the way Pine turns himself into an almost incestuous father figure for Banks and the kid or Pfeiffer’s big secret) are never fully explored, ignored in favor of more empty “good times” montages and weepy monologues.

Frankly, the movie is a bit of a disaster, but at least it should instantly disappear in the midst of a movie season dedicated to explosions and superheroes. Expect to see this thing playing on weekday afternoon TV in a couple months, but even then don’t watch it. Surely something more intellectually nourishing like Jerry Springer will be on.

The Stripper: Magic Mike

When it was announced that Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh would make a movie about the world of male stripping loosely based on the life of star Channing Tatum, most people (including myself) assumed it was a joke. After all, how could the man who put asses in seats with the tongue-in-cheek chic of Ocean’s Eleven and confounded viewers with brilliant arty side projects like Schizopolis possibly have any interest in a movie about wannabe Chippendales starring one of Hollywood’s blandest stars?

Well, somehow it happened and real surprise isn’t just that it got made, but that it's actually pretty good. Tatum keeps allowing sheds of personality to slip into his films (most notably 21 Jump Street) and delivers one of his more rounded performances here, while Soderbergh seems to have a good time trying to understand and playfully mock this weirdo world. It ain’t a masterpiece and who knows what kind of audience it will attract, but Magic Mike is still dramatically better than it could have been and the trailers suggest.

Tatum stars as Mike (I know, shocker!), a 30-year-old male stripper and desperate entrepreneur who runs a variety of side gigs from building custom furniture to working construction when he isn’t shaking his dangling bits in the face of screaming middle-aged women. He meets the 19-year-old Adam (Alex Pettyfer) at one of his construction jobs and sees something of himself in the college dropout with no ambitions beyond getting drunk enough to feel content to sleep on his sister’s couch. So Tatum invites him into the wild male stripping world led by Matthew McConaughey’s club owner Dallas (who is filled with philosophies, all of which appear to involve a perpetually shirtless existence). Adam falls into the world easily while Mike starts to tire of it, struggles to pull together a legitimate job, and falls for Adam’s beautiful, no-nonsense sis Brooke (Cody Horn). As always happens in these sorts of stories, the laughter must turn to tears, but at least with Soderbergh in charge that’s done more delicately than you’d expect.

As usual, Soderbergh acts as his own cinematographer and gives the film the locked off and detached aesthetic he’s been toying with for the last few years. The film is essentially fluff though and aside from the visuals he doesn’t pretend otherwise. Soderbergh revels in the absurd comedy inherent in the material, particularly in McConaughey, who practically delivers a self-mocking parody. Tatum can seem lost when playing a cardboard action lead, but give him a semi-idiotic manslut goofball like Mike and he can be quite a charming and entertaining screen presence. Everyone else falls into the deadpan “best acting is no acting” approach. Fair enough — no one needs to see a wild and melodramatic male stripper move. A deadpan comedy with enough insight for moments of self-loathing and darkness is fine.

Magic Mike is far from a masterpiece, but Soderbergh and Tatum (who also produced and worked on the script) made probably the best possible film about male strippers. How many people will actually go see the thing is a reasonable question, but at least one decent character study will slip out of Hollywood this summer. It’s a shame Soderbergh is retiring; he’s one of the few people who can who can actually get character-driven movies financed anymore and if he can make something this interesting out of such limited material, imagine what he could be doing if he was actually allowed to make whatever he wanted.

This Week In Film: The Kinda Good, The Bad, And The Quirky

2012-06-16T16:30:00Z

This week at the movies can be summed up by one word, “meh.” Presumably the studios assumed that the world would be so enamored with Prometheus this weekend that they couldn’t possibly be courted by a new blockbuster release. Big mistake. So instead of some ludicrously expensive action spectacle, we have a choice between a raunchy Adam Sandler comedy (That’s My Boy), an 80s jukebox musical (Rock Of Ages), and the latest indie quirk off for the Sundance crowd (Safety Not Guaranteed). So…yeah…not a great week of new releases. Ah well, there’s always next week, right? Sigh…

The Kinda Good: That's My Boy

This week the “good” is a relative term. Adam Sandler has returned with a movie that is idiotic, disgusting, and offensive. But it’s also his funniest movie in years. The thing is far from a masterpiece or even close to the comedies that made his name in the 90s, but at least it’s not family friendly dreck like Grown Ups.

Nope, this is a movie that opens with a heroic tale of statutory rape that manages to get more disgusting from there. Sandler stars as a guy who knocked up one of his junior high teachers, became a brief trash celebrity, and ruined the boy’s life while his teen-tapping mom was in prison. Flash forward 28 years and now Sandler is a burn out who faces prison time if he can’t pay off the IRS to the tune of $50,000. He manages to talk a trash TV show into forking over the cash if they can film a prison family reunion and sets out to find his son and trick him into joining. Of course, his boy (Andy Samberg) hasn’t spoken to him in a decade and is about to be married. So Sandler crashes the party for some debauchery and an inevitable round of father/son bonding.

It’s all pretty simple Sandler comedy stuff, the difference is that the movie is a hard R reveling in nudity and bodily fluids. Getting all dirty seems to have actually sparked some comedic energy in Sandler that he hasn’t shown in years. It’s one of his performances defined entirely by a goofy voice (in this case a hearty Boston accent), but there’s an anarchistic free-for-all feel that is closer to Sandler’s earliest movies than say Click and is a welcome surprise. Sure, Nick Swardson makes an unwanted appearance, the plot is paint-by-numbers, it’s overlong, and all the female characters are either evil or sex objects, but that sort of thing is a given in one of Sandler’s Happy Madison productions at this point.

The good news is that the movie is actually funny and takes risks in a way that the comedian hasn’t done in about a decade. Granted those risks were taken for what ultimately a dumb comedy with no redeeming values beyond shock laughs. Yet, given how far Sandler has lowered the bar in recent years, at least that’s something.

The Bad: Rock Of Ages

You gotta give the folks behind the original Rock Of Ages stage show credit for one thing, they definitely stumbled into a winning formula for success. I mean, why be bothered with taking the time to write a musical when you can just bust out an 80s playlist instead? That certainly makes things way easier, right? The play also had a tongue-in-cheek tone gently mocking the innocent clichés of musical theater plotting and a combination of that and 80s hair metal classics in a time when mocking 80s nostalgia was in it’s peak was enough for this thing to be a success.

A movie was inevitable and when gussied up with movie stars and production values, well the joke just isn’t as funny. It’s a mildly amusing jukebox musical with a couple decent performances, but certainly nothing particularly memorable or necessary. It’s the kind of breezy light entertainment that passes by fairly painlessly without coming close to making much of an impact. I suppose if you love the music or Tom Cruise, there’s enjoyment to be had. But at that point, why not just bust out your old mix tapes and listen to them while watching Cocktail on VHS? You’ll get way more campy laughs and at least the experience might feel somewhat genuine and not cynically mass produced.

The film is about a small town girl (living in a lonely world) who meets up with a city boy on the sunset strip where they set out to pursue their rock star dreams. They end up waiting tables at a sleazy club that’s hosting the farewell show of hairspay rock god Stacey Jaxx (Cruise). It’s sure to be a huge, which is why a churchgoing conservative lady (Catherine Zeta Jones) decides it must be protested, much to the chagrin of the club owner (Alec Baldwin) and his silly assistant (Russell Brand). You can probably guess where the story will go from here and you’d be right.

Along the way plenty of semi-appropriate rock anthems are belted out in a way the waters down their appeal and all the cast give performances that are at least appear to have the cadence and timing of being humorous. The whole thing is very bland and dull in a way that will sadly appeal to the target audience. Nothing I can say will sway those seduced by the idea or those already disgusted by it. You already know whether or not you’re going and whether or not you’ll like it. I will say that the movie and show isn’t offensively bad, it’s just very dull, bland, and predictable. A musical custom made for bad high school drama class reenactments and a movie that in a few years time will only be watched by those pimply cast members preparing for the performance. Save the money and go to karaoke instead. At least you can drink there and the bad covers will seem increasingly appealing as the night goes on.

The Quirky: Safety Not Guaranteed

Safety Not Guaranteed is the latest quirk-fest to emerge from America’s indie comedy scene. Like so many similar movies to proceed it, the film is about a depressed loner who learns to love life thanks to the affections and acceptance of a manic goofball. Thankfully there are enough wrenches in the formula to keep this thing from being Garden State 2: Adorkable Boogaloo. Thanks to a lead role from Aubrey Plaza (the closest living representation to Beavis And Butthead’s Daria) there’s a gender reversal and given that the requisite manic love interest is an insane Mark Duplass convinced he’s solved the mysteries of time travel, there’s a vaguely sci-fi underpinning to the whole endeavor. That ain’t much to separate it from the grating indie comedy pack, but it’s just enough.

Plaza stars as a depressed 20something (obviously) interning at a magazine who is assigned to follow Jake Johnson’s sleazy writer on a weeklong trip to try and track down the nutball who wrote an odd classified ad looking for someone to join him on a time traveling mission, requiring weapons experiencing, and promising “safety not guaranteed” (based on an actual ad that made the viral rounds a few years back). They discover the man responsible is a sad grocery store clerk still rocking the semi-mullet and jean coat style he founded in the 80s (Mark Duplass).

It’s decided that Plaza would be the best person to approach the jittery Duplass given that he probably hasn’t received any female attention in a while. So, they begin time traveling training and the more time Plaza spends with the lost and pained man, she starts to fall for him. At the same time Johnson’s character embarks on a mission to track down his old junior high spit swapping partner with hopes of rekindling their love affair. It barely has anything to do with the main storyline beyond a loose thematic link of not being able to let go of the past and learning to embrace the present. That’s kind of the main problem with the film as a whole, as director Colin Trevorrow and writer Derek Connolly (both working on their first feature) don’t seem entirely sure of what they want to do.

The movie never comfortably decides if it’s a goofball comedy mocking Duplass’ character or an earnest film about a lost soul. It’s also not clear if it’s all supposed to be real or a fantasy, if all the subplots actually connect, or what genre the whole thing is supposed to fall into. That slingshot approach to the tone is part of what makes the movie so compelling and unpredictable, yet at the same time it also turns the whole thang into a bit of a mess. Still, the performances are engaging enough to make it all worth while.

