Under the Skin

Under the Skin is a great example of why we need more 60-minute featurettes.  This is a mesmerizing film, featuring a brilliant performance from Scarlett Johansson, that’s about 48 minutes too long.

Johansson plays The Monster, albeit a monster who happens to look like Scarlett Johansson in a hooker costume.  She spends the first act of the film (mostly) driving around Glasgow in a windowless van, hunting for single young men.  When she spots a mark, she pulls over and asks for directions.  Once she has the young man talking, she tries to talk him into the van.  Pro tip:  don’t ever let a stranger lure you into a windowless van, even if that stranger looks like Scarlett Johansson in a hooker costume.

Fun fact: many of the film’s early encounters actually happened.  Johansson spent several days and nights driving around Glasgow in a van wired with microphones and hidden cameras, and she really did stop strangers and try to talk them into the vehicle.  Those who declined were chased after by people with waivers.  Those who accepted met the crew hiding in the back of the van and – you guessed it – signed waivers.

Not so fun fact: Under the Skin’s first act is an hour long, though it only takes the audience about twenty minutes to discern The Monster’s pattern and understand that she is growing and changing.  After that, it’s 40 tedious minutes of more of the same, punctuated by the occasional scene of heartbreak and horror.

Those second two acts move along nicely and keep us engaged, and in so doing they give us an inkling of how wonderful this film may have been as a 60-minute featurette.  Under the Skin creates a wonderful, suspenseful, and uneasy (yet meditative) mood.  It does great things with special effects on a very low budget.  It draws a career-highlight performance from its star, who is such a good actress that she can stand, nude, in front of a mirror and keep this male viewer's eyes locked on her face.

This film has so much going for it, I can only imagine how much better it may have been with a more ruthless edit.  As it stands, Under the Skin is good.  At 60 minutes, it could have been great.

Her

Her is the kind of movie that makes me love movies.  It’s a challenging piece of science fiction, a moving drama, and a piece that illuminates the human condition.  It’s brilliant.

The film, set in a washed out, near-future Los Angeles, follows an emotionally damaged man, one reeling from divorce, as he tries to reconstruct his life.  He downloads a new, artificially intelligent, operating system on his computer.  It cares about him.  It understands him.  It sounds like Scarlett Johansson.  Of course, he falls in love.

The AI, self-named Samantha seems real.  In some ways, she is real.  But she isn’t corporeally there.  She isn’t human.  What kind of a life has this man, brilliantly portrayed by Joachim Phoenix, bought into?  What kind of connection can he sustain with a glowing screen and a voice in an earpiece?

We could see this film simply as a wry commentary on the smartphone generation, but I think it has more to say.  I think it’s a commentary on all the things that draw us from human connection: our obsessions, our hobbies, our games - whatever it is that beckons us away from those who do, or those who would, love us. 

Her, however, isn’t just vehicle for late-night navel-gazing.  It’s also a finely crafted, beautifully performed and scored drama that quietly, subtly draws us in and invests us not only in the emotional life of Mister Phoenix, but in that of Johansson’s disembodied voice.  You could plug Her into your device of choice, plug that device into your car stereo, and just listen to it on a long drive – I suspect you may have an even more moving an experience than did I, watching it on a laptop in an airport lounge.

In short, Her is a thing of beauty, not to be missed.  I want to watch it again – this time, with people.

Avengers: The Age of Ultron

It’s probably not a good sign when you’re sitting in Avengers: Age of Ultron and thinking, “Y’know what was a really good Marvel movie?  Captain America: The Winter Soldier.  Where’s Robert Redford when you need him?”

Some background: I took my two older boys, ages 15 & 8, to see this movie.  I really wanted to see Mad Max: Fury Road, but fatherhood isn’t about getting what you want.  So, there we sat, popcorn and soda in hand, ready for some Whedon-y goodness.

[On further reflection, it probably wasn’t a good idea to let my 8-yr-old get the medium root beer, which would be a large in any sane world and contained roughly a metric ton of corn syrup.  After about fifteen minutes, he started to squirm, after 30, he was all over the place.  In thirty minute intervals thereafter, he left the (mostly empty) theater to run to the bathroom – probably more for the running than the actual bathroom.]

