The Interview

Vulgar, irreverent, and hilarious, The Interview works from start to finish.

Here’s the setup:  James Franco plays the host of a celebrity talk & gossip show like ‘Entertainment Tonight.’  Seth Rogen plays his director.  The show’s successful, both guys are making good money, and everyone’s happy.  Everyone, that is, except for Franco and Rogen, who want something more than money and fame: they want respect.

Their opportunity comes in the form of an invitation to interview Randall Park as Kim Jong Un.  Kim, as it happens, is a big fan.  They jump at the chance, and the CIA jumps at the chance to recruit them to assassinate the North Korean dictator.  Hijinks ensue.

I’ve been hard on Franco for performances such as the one he gave in Oz the Great and Powerful.  Here, however, he’s spot on.  He plays his character as a charming, well-meaning idiot, and there’s something so genuine about the performance that it makes for a comically sympathetic character.  Rogen’s the straight man, the smart guy who sees the angles and spends most of the film in shock at just how screwed he and his partner are.  It’s a fine comic pairing, and helps to keep the tension high even as the pile one on top of the other.

And the gags?  They work.  They work because we buy Franco and Rogen’s chemistry, we buy the film’s exaggerated artificiality, and we buy Park’s performance as a man who only seems a fool because he’s so clever.

This is just a very well made comedy, one that deserves to be seen.  I loved The Interview.

Oz the Great and Powerful

You could play a game during Oz the Great and Powerful called “How baked is James Franco right now?” I swear to God, the guy looks like he's flying high for a good half of the movie's running time.

So, what's it about? Well, Franco plays a low-end carnival magician who doesn't realize he's past his peak attractiveness. When Michelle Williams basically offers to marry him, he's too stupid to realize that there is no better deal around the corner and sends her on her way. So it's about an idiot.

When a tornado hits the carnival and the idiot gets transported to Oz, Mila Kunis basically offers to marry him. Not realizing that God has given him a second chance to settle down with an A-teamer even though he's a few years past his sell-by date, the idiot temporizes. Then, because he's pretty much the luckiest idiot ever, Rachel Weisz puts the moves on him. Ok, so the idiot wasn't an idiot after all: Rachel Weisz was the better deal around the corner. Guess how he responds?

Yep. He's an idiot.

Or not – you'll have to see the movie and decide for yourself. While doing so, enjoy Sam Raimi's unique directorial style (Really, you should see Drag Me to Hell.  Not enough people did.) the pretty colors, the fine supporting work, the expert animation, and playing “How baked is James Franco right now.” If you approach Oz the Great and Powerful in the right frame of mind, you'll have an idiotic good time.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a film about the roots of the Great Ape Revolution, is something of a misnomer.  Earth is already the planet of the apes, since we humans fall into that category.  Perhaps a better name might be Rise of the Planet of the Rest of the Apes.

Nevertheless, Rise of the Planet of the Apes does the impossible.  During the film’s climactic man-ape battle on the Golden Gate Bridge, we viewers know that mankind’s only hope is the complete destruction of the apes fighting to get across that bridge.  Nevertheless, we root for the chimps and gorillas and orangutans.  We, the audience, root for the success of our enslavers.

Wow.

Rise does this not only by anthropomorphizing a chimpanzee, but by making the anthropomorphization of said chimpanzee the actual subject of the film’s narrative.  We begin in an African jungle.  The chimp’s mother is captured, dragged away from her tribe, and injected with some kind of super chimp serum.  Later, when the mama chimp gives birth, we bond with her cute li’l offspring.  So does James Franco, who plays a scientist who adopts the infant and raises it like an odd cross between a child and a dog.  As the chimp will soon learn, however, Franco’s family represents the sum total of nice people in the entire universe. 

Here’s the problem: chimps don’t stay cuddly forever.  When they grow up and they get angry, they can kill people.  After our hero chimp, named Caesar (modeled by the talented Andy Serkis), attacks the Francos’ mean neighbor, he’s packed off to a facility for primates (No, not a hockey arena.  This is a facility for higher primates.).  The facility, more prison than sanctuary, becomes Caesar’s crucible: the place where he grows out of his trust for humans and into his role as leader of the ape revolution.  By the time he leads his comrades across that bridge, we’ve seen him endure so much cruelty at the hands of humankind that we really do root for him.  We want him and his comrades to find a better life, to find a way out from under the thumb of their enslavers.  What a wonderful exercise in cognitive dissonance!