Duplass is fantastic as the possibly insane time traveler, finding just the right balance between broad comic strokes and empathetic emotions. Johnson is absolutely hysterical as a image obsessed writer melancholic for his wasted youth (in fact the only reason it’s not irritating that his distracting subplot is in the movie is because he’s so damn entertaining). Plaza does her rolling eyes sarchastic thing well, although the movie proves that she might be best in supporting roles as she’s not as good at pulling off the transition into a caring person. She’s talented, but within a certain character type and fortunately for her, that’s all you need to find mild success as a comedic performer at her talent level.

Overall, the movie certainly isn’t a classic, but it’s enjoyable enough. If you like quirky indies you’ll enjoy it. If you hate em, guess what? Your moving going safety isn’t guaranteed (see what I did there, ain’t that clever?).

This Week in Film: The Mildly Disappointing, The Predictable, and The Uncomfortable

2012-06-09T12:35:00Z

Well, folks, the time has finally come for audiences to be treated to one of the most highly anticipated and ridiculously hyped movies of the summer, Prometheus. As with any movie that marketing departments assure us is a masterpiece, it’s a bit of a disappointment if you expect anything more than a decent sci-fi/horror blockbuster (and lord knows there aren’t many of those these days).

However if you don’t feel like sampling Ridley Scott’s tale of alien goo and human grue, there’s also a decent CGI celebrity-voiced animal movie coming out in Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted, as well as Dark Horse, the latest pitch black comedy about wounded souls from the incomparable director Todd Solondz (aka the man who put you through the wringer with Happiness).

That’s a pretty damn eclectic lineup of movies and, even more impressive, they are all worth seeing…well, as long as you go in with appropriately lowered expectations.

The Mildly Disappointing: Prometheus

Few blockbusters shuffle into theaters with the immense expectations facing Prometheus. Given that this is the return to both sci-fi and the Alien franchise by beloved genre icon, director Ridley Scott, fanboys have been foaming at the mouth for months and marketing execs have been promising brilliance. Well, unfortunately this thing isn’t a new genre masterpiece. Then again, it’s probably our fault for expecting it to be one.

Compared to the other 2012 summer blockbusters, it’s still one of the best nights of popcorn entertainment that we’ve gotten. Unfortunately given the project’s unfilled ambitions and ties to a genuine genre masterpiece, it can’t help but seem to fall a little short. Ah well, at least it’s a special effects blockbuster that suffers from being too ambitious rather than lacking artistic aspirations of any kind.

The original Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Noomi Rapace stars as a scientist who discovers cave paintings around the world pointing to a specific planet in another galaxy that the creators of humanity are supposedly from. Since the technology exists to fly out there and check out these human “engineers” she does just that, joining a crew led by a cold-as-ice Charlize Theron, Michael Fassbender doing some brilliant work as an android, and a large crew of indistinguishable scientists there simply to get bumped off one by one by the inevitable alien threat.

Eventually they land on the planet and find an abandoned cavern where the engineers once lived. They soon discover they were all wiped out by a mysterious black goo that was supposed to kill off humanity in an “engineered” (excuse the pun) apocalypse. Then they decide to bring some of this goo on their ship. No points awarded for guessing whether or not that works out.

The film is Scott’s attempt to craft a “what does it all mean” space epic along the lines of 2001: A Space Odyssey as well as a slice of horror/sci-fi like Alien. Well, he nails all of the horror set pieces brilliantly (one emergency C-section scene is sure to become a YouTube classic) and creates an incredible, lived-in sci-fi world. Unfortunately, the existential themes are never fully explored and the film never ties into the Alien series in a satisfying way. Even worse, it’s clear while watching the movie that at one point none of those threads were left dangling.

It all builds towards an obvious conclusion where the weird morphing monsters turn into an Alien to make a pessimistic point about the futility of questioning the origin of existence. Then instead of providing a climax, Scott gives us a cliffhanger to shrewdly set up an apparent trilogy. It’s an incredibly unsatisfying conclusion made even worse by lazy screenwriting, terrible dialogue, and a cast of underdeveloped characters.

There’s no getting around the fact that Prometheus is a deeply flawed movie, but to dismiss it as total crap as many critics and spurned fanboys are sure to do is a mistake. Even though the film never provides any of the answers that it tantalizingly promises, this is at least a blockbuster with some intriguing ideas that never come at the expense of entertainment. Scott creates some consistently stunning imagery and at least gets one fascinating character out of Fassbender’s embittered android (he also gets the best single sequence in the film, using the ship as his personal playground during the two years in which his human shipmates are locked in cryogenic sleep chambers).

Completely divorced of all the expectations and ties to Alien hanging over every frame of Prometheus, it’s a pretty damn good movie. Unfortunately, those factors and the many flaws are impossible to ignore, which will inevitably lead to a lot of hate and dismissal thrown at the movie by critics and audiences. Perhaps all of the dangling threads will be tantalizingly expanded on in a sequel, but there’s an equal chance that the flick will piss off so much of its core audience that it won’t make nearly enough money to justify a sequel. We’ll have to wait and see. A movie too good to be completely dismissed, but also far from the masterpiece we were promised.

The Predictable: Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted

Let’s face facts — you know exactly what Madagascar 3 will be before even buying a ticket. Unless it’s a Pixar joint, all CGI family fare is essentially the same these days. Take a bunch of brightly colored animals, give them some celebrity voices, mix in some pop culture references and musical montages, and you’ve got yourself a hit.

This movie does exactly what’s promised on the poster with a slightly more strange and absurd level of humor than expected (possibly as a result of the involvement of The Squid and the Whale and Fantastic Mr. Fox screenwriter Noah Baumbach). It accomplishes that in 90 mostly pain-free minutes and then let's you carry on with your day. This thing has no chance of becoming an animated classic, but as far as this type of movie goes, you could do a hell of a lot worse. It’s at least entertaining and unpretentious. That’ll be enough for now.

So we return to our group of pampered New York zoo critters (voiced by Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, and others) who are now in Africa and piss off a French animal control officer (hilariously voiced by Frances McDormand) leading to chases and adventures. Along the way there are some undeniably strange comedy asides and fantastic voice acting turns from the likes of Borat’s Sacha Baron Cohen and Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston. The comedy tone has enough traces of subversive wit and the plot zips by fast enough for this to qualify as one of the better examples of the never-ending stampede of wise-cracking CGI animal comedies.

There’s not really much else to say. Madagascar 3 is exactly what it needs to be and possibly even just a little bit funnier than expected. Nothing special, but at least it won’t be a soul-crushing experience for parents dragged along by their children.

The Uncomfortable: Dark Horse

Following his reflective Happiness sort-of-sequel Life During Wartime, dark comedy specialist Todd Solondz returns with Dark Horse. The movie initially appears to be his most mainstream outing to date, before diving into the deep end of the filmmaker’s oddest impulses. As a specialist in societal outcasts, it was inevitable that the writer/director would eventually create an entry in the recent spate of man-child comedies. However, Solondz is no Apatow and his tale of a 35-year-old man living with his parents and collection of action figures isn’t merely a gently comedic take on the subject.

Comedy is only the starting point and as the film wears on, it soon becomes a melancholic deconstruction of the man-child phenomenon and a hallucination-fueled nightmare of immaturity and failure. Not exactly a light date movie for the Seth Rogen crowd, but a comedy that cuts deep into the current cultural infatuation with glorified juvenile behavior.

The films stars previous supporting role specialist Jordan Gelber as Abe, a grown man whose life is dedicated to toys, cheesy pop music, playing board games with his mother (Mia Farrow), and slacking through a top position at his father’s office (Christopher Walken, playing the father, not the office). He still happily lives at home and has no intention of leaving, dreaming of marrying a woman and bringing her into his childhood bedroom until his parents move to Florida.

The dream seems close to reality when he meets the heavily medicated and equally confused Miranda (Selma Blair), who decides to at least try to settle for Abe because she has nothing better to do with her life. It all seems primed to become an “eccentric girl fixes damaged boy” comedy until Abe’s fractured and tenuous hold on reality starts to slip and award realism gives way to pained delusional surrealism.

The first half of Dark Horse offers some of the most taboo-free comedy of Solondz’s career and it briefly seems as though the cult director may have created his first shot at mainstream success since his debut Welcome to the Dollhouse. Abe’s clearly a stunted social misfit, but at least he’s irrationally confident and content and seems to have a shot at getting the girl. Then the filmmaker, who is incapable of pandering, makes it clear that Abe’s immaturity is not some cute affectation or defense mechanism. He’s a damaged soul and possibly even psychotic, while Miranda is using him purely to pretend she has a shot at a normal life.

The film is hardly a celebration of the man-child phenomenon. The lifestyle is shown to be a product of insecurity, neuroses, and delusion, with Abe’s active fantasy life gradually taking over his fragile reality. Though empathetic, there’s nothing cute about these regressed characters. They’re sick and Solondz, along with a game cast, explores the hows and whys through his patented brand of comedy designed to dig out those special kinds of laughs that stick in your throat and (god-forbid) provoke thought.

It’s not a movie that will be a crossover hit or deep enough to achieve universal critical praise, but for fans of the unique filmmaker and acidic social critic, it’s a must-see. Though tough going at times, it’s also a decent entry point for anyone curious to sample Soldonz’s sweetly twisted point of view but who isn't yet ready for something as intense as Happiness.

This Week in Film: The Good, The Bad, and The Mutants

2012-05-26T01:35:00Z

It should be possible to recommend a director-driven indie movie at this point in the summer, but thankfully the good folks behind Wes Anderson’s latest opus have decided to release it on screens in May. It’s not his best movie, but a welcome break from all the blockbusters coming out every week. Speaking of which, there’s another expensive flop this week in Men In Black 3 if you refuse to consider attending any movie without at least one major explosion this time of year.

Finally, if neither of those options are appealing and you’d rather just see a bunch of nondescript youngsters get killed in a horror movie this week, then there’s always Chernobyl Diaries. A few very different options, but only one qualifies as “good” in my three-tier judgment system. Guess which one that is this week? Please don’t cheat and look at the answer one line down. Okay, okay, so that’s pretty much impossible. Let’s just dive into the reviews and forget about the whole guessing game.

The Good: Moonrise Kingdom

Writer/director Wes Anderson has got to be the most widely imitated filmmaker of the last ten years. His meticulously designed deadpan melancholic comedies about broken families like Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Life Aquatic have become the lifeblood of hipsters and film students everywhere. Some pretty terrible movies have been made that desperately try to knock off Anderson’s aesthetic, but we can’t blame him for the imitators. Thankfully, through it all Anderson has never tried to change what he does and even though his work has become increasingly repetitive, no one makes a movie quite like this guy.