In the story, Tony Stark is basically Victor Frankenstein and the android Ultron his mad creation.  Unlike Frankenstein, Ultron doesn’t start out innocent and misunderstood.  It starts out evil, a fanatic who sees mass murder as a perfectly acceptable expedient enroute to utopia.  
And then there’s a lot of punching, plus a guy with a bow and arrow saying, “What am I doing here?  I’m just a guy with a bow and arrow!”  And people get hurt, and innocents get killed, and there’s a lot of angst, and it’s all so miserable that I thought I was in a DC movie.  In fact, it’s so miserable that, at the end of the movie, several characters just quit the team.  

Don’t get me wrong: the effects are great, the leads are likeable, and Linda Cardellini and Paul Bettany both shine in supporting roles.  But after two and a half hours, I wanted a little less recycled Shelly and little more Spider-Man learning to swing, or Star Lord disco-ing through space-ruins, or Robert Redford opening his fridge to find a bottle of Newman’s Own salad dressing on the top shelf.  I wanted some fun.  I wanted some laughs.  I wanted some moustache-twirling.  All I got were meditations on mortality, morality, and the use of denouments as leveraging tools in contract negotiations.

But, hey, my boys liked it.  As for me, I am honestly beginning to suspect that I’m getting too old for this stuff.

Chef

Funny and kind, Chef is a feel-good movie that sent me home with a smile on my face.

In the film, John Favreau plays a workaholic chef. He's divorced. He doesn't spend enough time with his son. He works for a restaurateur who's a businessman first and an epicurean second. He's miserable. When he loses his job and must start anew with a dilapidated food truck, things seem about as bad as they can get.

And then he remembers how much he loves cooking good food for people who appreciate it. Oh, and he bonds with his son, finds happiness, and so forth (That last sentence isn't a spoiler unless you've never been to the movies before.).

Think of Chef as cinematic comfort food, the motion picture equivalent of a grilled-cheese sandwich. Now, a grilled-cheese sandwich can be Velveeta on Wonder Bread hot off the Foreman Grill, or it can be a carefully chosen mix of cheeses on fresh-baked bread and grilled -just so- on a hot skittle with hand-drawn butter. Chef is the latter. It's genuinely, laugh-out-loud funny not just in its acting, but in its composition and editing. It boasts characters of depth and heart, people you'd be happy to call your friends. It photographs food and the process of its preparation with delight. It's just a joy, and it's putting a smile on my face even now, as I write about it days later.

See Chef and be happy.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Captain America: The Winter Soldier fuses the paranoid political thriller and the superhero action showcase. That it does so well, in part and in total, is a remarkable achievement.

Here's the setup: Cap & Black Widow (Chris Evans and Scarlett Johansson) are the two most attractive people in government service. They're also a superhero team that flies around the world doing secret missions for SHIELD. SHIELD is basically the DHS, but competent, international, and much better funded. SHIELD, however, may have a hidden agenda. Will Cap & BW sort things out in time?

Well, yeah, of course they will. That's not the point. The point is how well the film tells their story. Robert Redford (as, basically the Secretary of SHIELD) and Samuel L. Jackson (as himself) carry the political thriller aspects of the picture with aplomb. Evans & Johansson, who team up with Anthony Mackie (of the criminally underrated Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) to battle Frank Grillo (Warrior) and Sebastian Stan (Black Swan), make a great action duo. They combine athleticism with real acting chops, selling both their battles and their dialogue.

That said, the real star here is the story. It's like a finely tuned machine, shifting from character beats to action set-pieces and back again smoothly and gracefully. It parcels out information at just the right pace to allow us to keep up, and it hangs together well enough that it still makes sense a few days later.

In short, this is a successful motion picture. It clips along briskly, it's well engineered, it involved me in the lives of its characters, and it kept me engaged the entire time.

But that isn't what I'll remember about it.