The film couldn’t pull this off without selling us on its world, and Rise succeeds through smart casting, brilliant animation, and solid scoring.  The Franco family includes the likeable Franco himself, the also likeable John Lithgow, and the luminous Freida Pinto (of Slumdog Millionaire).  Brian Cox leads Team Evil, with help from Tom Felton and David Hewlett, and all three sell their villainy with gusto.  (They also all happen to be English, which calls into question the seriousness of the flag-less ape threat.)  {Note: If I were a better writer, I could have come up with a better Eddie Izzard callback.  We do what we can with what we’ve got.}  The animation, well, it’s wonderful.  We believe in these apes.  We believe in their weight and momentum and the emotions on their faces.  The music, well, I’m a Patrick Doyle fan and I have been since Henry V.  His score builds the world and fills in emotional beats that animated apes may not have been able to convey on their own. 

In short, not only does Rise of the Planet of the Apes work, it works wonderfully.  This ape found himself rooting for the competition against his better judgment, and he never thought that would happen.

Spider-Man 3

Warning!  Spoiler Ahead!

Here’s the problem with Spider-Man 3: at the end of the film, Peter Parker and Harry Osborn, in their Spider-Man and (new nemesis) Green Goblin costumes respectively, team up to fight the big, scary villains.  They’re old friends in great danger, yet they’re having a ball.  They fall into sync.  They help each other out.  They’re a couple of guys we’d love to spend an hour and a half with.  In other words, Spider-Man 3’s climax shows us what we’ve been missing, thus making us feel like we’ve been missing out.  Spider-Man was fun.  Spider-Man 2 was fun.  Spider-Man 3 doesn’t get fun until the last twenty minutes.  By then, it’s too late.

Spider-Man mastermind Sam Raimi set out to make a relationship movie in this, his third installment in the franchise.  Unfortunately, it’s the kind of relationship movie that makes you want to throw your remote at the screen and yell at these people to just go grab a beer and talk to each other.  If they’d done that, they’d have been much happier much sooner, and so would we.

Spider-Man 2

Many critics call Spider-Man 2 the best superhero movie.  I think that distinction belongs to The Incredibles, but I can see their point.

When the film opens, Spider-Man has been web slinging for a while.  He's also been trying to hold down a job, go to school, and be there for his friends, but he’s a juggler with too many balls and not enough hands.  Fighting crime is a full-time job, and he’s no millionaire playboy.  Something’s gotta give.

And so goes the maturation of Peter Parker.  He’s found his calling, but he hasn't found his balance.  What results is a work of surprising maturity, balancing the requirements of the ‘spectacular blockbuster’ with those of a carefully told story about growing up and out, about learning how to be a man.

So, how does Spider-Man 2 do in the ‘spectacular blockbuster’ department?  Very well, thank you.  The film has a very cool, very cinematic villain in Doctor Octopus, played by Alfred Molina.  Doctor Octopus is attached to enormous cybernetic arms, and the film brings them to life with a masterful combination of practical and computer-generated effects.  We believe in this contraption, and in the menace it represents, and this helps bring the film to life.  Of course, it doesn't hurt that the film continues the tradition of hiring world-class actors to play its villains.  Molina can do charm with the best of them, but he can also do a version of sneering contempt that’ll make you recoil.

So yeah, I can see why so many critics are in love with this film.  It’s thrilling and cool and rewarding, and it succeeds in every way.  I love it, too.  it isn't The Incredibles, a legitimate classic, but it belongs in the same sentence.

Spider-Man

Spider-Man ranks among the best superhero movies ever made.

You know how it goes: nerdy high schooler Peter Parker gets bitten by a radioactive spider, develops super powers, and fights bad guys.   It’s an origin story, like so many others, but Spider-Man’s theme, that with great power comes great responsibility, resonates because it’s a lesson that we all must learn, over and over again.  Spider-Man, as a character, has abilities that make him strong and fast and agile, as well as give him the ability to do neat stuff in involving lots of very tall buildings (Pity the poor, nerdy high schooler who gets bitten by a radioactive spider in Barstow.).  But it doesn’t necessarily follow that he’ll use these abilities responsibly.  In fact, he behaves like a child, with disastrous consequences.  And how many times has each of us done that?  How many times have we taken our unique gifts and used them irresponsibly or in service of our own narrow self-interest?  How has that usually worked out?  That’s part of Spider-Man’s appeal: we don’t need to be nerdy, or a high-schooler, or a New Yorker to relate to this character.  We look at Peter Parker, at Spider-Man, and we see a fanciful version of ourselves as we are and as we aspire to be.  That’s pretty good stuff for a superhero movie.

