Jupiter Ascending

There are two kinds of people in the world:  those who can get behind a wonderful, over-the-top inheritor of the Flash Gordon mantle such as Jupiter Ascending, and those without an ember of joy in their cold, dead hearts.

Here’s a story straight from the Pulp Age of Science Fiction: a peasant learns of a royal heritage, endures a wobbly period of uncertainty and disorientation, then finds his courage, saves the world, and gets the girl.  However, there’s a modern twist: the peasant’s a woman.  She gets the boy.
Beyond that, Jupiter Ascending is pretty standard stuff.  You’ve got your evil, decadent overlords bent on no good.  You’ve got your knight errant.  You’ve got your fantastical creature designs, thoughtfully designed alien landscapes & technologies, and fate of the world-type stuff hanging in the balance.

 

That said, Jupiter Ascending is *good* standard stuff.  Eddie Redmayne goes well over the top as a villain in the finest tradition of Ming the Merciless.  Channing Tatum is up for anything as the knight errant, imbuing the hokiest science fiction exposition with urgency and color.  And Mila Kunis, as the peasant girl with royal blood in her veins, does a marvelous job of showing us her character’s arc from dissatisfied nobody (But I was going to Toshi Station to pick up some power converters!) to resolute somebody (You’re up to no good, Villain.  And I’m going to stop you!).

So the question to ask yourself is this: do you enjoy pulpy, goofy sci-fi adventure crafted with love and an eye toward fun?  If so, expect to start smiling very early in this film, then keep smiling right up to the credits.  Jupiter Ascending is a pleasant surprise.

Loose Ends

Man, this whole "job and family thing really gets in the way of blogging.  Here are some short observations about what's been on my screen.

22 Jump  Street 

Don’t make my mistake.  Do not watch 22 Jump Street in a public, yet quiet, place.  I watched it while riding as a passenger in an airplane, and I spent roughly 90 minutes biting my knuckles to keep from guffawing.

This is my kind of comedy.  It’s clever, it’s packed with gags that hit us in rapid succession, and it even blows up a car.  Really, what more could you possibly want?

X-Men: Days of Future Past

Eh.  I’m getting too old for this $#!^.

Noah

Noah drags through its first act, then turns on the juice once the rain starts falling.  If you can get past the fact that everyone’s Caucasian and has British accents, then it’s easy to accept lava monsters and ancient industrialized civilizations.  Soon, you can immerse yourself in Aronofsky’s tale of justice and mercy, prophecy and insanity.  Just don’t make it the last film you see on a 9.5 hour flight.  This is not a movie to see when you're punchy.

Cats & Dogs

What a delightful film.  I’ve seen it, with my kids, I don’t know how many times.  It just never gets old.  

White House Down

Now, here’s a role for Jamie Foxx: President of the United States.  He has presence.  He has dignity.  He can pick up an automatic weapon and spray small-arms fire into the chests of evildoers. 

Unfortunately, White House Down makes him a supporting character.  That’s ok, however, because the lead is the surprisingly versatile Channing Tatum.  Together, the two of them run and gun through a film that’s basically Die Hard in the White House, and they do so with gusto and wit.

In my review of TheAmazing Spider-Man 2, I took that film to task for being nothing more than a formulaic product.  The film’s great failing, however, wasn’t in the fact that it was product: it was that it was poor product.  White House Down is, unabashedly, product.  But it’s good product, with excellent casting, slick effects and editing, and beats that flow one into the next.

Do you like rocket launchers?  White House Down has rocket launchers.  Do you like machine guns?  White House Down has machine guns.  How about genius villains who play Beethoven during their moments of triumph (I told you this was Die Hard in the White House!)?  Spunky kids?  Grizzled veterans who say things like, “I was wrong about you?”  Villains who practically shriek “And I would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids?”  Oh, yeah.  White House Down has all of these, and more, but it sells them with such glee that you can’t help but bop right along with it.

All this, and a Jamie Foxx on his game.  What more could you ask for?

The Lego Movie

The Lego Movie is clever, visually pleasing, and flat-out hilarious. My wife and I have been quoting it back and forth to each other for weeks.

