How to Train Your Dragon 2

Man, I just reviewed Paddington, which will probably make my yearly Top Ten.  How do you follow that?

Well, you could do worse than How to Train Your Dragon 2, a CGI action-adventure with beautiful animation, thrilling set-pieces, and touching emotional beats.

The film follows the continuing adventures of Hiccup and Toothless, a rider / dragon team, and the rest of the members of their Viking village as they seek to spread peace and love for dragonkind throughout their stylized version of Scandinavia.

Yes, there’s a villain.  And yes, there are more and bigger dragons, and yes, the stakes are (expectedly) higher in the sequel than in the original.  Ho hum.  Nevertheless, it’s all in the execution, and How to Train your Dragon 2 executes the material at the very highest level.  This is a wonderful adventure, technically awesome yet with a beating heart.

It just isn’t Paddington.  I think I should have watched a couple of episodes of Breaking Bad to cleanse my palate, because it turns out that a gentle little movie about a talking bear was one hard act to follow.

Kick-Ass 2

I saw Kick-Ass 2 a couple of weeks ago. I'm still trying to wrap my head around it. The film's tone shifts so often, sometimes within a scene, that it kept me off balance for nearly its entire running time. Sometimes, it's a comedy. Sometimes, it's an action adventure. Sometimes, it's a gruesome and tragic horror show.

Here's the setup: it's a year or two after the events of the original Kick-Ass (which I quite liked.  See my review at the link). Our hero has hung up his costume, and second (but more interesting) lead Hit Girl has done the same. But it's boring in the real world, and someone's gotta take on evildoers. Soon enough, our leads are back in harness: and just in time. Evil has a plan.

With a setup like that, a film can go anywhere. Kick-Ass 2 goes everywhere. It's an adolescent comedy, a superhero teamup movie, and a horror movie all at the same time. Do you like vomit gags? Kick-Ass 2 has 'em. Do you like that shot in which the team walks, slo-mo, abreast toward the camera? Oh, yeah. How are you with graphic torture and murder? Sexual assault? An underage girl using a pair of pliers to rip off a man's penis? Yeah, me neither.

The film has another strange feature: its title character isn't particularly interesting. Aaron-Taylor Johnson plays Dave Lizewski (aka Kick-Ass) as a bland nobody, someone who comes fully alive only when in costume. While Lizewski (who made a fine lead in Godzilla) does the job, he has a real handicap: he's cast opposite Chloë Grace Moretz, who's a genuine movie star. Not only does she have the more interesting character (a 9th-grader so damaged that she's only happy when killing), but she's a better actor; she brings a maturity and sophistication to her performance that reminds me of a young Jodie Foster.

So, toss together a number of dissonant elements, put your best performer in a supporting role, and bake until strange. If that sounds like a good recipe to you, you just might enjoy Kick-Ass 2.

Fright Night (2011)

Fright Night is actually good.

Sure, it's just another vampire movie with a menacing villain, plucky hero, and distressed damsel.  But Colin Farrell is an inspired choice for the vampire next door, Anton Yelchin is a likable and sufficiently plucky presence, and Imogen Poots makes for a particularly fetching damsel.  Add the beautifully aging Toni Collette (CDNW) and Balcony favorite David Tennant in important supporting roles, and Fright Night punches well above its weight.

Let's begin with Farrell.  Known for his good looks, there's something about him that has always struck me as menacing and untrustworthy.  While he can minimize that angle in films like the wonderful In Bruges, he plays it up here.  His vampire is the kind of guy women want and men fear, and he knows it.  He's been around for 400 years, he knows all the angles, and he enjoys playing with his food.  Described (by the typecast Christopher Mintz-Plasse) as "the shark from Jaws," he's set up a perfect hunting ground in a Las Vegas suburb where it's normal to sleep all day and work all night and where, in community dotted with foreclosure signs, no one can hear you scream.  He's wonderful, in the classic vampire tradition, and Fright Night's special effects team complements his performance with monster prosthetics and CGI that take him from menacing to terrifying in the blink of an eye.

Moving on, Yelchin and Poots perform capably in the hero and damsel roles, respectively.  Yelchin, winning as Checkov in the new Star Trek, does what he can with a part that hamfists the film's thematic elements, and, most challengly, requires him to dominate screen space shared with experienced, excellent actors like Farrell, Collette, and Tennant.  Poots is pretty and screams when appropriate, and she did nothing to break my disbelief.  Unfortunately, her part is rather thinly written, which is  normal for the genre.