Anderson’s latest effort, Moonrise Kingdom, takes many of his oft-repeated elements like hyper-articulate genius children, vintage pop, rigidly composed frames, and Bill Murray and yields another equally hilarious and emotionally resonant movie. With each passing project it becomes clearer what Anderson’s limitations are as a filmmaker, yet he always consistently proves that he can take the same themes, cast, and visual design and create something that feels fresh every time out. That’s the sign of truly gifted filmmaker.

The plot follows a 12-year-old boy scout (Jared Gillman) and a melancholic rich girl (Kara Hayward) who fall in love and run away together. While they are off playing at being renegade young lovers in pup tents, a search party is formed combining the forces of a scout master who takes his job too seriously (Edward Norton), the girl’s bickering/casually alcoholic parents (Bill Murray and Francis McDormand), the local sheriff (Bruce Willis), and social services (embodied by Tilda Swinton).

Like all Wes Anderson movies, it’s a whimsical comedy with undertones of pathos. The cast deadpan their way to fantastic comedic performances, cameo roles from other Anderson regulars like Jason Schwartzman pop up left and right, the soundtrack and style place the story in an indeterminable '60s setting, and the director manages to find some relatable emotions amidst all the chuckles. In theory this formula shouldn’t work anymore, but it does. Anderson creates a quietly moving ode to the gap between adulthood and adolescence and the challenges of finding genuine human connections.

Moonrise Kingdom is funny from start to finish (as must be expected from any movie featuring Billy Murray), yet Anderson always finds a way to use the laughs as an entry point for deeper emotions. The film is an interesting companion to his previous feature, the stop motion Fantastic Mr. Fox. On a certain level, both movies are essentially children’s stories told from the perspective of a nostalgic adult looking back without ever ignoring the complicated emotions and sadness that tend to get left out of most big screen representations of childhood.

Though his films are infinitely more stylized, the undeniable influence of Francois Truffaut (The 400 Blows) can be felt in Anderson’s completely unsentimental and honest portrayal of adolescence and it’s a world he seems to find limitless inspiration in. At this point you should know how you feel about Wes Anderson’s movies and Moonrise Kingdom will not win any new supporters. However, those who have long been seduced by his literate comedy charms will find plenty to fall in love with. I wish the guy could make a new movie every year. None of his legion of imitators are a substitute.

The Bad: Men in Black 3

Men in Black 3 comes to screens as one of those notorious, out of control productions. The budget reportedly swelled to $375 million and production had to be shut down for weeks in the middle of shooting so that the screenplay could be radically rewritten. It’s safe to say that the threequel developed a bad reputation before anyone got their eyeballs on the finished product and as much as I’d love to be able to say that the film is a secret success, I can’t. This thing is a mess.

Combining complex special effects spectacle with goofy character comedy ain’t easy and the original Men in Black was one of the rare blockbusters to pull it off. Both sequels offer improved special effects and fewer laughs than you’ll get out of the particularly depressed 2pm Wednesday drinking crowd at a dive bar. This new franchise entry might be slightly better than the last one, but not by much.

The plot is barely worth discussion. A confusing concoction of bad fatherhood jokes and a growling supervillain (Flight of the Conchords’ Jemaine Clement) is used to give Will Smith an excuse to go back in time to the '60s and partner up with Josh Brolin doing an impeccable impression of Tommy Lee Jones as a younger man. None of it makes much sense, which would be fine if it were funny or moderately amusing, but that’s just not the case. A decade of drama has robbed Smith of much of his comedy timing and it’s kind of sad to watch him try and play the wisecracking young buck even though he’s slipping into middle age. Tommy Lee Jones is so visibly bored that he’s barely present. Brolin is admittedly fantastic, but his section of the script was the most radically rewritten and the life has been sucked out of his jokes. The rest of the cast are all wasted on delivering exposition to try and force something resembling a passable narrative out of nothing.

It feels like director Barry Sonnenfeld simply stopped caring about the script at a certain point during shooting and focused entirely on the visuals. There are some fantastic special effects sequences (and with that budget, there had better be), but without a decent context for them to arrive or intriguing characters to share the screen with the effects, it’s hard to really care. Granted, the movie whizzes by at a sharp enough pace to never feel boring. That’s just not enough. For a sequel arriving this late to the party to land an audience, there has to be something new to add to the experience to justify the extension of the franchise.

There’s nothing of the sort here and it should vanish into obscurity pretty quickly, killing off the franchise along with it. I’ll bet the filmmakers wish the Men in Black’s memory erasers were real so that they could treat every audience member to a complimentary memory wipe shortly after every screening. It’s really the only way they could get viewers to sit through this thing more than once.

The Mutants: Chernobyl Diaries

Finally, if you don’t really have an interest in attending a movie this week unless it involves jump scares, blood, mutants, and bad dialogue, don’t worry, there’s a horror movie coming out as well. Bumped up to a May release rather suddenly, Chernobyl Diaries is the first official follow-up project from Paranormal Activity creator Oren Peli. The man who made a $200 million hit from his house might not be directing this particular outing, but he wrote and produced this globetrotting little horror tale with links to that old nuclear disaster. It’s pure nuts 'n' bolts horror stuff that doesn’t have ambitions beyond making the audience jump in their seats. However, it’s at least an efficient little scare factory with an evocative location that hasn’t been seen (or exploited?) before.

The film centers on a group of fairly indistinguishable 20-somethings. Two impossibly beautiful women and a somewhat dorky guy with a terrible sense of humor make a pit stop in Kiev during a Euro-trip to visit the dork’s brother. Even though the plan is to go to Moscow, the local bro has another idea. He found out about a secret tourist trip to Pripyat, the city that was evacuated after the Chernobyl disaster that can now be visited by tourists. So they all pile into a beat-up van with a sketchy tour guide to visit a radioactive ghost town.

A military post outside the city refuses to let them enter, but the guy running the tour knows a secret entrance and takes them into the town anyway. Everything seems fine at first despite the deeply creepy location…and then the van refuses to start and they are trapped overnight. Once the sun goes down, they hear strange noises, so the tour guide goes to investigate and doesn’t come back. Soon the young folk are being hunted, but they aren’t sure exactly what’s hunting them. Spoiler alert: it might be mutants from the nuclear disaster…well, it couldn’t really be anything else, could it?

Chernobyl Diaries features some of the most poorly written characters and dialogue from a horror movie in recent memory. However, the good news about that is that little time is wasted developing character. The filmmakers use the absolute minimum number of scenes to get their characters trapped in the rotting city so that most of the running time could be dedicated to creep-outs and attacks. Aside from the setting, there isn’t much here that hasn’t been seen in other horror movies, but it’s executed so efficiently that it’s hard to care. Enough of the scenes work to make it worth seeing provided that you enjoy this type of movie and go in with appropriately lowered expectations.

Accusations that the movie exploits a genuine disaster have already been made and they aren’t without merit (this flick does turn the tragedy into a mutant freak show after all). However, Chernobyl Diaries offers such basic and predictable monster movie entertainment that it’s hard to imagine anyone actually getting upset. It you want to jump at loud noises in the dark this weekend, there’s only one option. The movie will never be considered a classic, but given some of the crap Hollywood has cranked out over the last few years claiming to be horror movies, you could do a hell of a lot worse.

The Week in Film: The Good, The Bad, and The Unwatchable

2012-05-18T16:20:00Z

It’s a particularly bad weekend at the movies this week, folks. Two of the new releases (Battleship and What to Expect When You’re Expecting) will probably go down easily as the weakest movies of the entire summer.

It would be a complete wash-out of a movie week were it not for the saving grace of the delightfully offensive Sacha Baron Cohen. The man who brought us Borat returns with a cripplingly funny comedy about a dictator to save this week in movie-land. There’s a good chance that it will end up being the funniest damn movie of the summer, so if you enjoy laughing don’t miss out. You’ll certainly end up in tears if you go to either of the other stink piles shuffled into new release this week.

The Good: The Dictator

Borat turned British cult comedy icon Sacha Baron Cohen into a superstar overnight and that success was a both a blessing and a curse. Yeah, it was an instant classic but the fame that came along with that achievement meant that Cohen would have a hard time replicating the reality/comedy formula that saw him stage shock comedy pranks on innocent civilians. His follow-up, Bruno, was funny, but lacked the social commentary of Borat and the sense of surprise. Even worse, it meant that Cohen had dedicated a film to each of his iconic characters and suddenly had to start from scratch, with the world awaiting the results.

Well, his long-awaited follow up The Dictator is finally here and it’s a damn funny movie that proves Cohen can’t be written off yet. The guy wisely ditched his reality conceit, instead making a fairly traditional screwball comedy, albeit one with a premise that allowed him to dabble in his satiric, anarchistic, and delightfully juvenile comedy ways. It’s not a film that will suddenly enter debates over the greatest comedy ever made like Borat, but there’s a damn good chance that this thing will end up being the finest and funniest comedy of the year. That’s all we could really ask from Cohen at this point and it’s nice to see confirmation that he isn’t a one-trick naked wrestling pony.

This time at bat Cohen plays Aladeen, a prodigiously bearded dictator from a fictional Middle Eastern country. He’s still an average dude though, just one surrounded by an army of “virgins” who he tests out every night, beheads anyone who disagrees with him, and even hosts his own national Olympic ceremony simply to claim all the medals for himself. Okay, so he’s not an average guy, but Aladeen does fall comfortably into Cohen’s collection of human cartoons and self-empowered douchebags. Aladeen stands in for all of our favorite heavy-hitter dictators from Saddam Hussain to Kim Jong-Il (to whom the film is hilariously dedicated). He’s quickly whisked off to New York City for an inevitably controversial speech to the UN.

Unfortunately, Aladeen’s #2 is played by Ben Kingsley and is therefore evil. He shaves off Aladeen’s beard and sends him out into the street, replacing him with an idiotic body double (also played by Cohen) with plans to turn the country into a democracy and sell off the rich oil concerns to Chinese and US business interests. Aladeen is furious, but beardless and therefore powerless. However, he does find support in a hippie hyper-liberal vegan grocer (the perpetually underrated Anna Faris) who thinks his misogyny and delusions of grandeur are ironic. Then somehow Aladeen starts to feel for the pretty lady and her liberal ways seem to slip into his thoughts. Think she might change the Dictator? (Hint: no!)