I'll remember two particular moments (the second of which is a spoiler). The first is minor piece of set-dressing. When Redford's character opens his kitchen refrigerator, the astute viewer will notice that he stocks his fridge with Newman's Own marinara sauce. That's a nice touch. The second is the most powerful scene in the movie. Villain Frank Grillo, all muscles, veins, and menace, is pointing his gun at the back of a computer technician's head, commanding him to enter a code that will make bad things happen. The technician, whom I'm guessing is played by Aaron Himelstein, squirms with terror. Nevertheless, he refuses to enter the code. That's fine, but the part that sells the moment is that he doesn't refuse nobly, standing up to the meanie and telling him to get stuffed. He practically squeaks his refusal, trying to melt into his chair and probably $#!^ting his pants. It's the bravest damn thing I've seen in a movie all year.


Well done.

The Avengers

I suspect that The Avengers is pretty much the best movie about The Avengers that it’s possible to make.  Consider this:

·      There are several Avengers, all of whom we should care about.

·      They need something to avenge, something that we in the audience feel needs avenging.  The audience needs to cry.  Then, it needs to get mad.

·      People liked Iron Man more than they liked The Hulk.  Message: make ‘em laugh; don’t make ‘em think.

·      Lots of stuff had better blow up real good.

Now, consider the following:

·      Joss Whedon is really, really good at screenwriting and directing.  His resume demonstrates an ablity to craft fully realized worlds, populate them with diverse and engaging characters, and give those characters interesting (and funny) things to say.

·      He’s not afraid to blow stuff up real good.

So, Item One: so many Avengers, so little time.  Whedon addresses this by taking characters who had been in bad movies (Captain America, Thor, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2) and cutting those film’s weaknesses.  Consequently, he capitalizes on their strengths.  Here’s a rundown:

Robert Downey, Jr.’s comic timing is Iron Man’s whole appeal.  Too much of it, however, and you want him to just shut up already.  The Avengers uses him enough to satisfy the audience’s thirst for its favorite player, but not so much that they hope for Sam Rockwell to show up and give ‘em a break.

Thor’s problem was that the whole movie was about two things: Thor’s magical transformation from dick to hero through the power of Natalie Portman’s smile, and Loki’s descent from someone who, reasonably enough, doesn’t like the dickish Thor to full-blown villain.  Here, Chris Hemsworth’s Thor begins the film understanding justice and humility while Tom Hiddleston’s Loki radiates gleeful malevolence.  Now, I’ve got a good guy I can root for and a bad guy I can boo. 

Edward Norton is a brilliant actor, no doubt about it.  But his Bruce Banner was just plain boring.  Eric Bana’s version, on the other hand, was masterful; but everybody (except for me) hated that movie.  Whedon’s solution?  Assume his audience already knows Banner’s back story and give us a whole new guy to play the character.  Mark Ruffalo plays Banner not as a rope about to snap, but as a decent guy with issues – a guy who can tell a joke.  We sympathized with Norton and Bana, but we like Ruffalo.

Captain America suffered from being just another origin story.  Its villains, extra-evil Nazis calling themselves Hydra, were an insult to every self-respecting actual evil Nazi still hiding out in Argentina.  I mean, c’mon!  How do you top real, historic Nazis for evil?  And Illinois Nazis don’t count.  Further, if you’re Captain America and you’ve already beaten the Nazis, where are you going to go next?  That’s why Loki’s the perfect foil: he’s the villain of Norse mythology, one of the touchstones of German National Socialism.  Further, Whedon leverages the fact that Chris Evans’s Captain America is an actual Army captain, schooled in small unit tactics and experienced in leading capable people under stressful conditions.  Throw in some fish-out-water material (he had to get the character to 2012 somehow), and you are maximizing the potential of this character.

There are other Avengers, like Scarlett Johansson, whom we like because she’s Scarlett Johansson, and Jeremy Renner, whom we like because we remember The Hurt Locker.  And you know what?  It all works.  Whedon takes the best, most entertaining aspects of his characters, cuts the fat, and gives us concurrent arcs in which we can believe.  Success!

Item Two:  Whedon does give them something to avenge, and it works on a personal level.  This isn’t, “Hey, you wiped out a Dunkin’ Donuts, and now we’re really mad.”  It’s, “You have gone too far, and this shall not stand.”  Going in to the details would spoil the film, I think.  But I’m comfortable telling you that Whedon surprised me, saddened me, angered me, and made me hungry for revenge.