The film begins as a relatively straightforward action-adventure, albeit with a Lego twist. The cleverness comes from two sources: the gags, which seem mostly to consist of taking down mainstream culture in general (a bold move for a mainstream film) and Batman in particular, and the structure. I particularly enjoyed all the digs at the Caped Crusader, whom I've always found to be a ridiculous character better suited to Adam West than Christian Bale. It's difficult to praise the film's structure without getting into spoiler territory, but suffice it to say that the movie takes everything you know about how these movies go, inverts it, then twists it sideways. It works, it's seamless, and it's wonderfully creative. I loved it.

Visually, The Lego Movie looks great. In fact, I've never seen a film animated quite like this one. It looks like a computer rendering of stop-motion animation using actual, used Legos, some of which appear to have been scavenged from one of the piles on my kids' bedroom floor. Some light research tells me that filmmakers Phil Lord and Chris Miller (of the hilarious 21 Jump Street and good-enough Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs) employed a computer program that modeled how actual bricks to fit together to ensure that most everything shown onscreen can actually be built. The effect? A palpable sense of wonder.

Finally, The Lego Movie is hilarious. Now, I'm an easy laugh – when my wife and I used to frequent comedy clubs, we'd always get seated right up front because laughter's infectious. That said, I laughed out loud throughout this film. From little gags like Abraham's Lincoln's unique mode of transportation to Will Arnett's 90-minute Batman parody, this picture scores again and again and again.

In short, everything about The Lego Movie is awesome. I can't wait for Lord & Miller's next picture.

21 Jump Street & The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

21 JUMP STREET

Funny, exciting, and kinda sweet, 21 Jump Street is my biggest surprise of the summer.  The story’s nicely constructed and does a fine job of walking the line between schmaltzy and savvy.  Jonah Hill does a fine job, co-star Channing Tatum reveals a surprising gift for comedy, and the Third Act peril and action beats don’t overwhelm the generally light tone.

THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is basically BBC porn.  It puts together beloved actors from the British drama scene, gives them arcs that reward our love for them, and pays it all off with a tear-jerking finale that sends us out the door with smiles on our faces.

I mean, look: we’re talking about a feel-good movie starring Bill Nighy, Judi Dench, Tom Wilkinson, Maggie Smith, Penelope Wilton, etc, plus Dev Patel as the eponymous hotel’s part-owner and manager.  These are all people we’re happy to spend time with for an hour and a half, and they’re happy to make us laugh, cry, and feel like we’re getting our money’s worth.  I know I did.

Haywire

Haywire stars MMA & Muay Thai champion Gina Carano as a spy-for-hire who finds herself trapped in an espionage thriller made by people who appear to have no love for the genre.

We’ve all seen plenty of action thrillers headlined by women who look like they couldn’t hurt a fly.  I like waif-fu as much as the next guy, but let’s face it: force equals mass times acceleration.  I had a great time watching wafer-thin Zoe Saldana beat up grown men in Colombiana, for instance, but at no time did I believe her punches would actually hurt.  Gina Carano, on the other hand, is no waif: she looks like she knows her way around a steak dinner, she moves like the trained and experienced fighter she is, and I didn’t have to forcibly suspend my disbelief to accept her besting her foes.

Problem is, she’s a terrible actress.  Director Steven Soderbergh puts her onscreen with people like Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Ewan McGregor, Bill Paxton, and Michael Fassbender, and she comes across as wooden and overmatched.  I believed her when she was in action, but I couldn’t believe her when she was setting up the situations and motivations that put her in action.

And the action itself?  It isn’t much fun.  In fact, it feels like it was made by people who felt they were slumming.  The music just sits there, the fights are poorly edited, the double and triple crosses carry no heft, and the production has no sense of joy.  Compare Haywire with, say, Tai Chi Master.  Tai Chi Master is standard wuxia fare, but it’s made by people who love wuxia.  There’s an exuberance in the stunt work, the music, the performances, the editing, that you just won’t find in Haywire.

Look, I like action pictures.  I enjoy good fight choreography, I like fireballs as much as the next guy, and I’m a sucker for a good chase scene.  But you’ve got to meet me half way.  You’ve got to cast a lead who can act.  You’ve got to give your picture a sense of urgency and propulsion.  You’ve got to love the genre.  Haywire doesn’t, so I’m marking it down as one of Soderbergh’s failures.