It’s all just an excuse for Cohen to throw a bunch of gags at the audience and see what sticks. Thankfully, the hit to miss ratio is quite high with Cohen dabbling in nearly every form of comedy from slapstick to satire, poo jokes, and social commentary. In many ways it’s a far more conventional comedy that anything he’s made before, but in this case that isn’t a bad thing. For Cohen, it’s actually an experiment to see if he can create a character for a fully fictional world and sustain laughs through a conventional narrative. The guy succeeds in spades with another hilarious and easily imitated performance and tosses in a couple of gross-out gags like an impromptu birth that really test the limits of good taste.

The balance of clever and idiotic humor creates a movie to both please the masses and earn a few critical accolades. Sure, Cohen’s brand of comedy is becoming a wee bit predictable and there are some groaners hidden throughout, but compared to other Hollywood comedies and not Cohen’s past efforts, it’s a brilliant piece of work. As long as audiences can stop expecting the guy to make a new Borat every time out, Cohen should have quite a strong career. If nothing else, The Dictator proves he can still get shocks and laughs without having to trick people into being his co-stars and it will be exciting to see what he comes up with next. If you don’t mind being offended while laughing yourself silly, this might be your favorite flick of the summer thus far.

The Bad: Battleship

Here’s a shocker — that movie based on the old Battleship board game kind of stinks. Okay, so that was inevitable. However, the actual surprise is how boring the whole mess is. In theory, putting together two hours of aliens and battleships shooting the crap out of each other should have at least been a little exciting in a guilty pleasure kind of way. Unfortunately, the folks behind Battleship didn’t even deliver on that modest goal.

Instead their movie is a shaggy two-plus hours long with so many classic rock montages and boom boom explosion sequences that it pummels audiences into submission, and not in a good way. Though the movie tries desperately to recapture the magic of '90s action flicks like The Rock or Con Air, the results are a pale imitation at best. The constant barrage of loud noises and expensive visuals proves to be more exhausting than enthralling. By the end, you’ll want to grab a pack of aspirin and go to sleep, hoping that the sweet escape of dreamland will wash the whole mess from memory.

The movie stars Taylor Kitsch (who the producers probably assumed would be a star now after John Carter…whoops!) as a perpetual screw-up who finds himself in the Navy after years of failure. He keeps screwing up in the Navy, of course, but he does at least have a blond bimbo girlfriend (Brooklyn Decker), which is every man’s dream, right? Unfortunately that golden haired princess’s father is Kitsch’s general (Liam Neeson, slumming it even lower than usual) who is so disgusted by his slacking ways that not only won’t he grant permission for them to wed, but he wants to kick the jerk out of the Navy as well. It all comes down to a big round of war games where Kitsch has to find a way to impress papa Neeson to keep his job and his set of boobs. Then, uh-oh — alien spacecraft crash into the water in the middle of the games and suddenly Hitch and the fleet of overwhelmed sea vessels have to find a way to kill enemies from another planet. Don’t worry, they do. It’s that kind of movie.

Now, it’s impossible to believe anyone had high expectations for this flick. All that the undemanding target audience will want are explosions and fast pacing. Had the filmmakers reveled in the inherent stupidity of the material and turned it into a goofy lark, it could have been fun. Instead, everyone seemed to take it very seriously, attempting to craft an advertisement for how awesome the US Navy is, and it’s hard to imagine anyone enjoying that take on the material.

There are a handful of amusing moments that will score laughs (a scene where the heroes fire their rockets blindly while looking at a grid like the original board game, the fact that the alien bullets look just like the Battleship pegs, and a hysterical sequence with geriatric Navy vets marching towards the camera in slow motion like a grey-haired twist on Reservoir Dogs). Had these scenes been intended as parody or camp, it would have been a sign of at least a little creativity or tongue-in-cheek humor from the folks responsible. Unfortunately, they were clearly played straight and the fact that those rounds of non-deliberate laughter were the biggest audience reactions is a very bad sign.

When the best you can get from an audience is mocking laughter at your movie, it’s a failure. Well, Battleship is one big stinking blockbuster failure and not even one that falls into the so-bad-it's-good category. It’s best just to ignore the fact that this movie even exists. You don’t want to encourage the people at Hasbro Films (that’s right, the toy company now has a production wing) to make more of these things. No good can come from that.

The Unwatchable: What to Expect When You’re Expecting

Yet as bad as Battleship is (and trust me, it’s baaaaaaad), somehow What to Expect When You’re Expecting is worse. Based on a popular series of self-help guides to pregnancy, this ensemble “comedy” is kind of like a pregnancy movie value pack. Rather than sitting through one played-out comedic tale of having a baby, you get five. There’s a reality TV fitness guru (Cameron Diaz) who risks complications by pushing herself too hard, a baby-store owner (Elizabeth Banks) finally having her own young 'un who goes through every conceivable complication, a 50-year-old race car driver (Dennis Quaid) having a late inning kid with his 20-something girlfriend, a 20-year-old (Anna Kendrick) knocked up over a one-night stand and forced to face the consequences, and an infertile photographer (Jennifer Lopez) who decides to adopt a baby from Ethiopia.

Between the five curiously aligned pregnancies, no cliché of the genre is left unexplored. You get 'em all at once to save you the trouble of having to watch another pregnancy movie (in a way, it’s almost a public service). Then, in a shrewd attempt to trick guys into entering the theater, there’s a group of dads (led by Chris Rock, Thomas Lennon, and Rob Huebel) who meet in the park for a baby club where they can still be dudes while trying to raise their kids.

That’s a whole lot of plot threads for one movie to handle and just as big of a mess as you’d expect. Trying to stitch all those threads together into a single 110-minute running time guarantees that none of the characters or stories are properly developed. Everything is rushed and every character slots into a well-worn character type. Had the filmmakers taken a goofy sketch comedy approach (like, say, Woody Allen’s Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask did with similar self-help book source material) that wouldn’t really matter and the talented cast could have focused on laughs. But no, director Kirk Jones and company want this to be a sweet and moving tale as well. There’s not enough time for him to pull that off, so we’re stuck with five underwhelming melodramas and a consistent lack of laughs. It’s a bit of a disaster, offering nothing of worth to audiences and is actually a bit depressing to watch, given all of the talented performers who are being wasted simultaneously.

If you were even considering seeing What to Expect When You’re Expecting, for the love of god, don’t do it. This thing is a waste of time with absolutely no redeeming qualities. Harsh? Absolutely, but also true. Please take my advice so that I didn't suffer through this trash in vain.

The Week in Film: The Good, The Bad, and The Norwegian

2012-05-04T16:35:00Z

Summer blockbuster season is officially here. Realistically, there’s only need to discuss one new release this week. The Avengers combines a whole pack of superheroes and is guaranteed to set the bar high for box office totals in the 2012 summer movie season. It’s also a pretty fantastic film for what it’s worth.

Outside of the teen-pleasing superheroes shenanigans, there’s also a movie about old British people retiring in India (The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) and a blood-soaked Danish thriller (Headhunters). Yeah…somehow I think The Avengers is going to beat the competition this week, how about you folks?

The Good: The Avengers

So this is it. The result of Marvel Studio’s four-year master plan of introducing their remaining superhero superstars to the world in movies with the plan of bringing them all together as The Avengers. It was a risky move and I’m thrilled to announce that it paid off in a big, bad way. This all-star comic book mash-up doesn’t just work, it’s possibly the most purely entertaining project that Marvel has cranked out thus far. Sure, there’s not much going on in the movie beyond a sugar rush of giddy entertainment, but in the world of comic book adaptations, isn’t that the goal?

After slipping setup for this epic into Iron Man 2, Thor, and Captain America, the movie hits the ground running. Thor’s jerky brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) arrives on earth via the mysterious powerful cube from Captain America with plans of importing an alien army from another dimension to take over the world. Unfortunately, he forgot about something.

Perpetual movie badass Samuel L. Jackson (wearing an eye patch and thus increasing his badassness tenfold) plays earth’s super-secret special agent who has built up a Rolodex of super-powered friends to call for help. So he brings together special agents Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson showing the kung fu skills we never knew she had) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner with ‘tude to spare), frozen popsicle WW2 hero Captain America (square jawed all-American Chris Evans), billionaire playboy/mechanical suit hero Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr. in full-on wisecracking mode), Loki’s god of a brother Thor (Chrs Hemsworth, also a god to the ladies), and a certain scientist named Bruce Banner with the gamma-ray knowledge the group needs and a certain internal green monster that they could use (Mark Ruffalo, joking and emoting his way into finally giving us a definitive big screen version of The Hulk). The team assembles, they bicker and fight, and then come together to save the world in a New City smackdown that every subsequent blockbuster this summer will struggle to top.

That’s a heck of a lot of characters for one movie to juggle, but fortunately Marvel’s smartest decision was to hand that task over the writer/director Joss Whedon (Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Firefly). With his TV background, Whedon knows how to juggle multiple characters and narrative threads, masterfully pulling this team together. His geek credentials ensure he loves all the characters equally and gives them all a chance to shine (particularly Ruffalo’s movie-stealing Hulk and Scar-Jo’s Black Widow, now the latest in a long line of Whedon’s tough-as-nails girl heroes). His sense of humor also infuses the blockbuster, turning The Avengers into a dysfunctional family with more laughs than most comedies.

Downey and company provide clever characterization and smackdowns in equal measure and even though the movie weighs in at a hefty 140 minutes, so much wonderful writing, acting, and action fills that time that you’ll never feel it (your bladder might, but you’ll just have to learn self-control, won’t you?). We really couldn’t expect a better Avengers movie than this. Marvel’s big gamble paid off and now they face the even more difficult task of trying to top this movie with sequels.

The Avengers instantly qualifies as one of the finest superhero romps ever made and probably one of the greatest summer blockbusters around, for that matter. If you feel like popcorn entertainment this weekend, buckle up and enjoy the ride. We’ll be lucky if even one other blockbuster this summer is as good.

The Bad: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Opening the same week as The Avengers is another epic team-up of sorts. This one will play for a slightly different crowd though. No tights or spandex here — it’s a coalition of British thespian types like Judi Dench, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy, Penelope Wilton, and Maggie Smith. Director John Madden’s (no relation) mash-up is about a group of disparate British retirees who decide to movie to India for their autumn years due to a lack of funds.