Item Three:  The Avengers is funny.  I laughed out loud more often than I did at Bridesmaids.

Item Four:  Lots of stuff does, in fact, blow up real good.

So, there’s all that.  There’s plenty that didn’t work for me, as well.  The “Let’s fight before we team up” stage went on a little long.  I’m convinced that Tony Stark’s true nature is that of an amusingly selfish jerk, sentencing us to film after film in which he learns to not be such a jerk, only so that he can forget those lessons in time for the next outing.  I never have been able to get past the fact that a hovering aircraft carrier is a profoundly stupid idea.  But that’s ok.  By taking the best of the films that preceded it, The Avengers crafts an exciting, spectacular, fun time at the movies.

Movies like this are what popcorn is made for.  Or shawarma.  Whatever.

Iron Man 2

IRON MAN 2 is a great, great movie.  That is, if you love reading Popular Mechanics.  Because if there’s one thing IRON MAN 2 delights in showing us, it’s long sequences of guys welding.  And dragging cables.  And doing, y’know, Metal Shop stuff.

Me, I don’t read Popular Mechanics.  I never took Metal Shop.  Long stretches of IRON MAN 2 bored me out of my mind. 

That’s not to say that Robert Downey, Jr. isn’t fantastic in what will become his signature role.  Or that Scarlett Johansson (as a superduperspy) doesn’t look great in a catsuit.  It doesn’t even mean that stuff doesn’t blow up real good.  It just means that I didn’t care.

I didn’t care about Iron Man’s big fight with his best friend (a role demanding far less gravitas than The Great Don Cheadle brought to bear).  I didn’t care about the Big Villain’s boring revenge story.  And I certainly didn’t care about the intricacies of corporate reorganization.

By the time the Big Villain, who wasn’t nearly as interesting as the Little Villain, unleashed his evil plan, I’d grown so worn out with pseudo-physics, quasi-engineering bull$#!^ that I could only marvel that this film failed to learn the basic lesson of the Star Wars prequels.  To wit, fighting robots are dull.  Their destruction carries no emotional heft, because they’re things.  You might as well have given me twenty minutes of Iron Man unplugging refrigerators.

For all that, however, IRON MAN 2 does offer something to make it worth seeing.  It’s not on the posters and it’s not in the ads, however: it’s a secret weapon named Sam Rockwell, upon whom I now formally grant Can Do No Wrong status.  Rockwell plays the Little Villain, the CEO of Stark Corporation’s primary competitor in the weapons business.  His name is Justin Hammer, and he’s a weasely, sniveling wannabe Tony Stark who absolutely steals every second he’s on screen.  Let me say that again:  Sam Rockwell (CDNW) steals the screen from Robert Downey, Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, and The Great Don Cheadle.  I didn’t think anyone could upstage any of these actors; but Rockwell’s Justin Hammer is so deliciously slimy, so wily yet such a doofus, that he runs away with this movie.  After GALAXY QUEST, THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND, CHOKE, MOON, and now IRON MAN 2, I can safely assert that Sam Rockwell has arrived.  This actor, truly, can do no wrong.

So, yeah, IRON MAN 2 has a whole lot working against it.  But its bright spot is very, very bright.  If they make another film in this series, I hope they call it JUSTIN HAMMER.

He's Just Not That Into You

Look , I get that HE’S JUST NOT INTO YOU was not made with me in mind. I didn’t expect to see any stuff get blown up real good, nor did I expect to see anyone kick anyone else in the face. But I sat down for it anyway: a friend recommended it, and I like to tell myself that I don’t believe in guy movies and chick movies, but only good movies and bad movies.

This movie begins with a “girl talk” voiceover about the nature of relationships that effectively announced that not only was it not made with me in mind, but it was made with a mind to specifically exclude members of my gender and orientation. This movie was just not that into me.

And that’s ok. I’ve been out with my wife and sat drinking my coffee while she talks with her female friends or relatives. I get that things don’t need to cater to my tastes to have value. But while HE’S JUST NOT INTO YOU is professionally written, photographed, and acted, it’s an intellectually dishonest film that spends 7/8 of its running time advocating for a world view that it abandons when it’s time to put smiles on faces before the closing credits.