Thematics aside, Spider-Man also succeeds as pure entertainment.  Star Tobey Maguire nails the role, bringing just the right combination of gee-whiz excitement over his transformation and insecurity as he develops into a man.  Perhaps more importantly, he conveys how much Peter Parker enjoys being Spider-Man.  Sure, he must have looped much of his in-mask dialogue, but his wahoos and shouts of joy as he swings from building to building feel like the authentic whoops of a young man having a ball.  Willem Dafoe, as the villain, proves yet again that he ranks among his generation’s finest actors.  His reading of an easy cliché, “We’ll meet again, Spider Man,” belongs at the top of Villainy’s Greatest Hits.  He goes big and broad, and just the right amount of over the top, without devolving into silliness. 

This isn’t a two-man show, however.  J.K. Simmons, playing Parker’s boss and newspaper editor, made my family laugh out loud as scenery-chewing comic relief.  Kirsten Dunst and James Franco, as our hero’s would-be girlfriend and only slightly baked best friend, respectively, ground Peter and help us get an “in” to the story.  The Chin, well, he does his thing.  It really is a magnificent chin.

But hey, these are professional actors.  They’re supposed to be good.  What makes Spider-Man good is that sense of joy, that fun we get as we swing with Peter Parker through the canyons of Manhattan, thrilled at our abilities and finding our place in the world.  There aren’t enough movies about joy and responsibility out there.  Even if there were, Spider-Man would be the best of them.  I just plain loved it.

Flyboys

You’ll like Flyboys if you like aviation history.  You’ll like Flyboys if you like “historical recreation” movies.  You won’t like Flyboys if you like, y’know, good movies.

In WWI, France established the Lafayette Escadrille.  Think of it as a Foreign Legion, but with American pilots.  This film is, generally, based on their story.  Many of the people portrayed here really existed, and many of the things we see them do actually happened.  So, hey, so far so good.

But here’s the problem: the screenplay’s just too tight.  Every fact about the escadrille’s planes that we learn early in the film becomes important in combat later on.  The love story feels like a detour from the plot.  We predict nearly every beat and, though the planes look pretty and the uniforms crisp, this film offers no suspense, no surprise, nothing that we expect in narrative cinema.  This feels like a story that’s hitting all the marks from one of those screenwriting books, and it certainly has the best intentions of hagiographying the Corps.  But there’s no soul here, no fuzziness, nothing that makes it feel like it’s about real people and not just lists of traits noted on index cards.

Nevertheless, I like aviation history.  I like  “historical recreation” movies.  Flyboys wasn’t much good, but it did teach me something about its world.  I guess there’s that.

127 Hours

127 Hours is fantastic!

If you’d told me that you could make a movie about a guy who gets stuck in a crevice for five days anything other than a tedious, painful slog, you’d have lost me.  But 127 Hours starts with a bang and propels us through an ordeal of thirst and increasing desperation with, dare I say it, verve and aplomb.

Here’s the setup: James Franco plays a fun-loving guy whose idea of a good time is heading out to the desert and biking, running, and climbing on his own.  Clearly, this character hasn’t seen any Werner Herzog documentaries, or he’d know that nature is intrinsically out to get him and he should never venture out without a buddy, a plan, someone who knows where he’s going, some signal flares, and maybe a short-wave radio.  Nevertheless, Franco’s a likeable fellow who appears to mean well, so we forgive.  While running along, he misjudges the stability of a piece of sandstone and falls into a crevice.  The piece of sandstone falls on top of him, pinning his arm to the crevice wall.  He’s alone.  He’s stuck.  He’s screwed.

Here’s the slog part, right?  Not at all.  Director Danny Boyle uses music, creative and exciting camera work, and a smartly crafted screenplay to keep us absolutely riveted on this story.  Franco tries various schemes to free his arm.  He deals with limited mobility and a dwindling water supply.  He hallucinates, he panics, he gets himself back together.  Ultimately, he decides he must cut his arm off to get free, then realizes that he’s dulled his knife by chipping at rock.  Now what?