They all have their own reasons, like surgery (Smith), dot com investment disasters (Nighy/Wilton), discovering a past secret (Wilkinson), or just good, old-fashioned poverty (Dench). Of course, they’re all vaguely disgusted by their new tea-and-biscuits-free environment but gradually learn to be seduced by India’s charms. Sounds like a lay-up gentle comedy that would be impossible to screw up, right? Well…

There’s no doubt in my mind that the intentions behind The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel were pure. The problem is that the movie is dripping with a certain kind of distinctly British racism that’s impossible to ignore. It’s not hateful or spiteful racism like the kind we see in the good ol’ US of A from time to time. No, it’s more condescending, that British colonial view of other cultures as cute, but woefully misguided and in need of a little British order to run their country properly. Indian locals are presented as nice people burdened with every possible cultural stereotype from funny accents to deceitful behavior, overbearing mothers, and even call center jobs. It’s an embarrassingly outdated and naïve view of the country that’s undeniably offensive, even if it’s doled out in a gentle side-door manner that many audience members won’t notice.

Now, with a cast that good the movie obviously isn’t without its moments. Madden is able to tease plenty of enjoyable banter out of his actors, shoot some postcard footage of India, and wrap things up in a heartwarming manner. The problem is that he and everyone else are clearly going through the motions. I can’t imagine anyone was under the delusion they were making something special and clearly signed up for a paycheck and a free trip to India. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel isn’t the worst movie ever made, but it is racist twaddle made by elitists who should know better. A good movie to take an elderly relative to if you run out of conversation over the weekend, but even then you might want to sneak into The Avengers while they are placated by the grey-haired escapism.

The Norwegian: Headhunters

Finally if The Avengers gets you so riled up that you feel like another slice of big screen thrills 'n' escapism this week, then you’ll want to check out Headhunters. Admittedly, Norway isn’t exactly a country known for its action/thrillers, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t filmmakers out there who can shift plenty of popcorn when given the chance. Adapted from a best selling novel by Jo Nesbø, Headhunters is an expertly plotted and darkly comedic thriller in the vein of an early Coen brothers effort. It works so well that an American remake is already underway even though it’s hard to imagine Hollywood possibly topping this version.

The film stars Aksel Hennie as Roger Brown, a corporate recruiter (or headhunter) who moonlights as an art thief/forger by stealing his clients' collections to maintain his ludicrously successful lifestyle and please his trophy wife. Unfortunately, he bites off a little more than he can chew when targeting Game Of Thrones’ Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, a ex-military hit man and surveillance expert (or headhunter—see what they did with the title?). Things very quickly spiral out of control for Brown when he inadvertently enters a game of cat and mouse with a master and has to swim through literal rivers of sh*t to find salvation.

Commercial director Morten Tyldum clearly loves this sort of material and has a ball misdirecting the audience with his twisting tale. Tyldum switches genres and tones at will, starting with a slick heist movie before turning it into a gritty revenge movie. All the while, he constantly winks at the audience with a sick streak of humor while torturing the fantastic actor Hennie. Filled with nudity, violence, and excrement, this is not a movie for the squeamish and is definitely geared to an adult audience.

Thankfully, it’s also geared to the intellect of an adult audience as well, offering plenty of movie thrills in a handsome package that actually requires some intellectual engagement amidst the entertainment. This is one hell of a ride that should bring plenty of the cast and crew over to Hollywood. Don’t be scared off by the subtitles. Headhunters might not be able to match the scale of a summer blockbuster, but it can definitely match the escapist entertainment value. Don’t miss out, this thing won’t be in theaters for long.

The Week in Film: The Good, The Overlong, and The Raven

2012-04-27T13:40:00Z

Next week summer blockbuster season officially kicks off with the release of The Avengers, so this weekend is packed with the final glut of spring movies before popcorn n’ explosions take over the multiplex. In theory that should mean that we’re getting stuck with a dump truck full of twaddle getting little more than a cursory run on screens before disappearing into Netflix obscurity, but truthfully it’s not a bad week at the movies.

First up the latest Aardman Animation project The Pirates! A Band Of Misfits has been released, which is always a cause for celebration (especially if you’re tired of taking your children to disposable family film trash). Then there’s the latest Judd Apatow-produced joint The Five-Year Engagement and the pulpy Edgar Allan Poe thriller The Raven, both of which offer exactly what you’d expect from the trailers and are only mildly disappointing at worst.

All three are surprisingly strong films, so I suppose that worst case scenario, at least you’ve got three solid back-up choices if The Avengers is sold out during your pilgrimage to the multiplex next week.

The Good: The Pirates! A Band Of Misfits

Along with Studio Ghibli and Pixar, the lovable chaps at Aardman can be consistently counted on to deliver animated entertainment boasting the finest possible technical quality and wonderfully clever writing geared to all ages. Through features like Chicken Run and their multi-Oscar winging Wallace And Gromit shorts, Aardman has developed a charming house visual style and a distinctly British sense of humor guaranteed to please the most cynical of adults as much as the most ADD-addled of children and The Pirates! A Band Of Misfits is no exception. Five years in the making, it’s one of the most ambitious stop motion films ever attempted, filled with action spectacle, countless eccentric characters, and more jokes crammed in per minute than should legally be allowed to pummel an audience.

Based on a popular series of UK YA novels by Gideon Dafoe, the film is about the amusingly Hugh Grant-voiced Captain Pirate who sails the seas with a crew of lovable morons. They are probably the least successful pirates around, but the captain’s ego knows no bounds and he decides to run for the “Pirate Of The Year Award” despite being unqualified to do so.

An adventure then kicks off involving Charles Darwin, Queen Victoria, as well as a feuding Jane Austin and The Elephant Man. As those references suggest, there’s plenty of humor in the film geared for the grownups in the crowd, but the jokes and plot twists comes so fast and furiously that kids will never be scratching their heads for too long.

Aardman founder Peter Lord directs, shooting the movie like a blockbuster swashbuckler, with massive sequences that must have taken months to shoot in stop motion and yet never brushing aside the simple pleasures of plot and characterization. A voice cast led by Grant, Martin Freeman, David Tennant, Jeremy Piven, and Brian Blessed provide consistently hilarious performances perfectly matched by the goofily designed puppets and silky-smooth animation.

It might not be a film offering insight into the human condition, but it does offer unrelenting entertainment that will have any viewer giggling with delight until the credits role. Like all of Aardman’s stop-motion output, this is pure movie pleasure. Oh and it’s also in 3D, but the plastic glasses add very little, so don’t feel like you have to seek out that expensive and useless format to get the full enjoyment of the flick.

The Overlong: The Five-Year Engagement

This summer’s first product from the unstoppable Judd Apatow comedy factory is The Five-Year Engagement. It’s the latest film by Jason Segal and his writer/directing buddy Nicholas Stoller who previously cranked out Forgetting Sarah Marshall together and co-wrote The Muppets. As you’d expect based on Marshall, it’s a romantic comedy that wears heartbreak and embarrassment on its sleeve.

This time Segal’s character is a little more lucky in love, but no less troubled. He plays a San Francisco sous chef on the rise recently engaged to a beautiful British export (the absurdly adorable Emily Blunt) who is attempting to complete her doctorate in behavioral psychology. Their engagement is awkwardly charming, but the wedding is endlessly delayed.

First it’s pushed back so that Blunt’s recently preggers sister (Alison Brie) can have a romantic shotgun wedding with Segal’s dude’s dude best friend (Chris Pratt). Then it’s delayed so that Blunt can move to Michigan to complete her education. Then it’s delayed because Segal becomes a bearded and depressed mess when forced to make sandwiches in Michigan (not exactly the culinary capital of the world). Additional delays pile on, countless comedians steal scenes in small roles, and eventually it rushes towards an inevitable rom-com climax.

Now, all Apatow supervised comedies are fairly slow and ambling to allow the cast to expand the laughs through improvisation, but The Five-Year Engagement really pushes that quality past the breaking point. Perhaps comic actors know now that a good scene-stealing turn in an Apatow-joint can jump start a career and really draw their scenes out. The film is consistently funny with guys like Brian Posehn and Chris Parnell getting big laughs in supporting roles, but as a result the whole thing drags on for far too long, way past the point of being enjoyably ambling.

Part of the problem is the over-stuffed cast of scene-stealers, part of it is the fact that the movie is about endless delays that are deliberately annoying, and part of it is a result of the Segal/Stoller comedy style that extends every scene for the sake of awkward comedy. All the factors combine for a comedy that feels like a marathon viewing session at only two hours. It’s still sweetly heartfelt and funny, it just becomes a bit tough to sit through by the time the third act couple-separation sets in.

I can’t help but feel that the movie would have been immeasurably improved by one last trip to the editing room to sheer out 15-20 minutes, even if laughs and cameos were lost in the process. Part of the Apatow comedy brand is a rambling, shaggy-dog structure and The Five-Year Engagement pushes that too far, testing audiences’ patience. I’m sure it will still be a date movie success, but it won’t be the Bridesmaids-style smash that everyone involved was clearly hoping for.

The Raven

There’s a long history between Edgar Allan Poe and the movies, from arty adaptations to exploitative schlock. The Raven falls more into the latter category, which isn’t necessarily a problem. While Poe may have been a poet and a literary genius, he did also produce some of the most lurid pulp stories of his time.

Based on a graphic novel (and very much feeling like it with all the silly pulp excess), The Raven is set during the final weeks of Poe’s life. However, contrary to historical records, he apparently spent that time tracking down a serial killer who was offing his victims in ways ripped out of Poe’s writing. Yeah, it’s completely daffy, but you know what? It’s also a great deal of fun if you can turn your brain off long enough to enjoy it.

V For Vendetta’s James McTeigue directs with the same glossy, shadowy style he picked up from his mentors The Wachowski Brothers (The Matrix). No gory set piece passes without a gloriously over-the-top camera move lingering on the violence, which is entirely appropriate for this sort of thing.

A cast of vaguely embarrassed British character actors all play their roles with their tongues appropriately in their cheek as does Cusack…well, for the most part. The main issue with The Raven is that the filmmakers clearly weren’t comfortable in completely embracing the inherent silliness of the project and that’s most evident in Cusack’s performance. At times he’s vamping it up with an almost Nic Cage abandon, while in other scenes he plays things curiously straight, digging for emotion and insight into Poe’s life that just isn’t there.