Collette, well, she Can Do No Wrong.  As a capable single mother who is not immune to the charms of the hunky, though rather pale, new neighbor, she sells the flustered demeanor of someone who's not quite herself when a certain other someone is around.  When it's time for her to scream she screams with gusto.  When it's time for her to fight, we cheer her on.

Finally, we have David Tennant in the role of a Chriss Angel manque whose schtick is vampire hunting.  It's a fun update on Roddy McDowall's "Creature Feature" host of the 1985 Fright Night, with a vulgar and alcoholic Tennant blowing through all of Yelchin's illusions about heroism and the supernatural right up until it's time for him to man up and join the fight.  One feels that Tennant is deliberately distancing himself from his "Doctor Who" persona with a performance that's definitely not fit for television, and I must admit that I found it jarring at first.  Once I settled into it, however, and met the character on his own terms, I bought it and enjoyed the ride.  Fright Night didn't do particularly well at the box office, as I recall, and I don't know how many opportunities Tennant will get to make his splash in American films.  Nevertheless, he acquitted himself well here.  I hope it works out for him.

So the performances work, the effects are fantastic, and the movie rocks along in the finest action-horror tradition (it isn't really scary, not like The Shining, but it is fun in a scary way).  I liked everything about Fright Night.  If you missed it when it hit theaters last year, it's worth queueing up in anticipation of Halloween.

Role Models

ROLE MODELS is your standard comedy about man-children who learn an important Life Lesson and find their way to actual adulthood. You’ve seen its every beat before and it has nothing new to offer in the way of conception, scoring, technical wizardry, or artistry.

It’s also funny. Very funny. Laugh – out – loud funny. Paul “why is this guy not a huge star” Rudd and Seann William Scott are a great comic duo, playing off one another with the perfect combination of affection and exasperation. Elizabeth Banks turns a thankless “love interest” part into gold, and Jane Lynch is just one or two more parts this great away from joining Cloris Leachman in the Hall of Great Comic Actresses (I don’t know why Jane Lynch reminds me of Cloris Leachman. She just does. It’s a compliment.). This is a movie that goes from broad, physical bits to Marvin Hamlisch jokes and back again with flawless delivery and perfect timing.

Yes, it should be crap. You know it. I know it. The guys who wrote it know it. But they took a crap outline, fleshed it out with great jokes, put it in the hands of first-rate comic actors, and turned it into a freakin’ masterpiece.

Who’d’a thunk it.

PS I used to run down the ravine behind the University of San Diego. At the bottom of the ravine, there’s a park. On Saturdays, that park would be filled with people dressed like hot dog vendors at the Renaissance Fair, merrily whacking one another with foam rubber swords. Just so you know, there are folks out there who really do see that as a fun way to spend their Saturday.

Superbad

SUPERBAD is the funniest movie I've seen in months. Its jokes range from broad to subtle, its characters feel and behave in comically realistic ways, and its humour feels natural, rather than forced. There's never a sense, as in BALLS OF FURY, that this film is jumping around and shouting, "Look at me! I'm funny!" It just is.

SUPERBAD follows three geeks on the cusp of high school graduation. There's the skinny one, the fat one, and the one who lives at the very bottom of the social ladder. Unlike NAPOLEON DYNAMITE, which invites us to laugh at its geeks, SUPERBAD invites us to laugh with them as they embark on a quest which, for a high schooler, is all-important: they need to score some alcohol for a party (Side note: when we were in high school and wanted alcohol, we drove around town with our prettiest friend. When we spotted a liquor store that was staffed by a man either very young or very old, we sent her in with cash and a smile. Worked every time.). Along the way, they try their hands at forgery, petty theft, setting police cars on fire, and scaring the hell out of small children. It sounds horrendous, I know, but trust me when I say that it's all in good fun. These kids mean well, they really do, and we can't help but like them and root for them.

That's fine, and it could make for a reasonably pleasant time at the movies, but that isn't what makes SUPERBAD so funny. It's the dialogue, baby, and SUPERBAD is a dialogue-rich film that creates some of the most hilarious exchanges I've enjoyed since KISS, KISS, BANG, BANG. I saw this with some friends the other night, and we've been quoting lines back and forth ever since.

Additionally, this movie has a sweetness to it that gives it a warm glow. There's no villain, per se - just situations. It' s nice, and it avoids the uncomfortable changes in tone that hurts movies like THE WEDDING CRASHERS.

Overall, I rate SUPERBAD as a huge, huge hit. It's the kind of movie one can see over and over again, and I fully intend to. What a great comedy.