I can forgive a film many flaws, but that kind of dishonesty is not among them. HE’S JUST NOT INTO YOU is a liar. Don’t get into it.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Vicky Christina Barcelona

Sorry, I just don’t care about anybody in VICKY CHRISTINA BARCELONA.

Look, I’ve got a wife, two jobs, three kids, a dog, a house, and the very real possibility of an airline furlough on the horizon. I find it difficult to get lost in the problems of wealthy young people with worthless educations and too many options.

The feckless rich girl must leave the wealthy artist’s household because of her restlessness? Frak you.

The wealthy artist is locked in a destructive relationship with the crazy lady? Frak you.

The aimless rich girl must choose between the wealthy artist and the wealthy banker? Frak you and enjoy his bonus check.

I mean, hey, I’m all for the glamorous rich. I love it when they dance around in Fred Astaire movies or banter with Groucho. But I just don’t have time for the sun-drenched parasites in this movie.

Next.

SpongeBob Square Pants: The Movie

So, here's the thing about SPONGEBOB SQUARE PANTS: THE MOVIE: it's not as bad as you think.

The picture begins with a pirate ship at sea. They spot a floating seachest, open it, and are delighted to find tickets to the SpongeBob movie. They break into a terrific chanty-style rendition of the SpongeBob theme song, and before you know it we're in Bikini Bottom, home of the titular sponge.

The story itself is your basic quest tale, with fun turns by guest voice actors such as Jeffrey Tambor, Alec Baldwin, and Scarlett Johansson. It's pleasantly diverting stuff, but there's something about it that both sells this movie and takes it completely over the top. SpongeBob has unmasked the villain, but the forces of evil are closing in on him anyway. Suddenly, apropos of nothing, he breaks into a rock tune (written and performed by Twisted Sister's Dee Snider), a guitar materializes in his hands, and before you know it, he's freeing the city by shooting laser beams out of aforementioned guitar while simultaneously rocking the house. This is bona fide silly fun, and I loved its audacity of concept and cleanliness of execution, right down to the sampling of David Lee Roth's scat from "Just a Gigolo."

I don't know if I'd call this a pleasant surprise: I expected it to be odious and it turned out to be only ok. Nevertheless, I'll chock this one up in the "win" column. Omilybooblyzeeblybop!

The Black Dahlia

THE BLACK DAHLIA, drawn from a riveting James Ellroy novel, is a slow, tedious slog of a police procedural that’s done in by its combination of flaccid acting and jarring set design.

Several of THE BLACK DAHLIA’s key roles fall so resoundingly flat that it’s hard to believe professional actors performed them. Two of the Dahlia’s friends land with thuds, as does the femme fatale and her mother (!). The friends may have been a masterstroke on director Brian DePalma’s part, of course: they’re supposed to be bad actresses, and they’re played by bad actresses. Oh, the meta! The femme fatale, VALLEY GIRL’s Hilary Swank, manages zero chemistry with the man she’s supposedly seducing, and the mother can’t decide if she’s trying to channel Margaret Dumont or Dame Edna Everage.

In the middle of this mess, we have Josh Hartnett and Aaron Eckhart - one of whom seems not quite innocent enough for the role he’s supposed to be playing, and the other not quite crafty enough for his. They’re both in love with Scarlett Johansson, a normally intriguing actress who delivers a performance so lacking in enthusiasm that’s it’s hard to imagine her own mother falling in love with her.

No one brings much in the way of life to this movie, and the shortcoming gets reflected in the set design, which is either another meta-joke or a poor choice to rely on CGI landscapes and studio back lots to create a world that feels just a little too fresh, a little too clean for Los Angeles in the ‘40s.

But you know, I could forget these issues if the story itself were engaging. Unfortunately, such is not the case. While Ellroy breathes life into this story, the movie never sells me on its characters’ actions, priorities, or dilemmas. I just didn’t care about any of these people, and that’s death for a whodunit. If you’re interested in the Dahlia case, read the book. If you’re looking for a good detective movie, rent CHINATOWN again.