In the end, Cusack’s performance and the film as whole are perfectly adequate, but only because the mishmash movie ultimately favors pop excess over misplaced earnestness. Had the entire project been played to the rafters for goofy laughs with Cusack wearing ridiculous prosthetics to make him look more like Poe (or better yet had Nic Cage taken the role) this could have been a hell of a lot of fun. Instead, the whole thing is kind of a mess, but still a fun mess at least.

It’s very reminiscent of that ol’ Jack The Ripper graphic novel adaptation From Hell. The visual design is dead on and the cast is right, it’s just all marred by a tonally inconsistent script that never quite comes together. Still worth seeing if the subject matter interests you and you don’t mind a little excessive bloodshed. But the lower your expectations are when you enter the theater, the better.

The Week in Film: The Good, The Efron, and The Chimp

2012-04-20T15:55:00Z

Well, folks, I wish I could tell you that this week’s column was dedicated entirely to some strange new movie called "The Efron and The Chimp." Yep, that’d sure be nice, but unfortunately that would also be little more than a fantasy. You see, the two major releases slipping onto screens this week are a terrible Zac Efron-starring love story and a boring Disney documentary about chimpanzees.

Fortunately, not all is lost. One of the great forgotten voices of the '90s American indie film landscape has also returned. If you don’t know the name Whit Stillman, then you’re in for a treat with Damsels in Distress. If you do know the name, then you’re in for an even bigger treat because it’s his first movie in 14 years. Thank god ol’ Whit came back to us this week. The other two releases are enough to make you want to give up on movies in general.

The Good: Damsels in Distress

It’s tough to classify any movie made by writer/director Whit Stillman. The guy specializes in comedies about deeply unhappy but privileged people. They are sophisticated, dialogue-driven movies set in smoking rooms and filled with hyper-articulate discussions about little more than inflating his characters’ egos. His films feel like comedies written in the '30s and '40s that just happen to come out today.

In the '90s, the likes of Metropolitan and The Last Days of Disco felt like nothing else and unfortunately made very little money despite a passionate fan base of snobs and lovers of snob-mockery. As a result, the guy hasn’t been able to get a movie made for over a decade. Many wondered if he had retired, but unfortunately his absence from screens wasn’t voluntary. However, the recent success of similar movies by filmmakers like Wes Anderson have created a market where a Stillman project seemed miraculously profitably again and now he’s finally returned with easily his most purely enjoyable movie to date.

Damsels in Distress follows a group of impossibly prim 'n' proper college girls at an unnamed campus that recently went coed. Brain dead frat boys rule the school, but Violet (Greta Gerwig) and her team of budding debutantes are here to help. They send colorfully packaged deodorant to frat houses, host a suicide prevention center with free doughnuts and dance lessons, date dirty boys to elevate their social standing, and work on creating a new dance craze. They’re snobs, but well-intentioned snobs, and Stillman always presents them in a silly enough light to prevent that snobbery from becoming grating.

There are subplots involving heartbreak and scandal, but really the movie (like all of Stillman’s work) is more about creating complicated, intellectually brilliant, but emotionally stunted (or vice versa) characters and watching their fragile worlds unravel — you know, the things good comedies are made of.

Stillman’s movies definitely aren’t for everyone. You won’t see any action scenes or grand emotional arcs. No, his movies are about the simple pleasures of well-crafted characters battling and connecting through stylized dialogue. For fans of those often ignored techniques, it’s a joy to watch his eccentric stories unfold. While his previous movies featured a more cynical touch and harsher characters that alienated some viewers, Damsels in Distress is a more purely pleasurable comedy, albeit one written by and for folks who dabbled in undergrad literature courses. It might not be as dark and insightful a film as Metropolitan, but what Stillman loses in subtext he more than makes up for in laughs.

If you’re someone who enjoys Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach, or mumblecore movies, Damsels in Distress is a pure joy to experience and a must-see. If those qualifiers meant nothing, it might not be fore you, but it’s definitely worth a shot. As long as you aren’t weaned purely on the Adam Sandler school of comedy, it’s hard to imagine hating Stillman’s long awaited return to literate farce.

The Efron: The Lucky One

Thanks to the success of gag-inducing romantic cheese like Dear John and A Walk to Remember we now have to sit through The Lucky One. Nicholas Sparks’s cornball bestsellers are becoming a bit of a franchise these days and unfortunately for guys in relationships, they make movie date nights almost unbearable. Not a moment of these movies feels real, yet the target audience seems to eat it up. So we keep getting at least one vaguely conservative Sparks melodrama in theaters every year and aside from the changing casts, they are almost indistinguishable.

This one is about a soldier returning from Iraq with a photo of a beautiful woman that he found on the battlefield and used as a good luck charm. He eventually walks across the country in search of the woman, he finds her, and they fall in love. Of course, he never reveals the secret about why he came to town. A jealous ex-husband will have to do that for him, leading to a momentary split for the couple until the woman realizes that she’s pissed over an impossibly romantic act. Ho-hum. Who cares? Not a second of the story is believable or even interesting.

Movies like The Lucky One exist purely to make single women go “awwwww” and make women in relationships irritated at their partners for being human beings rather than soft-spoken, handsome fantasies. It would be nice if everyone could objectively see this movie as manipulative, predictable trash, but sadly that ain’t going to happen. There’s a built-in audience for this swill and it will make money.

The only thing that might help matters is the fact that Zac Efron’s one-note performance is particularly excruciating. He stares off into he distance looking vaguely upset whether he’s in danger, courting the love of his life, or just lazing around the house. The guy does some pretty embarrassing “acting,” but at least he can blame the source material that gave him nothing to work with.

Do yourself a favor and don’t see this movie. Just watch the trailer, get that warm fuzzy feeling, and then dedicate two hours to watching a romantic movie about actual human relationships. All the Nicholas Sparks movies offer are two hours of human mannequins staring into each other’s eyes and expressing love with dollar store greeting card sentiments. Sure, that’s what the Twilight movies are like as well, but at least they’ve got vampires. That ain’t much, but it’s something.

The Chimp: Chimpanzee

Earth Day is comin’ up fast, so that means it’s time for another nature documentary from the good folks at Disney. Back in the ancient days of 2007-2008, that meant theatrical versions of the remarkable BBC series Planet Earth and Oceans. Those projects were lovingly crafted for so long that the filmmakers captured stunning nature photography from around the world practically designed for big screen consumption. They were hits and now Disney cranks out a new nature documentary every damn year. The trouble is when the subject is a single species and the film is produced on a tight schedule, the results are nowhere near as impressive as a glob-trotting romp years in the making.

This year Disney decided to capitalize on the world’s love of monkeys with Chimpanzee. The result is pretty well exactly what you’d expect. Filmmakers shot a bunch of chimps being cute. Some of the footage (particularly of an alpha male adopting an orphaned chimp) is undeniably impressive, but there just isn’t enough material to force a feature length running time. To make up for it, Tim Allen was hired to provide constant voiceover, awkwardly forcing a narrative onto the movie, anthropomorphizing the animals to a ludicrous degree, and adding in a couple of terrible jokes. The end result is about as manipulative as a Disney cartoon, which really doesn’t work in the documentary form.

I suppose little kiddies will probably enjoy Chimpanzee thanks to the forced narrative, but parents will be rolling their eyes. It makes perfect sense that Disney would set their highly profitable, anthropomorphizing sights on nature documentaries now that there’s a doc market at the multiplex, but it doesn’t make it less annoying. There’s really no reason for this movie to be in a theater and not on the Discovery Channel. Perhaps Disney set the bar too high with Earth and Oceans. Their single species docs like Wild Cats and Chimpanzee aren’t even close to being as enjoyable or suited to theatrical exhibition.

Hopefully the poor box office results for Wild Cats and the inevitably poor box office results for Chimpanzee will encourage the Disney Nature doc team to aim a little higher next time. Considering the money and resources at their disposal, they should be capable of more than this.

The Week in Film: The Good, The Bad, and The Stooges

2012-04-13T20:50:00Z

This week at the movies may as well be called “Attack of the Bs.” With the start of summer blockbuster season mere weeks away, this week offers a collection of medium budget B-movies that studios cranked out alongside the $100 million moneymakers. The good news is all three major releases offer good, old-fashioned, trashy fun.

First up, there’s a new meta-horror classic in Cabin in the Woods that should have a cult fan base by Monday. Then there’s the latest trashy Luc Besson action flick Lockout that’s just as good/bad as explosion-loving audiences will want. Finally, if you like your on-screen violence a little more silly and focused on the groin, then the slapstick-loving Farrelly brothers have whipped up an update of The Three Stooges that is far better than it has any right to be.

As long as you aren’t expecting more the B-grade fun, it’s hard to imagine you won’t have a good time at the theater with one of these options. Your brain won’t be tested much, but if you’re looking for mindless escape, you’re all set.

The Good: Cabin in the Woods

Cabin in the Woods is an incredibly hard movie to review, because it’s one of the rare recent films to slip onto screens without a trailer spoiling every surprise. Even the first scene is completely unexpected and promises a different film than most people should suspect when entering the theater.

Yes, the main plot thread involves a collection of 20-something horror movie archetypes (the jock, the ditz, the stoner, the prude, etc) marching out to certain doom in a rural cabin, but that’s only half of what the film is about. There’s another element that cleverly allows co-writer/director Drew Goddard and co-writer/producer Joss Whedon (longtime collaborators stretching back to Buffy the Vampire Slayer) to cleverly examine and poke fun at the horror movie clichés they gleefully employ in the A plot.

Yeah, I know that’s a very vague description, but honestly, this is a movie that benefits from knowing as little as possible in advance. You will get all the grisly fun expected from a “cabin in the woods” horror movie, but presented in a smartly tongue-in-cheek manner that is absolutely hilarious. Quite honestly, this is easily one of the finest horror movies released in the last decade and one that should please genre fans as well as people who don’t generally like horror movies. Goddard proves to be an expert wielder of suspense, gore, and jump scares as well as a movie geek smartypants capable of film school deconstruction and gut-busting belly laughs.

The flick was sadly caught up in MGM’s collapse and sat on the shelf for two years, generating a mythical status amongst horror fans who wondered if they’re ever get to see it. The good news is that the hype is justified and the movie is worth the wait. Now, let’s just hope that audiences can tear themselves away from The Hunger Games long enough to make Cabin in the Woods a box office hit.

