Short Takes

Here are some short responses to some of the films I've managed to see over the last couple of weeks:

MY WEEK WITH MARILYN

I’ve never cared about Marilyn Monroe one way or another.  Sure, I enjoyed Some Like it Hot as much as the next guy, but she never lit my fuse like, say, Barbara Stanwyck does.

That said, My Week with Marilyn made me care about Marilyn Monroe quite a lot.  The story reminds one of My Favorite Year: a show-business neophyte befriends a star, to mutual benefit.  Michelle Williams plays Marilyn in the full flower of her stardom, every bit as dazzling and insecure as history remembers her.  Lawrence Olivier (the brilliant Kenneth Branagh) has hired her to come to England to film a movie, and she’s so intimidated she can barely function.  Enter Colin Clarke, the neophyte and audience surrogate, who finds himself in the Star’s confidence.  

Soon enough, I was in.  Through Clarke’s eyes, I came to see Marilyn as an impossibly tough, delicate, and ultimately inscrutable woman entirely worthy of fascination.  So much did this film pique my interest, I’m queuing up the Olivier/Monroe pairing The Prince and the Showgirl.  I want to spend more time with Marilyn.

THE MUPPETS

Hey, you.  Yeah: you.  You like big production numbers?  Silly jokes?  Evil villains?  Boom: here you go, then.  The Muppets is for you.

Here’s the story: Jason Segel and Amy Adams help the Muppets reunite and put on a show.  That’s it.  Have at it.

So, enough about The Muppets.  Let’s talk about Amy Adams.  If ever an actress could lay claim the to the title, “The Next Julie Andrews,” it’s her.  She can sing.  She can dance.  She can act.  She can do all three at the same time, and do them well.  In fact, I’m kind of sorry that she was born too late for the era of the Great Hollywood Musical.  Given the right material, she could have passed in to legend, like Andrews.  She’s young, still, and she has plenty of time.  I loved watching her in The Muppets, I think she’s the real deal, and I hope someone out there is building a musical around her. 

I’d be there.  Opening day.

THE DESCENDANTS

 

The Descendants is one of those films that takes a basically likeable guy, piles a ton of manure on his head, and observes.  George Clooney (CDNW) plays the guy, nearly everyone else plays pilers, and we observe. 

The result?  A rich and rewarding character study of a man going through the hardest period of his life, told with tenderness and care.  The Descendants is worth your time.

BRIDESMAIDS

Bridesmaids revels in the comedy of the uncomfortable.  I found it so writhingly uncomfortable that I couldn’t wait for it to end.

ATTACK THE BLOCK

Attack The Block introduces us to a gang of young thugs in training, exposes them to an alien menace, and tries to get us to root for the thugs as they battle monsters.

I never could bring myself to care about the thugs.  Thus, I felt no tension.  Many of my friends laud this film as an innovative monster movie with a nifty hook, but to me it was just another chore.  Pass.

THE CAPTAINS

William Shatner is a terrific interviewer.  He’s so blithely self-absorbed that he puts his subjects at ease, comfortable in the knowledge that all they need to do for the next hour or so is sit back and hit the softballs he tosses between monologues.  And then they’ll inadvertently say something genuine, reveal a doubt or a weakness, and whammo!  He homes in, relentlessly questioning until he gets at its kernel, and we learn something.

In The Captains, Shatner interviews the actors who’ve played the Captain roles in the five Star Trek TV series, as well as the one who played Kirk in the newest movie.  Of the group, Avery Brooks is the most slippery and Chris Pine the least reflective (I’m not saying he’s callow or dumb, just that he’s not yet at that stage of his life path.).  They come across as a smart bunch, they know how to tell good stories, and Shatner really gets it out of them.

If you love Star Trek or if, like me, you’ve outgrown it but still love the idea of Star Trek, you’ll love The Captains.  As for me, I understand that William Shatner has an interview show on basic cable somewhere.  I’m going to look it up.  The man is really good at this.

Real Steel

Real Steel.  It’s a fighting movie without any actual fighting.  Yes, enormous animated robots duke it out in various venues, but they’re just robots.  This could be a movie about slot car racing or flying model airplanes.

Here’s the deal: it’s the near future.  Hugh Jackman plays a derelict drifter, one whose sole possessions appear to be a semi truck, a rock ‘em sock ‘em robot, and a 6-pack of cheap beer.  Oh, and he must have a full gym and a nutritionist and a personal trainer and some actual motivation in there, too, because I’ve never heard of a derelict drifter in the kind of shape this guy’s in.  Anyway, he drives from town to town, putting his ‘bot in small-time bouts for chump change and making bets he can’t cover.  He’s bad at it.  Enter a long-lost son.  Time to grow up.  Time to make something of himself.  All that.  You’ve seen it before.

Look, Jackman’s a super-talented man, Dakota Goyo, who plays the son, is a super-talented boy, and it’s hard to screw up the “man-child grows up and bonds with his kid” storyline.  But that storyline is really just a framework for the film’s showcase battles between various androids, and I couldn’t bring myself to care about them.  Not because I didn’t care about Jackman père et fils, but because a fight in which the contestants neither tire nor feel pain is no fight at all.  I’m not holding myself out as an expert fighter, here – I’m basically going on memories of Plebe boxing at USNA.  But I remember how I felt after only three rounds, when it was all my opponent and I could do to keep our gloves up and lob feather-light jabs at one another.  Real Steel’s robots can’t know what that’s like, so I couldn’t care about them.  And since I couldn’t do that, well, the movie’s marquee moments fell flat.

I think Jackman and Goyo could have carried a movie about a down-on-his-luck boxer who needed someone to believe in him.  The very conceit of Real Steel, however, left me with no skin in the game.