The Croods; Rush; A Most Wanted Man

The Croods

The Croods is fine.  It’s pretty, it tells a nice story, and its voice cast includes personal favorites Nicholas Cage, Emma Stone, and Cloris Leachman.

That’s about all I can say for it, however.  I didn’t laugh.  I didn’t cry.  I just sorta rocked along pleasantly for an hour and half.  That ain’t bad.  It ain’t great, either.  It’s fine.  No, really.  It’s fine.

Rush

I spent the first hour or so of Rush not enjoying the movie.  Like Amadeus, the film sets up a conflict between a natural talent (Chris Hemsworth, a British Formula One driver) and a grinder (Daniel Brühl, his Austrian nemesis (the actor also appears in A Most Wanted Man, discussed below)).   Thing is, I identified with the grinder. Hemsworth’s character put my teeth on edge.

Then the movie took an unexpected turn, went in an entirely different direction than I’d expected, and made me hold my breath, tense in sympathy to the action onscreen, and hang on every twist and turn of the competitors’ races.

I feel like I started out with Days of Thunder and finished with something wonderful.  Rush is the most surprising movie I’ve seen this year. 

A Most Wanted Man

Some deaths get to you, even if you never really knew the person in question.  I still miss Phil Hartman.  I miss Philip Seymour Hoffman.

In A Most Wanted Man, Hoffman plays the Hamburg chief of a small German intelligence organization occupied with hunting terrorists.  The film, based on a John le Carré novel, occupies itself not with fast cars and gadgets, but with the nondescript, dedicated, and frequently exhausted people who actually make the intelligence community go.  Hoffman, overweight, disheveled, and brilliant, is a perfect match for this world.  His character belongs in dimly lit bars, crafting plans and making deals, and I believed in him every step of the way.

The plot?  Well, it’s a le Carré story, so it features twists and surprises and a kind of mundane weariness that feels all the more immediate because we can imagine it happening right in the next booth over.

The effect?  Well, mostly sadness.  Sadness for the characters in the story, but particular sadness for the loss of Philip Seymour Hoffman, one of our generation’s great actors and a talent that I’m sure to miss for a long time to come.

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.

Thor: The Dark World

I didn’t care for Thor (see my review).  It was a movie about people I didn’t care about fighting for stakes that didn’t matter.

I’m pleased to report that Thor: The Dark World fixes its predecessor’s faults.  This time around, the titular Thor is an interesting guy fighting a threatening villain over something worthy of the effort.  Both hero Chris Hemsworth and nemesis Tom Hiddleston have found their groove.  Villain of the Week Christopher Eccleston seems a credible threat to the universe in general and Earth in particular.  Even previously misused Natalie Portman comes across as competent and capable, as opposed to just another Pauline.  The action sequences pop, the jokes land, and everything hangs together.

I admit, I watched most of Thor: The Dark World while troubleshooting a technical issue with one of my gadgets, but that’s ok.  This is light action entertainment, perfectly fine to play in the background while folding socks or debugging code.  Let’s just forget the first outing even existed.

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.

Thor

I didn’t care about Thor, so I didn’t care about Thor.  Since I didn’t care about Thor, I didn’t care about Thor’s antagonist, his love interest, his friends, or his problems.  You know who I did care about?  Agent Coulson, the guy who appeared to be Samuel L. Jackson’s #2 at SHIELD, which was sorta the FBI for superhero stuff.  He played a minor role in Thor, but I’d go to see a movie about him.

Here’s the problem: Thor (a totally ‘roided out Chris Hemsworth – I mean, really: compare a photo of him from the Star Trek reboot with a photo of him from this film) is a god.  Yeah, the film presents him as super sci fi bs alien, but he’s basically a god.  Not only is he a god, but he’s a dick of a god.  He’s obnoxious and egotistical and has a lot to learn.  The film is all about him learning to not be such a dick, but so what?  Show me a movie about a guy who isn’t a dick in the first place.

Natalie Portman plays Thor’s love interest, a graduate student in physics with her own ‘roided out Land Rover, her own supercool lab, and her own sidekick.  When I was a grad student, I could barely afford ramen.  How was I supposed to care about this magic princess scientist, doing research in her fantasy world?  Now, fine, I know what you’re thinking: this is Natalie Portman we’re talking about.  I don’t contest that she’s an absolutely outstanding actress, but this film gives her nothing to do, really.  Any reasonably competent, age-appropriate actress could have played this role (that is, pretty girl who digs ‘roided out guys who are dicks).  I doubt I’d have believed in any of them.

Thor’s friends?  Hey, they’re gods, too!  One’s a younger version of Xena, one looks like a youthful Cary Elwes with silly facial hair, one’s a glutton, and one’s just a guy with a mace who doesn’t even do anything cool.  I couldn’t relate to any of these gods.  If I met them socially, I wouldn’t like them and they wouldn’t like me.  Why should I care about them?

Loki’s the antagonist, here presented as Thor’s brother and, essentially, the nerd to Thor’s jock.  Problem is, he’s a god, too, so his problems also aren’t my problems.  What are his problems?  I’m not entirely sure (Well, he does wear a goofy helmet, and there have been times in my life when I could relate to that.).  Is he consumed with jealousy?  Is he ambitious?  Self-hating?  How ‘bout just plain evil?  I don’t know, and neither does the film.  It keeps changing.

Ok, so I didn’t like the characters.  What was so bad about Thor’s problems? I didn’t feel like I had a dog in the fight.  Since I didn’t care about Thor, I didn’t care whether he or Loki sat on the throne of Asgard.  Yeah, there was some stuff in there about evil frost giants, but I didn’t see them as a threat to Earth, so what exactly were the stakes for me?  I’ll tell you: zippy.

And yet, Thor manages to stay marginally entertaining for a couple of hours, thanks primarily to Kenneth Branagh’s direction and the presence of one Agent Coulson of SHIELD, assayed by Clark Gregg.  Coulson’s an actual human being, a disciplined and efficient government agent bringing cold federal processes to a fantastical world of heroes and monsters.  Now, that’s interesting.  I want to know more about this guy: where does he come from?  How’d he get into this business?  What does he think of all this craziness?  There’s your movie.

Generally speaking, I enjoy spectacular action movies.  I wanted to get into Thor.  It looked pretty, lots of stuff blew up real good, and Natalie Portman did bite her lip once or twice.  But I needed more.  I needed some skin in the game.  I needed to care.