We need more smart genre movies like this and talented filmmakers like Goddard need to rake in actual cash money rather than just cult appeal to keep working. If you only see one movie this week, make it Cabin in the Woods. I know this review didn’t exactly offer many details as to why that’s the case, but trust me. Once you’ve experienced the bizarre surprises for yourself, you’ll thank me for keeping the secrets.

The Bad: Lockout

Speaking of smart genre movies that attempt to revitalize the genre, here’s a project that couldn’t be farther away from achieving that goal. Lockout is an action movie you’ve seen before in countless iterations. It takes the “one man vs insurmountable odds” conceit from action classics like Die Hard and plays it out to the letter. Specifically, the film is an unofficial remake of Escape from New York, only in space.

The president’s daughter is trapped in a futuristic space station prison that has been taken over by the particularly violent and insane inmates. Only one man could possibly save her, a recent police captive named Snow who speaks entirely in one-liners and is involved with some sort of government conspiracy that requires a chat with one of the space prisoners to sort out. So Snow is shot into space to save the president's daughter. Do you think he’ll succeed? Have you seen an action movie before?

Lockout comes from the French action movie factory run by Luc Besson. The guy directed some bona fide action movie masterpieces in the '80s and '90s like La Femme Nikita and The Professional, but over the last 10-15 years he’s given up on directing. Now he merely comes up with action movie concepts, hands them off to cheap 'n' inexperienced writers/directors, hires a B-level celebrity to star, and collects the profits. That’s the good ol’ Roger Corman school of exploitation filmmaking and certainly Besson’s Eurotrash action movies can always be counted on for lurid entertainment, occasionally producing a gem (District B13) and often shitting out swill (From Paris with Love).

Besson’s Lockout at least boasts slick production values, an amusing lead performance from Guy Pearce, and moves along at a frenetic pace. However, it’s also pure paint-by-numbers action filmmaking offering no surprises, a terribly wooden performance from lady lead Maggie Grace, and some of the worst sub-sitcom one-liners you’ll ever hear. Simply put, it’s forgettable B-movie trash. Now, that’s what most action movies are and the flick definitely delivers on the meager promises of the premise and poster. If you go in with suitably low expectations, you at least won’t be bored. It’s just that nothing about the movie makes it distinct enough to stick in your memory for longer than five consecutive seconds.

If you’re looking for an action film that will forcibly shut down your brain for 90 minutes and blow things up real good, I suppose Lookout is enjoyable enough. It’s just not original, interesting or even particularly well made. But then few action flicks are, I suppose.

The Stooges: The Three Stooges

In theory a Three Stooges reboot shouldn’t work. In fact, it should be an embarrassment. Yet with the folks who filled Cameron Diaz’s hair with semen and gave Jeff Daniels explosive diarrhea in charge, it’s undeniably hilarious. The Farrelly Brothers have been nursing this Stooges update along for almost a decade as their dream project.

While it would have been nice to see what the hell it would have been like to have Benicio Del Toro, Sean Penn, and Jim Carrey in the iconic roles as was once rumored, the impressions by Sean Hayes, Chris Diamantopoulos, and Will Sasso are so mind-bogglingly perfect, it’s hard to complain. A lot of love clearly went into this project about three grown men smacking each other silly (it’s even broken up into three shorts with title cards like the good old days) and fans of the Stooges should giggle with delight while everyone else will remain as confused by their appeal as ever.

The threadbare plot sees Larry, Curly, and Moe try to save their childhood orphanage by raising $800,000 and end up in the midst of an absurd murder plot. It’s completely disposable, but then the Stooges were never exactly known for tight plotting. The Farrellys also surround the three leads with some big comedy talent like Larry David and Jane Lynch (both amusingly playing nuns) and everyone involved embraces the sweet tone and cartoon exaggeration of the film.

A few current pop culture references fall flat and reek of studio interference (and the prominent placement of those gags in the trailer confirms that and was a big mistake), but enough of the slapstick gags hit hard enough to make up for the comedy whiffs. This is easily the best thing the Farrellys have made in years, ditching their desire to match a love story with gross-out gags that ruined many of their movies in the 2000s. It’s all infantile and idiotic, but at least unapologetic about it.

This is 90 minutes of bad taste comedy violence at its finest, guaranteed to make anyone with a guilty love of bathroom humor and the “man-fall-down-go-boom” school of comedy keel over in hysterics. If you’ve long dreamed of seeing a dolphin spit a peanut out of its blowhole straight into a lion’s nutsack, your prayers have been answered.

The Week In Film: The Good, The Not That Bad, and The Hunter

2012-04-06T02:30:00Z

Unfortunately there are no great movies coming out this week that you’ll want to trample old women and children to see. However, there aren’t any turds that will make you question why you even bothered going to the theater in the first place.

Whether you decide you feel like seeing Lee Hirsch’s documentary Bully, the belated sequel American Reunion, or the Willem Dafoe thriller The Hunter, it’s hard to imagine you’ll be soul-crushingly disappointed. All three movies at least deliver on their meager ambitions and offer a decent way to kill 90 minutes.

Of course you could also go and see the reissue of Titanic in 3D as well, but in that case you’d be an insane person and I’d prefer that you not read this column. No, that’s too harsh. You can still read it, but please try to start spending your time and money on better movies. Come on!

The Good: Bully

Lee Hirsch’s documentary Bully has received a lot of press over the last few weeks over battles with the MPAA and justifiably so. The ratings board objects to the most potent scene in the film where an unfortunate middle school student named Alex is beaten and relentlessly mocked on the school bus using a variety of offensive terms. It’s a devastating scene that along with the movie as a whole should be mandatory viewing for young kids and teens to properly understand the bullying epidemic.

Yet, since the MPAA feels that kids should not be exposed to the swears that those kids themselves are using, they won’t be able to unless they are able to find a theater showing the movie unrated. It’s a ridiculous controversy that should call into question the validity of the MPAA, but at least has drawn some attention to this wonderful little movie.

Bully follows a collection of kids who are targets for hallway harassment. There’s Kelby, a lesbian in the Bible belt who was mocked relentlessly even by her teachers. There’s Ja’Maya, who was so frustrated by her treatment that she brought her mother’s handgun onto her school bus. And then there are a few suffering families whose youngsters committed suicide as a result of bullying.

All the stories are gut-punch powerful, but the most potent and pertinent subject is Alex, a middle schooler from Iowa who on the good days is called “fish face” by his peers and on the bad days is beaten and strangled. Hirsch followed Alex long enough to actually capture some of this abuse on camera and it’s almost impossible to watch. He’s such a nice and optimistic kid, but due to his physical appearance and social issues, just leaving the house guarantees mockery and beatings.

Now, bullying is obviously not a new phenomenon, but it is something routinely accepted as a fact of life. Hirsch offers no solutions in his movie, he merely gives the victims a voice and shows their torment in excruciating detail. The most upsetting moments in the film come when Hirsch captures the assistant principal in Alex’s school refusing to acknowledge that the bullying even exists until she’s confronted with the footage directly. Is there a solution to that kind of “out of sight, out of mind” thinking? I don’t know and the film certainly doesn’t offer anything beyond sentiments like “be nice to each other, kiddies.” That’s kind of the problem with Bully. It captures abuse and makes the audience feel for the victims, but offers little hope and makes no attempt to explore the causes and mindsets of bullies themselves.

Hirsch’s approach is a bit one-note and given the widespread attention the film is bringing to the issue, it doesn’t feel like the full examination the subject deserves. Still, what Hirsch does accomplish works well enough and makes the documentary a must-see for parents and children everywhere. This is a film that will inevitably become mandatory school viewing and with the powerful Weinstein Company behind it, should get into the Oscar race next February as well.

The Not That Bad: American Reunion

Thirteen years after Jason Biggs made sweet love to the finest diner dessert around, the whole gang has returned for American Reunion. While it may seem odd that a teen sex comedy would get a sequel with the cast sliding through their 30s, the result actually isn’t that bad. With Seth Rogen and company having ushered in a new era of R-rated sex comedies about grown men behaving like adolescents, the belated sequel actually has an established slot to fill at the multiplex. And thanks to Universal hiring Harold And Kumar creators Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg to write the script and fill the director’s chair, there are actually quite a few laughs to be had. The only downside is that the entire cast returned and only half of the players were ever really funny.

The concept is as simple as it gets: the gang returns for their high school reunion. Biggs and his band camp life partner (Alyson Hannigan) now have a child to catch them in embarrassing sexual situations. Eugene Levy is now a widower looking for lovin’ in the arms of the original MILF, Stifler’s Mom (and with Levy and Jennifer Coolidge having worked together in Christopher Guest movies, they’re quite a team). Finch (Eddie Thomas) is now a world-weary traveler and Seann William Scott’s iconic dink Stifler is an underachiever pining for high school.

All of those characters still have some surprising juice left in them, and with solid comedy performers playing the roles, the movie delivers quite a few hilarious set pieces. Unfortunately, lesser talents like Chris Klein, Tara Reid, and Thomas Nicholas are also back. They were voids of talent on the first go round, there purely for love stories since the other characters are too neurotic and messed up for conventional relationships. While those actors were decent exposition deliverers as cute teens, they are comedy killers as adults and all their romantic entanglements do is slow the movie to a crawl.

Thankfully Hurwtiz and Schlossberg at least know those characters are useless and rush through their stories as quickly as possible. As long as Biggs is getting caught in compromising sexual situations with a teen he used to babysit or Stifler is getting Levy trashed to try and hook him up with some “vag” (Levy’s response: “in my day we called it beaver and let me tell you, I got quite a few pelts”) there are enough laughs to make the movie bearable. The directors even toss their Harold And Kumar buddy John Cho a bone by giving his MILF-loving side character a bigger role as a sleazeball running the high school reunion and he’s possibly the funniest thing in the movie.

American Reunion is little more than an insubstantial sex comedy that thrives on nostalgia for a franchise that was never that interesting to begin with. Taken with the lowered expectations that the fourth American Pie movie deserves, the thing is pretty funny. It’s not a classic by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s better than it should have been. If for some reason you’re dying to see a return from the American Pie gang, it’s hard to imagine you’ll leave disappointed. Well… that is unless fading memory has somehow confused you into thinking the original American Pie was a masterpiece. They were always just competent sex comedies and this new edition is at least on par with what came before.