This is powerful, exciting stuff, held together by Boyle’s virtuoso directing and Franco’s extraordinary performance.  I didn’t think I could spend an hour and a half with a guy pinned by a rock, but 127 Hours not only makes it work, it makes it pop.  127 Hours is phenomenal.

The Pineapple Express

THE PINEAPPLE EXPRESS left me cold. The characters seemed to come from another planet, the action beats felt ridiculously odd, and the comedy set pieces left me flat. While James Franco does, indeed, act his ass off, I never saw the comedy in his interactions with Rogen.

There's just nothing funny here. Two stoners bumbling through a deadly adventure could be funny, I suppose, but the stakes are too high and the comedy not high enough. I spent the film wondering if it would have worked better as a Cheech 'N Chong movie. Do you think they could have saved it?

In The Valley of Elah

IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH had me right up until the very last shot.

For most of the film's running time, it's a reasonably effective portrait of a man dealing with the most devastating news imaginable: the death of the youngest and last of his children. When the man, a former Army detective played by Tommy Lee Jones, travels to his son's Army Fort to find out what happened, he learns that his son was the victim of a gruesome murder. Jason Patric (who was absolutely brilliant in RUSH - Netflix it today!) is the Army investigator assigned to the case, and Charlize Theron is the local deputy. Between them, Jones doesn't know if he's getting help or the runaround. But he's got to hold it together and try to figure things out.

So ELAH runs as a devastating portrait and a fascinating mystery. But Paul Haggis, who wrote both this and the execrable CRASH, wouldn't know finess if it shat in his Wheaties. By the end, he takes the film to bombastic ground, though Jones's performance holds the picture together. At the very end, however, Haggis includes a moment so hamhanded, so ridiculous that it spoils the whole thing.

IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH. Turn it off with about five minutes to go, and you'll find it a fine film. Stick to the credits, however, and you'll throw your shoe at the screen. Bah.

Spider-Man 3

Last weekend, I took my family to see SPIDER-MAN 3. Judging by the difference in our reactions, I saw a totally different movie than they did. In fact, judging by the fact that I was often the only one laughing in the theater, I saw a totally different movie than everyone else in the theater.

That's ok. I loved the movie I saw.

SPIDER-MAN 3's opening credits give us a quick recap of the previous two movies, and before you know it we're right in the middle of the action. Things are going pretty well for Peter/Spidey. He's managing a good work/life balance, he makes time to attend Mary Jane's big Broadway premier, and he's happy as a beloved New York icon. But wouldn't you know, as in most two-career relationships, one partner's career starts falling behind. Before you know it, Peter's life is filled with animosity, jealousy, and guyscara. This is not good.

Speaking of things that are not good, Harry Osbourne is all Goblined out and ready for revenge; that guy from SIDEWAYS has been working out and he's mad as hell; and there's this new photographer at the Bugle who isn't above a little photoshopping if it'll help to make the perfect shot. Oh, and now Peter has to cope with a new black tar habit, to boot.

So, there's your drama. But director Sam Raimi isn't just about the drama: SM3 is laced with comedy that runs from the subtle dig to the broad John Cleese impression (I swear to God, I was waiting for Bruce Campbell to offer Peter a wafer-thin mint.) to the full-on SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER parody. Additionally, SM3's action set-pieces manage both beauty and excitement. Mix in a nice moral, solid work in even the smaller supporting roles, and you have a recipe for big-ticket, blockbuster fun.

SPIDER-MAN 3 is just the thing for a summer afternoon, even if you are the only one laughing in the theater. The more I think about it, the more I like it.

The Great Raid

Poor James Franco. The guy hasn't had a hit in some time, and he must be running out of studio goodwill by now. THE GREAT RAID hasn't helped.

THE GREAT RAID is actually two movies: a Franco - starring "mission" picture a la THE BRIDGE AT REMAGEN and a Joseph Fiennes - starring "POW" picture about the tribulations of the guys stuck in WWII's infamous Cabanuatan POW camp. The former is pretty good, while the latter had me looking at my watch. Fortunately, the movie shifted back and forth betweeen the two often enough that I knew the good part would always be coming back.

Had THE GREAT RAID been about only the Great Raid, it could have been a bang-up picture and, perhaps, Franco may have gotten a hit. As it is, the thing's too unfocused and it easily drops into the "forgettable" pile.