The Hunter

If you don’t like Willem Dafoe, then it’s not worth checking out The Hunter. The character actor is in almost every frame of the new Australian thriller and thankfully the guy has the screen presence to pull it off. Dafoe plays a high-end animal hunting mercenary (because apparently those exist) who is hired by a mysterious company to head to Tasmania in search of a rare tiger recently spotted in the region. Once there, Dafoe shacks up with a broken family and plays Daddy since the father went missing recently searching for the same animal.

Out of work locals (led by the always fantastic Sam Neill) don’t take too kindly to the American boy coming to town to take their jobs and start harassing him. At first, it takes the form of drive-by verbal abuse, then his car is vandalized, and gradually he starts to feel like his life is in danger and possibly even the lives of the surrogate family he's staying with.

This is one of those “hunter becomes the hunted” flicks that starts to turn into a vaguely existential crisis as it slowly marches towards its conclusion. Dafoe seems calm and content while setting traps and seeking the animal, but his life is much more tumultuous whenever he returns to society. Whether it’s harassment from locals or the creepy comfort zone he’s slipping into with the family, the hunter never quite seems as comfortable with people as he does tracking down animals in the wild.

Dafoe is, of course, excellent, his grizzled features suggesting a pained back story and inner life whenever he marches through the woods alone. Australian TV director Daniel Nettheim also does a good job of gradually building up tension and paranoia to a fever pitch as the movie meanders towards an inevitably tragic climax.

Unfortunately while all that waiting and build-up suggests the film is going somewhere big (whether it be a meaningful last minute plot twist or some sort of journey into insanity on Dafoe’s part), nothing much happens. The story ends on the downbeat note we expect, but never seems to offer much sense of closure or meaning for the suspense-filled venture. The Hunter is still an interesting film, just a somewhat empty experience.

The intense build-up will keep you glued to the screen, but without much of a the thematic or narrative payoff to speak of, you might wander out of the theater muttering, “What was all that about?” For Willem Dafoe junkies it’s still a must-see as the man manages to be captivating even when nothing of note is happening. For everyone else, The Hunter remains an intriguing thriller geared to adults with some fantastic sequences. It just doesn’t add up to anything special.

The Week In Film: The Goon, The Bad, and The Ugly

2012-03-30T12:15:00Z

It’s a rough week at the movies, folks. Knowing what a massive hit Hunger Games was destined to be, the studios have decided to dump to crappy blockbusters they probably predicted would fail (Wrath of the Titans and Mirror Mirror) and for some reason re-release Titanic in 3D. That’s a pretty ugly batch of Hollywood releases to consider, but the good news is there’s a small, vulgar, and violent hockey comedy also coming out that’s actually quite good.

So, unless you feel like being disappointed by big budget bombs, the best way to go is with an R-rated sports comedy. Sure, it’s not the ideal choice, but it’s just one of those crappy weeks at the movies, folks. Sorry. Wish that wasn’t true. Sigh…

The Goon

The best movie slipping onto screens this week arrives with little fanfare. It’s a blood-soaked hockey comedy that revels in the violence of sport like the genre classic Slapshot. Seann William Scott stars as a player on the typical sports movie rise-to-glory track. However, he’s not a talent worthy of a high draft pick. Nope, he’s a rather daft innocent who has worked as a bouncer for most of his life because his greatest gifts are his ability to dole out violence and take a punch without a flinch.

His talents are noticed by his hockey blogging buddy (Jay Baruchel, who also co-wrote the script with Seth Rogen’s screenwriting partner Evan Goldberg), who helps him get a gig in the minor leagues. Of course, Scott can’t even skate but that doesn’t matter. His rise to minor league hockey glory has nothing to do with scoring goals. He’s just there to dole out hockey’s special brand violence that makes the crowd cheer. Amusingly, the movie doesn’t build to a championship win or an inspiring rise to professional glory. Nope, it all builds to Scott duking it out with an aging French Canadian ass-kicking hockey legend hilariously played by Liev Schreiber.

Goon is one of those “men behaving badly” comedies filled with saucy language, comically excessive violence, and all manner of substance abuse (my favorite line: “I only have two rules: Don’t touch my f*cking percocets and have you got any f*cking percocets”). But, with the film directed by Fubar veteran Michael Dowse, there’s also a little heart without ever dipping into sentimentality. Scott is given a love interest in the absolutely adorable Alison Pill (sure to become a star in a few years if there’s any justice in this world). She’s a violence-loving hockey groupie who gives the lovable loser something to look forward to without ever distracting from the comedy. The sweetest and most romantic exchange in the movie is when Pil admits, “You make me want to stop sleeping with a bunch of guys” and Scott replies, “That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.”

Goon is a raunchy sports comedy that wears its R-rating as a badge of honor and it’s also probably the best sports movie (full stop) to come along in years. Though the film won’t break box office records, it’s guaranteed to become a cult classic, filling locker rooms with knowing laughter for decades. If you only make one trip to the theaters this weekend and don’t mind being offended, run to Goon. Sneaking beer into the theater along with you isn’t required, but it ain’t a bad idea either.

The Bad: Wrath of the Titans

So this is what the blockbuster movie market has come to — cashing in with sequels to remakes. Clash of the Titans made just enough money for Warner Brothers to crank out a perfunctory sequel and that’s exactly what audiences will be getting this weekend. Wrath of the Titans is the product of high paid Hollywood studio employees going through the motions. The script recycles the formula of the last movie almost scene-by-scene, the actors appear bored, and even the giant CGI monsters that will be selling tickets look like they were cranked out without much thought. It’s a movie made on autopilot that’s sure to bore audiences just as much as it clearly bored the filmmakers.

Sam Worthington makes a return as Perseus, giving one of his patented personality-free performances that could have been played just as effectively as by one of his carboard cutouts left over from the Clash of the Titans marketing campaign. He’s now a daddy in ancient Greece who has sworn off fighting monsters. Unfortunately his daddy Zeus (Liam Neeson) is in a bit of a pickle, which draws Perseus out of retirement. You see, that pesky Hades (Ralph Fiennes) is back and plans to resurrect the fire-powered supermonster Kronos by draining Zeus of his powers.

The only thing that can stop Kronos is a super-duper-mega-weapon made by combining several regular old super-weapons like Poseidon’s trident. So, Perseus sets out on a new quest along with a fresh love interest (the gorgeous Rosamund Pike as Queen Andromeda) and a comic relief ragamuffin (Toby Kebbell’s Agenor, who is at least supposed to be funny). Along the way they meet eccentric side characters and of course fight giant monsters until they have to slay the most giant monster of them all (well, the biggest one since the last movie, anyway).

Making an entertaining move about ancient Greek warriors fighting legendary beasts should be easy, yet everyone involved in the project seems to have proven that the results can in fact be boring. The story offers little of interest. The actors perform their dry dialogue so half-heartedly that you can practically see them checking their watches for the lunch break (this is particularly true of Neeson and Fiennes who are barely in the movie and probably only showed up out of contractual obligations).

Even the action scenes prove to be irritating because Battle Los Angeles director Jonathan Liebesman decided to shoot the sequences using his patented shaky cam technique, ensuring that you can never tell who is actually winning a fight until it’s over (throw in some crappy post-converted 3D and you’ve got yourself an audience with a headache).

I suppose the studio is banking on the fact that the 12-year-old target audience will eat it up because they don’t know that this sort of thing can be done so much better. Hopefully all those kids will go see The Hunger Games for a third time this weekend instead and Wrath of the Titans will be a deserved box office bomb. If no one went out to see John Carter when some creative people were at least trying to create an interesting fantasy epic, then let's hope this infinitely worse slice of fantasy claptrap meets the same fate.

The Ugly: Mirror Mirror

In fairness the “ugly” label I’ve bestowed onto Mirror Mirror should not be taken literally. The one thing this movie does have going for it are the visuals. That’s director Tarsem Singh’s specialty and his films The Cell and The Fall are two of the most gorgeous movies that you’re likely to see. The man knows how to create a painterly, exaggerated world and then exquisitely photograph it within beautifully composed frames.

Unfortunately, that’s all he can do. Singh was born to create eye-popping commercials and music videos because the guy just doesn’t know how to tell a story. Mirror Mirror is his take on the Snow White tale and the only way to make a new Snow White film worth seeing would be come up with some sort of original take on the material. There’s nothing of the sort here, just flat jokes, a convoluted storyline, and wooden performances. As a piece of storytelling, this movie is an ugly mess that no pretty picture can save.

This Snow White story comes from the perspective of the wicked Queen (Julia Roberts). The basic set-up is the same (murdered king, magic mirror, imprisoned princess who is “the fairest of them all,” etc), but from there things change. There’s a financial crisis in the kingdom and the Queen decides she needs to wed a king to bail her out. While looking for suitors she finds a prince charming (Armie Hammer), but he’s got a thing for Snow White and so the Queen has her banished.

Snow White ends up meeting seven dwarves, bandits who rob anyone who passes through the forest. They fall for Snow White though and she suggests they do the ol’ Robin Hood “rob from the rich, give to the poor” thing. The dwarves agree and train her to be their full-sized fighting leader. Prince charming ends up finding Snow White in the woods, their romance is rekindled, the queen gets pissed, yadda, yadda, yadda, happily ever after. This is one of those fractured fairy tales style takes on a classic, trying to liven up the story with some subversive comedy twists. Unfortunately for that to work it has to be clever and funny, which Mirror Mirror most certainly ain’t.

The production and costume design meetings for Mirror Mirror must have been extraordinary, filled with an overabundance of brilliant ideas (a costume ball with Roberts in a peacock enhanced gown and Snow White dressed as a swan complete with the bird’s head as a hat is a particular standout). Any frame from this film would be suitable for the poster and would draw people in. It’s just a shame that there weren’t any script meetings with even half as many ideas. The twists in the formula feel like desperate attempts to make this rendition of Snow White different rather than anything suggesting a new take on an old yarn.

The comedy, whether it be visual slapstick or verbal sparring, never delivers a laugh. Singh may have a sense of humor in person, but he’s got no idea of how to translate it to the screen. The actors all appear lost, but it’s difficult to blame them for bad performances given the limp material. Roberts works her movie star charm with all her might, but she never comes off as entertainingly wicked as it’s clear everyone was striving for. She’s lost in the distracting visual designs and drab writing along with everyone else.

The film is a total mess and it’s hard to imagine even audiences of children finding anything to enjoy beyond the images. Kids three and under might enjoy it because that’s all they’ll be able to take in, but everyone else needs to stay far, far away.